Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLaura Murphy, "Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt" (Columbia Global Reports, 2021)
A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it?
Millions of people around the world today are ens…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political …
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Michael Hiltzik, "Golden State: The Making of California" (Mariner, 2025)
Episode 190
California has long reigned as the land of plenty, a place where the sun always shines and opportunity beckons. Even prior to its statehood in 1850, …
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Faisal Chaudhry, "South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)
South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford UP, 2024) considers the lega…
8 months, 4 weeks ago
Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Episode 287
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s blood…
8 months, 4 weeks ago
Federico Marcon, "Fascism: The History of a Word" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Episode 249
The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the te…
8 months, 4 weeks ago
Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025)
From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers…
8 months, 4 weeks ago
Elaine Weiss, "Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly sig…
9 months ago
Aviva Guttmann, "Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad's Assassination Campaign" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Episode 117
In this unprecedented history of intelligence cooperation during the Cold War, Aviva Guttmann uncovers the key role of European intelligence agencies…
9 months ago
Walter Scheidel, "What Is Ancient History?" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Episode 1
It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of ext…
9 months ago