Advertise on podcast: New Books in History

From their foundational era in 1097 to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem almost a century later, the Crusader States transformed the Middle Eastern world. In an era shaped by many conflicts, this was not simply a war between Christianity and Islam, but an epic contest among multiple rival empires, dynasties, and cultures. Nicholas Morton's The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East (Pegasus, 2026) unfolds through a kaleidoscope of perspectives: a Byzantine renegade, a crusader princess, a Turkish matriarch, a young Arab nobleman, a Syriac archbishop, Saladin's leading commander, and the vizier of Egypt. Between them, information, technologies, and ideas—as well as weapons—crossed borders at astonishing speed as their societies fought, allied, and traded. Their entangled fates reshaped not only the Middle East, but the medieval world itself. Drawing on sources from Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Latin, and Hebrew traditions, Nicholas Morton's enthralling panorama transforms our understanding of the Crusades, revealing these wars not as a single clash of faiths, but as a dynamic era of war, commerce, innovation, and exchange that defined the course of history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A geopolitical and legal history of the bestselling videogame Tetris—the stunningly successful game that began in a Soviet research lab monitored by the KGB. Tetris—the game that would take the world by storm—was formally introduced to the West in 1987, at a time when Soviet technology exports were minimal and the Berlin Wall was still standing strong. Far from being a capitalist cultural product, the game had actually been designed in a Soviet computer lab tightly monitored by the KGB, at a time when Ronald Reagan referred to the USSR as the “evil empire.” So, how did Tetris jump the wall to become such a blockbuster? And why does a US company, The Tetris Company (TTC), now own the game, when it was the property of Mother Russia? Why has TTC been able to monopolize both the shape of the pieces which predated Tetris and the very concept of an electronic puzzle game with falling pieces, which flies in the face of traditional copyright law? Why and how have Soviet socialists morphed into hardcore capitalists? In Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values (MIT Press, 2026), Julien Mailland answers these questions and more, explaining the fascinating history of Tetris’ commercial success as a story of two systems radically opposed in histories, cultures, economics, and politics. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since the early 1980s. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds three PhDs in game studies (LMU Munich, University of Passau & University of Vechta). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm HNU, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lee Raye joins Jana Byars to talk about their new book, Creatures of Story and Song: Tracing Britain's Lost Species (Reaktion, 2026). Discover why a beaver was said to bite off its own testicles, why the baleen of a right whale was prized by medieval knights or why you should give your crush the gift of a great auk. Creatures of Story and Song pieces together evocative legends, poems and historical accounts from a thousand years of history to remember fourteen of Britain’s extinct creatures. More than merely charting their demise, this book explores the rich legacy that such creatures as the eagle, boar and wolf left on our cultural landscape, and sheds light on what it was like to live alongside them. As some, like the beaver, look set for a comeback, Lee Raye’s book offers curious readers charming context on these animals’ ancestors. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Enriched by extraordinary first-hand accounts, Prit Buttar's Into the Reich: The Red Army’s Advance to the Oder in 1945 (Osprey Publishing, 2025) is a fascinating history of the dying days of the Third Reich as Stalin sought to consolidate his own empire.In January 1945, the Red Army launched a powerful offensive across the Vistula River to drive the Wehrmacht out of Poland, with the intention of securing a start line for an operation that would ultimately result in the capture of Berlin and the end of the war. But, as Prit Buttar expertly reveals, there were other issues at play. Stalin was determined to push the boundaries of the Soviet Union further west, restoring land lost by the tsars and securing vast industrial and mineral wealth. While negotiations took place between the Allied powers regarding the fate of Poland, the Red Army burst through the German lines, liberating Auschwitz even as the SS drove concentration camp inmates onto frozen roads in a series of death marches.The Wehrmacht staged a desperate fight back with their last major armoured offensive on the Eastern Front. Launched in February 1945 from the German-Polish border, it forced a halt to the Soviet forces on the banks of the Oder before the rush to Berlin. Written by an acknowledged expert on the Eastern Front and packed with first-hand accounts, this is the definitive account of the strategic goals, both military and political, of Stalin, his generals, and their armies as they raced into the Reich, and of the German forces who stood in the way.Prit Buttar studied medicine at Oxford and London before joining the British Army as a doctor. After leaving the army, he worked as a GP. He is extensively involved in medical politics, both at local and national level. An established expert on the Eastern Front in 20th-century military history, his previous books include the critically acclaimed two-volume series on the siege of Leningrad: To Besiege A City (Osprey 2023) and Hero City (Osprey 2024). He now lives France.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He served as the editor of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) newsletter from 2016 to 2018 and is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Lilyanna D'Amato speaks with Rahim Kurwa about his book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing (U California Press, 2025), which examines the policing of housing in Los Angeles' northernmost suburb, Antelope Valley. Kurwa traces the suburbs' relationship with Los Angeles from post WWII to the early 2000s and 2010s, when the region saw increased Black migration as result of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, the largest rental assistance program for low-income families in the nation. Kurwa contextualizes the adoption and reception of the voucher system in Los Angeles at the end of the 20th century, and explores the participatory policing and criminalization practices used to evict Black residents and re-segregate the region. