New Books in History

In High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025), Aaron G. Fountain Jr. highlights the crucial impact of high school activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Mid-twentieth-century student activism is a pivotal chapter in American history. While college activism has been well documented, the equally vital contributions of high school students have often been overlooked. Only recently have scholars begun to recognize the transformative role teenagers played in reshaping American education. Inspired by civil rights and antiwar movements, students across the nation demanded a voice in their education by organizing sit-ins, walkouts, and strikes. From cities such as San Francisco and Chicago to smaller towns such as Jonesboro, Georgia, these young leaders fought for curricula that reflected their evolving worldviews. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Aaron G. Fountain Jr. reveals how teenagers became powerful agents of change, advocating for constitutional rights and influencing school reform. Ironically, the modernization of school security, including police presence, was partly a response to these student-led movements. Through oral histories and FBI records, this fascinating history offers a fresh perspective on high school activism and its lasting impact on American education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2025) historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley used education reform to target working-class communities and advocate for their middle-class ideals of girlhood and femininity, which could vary depending on the racial or socio-economic backgrounds of the girls. For example, reformers generally encouraged white girls to care for their future families, while pushing Black girls toward becoming domestic workers in others’ homes. Using Chicago as a case study, Oram also explores how many of the reforms sought by white women were in response to evolving anxieties about immigration, health, and sexual delinquency.An illuminating addition to the history of urban education in America, Home Work enriches our understanding of educational inequality in twentieth-century schools. Allie Morris (aemorris5@wisc.edu) is a joint Ph.D. student in Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She broadly studies gender, age, and education in the late 20th-century United States. Her current research focuses on the political history of girlhood from the 1960s to the 1990s, examining girls’ culture and activism in the American high school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia. Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets. Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach. By chronicling capitalism’s global history, Beckert exposes the reality of the system that now seems simply “natural.” It is said that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If there is one ultimate lesson in this extraordinary book, it’s how to leave that behind. Though cloaked in a false timelessness and universality, capitalism is, in reality, a recent human invention. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely tote up capitalism’s debits and credits. He shows us how to look through and beyond it to imagine a different and larger world. Soumyadeep Guha is a fourth-year PhD student in the History Department at Binghamton University, New York. He is interested in historical research focusing on themes such as Agrarian/Environmental History, History of Science and Tech, Global History, and their intersections. His prospective dissertation questions are on the pre-history of the ‘Green Revolution’ in Eastern India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This sweeping history tells the story of contemporary Japan from its defeat in the Asia-Pacific War in 1945 until the early decades of the new millennium. How did the Japanese people deal with the collapse of its empire and the American-led occupation? What factors played into Japan's remarkable economic recovery and stunning affluence? How did democracy develop under the new pacifist constitution and long-term conservative rule? And how did Japanese society and culture reflect the extraordinary demographic transformations of the era? After a concise recap of events prior to 1945, historian Simon Avenell traces the country's early postwar recovery, its striking economic growth, the political and social struggles of the citizenry, the legacies of colonial empire and militarism, the profound demographic changes wrought by urbanization and affluence, the impact of regional and global entanglements, and the flowering of postwar culture. The content chapters are augmented by an introduction exploring the diverse historical interpretations of the era and its major themes, along with an epilogue pondering the prospects for Japan's postwar condition at our contemporary moment. The lively narrative is supported by a wealth of images, charts, tables, primary sources, and cutting-edge research. Drawing on recent historiography, the book presents Japan's postwar history both as a distinctive phase in the country's modern experience, as well as an era with deep connections to developments before 1945. A History of Postwar Japan will appeal to a broad readership, including students and general readers who want a comprehensive and compelling narrative of Japan's contemporary history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of secret documents from colonies approaching independence. The Colonial Office in London arranged the deposit of these documents in high security facilities, where they remained inaccessible until 2011 following a compensation suit by Kenyan survivors of British colonial rule against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Curating the Colonial Past: The ‘Migrated Archives' and the Struggle for Kenya's History (Cambridge University Press, 2025) presents the first full length exploration of these 'migrated archives', chronicling the struggle between British attempts to conceal and Kenyan efforts to reveal evidence of the colonial past. Neither displayed nor destroyed, Dr. Riley Linebaugh explores how these records formed an archival limbo in which the British government delayed moral and legal judgement of empire. Yet, these practices did not go unchallenged. Dr. Linebaugh demonstrates how disputes over the 'migrated archives' facilitated the continuation of anticolonial sovereignty struggles beyond independence, struggles which persist into the present. