New Books in History

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

Maurice Samuels, historian and director of Yale’s Program for the Study of Antisemitism, explores Jewish life in France from emancipation to the Dreyfus crisis. He traces Dreyfus’s story, the rise of public intellectuals like Zola, distinct regional Jewish communities, and the difference between assimilation and integration. The conversation also covers laïcité, Léon Blum’s ascent, and colonial-era tensions shaping modern French Jewish identity.

Jacqueline Riding, historian, art historian and author of Hard Streets, traces working-class life in Chaplin’s South London. She explores street theatre, music halls and local arts as routes out of poverty. She maps urban change, reform, workhouses, women's labour and community institutions that shaped everyday survival and aspiration.

Andreas Killen, historian and professor at City College of New York, explores brain science in the early Cold War. He traces 1950s breakthroughs like EEG, awake neurosurgery, and sensory deprivation. He follows how scientific metaphors, Cold War paranoia, and media shaped brainwashing myths and later programs such as MKUltra.

Blair L. M. Kelley, historian and UNC-Chapel Hill Southern Studies professor, explores how Black laundresses, Pullman porters, postal workers and others built institutions and community from emancipation into the 20th century. She discusses her family stories, archival photos and oral histories. The conversation traces labor organizing, federal policy exclusions, and the spaces Black workers made for dignity and resistance.

Itohan I. Osayimwese, a Brown professor of architectural and urban history focused on African built environments, recounts how colonial agents dismantled African buildings and rebranded architectural parts as art. She traces violent 'dismemberment' across the continent. The conversation covers museum mislabeling, restitution debates, case studies like Benin and Great Zimbabwe, and how repatriation could restore cultural memory.

Jessica Lake, senior lecturer and legal scholar of media, defamation, and privacy law, discusses the gendered history of defamation law. She traces landmark cases like Mary Smith’s 1788 suit, the rise of Slander of Women statutes across colonies and states, transnational legal circulation, and surprising links between reputation, race, and legal reform.

Arnoud S. Q. Visser, professor of textual culture and director of the Huizinga Institute, explores the long history of pedantry. He traces irritating know-it-all behavior from ancient sophists to Renaissance caricatures and modern culture wars. Short, lively takes cover language, conduct, education, gendered stereotypes, and why anti-intellectualism keeps resurfacing.

Luca Cottini, associate professor of Italian studies and creator of the Italian Innovators YouTube channel, explores Italy’s complex encounters with the United States around 1888–1919. He traces transatlantic cultural flows, emigration laws, baseball tours, Columbus myths, American products and ideas, and Woodrow Wilson’s wartime soft power. Short, lively stories link commerce, culture, and national identity.