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Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures. Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the history of the collection and distribution of African architectural fragments, documenting the brutality of the colonial regimes that looted Africa’s buildings and addressing the ethical questions surrounding the display of these objects.Dr. Itohan Osayimwese ranges across the whole of Africa, from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, and spanning the western, central, and eastern regions of the continent. She describes how collectors employed violent means to remove elements such as columns and door panels from buildings, and how these methods differentiated architectural collecting from conventional collecting. She shows how Western collectors mischaracterized building components as ornament, erasing their architectural character and concealing the evidence of their theft. Dr. Osayimwese discusses how the very act of displacing building parts like floor tiles and woven screen walls has resulted in a loss of knowledge about their original function and argues that because of these removals, scholars have yet to fully grasp the variety and character of African architecture.Richly illustrated, Africa’s Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa’s architectural heritage and restitution for African communities. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community.  In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves. Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book. Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century. Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press. Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths. On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton University Press, 2025) offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates. Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savantes to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors. He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas, social status, political authority, and belief. Shifting attention away from the self-proclaimed virtues of the learned to their less-than-flattering vice, Visser makes a bold and provocative contribution to the history of Western thought. Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from satire and comedy to essays, sermons, and film, On Pedantry sheds critical light on why anti-intellectual views have gained renewed prominence today and serves as essential reading in an age of rising populism across the globe. Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving "special damage." Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement. In Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called "whores." Dr. Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents. The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal "civilised" New World. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a pivotal time for the United States as the nation emerged as a political and industrial powerhouse and fashioned its new value system. Amid waves of emigration and evolving cultural exchanges, Italy’s relationship with America became a complex tapestry of admiration, critique, and adaptation. This study of Italy’s Americanism explores social debates within Italy regarding emigration, the development of a Columbian narrative, European reactions to the Spanish-American War, the impact of American products on Italian society, and former US president Woodrow Wilson’s military intervention and political propaganda during the First World War. It highlights discussions among Italians about the implications of emigration, contrasting prevailing negative views with a counter-narrative from Italian journalists, scholars, and missionaries who visited the United States. The negotiation of US imports and their incorporation into the Italian national context document the formation of a distinct American subculture and the early phases of the nation’s Americanization. The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888-1919 (University of Toronto Press, 2025) provides a unique perspective to assess the early stages of America’s “soft” expansion, as the flow of departing and returning emigrants made Italy a favourable terrain for commercial penetration in Europe, transforming an export ideology into a complex network of transatlantic relations. Luca Cottini, PhD, is an associate professor of Italian in Villanova University. He is also the creator of the popular Youtube channel, Italian Innovators. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The racist roots of modern policing in Baltimore By the early twentieth century, postbellum assaults on civil rights and the advent of Jim Crow expanded Baltimore’s law enforcement into a vast network designed to oppress Black people. Michael Casiano’s history charts the institutional consolidation of the city’s post–Civil War police state. Authorities in Baltimore organized and established municipal power in distinct but connected sites that included jails, areas of political and social activism, public schools, street corners, courtrooms, and homes. Casiano analyzes policing in light of two parallel and inextricable realities of the city’s governance. First, policing evolved from an inefficient and vigilante-driven system into a modern and paramilitary endeavor focused on suppressing citizens and maximizing the power, wealth, and reach of capitalists. Second, decades of racial antagonism shaped Baltimore policing into an apparatus primarily oriented around subduing Black freedom. A compelling urban history, Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore's Police State (U Illinois Press, 2025) uses voices from all levels of society to examine police power, incarceration, and the perils of being Black in post–Civil War Baltimore. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last five centuries, Wilson finds little unique or preordained in German militarism or warfighting. Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Harvard UP, 2023) takes as its starting point the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which created new mechanisms for raising troops but also for resolving disputes diplomatically. Both the empire and the Swiss Confederation were largely defensive in orientation, while German participation in foreign wars was most often in partnership with allies. The primary aggressor in Central Europe was not Prussia but the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, yet Austria's strength owed much to its ability to secure allies. Prussia, meanwhile, invested in militarization but maintained a part-time army well into the nineteenth century. Alongside Switzerland, which relied on traditional militia, both states exemplify the longstanding civilian element within German military power. Only after Prussia's unexpected victory over France in 1871 did Germans and outsiders come to believe in a German gift for warfare--a special capacity for high-speed, high-intensity combat that could overcome numerical disadvantage. It took two world wars to expose the fallacy of German military genius. Yet even today, Wilson argues, Germany's strategic position is misunderstood. The country now seen as a bastion of peace spends heavily on defense in comparison to its peers and is deeply invested in less kinetic contemporary forms of coercive power. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. The celebration of peacekeeping as a legitimate and desirable use of military force is expressed through the unproblematised acceptance of militarism. Introducing a novel framework – martial peace – the book offers an in-depth examination of the Canadian Armed Forces missions to Afghanistan and the use of police violence against Indigenous protests in Canada as case examples where military violence has been justified in the name of peace. It critically investigates the peacekeeper myth and challenges the academic, government and popular beliefs that martial violence is required to sustain peace. