All Episodes

Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)

An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland

A. J. Murphy, "Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Emile Chabal, "The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian" (Harvard UP, 2026)

William Whyte, "The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Ashton Lazarus, "Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Luna Sabastian, "Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Jay Belsky, "Nature of Nurture: Rethinking Why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Paul Osterman, "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Weipin Tsai, "The Making of China's Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Matthieu Felt, "Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Alex Averbuch, "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Raffaele Danna, "The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Peter Mauch, "Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, "The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Guoqi Xu, "The Idea of China: A Contested History" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Rian Thum, "Islamic China: An Asian History" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Michelle Jackson, "The Division of Rationalized Labor" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Ruixue Jia et al., "The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Sugata Bose, "Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Hang Tu, "Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Jennifer Vail, "Friction: A Biography" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Peter H. Wilson, "Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Dagomar Degroot, "Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Marcy Norton, "The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492" (Harvard UP, 2024)

John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Marcus Willaschek, "Kant: A Revolution in Thinking" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen, "Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Brooke Barbier, "King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Thomas Piketty, "A Brief History of Equality" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Lucy Caplan, "Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Natasha Piano, "Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Angelos Chaniotis, "Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Melissa M. Matthes, "When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Adam Bremer-McCollum, "The Pearlsong" (Harvard UP, 2025)

What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala

Miranda Spieler, "Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Jamal J. Elias, "After Rumi: The Mevlevis and Their World" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Brandon Bloch, "Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Oswyn Murray, "The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Maren A. Ehlers, "Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018)

Raymond Jonas, "Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Benjamin Francis-Fallon, "The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Victoria de Grazia, "The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Victoria de Grazia, "The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Minxin Pei, "The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sarah Gold McBride "Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Richard Calis, "The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Michael David-Fox, "Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Udi Greenberg, "The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Xiaolu Ma, "Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930)" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Kornel Chang, "A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation" (Harvard UP, 2025)

James M. O’Toole, "For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

The Audiobook's Century-Long Overnight Success

Kimberly Clausing, "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Erik Baker, "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Rebecca Haw Allensworth, "The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Jonathan Haslam, "Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine" (Harvard UP, 2025)

S4E20 Cosmic Connections: A Conversation with Charles Taylor

Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Mou Banerjee, "The Disinherited: The Politics of Christian Conversion in Colonial India" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Osamah F. Khalil, "A World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Harvey Whitehouse, "Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Alexis Peri, "Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence Between American and Soviet Women" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Faisal Devji, "Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea" (Harvard UP, 2013)

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, "Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sarah Lewis, "The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Neil Van Leeuwen, "Religion As Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Yakov Feygin, "Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Paul J. Kosmin, "Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Jonathan Gienapp, "Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique" (Yale UP, 2024)

Wendy Salkin, "Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Randall Stephens, "The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock n’ Roll" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Nazmul Sultan, "Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Ana Raquel Minian, “Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration” (Harvard UP, 2018)

David E. Kaiser, “The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy” (Harvard UP, 2008)

Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jacob Lee, "Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Daniel Susskind, "Growth: A History and a Reckoning" (Harvard UP, 2024)

J. Megan Greene, "Building a Nation at War: Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Madman in the White House?

Judith Lewis Herman, "Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice" (Basic Books, 2023)

En Li, "Betting on the Civil Service Examinations: The Lottery in Late Qing China" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson, "Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade" (Harvard UP, 2024)