New Books in History

Marshall Poe

Episodes

Mentioned books

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Feb 23, 2026 • 1h 36min

Lillian Guerra, "Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)

Lillian Guerra, historian of Cuban history who uses archival and oral-history research, discusses how postrevolutionary Cuba enforced a patriot-or-traitor binary. Short segments explore literacy campaigns that cultivated loyalty, neighborhood surveillance and informant networks, political prisons and rehabilitation, youth labor pedagogy, and the Mariel crisis that exposed regime vulnerabilities.
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Feb 23, 2026 • 1h 26min

Martin Heidegger, "Being and Time: An Annotated Translation" (Yale UP, 2026)

Cyril Welch, professor emeritus and long‑time Heidegger teacher who produced a new annotated translation of Being and Time. He explains how decades of classroom work shaped the translation. He discusses teaching strategies, Heidegger’s ties to Greek thought and phenomenology, everydayness and authenticity, tone and translation choices, and why the book’s unfinished form matters.
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Feb 22, 2026 • 55min

Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)

Marc Masters, music journalist and author of High Bias, traces the cultural and technical life of the compact cassette. He explores industry panic over home taping, mixtape and DJ innovations, underground mail-art and noise scenes, live concert-taping cultures, and the cassette’s modern indie resurgence. Short, vivid stories paint the tape as a tool of creativity, community, and resistance.
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Feb 22, 2026 • 46min

Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)

Sally Lowe, a legal historian of Cambodian and Southeast Asian law, discusses colonial reforms and archival discoveries. She traces clashes between Cambodian ritual royal law and French positivist law. She explains separate colonial jurisdictions, the 1911 codifications, and how French legal structures ultimately bolstered executive power and reshaped the monarchy's legal role.
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Feb 22, 2026 • 53min

Mark Thomas Edwards, "Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mark Thomas Edwards, a professor of U.S. history and politics who wrote a new biography of Walter Lippmann, explores Lippmann’s intellectual and religious life. The conversation covers Lippmann’s fame as a public intellectual, his shifting views on religion and liberalism, his Cold War skepticism and foreign‑policy realism, and his idea of civic religion as a remedy for a post‑Christian society.
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Feb 22, 2026 • 48min

Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

Cecilia Márquez, Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke, studies Latinx history in the U.S. South. She maps shifting racial categories from provisional whiteness to the 'hardworking Hispanic' label. Short takes explore how Blackness shaped Latino racialization, industry-driven migration, post-2008 immigration enforcement, and surprising moments of Southern racial politics and culture.
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Feb 21, 2026 • 54min

Jie-Hyun Lim, "Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Jie-Hyun Lim, historian and Distinguished Professor from South Korea who founded the Critical Global Studies Institute, discusses how nations frame historical suffering as political capital. He traces memorial sites, Holocaust centrality in global memory, and how perpetrators recast themselves as victims. He argues for transnational approaches to reconciliation and compares diverse memory politics across countries.
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Feb 21, 2026 • 56min

Jeremy Black, "The Short History of Russia: Returning to Another Country" (Amberley, 2026)

Jeremy Black, historian and Professor Emeritus at the University of Exeter, offers a brisk national history of Russia. He explores origins from Orthodoxy and the Mongol legacy to serfdom and imperial expansion. He traces key wars, revolutions, Stalinism, Soviet collapse, and the rise of Putin. Short, panoramic, and focused on how past patterns shape present geopolitics.
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Feb 20, 2026 • 1h 4min

Ray Yep, "Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

Ray Yep, research director at the Hong Kong History Centre and author of a new study on Murray MacLehose, examines Hong Kong’s 1970s politics and colonial bargaining. He unpacks MacLehose’s reforms, anti-corruption drive, the Vietnamese refugee diplomacy, and covert negotiations with London. The conversation highlights informal leverage, media image, and archival revelations about contested autonomy.
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Feb 19, 2026 • 40min

David Frankfurter ed., "Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic" (Brill, 2019)

David Frankfurter, a Boston University scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions and magical texts, guides a tour of how scholars define and study ancient magic. He outlines the book's three-part structure and key sources. Short, lively takes cover language, material amulets, protective figurines, and why simplistic magic-to-modernity stories mislead.

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