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Migration between the United States and Mexico is often compared to the river that runs along the border: a "flow" of immigrants, a "flood" of documented and undocumented workers, a "dam" that has broken. Scholars, journalists, and novelists often tell this story from a south-to-north perspective, emphasizing Mexican migration to the United States, and the American response to the influx of people crossing its borders. In Caught in the Current, Irvin Ibargüen offers a Mexico-centered history of migration in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on Mexican periodicals and archival sources, he explores how the Mexican state sought to manage US-bound migration. Ibargüen examines Mexico's efforts to blunt migration's impact on its economy, social order, and reputation, at times even aiming to restrict the flow of migrants. As a transnational history, the book highlights how Mexico's policies to moderate out-migration were contested by both the United States and migrants themselves, dooming them to fail. Ultimately, Caught in the Current reveals how both countries manipulated the border to impose control over a phenomenon that quickly escaped legal and political boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From the end of the American Civil War to the start of World War II, the Protestant missionary movement unintentionally tilled the soil in which American Islamophobia would eventually take root. What ideas did missionaries in Islamic contexts pass on to later generations? How were these ideas connected to centuries-old Protestant discourses about Muslims and gender beginning in the Reformation? And what bearing does this history have on the birth of Islamophobia and on Christian-Muslim dialogue efforts in the US today? In answering these questions, Re-inventing Islam traces the gender constructs that have informed historical Protestant perceptions of Islam, especially in the far-reaching textual, visual, and material influences of the American and British movement for missions to Muslims. This book first considers Protestant discourse about Muslim women and men from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Then it turns to the colossal archive of literature, images, and cultural objects that missionaries--and particularly missionary women--collected from Islamic contexts and used to inform and motivate their constituents.Anglo-Protestants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perpetually re-invented stereotypes about Muslims and used these negative images to achieve particular Protestant theological and political purposes, including missionary aims. They did so when disseminating gender critiques widely to Protestant men, women, and children. Why did they re-invent Islam? Deanna Ferree Womack argues that they did so to reinforce Protestant theological claims, to justify their evangelistic endeavors, to express both humanitarian concern and Eurocentric views of the world, and to support British and American cultural, economic, and military expansion. Simultaneously, however, this same missionary movement educated its constituents about diverse Islamic cultures, in part by providing humanizing images of Islam. Missionaries also formed personal relationships with Muslims that would open pathways toward formal efforts of Christian-Muslim dialogue after the mid-twentieth century. Americans have inherited all of these legacies. In revisiting this history readers will find new possibilities for building a more open and just future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Christopher Hill was one of the leading historians of his generation. His work across more than 15 books and dozens of articles fundamentally rewrote the way we understand the English Revolution and the development of the modern British state. While his career brought many of the trappings of establishment respectability – he was both a Fellow of the British Academy and the Master of Balliol College, Oxford - he was also seen as a threat to that very same establishment. Under surveillance by the security services for decades, in the 1980s Hill was publicly accused of having been a Soviet agent during the war. His was a Cold War life, as well as a scholarly one.In this brilliant work of biography Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian (Verso Books, 2025), Michael Braddick charts Hill's development from his abandonment of the respectable provincial Methodism of his youth, through his embrace of Marxism, his membership and eventual break with the Communist Party, as well as his celebrated intellectual career. While many of his books - not least the thrilling work of historical resurrection, The World Turned Upside Down, and God's Englishman, his classic biography of Oliver Cromwell - are still widely read and admired, his intellectual reputation was damaged by sustained academic criticism in the politically-charged atmosphere of the 1980s.Braddick’s judicious biography not only situates Hill’s life and work in their historical context but seeks to rescue Hill for a new generation of readers. Mike Braddick is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Lucas Tse is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a "modern-day Copernicus." The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom--positions this liberation at the center of a "movement of global Blackness," with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), at its head.That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is "typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa's enormous role in the birth of the modern world." Determined to re-create Nkrumah's life as "an epic twentieth-century story," The Second Emancipation begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana's Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French's consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah's early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu--including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him "one of the greatest political leaders of our century"--and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana's first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah's radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history. Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China, based in Shanghai. The author of six books, including Born in Blackness, French lives in New York City. Ayisha Osori is a lawyer and Director at Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed ‘Strange Newes’ sheets of the sixteenth century to the sensationalism of today’s digital age. The narrative weaves from Regency gossip writers through New York’s ‘yellow journalism’ battles to the ‘sex and sleaze’ Sun of the 1970s; and from the Brexit-backing populism of the Daily Mail to the celebrity-obsessed Mail Online of the 2000s. Colourful figures such as Daniel Defoe, Lord Northcliffe, Hugh Cudlipp, Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell are brought to vivid life. From scandalous confessions to the Leveson Inquiry, the book explores journalists’ unscrupulous methods, taking in phone hacking, privacy breaches and bribery. In the digital era, popular journalism succumbed to ‘churnalism’ while a certain royal is seeking revenge on the tabloids today. Terry Kirby is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of The Trials of the Baroness (1991). He has been a journalist for more than four decades and was a founder member of staff at The Independent, where he worked for more than twenty years in a number of roles, including crime correspondent, night editor and chief reporter Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history