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kelly Lytle Hernández joins Michael Stauch to discuss how the US immigration system has always been “racist by design.” Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. In Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control (Norton, 2026), Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only America’s first immigration bans (to prevent news of a free Black republic from reaching our shores) but also its first refugee resettlement program (to welcome and support Haiti’s evicted enslavers.) She explains how Chinese Exclusion led the Supreme Court to disconnect immigration laws from the constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and Jim Crow segregationists built much of our current immigration regime as expressly "whites-only," and shows how during the Civil Rights Movement, Congress amended this system but never abolished it, leaving many of the regime’s racist rules and rituals intact today.  Highlights include:  - How an “Exclusion Quartet” of rulings by the Supreme Court in the late 19th century “unhinged” the Constitution from immigration policy; - How the “family reunification” clause of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, meant to favor European migrants, combined with global instability in the 1970s and ‘80s to create an enormous wave of non-white immigrants to the United States; - What changed (and didn’t change) in immigration policy during World War II and the Cold War;  - How guestworker programs, asylum restrictions, and the US “visa dome” contribute to the racist-by-design immigration regime;  - How immigrants and their advocates have long used cracks and loopholes in immigration legislation to create space for themselves in the United States.  Guest: Kelly Lytle Hernández is a Professor in the Departments of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she also holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History. She is one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, and the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022).  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.

David N. Gellman interviews Nicholas P. Wood on Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view that slavery was a sinful form of oppression that would provoke God’s wrath against slaveholding societies. These principles were first advanced by a handful of Quakers and Puritans as early as the 1600s, but they did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century. Quakers embraced antislavery theology during the French and Indian War, which they interpreted as divine chastisement for the sin of colonial slavery. Citing the prophet Isaiah, they pledged to please the Lord by letting the oppressed go free.Antislavery theology became even more prominent during the American Revolution. When Parliament provoked an imperial crisis in the 1760s, abolitionists argued it was further evidence of God’s anger over slavery. The outbreak of war in 1775 made these arguments increasingly persuasive. Let the Oppressed Go Free demonstrates that antislavery activism during the Revolution by Quakers, African Americans, and evangelical patriots was more sophisticated and influential than historians have recognized. The northern states that began abolishing slavery during the Revolution did so in response to tenacious agitation and generally described their actions as designed to earn God’s blessing.Let the Oppressed Go Free challenges many common assumptions about abolitionism and the American Revolution. Wood demonstrates that religion remained central to abolitionism rather than being displaced by “secular” arguments about natural rights. And whereas some have argued that the Revolutionary War hindered antislavery progress and fueled racism, Wood shows that the war accelerated reform. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill remain two of the most iconic figures of the twentieth century and Joel Nelson’s new book, Kennedy’s Only Hero: How JFK’s Obsession with Winston Churchill Defined His Presidency (Public Affairs, 2026), reveals the unexpected influence that Churchill had on Kennedy’s political career. Winston Churchill remains one of the modern age’s most revered leaders. His life has been the subject of decades of mythmaking and scrutiny, and yet few know the powerful sway he had over another twentieth-century political icon―John F. Kennedy. Drawing on deep wells of unpublished archival material, Kennedy's Only Hero uncovers Kennedy’s obsession with Churchill, whose career, policies, writings, and even daily habits profoundly shaped the future president. Kennedy discovered Churchill’s books as a teenager and by his early twenties had become an unswerving believer in his brilliance. Under Churchill’s influence, Kennedy rejected his own youthful isolationism and adopted the approach to national and international politics that propelled him to the presidency. Although they would not meet until late in their lives, Churchill’s influence on Kennedy’s campaign tactics, speeches, and worldview was overwhelming. Kennedy’s conviction in the power of peace through strength, his faith in summits, his understanding of the importance of rhetoric, and his deep commitment to service and global engagement―all came from Churchill. Kennedy's Only Hero is an enlightening and deeply human story of an admiration and aspiration that changed the course of history.   Andrew O. Pace is a Senior Historian at SNA International in support of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Dr. Pace is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I spoke with writer and The Hollywood Reporter editor Julian Sancton about his New York Times bestselling book, Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night (Penguin, 2021). Julian tells the jaw-dropping story of the 1897 Belgian expedition to Antarctica and the drama of its crew, who were forced to survive for months in the freezing cold, barren landscape, and darkness, with limited supplies, after their ship, the Belgica, became trapped in the Antarctic ice. It’s a riveting book. And it's also a great a case study (or, actually, multiple case studies) of leadership.  Much of what could have gone wrong did go wrong, from the moment the idea of the expedition arose in the mind of the young Belgian Navy officer Adrien de Gerlache to the ship’s nearly miraculous return to Antwerp in late 1899.  