Apr 2025
Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)
After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More
1h 7m
Mar 7
Mattie Armstrong-Price, "Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways" (U California Press, 2026)
Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Mattie Armstrong-Price offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. The book ... Show More
43m 1s
Dec 2024
How did American Muslims help shape US history?
Centuries after the first Muslims stepped foot in America, the United States is home to nearly 4 million Muslim Americans. In ‘American Muslims: A History Revealed,’ a six-part PBS docuseries that premiered in October, journalists and historians uncover the stories of American Mu ... Show More
23m 37s
May 2023
Susan Hartman, "City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town" (Beacon Press, 2022)
How can scholars employ the practices and techniques of investigative journalism?
Susan Hartman provides an answer in her intimate look at refugee experience in the United States. In City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life Into A Dying American Town (Beac ... Show More
40m 45s
Nov 2024
Fatima Rajina, "British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End: The Changing Landscape of Dress and Language" (Manchester UP, 2024)
Popular discourse around British Muslims has often been dominated by a focus on Muslim women and their sartorial choices, particularly the hijab and niqab. British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End: The Changing Landscape of Dress and Language (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Fatim ... Show More
59m 40s
Nov 2024
Fatima Rajina, "British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End: The Changing Landscape of Dress and Language" (Manchester UP, 2024)
Popular discourse around British Muslims has often been dominated by a focus on Muslim women and their sartorial choices, particularly the hijab and niqab. British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End: The Changing Landscape of Dress and Language (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Fatim ... Show More
59m 40s
Oct 2023
Ep 9: The 500-year history of Islam in America, with Dr Sylviane Diouf and Dr Hussein Rashid
Our latest episode tells the story of how Islam arrived in America, possibly as early as the 1400s on ships from Europe and West Africa.
We have two guests on this episode. One is Sylviane Diouf, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown Univ ... Show More
39m 50s
Jun 2024
Stephanie Ternullo, "How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Over the past several decades, predominantly White, postindustrial cities in America’s agriculture and manufacturing centre have flipped from blue to red. Cities that were once part of the traditional Democratic New Deal coalition began to vote Republican, providing crucial suppo ... Show More
54m 18s
Jun 2023
Erik Kojola, "Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range" (NYU Press, 2023)
On an unseasonably warm October afternoon in Saint Paul, hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of a proposed copper-nickel mine in the rural northern part of their state. The crowd eagerly listened to speeches on how the project would bring long-term risks and p ... Show More
28m 28s
Feb 2025
Miles Glendinning, "Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a major work that provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the peo ... Show More
1h 17m
The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest (NYU Press, 2022) uncovers the long history of Musl ... Show More
