I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic…
Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India (Stanford UP, 2026) reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in…
Love and Terror, The Helter Skelter History of the Manson Murders (Verso, 2026) is the most recent addition to the hundreds of books and films devoted to the killings committed by Charlie Manson’s…
From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the…
In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his…
Edward Blum interviews Holly White on her new book Constructing American Childhood: Age-Based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States. As of 2025, in the United States an…
The first large number of Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1840s, and Chinese opera troupes were not far behind. In Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in…
Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture…
A joke is never just a joke—not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy, 1750–1850 (JHU Press, 2025) Eran A. Zelnik offers…
In This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation (Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy’s unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with…
