Kori Schake, "The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States" (Wiley, 2025)

One of the biggest worries of the US Constitution's Framers was the danger of a standing army to a democracy, so they designed a system to ensure civilian control over the state's armed forces. In The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States (Wiley, 2025), Kori Schake looks at how well this principle of civilian control has worked across US history. Writing for popular and academic audiences, Schake highlights instances when the principle of civilian control over the military risked failing as well as when it worked. The State and the Soldier presents a highly readable history of the tenuous relationship between a republican form of government and the armed forces it needs to maintain. Kori Schake, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can find a transcript of our conversation here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from nearly forty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched together from the raw material of older films. At around the same time, the transition to synchronous sound added a transformative new element to the grammar of cinema: the voiceover narration. Together, the film inventory and offscreen commentary gave rise to the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that preserves and rewinds history. In How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America (Columbia University Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas Doherty tells the story of the archival documentary, spotlighting the first films that set out deliberately to preserve history on screen. He shows how newsreels and documentaries challenged the era’s restrictive censorship and how film began to engage with the great political issues of the day. Doherty considers a range of films—some well-known, others obscure—including J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Laurence Stallings and Truman Talley’s The First World War (1934), Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), Max Eastman and Herbert Axelbank’s Tsar to Lenin (1937), and the March of Time screen magazine. Tracing the creation of the archival documentary, How Film Became History illuminates how motion pictures have come to shape our vision of the past. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Denise Z. Davidson joins Jana Byars to talk about Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters (Cornell UP, 2025). The book explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement. Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters. By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

While most English-language histories of Taiwan focus on its geopolitical role, Taiwan: A People’s History (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Evan N. Dawley centres on the people of Taiwan themselves and explores how they have formed a unique polity, telling the story of the Indigenous Taiwanese, the Hoklo and Hakka who came from China before the twentieth century, Japanese colonialism and the Chinese who arrived after 1945. Dr. Dawley describes how successive waves of immigration changed Taiwan and how these diverse groups of Indigenous tribes and settlers interacted economically and culturally, creating new Taiwanese identities in the process. Over the last century Taiwan has developed from an authoritarian state to one of the world’s most vibrant democracies and advanced economies. It is a successful independent society, albeit one whose existence remains under a shadow. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Hotels represent nations, hosting visiting monarchs, politicians, and diplomats. Hotels underpin global networks of travel and communication, on which national and international prosperity have increasingly depended since the end of the First World War. Yet hotels are also places where people can be anonymous; where murderers and thieves mix with adulterers and con artists; and where prejudice finds expression in who is refused access, and in the forms of 'service' provided by staff in the lowest-paid roles. The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918 (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Professor Eloise Moss is the first book to uncover how hotels entrenched inequality, prejudice, and exploitation in Britain's tourist sector, and in wider society and culture, during the 20th century.Professor Moss delves into hotel murders, swindles, and scandals, including the history of Agatha Christie's disappearance in 1926, the 'Margate Hotel Murder', and the divorce of Wallis Simpson in 1936 so she could marry King Edward VIII. Professor Moss's exploration of the hotel also shines a light on the fight against the colour bar, the formation of the British civil rights movement, and the visit to London of Martin Luther King Jr.The Secret Life of the Hotel uniquely tells the story of Britain's relationship with the world during the 20th century through the prism of its hotels, showing how their infrastructure and 'welcome' had profound consequences for women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ citizens, and people with disabilities. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Justin Randolph, assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, joins Michael Stauch to discuss Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside (UNC Press, 2026), his new book on policing in Jim Crow Mississippi, told through the lens of that state’s highway patrol. Using oral history and a wide range of archival sources, Randolph narrates efforts by elites in Mississippi to modernize the police while maintaining social hierarchies, as well as efforts on the part of Black Mississippians to envision a world without police. Highlights include: What a focus on state-level policing adds to our understanding of policing; How the founding of the Mississippi highway patrol brought together various forms of policing in the Southwest, including the Texas rangers; A surprisingly robust discussion of cows, including Mississippi’s economic transformation to a center of cattle raising and the rise of cattlemen’s “Massive Resistance” in the 1950s; What Nina Simone revealed about policing in Mississippi, and the myth of Southern exceptionalism, in her song “Mississippi Goddam.” Guest: Justin Randolph is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, and his other research projects include histories of police desegregation, rural debt peonage, the Taser, and 9-1-1. His writing has appeared in scholarly outlets like the Journal of Southern History and Southern Cultures. He has also written for popular outlets such as The Washington Post, The Mississippi Encyclopedia, and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. He has received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship and prizes from both the Southern Historical Association and Agricultural History Society. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Former chief steward and union organizer Gordon Simmons joins Michael Stauch to discuss his new book on the history of labor struggles by public sector workers in West Virginia since 1969. With an emphasis on rank-and-file rebellion expressed through wildcat strikes and other job actions, Simmons provides a sweeping account of the past that has rich lessons for the present.   