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In this episode of In Conversation, Lilyanna D'Amato speaks with Paul Kelton about his new book, Hidden Terrors: The Scourge of Cholera in Jackson's America (Oxford UP, 2026), which traces the arrival of the first cholera pandemic in the United States, in the 1830s. Drawing on various historical documents, including family papers, letters, and newspaper accounts from the time, Kelton examines how ordinary Americans reacted to the strange disease and how the country’s ideologies and inequalities resulted in loss of life on a mass scale.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What drives someone to challenge the status quo to prevent disaster? In The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and the Discoveries That Changed Our World with Barry R Davis  (JHU Press, 2026), Barry R. Davis chronicles the work of bold individuals who recognized the warning signs of catastrophe and intervened before tragedy could strike. With stories that include fire, disease, climate change, and public health, Davis illuminates the efforts of those who confronted indifference, ignorance, and inertia to shift society's focus from reaction to prevention. Through real-world case studies and historical research, The Preventioneers introduces readers to a diverse cast of problem-solvers who identified threats, persuaded skeptics, and devised practical solutions. In colonial Boston, a young Benjamin Franklin witnessed one of the city's most devastating fires. Haunted by that memory, Franklin grew into a lifelong advocate for fire prevention. Ignaz Semmelweis and Sara Josephine Baker fought to raise awareness of and prevent child and maternal mortality. Richard Doll's work to establish the link between smoking and lung cancer revealed the danger of what many viewed as a harmless activity. These inspiring stories exemplify the central message of the book: Prevention is a powerful form of civic action. Their work underscores how principles of prevention transcend fields, whether addressing maternal mortality, auto safety, cancer, or climate change. Davis underscores that successful prevention requires more than knowledge; it also demands courage, strategy, and relentless advocacy. In doing so, The Preventioneers introduces a framework for thinking about how societies can act early, save lives, and build a healthier, more resilient future. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tune in to this discussion about How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture by Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda T. Moses (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) Biologically speaking, there is no such thing as race. Yet this seems to contradict the experiences of people in the United States and other countries where racial classification is used daily, by individuals and institutions. Race still matters, whether in wealth accumulation, educational achievement, health, the legal system, or in personal safety. How can race not be real when we experience its effects every day? Mukhopadhyay, Henze, and Moses systematically deconstruct the myth of race as biology and address the reality of race as a cultural invention, drawing on biocultural, historical, and cross-cultural anthropological perspectives. In doing so, they shed light on the intricate interplay among race, biology, culture, power, and stratification. Part I, “The Fallacy of Race as Biology,” unravels the myth that races are biologically valid divisions of humanity. Part II, “Culture Creates Race,” explores race as a social construction; the emergence of the racial worldview as ideological justification for inequality; and how social processes, especially restrictions on interracial sex and marriage, maintained visible markers of racial hierarchy. Part III, “Contemporary Issues,” examines current manifestations of racial stratification including the educational achievement gap, health disparities, and how the language of race embodies and reinforces a racial worldview. Dr. Mukhopadhyay is a cultural anthropologist whose specialties are gender, family, sexuality, race, cultural diversity, multicultural education, cognitive anthropology, ethnographic decision-modeling, theory and methodology. Her research has focused on gendered activities, in households, politics, music, and science & engineering (STEM). This has involved fieldwork in both the United States and India. Dr. Rosemary Henze is an educational anthropologist whose teaching, research, and educational projects seek to enhance social justice and equity in education. She applies concepts and methods from anthropology and linguistics to the study of race relations, immigration and multilingualism, Islamophobia, and the spread of English, among other topics.  Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Projecting Knowledge: The Optical Lantern and Science Communication, 1880s-1940s (Brepols, 2026) takes one of those fundamental questions - how does knowledge circulate? - and says, like others: we must look at the media technologies through which that knowledge not only circulates, but is transformed. This edited collection does that by looking at the history of the projection lantern across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The projection lantern, also known as the 'magic lantern', 'optical lantern', and 'sciopticon', amongst other names, is part of a long history of media technologies and techniques that have allowed users to project images onto surfaces for audiences to view. The optical lantern helped the projected image become a ubiquitous form of media, known by wide and diverse publics during a wave of 19th century media popularisation.  From the 1880s until well into the twentieth century, the optical lantern was an immensely important tool to disseminate knowledge both within and outside academia, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. This volume maps the lantern-illustrated lecture from various perspectives, with contributions on how to research historical audiences, on the spaces where projection was used, on the role of images as evidence, on the shifts in pedagogy that were supported by the projected image, and on the archives and sources that provide access to material that allows an understanding of the multiple ways in which the medium was used. Projecting Knowledge was edited by Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves, Nico de Klerk, Frank Kessler, and Jamilla Notebaard. Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves is a historian interested in the cultural dimensions of media, science, and technology. She earned her PhD at Utrecht University within the research project Projecting Knowledge, producing the first large-scale survey of public lantern lectures in Dutch society from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. She currently holds a postdoctoral position in the Technology, Innovation & Society group at Eindhoven University of Technology.Nico de Klerk is an independent researcher and archivist in the field of film and media history. Between 2018 and 2023, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the project Projecting Knowledge at Utrecht University, which partly overlapped with his research for the project Educational Film Practices in Austria, 1918-1970, at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut for Digital History, Vienna. His current research focuses on the film-illustrated lecture in the Netherlands between c. 1910 and 1940. Frank Kessler is professor emeritus of Media History at Utrecht University. He is one of the founders of KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films and the KINtop – Studies in Early Cinema book series. His research interests focus on the emergence of cinema as a multi-facetted medium and a cultural form, as well as on nineteenth-century visual media. His most recent research is dedicated the optical lantern as a tool for knowledge communication. Jamilla Notebaard is a historian whose doctoral research explored the use of the magic lantern in Dutch academic education at the end of the nineteenth century. Her work reflects a deep interest in the history of science, particularly in the epistemic role of images in shaping knowledge within scholarly communities and beyond. She investigates how visual representations function as carriers of meaning, influencing both collective understanding and individual perception. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (RTP) emerged under the unique circumstances of a poor Southern state that needed to find a way to offset the declining industries of tobacco, furniture, and textiles in the 1950s. Through the sustained commitment of nearby universities, business leaders, and local and state officials, state leaders established the largest science and research park in the United States in an area that was nothing but “possums and pines.” Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park (Duke University Press, 2026) tells this story through the eyes of those at the center of it, like the local black leaders who convinced white officials to desegregate public schools with the justification that it would make the area more appealing to tech companies, or how a chance meeting between the governor and a Danish executive led to North Carolina becoming an epicenter for weight loss drugmakers decades later. Allen Paul and Mack Paul organize the story around major periods in RTP’s growth, showing how RTP came to define the region and the state by the 1990s as well as the major setbacks it encountered in the early 2000s. Breaking down the strategies that led to RTP’s success, like creating new institutions in targeted tech areas to spur activity and factoring quality of life into the regional planning of the area, Miracle Road demonstrates how the story of Research Triangle Park is a fascinating and important case study of urban development in the twenty-first century.Mack Paul cofounded Morningstar Law Group, where he is a partner. He teaches land use law at North Carolina State University and North Carolina Central University. Mack served as chair of the Greater Triangle Regional Council and has written extensively about the development of the Triangle Region. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In my conversation with Professor Pablo F. Gómez about his new book, Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026. Our conversation explored the unsettling relationship between slavery, the body, measurement, and knowledge. What does it mean to measure a human body within a system that has already reduced that person to a commodity? And what happens when numbers that appear neutral become entangled with violence, commerce and exploitation? What stayed with me is the book’s invitation to think differently about numbers. Behind measurements of height, weight, health, disease and mortality were human beings whose lives could not be contained by the data recorded about them. These questions are not only historical. We live in an increasingly quantified world, where bodies, health, productivity and risk are constantly measured and transformed into data. So perhaps one question we should keep asking is: Who is doing the counting, why are they counting, and what happens to the people being counted? I invite you to listen to our conversation and reflect with us on the histories behind the numbers we encounter today.   Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to write that flowed from the body?" Presence is her answer. The book draws from a vast array of archival and printed sources to illustrate the realities of women's physical experiences in early modern Europe, from eating, pregnancy, abortion, birth, nursing, sleeping, working, and dying. Maglaque intersperses her historical narrative with personal accounts, demonstrating the ways in which studying the past can impact our lives today. For anyone interested in women's history, the history of labor, early modern health and medicine, or simply the purpose and potential of historical study, Presence is the book to read. Erin Maglaque is a historian of early modern Europe and gender. She teaches at Durham University and writes for publications including the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City (MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Lee Dugatkin chronicles this little-known crisis, revealing how the epidemic disrupted nearly every aspect of urban life. From coast to coast, livelihoods collapsed as horses lay sick, or worse dying, on stable floors, fires raged unchecked without horse-drawn wagons, and city development stalled for lack of horsepower. Just as the Gilded Age was dawning and industrialists were poised to amass fortunes, the flu slowed progress to a crawl. Yet the tragedy also catalyzed revolutions in medicine, animal rights, and transportation. Veterinary science in the U.S. was still emerging, but detailed medical reports from the epidemic helped validate germ theory and discredit outdated beliefs. The crisis also spotlighted early animal welfare efforts, with fledgling groups like the ASPCA advocating for sick horses forced to work. Finally, the sheer vulnerability of relying on animals for transport spurred a shift toward mechanized systems. As illuminating as it is humbling, the book brings to life a critical account of a crisis that still speaks to the complex public health and transportation challenges we face today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine (U Chicago Press, 2025) traces the emergence of trans medicine in Scandinavia in the twentieth century, exploring the construction and negotiation of medical expertise among medical professionals, patients, and activists in the media and government bureaucracy. The book combines the author’s analysis of medical records and other archival sources with oral history interviews with former patients, activists, doctors, psychologists, and civil servants. Physician-historian Ketil Slagstad uses the Scandinavian story of sex reassignment to anchor not only the role of the state but also bureaucracy and social rights. Scandinavian countries, he shows, played a foundational role in the emergence of trans medicine internationally. As a result, Standardizing Sex tells a transnational history of medicine that sheds light on a set of relations and problems that continue to impact discussions of trans medicine and trans rights around the world. Slagstad’s sources offer a rare opportunity to explore the emergence of trans medicine in action in the clinic, laboratory, waiting room, and operating room, as well as in the bureaucrat’s office, on the psychologist’s couch, and in the publications and meetings of activist groups. Together, these sources allow for the analysis of the increasingly complex negotiations of nosological criteria, medical knowledge, and medical practices in a formative period for transgender medicine. More generally, the book offers a story about the reshaping of the normal and the pathological in modern societies. Ketil Slagstad is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at Charité: Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI.  