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  • Phillip Lieberman, "The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    Phillip Lieberman, "The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
    2024/11/23
    In The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West (Cambridge UP, 2022), Phillip Lieberman revisits one of the foundational narratives of medieval Jewish history--that the rise of Islam led the Jews of Babylonia, the largest Jewish community prior to the rise of Islam, to abandon a livelihood based on agriculture and move into urban crafts and long-distance trade. Here, he presents an alternative account that reveals the complexity of interfaith relations in early Islam. Using Jewish and Islamic chronicles, legal materials, and the rich documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza, Lieberman demonstrates that Jews initially remained on the rural periphery after the Islamic conquest of Iraq. Gradually, they assimilated to an emerging Islamicate identity as the new religion took shape, sapping towns and villages of their strength. Simultaneously, a small, elite group of merchants and communal leaders migrated westward. Lieberman here explores their formative influence on the Jewish communities of the southern Mediterranean that flourished under Islamic conquest. 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 時間 29 分
  • Travis A. Weisse, "Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness" (UNC Press, 2024)

    Travis A. Weisse, "Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness" (UNC Press, 2024)
    2024/11/23
    In Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) Dr. Travis A. Weisse tells a new history of modern diets in America that goes beyond the familiar narrative of the nation's collective failure to lose weight. By exploring how the popularity of diets grew alongside patients' frustrations with the limitations and failures of the American healthcare system in the face of chronic disease, Weisse argues that millions of Americans sought "fad" diets—such as the notorious Atkins program which ushered in the low-carbohydrate craze—to wrest control of their health from pessimistic doctors and lifelong pharmaceutical regimens. Drawing on novel archival sources and a wide variety of popular media, Dr. Weisse shows the lengths to which twentieth-century American dieters went to heal themselves outside the borders of orthodox medicine and the subsequent political and scientific backlash they received. Through colorful profiles of the leaders of four major diet movements, Health Freaks demonstrates that these diet gurus weren't shady snake oil salesmen preying on the vulnerable; rather, they were vocal champions for millions of frustrated Americans seeking longer, healthier lives. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. 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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    53 分
  • Margaret Mehl, "Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert" (Open Book, 2024)

    Margaret Mehl, "Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert" (Open Book, 2024)
    2024/11/23
    Margaret Mehl’s Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert (Open Book 2024) examines the ways in which Western classical (or “art”) music contributed to Japanese nation-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mehl’s analysis of this critical half-century or so in modern Japanese history is sensitive to the power of the participative “musicking” in shaping shared understandings of national and local community and their place within a larger world. The book, which is split into the global, national, and local, also demonstrates that as much as Western art music shaped Japan, Japan shaped back. In doing so, “Japanese” music was defined in important ways that have continued to influence a sense of national self and culture. 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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    58 分
  • 138c Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie (with David Cunningham)

    138c Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie (with David Cunningham)
    2024/11/23
    Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, USA (Oxford UP, 2014) and There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (U California Press, 2005). His ongoing research includes the recent wave of conflicts around Confederate monuments and other sites of contested memory. David's vision of what has changed in 2024 relates to an extended analogy to the election of 1972, when the avowedly racist George ("Segregation....forever") Wallace almost rode right-wing fury to victory. Notes of hope? Well, David has faith in extant political institutions and even bureaucracy (long live the deep state) to blunt the force of Trump's onslaught; movement politics of the left may also prove capable, as they were in the 1930's of rising up in response to a ferocious successful mobilization on the right. You can also listen to earlier conversations with Vincent Brown and Mark Blyth. Listen and Read here. 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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    24 分
  • Required Reading

    Required Reading
    2024/11/23
    Priyasha Mukhopadhyay develops the concept of the functional archive of empire, consisting of texts ranging from licenses and other bureaucratic documents to manuals and almanacs. She describes how historical readers in colonial South Asia made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. She illustrates this with the example of a manual used by soldiers which despite being widely used, also created complex relationships with its users - soldiers in the field - which often entailed in their not actually reading the book and complaining about being required to read them. Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. Her first book, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire, was published by Princeton University Press in August 2024. Image: “Plate XII”, Field Service Pocket Book Part II - India, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1928 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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    21 分
  • Timothy E. Nelson, "Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)

