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Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched...
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This essay concerns a common rite of conviviality among the seventeenth-century Muscovite elite — the...
The later seventeenth century was an era of unprecedented social mobility in the upper reaches...
Among Western historians it is generally agreed that the "military revolution" spurred bureaucratization, and that...
What has been called the early modern military revolution may be described most simply as...
File
When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after...
The founding fathers--and mothers, sons and daughters--were British. Sort of. It's true that they were...
You've got to be pretty creative to get anything like "holy war" out of the...
If you're a native-born American, you're probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben...
Europeans like to say that "America" (aka the "United States") is not a nation. They...
I vividly recall a time in my life--especially my late teens and early twenties--when I...
[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] Modern sports carry the DNA of the games of...
[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Despite its focus on education, Sally Ninham's recent book,...
If Edith Sheffer's excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain...
We've dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books...
[Cross-posted from New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies] Most Westerners know about the Gulag...
If you've ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a "pre-war building"...
When I was an undergraduate, I noticed that there were certain books that seemed to...
Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical...
When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop...
I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I...
It's safe to say that nobody but genocidaires likes genocide. It's also safe to say...
It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall...
One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of "Big History" is that the...
Being a historian is a bit of a slog: years in graduate school, more years...
When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool,...
I think this is really interesting. Among the thousands of iconic and easily recognizable photographs...
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, the day on which we remember...
What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the...
I used to live in Washington DC, not far from a place I learned to...
One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material...
When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws....
We should be skeptical of what is sometimes called "Jew counting" and all it implies....
Most of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live...
[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh's ThoughtCast.] Author Megan Marshall has recently...
[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh's ThoughtCast] At a time when the...
Here's a simple--or should we say simplistic?--line of political reasoning: communities are made of people;...
When I was in college I had a summer job once working in an aircraft...
You've probably heard of the "Age of Exploration." You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da...
It's pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a "fascist." Everyone knows, however,...
I remember clearly the day I was offered my first credit card. It was in...
Sometimes a shallow explanation, the kind you read in newspapers and hear on television, is...
Reading J. E. Lendon's writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010)...
Most Americans could tell you who George Washington's wife was. (Martha, right?) Most Americans probably...
Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to...
The term "totalitarian" is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as...
I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my...
You've probably read about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It's the largest (17 miles around!),...
We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or...
What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say...
The question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands...
Here's something interesting. If you search Google Books for "Hitler," you'll get 3,090,000 results. What's...
Here's something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just...
I'll tell you something I've never really understood: the difference between "art" and "craft." Yes,...
In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931–1941 (Basic Books,...
I think that many smart people, particularly on the Left, make a really ill-considered assumption,...
I fear that most people think that "history" is "the past" and that the one...
In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to...
I imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I...
There's a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar."...
My son Isaiah likes to play the "why" game. Isaiah: "Why is my ice cream...
Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and...
Try to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part...
There’s a quip that goes “Christianity is probably a great religion. Someone should really try...
Don’t you find it a bit curious that there are literally thousands of pills that...
Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been...
I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900...
In the late 19th century, French sociologist Émile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness”...
I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old...
In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was...
Historians don't generally like the idea of "human nature". We tend to believe that people...
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century...
The past is always with us, but it's really always with politicians. Once you put...
I confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews...
If you're like me (and I hope you aren't), the "Trial of the Century" involved...
You've probably heard of hipsters. Heck, you may even be a hipster. If you don't...
Of all the events in American history, two are far and away the most troubling:...
It's one thing to say that the study of history is "relevant" to contemporary problems;...
Sometimes when you win you lose. That's called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you...
You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who...
If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s in suburbia, you probably lived in...
Long ago, historians more or less gave up on "theories of history." They determined that...
I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all...
I asked my wife if she knew who W. E. B. Du Bois was. She...
Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago...
One night my wife and I were on the road, staying in a hotel in...
I've got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You've heard...
Here's something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe's terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search...
In preparation for this interview I watched the documentary (that's what the producers call it,...
There's a concept I find myself coming back to again and again—"speciation." It's drawn from...
Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he...
I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both...
Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close...
Americans don't like "big government" right? Not exactly. In the Early Republic (1789 to the...
For us, every "nation" has and has always had a "culture," meaning a defining set...
One of the most fundamental—and vexing—questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make...
I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and...
Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well,...
Why the heck is "America" called "America" and not, say, "Columbia?" You'll find the answer...
Why did communism collapse so rapidly in Eastern Europe in 1989? The answer commonly given...
One of my favorite bumper stickers reads "Unions: the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend."...
I'll be honest: I have a Ph.D. in early modern European history from a big...
Ben Binstock's Vermeer's Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is...
To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and...
By the time the Nazi's invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik...
What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An...
There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black...
We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren't. They come and go....
Think of this. From the origins of civilization roughly 5000 years ago to around 1900...
