Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchPhilip Freeman, "Julian: Rome's Last Pagan Emperor" (Yale UP, 2023)
Episode 31
Today I talked to Philip Freeman about his new book Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor (Yale UP, 2023).
Flavius Claudius Julianus, or Julian the Aposta…
1 year, 9 months ago
Grant Olwage, "Paul Robeson's Voices" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 252
Paul Robeson's Voices (Oxford UP, 2023) is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage exam…
1 year, 9 months ago
Peter Rose, "The Good War of Consul Reeves" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)
Episode 203
Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in…
1 year, 9 months ago
Matthew C. Ehrlich, "The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
Episode 223
The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice …
1 year, 9 months ago
Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019)
Episode 12
In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of th…
1 year, 9 months ago
Tom Boniface-Webb, "Modern Music Masters: Oasis" (MMM, 2020)
Episode 83
In the first book in the Modern Music Masters series, Tom Boniface-Webb examines the Manchester band Modern Music Masters-Oasis (MMM, 2020). Founded …
1 year, 9 months ago
Sara E. Johnson, "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023)
Episode 223
If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-…
1 year, 9 months ago
Mark Blake, "Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
Episode 250
An illuminating deep-dive into everything Fleetwood Mac--the songs, the rivalries, the successes, and the failures—Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwoo…
1 year, 9 months ago
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France" (Duke UP, 2018)
Episode 475
The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.”…
1 year, 9 months ago
James M. Scott, "Black Snow: Curtis Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb" (Norton, 2024)
Episode 43
In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. S…
1 year, 9 months ago