The latest in New Books in History

I am just barely keeping up with New Books In History. Every week a new interview with authors come out and there is still a considerable backlog I'd love to look in to. At least with the new ones I am done, although I haven't had the time to report on that. So, once more, here is a combined review of three episodes in this fine podcast.

In Becoming Historians Marshal Poe interviews the authors and historians James Banner and John Gillis. They discuss their book about the way the established names became historians. It turns into a comparison game between those historians, including Banner and Gillis and the generation of Marshall Poe and the fundamental differences in atmosphere and environment in which they became historians and mad a career as such (or failed to do so). Inevitably this is also implicitly a talk about how academia has developed, for better or worse, over the past decades.

Rebels Rising is a book by Benjamin Carp about the places where the American Revolution was concocted. This was in bars, but also in churches, markets and even in people's homes. Marshal Poe speaks with Carp.

The Frankfurter Schule surely was an important name when I studied sociology. It never occurred to me though that these people went in exile and after the war only some of them returned to Germany, making this in part American, in part a German phenomenon. Thomas Wheatland wrote a book about the Frankfurt School in Exile and tells Marshal Poe, he actually prefers to speak of the Horkheimer circle. And more: the desertion of Fromm and the misgivings of Marcuse and Adorno. A must listen.

More NBIH:
Three recommendations,
American Exceptionalism,
The Great War in short,
How Rome Fell,
Glancing over the backlog.