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory (Indiana UP, 2025) gathers interviews with members of the last generation to experience a unified Yugoslavia as children. Born between 1971 and 1991, this cohort spent a relatively short period of their childhood in Yugoslavia – yet the Yugoslav experience had a profound and lasting impact on their lives. The eight individuals selected for this collection share memories of their childhood during the final decades of socialism, offering unique insights into what it means to lose a country, and how they continue to find meaning in the Yugoslav past. Jovana Babović is an Associate Professor of modern European history at SUNY Geneseo. Her research focuses on urban culture and society in Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. Profile page: here Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Saundra Weddle joins fellow Venetianist Jana Byars to talk about her pathbreaking new release, The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State UP, 2026). This book deepens our understanding of women’s engagement in urban life through a close study of Venice’s sex trade. Centering questions of gender, agency, and mobility, it reveals how sex workers were embedded in the social and spatial fabric of the city. From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Venetian government attempted to control commercial sex by segregating it in municipal brothels in Rialto and later by minimizing the public’s contact with sex workers, limiting their profits, and cracking down on recruitment. These decentralized efforts proved ineffective, and women who performed this labor lived and worked throughout the city. This book traces the diffusion of sex work from the brothels to the alleys, gondola landings, taverns, bathhouses, and peripheral squares of Venice. Saundra Weddle uses legislation, criminal records, contemporary chronicles, and other archival sources to reconstruct the networks of sex workers, procuresses, clients, landlords, and others who facilitated or profited from their labor. Using maps and photographs of key sites, Weddle demonstrates how the built environment both constrained and enabled women’s practices, offering an alternative urban history that foregrounds embodied experiences and vernacular spaces. By assigning new meanings to everyday locations and spatial conditions, this study challenges monument- and elite-centered narratives of Venice and redefines the place of women within its urban history. It will be of interest to scholars of architectural and urban history, women and gender studies, early modern social history, and Italian studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In A Nasty Little War: The Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (Basic Books, 2024), award-winning reporter Anna Reid tells the extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution. In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia, with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bolshevik forces in trying to overthrow the new men in the Kremlin, in an astonishingly ambitious military adventure known as the Intervention. Fresh, in the case of the British, from the trenches, they found themselves in a mobile, multi-sided conflict as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddlesteamers, they bivouacked in snowbound cabins and Kirghiz yurts, torpedoed Red battleships from speedboats, improvised new currencies and the world’s first air-dropped chemical weapons, got caught up in mass retreats and a typhus epidemic, organised several coups and at least one assassination. Taking tea with warlords and princesses, they also turned a blind eye to their Russian allies’ numerous atrocities. Two years later they left again, filing glumly back onto their troopships as port after port fell to the Red Army. Later, American veterans compared the humiliation to Vietnam, and the politicians and generals responsible preferred to trivialise or forget. Drawing on previously unused diaries, letters and memoirs, A Nasty Little War brings an episode with echoes down the century since vividly to life. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environment of the home front. War is often viewed as a crucible that can transform society, but American race relations proved remarkably durable. In Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam (U Massachusetts Press, 2023), Gerald F. Goodwin examines how Black servicemen experienced and interpreted racial issues during their time in Vietnam. Drawing on more than fifty new oral interviews and significant archival research, as well as newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and documentaries, Goodwin reveals that for many African Americans the front line and the home front were two sides of the same coin. Serving during the same period as the civil rights movement and the race riots in Chicago, Detroit, and dozens of other American cities, these men increasingly connected the racism that they encountered in the barracks and on the battlefields with the tensions and violence that were simmering back home. Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The idea of self-determination is one of the most significant in modern international politics. For more than a century diplomats, lawyers, scholars, activists, and ordinary people in every part of the globe have wrestled with its meaning and implications for decolonization, human rights, sovereignty, and international order. The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000 (Oxford UP, 2025) argues that there was no one self-determination, but a century-long contest between contending visions of sovereignty and rights that were as varied and changing as the nature of sovereignty itself. In this globe-spanning narrative, Simpson argues that self-determination's meaning has often emerged not just from the United Nations but from the claims of movements and peoples on the margins of international society. Powerful states, he shows, persistently rejected expansive self-determination claims, arguing that these threatened great power conflict, the dissolution of international order, or the unravelling of the world economy. Pacific Island territories, indigenous peoples, regional and secessionist movements, and transnational solidarity groups, among others, rejected the efforts of large, powerful states to define self-determination along narrow lines. Instead, international historian Bradley R. Simpson shows they offered expansive visions of economic, political, and cultural sovereignty ranging far beyond the movement for decolonization with which they are often associated. As they did so, these movements and groups helped to vernacularize self-determination as a language of social justice and rights for people around the world. An ambitious work of global breadth on a key geopolitical issue, The First Right transforms how we think about the making of the twentieth century world order and the place of the global South and decolonization in it. Dr. Bradley R. Simpson is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Samee Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of World History at Drury University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo's book The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950  (Liverpool UP, 2023) deals comprehensively with the process of Francoist state- and nation-building in Spain. Franco's chosen tools were mass repression and cleansing, undertaken both during the battlefield war of 1936-39 and in the decade afterwards, when war against defeated constituencies continued by institutional means. Mobilising its grass roots supporters made them complicit in the state's project. The complex process of cleansing and conversion of the political enemy required classifying soldiers from the defeated Republican army and Republican-zone civilians into pro-Franco, indifferent, or internal enemy. Many of the latter were either extrajudicially murdered or executed after cursory military trials. Classification used ultra-traditionalist Catholic means, including segregation and forced conversion.  The new society programme implemented between 1936 and 1950 was applied nation-wide to political activists, members of Republican parties, labour organisations, and (poor) urban and (landless) rural social constituencies. The Francoist project adapted to the changing national and international contexts across the period 1936-1950: from a civil war; through the period of relations with the Axis powers at the same time as receiving Nazi assistance in building up Franco's police force as an agent of repression; to the transformation of Franco into an anti-Communist client of the Cold War West. The Fabric of Fear addresses the social effects of the cleansing process on both victors and vanquished. On the one hand, Franco's violent policy forged a new society and tightened the links between the regime and its social base. On the other hand, the violence and coercion exerted on the vanquished resulted in their civil and legal death: they were expelled from Franco's national community and deprived of all rights in what became de facto an apartheid society in Spain. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history