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New Books in History

New Books in History

By: Marshall Poe
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 Interviews with Historians about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historyNew Books Network Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Alissa Walter, "Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad" (Stanford UP, 2025)

    Alissa Walter, "Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad" (Stanford UP, 2025)
    Jul 16 2025
    Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad (Stanford UP, 2025) offers a history of state-society relations in Baghdad, exploring how city residents managed through periods of economic growth, sanctions, and war, from the oil boom of the 1950s through the withdrawal of US troops in 2011. Interactions between citizens and their rulers shaped the social fabric and political realities of the city. Notably, low-ranking Ba'th party officials functioned as crucial intermediaries, deciding how regime policies would be applied. Charting the social, economic, and political transformations of Iraq's capital city, Alissa Walter examines how national policies translated into action at the local, everyday level. With this book, Walter reveals how authoritarian governance worked in practice. She follows shifts in mid-century housing and urban development, the impact of the Iran–Iraq and Gulf Wars on city life, and the manipulation of food rations and growth of black markets. Reading citizen petitions to the government, Walter illuminates citizens' self-advocacy and the important role of low-ranking party officials and state bureaucrats embedded within neighborhoods. The US occupation and ensuing sectarian fighting upended Baghdad's neighborhoods through violent displacement and the collapse of basic state services. This power vacuum paved the way for new power brokers, including militias and neighborhood councils, to compete for influence on the local level. Alissa Walter is Associate Professor of History at Seattle Pacific University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    33 mins
  • Sonia C. Gomez, "Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Sonia C. Gomez, "Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America" (NYU Press, 2024)
    Jul 16 2025
    Picture Bride, War Bride examines how the institution of marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period of Japanese exclusion. Gomez’s work joins together an analysis of picture brides, or Japanese women who migrated to the United States to join husbands whom they married [in absentia] in the early 20th century, with war brides, or Japanese women who married American military servicemen after World War II. By combining the analysis of these two categories, Gomez centralizes the overlapping and conflicting logics to either racially exclude Japanese or facilitate their inclusion via immigration legislation that privileged wives and mothers. In short, the book tells a story of how the interplay between societal norms and political interests can both harness and contradict the interconnected frameworks of race, gender, and sexuality. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba, "Human Resources: Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain" (Profile Books, 2025)

    Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba, "Human Resources: Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain" (Profile Books, 2025)
    Jul 15 2025
    Ordinary items take on new meanings when you cast them in different light. The origins of tea, coffee and sugar are well known, but when you discover that gym treadmills were pioneered on plantations or that denim jeans were once clothing for enslaved people, you can't help but ask where else the legacy of slavery hides in plain sight. Through the stories of thirty-nine everyday places and objects, in Human Resources: Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain – in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things (Profile, 2025) Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba unpick the threads of the history that we never learned in school, revealing the truth of how Britain's present is bound to a darker past. Taking us from art galleries to football stands, banks to hospitals, from grand country houses to the backs of our kitchen cupboards, Human Resources is an eye-opening inquiry that gives a voice to the enslaved people who built modern Britain. 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
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    1 hr and 5 mins

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