New Books in History

Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept of atrocity even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country? In Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford UP, 2025), Bruce Robbins details how, when and where the conceptual space opened to make the recognition of atrocity possible. Robbins reads Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and many other writers to examine how writers not only develop but question what representations of atrocity achieve. Critically examining the emergence of a cosmopolitan ethic, and questioning the practical wisdom offered by the indignation or its refusal in the face of atrocity, Robbins argues for the invention of atrocity as a moral achievement, however tainted its development may have been. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents. Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science.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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the story of American popular music, celebrity following, and fan behavior during World War II through close examination of “bobbysoxers.” Preserved in popular memory as primarily white, hysterical, teen girl devotees of Frank Sinatra clad in bobby socks and saddle shoes, these girls were accused of displaying inappropriate behavior and priorities in their obsessive pursuit of a crooning celebrity at a time of international crisis. Dr. Beisel Hollenbach peels back the stereotypes of girlhood idol adoration by documenting the intimate practices of wartime Sinatra fan clubs, revealing a new side of this familiar story in American history through the perspective of the bobbysoxer.In World War II America, fan clubs and organizations like Teen Canteens offered a haven for teenage girls to celebrate their enjoyment of popular culture while cultivating relationships with each other through media icons and the entertainment industry. Many of these organizations attempted to encourage diverse memberships, influenced in part by Frank Sinatra's public work on racial and religious tolerance, and by Sinatra's own identity as an Italian American. Away from the critical public eye, these communities offered girls a place to safely explore and discuss issues including civil rights, politics, the war, patriotism, internationalism, and professional development in the context of their shared Sinatra fandom. With these broader social and political complexities in mind, The Business of Bobbysoxers shines a light on musical fan communities that provided teenage girls with peer groups at a critical moment of personal and historical change, allowing them to creatively express their desires and imagine their futures as American women together.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million.Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum (Oxford UP, 2025) reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws."Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was released in 2022? When IBMs Deep Blue defeated Chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997? When Stanley Kubrick introduced us to HAL 9000 in 1968? Or perhaps you think it was much earlier. Maybe we have had the dream of AI since the development of the first computers by Von Neumann, or even earlier, by Babbage. Or maybe you think the dawning of the age of science itself is ground zero for our thoughts of artificial intelligence.Kevin LaGrandeur traces our dreams - and fears - of artificial intelligence back way further than this. LaGrandeur argues that ideas of artificial slaves can be found in the writing of Aristotle, in the Renaissance-era idea of the Homunculus, in the Jewish legend of the Golem.LaGrandeur, a longtime professor at the New York Institute of Technology and now an independent scholar and Director of Research at the Global AI Ethics Institute, has more than 25 years of experience teaching, writing and speaking about technology and society.We were thrilled to be able to have a wide-ranging conversation with Professor LaGrandeur about his pathbreaking research on Androids and intelligent networks in early modern culture, and his current work on the ethics and implications of AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

James Bond, Ian Fleming’s irrepressible and ubiquitous ‘spy,’ is often understood as a Cold Warrior, but James Bond’s Cold War diverged from the actual global conflict in subtle but significant ways.That tension between the real and fictional provides perspectives into Cold War culture transcending ideological and geopolitical divides. The Bondiverse is complex and multi-textual, including novels, films, video games, and even a comic strip, and has also inspired an array of homages, copies, and competitors. Awareness of its rich possibilities only becomes apparent through a multi-disciplinary lens.The desire to consider current trends in Bondian studies inspired a conference entitled ‘The Bondian Cold War,’ convened at Tallinn University, Estonia in June 2019. Conference participants, drawn from three continents and multiple disciplines – film studies, history, intelligence studies, and literature, as well as intelligence practitioners – offered papers on the literary and cinematic aspects of the ‘spy’, discussed fact versus fiction in the Bond canon, went in search of a global Bond, and pondered gender and sexuality across the Bondiverse.The Bondian Cold War: The Transnational Legacy of a Cultural Icon (Routledge, 2024) is suitable for students, researchers, and anyone interested in Cold War culture, makes vital contributions to understanding Bond as a global phenomenon, across traditional divisions of East and West, and beyond the end of the Cold War from which he emerged. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Grunge. Flannel. Generation X. In 1993, Seattle was the capital of the world, Nirvana was king, and slackers were everywhere. When the Red Hot organization, a group of activists dedicated to raising money and awareness of AIDS, released their third compilation CD featuring the biggest bands of the era--Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, The Breeders, Nirvana and more it quickly became the touchstone of a generation. Rolling Stone called No Alternative a "jaw-dropping compilation of musical gems."This book takes a look back at what happened to the bands involved with No Alternative. It includes new interviews with the musicians and others behind the record, and chronicles the downfall of an industry, the taming of a devastating illness, and the arrival of another global pandemic. It's about growing up, saying goodbye, and proving once more that you can't go home again (even if that's where you left all of your CDs).Jeff Gomez has been writing about the worlds of Generation X and alternative music for over 25 years and is the author of several books including Zeppelin Over Dayton: Guided By Voices Album By Album and Math Rock.Jeff Gomez’s website.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).Bradley on Twitter and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

At the end of Eric Cline's bestselling history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce, and monumental architecture was lost and the so-called First Dark Age had begun. Now, in After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton UP, 2025), Cline tells the compelling story of what happened next, over four centuries, across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world. It is a story of resilience, transformation, and success, as well as failures, in an age of chaos and reconfiguration.After 1177 B.C. tells how the collapse of powerful Late Bronze Age civilizations created new circumstances to which people and societies had to adapt. Those that failed to adjust disappeared from the world stage, while others transformed themselves, resulting in a new world order that included Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites, Neo-Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, and Neo-Babylonians. Taking the story up to the resurgence of Greece marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C., the book also describes how world-changing innovations such as the use of iron and the alphabet emerged amid the chaos.Filled with lessons for today about why some societies survive massive shocks while others do not, After 1177 B.C. reveals why this period, far from being the First Dark Age, was a new age with new inventions and new opportunities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a "military conspiracy" to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (UP of Kansas, 2015), Peter Whitewood advances an entirely new explanation for Stalin's actions--an explanation with the potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps and over 750,000 executed.Framing his study within the context of Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution, Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the military purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military relations under the Stalinist regime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene by Samantha Ege (University of Illinois Press, 2014) is a collective biography of a group of Black women living in Chicago who were at the center of the support, promotion, and circulation of classical music by Black composers—often specifically Black women composers—in the years between the World Wars. Women like Nora Holt, Maud Roberts George, Estella Conway Bonds, and her daughter Margaret Bonds founded and led institutions, raised money, wrote music criticism, composed music, played in and arranged concerts, opened their homes to salons and their wallets to support concerts and even individuals. This “behind the scenes” book, shows how these Race Women made Chicago’s South Side into a center of Black classical music making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history