De Gerlache faced funding problems, PR challenges, crew mutinies, ocean storms and other menacing elements, deadly threats to his men’s health, limited resources, and his own weaknesses, including ambition, stubbornness, and pride. We talk about how the entrepreneurial American doctor and adventurer Frederick Cook stepped in and helped save the expedition, introducing a different leadership style and drawing on knowledge he had acquired during his earlier voyages to the far north.  Julian also talks about how the Belgica case shaped NASA’s studies of human survival in extreme conditions and shares his reflections on his history studies at Harvard, his decision to pursue a career as a writer and editor, as well as on AI. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Six great Asian river systems have their origins in the Tibetan glacial region: the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Red and the Yangtse ('BISMRY'). Together they comprise the largest concentration of fresh water on the planet outside of the polar regions, and they support one third of humanity. In the age of imperialism, Western colonial powers dreamed of harnessing the economic potential of these great rivers, as if an ‘empire of men’ challenged a much older ‘empire of rivers’. This is the theme of Iftekhar Iqbal’s conceptually ambitious new book, The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia, just published by Stanford University Press this year. This neo-Braudellian history of Asia’s great rivers encourages us to re-examine our thinking about the impact of imperialism, historical agency, Cold War regional categories of ‘South Asia’, ‘Southeast Asia’, and ‘East Asia’, into which the study of Asian history is usually divided, and even the humble mule, which played a crucial role in connecting this mountainous, watery region.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Historians have always known that the success of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day in June 1944 depended on deceiving the Germans about where the invasion would take place. Jason Bell’s book, Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War (Hanover Square Press, 2026), tells the story of how three secret agents got themselves captured in Hungary to convince the Third Reich that the Allied invasion was taking place a thousand miles away. March 16, 1944. Colonel Duke jumped into Hitler's Europe to lead Operation Sparrow, an OSS mission authorized by the president. Duke was forty-eight, twice the age of most paratroopers. He had played pro football for the New York Giants, flown fighter planes, and made his fortune in advertising before World War II made him a spy behind enemy lines. Within days, the three Sparrows were captured in Hungary. It wasn’t a failure. It was the plan. Under brutal Gestapo interrogation, Duke and his men set out to convince the Third Reich that the D-Day invasion would strike the Balkans, far from France. Survive torture while making a lie sound true—it was either genius or suicidal. Probably both. If the ruse held, Axis divisions would defend the wrong coast. If it broke, three Americans would be shot as spies—and the Wehrmacht would be poised to win D-Day. Of the tens of millions who fought in the war, the Sparrows were the only ones whose mission required capture by the Nazis. Drawing on recently declassified OSS files, Jason Bell brings their story to life. Operation Sparrow reveals: The American heroes who turned their own capture into a weaponThe Gestapo interrogation rooms that became a secret Allied battlefieldThe top-secret deception that kept Hitler's divisions away from NormandyMeticulously researched and told at the pace of a thriller, Operation Sparrow is narrative history for readers of Operation Mincemeat and Unbroken.   Andrew O. Pace is a Senior Historian at SNA International in support of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Dr. Pace is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoW or its components.  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.

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”In How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington (Pantheon, 2026), Pulitzer Prizing-winning author Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before. Dr. Marcia Chatelain a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls and Franchise, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, the Hagley Prize for Business History, and the Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok.  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.

Great Power Diplomacy. The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Kissinger (Princeton UP, 2025) is a captivating history of diplomacy—and an urgent reminder of why we need to revive its lost arts to survive in a dangerous era of great power competition. From the beginning of time, human societies have found themselves confronted by enemies too numerous or ferocious to defeat solely by force of arms. In these dramatic moments, wise leaders have turned to diplomacy to rearrange the gameboard in their favor and stymie seemingly unstoppable foes. In Great Power Diplomacy, American historian and diplomat A. Wess Mitchell recounts the forgotten story of how history’s most legendary empires have used diplomacy as a tool of grand strategy to outwit, outmaneuver, and outlast militarily superior opponents. Through fifteen centuries of history, Great Power Diplomacy recreates the perilous junctures, colorful personalities, and intricate statecraft that led to some of history’s most stunning diplomatic achievements—and greatest disasters. The protagonists include giants like Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck, and Kissinger, but also a lesser-known cast of scoundrels, eunuchs, drunkards, and fools. At every turn, fortune favored those great powers with the foresight and dexterity to build winning alliances, splinter enemy coalitions, and, when necessary, make peace with their bitterest foes. Diplomacy of this kind has become a lost art in recent years as Western elites embraced the illusion that globalization and the spread of democracy would create a borderless world where nations would live in harmony and war would be abolished from the human story. But, as Great Power Diplomacy reveals, we will need to rediscover the secrets of skillful statecraft as the world enters an unstable new era in which continent-sized great powers compete for territory, resources, and prestige. By recalling diplomacy’s rich past, we can equip ourselves for a more dangerous future. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.