Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMargarette Lincoln, "Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty" (Yale UP, 2024)
Episode 103
A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends.
Victorian women ate arsenic to achie…
2 years ago
Deborah Valenze, "The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History" (Yale UP, 2023)
Episode 229
A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and env…
2 years ago
Seth Kimmel, "The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Episode 84
In The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U Chicago Press, 2024) Seth Kimmel explores the material history of libraries…
2 years ago
Beatrice de Graaf, "Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Episode 988
After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat …
2 years ago
John Freed, “Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth” (Yale UP, 2016)
Episode 64
For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-…
2 years ago
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Episode 29
News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and …
2 years ago
Sonja Stojanovic, "Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
Episode 136
Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visib…
2 years ago
Anne Higonnet, "Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution" (Norton, 2024)
Episode 102
Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had…
2 years ago
Amanda Shoaf Vincent, "Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris's New Parks, 1977-1995" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
Episode 135
In the space of about two decades, five major parks were proposed, designed, and created in Paris. Some emerged from competitions between professiona…
2 years ago
Thomas Weber, “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic Books, 2017)
Episode 30
Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becomin…
2 years ago