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Although Spain was never a formal ally of the United States during the American Revolution, its entry into the war definitively tipped the balance against Britain. Led by Bernardo de Gálvez, supreme commander of the Spanish forces in North America, their military campaigns against British settlements on the Mississippi River—and later against Mobile and Pensacola—were crucial in preventing Britain from concentrating all its North American military and naval forces on the fight against George Washington’s Continental army. In this first comprehensive biography of Gálvez (1746–86) Bernardo de Gálvez: Spanish Hero of the American Revolution (UNC Press, 2026), Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia assesses the commander’s considerable historical impact and expands our understanding of Spain’s contribution to the war.A man of both empire and the Enlightenment, as viceroy of New Spain (1785–86), Gálvez was also pivotal in the design and implementation of Spanish colonial reforms, which included the reorganization of Spain’s Northern Frontier that brought peace to the region for the duration of the Spanish presence in North America. Extensively researched through Spanish, Mexican, and US archives, Quintero Saravia’s portrait of Gálvez reveals him as central to the histories of the Revolution and late eighteenth-century America and offers a reinterpretation of the international factors involved in the American War for Independence. 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 twentieth century, most US states established eugenics programs to improve the human race through selective breeding. North Carolina ran one of the nation's most aggressive programs; between 1927 and 1977, at least 5,700 people were sterilized and thousands more were committed to institutions. While sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s disproportionately targeted Black women receiving public assistance, the program's early focus was on poor white women. These policies were framed as scientific and progressive, yet they were deeply intertwined with racial and class biases, reflecting long-standing social hierarchies in the South. Anna Krome-Lukens examines those early years and reveals how such white reformers as social workers, politicians, and activists promoted the principles of eugenics while shaping the emerging welfare state before and during the New Deal. Tracing this history, the book illuminates how North Carolina's eugenics programs influenced the modern welfare state and how their legacy continues to shape debates over social policy today.  The episode brings the Book Review Managing Editor of the Journal of Women's History, Ariel Schnee (History PhD Candidate, University of Oklahoma), into conversation with the book's author, historian and scholar of public policy Dr. Anna Krome-Lukens (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). Copies of Strong State, Weak Links: Eugenics and the Southern Politics of Welfare (UNC Press, 2026) can be found at the University of North Carolina Press website. The Journal of Women's History can be found here and online at Project Muse. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s. In her compelling and textured history, Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles, Dr. Isabela Seong Leong Quintana unearths the entwined stories of Chinatown and Sonoratown through the everyday lives of their residents. In this conversation, we talk about the significance of comparative Latinx and Asian American Studies, the importance of spatial analysis in urban history, and the methodological challenges of locating Mexican and Chinese women and children in the archives. Dr. Quintana is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with affiliations in Culture & Theory and Chicané/Latiné Studies. Her work explores the interconnected histories of Asian Americans and Chicanés/Latinés, centering women and children within U.S. borderlands and recovering unarchived voices. Quintana also co-directs The Five Chinatowns Project at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, a community-based research initiative documenting Chinese American Los Angeles through oral histories, archival creation, and youth mentorship. She is the author of Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

While the war on terror has been America's largest and most publicized attempt to root out foreign enemies this century, the quest to identify and destroy real or imagined threats to national security has long been a part of US history. Drawing on six case studies, Professor Michael E. Neagle spotlights the commonalities of how the United States has leveraged popular understandings of "bandits" to justify incursions abroad as well as rally popular and political support at home. Chasing Bandits: America's Long War on Terror (UNC Press, 2025) puts recent manhunts for such figures as Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi into deep historical context. For more than a century, Americans have designated some enemies as bandits, but chasing them has yielded mixed results. Dr. Michael Neagle is director of history and political science at Nichols College, where he is also co-chair of the terrorism studies program. Dr. Jacob Hagstrom is an army veteran and author of America's Favorite Warlord (Pen and Sword, 2026). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Humans have always incorporated wildlife into processes of work, capture, and exchange. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, globalization became the latest in a long line of forces affecting human-animal relations. Grey parrots travelled the world as pets; rats used global shipping infrastructure to spread to far-off islands and became the object of cross-border extermination campaigns; and California sea otters were relocated to accommodate global oil transportation needs. The language of globalization, however, is rarely used to understand the history of these creatures. Globalizing Wildlife (UNC Press, 2026) shows how wild animals were not simply affected by globalization but shaped its concrete trajectories at local, national, and international scales. The editors and contributors of this collection bring the more-than-human turn to globalization studies, foregrounding not only how globalization matters for wildlife but also how wildlife matters for and constitutes globalization. The volume presents a range of geographically- and species-diverse case studies spanning from the 1870s to the present day to show that globalizing wildlife is far from a homogenous process. Ultimately, contributors reconceptualize globalization and wildlife in relation to one another and foster new connections between the longstanding study of globalization and the dynamic, rapidly consolidating field of historical animal studies. Contributors are Vincent Bijman, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Regina Horta Duarte, George Iordachescu, Nancy J. Jacobs, Ajit Menon, Gregg Mitman, Nitin D. Rai, Simone Schleper, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Monica Vasile, and James L. A. Webb Jr. Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he’s currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology. Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory, embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India. Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert, and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage revival. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), naturalist, forager, and educator Maria Pinto uncovers strange and beautiful connections between the natural and human worlds, mingling reportage, research, memoir, and nature writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers’ domestication of the unforgettable aroma of truffles, to the possibility that enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers. Pinto brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal, ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join us in pursuit of beautiful, perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as we explore this understudied kingdom’s awe-inspiring diversity, discovering how fungi have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival, pleasure, revelation, and revolution. When she’s not in the woods (and sometimes when she is), Maria Pinto is a writer, editor, and educator. She teaches writing for various literary organizations. She reads fiction for Peripheries Journal and serves on the board of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy nonprofit. Her writing has been supported by Assets for Artists at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Mass Cultural Council, the Writers’ Room of Boston, The Mastheads, and The Garrett on the Green. You can find Maria at her Website and on Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and 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.

