New Books in History

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a pivotal time for the United States as the nation emerged as a political and industrial powerhouse and fashioned its new value system. Amid waves of emigration and evolving cultural exchanges, Italy’s relationship with America became a complex tapestry of admiration, critique, and adaptation. This study of Italy’s Americanism explores social debates within Italy regarding emigration, the development of a Columbian narrative, European reactions to the Spanish-American War, the impact of American products on Italian society, and former US president Woodrow Wilson’s military intervention and political propaganda during the First World War. It highlights discussions among Italians about the implications of emigration, contrasting prevailing negative views with a counter-narrative from Italian journalists, scholars, and missionaries who visited the United States. The negotiation of US imports and their incorporation into the Italian national context document the formation of a distinct American subculture and the early phases of the nation’s Americanization. The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888-1919 (University of Toronto Press, 2025) provides a unique perspective to assess the early stages of America’s “soft” expansion, as the flow of departing and returning emigrants made Italy a favourable terrain for commercial penetration in Europe, transforming an export ideology into a complex network of transatlantic relations. Luca Cottini, PhD, is an associate professor of Italian in Villanova University. He is also the creator of the popular Youtube channel, Italian Innovators. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths. On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton University Press, 2025) offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates. Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savantes to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors. He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas, social status, political authority, and belief. Shifting attention away from the self-proclaimed virtues of the learned to their less-than-flattering vice, Visser makes a bold and provocative contribution to the history of Western thought. Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from satire and comedy to essays, sermons, and film, On Pedantry sheds critical light on why anti-intellectual views have gained renewed prominence today and serves as essential reading in an age of rising populism across the globe. Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving "special damage." Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement. In Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called "whores." Dr. Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents. The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal "civilised" New World. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Peter H. Wilson, Professor of the history of war at Oxford and author of Iron and Blood, rethinks five centuries of German-speaking military history. He questions myths of innate German militarism. He traces shifting power from Habsburgs to Prussia, explores soldier life, mercenaries, and militia, and repositions the world wars within long-term military and political change.

Michael Casiano, Assistant Professor of American Studies at UMBC and author of Let Us Alone, traces how Baltimore’s police grew into a racialized municipal power. He discusses the book’s organization by policing sites, the chilling cover photo of masked detectives, vagrancy laws and jails, reformers' roles, courtroom cases like Henry Brown’s, and the Black press as a record of policing.

Nicole Wegner, a lecturer who studies militarism and peace, explores how the peacekeeper myth emotionally legitimizes military force. She discusses the concept of martial peace, how myths form and sustain militarism, Canada's peacekeeping narrative, Afghanistan's role, and links between militarized policing and Indigenous suppression. Short, provocative, and focused on storytelling and political narratives.

Jovana Babović, Associate Professor of modern European history at SUNY Geneseo, studies Yugoslav and Eastern European urban culture. She shares oral histories from those born 1971–1991. Listeners hear memories of childhood in late socialism. Conversations cover multilingual everyday life, mobility across the region, who claims Yugoslavia, and unexpected post-Yugoslav diasporas.

Saundra Weddle, professor of architecture who studies how buildings shape social life, discusses her book on Venice’s sex trade. She traces how sex work spread beyond municipal brothels into alleys, gondola landings, taverns, and bathhouses. Conversations cover mapping and archival methods, neighborhood patterns, networks of workers and intermediaries, and how urban space shaped mobility and everyday practices.

Anna Reid, journalist-turned-historian known for her work on Russia and Ukraine, examines the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. She recounts sprawling campaigns from Siberia to the Arctic. The conversation highlights shifting Allied aims, soldiers’ harsh daily realities, complicity in pogroms, and how this forgotten adventure was later remembered or erased.

Damon Scott, urban historical geographer and author of The City Aroused, traces postwar San Francisco’s queer places and the redevelopment that erased them. He maps unrecorded waterfront sites. He discusses racial mixed maritime communities, policing and raids, legal blight and eminent domain, and how displaced drinking venues sparked collective political organizing.