Live from New York, because #ScholarSunday travels, here’s my 272nd thread of great public scholarly writing, podcast episodes, new & forthcoming books from the past week. Add more below, share as widely as possible, & enjoy, all!
First, a special shout-out to longtime online friend & supporter of these threads Jamie Gump, who is our first Easter Egg contest winner! Jamie teaches classes on wine, which is an even cooler gig than AmericanStudies public scholar & #ScholarSunday collator! Check out my Bluesky account for the Easter Egg contest for this week’s thread, & see your name (& work if you’d like) in lights next week!
Articles:
Starting with some favorite articles from the week, including Boen Wang for the Pittsburgh Review of Books on the unexpected results when Standard Oil hired the legendary photographer Gordon Parks to create propaganda. (For more on photography, propaganda, & activism, keep an eye out for the Fifth Inning of my podcast’s second season, which will drop on Wednesday.)
Fascinating Aeon magazine essay from Coreen McGuire & Alex Aylward on why some disabled people supported eugenics in the 1930s.
While over at Contingent magazine, Whitney Barlow Robles wrote about how historians of science seek to understand alchemy & other past worldviews.
& for the Urban History Association’s Metropole, Grace Gillies traced what the Bacchanalian conspiracy of ancient Rome can reveal about a city’s “night-time spaces.”
Lots of other great public scholarly articles this week, including the editors of the Victoria County History project on Lucy Simpkins’s fight against the Corn Laws in 1840s England.
Over at the History Workshop, Oyeshi Ganguly wrote about her work archiving Bengal’s early 20C revolutionary women.
Bracing & important essay from Dominique J. Baker & Christopher T. Bennett in Public Books digging into who really receives Guggenheim fellowships, past & present.
While Mikhail Svirin wrote for the AHA’s Perspectives on the multinational history of the red-white-blue bag.
& check out a new resource from the AHA’s American Historical Review, a digital syllabus on the global histories of authoritarianism.
Four open-access scholarly publications to share this week, including Bernard Capp for The Historical Journal on the cultural, social, & ideological roles of the hat in Early Modern England.
Also open-access is Barnet Hartston in The International Journal of the History of Sport on homing pigeons, militarism, & masculinity in Imperial Germany & Austria-Hungary.
Thanks to SAGE GRAY (Walter D. Greason) for sharing an open-access version of Alexandre White, Rachel L.J. Thornton, & Jeremy A. Greene in the New England Journal of Medicine on recentering Black theorists of health & society including Du Bois.
& likewise fully open-access is Rachel Elder & Thomas Schlich’s edited collection Technology, Health, & the Patient Consumer in the 20th Century from Manchester University Press.
Two columns from Saturday Evening Post colleagues to share this week, including Sheeka Sanahori on mid-19C vigilante committees & the pathway to freedom for enslaved people.
& also in the Post, Martha Sandweiss wrote about her fascinating new book The Girl in the Middle & why American history needs more names.
Current Events:
Turning to current events public scholarly writing, a trio of exemplary responses to the defeat of Orban in Hungary, including Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (that’s a gift link) on why illiberalism is not inevitable.
Sarah van Gelder wrote for Truthout on the community that authoritarians fear the most—people who stick up for each other.
& Heather Cox Richardson’s April 13th installment of Letters from an American was a must-read on Orban, American conservatism, FDR, & more.
Turning to other current events, Garrett M. Graff wrote for The New Yorker’s The Lede on how much the war in Iran has depleted the U.S. missile supply.
Tom Jones wrote for the Poynter Institute on how Trump’s Truth Social posts are driving the news cycle & raising alarms.
Speaking of propagandistic social media, vital essay from Mitch Therieau for The Drift magazine on the DHS’s regime of images.
Over at her The Handbasket newsletter, Marisa Kabas shared an excerpt from Nicholas Enrich’s important book Into the Wood Chipper on the gutting of USAID.
Speaking of these ongoing federal cuts, thanks to the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic’s Panorama for tracking the NEH’s removal of all content from the popular Edsitement project.
For the website of Geneseo, New York’s Public Honors College, VP of Enrollment Costas Solomou wrote about why we need to look at public higher ed for the true affordability crisis.
Over at The Guardian, Laurie Penny wrote about how feminists began raising alarms about the manosphere decades ago but were ignored.
& I really enjoyed B.R. Cohen’s Public Books interview with Alicia Kennedy on food writing, food security, & food justice.
Podcasts:
Starting this section with a recent podcast episode I missed, Boyd Cothran of The Gilded Age & Progressive Era interviewing Marc J. Dunkelman about his new book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress–& How to Bring It Back.
Lots of great new podcast episodes this week, including Ross Lennon’s first solo ep for his History on Film podcast, part one of a mini-series on his genre studies of teen movies.
For his American Medieval podcast, Matt Gabriele shared a crossover episode with Jason Herbert’s Reckoning, a conversation about Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven featuring Gabriele, Herbert, John Wyatt Greenlee, Thomas Lecaque, & David M. Perry.
Over at his America: The Story of the USA podcast, Liam Heffernan was joined by Beck Krefting to discuss the history of comedy in America–& why we don’t get sarcasm.
Episode 95 of Kate Carpenter’s Drafting the Past podcast features John Garrison Marks on his new book on the legacies of George Washington & slavery, his writing process, & more.
While the latest episode of Jerry Landry’s Presidencies of the United States podcast focuses on James Monroe & the fragile Era of Good Feelings.
Two new episodes of Alycia Asai’s Civics & Coffee podcast this week, including an interview with Shannon McKenna Schmidt about her new book on Lady Bird Johnson’s 1964 whistlestop campaign tour, & the latest regular C&C History Factory episode, on the vanishing First Lady Lucretia Garfield.