Molly Brookfield’s book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) explores the historical, legal, and cultural history of street harassment in the United States. Historically, Brookfield identified the "masher panic" (late 19th–early 20th century) when reformers and municipalities labeled male accosting of women a public problem and enacted anti-masher ordinances or applied disorderly-conduct laws. On law and policy, the book highlights primarily local legal responses against harassment, with municipal codes and reinterpretations of existing ordinances more common than coherent federal action that criminalizes mashing. In Watching the Girls Go By, street harassment is situated on a continuum with other gendered and sexualized violence, with the argument that street harassment normalizes and underpins more extreme harms against women. The book portrays historical scholarly perspectives to street harassment including those of Cheryl Bernard and Edith Schlaffler. Also, the book builds on diverse historical sources and employs varying terms for similar behaviors. The author uses "intrusive behaviors" as a more precise analytic category while preserving period-specific terms when discussing particular historical contexts. Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links: LinkedIn, ORCID, Meta. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As many as ten thousand people attempt to illegally cross the border between the US and Mexico each month, braving deserts, rivers, and other environmental hazards in the process. But the very illegality of that crossing has an environmental history, writes Penn State University assistant professor Mary Mendoza in Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). It was diseases, microbes, insects, and animals which, in part, hardened the border from a porous array of landscapes into the militarized zone seen on the news every night. However, despite the ecological and political difficulties of doing so, people continue to cross the border between the two countries, defying environmental odds and risking death along the way. In Deadly Divide, Mendoza explains why, underscores the risks involved, and shows how we got to this point, keeping an eye on the border region's stark landscape with every step of the way. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What was it like to live in a city experiencing occupation by a foreign army? What did it mean when a family had to quarter an officer in their home? More specifically, how did military occupation affect the women and men who lived in those cities, and alter the gender system? Lauren Duval’s The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2025) tackles the these questions by looking at the experiences of a wide range of Americans, Black and white, in the cities occupied by the British during the American Revolution. Why the household? Because this was the primary social and economic unit of the day, a site where people during the war encountered unprecedented threats to their sense of social order. By looking at households, we gain not only an intimate view of the experience of war, but also a sweeping interpretation of the effects of war on American understandings of gender and power. Some Americans saw military occupation as a threat, full stop. It challenged men’s senses of power and authority over their families, and the ever-present threat of rape hovered over women and girls. But because occupation could loosen some of the patriarchal control in the household, it could also offer tempting new opportunities. Free and enslaved Black people could take advantage of the disruptions to make calculated moves to gain freedom—or more freedom than they currently enjoyed. Black and white women could hope for a different kind of freedom when they forged relationships with military men. In all, The Home Front reveals entire worlds of young women, British officers, anxious patriarchs, enslaved Black women, German soldiers, and wives struggling to survive while their husbands or sons languished in prison or served in the military. And when the book turns to the postwar era, it reveals a stunning assessment of how those experiences of military occupation altered Americans’ views of household social order. As a result, Duval’s book does something unusual: it threads the needle between military history and the history of gender, women, and sexuality. Join us for this conversation between Lauren Duval and Carolyn Eastman (The Strange Genius of Mr. O and President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) and get a glimpse into the experience of living during wartime. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory (UNC Press, 2026), historian John Garrison Marks tells the story of Americans’ long, fraught struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery. He traces how politicians, abolitionists, educators, activists, Washington’s former slaves and their descendants, and others have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated slavery’s place in Washington’s story, and how they have wielded versions of that story in the political and cultural fights of their time. Dr. Marks shows how generational struggles over our collective memory of Washington and slavery have always been part of a bigger conversation about defining the United States and its people. As debates about the founders’ participation in the system of slavery continue to roil public discourse, Dr. Marks shows with new clarity that Americans have never collectively reconciled Washington’s conflicted legacy. By truly grappling with Washington’s role as enslaver and emancipator, we may come to better understand the nation and ourselves. This episode considers: the life and legacy of George Washington, the role of myth and memory in the New Republic, and how conflicted legacies