Suggested additional channels: Political Science, National Security, American Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Studies, New Books with Miranda Melcher NB: I don’t think this needs to go on General History
The no-fly zone is a frequently used instrument in the US foreign policy arsenal, despite detrimental, or even catastrophic, results. Th ... Show More
Today
Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the ... Show More
55m 48s
Oct 10
Nick Higham, "Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
As the First World War drew to a close and regimes began to collapse across Europe, British officials plotted a daring campaign to send an unlikely band of maverick soldiers, diplomats and spies to the chaotic region around the Caspian Sea. Their mission: to block the advance of ... Show More
49m 2s
Oct 8
Tyler Jost, "Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Why do states start conflicts that they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Bureaucracies at War (Cambridge UP, 2024) examines how national security institutions shape the quality of bureaucratic information upon which l ... Show More
49m 23s
Mar 2025
235. The Viceroy, The Psychopath, and The Merchant: The Irish in Empire (Ep 3)
Ireland may have been England’s first colony but, by the 17th century, Irishmen were carving out their own imperial legacies in India. Gerald Aungier, an ambitious East India Company official, saw Bombay as a new frontier for plantation and trade. Drawing from his family’s planta ... Show More
53m 58s
Oct 2023
Arunima Datta, "Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (OUP, 2023) focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South ... Show More
1h 12m
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 12m
Jul 2024
The Mighty Ashanti: Rival to the British Empire
At the end of the 17th century, a small clan - the Akan - in West Africa began growing into what would later become the powerful Ashanti Empire. The state grew rapidly in both wealth and land until it spanned most of modern day Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Togo.
Luke Pepera join ... Show More
29m 42s
Feb 2025
231. Colonising Ireland: Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, & The Tudor Conquest (Ep 1)
Ireland is the only country in Western Europe that has experienced being colonised in the modern era. It was used by England as a laboratory for imperialism, and was the site of bloody colonial wars for centuries, yet many people in the neighbouring United Kingdom have little und ... Show More
40m 19s
Feb 2025
Magnus Course, "Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
An ethnographic exploration of anthropological failures through the Mapuche archetypes of witch, clown, and usurper, Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) invites readers to consider concepts of failure, knowing, and being in the world wi ... Show More
1h 16m
Oct 2024
Jamestown | The Great Reforms | 4
In April 1613, years of bloody warfare culminated in the kidnapping of the paramount chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas. The English colonists in Jamestown offered to return her in exchange for stolen weapons, English prisoners, and corn, but their proposal was met with silence ... Show More
39m 50s