Covering the whole of the ancient Greek experience from its beginnings late in the third millennium BCE to the Roman conquest in 30 BCE, Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture(Princeton UP, 2024) is an accessible and lively introduction to the Greeks and their ways of living and thinking. In this fresh and witty exploration of the thought, culture, society, and history of the Greeks, Jennifer Roberts traces not only the common values that united them across the seas and the centuries, but also the enormous diversity in their ideas and beliefs. Examining the huge importance to the Greeks of religion, mythology, the Homeric epics, tragic and comic drama, philosophy, and the city-state, the book offers shifting perspectives on an extraordinary and astonishingly creative people. Century after century, in one medium after another, the Greeks addressed big questions, many of which are still very much with us, from whether gods exist and what happens after we die to what political system is best and how we can know what is real. Yet for all their virtues, Greek men set themselves apart from women and foreigners and profited from the unpaid labor of enslaved workers, and the book also looks at the mixed legacy of the ancient Greeks today. The result is a rich, wide-ranging, and compelling history of a fascinating and profoundly influential culture in all its complexity—and the myriad ways, good and bad, it continues to shape us today.
Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953(Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema.
Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results.
Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.
The first book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon’s role in popular culture, science, and myth.
President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed the path of space exploration. For the first time, each of those beautifully hand-drawn, colorful charts is presented together in one stunning book. In Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter (U Chicago Press, 2024), National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell’s expert commentary accompanies each chart, along with the key geological characteristics and interpretations that were set out in the original Geologic Atlas of the Moon. Interwoven throughout the book are contributions from scholars devoted to studying the multifaceted significance of the Moon to humankind around the world. Traveling from the Stone Age to the present day, they explore a wide range of topics: the prehistoric lunar calendar; the role of the Moon in creation myths of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the role of the Moon in astrology; the importance of the Moon in establishing an Earth-centered solar system; the association of the Moon with madness and the menstrual cycle; how the Moon governs the tides; and the use of the Moon in surrealist art. Combining a thoughtful retelling of the Moon’s cultural associations throughout history with the beautifully illustrated and scientifically accurate charting of its surface, Lunar is a stunning celebration of the Moon in all its guises.
Gabriela Radulescu is a Guggenheim Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Gabriela holds a PhD in the history of science from the Technical University of Berlin. Her dissertation “A History of Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI): Astronautics and Radio Astronomy Across the Iron Curtain (1956-1976)” examined the political origins and history of the scientific field known to this day as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Barry Diller has been a towering force in American entertainment and business for more than half a century. He helped reshape television at ABC, led Paramount during a golden era of filmmaking and launched the Fox network. Today, his digital empire spans travel, home services and online dating. Geoff Bennett spoke with Diller about his remarkable journey and his candid new memoir, "Who Knew." PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Emotion lies at the heart of all national movements, and Zionism is no exception. For those who identify as Zionist, the word connotes liberation and redemption, uniqueness and vulnerability. Yet for many, Zionism is a source of distaste if not disgust, and those who reject it are no less passionate than those who embrace it. The power of such emotions helps explain why a word originally associated with territorial aspiration has survived so many years after the establishment of the Israeli state. Zionism: An Emotional State(Rutgers UP, 2023) expertly demonstrates how the energy propelling the Zionist project originates from bundles of feeling whose elements have varied in volume, intensity, and durability across space and time. Beginning with an original typology of Zionism and a new take on its relationship to colonialism, Penslar then examines the emotions that have shaped Zionist sensibilities and practices over the course of the movement’s history. The resulting portrait of Zionism reconfigures how we understand Jewish identity amidst continuing debates on the role of nationalism in the modern world.
Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He previously taught at Indiana University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, where he was in inaugural holder of the Stanley Lewis Chair in Modern Israel Studies. Penslar has published a dozen books, most recently Zionism: An EmotionalState (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. Penslar is a past president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
On Friday nights, you see Jonathan Capehart alongside David Brooks discussing the big political stories of the week. But it was a long journey that led him to the News Hour. He joined Amna Nawaz to discuss his new memoir, "Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man's Search for Home."
PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences?
Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence.
Illustrates the connections between philosophical debates surrounding liberty and the sociopolitical contexts in which they took place
Provides a comprehensive analysis and bibliography of rival ways of thinking about liberty
Explores the contribution of the American Revolution to discussions on the idea of liberty
Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History, and the recipient of many awards including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. Previous publications include the two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and, most recently, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018).
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
Fabiola Jean-Louis has been researching and exploring her Haitian heritage to create art that reimagines history and identity through a deeply personal lens. That work is now on display in Boston in the exhibit "Waters of the Abyss." Special correspondent Jared Bowen takes us there for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Why did so many rulers throughout history risk converting to a new religion brought by outsiders? In his award-winning Unearthly Powers (2019), Dr. Alan Strathern set out a theoretical framework for understanding the relation between religion and political authority based on a distinction between two kinds of religion - immanentism and transcendentalism - and the different ways they made monarchy sacred. Please listen to his interview on that book on the New Books Network!
This ambitious and innovative companion volume Converting Rulers: Global Patterns, 1450–1850(Cambridge University Press, 2024) tests and substantiates this approach using case studies from Kongo (1480–1530), Japan (1560–1614), Ayutthaya (Thailand, 1660–1690) and Hawaii (1800–1830). Through in-depth analysis of key turning points in the careers of warlords, chiefs and kings, a tapestry of unique characters and stories is brought to light. However, these examples ultimately demonstrate that global patterns of conversion can be established to illuminate the religious geography of the world today.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
In a multipolar world where America wields less relative power, the United States can no longer get away with poor statecraft. To understand how the US can approach future national security challenges, I spoke with Dennis Ross, a senior US diplomat and the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His new book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World(Oxford University Press, 2025) offers a revised toolkit for US foreign policy and global leadership.
The United States may still be the world's strongest country, but it now faces real challenges at both a global and regional level. The unipolar world which was dominated by America after the Cold War is gone. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is both a military and economic competitor and it is actively challenging the norms and institutions that the US used to shape an international order during and after the Cold War. Directly and indirectly, it has partners trying to undo the American-dominated order, with Russia seeking to extinguish Ukraine, and Iran trying to undermine American presence, influence, and any set of rules for the Middle East that it does not dominate.
The failures of American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened the domestic consensus for a US leadership role internationally. Traditions in US foreign policy, especially the American sense of exceptionalism, have at different points justified both withdrawal and international activism. Iraq and Afghanistan fed the instinct to withdraw and to end the “forever wars.” But the folly of these US interventions did not necessarily mean that all use of force to back diplomacy or specific political ends was wrong; rather it meant in these cases, the Bush Administration failed in the most basic task of good statecraft: namely, marrying objectives and means. Nothing more clearly defines effective statecraft than identifying well-considered goals and then knowing how to use all the tools of statecraft—diplomatic, economic, military, intelligence, information, cyber, scientific, education—to achieve them. But all too often American presidents have adopted goals that were poorly defined and not thought through.
In Statecraft 2.0, Dennis Ross explains why failing to marry objectives and means has happened so often in American foreign policy. He uses historical examples to illustrate the factors that account for this, including political pressures, weak understanding of the countries where the US has intervened, changing objectives before achieving those that have been established, relying too much on ourselves and too little on allies and partners. To be fair, there have not only been failures, there have been successes as well. Ross uses case studies to look more closely at the circumstances in which Administrations have succeeded and failed in marrying objectives and means. He distills the lessons from good cases of statecraft—German unification in NATO, the first Gulf War, the surge in Iraq 2007-8—and bad cases of statecraft—going to war in Iraq 2003, and the Obama policy toward Syria. Based on those lessons, he develops a framework for applying today a statecraft approach to our policy toward China, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book concludes with how a smart statecraft approach would shape policy toward the new national security challenges of climate, pandemics, and cyber.
Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war.
