New Books in Intellectual History

Professor Catherine Clarke, a historian at the Institute of Historical Research, explores England's past through poetry in her upcoming book, A History of England in 25 Poems. She discusses how each poem serves as a portal to its historical context, revealing emotions from intimate to grand. Clarke analyzes the selection process, emphasizing narrative over literary fame. Delving into themes like societal roles and political commentary, she highlights pieces from Mary Leapor and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, illustrating poetry’s profound influence on national identity.

In this engaging discussion, Mary E. Stuckey, an expert in American national identity and Professor at Penn State, explores her new book. She reveals how Thomas Jefferson's complex legacy shapes our understanding of American identity. Stuckey argues that Jefferson is a richer symbol than Washington due to his contradictions. She examines how presidents invoke his image, how monuments reflect different interpretations, and critiques popular culture's portrayal of him. Ultimately, she highlights how diverse representations of Jefferson reveal the multifaceted nature of what it means to be American.

Sheiba Kian Kaufman, an Assistant Professor of English, delves into her research on the intersection of Persian culture and early modern English drama. She unpacks how representations of Persian monarchs like Cyrus the Great serve as models of cosmopolitanism and intercultural hospitality in Shakespearean works. Kaufman discusses the concept of 'adab', Persian ethics shaping manners, and reads Edgar in "King Lear" as a uniquely non-threatening figure. Her insights create a rich tapestry linking literature, globality, and personal memory in her scholarly journey.

As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the long twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their children make sense of their lives as Jews in the modern world. In her book, Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025), Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness. Udel provides the most comprehensive study to date of this corpus of nearly a thousand picture books, chapter books, story and poetry collections, and anthologies. Moving geographically from Europe to the Americas and chronologically through the twentieth century, she considers this emerging canon in relation to the deep Jewish past and imagined Jewish futures before reckoning with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused political ideologies ranging from socialism to Zionism and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism, one shaped equally by the utopianism of the Jewish left and important shifts in the Western understanding of children, childhood, and family life. Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy. Interviewee: Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Most people on the contemporary left see Stalin as an unfortunate stain on the history of the global left, a part of the historical process that we’d be better avoiding in our attempts to build towards socialism. He does still have some scattered defenders though, putting out books and articles trying to turn his legacy into something commendable that we ought to try and build upon today. Returning today is Douglas Greene, who is not one of his defenders, but instead has written a book exploring the defenses of Stalin with his new book In Stalin’s Shadow: Leon Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials (Resistance Books, 2025). Much of the text is concerned with fact-checking, going through the middle decades of the twentieth century to give a critical accounting of Stalin, but one that nonetheless holds onto the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Beyond this fact-checking mission though, the book also takes this time as an opportunity to reflect on some of the deeper structures of thought that might lead one to defend Stalin. Rather than a simple mistake that can be easily corrected with a couple new facts, Greene sees neo-Stalinism as a sort of leftist conspiracy theory, one that mirrors much of the paranoia of Stalin’s own time. The book then is an opportunity to reflect on what sort of reasoning takes us into these sorts of dead-ends, and what sorts of reasoning might be needed to help us start building towards a truly revolutionary future. Much of the content of this book builds on Greene’s previously published book The Dialectics of Saturn, which we discussed a couple years ago. Douglas Greene is an independent historian. His many previous books have included A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism, Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union and The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade's Revenge, all of which have been discussed previously on this show. He is a frequent contributor to Left Voice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as Angie Hobbs argues in this clear-sighted book Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, 2025), that is a mistake.If we want to understand the world we live in – from democracy, autocracy and fake news to celebrity, cancel culture and what money can and cannot do – there is no better place to start than Plato. Exploring the intersection between the ancient and the modern, Professor Hobbs shows how Plato can help us address key questions concerning the nature of a flourishing life and community, healthcare, love and friendship, heroism, reality, art and myth-making. She also shows us how Plato's adaptation of the Socratic method and dialogue form can enable us to deal with contested issues more constructively.Plato's methodology, arguments, ideas and vivid images are explained with a clarity suitable both for readers familiar with his work and for those approaching Plato for the first time. This book shows why Plato really matters, now more than ever. Angie Hobbs is emerita Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. She gained a degree in Classics and a PhD in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and her chief interests are in ancient philosophy and literature, and ethics and political theory from classical thought to the present, and she has published widely in these areas, including Plato and the Hero. She works in a number of policy sectors, and contributes regularly to media around the world, including many appearances on In Our Time on Radio 4; she has spoken at the World Economic Forum at Davos, the Athens Democracy Forum, the Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament and Westminster Abbey and been the guest on Desert Island Discs and Private Passions. Website here Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Noam Sienna, a scholar specializing in Jewish culture within the Islamic world, delves into the vibrant literary tapestry of North African Jewish communities. He discusses how these communities fostered a transnational book culture connecting regions from Fez to Livorno. Sienna highlights the unique role of libraries as family collections and the challenges of cataloging Judeo-Arabic texts. He also presents the often-overlooked labor of scribes and the emotional impacts of books, while previewing his next project on early Ottoman Sephardi printing.

Join Paul J. Gutacker, a historian from Baylor University, as he explores evangelical Protestant engagement with Christian history in his new book. He debunks the myth that 19th-century Protestants dismissed tradition, revealing their deep interest in the past through sermons and political debates. Discover how historical narratives fueled anti-Catholicism and shaped the abolitionist movement. Gutacker highlights the role of women in church history and how African American ministers invoked history for liberation. It's a fascinating dive into the complexities of faith and memory!

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here. Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here. Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration. Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Oxford UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van AmsterdamMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history