New Books in History

Joshua Clark Davis, an associate professor who studies postwar U.S. history and social movements, describes how local police actively sabotaged civil rights organizing. He explores red squads, undercover infiltration, legal and economic attacks, and the deliberate erasure of records. The conversation links these historical tactics to modern surveillance and repression of protesters.

Nancy Castaldo, environmental educator and science author, presents Squirrel: How a Backyard Forager Shapes Our World. She explores squirrel diversity across continents. She recounts their roles in urban parks, cultural stories, and surprising caching intelligence. She examines invasive versus endangered dynamics and why coexistence and better research matter.

Hilary French, an architectural historian and dancer, draws on design knowledge and personal experience to trace ballroom and Latin dance history. She explores the rise of public ballrooms, codification of technique, American and British influences, the art‑deco palaces of Mecca Dancing, midcentury decline, TV revival, and recent moves toward inclusivity and preservation.

Florian Wagner, Assistant Professor of History and author of Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, explores the International Colonial Institute from 1893 to the 1970s. He traces how reformist language and scientific claims professionalized colonial administration. He shows ideological convergence across Europe and how postwar rebranding sustained segregation under the guise of differing civilizations.

Ian Smith, Professor of English at USC and author of Black Shakespeare, probes how readers are trained to miss race in Shakespeare. He explores systemic whiteness, racial literacy, and how historical laws and theatrical strategies shape perception. Short, sharp takes touch on Othello, Shylock, Hamlet, and how classroom and archival work can reshape how we read race.

Lucy Donkin, cultural and art historian of the Middle Ages, explores how floors and ground shaped sacred spaces. She discusses holy footprints as contact relics, consecration rituals written in ash, and how paving, materials, and carpets marked status and liturgical roles. She also covers trampling, buried graves beneath feet, and surprising modern parallels.

Ann Komaromi, a University of Toronto professor researching underground publishing, explores samizdat as an uncensored network of journals, art folios, and readings. She discusses poetry’s role, regional and religious samizdat communities, conceptual art documentation, striking cover art, and samizdat’s ties to later digital circulation methods.

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, writer, civil rights attorney, and constitutional law professor, reflects on the history of protest and policing. She traces policing’s roots to slavery, discusses militarization and weakened federal reform, and warns how legal shifts and institutional patterns endanger protesters and marginalized communities.

Thomas Kuehn, Professor Emeritus and historian of law and family in Renaissance Italy, discusses how family property formed the core of social life. He traces legal theories of shared rights, archival methods in Florence and Milan, frequent inheritance conflicts, and the legal devices used to preserve or divide patrimony. The conversation also covers municipal oversight, inventories, and managing problematic heirs.

In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how the press on both sides of the Atlantic nourished anticolonial and antiracist movements. Editors with varying levels of education, men and women journalists, worker and peasant correspondents, and anonymous contributors voiced incisive critiques of empire and experimented with visions of Black freedom. But as independence loomed, the press transformed to better demonstrate the respectability expected of a self-governing people. Seeing themselves as “the Fourth and Only Estate,” the sole democratic institution available to a colonized population, early press contributors experimented with the form and function of the newspaper itself. They advanced anticolonial goals through clipping and reprinting articles from a variety of sources; drawing on local ways of speaking; and manipulating photography, comics, and advertising. Such unruly content, James shows, served as a strategic assertion of autonomy against colonial bureaucracy. Yet in the 1950s, this landscape changed as press professionalism became a proxy for a colony’s capacity to govern itself. Analyzing a key moment in the history of Black Atlantic political thought, The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960 (Harvard UP, 2025) highlights the boundless, shapeshifting power of experimental media. During the era of decolonization, as independence loomed on the horizon, West African and Caribbean newspapers creatively engineered and reinvented debates about imperialism, racial capitalism, and Black freedom dreams and realities. Leslie James is Reader and Sinor Lecturer in Global History at Queen Mary University of London and the author of George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire, 1939–1959. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history