Applied History in the US Department of State

We tend to talk about globalisation as if it arrived with container ships, multinationals and the internet. Christopher Meissner’s One from the Many: The Global Economy since 1850 (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that it has a far longer and messier history. In my latest New Books Network interview, I put that history, and some of its biggest open questions, to him.A book for a nervous momentTariffs, industrial policy, “economic security” and the relocation of supply chains have revived the argument that globalisation is going into reverse. Meissner, Professor of Economics at UC Davis and a Research Associate at the NBER, takes the long view. Trade, capital and migration surged between 1850 and 1914, collapsed between the wars, and were rebuilt after 1945. His conclusion is that globalisation is hard to kill, but not guaranteed to survive. That depends on political choices and international cooperation.If you teach economics, history or political science, or simply want to know whether today’s headlines signal the end of globalisation, this book and this conversation are for you. What we talk aboutWhy the first globalisation happened, and what a Briton, an Argentine or an American in 1900 would have made of today’s worldMigration: we have liberalised goods and capital far more than people, so how much does that limit globalisation’s power to reduce inequality?Whether backlash was always built into globalisation, or whether wars and shocks brought it down, and what that means for today’s politicsThe Great Depression and the question of leadership: can the world economy function without a power willing to underwrite it?The paradox of the US dollar, and why capital flows towards the richest economy rather than the poorestWhat evidence would convince Chris that “this time really is different”Writing a first book, and why economics works best inside history rather than bolted on beside it.Some of these questions came from my own students, where the book is now core reading. They like it because it explains long-run change while making formal theory accesible.What other reviewers sayBarry Eichengreen, in Foreign Affairs, praised its clarity and concision across nearly two centuries. In Good Reads, Jason Furman called it a reliable, readable history, well grounded in the research literature. Donald Boudreaux, in The Independent Review, judged it an admirable survey of key events and theories, although he took issue with some analytical choices. That makes it a useful starting point for readers who want to form their own view. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Distinguished Oxford historian Sudhir Hazareesingh has written a stunning new study documenting the inevitable resistance that New World enslavement produced throughout its long terrible history. Joining John to speak with Sudhir is George Boulukos of SIU Carbondale, author of The Grateful Slave.Daring to Be Free Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World (a suitable companion to Hazareesingh's earlier biography of the Haitian nation builder Toussaint Louverture, Black Spartacus) opens up four crucial topics that reshape the stories we tell about slavery's "social death.” One is persistent resistance during the Middle Passage, another is the omnipresence of successful marronage (meaning escape to highlands or remote refuges). Third is the strikingly omnipresent hope inspired by slaves' widespread knowledge the successful Haitian revolution. Finally, Sudhir emphasizes the striking way a sense of agency and autonomy among enslaved persons persisted in the New World–by way both of culture (frequently marked by durable religious practice) and by way of violent, frequently fatal rebellions, which were systematically under-acknowledged or swept under the rug within enslaving societies. As he sums it up: "Resistance during middle passage, marronage, resistance based on culture, insurrections."  Moreover, he persuasively makes the case that the role of benevolent actors within enslaving societies (the William Wilberforces of the world...) "has been greatly exaggerated, and in fact, their interventions were more often than not...actually prompted by the resistance of the enslaved themselves."Mentioned in the episode:Sylvaine Diouf on hinterland marronage, Slavery's Exiles: The Story of America's Maroons.Aime Cesaire, "The Verb 'Marooner'" (1950, English version 1972)Francois Mackandal: Haitian religious leader who alluded to and educated Haitians a longer pre-Revolutionary tradition there. Julia C. Scott, The Common Wind. on communicative structures within the African-American slave world. Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982) introduced much-debated and frequently misunderstood category, one that is brilliantly explicated and extended by Vincent Brown, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery." (2009).Recallable BooksRebecca Hall, Wake (graphic novel) Marcelo D'Salete Angola Janga (Graphic novel about Brazilian Marronage) C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins (1938)Richard Price, First Time. Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (2015)Read Transcript here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How Henry Ford institutionalized a social gospel Henry Ford did not just mass produce cars. As a member of the Episcopal Church, reader of New Thought texts, believer in the “gospel of reincarnation,” mass marketer of antisemitic material, and employer who institutionalized a social gospel, Henry Ford’s contributions to American models of business were informed by and produced for an America he understood to be broadly Christian. Though Ford’s efforts at the head of the Ford Motor Company have commonly been understood as secular, Ford himself was explicit that his work in engineering and auto production was prophetic and meant to remake the world. This religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company repositions them within critical studies of religion, examining how Ford transformed American religious practice in the twentieth century. Drawing directly on documents from Ford’s archive, Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America (NYU Press, 2025) examines Ford’s mass production methods and bureaucratic reforms as examples of prosperity gospel traditions, illuminating the ways manufacturing and technology intersect with American religious practice. Bridging American religious and industrial history, Assembling Religion offers a new and surprising way to understand Ford’s impact on culture, commerce, and the technology of labor. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I sat down with Lydia Sizer to chat about her experience developing applied history initiatives at the US Department of State’s Office of the Historian. We talked about what it’s like to collaborate with policymakers and what it means to negotiate productive tensions between political science and historical methodologies.Lydia talks about her doctoral dissertation, in which she drew on political science, history, and her own experience at the State Department’s Libya Desk to analyze how diplomats make high-stakes decisions with very limited information. We discuss how history can be useful for analyzing institutional memory in government and private organizations, and how #applied history initiatives can help mitigate some of the institutional memory loss that is built into democratic politics.We discuss Lydia’s positive experience using #AI in her work and talks about her ongoing efforts to anticipate policy trends rather than merely respond to them.  We also talk about the punk band The Clash and how their 1982 hit song “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” can help us understand practical approaches to history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE In a groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, a prize-winning historian shines a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world.In her powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. In her sparkling and original Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (Doubleday, 2026) Pearsall uncovers the insurgents, freedom lovers, and dreamers in India, West Africa, North America, Europe, China, and West Indian islands who shaped the nature of American rebellion and nationhood.In each fresh and compelling chapter of Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall plucks a keyword from the Declaration of Independence—security, happiness, respect– finding its spark in a far-flung place. In an Edinburgh club where women were first invited into philosophical conversations, she explores what the pursuit of happiness meant to women and men of all sorts. She traces how novel forms of slavery provoked a new use of the word liberty in Connecticut petitions as well as in cries of “liberty or death.” On a Kolkata street where Indians protested relentless taxes, Pearsall finds a critique of oppressive imperial government that galvanized Americans in their protests and parties against the tea of the English East India Company. In rural Germany, boy soldiers sent abroad to die for Britain complicate who can lay claim to being civilized in a brutal war.In telling the extraordinary tales of Friends of Liberty protesting tyranny around the world, Pearsall restores these individuals and movements to their rightful place in the vital story of the American Revolution and the nation it created. The result is a stirring and surprising revisioning of our history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the inside flap:In Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory (Duke UP, 2025), Ronald Radano proposes a new understanding of US Black music by focusing on the key matter of value, manifested musically in its seemingly embodied qualities—spirit, soul, and groove. While acknowledging these qualities are always embedded in Black music, Radano shows they developed not simply from performance but from musicians’ status as laborers inhabiting an enduring racial-economic contradiction: Black music originated publicly as an exchangeable property owned by people whose subhuman status granted them—as “natural” musicians—indelible properties of sound. As a contradiction of the rules of ownership, wherein enslaved property was forbidden the right to own, modern Black music emerges after emancipation as a primary possession, moving dialectically into commercial markets and counterhistorically back into Black worlds. Slavery’s seminal contest of ownership underlie modern musical sensations of aliveness, which become the chief measure of value in popular music. By reconceiving US Black music history as a history of value, Radano rethinks the music’s place in US and global culture.Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale [email protected] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Whatever happened to the working class? A compelling new social history of Britain since 1945From the picket lines of the Miners' Strike to the Amazon warehouses of today, the British working class has been pushed from the center of political life to its margins, though not without a fight. But how did a force that once shaped nations become invisible?Historian Ewan Gibbs reconstructs what was lost—and what was taken. Through vivid first-hand accounts, he traces the transformation of a class forged in mines and shipyards into one scattered across call centers and gig economy apps. This is the story of council estates sold off, unions broken, mill towns hollowed out, and a sense of solidarity ground down by decades of insecurity.Yet, as inequality deepens and class roars back into political debate, Gibbs confronts the essential question: who now speaks for labour? Richly researched and deeply humane, An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class (Verso, 2026) is the definitive history of British post war working-class life.Ewan Gibbs is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. He writes about energy, industry, work and protest for the London Review of Books, Financial Times, The Times, Prospect, Break Down, Dissent and Jacobin. His first book, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland, was shortlisted for the Scottish History Book of the Year.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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When German occupiers rolled into Paris in June 1940, they arrived wary of the French Catholic Church. In a country where more than 80 percent of citizens were Catholic, bishops held enormous moral sway. During the 1930s, many used their positions to forcefully condemn the rise of Nazism. But as the persecution of Jews escalated during the Occupation, every bishop in France maintained a deafening silence. In fact, the Church stood publicly alongside Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime. Even when bishops famously broke silence to protest the deportation of Jews in 1942—a moment long remembered as one of moral awakening—they quickly retreated, discouraging further defiance.The French Church’s public silence during the Holocaust is no secret. But as Aliza Luft shows, private interactions between bishops, French Jewish leaders, and Vichy officials were just as consequential. Turning to letters, diaries, and records of private conversations, Luft traces the moral dilemmas and calculated choices that shaped these hidden negotiations. As Jewish leaders turned to the Church for information and protection, bishops repeatedly assured them of the Church’s sympathy and support. These guarantees from the nation’s highest moral authorities, combined with the false promises of Vichy officials, encouraged French Jews to place their faith in relationships and republican ideals that proved tragically hollow.Drawing on years of archival research, Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2026) is a harrowing account of how genocide unfolds day by day—not only through spectacular violence, but also through misleading assurances, quiet capitulations, and broken promises. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The national parks are loved by many Americans and visitors from around the world. Yet, few realize how often these landscapes and their history have been shaped by questions answered in the courts. With more than 3,500 lawsuits involving the National Park Service, litigation has shaped and defined the character of the parks. Litigation has determined how land can be added to national parks, answered questions about treaty and free speech rights on park land, and settled numerous other disputes that have helped determine what the parks look like today. In her new book National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles (University of Nevada Press, 2026), Carla Chung Mattix examines five landmark Supreme Court cases involving national parks over the course of nearly a century. These cases provide readers with a new lens to understanding the parks and help them understand the role of the courts in the nation's public lands. In this episode, Mattix, who was an attorney for the National Park Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of the Solicitor for 25 years, discusses her new book and the Court's influence on the national parks.    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rongbin Han is a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia, where he studies Chinese politics and the internet. Han’s latest book—and the topic of this New Books Network episode—is Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism (Columbia UP, 2026).Make China Great Again delves into a subgenre of Chinese web novels that attempt to re-imagine the country’s history in ways that align with Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” and the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. In these novels, characters might go back in time to foment a communist revolution decades before the PRC’s establishment, industrialize the late Ming dynasty, or bring elements of democratic elections to the Song dynasty. Given the popularity of web novels in China—almost half of Chinese netizens read internet literature—such alternate histories provide a window into how an authoritarian state can negotiate the consent of its citizenry using popular culture. Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.