Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchSophia Rosenfeld, "The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Episode 114
Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to…
1 year, 6 months ago
Whitney Dirks, "Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
Episode 91
Whitney Dirks joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Monstrosity, Bodies, and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Curiosity to See and Behold (A…
1 year, 6 months ago
Blessin Adams, "Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain" (HarperCollins, 2025)
Episode 29
Early Modern Britain was awash with pamphlets, ballads, woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning fema…
1 year, 6 months ago
Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Episode 223
Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the…
1 year, 6 months ago
Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Episode 21
How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the ca…
1 year, 6 months ago
Adam Jortner, "A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Episode 24
Today I’m speaking with Adam Jortner, Goodwin-Philpott Professor of History at Auburn University. We are discussing his latest book, A Promised Land:…
1 year, 6 months ago
Matthew McCormack, "Shoes and the Georgian Man" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Episode 151
Shoes are everyday objects but they are loaded with meaning. Shoes and the Georgian Man (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Matthew McCormack reveals how shoes…
1 year, 6 months ago
Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, "America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Episode 119
As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania Pr…
1 year, 6 months ago
Michelle D. Brock, "Plagues of the Heart: Crisis and Covenanting in a Seventeenth-Century Scottish Town" (Manchester UP, 2024)
Episode 15
Using a wide range of archival material and a microhistorical approach, Plagues of the Heart: Crisis and Covenanting in a Seventeenth-Century Scottis…
1 year, 6 months ago
Steven King, "Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present" (McGill Queen's UP, 2024)
Episode 12
The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistent…
1 year, 6 months ago