    Timothy E. Nelson, "Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)
    2024/11/22
    By most accounts, Blackdom, New Mexico existed from 1900-1930. However, as historian and artist Dr. Timothy Nelson argues in his new book, the Black colony founded in the then-territory of New Mexico has a much longer history and many afterlives, even after the residents moved away. In Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930 (Texas Tech University Press, 2023), Nelson weaves together the history of a particular place with philosophy, personal vulnerability, and the historiography of the American West to provide a unique account of the rise, decline, and continuance of Blackdom as both myth and reality. A unique book, Blackdom, New Mexico places Nelson as the storyteller front and center in the narrative, tracing his own life and family history growing up in Compton, California and training as a historian in New Mexico, and connecting these threads with the history of Black colonization along what he terms the Afro-Frontier. Blackdom, New Mexico is an excellent example of how even when the past seems dead in the past, its legacies and ghosts live on. 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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    54 分
  • Leila K. Norako, "Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500" (Cornell UP, 2024)

    Leila K. Norako, "Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500" (Cornell UP, 2024)
    2024/11/22
    Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500 (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Leila Norako asks why medieval romances reimagining the crusades ending in a Christian victory circulated in England with such abundance after the 1291 Muslim reconquest of Acre, the last of the Latin crusader states in the Holy Land, and what these texts reveal about the cultural anxieties of late medieval England. Dr. Norako highlights the impact that the Ottoman victory and subsequent massacre of Christian prisoners at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 had on intensifying the popularity of what she calls recovery romance. These two episodes inspired a sense of urgency over the fate of the Holy Land and of Latin Christendom itself, resulting in the proliferation of romances in which crusading English kings like Richard I and anachronistic legends like King Arthur not only reconquered Jerusalem but committed genocidal violence against the Muslims. These romances, which—as Norako argues—also influenced Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, conjure fantasies of an ascendant global Christendom by rehearsing acts of conquest and cultural annihilation that were impossible to realize in the late Middle Ages. Emphasizing the tension in these texts between nostalgia and anticipation that fuels their narrative momentum, Monstrous Fantasies also explores how the cultural desires for European and Christian hegemony that recovery romances versified were revived in the wake of the so-called wars on terror in the twenty-first century in such films as Kingdom of Heaven and American Sniper. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. 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 時間 28 分
  • Youcef Soufi, "Homegrown Radicals: A Story of State Violence, Islamophobia, and Jihad in the Post-9/11 World" (NYU Press, 2025)

    Youcef Soufi, "Homegrown Radicals: A Story of State Violence, Islamophobia, and Jihad in the Post-9/11 World" (NYU Press, 2025)
    2024/11/22
    Youcef Soufi’s Homegrown Radicals: A Story of State Violence, Islamophobia, and Jihad in the Post-9/11 World (NYU Press, 2025) tells the story of three Muslim university students who disappeared from Winnipeg, Canada. In this gripping narrative, we learn that these young men had become “radicalized”, which brought the attention of Canadian and American security agencies to this small town. What is different about the journey we go on with Soufi is the story of families, friends, and the Muslim community who are left behind grappling with loss, grief, and hyper-surveillance as the result of the disappearance of these young men. From university to the courtroom, and beyond, Soufi’s moving narrative forces us to grapple with the affective injury faced by the Winnipeg Muslim community as discourse of radicalization, Islamophobic state policies, and military response to the war on terror, reminded Muslims of the ungrievability of their lives. Soufi’s writing is poignant; he moves between his scholarly command of Islamic history, archival data, and interviews and deeply vulnerable auto-ethnography. The book is a must read for anyone interested in Muslims and Islam, especially in North America. 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 時間 23 分