New Books in History

Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive (NYU Press, 2026) is a bold and incisive reconsideration of the relationship between enslavement, disability, and performance in 19th- and early 20th-century America; a time when transition from slavery to legal freedom became entangled with the spectacle of the freak show stage, where disabled and racialized performers became lucrative attractions. At the heart of this powerful study are conjoined twins Millie Christine McKoy, born into slavery and later emancipated, and the so-called “original Siamese Twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker, who navigated the freak show circuit not only as performers but also as enslavers. Their stories reveal how archival practices surrounding enslavement and performance labor worked in tandem, creating a system where unfree and newly freed bodies were simultaneously valued and devalued—exploited for their spectacle yet rendered abject within traditional labor economies. Blending historical analysis with innovative archival theory, Currencies of Cruelty challenges conventional narratives of labor, freedom, and human worth. A gripping exploration of race, commerce, and bodily spectacle, this book sheds crucial light on how histories of subjugation continue to shape our understanding of value and visibility today. Author Danielle Bainbridge is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, where she also holds courtesy appointments in Performance Studies and Black Studies. You can find her at the Northwestern University website, on Instagram, and on Bluesky. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Salt lakes are some of the most beautiful and unusual landscapes that you can find on this planet, even as they can be quite alien to people used to fresh bodies of water. They're also uniquely threatened, both by everyday human activity such as farming and industry and by the looming problem of anthropogenic climate change. As the lakes dry up, the consequences to the surrounding ecosystems can be devastating; meanwhile, people who live nearby can suffer from declining air quality, toxic levels of exposure to minerals in the lakebeds, and long-term health concerns. In Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History (W. W. Norton, 2026) that's part memoir and part history and geography, Caroline Tracey describes a series of journeys across North America and Central Asia that brought her close to numerous different salt lakes. She outlines their history, the threats facing them, their ecological and cultural significance, and how people are trying to protect and conserve them. And even as she does the work of telling their history, she also makes clear the effect that these landscapes had on her in developing a greater understanding of her own sexuality and place in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.Now in The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025), curator, art historian, and podcast host Jennifer Dasal presents the untold story of the Club, the philanthropists who created it, and the artists it housed. These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women's lives revealed the power of the Club itself, and the way that having a safe home for single women of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people. A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life Our guest is: Jennifer Dasal, who is the creator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, the author of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. She holds an MA in art history, and is the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lectures frequently on art both locally and nationally Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Artisans and Designers Thanks To Life In The Garden Behind The Moon Jumping Through Hoops Your Art Will Save Your Life The Artists Joy Speaking While Female My What-if Year We Take Our Cities With Us Pursuing Life Abroad 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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

“Japanese war crimes are notorious. During the Second World War, as Japanese forces overran Southeast Asia and the Pacific, they massacred, murdered, raped, and tortured Asians and Westerners who fell into their hands. They also mistreated hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian internees. After the war ended in 1945, the victorious Allied powers conducted trials in which they brought Japanese perpetrators to justice, as they also did with Germans in Europe… In this provocative new book, Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away, published by University of Hawaiʻi Press (2026), historians Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson analyse thirteen case studies of Japanese war crimes. They attempt to answer a crucial question with contemporary relevance, how does one become a war criminal? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) examines the significance of Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations to the immigrant experience, particularly their implications for the formation of a Pan-Caribbean American identity and Black diasporic politics.At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City exploded with the establishment of mutual aid societies and benevolent associations. Caribbean immigrants, especially women, eager to find their place in a bustling new world, created these organizations, including the West Indian Benevolent Association of New York City, founded in 1884. They served as forums for discussions on Caribbean American affairs, hosted cultural activities, and provided newly arrived immigrants with various forms of support, including job and housing assistance, rotating lines of credit, help in the naturalization process, and its most popular function—sickness and burial assistance. In examining the number of these organizations, their membership, and the functions they served, Tyesha Maddox argues that mutual aid societies not only fostered a collective West Indian ethnic identity among immigrants from specific islands, but also strengthened kinship networks with those back home in the Caribbean. Especially important to these processes were Caribbean women such as Elizabeth Hendrickson, co-founder of the American West Indian Ladies’ Aid Society in 1915 and the Harlem Tenants’ League in 1928.Immigrant involvement in mutual aid societies also strengthened the belief that their own fate was closely intertwined with the social, economic, and political welfare of the Black international community. A Home Away from Home demonstrates how Caribbean American mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in many ways became proto-Pan-Africanist organizations. Kiana M. Knight is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame.  