For his Public Books Writing Latinos podcast, host Geraldo Cadava interviewed Pulitzer-winning journalist Mirta Ojito about her debut novel, Deeper than the Ocean.
The latest episode of Rich Napolitano’s Shipwrecks & Sea Dogs podcast tells the eerie story of the 1921 ghost ship Carroll A. Deering.
While episode 76 of Waitman W. Beorn’s Holocaust History podcast features special guest host Doris Bergen interviewing Beorn himself about his research into the Janowska concentration camp.
Turning to current events conversations, thanks to the folks at NiCHE Canada for sharing Crystal Gail Fraser & Jess Dunkin’s 2026 David Neufeld Memorial Lecture, on the How I Survived podcast & recreation at Canada’s residential schools.
On a very similar note, here’s the Fourth Inning of Diamond in the Rough, the second season of my Baseball, Bigotry, & the Battle for America podcast, this one focused on the origins of baseball at Manzanar & the social significance of sports.
The latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson & Paul Krugman’s monthly Lunch Money podcast is a bracing & important conversation about how America is losing the world.
While for the latest episode of John Fugelsang & Corey Brettschneider’s The Oath & the Office podcast, they discussed Trump’s attacks on the Pope.
& for the Progress Texas podcast, Rick Halperin, Michael Phillips, & Hadi Jawad joined to discuss the opportunities for Dallas as it hosts the World Cup.
Books:
Starting this section with a recent book I missed, Amy Nathan’s Riding into History: The Surprising Story of Sarah Keys Evans & the Fight to Desegregate Bus Travel from Duke University Press.
Out this week from Princeton University Press is Catherine Fletcher’s The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires.
Published this week by Oxford University Press is Emily Sneff’s When the Declaration of Independence Was News. & also check out Rebecca Brenner Graham’s Smithsonian magazine article on that book & its focal histories.
Likewise out from Oxford this week is Michael Mandelbaum’s The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy.
Also published this week is Stuart Schrader’s Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect & Serve Themselves from Hachette Book Group. & check out an excerpt from that book for n+1 magazine here.
Out now from the folks at Working Class History is their newest publication, Out of the Lab, Into the Streets: An Oral History of the 2022 UAW Strike at the University of California.
& finally, out now & open-access from the University of Toronto Press is Samuel Clowes Huneke’s I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany.
For an author’s perspective on his own recent publication, check out Luke Goebel for the Pittsburgh Review of Books on his LA noir novel Kill Dick.
Forthcoming in June from Edinburgh University Press is Sue Matheson & Cynthia J. Miller’s edited collection Explorers on Screen: Adventure! Danger! Romance!
While forthcoming in December & now available for pre-order from MacMillan is Lauren Arrington’s Bohemians on the Breadline: The Radical Women Artists of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
For the latest USIH book review, Elesha Coffman wrote about David F. Evans’s Damned Whiteness: How White Christian Allies Failed the Black Freedom Movement.
& for the Pittsburgh Review of Books, Pamela S. Nadell reviewed Mark Mazower’s On Antisemitism: A Word in History.
Newsletters and Blog Posts:
Gonna end with a bunch of newsletters & blog posts as usual, starting with Don Moynihan for his Can We Still Govern? newsletter on the death of Direct File & state capacity.
For her Boogie-Woogie Rumble of Space-Time newsletter, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein wrote about Artemis, capitalism, & the logics of colonialism.
Two new posts from Felicia Kornbluh for her History Teaches… newsletter this week, including this one on Trump’s threats against Iran & this one on the ouster of Orban in Turkey.
For his Ideas Roadshow newsletter, Howard Burton wrote about the Met’s new Raphael exhibition & the ethics of visiting the U.S. in this moment.
Over at his Civil War Memory newsletter, Kevin M. Levin offered nuanced & moving reflections on the 150th anniversary of the dedication of the DC Freedmen’s Memorial.
For the latest In Pursuit newsletter, Sharon McMahon wrote about William Henry Harrison & loyalty to democracy over party.
For his Liberating Narratives site, Bram Hubbell wrote about teaching the origins of decolonization in 1945.
Over at his Looking Through the Past newsletter, George Dillard wrote about tea’s role in making the modern world.
For her Perceptive Travel blog, Kerry Dexter wrote about travel inspiration we can get from poets.
While for her History in the Margins blog, Pamela D. Toler shared her takeaways on the Spies & Space exhibit at Minnesota’s Museum of Russian Art.
At her site Theresa Kaminski shared the 12th installment of her Dispatches from the Writing Life, on Jane Grant’s letters with Elisabeth Marbury.
While over at his Freedom Papers newsletter, Etienne Toussaint wrote about Du Bois, double consciousness, & showing up whole.
Gonna end with a bunch of great cultural studies work as ever, including Viviane Saglier for the History Workshop on Palestinian cinema & popular education.
For Public Books Ryan Carroll wrote about the second season of The Pitt & corny representations of contemporary crises.
For the Saturday Evening Post, Troy Brownfield highlighted six great real-life journalism films.
For Bright Wall/Dark Room’s ongoing Comedy Happy Place issue, C. Zhang wrote about the films of Billy Wilder.
While for a special 100th post tribute on her Review Roulette newsletter, Vaughn Joy shared an updated version of her vital methodology piece.
& finally for his Academic Bubble newsletter, Dion Georgiou wrote about the acclaimed Brazilian political thriller The Secret Agent.
& if you need more public scholarly goodness, check out the 54th installment of Dion’s Stop, Look, & Listen compilation series.
PS. I’m sure both Dion & I missed plenty as ever, so please share more writing, podcasts, new & forthcoming books below. Thanks, & happy reading, listening, & learning, all!
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