The 2 Best New Books in History Podcast Episodes
1) Steven Seegel, "Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map maki...Show More
AUDIO REMOVED: The podcast creator has removed the audio for this episode.2) Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement” (NYU Press, 2013)
The historiography of the southern Civil Rights Movement has long focused on the tactic of non-violence. With only a few notable exceptions, most scholarship locates the use of armed self-defense and ...Show More
AUDIO REMOVED: The podcast creator has removed the audio for this episode.3) Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez, "The New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain's Atlantic Empire" (Duke UP, 2025)
The New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain's Atlantic Empire (Duke UP, 2025) tells the history of the making and unmaking of empire in the diverse and decentralized Indigenous lands...Show More
4) Philip C. Almond, "Noah and the Flood in Western Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
In a world beset by climatic emergencies, the continuing resonance of the flood story is perhaps easy to understand. Whether in the tortured alpha male intensity of Russell Crowe’s Noah, in Darren Aro...Show More
5) Timothy Manion, "Why Barbarossa Failed: Germany and Russia in the Second World War" (Helion, 2026)
Why did Operation Barbarossa fail? For more than eight decades, historians have offered one dominant answer: Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was doomed from the outset. Vast distances, bru...Show More
6) Karima Moyer-Nocchi, "The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Today, macaroni and cheese is the ultimate comfort food, a staple of weeknight dinners, family gatherings, and Soul Food restaurants. Humble though the dish may seem, its history is filled with surpri...Show More
7) Sunmin Kim, "The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
What happens when theories of racial hierarchies interact with reality? How are they contested, refuted and changed in light of that encounter? What role do experts, most notably social scientists, pl...Show More
8) A.J. Bauer, "Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press" (Columbia UP, 2026)
In Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press (Columbia UP, 2026), A.J. Bauer examines the history of the idea of a “liberal media bias.” Rather than trying to show...Show More
9) Kalpana Karunakaran, "A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras" (Context, 2026)
In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911–2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity o...Show More
10) Alistair Moffat, "Edinburgh: A New History" (Birlinn, 2024)
From prehistory to the present day, the story of Edinburgh is packed with incident and drama. As Scotland’s capital since 1437, the city has witnessed many of the key events which have shaped the nati...Show More