Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchIan Smith, "Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Episode 267
In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and…
4 months ago
Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)
In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printe…
4 months ago
Jacqueline Riding, "Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London" (Profile Books, 2025)
Episode 190
Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charl…
4 months ago
David McCrone, "Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
Scotland is a nation that has undergone significant changes over the last 50 years or so. This is, of course, true of much of the Western world but, …
4 months ago
Tom Menger, "The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
The violence of colonial wars between 1890 and 1914 is often thought to have been uniquely shaped by the nature of each of the European empires. The …
4 months, 1 week ago
Olivia Weisser, "The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, venereal disease, or the 'pox,' was a dreaded diagnosis throughout Europe. Its ghastly marks, along with…
4 months, 1 week ago
Jeremy Black, "Britain's Imperial Histories (St. Augustine's Press, 2025)
Military historian Jeremy Black continues his review of the global context of martial conflict and spatial conquest into the modern era (16th-20th ce…
4 months, 1 week ago
Iain Jackson et. al., "Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company (Bloomsbury, 2025) pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the hi…
4 months, 1 week ago
Karin Wulf, "Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In eighteenth-century America, genealogy was more than a simple record of family ties—it was a powerful force that shaped society. Lineage: Genealogy…
4 months, 1 week ago
Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (Public Affairs, 2021)
Episode 96
As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 194…
4 months, 1 week ago