New Books in History
Marshall Poe
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
Episodes
Mentioned books
Mar 12, 2026 • 1h 2min
Kim Bowes, "Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Kim Bowes, professor of archaeology and ancient history who studies non-elite Roman lives. She explores how ordinary Romans hustled to survive: mixed incomes, women’s textile work, child labor, and fragile savings. Archaeology and texts reveal consumption, markets, and bodily evidence of intense labor. The conversation links ancient survival strategies to modern precarity.
Mar 12, 2026 • 36min
Michelle Adams, "The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North" (FSG Press, 2025)
Michelle Adams, a law professor and Detroit scholar, tells the story of Milliken v. Bradley and the fight over metropolitan school integration. She traces housing segregation, Judge Roth’s metropolitan remedy, and how Nixon-era Supreme Court shifts halted cross-border solutions. Conversations touch on local leaders, surprising alliances, and policy paths toward more integrated schools.
Mar 11, 2026 • 1h 6min
Mike Pitts, "Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Mike Pitts, writer, broadcaster and archaeologist formerly a museum curator, revisits Rapa Nui’s history. He challenges the eco-collapse story and highlights European impacts. He uncovers Katherine Routledge’s neglected records and explores Polynesian navigation, farming innovations, and the meaning of the moai. The book reframes who gets to write the island’s past.
Mar 11, 2026 • 1h 14min
Elliot B. Hanowski, "Towards a Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023)
Elliot B. Hanowski, an academic librarian and historian of unbelief in Canada. He discusses militant secularist groups in the 1920s and 30s, public lectures and street activism, regional clashes with dominant Christian institutions, legal battles over blasphemy, and how skeptics used controversies to gain visibility.
Mar 11, 2026 • 1h 3min
The Augustan Revolution: On Ancient Rome with Reece Edmends
Dr. Reece (Rhys) Edmends, a Roman historian and junior faculty in Princeton’s Classics Department, discusses the fall of the Republic and Augustus’s rise. He explores Augustus’s political skill and propaganda, the legal and rhetorical meaning of “liberation,” the role of poets and religion in shaping imperial messaging, and how peace and institutions transformed Roman life and later history.
Mar 10, 2026 • 45min
Caroline Sharples, "The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History" (Yale UP, 2026)
Caroline Sharples, a senior lecturer at the University of Roehampton and author of The Long Death of Adolf Hitler, explores how Hitler’s death became a global mystery. She traces wartime expectations, Allied and Soviet secrecy, forensic dental evidence, and the culture of conspiracy and spectacle that kept his fate open to debate.
Mar 10, 2026 • 56min
Daneesh Majid, "The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present Day" (Harper Collins, 2025)
Daneesh Majid, journalist and writer in Hyderabad who chronicles South Asian culture and Urdu literature. He centers everyday memories to retell Hyderabad’s modern past. He recounts 1948’s police action, mulki vs non-mulki tensions and Telangana migration. He explores Gulf remittances, Urdu’s decline, and the rise of communal polarization.
Mar 9, 2026 • 44min
Karen Dubinsky, "Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters" (Between the Lines, 2025)
Karen Dubinsky, Professor of History at Queen's University and author of Strangely Friends, explores Cuban-Canadian personal and cultural ties. She traces teaching exchanges that sparked the research. She highlights engineers and NGO work in Cuba, student tours, and vibrant Cuban music scenes in Toronto and Montreal. She also reflects on how recent crises strain these people-to-people connections.
Mar 9, 2026 • 1h 11min
Maud Anne Bracke, "Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford UP, 2025)
Maud Bracke, Professor of Modern European History who studies European feminisms and reproductive rights. She traces how reproductive liberty and responsibilisation shaped French law and public debate in the 1960s-70s. She explores stratified reproduction, contraception and abortion laws, racialized policies in overseas departments, disability and Black feminist interventions, and tensions in feminist movements.
Mar 8, 2026 • 1h 11min
Guoqi Xu, "The Idea of China: A Contested History" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Xu Guoqi, historian of modern China and founder of the Institute of Transnational History of China, explores who and what counts as China. He discusses sports and transnational identities, contested national narratives, shared-history methodology, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and how personal lives reshape ideas of nationhood.
