New Books in History

For generations, American Catholics went faithfully to confession, admitting their sins to a priest and accepting through him God’s forgiveness. The sacrament served as a distinctive marker of Catholic identity, shaping parishioners’ views of their relationship to God, their neighbors, and the wider world. But starting in the 1970s, many abandoned confession altogether. Focusing on the experiences of both laypeople and priests, in For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America (Harvard University Press, 2025) Dr. James M. O’Toole reconstructs the history of confession’s steady rise—and dramatic fall—among American Catholics.In the early United States, the Catholic Church grew rapidly—and with it, confession’s centrality. Although the sacrament was practiced unevenly for much of the nineteenth century, frequent confession became common by the early twentieth. Both priests and parishioners understood confession as a ritual crucial for the soul, while on a social level, it established Catholic distinctiveness within a largely Protestant country. Today, however, even faithful Catholics seldom confess. The reasons for this change, Dr. O’Toole reveals, include the emergence of psychology and other forms of counseling; the Church’s stance against contraception, which alienated many parishioners; and a growing sense of confession’s inability to confront social problems like structural racism, poverty, and sexism. Meanwhile, increasing recognition of sexual abuse within the Church further undermined trust in clergy as confessors.Sensitively attuned to the historical importance of confession, For I Have Sinned also suggests that, if the sacrament no longer serves the needs of US Catholics, the Church and its members might find new ways to express their ideals in the twenty-first century.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. You can find Miranda’s episodes 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

Reframing India in World History breaks the stereotypical portrayal of India based on misconstrued historical theories. Prevalent constructions of Indian history are tinged with colonial historical frameworks and presentation. It is important to understand India for what it is in the past based on self-determined frameworks derived from Indian history to reclaim India’s place in the world history. Based on new evidence-based research, Lavanya Vemsani explores patterns of civilization that are indigenous to India to investigate its history from the beginning to the present. This book covers topics central to a comprehensive understanding of the nation including a discussion of long held cultural notions, civilization continuity, and the historical crises deriving from conquests and colonization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace.We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.Was it April 9, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”? That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death.To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States's interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

When we think of Vietnamese history, we tend to think of plucky peasant guerillas fighting for their independence against French colonial rule or American imperialism - or even mighty China. In her new book, A Maritime Vietnam: From the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2024), Li Tana challenges this powerful stereotype by recasting Vietnam as a maritime state with a long history of dynamic commercial relations with the outside world, from China, to Southeast Asia, to India, and the Middle East. The book aims to escape from the rigid nationalist historiography that has long characterized history writing on Vietnam and develop a new way of thinking about Vietnam’s history that emphasizes its outward, commercial relations. It also revisits the old question of whether we should view Vietnam as an East Asian country, oriented towards China, or a Southeast Asian country, characterized by a cosmopolitanism and historical openness to maritime trade and the outside world. This is a provocative and important book which challenges powerful ideas about the way we understand Vietnam’s history and place in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War (1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state, but also to bring the revolution to Europe. Peter Whitewood shows that while the Red Army's rapid drive to the gates of Warsaw in summer 1920 raised great hopes for world revolution, the subsequent collapse of the offensive had a more striking result. The Soviet military and political leadership drew the mistaken conclusion that they had not been defeated by the Polish Army, but by the forces of the capitalist world - Britain and France - who were perceived as having directed the war behind-the-scenes. They were taken aback by the strength of the forces of counterrevolution and convinced they had been overcome by the capitalist powers.The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2023) reveals that - in the aftermath of the catastrophe at Warsaw -Lenin, Stalin and other senior Bolsheviks were convinced that another war against Poland and its capitalist backers was inevitable with this perpetual fear of war shaping the evolution of the early Soviet state. It also further encouraged the creation of a centralised and repressive one-party state and provided a powerful rationale for the breakneck industrialisation of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The Soviet leadership's central preoccupation in the 1930s was Nazi Germany; this book convincingly argues that Bolshevik perceptions of Poland and the capitalist world in the decade before were given as much significance and were ultimately crucial to the rise of Stalinism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1945 to 1946, postwar India was enthralled by the treason trial of three officers—formerly of the Indian National Army, who fought against the British in the Second World War. The trial sparked outrage across the country, among ordinary people, members of the pro-independence movement and, worryingly for the British Raj, members of the Indian army.The end-result? Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of the Indian army, commuted the INA officers’ sentences. Just over a year later, India and Pakistan were independent countries.Ashis Ray joins us today to talk about these events, described in his recent book The Trial that Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence (Routledge, 2024)Ashis Ray has been a foreign correspondent since 1977, broadcasting on BBC, CNN and ITN and writing for Ananda Bazar Group, The Times of India, The Tribune, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, Financial Times and Nikkei Asia, among other publications. He was CNN’s founding South Asia bureau chief before becoming the network’s editor-at-large.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Trial That Shook Britain. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand.The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.In The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown-from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun-he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures moulded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 engrained forms of inequality and racial hierarchy in modern politics that remain with us today.A breath taking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period's grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations.Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times.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