Highlights include: ●      A discussion of wildcat strikes and why West Virginia’s public sector workers waged them, again and again, in this period; ●      How a teacher wearing blue jeans sparked a battle over expressions of the counterculture in workplaces across West Virginia; ●      Why New Democrats like Joe Manchin sided against rank-and-file rebellion among public sector workers in Virginia; ●      How West Virginia public school teachers in 2018 used Facebook to organize a walkout that defied the union and won significant concessions from the state; ●      The joy of participating in “collective hell-raising” with co-workers and friends.   Guest: Gordon Simmons is a retired union organizer and president of the West Virginia Labor History Association. He is now employed as an investigator for the Human Rights Commission for the state of West Virginia and as an adjunct professor in philosophy at Marshall University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Political Scientist Steve Knott has a new book that focuses on conspiracy theories within the American presidency and often promulgated by the president himself. This is not, per se, a book about conspiracy theories in general, but about the narratives that presidents have used—that constitutes a kind of conspiracy thinking—to engage voters and push for particular policy ideas and outcomes. Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency (UP Kansas, 2025) spans the entire history of the United States, paying close attention to presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and finally Donald Trump. These particular presidents, both during their administrations and after, made use of conspiracies and/or demagogic rhetoric to encourage their supporters and to appeal to public fears. As Knott notes, Alexander Hamilton warns against this in both Federalist #1 and Federalist #85, wrapping the discussion of the new Constitution in concerns with regard to demagoguery. So many of the conspiracies that are pushed by presidents have at their base racism and an effort to fan the flames of racial fear and resentment. Jefferson, Jackson, Johnson, and Wilson all made use of racism as a part of their conspiracies. Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency also mines the deep vein of conspiracy theories around moneyed and elite interests, since many presidents cast these interests as predatory and “out to get” the average citizen. This is another constant approach among the presidents from the early days of the republic through to our contemporary “conspirator in chief” Donald Trump. Part of the way that presidents use these kinds of conspiracies is to set up a dichotomy of those who are with the president and those who are against the president, and this latter group is, inevitably, also opposed to the country as a whole and the way of life in the United States. Knott explains that this was the kind of rhetoric that both FDR and Truman used in their implementation of this kind of conspiratorial rhetoric. This also leans on national security as a point of contention, and that those in opposition to the president or the president’s policies are also potential threats to the republic. This is another dimension that Trump builds on in his use of this kind of rhetoric and division. In the final part of Conspirator in Chief, Knott sketches out those presidents who go far in standing against this kind of language and these kinds of attacks. Included in this grouping are John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William Howard Taft, and John F. Kennedy, among others. These individuals leaned into reason more than rumormongering, examining their own biases, and also pointing to the conspiracies that others were advocating. While we learn a great deal about demagogic presidents who stirred up conspiracies based in racism, fear, antisemitism, and classism, we also learn about those who operated differently, who tried to protect the country from such divisive rhetoric. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium--following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers--and shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics. For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium--how it was farmed, refined, and used to build modern medicine and shape state power--has remained largely untold.Drawing on archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the United States, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford UP, 2026) traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants in India, Turkey, and Australia to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource and a means of securing global stature. In postcolonial India, by contrast, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value amid the shifting currents of the Cold War. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon.Markets of Pain reveals how a seemingly marginal crop became an unlikely engine of modernization, a tool of Cold War geopolitics, and a harbinger of today's global opioid crisis. Blending vivid scenes from opium's fields and factories with incisive analysis of scientific and diplomatic archives, Benjamin Robert Siegel recovers a buried history with urgent relevance for global supply chains, international power, and public health. Markets of Pain offers an account of the global drug trade in the twentieth century, focusing on the transformation of opium from a colonial commodity into a modern resource for the American and European pharmaceutical industries. Challenging simplistic ideas of licit and illicit drugs in the twentieth century, it reveals how the modern global drug regime was formed by India and Turkey's navigation of the international anti-opium movement, the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, and the complex relationship between agriculture, medicine, and global capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Award-winning author Wil Haygood joins Michael Stauch to discuss The War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home (Knopf, 2026) his new book on the experiences of Black soldiers during the first war fought with an integrated military, the Vietnam War. Through the lives of seven soldiers, a pianist, and a wartime journalist, Haygood details how Black soldiers’ attempts to rise through their merits in the military came up against white racism within that same military, even as the Civil Rights movement scored significant gains domestically, through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Highlights include: How VA employee Maude DeVictor helped expose the effects of Agent Orange on returning veterans; Pilot Fred Cherry’s flight “from segregation to integration” before spending five years as the first African American prisoner of war in Vietnam; Art Gregg’s distinguished career in military logistics, culminating in renaming Fort Robert E. Lee in his honor (before that fort was again renamed under the Trump administration); The power of monuments and memorials to shape public memory and inspire future generations, as in the memorial to Henry O. Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point, in former secretary of defense Lloyd Austin’s hometown; Wil’s soon-to-be legendary rendition of Marvin Gaye’s antiwar masterpiece, “What’s Going On.” Guest: Wil Haygood is the author of ten nonfiction books, many of which have won literary awards. His book, The Butler, was made into a film directed by Lee Daniels. Haygood has been a correspondent for the Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2022, he received the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Peace Prize Foundation. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Haygood is currently Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Ohio and has recently been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history