Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish...

What do the social worlds of teenage Muslim American boys look like? What issues do they grapple with and how do they think about issues that arise in their everyday lives? In his new book Keeping it Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys (Princeton University Press, 2017), John O’Brien answers...

This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. This unique book by dynamic father-son duo Steve...

In his new book, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Konrad Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the lives of ordinary Germans throughout the 20th century. Drawing on six dozen memoirs of Germans born in the...

Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 2018) is THE book that explains what that connection is, and how both math and music connect to both physics and biology.  There are wonderful anecdotes detailing the...

The last two decades have seen a surge in global histories, be they global histories of food, of ideas, or social movements.  But why this move away from strictly national and regional histories? Is it because we think of ourselves as an increasingly globalized society? And how can we think...

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din...

Stories about the suburbs often focus on conservatism. But, as Lily Geismer shows in her fascinating book, called Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberalism and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton University Press, 2014) suburbs can also be liberal spaces. The high-tech corridor of the Route 128 highway that circles Boston...

As a graduate student, I spent quite a bit of time explaining to people how we needed to pay much more attention to the history of World War One in the East.  What I didn’t realize is that we needed to see the war as it appeared from Istanbul just...

How certain can you be that you’re actually sitting at your desk when it seems that you are? You might see your desk before you and feel it beneath your arms and yet, how can you prove that your senses are to be trusted? How can you know for sure...