With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data. At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This special episode features a short talk Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, gave at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event featured a great mix of historians and Science and Technology Studies scholars and was organized by Jacob Bruggeman, who recently finished his dissertation on the politics of computer hackers at Johns Hopkins University and is now headed to a job at Ohio State University. Thanks to Jacob for putting the event together and hearty congratulations on his accomplishments. In the talk, Vinsel argues that we are missing a synthetic social and economic history of how our adoption and use of digital technologies over the past fifty years has affected everyday life in many social spheres, including work, religion, politics, schools, and family life. He also points to some exemplary scholars who have laid some initial groundwork on these topics and gives some suggestions for primary and secondary sources we can use to do this work. Most of all, the talk is an open invitation to collective work - because doing this project well goes far beyond what any individual can do alone. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck’s life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck’s basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, ⁠The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck⁠ (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. ⁠Jessica Riskin⁠ is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. ⁠Anna Olteanu⁠ is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jonathan Fuller’s The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a philosophical tour through scientific medicine, visiting its distinctive problems, particularly problems brought about by the twentieth century fusion of medicine with epidemiology. Drawing on the author’s training in philosophy of medicine, history and philosophy of science, and clinical medicine, the book examines the contours of the ‘epidemiological medicine’ that resulted from this fusion. It dissects several philosophical problems of the new modern medicine while exploring topics such as theories of contagion and cancer, concepts and theories of disease etiology, the nature of chronic diseases and mental disorders, concepts of medical risk, models of medical evidence and medical prediction, the problems of extrapolating from clinical research, therapeutic skepticism, and the future of modern medicine. Expansive, detailed, rigorous, insightful, and refreshingly penetrable, The New Modern Medicine is an ambitious contribution to the philosophy of medicine and to our understanding of scientific medicine. It is available online open access. This episode is hosted by Alex Broadbent, Professor of Philosophy of Science at Durham University and Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is Director of the Durham-Johannesburg Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Public Health, and co-leads the Measurement Lab in the Institute for Medical Humanities. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often categorize their subjects as being motivated by one of two opposing notions: a wholehearted embrace of progress or an antimodernist nostalgia. A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026) centers a different kind of response to the period’s newly intensified awareness of temporality and history: an obsession with preserving perfection. Engaging a diverse set of case studies, Dr. Ellery E. Foutch explores the era’s desire to forestall the march of time and immortalize the fleeting moment through art and technology. Beginning with an investigation of artist and naturalist Titian Peale’s butterfly illustrations and specimen boxes, Dr. Foutch assesses the implications of attempts to fix animal life in the “perfect state.” She then turns to Harvard’s Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, botanical models meticulously crafted to serve as instructional tools but most famous internationally as a spectacle for tourists. Finally, she scrutinizes the period’s preoccupation with the fragility of the human body, examining artistic representations of the legendary bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, widely known during his time as the “Perfect Man.” Highlighting the paradoxical way in which these attempts at preservation ultimately sap the vitality from the organic processes they seek to arrest, Dr. Foutch uses these curious objects to unpack a deep set of cultural anxieties around decay and death. By analyzing objects of mass culture and natural history using methods typically reserved for works of art, A Perfectionist Impulse provides a unique window into how nineteenth-century scientists, technologists, artists, and entertainers rendered a common desire for perfection and immortality. Itself a wondrous collection of attempts to capture the idealized moment, this extensively illustrated book serves as a shining example of our enduring fascination with the ephemeral. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts would shape early computer science and the first applications of computer technology in manufacturing and business, with profound consequences for workers and managers alike. By the 1960s, practices originally developed to improve industrial efficiency were being used by Wall Street, influencing how markets worked and even how traders thought. Digital technology became central to finance, tying together far-flung trading floors and automating decision making—with alarming consequences, including the 1987 Black Monday crash. In Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy (Columbia University Press, 2026), Dr. Devin Kennedy offers a new history of the digital economy, showing how the computer emerged from—and transformed—capitalism in the United States. He traces how computer science and technology were made by industry, which molded computation to manage factories, financial markets, and entire firms. Drawing on the archives of businesses, computer researchers, regulators, and financial institutions, Coding Capitalism retells the story of the postwar economy and the computer, revealing how mid-century business laid the foundations of the digital world. Bridging business and economic history with the history of science and technology, this book uncovers the prehistory of big tech and demonstrates how capitalism has shaped computing since its invention. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.