New Books In History

The Republic of Ireland (aka The Irish Free State, Éire) declared neutrality during the Second World War. That wasn’t particularly unusual: Portugal  Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland did too. Yet around 60,000 “neutral” Irish volunteered to fight on one side (with the Allies, in this case). That was unusual.  After the war, most of the Irish volunteers remained in the [...]

Interview with Bernard Kelly [ 55:53 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Most people who listen to this podcast will have heard of Joseph McCarthy and HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities). His activities and those of HUAC were, however, only the tip of a very large iceberg. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government conducted something like a “purge” of federal employees with leftist pasts. Thousands [...]

Interview with Landon Storrs [ 1:01:31 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book [...]

Interview with Mary Fulbrook [ 1:00:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s new book explores translations across texts, images, and cultural practices in the early modern world. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2012) uses three key themes in early modern history – diplomacy, warfare, and visual representation – to show how commensurability across cultures, rather than existing [...]

Interview with Sanjay Subrahmanyam [ 1:02:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download