There is a pervasive stereotype of tattoo culture as relating to an underworld of scoundrels, sailors, and ne’er-do-wells, yet it has existed in the West as a professionalized art practice for centuries. Drawing on extensive new research and unprecedented access to largely unpublished private archives of photographs, art, and ephemera, in Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Matt Lodder offers a new perspective on the history of commercial tattooing in Europe and the United States, beginning even before it emerged as a recognizable profession in the mid-nineteenth century. In the process, he shows that the art of tattoo has long been both practiced and commissioned by individuals across economic, gender, and class divides; he also examines the stylistic trends that have shaped tattoo’s development as an art form over its history.Lodder introduces the many artists and professionals who shaped tattoo history, including early figures like Martin Hildebrandt, the first-known professional tattoo artist in the West; prominent woman artists like Grace Bell and Jessie Knight; mid-twentieth-century icons like Sailor Jerry and Les Skuse and the Bristol Tattoo Club; and contemporary industry stars including Ed Hardy, Davy Jones, and the Leu family. Richly illustrated with rarely published images, this important book is the first to examine the history of tattoo in the west as both a serious profession and an art form.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

In Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism (U Wisconsin Press, 2025), Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment among that country's population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. Within Germany, by contrast, rescuers are often presented in both scholarship and public commemoration as a small minority; their examples condemn the majority by showing what Germans could have done but did not do.Kabalek argues that such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority obscure the complex motivations and situations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the view that the rescuers were "forgotten" after the war, he shows that portrayals and interpretations of helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to actively debate questions of collective morality. Rescue and Remembrance analyzes the varied and changing depictions of rescue in the distinct German politics from the Nazi period, examining how the very notions of "majority" and "collective" were articulated and reformulated.Kobi Kabalek is Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies, Penn State University, since 2019. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, with a dissertation on “The Rescue of Jews and the Memory of Nazism in Germany” (2013). In 2014-2017 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as part of the ERC project “Experience, Judgment, and Representation of WWII in an Age of Globalization,” and examined conflicting perspectives concerning the war in Mandatory Palestine and their impact on the postwar historiography of Israel and Zionism. Former editor of The Journal for Holocaust Research and assistant editor of History & Memory. His research focuses on historical perceptions, moral sentiments, and memory in film, literature, auto/biography, oral narratives, art, etc., in German, Israeli, and global Holocaust history. He currently explores marginalized and extreme phenomena in Holocaust testimonies, historical writing, and popular culture – with special attention to the role of fantasy, imagination, and horror – and their impact on our understanding and representation of the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Forged in Genocide traces the early history of colonial capitalism in Namibia with a central focus on migrants who came to be key to the economy during and as a result of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904-1908). It posits that Namibia, far from being a colonial backwater of the early 20th century, became highly integrated into the labor flows and economies of West and Southern Africa, and even for a time was one of the most sought-after regions for African migrants because of relatively high wages and numerous opportunities resulting from the war's demographic devastation paired with an economic frenzy following the discovery of diamonds. In highlighting the life stories of migrants in Namibia from regions as diverse as the Kru coast of Liberia, the Eastern Cape of South Africa, and the Ovambo polities of Northern Namibia, this work integrates micro-history into larger African continental trends. Building off of written sources from migrants themselves and utilising the Namibian Worker Database constructed for this project, this book explores the lives of workers in early colonial Namibia in a way that has hereto not been attempted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history