Episodios

  • Daniel Todman, "Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947" (Oxford UP, 2020)

    Daniel Todman, "Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947" (Oxford UP, 2020)
    Aug 31 2024
    The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 (Oxford UP, 2020), begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history: the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese. As in the first volume of Todman's epic account of British involvement in World War II ("Total history at its best," according to Jay Winter), he highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing on its inhabitants, its defenders, and its wartime leadership. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return. It also documents the full impact of the entrance into the war by the United States, and its ascendant stewardship of the war. Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 is a triumph of narrative and research. Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences--at home and abroad--of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain and the world. Bob Wintermute is professor of history at Queens College, CUNY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    55 m
  • Lise Butler, "Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970" (Oxford UP, 2020)

    Lise Butler, "Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970" (Oxford UP, 2020)
    Aug 30 2024
    Lise Butler’s Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70 (Oxford UP, 2020) invites us to revisit a figure who, in Butler’s words, is both a ‘relatively obscure’ yet also ‘curiously ubiquitous’ in the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain. The book uses Young, a policy maker and sociology to explore the role of social science in social democratic politics in the postwar period. Butler explores Young’s role in activities such as his role developing the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto ‘Let us Face the Future’, his work as a sociologist, most notably in his monograph Family and Kinship in East London (co-authored with Peter Wilmott), and his role as a social innovator helping to establish Institute of Community Studies, the Consumers' Association, Which? magazine, the Social Science Research Council and the Open University. In doing so she offers a thought provoking story which encourages rethinking some of the common assumptions made about the role of sociology, and social science more broadly, in British politics. In this podcast we explore the themes of the book, which includes not only discussing the above but also themes such as the role of women and the family in Young’s thought, why he favoured the basic income, the social scientific turn in the history of modern Britain and why, exactly, buying a fridge is a political act. Matt Dawson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow with research interests in social theory and the history of sociology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 h y 15 m
  • Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov, "Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism" (Stanford UP, 2019)

    Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov, "Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism" (Stanford UP, 2019)
    Aug 29 2024
    The practice of Partition understood as the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states is often regarded as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In their edited volume Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019), Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov uncover the collective history of the concept of partition and locate its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Moving beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon, the volume discusses creation of new political entities in the world of the British empire, from the Irish Free State, to the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and Palestine. Yorgos Giannakopoulos is a currently a Junior Research Fellow in Durham University, UK. He is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. His published research recovers the regional impact of British Intellectuals in Eastern Europe in the age of nationalism and internationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    52 m
  • Mark Valeri, "The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Mark Valeri, "The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Aug 29 2024
    During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift? Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilising agendas in favour of reasoned persuasion. Dr. Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    50 m
  • Michelle Tusan, "The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Michelle Tusan, "The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
    Aug 27 2024
    In The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Michelle Tusan profoundly reshapes the story of how the First World War ended in the Middle East. Tracing Europe's war with the Ottoman Empire through to the signing of Lausanne, which finally ended the war in 1923, she places the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against the unrelenting war in the East and reassesses the military operations, humanitarian activities and diplomatic dealings that continued after the signing of Versailles in 1919. She shows how, on the Middle Eastern Front, Britain and France directed Allied war strategy against a resurgent Ottoman Empire to sustain an imperial system that favored Europe's dominance within the nascent international system. The protracted nature of the conflict and ongoing humanitarian crisis proved devastating for the civilian populations caught in its wake and increasingly questioned old certainties about a European-led imperial order and humanitarian intervention. Its consequences would transform the postwar world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 h y 3 m
  • Lori Gemeiner-Bihler, "Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945" (SUNY Press, 2019)

    Lori Gemeiner-Bihler, "Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945" (SUNY Press, 2019)
    Aug 27 2024
    In the years following Hitler’s rise to power, German Jews faced increasingly restrictive antisemitic laws, and many responded by fleeing to more tolerant countries. Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945 (SUNY Press, 2019), compares the experiences of Jewish refugees who immigrated to London and New York City by analyzing letters, diaries, newspapers, organizational documents, and oral histories. Lori Gemeiner-Bihler examines institutions, neighborhoods, employment, language use, name changes, dress, family dynamics, and domestic life in these two cities to determine why immigrants in London adopted local customs more quickly than those in New York City, yet identified less as British than their counterparts in the United States did as American. By highlighting a disparity between integration and identity formation, Gemeiner-Bihler challenges traditional theories of assimilation and provides a new framework for the study of refugees and migration. Lori Gemeiner-Bihler is Associate Professor of History at Framingham State University. Robin Buller is a Doctoral Candidate in History at UNC Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 h y 9 m
  • Nazmul Sultan, "Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought" (Harvard UP, 2024)

    Nazmul Sultan, "Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought" (Harvard UP, 2024)
    Aug 24 2024
    Indians, their former British rulers asserted, were unfit to rule themselves. Behind this assertion lay a foundational claim about the absence of peoplehood in India. The purported “backwardness” of Indians as a people led to a democratic legitimation of empire, justifying self-government at home and imperial rule in the colonies. In response, Indian anticolonial thinkers launched a searching critique of the modern ideal of peoplehood. Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Harvard University Press, 2024) is the first account of Indian answers to the question of peoplehood in political theory. This new book by Nazmul Sultan shows how Indian political thinkers explored the fraught theoretical space between sovereignty and government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Surendranath Banerjea and Radhakamal Mukerjee to Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian political thinkers offered novel insights into the globalization of democracy, and ultimately drove India’s twentieth-century political transformation. In this conversation, Sultan talks to host Yi Ning Chang about sovereignty and government, democracy and development, and the intellectual choices that laid the foundation of postcolonial democracy in the mid-twentieth century. Yi Ning Chang is a PhD Candidate in political theory at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She is writing a dissertation on the end of anticolonial politics. Through a study of 1950s–60s Southeast Asia, the project examines the relationship between critique and action, and the effects anticolonialism had on politics in the postcolony. She has wider interests in the history of twentieth-century political thought, the politics of resistance, and theory from the postcolonial world. Yi Ning can be reached at yiningchang@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 h y 48 m
  • Gary Mucciaroni, "Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

    Gary Mucciaroni, "Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945" (U Toronto Press, 2024)
    Aug 24 2024
    Since the mid-nineteenth century, public officials, reformers, journalists, and other elites have referred to “the labour question.” The labour question was rooted in the system of wage labour that spread throughout much of Europe and its colonies and produced contending classes as industrialization unfolded. Answers to the Labour Question explores how the liberal state responded to workers’ demands that employers recognize trade unions as their legitimate representatives in their struggle for compensation and control over the workplace. In Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945 (University of Toronto Press, 2024), Dr. Gary Mucciaroni examines five Anglophone nations – Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States – whose differences are often overlooked in the literature on political economy, which lumps them together as liberal, “market-led” economies. Despite their many shared characteristics and common historical origins, these nations’ responses to the labour question diverged dramatically. Dr. Mucciaroni identifies the factors that explain why these nations developed such different industrial relations regimes and how the paths each nation took to the adoption of its regime reflected a different logic of institutional change. Drawing on newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates, and personal memoirs, among other sources, Answers to the Labour Question aims to understand the variety of state responses to industrial unrest and institutional change beyond the domain of industrial relations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 h y 8 m