Kiana’s Webpage Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Political Economy of Oil in Venezuela: Class Conflict, the State, and the World Market (Brill, 2026) is the latest book from Dr. Kristin Ciupa, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Regina. Published with Brill, this book provides a detailed and engaging account of the historical development of Venezuela’s political economy and interrelated oil industry. The book takes us from Venezuela prior to the advent of oil discovery where the economy was dependent on a limited range of export-oriented agricultural crops, all the way up to the Bolivarian government project instituted by Hugo Chavez. Of course, Venezuela has been at the centre of political turmoil at present, and it is crucial to get a strong, historical understanding of Venezuela’s political economy, connected as it is with broader regional and global developments, to more concretely comprehend the current moment. Ciupa situates Venezuela within not only the broader ‘Pink Tide’ that swept different parts of Latin America since the1990s, but also within the dynamics and tendencies of oil extraction and class politics at a local and international scale. Much of the literature has seen Venezuela as trapped in the classic ‘resource curse’, where oil-exporting developing countries earn windfall revenues but have been unable to translate that to sustainable growth and development, which is usually deemed to be due to poor economic planning, weak institutions, and a lack of incentives for governments to invest. Ciupa’s book argues, instead, that the interplay between national and international structures and relations of power, in Venezuela and in the global market, serve to perpetuate oil dependence. In making this argument, Ciupa presents a detailed, historical analysis of the ways in which the country was subsumed into the global economy as an oil exporter, tracing Venezuela’s development and political economy through its prior dictatorships, the crises of the twentieth century, and then finally through the revolutionary Bolivarian government led by Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro. Kristin Ciupa’s new book is a detailed, theoretically invigorated, and careful examination of Venezuela and its oil industry, which is still at the centre of geopolitical struggles more broadly today. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region's changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands' early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands' history for scholars and nonspecialists alike. Gregory Smits is professor of history and Asian Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Early Ryukyuan History: A New Model. Ran Zwigenberg is a professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Fifty years ago, a government investigation led by US senator Frank Church uncovered some of the darkest state secrets of the twentieth century. The Church Committee confirmed the nation's worst fears about the unchecked power of its intelligence agencies: at the FBI, surveillance campaigns against civil rights leaders and clandestine attempts to disrupt antiwar protests; at the CIA, assassination plots against foreign heads of state, experiments with toxic substances and illegal drugs, and covert partnerships with the Mafia. The Church Committee's findings were so explosive that key members found themselves on the watch lists of the very government agencies they were investigating. Three witnesses who cooperated with the inquiry were murdered. Amid the creep of digital surveillance and the upheavals of social protest, this accessible volume The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026), containing the most harrowing revelations of the Church Committee investigation, sheds valuable light on some of today's most urgent concerns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today, we're speaking with Nicholas Juravich, author of Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education (U Illinois Press, 2024). In this book, Juravich explores the emergence of paraprofessional educators in U.S. schools during the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s. He shows how these workers—often underpaid and undervalued—played a crucial role in addressing what he calls a "crisis of care" in public education. The book situates paraprofessionals within broader Black and Latino struggles for economic opportunity and social justice, particularly in New York City. Juravich traces how these workers reshaped classrooms, strengthened ties between schools and communities, and helped create pathways for Black and Latino teachers in the 1970s and early 1980s. He also highlights how their organizing contributed to the growth and diversification of public-sector unions. Para Power ultimately offers a compelling look at an often overlooked workforce and its impact on education, labor, and community life. Nicholas Juravich is an assistant professor of history and labor studies at UMass Boston, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Labor Resource Center. Previously, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's History at the New-York Historical Society, where he curated the exhibition Ladies' Garments, Women's Work, Women's Activism and helped develop educational workshops on school segregation and movements for educational equality in New York City. His research focuses on public education, community organizing, and public-sector unions in 20th-century U.S. cities, and has been supported by numerous foundations and institutions. My co-host today is Jillian Felton, a graduate student in the MA program in Communication at Oakland University. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Nicholas W. Gentile complicates our understanding of the American Revolution through a microhistory of one Massachusetts town in his new book, Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution (U Mass Press, 2025). In 1774, a group of elite men in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, just outside Salem, wrote an address to the royal governor thanking him for his service to the colony, even as town residents began demanding independence from Great Britain. Town meeting records reveal how the town’s patriot majority pressured the signers to withdraw their support for the governor and demanded public recantations and issued damning reports, even forcing some of the signers into exile. Enemies to Their Country tells the story of the year following the Address, chronicling the town’s struggle to achieve consensus even as the war for American independence started. This microhistory of one vitally important town, the second largest in Massachusetts at the time, with a thriving local economy based on fishing and a robust community of religious and civically engaged citizens, complicates simplistic ideas of the American Revolution. Through compelling stories of neighboring individuals and families, many of which have not been told, it also provides an example of a politically polarized constituency struggling to find consensus at a time of great conflict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history