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New Books in Intellectual History

New Books in Intellectual History

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 Interviews with Scholars of Intellectual History about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-historyNew Books Network Monde Sciences sociales
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  • Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

    Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
    Sep 10 2025
    A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots. In Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet. Dorothy Armstrong is a historian of the material culture of South, Central and West Asia. She has taught at the Royal College of Art, Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Oxford. She was the Beattie Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where she is now honorary research fellow. Threads of Empire is her first book. 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 here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    1 h et 14 min
  • Leah Hochman and Stanley M. Davids, "Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought" (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023)

    Leah Hochman and Stanley M. Davids, "Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought" (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023)
    Sep 7 2025
    The story of Judaism is the story of change. Throughout Jewish history, revolutionary events and subversive ideas have burst forth, repeatedly transforming Jewish experience. Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023), edited by Rabbi Stanley M. Davids (z’l) and Dr. Leah Hochman seeks to explore these ideas---and the individuals behind them---by delving into historical disruptions that led to lasting change in Jewish thought. The book includes distinguished array of scholars who take us on a journey from the disruptive prophets of ancient times, through rational, mystical, and extremist medievalists, to the impact of Haskalah and early Reform thought in modernity. It also explore contemporary innovations such as changes in liturgy and music, feminism, and post-Holocaust theology are included, as are insights into Sephardic and North African experiences. By showing how Judaism forms---then re-forms, and re-forms again---the contributors demonstrate that tensions between continuity and change have always been part of Jewish life, helping us to both understand the past and contemplate the future. Today, we are in conversation with Dr. Hochman Associate professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Los Angeles. Our host, Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    50 min
  • Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)

    Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)
    Sep 5 2025
    An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lesley sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing. Lesley and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lesley, not attentively enough. Lyndsey is not a fan of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, because it makes the evil banality of extermination monstrous all over again (cf. her"Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt.") Responsibility is crucial: She praises Arendt for distinguishing between temptation and coercion. Mentioned in the episode: Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 one of the last great historical events in Arendt’s lifetime. Lesley praises “reading while walking” and the unpacking of the totalitarian in Anna Burns’s marvelous Norther Ireland novel, Milkman. Hannah Pitkin’s wonderful 1998 The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, emphasizes Arendt’s idea that although we are free, we can forfeit that freedom by assuming we are rule-bound. Arendt on the challenge of identity: “When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.” The Holocaust is a crime agains humanity a crime against the human status, a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people".” Various books by Hannah Arendt come up: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on teh Banality of Evil. (1963). Judgement in Arendt is crucial from earliest days studying Kant and in her final works (among The Life of the Mind) she speaks of the moments when "the mind goes visiting.” Her earliest ideas about love and natality are in Love and Saint Augustine (1929, not published in English until 1996). Hannah Arendt is buried at Bard, near her husband Heinrich Blucher and opposite Philip Roth, who reportedly wanted to capture some of the spillover Arendt traffic. James Baldwin's essay “The Fire Next Time” (1963) caused Arendt to write Baldwin about the difference between pariah love and the love of those in power, who think that love can justify lashing out with power. Recallable Books Lyndsey praises Leah Ypi's (Free) forthcoming memoir about her Albanian family, Indignity. John recalls E. M Forster, Howard’s End a novel that thinks philosophically (in a novelistic vein) about how to continue being an individual in a new Imperial Britain. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    56 min
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