continue. A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life Guest: Dr. John Garrison Marks holds a Ph.D. in history from Rice University. He is a New Jersey native currently living outside Washington, DC. He is the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler holds a Ph.D. in history which she uses to explore the stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. She is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the newsletter at christinagessler.substack.com. Playlist for listeners: Never Caught Running From Bondage No Common Ground The Vice-President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom The Social Constructions of Race What Might Be The Untold Story of President Lincoln Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A striking triptych once displayed in countless African American households, the Trinity typically features Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy. More than decoration, these portraits were deliberate acts of memory and quiet resistance, a medium through which African Americans asserted their own narratives of hope, leadership, and the fight for justice. In this provocative history The Trinity: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Civil Rights in African American Memory (UNC Press, 2026), Sharron Wilkins Conrad traces the Trinity across several decades, showing how African Americans didn’t merely remember the civil rights movement; they shaped its meaning. The Trinity reveals why Kennedy’s image hung beside King and Christ, while Lyndon B. Johnson, despite signing landmark legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, remained largely unheralded. Kennedy’s charisma, symbolic promise, and perceived martyrdom placed him among sacred icons, while Johnson—seen as transactional and confronted by the era’s growing impatience—never secured the same emotional legacy. In a gripping exploration of memory and meaning-making, Conrad reveals how communities create historical truths by elevating some leaders, sidelining others, and preserving their own visions in defiance of the official record. Raymond Williams, PhD is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American History and Politics. You can find Raymond on Instagram, Threads, and Twitter at @rtwilliams16. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Youssef J. Carter’s The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path (UNC Press, 2026) is a stunning meditation on Black Atlantic Sufism, specifically as it travels between South Carolina and Senegal via the Mustafawiyya Sufi community and Shaykh Arona Faye. The book orbits around Sufi conceptual frameworks which are translated through the register of Black and Africana Studies. For example, bay’a is rendered as “solidarity” or khidma as “labour”; such attunement of Sufi concepts presents capacious possibilities for Sufi studies at the intersection of Black and Muslim studies. The book then uses deep ethnography to capture the flows of stories, rituals, and piety, and also Black radical labour, motherwork, and becoming to highlight how in spite of the ongoing violence of racial capitalism and plantation modernity, Black-Africana Sufi communities are vital spaces of worldmaking, one that is not merely metaphysical (such as through ritual piety) but also political, anti-racist, and anti-colonial and rooted in collective care. This book is necessary reading for scholars of Sufism, and those who work on Black and African Islam. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jesse Montgomery joins Michael Stauch to discuss It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story (UNC Press, 2026). They examine how young white migrants from Appalachia and the South fought police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, and even joined forces with Fred Hampton’s Black Panther Party and the Young Lords to create the original Rainbow Coalition in the streets of Chicago in the 1960s and ‘70s. Highlights include: How the Young Patriots evolved from street gang to political organizers active in Chicago’s “Hillbilly Harlem,” the Uptown neighborhood; A reminder that poor white workers made up the large majority of migrants from the South during the Great Migrations of the 20th century; How the Young Patriots attempted to “re-signify” the Confederate flag, paralleling efforts by “race traitors” like Noel Ignatiev to reframe white workers in a context of interracial class solidarity; How the story of the Young Patriots is also a story of urban renewal, and the fight against it, in Chicago; A discussion of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and the role of country music in the culture wars of the 1960s. Guest: Jesse Montgomery is a visiting assistant professor of English at Berea College who works on American literature after 1945, Appalachian outmigration, and radical culture. Jesse holds a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. His writing has appeared in n+1, Popula, Full Stop, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical, working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, Ybor City was a neighborhood of cigar workers and Caribbean revolutionaries who sought refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil during the early half of the twentieth century. In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Historian Sarah McNamara tells the story of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinas/os who organized strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized U.S. foreign policy. While many members of the immigrant generation maintained their dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, those who came of age in the wake of World War II distanced themselves from leftist politics amidst the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal. This portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.