You could fill a large library with books about JFK's assassination. We've even touched on...
When I was in high school I had several friends who went to Wichita's only...
This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is...
Germans and Nazis. They were different things, right? I mean some Germans were members of...
In the Gospels, the disciples come to Jesus and ask him about the End of...
In 1983, when I was in college, I participated in something called a "Die-In." A...
You've probably heard of the Hudson River, and you may have even heard of Hudson...
It's hard to be a Christian. It's even harder to be a good Christian. But...
In 1980 I left Kansas to go to college in Iowa. A lot of things...
It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for...
You’ve heard of “Reconstruction,” that is, the reform of the South after the Civil War....
Ever wonder where the term “populist” came from? It came from “Populism,” a nineteenth/early twentieth-century...
Like it or not, governments need to mobilize their populations in times of crisis and...
My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or "Thuds." He bombed the heck...
Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically...
I have a friend who, as a young child, happened to meet Herbert Marcuse, by...
When I was in college about a million years ago, we used to sit in...
When I was young, I remember going to my high school library (not to study,...
Memorial day is coming up, and maybe you are going to take a little car...
When I was in high school, I really didn't go in for reading. Until, that...
It's shocking and embarrassing how little I, as an American, know about Mexican history. Mexico...
It's the classic historical question: Why did the Roman Empire fall? There are doubtless lots...
How different is the United States from other nations? American leaders and common folk have...
Most people know what "appeasement" is. You know, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Anschluss...
I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and...
Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them....
When did Americans begin to think of marriage as "work," as in, "If you want...
Ronald Reagan was a odd fellow. Nobody seems to know what to make of him....
Gordon Brown, the British PM, came calling to Washington recently. He jumped the pond, of...
First, the conventional wisdom. Because Homo sapiens are a young species and haven't had time...
When we speak of the "Age of Discovery," we usually mean the later fifteenth and...
In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though...
My Midwestern high school was pretty typical. There were freaks, geeks, jocks, drama-types. Some were...
Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand...
Scholars argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It's a difficult question. On the one...
The modern newspaper is not as old as you think. Until the early nineteenth century,...
In just a few days, the United States will inaugurate its first black president, Senator...
The vast majority of historians write history. Perhaps that's good, as one should stick to...
There was a time when "history" was the history of powerful people. Shakespeare captures this...
If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you...
If you ask me, the "white wedding" is the oddest thing. I'm a modern guy...
While researching his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (with Mike...
Did you ever wonder how we got from a moment in which almost everything on...
The thing about empire building is that when you're done building one, you've got to...
As some of you may be aware, there's a big election coming up. Yes, it's...
If you ask most Americans when the U.S. became heavily involved in the Persian Gulf,...
There are some topics that historians know not to touch. They are just too hot...
It's curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word "Nazi," and...
Being "sent to Siberia" is practically a synonym for exile even in English-speaking countries. Why...
U.S. forces invade a distant country in order to disarm an international threat to American...
It's hard to know what to think about the Russian Revolution of 1917. Was it...
"Swords and Sandals" movies always amaze me. You know the ones I'm talking about: "Spartacus,"...
There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don't like very much. Maybe...
We don't think much about institutions. They just seem to "be there." But they have...
When you were in college, did you visit the health center? I did, several times....
Why did Reconstruction fail? Why didn't the post-war Federal government protect the civil rights of...
The question of how we come to understand who we are--nationality-wise--is a thorny one. In...
I confess I sometimes wonder where we got in the habit of proclaiming, usually with...
Much has been written about Winston Churchill recently. Some love him, some hate him. But...
People will often say that "this land"--wherever this land happens to be--is theirs because their...
Tim Snyder has written a great book. It's called The Red Prince: The Secret Lives...
Every so often I read a book that reminds me that things weren't at all...
Today I'm very pleased to have Professor Walter Moss of Eastern Michigan University on the...
Today we are happy to have Colin Grant on the show. Colin is that rare...
A number of years ago I read Robert Service's excellent biography of Lenin and came...
Today we have Professor Kimberly Jensen on the show. She teaches in the Department of...
John Randolph, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is our guest on...
This week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show...
This week on New Books in History we interviewed Donald Ritchie about his new book...
Today we're pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor...
Today we talked with Eric Gardner, who is chair and professor of English at Saginaw...
This week we interviewed Laura Wittern-Keller about her new book, Freedom of the Screen:...
Today we talk to J. D. Bowers of Northern Illinois University about his book ...
This week we talk to Matt Wasniewski. Matt is the historian and publications manager in...
This week we feature an interview with Abigail Foerstner about her new book, James Van...
Today we feature an interview with Kevin Mumford about his new book Newark. A...
Welcome to New Books in History. In this, our inaugural podcast, we're honored to have...
A graphic novel for young people on the election of Abraham Lincoln.
A graphic novel for young people on the integration of the Little Rocks schools in...
A graphic novel for young people on the coming of the American Revolution.
