Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a histor ... Show More
Oct 21
Defeat at the Dnepr: The XLVIII Panzerkorps Counterattack at Kiev, November 1943 with Simon Waring (Casemate, 2026)
In late 1943, the German Army on the Eastern Front was in dire straits. Its southern army group had been pushed out of eastern Ukraine, and on 6 November 1943, Kiev—one of the Soviet Union’s largest cities—was retaken by an increasingly capable Soviet Red Army. To prevent the tot ... Show More
1h 18m
Oct 15
Racism and Antiracism in Divided Germany with Michelle Lynn Kahn and Lauren Stokes (Cornell UP, 2026)
Racism and Antiracism in Divided Germany (Cornell UP, 2026) addresses how racism expresses itself and what it means to be antiracist by tracing the history of racism and antiracist activism in East, West, and unified Germany. As far-right extremism surges in Germany today, German ... Show More
50m 8s
Sep 30
Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the North American Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War with Jason Bell (Hanover Square Press, 2026)
Historians have always known that the success of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day in June 1944 depended on deceiving the Germans about where the invasion would take place. Jason Bell’s book, Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and ... Show More
31m 45s
Feb 2025
Magdalena Buchczyk, "Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, History and Ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, history and ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Magdalena Buchczyk delves into the history and the changing material culture in Europe through the stories of a basket, a carpet, a waistcoa ... Show More
51m 48s
Mar 2021
Robert Launay, "Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)
Take a look at a globe. Europe is there in big letters, and, to us, this hardly merits a passing thought. But Europe is a concept, a construct, an idea. So too is modernity. These categories have rich and contested histories. It is to their lineage that Robert Launay looks in Sav ... Show More
1h 3m
May 2023
Anne Gerritsen and Burton Cleetus, "Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000 (Bloomsbury, 2023): Introducing materiality into the study of the history of medicine, this volume hones in on communities across the Indian Ocean World and explores how ... Show More
51m 18s
Jun 2021
The Material World Remade, c.1500-1820 with Dr. Beverly Lemire
Beginning in the early 16th century, bureoning international trade markets transported new products--and new fashions--around the globe, effectively transforming material cultures in ways which still resonate to this day. Dr. Beverly Lemire joins us to discuss her book Global Tra ... Show More
45m 42s
Nov 2023
Writing the History of Money and Monetary Policy
What do the histories of currency and monetary policy tell us about societies at large, political structures, and cultures? Ekaterina Pravilova and Rebecca Spang tackle these questions, respectively, in two important books that examine the history of the Russian ruble from the ti ... Show More
58m 24s
Jan 2022
Malika Maskarinec, "The Forces of Form in German Modernism" (Northwestern UP, 2018)
The late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe were times of intense technological, social and political change and transformation, and so it’s no surprise that much of the art and literature of this period was equal in its innovative intensity, attempting to make sense of time ... Show More
1h 12m