Mar 2025
Tom Lynch, "Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University o ... Show More
1h 4m
Aug 26
David Helvarg, "Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wondrous and underappreciated marine habitats. I ... Show More
31m 51s
Aug 14
Daniel Byman, "American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Amidst heightened rhetoric and increasing polarization in the United States, American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America (Oxford University Press, 2026) chronicles the causes and consequences of two centuries of mob violence in American history, highlighting exactly w ... Show More
1h 3m
Feb 2024
Daniel Immerwahr, "How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States" (FSG, 2019)
“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its p ... Show More
1h 19m
Mar 2021
Sarah Kovner, "Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps" (Harvard UP, 2020)
Sarah Kovner’s Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Harvard UP, 2020) is a nuanced look at the experiences, narratives―and the popular/historical memories of those experiences and narratives―of World War II-era Allied POWs in Japanese custody, especially in the Eng ... Show More
51m 15s
Dec 2022
What’s The Cold, Hard Truth About Ice In Hawaiʻi? with Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart
In the mid-1800s, Americans shipped ice to Hawaiʻi in the hopes that there would be a market for it. There wasn’t. So how did ice—in the form of cocktails, ice cream, shave ice, and beyond—become lodged in Hawaiʻi’s foodscape? This week, Professor Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopul ... Show More
1 h
Jul 2023
Vivian Nun Halloran, "Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to c ... Show More
1h 20m
Jul 2024
Has imperial history become too politicised?
Controversies surrounding the history of the British empire have become particularly intense in recent years, with academics, politicians and commentators all offering differing views about how we should understand the nation's imperial past. A new book, The Truth about Empire, d ... Show More
42m 13s
Dec 2022
Daniel Immerwahr, "The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Empire in George Lucas’s Star Wars" (2022)
In this episode I got to chat about two of my favorite things: the history of imperialism and Star Wars with Daniel Immerwahr, Professor of History at Northwestern University. Our conversation focused on his recent article “The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Emp ... Show More
1h 4m
Jul 2021
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that “the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in wa ... Show More
1h 10m
One of my talking points when hanging out with my fellow diplomatic historians is the painful absence of scholarship on Hawaii. Too many political histories treat Hawaii’s statehood as a kind of historical inevitability, an event that was bound to pass the moment the kingdom was annexed. As I would frequently pontificate, “nobody has unpacked the imperial hi ... Show More
