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Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)
The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. In The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard UP, 2025), Dr. Zara Anishanslin charts the intertwined lives of three such figures who dared to defy the British monarchy: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. From London to Boston, from Jamaica to Paris, from Bath to Philadelphia, these largely forgotten patriots boldly risked their reputations and their lives to declare independence. Mostly excluded from formal political or military power, these artists and their circles fired salvos against the king on the walls of the Royal Academy as well as on the battlefields of North America. They used their talents to inspire rebellion, define American patriotism, and fashion a new political culture, often alongside more familiar revolutionary figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley. Pine, an award-winning British artist rumored to be of African descent, infused massive history paintings with politics and eventually emigrated to the young United States. Demah, the first identifiable enslaved portrait painter in America, was Pine’s pupil in London before self-emancipating and enlisting to fight for the Patriot cause. And Wright, a Long Island–born wax sculptor who became a sensation in London, loudly advocated for revolution while acting as an informal patriot spy. Illuminating a transatlantic and cosmopolitan world of revolutionary fervor, The Painter’s Fire reveals an extraordinary cohort whose experiences testify to both the promise and the limits of liberty in the founding era. 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
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Katherine J. Parkin, "The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
The abortion market was a powerful economic force in American life. Before legalization lowered the cost, one million women each year collectively paid upward of $750 million for abortions. In The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), Dr. Katherine Parkin reveals the strength of a massive consumer market that involved loans, advertising, and travel, as well as the costs associated with the procedure itself. Laying the foundation for the emergence of a public market that facilitated the buying and selling of abortions, wealthy population control ideologues encouraged positive public discourse on abortion, funded medical studies, and waged legal battles. White, middle- and upper-class women sought out abortions and paid exorbitantly for them. Male entrepreneurs emerged to capitalize on the booming market and profit from the incredible demand. Advertising on billboards and in college newspapers, men profited by providing the phone number, getting kickbacks for delivering patients, and arranging for women’s travel to Mexico, Puerto Rico, England, and Japan. Students demanded abortion access and organized when it came at a steep cost, especially to the poorest among them. Abortion providers in Kansas, California, and Washington, D.C. attracted out-of-state consumers, with some women aided by their universities or by medical insurance. Between 1970 and 1973, entrepreneurs, providers, and hundreds of thousands of women seeking to buy abortions headed to New York City, heralded by some as the “abortion capital of the world.” While we may have imagined that securing an abortion was best understood as a hidden, woman-only experience, The Abortion Market reveals the extent to which businesses and businessmen openly selling abortion access shaped the experience of buying abortions for millions of women. 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
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Justine De Young, "The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Using artworks by Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others, The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Justine De Young explores how women and artists in Impressionist Paris (1855-1885) crafted their public images to exploit and resist stereotypes.French societal expectations and beauty ideals shaped how women were seen and how they chose to present themselves in public – whether on the street, in a photograph, or in a portrait on the walls of the annual Paris Salon. On Paris's broad new boulevards and in its public parks and theaters, women dressed to impress anonymous strangers as well as their friends. They even circulated aspirational photographs of themselves. Looking at a rich array of visual sources – from portraits to modern-life paintings, and from photographs to fashion plates – Dr. De Young reveals how women were seen, how they aspired to be seen, and how they navigated public life in Second Empire and Belle Époque Paris.This book considers how fashionable feminine “types” made famous in books, caricatures, and paintings created a visual lexicon and stylistic guide for women. Men and women alike relied on these types – cocotte (mistress), jeune veuve (young widow), amazone (independent equestrienne), demoiselle de magasin (shopgirl), and Parisienne (chic Parisian woman) – to judge the class, character, morality, and worth of strangers. With a rich set of illustrations from the Impressionist canon and beyond, The Art of Parisian Chic shows how modern women used fashion and these stereotypes to construct and reinvent their identities. 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
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Jill Elaine Hasday, "We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People", too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women's struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision making, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.Professor Jill Elaine Hasday's We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2025) is the first book to explore how forgetting women's struggles for equality—and forgetting the work America still has to do—perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Professor Hasday argues that remembering women's stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women's inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.America needs more conflict over women's status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men's spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America's dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women's progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future. 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
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Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Kathleen Casey joins Jana Byars to talk about The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford UP, 2025). Purses and bags have always been much more than a fashion accessory. For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political objectives. In the early 1800s, when the slim fit of neoclassical dresses made interior pockets impractical, upper-class women began to carry small purses called reticules, which provided them with a private place in a world where they did not have equal access to public space. Although many items of apparel have long expressed their wearer's aspirations, only the purse has offered carriers privacy, pride, and pleasure. This privacy has been particularly important for those who have faced discrimination because of their gender, class, race, citizenship, or sexuality. The Things She Carried reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality. Kathleen Casey closely examines a variety of sources--from vintage purses found in abandoned buildings and museum collections to advertisements, photograph albums, trade journals, newspaper columns, and trial transcripts. She finds purses in use at fraught historical moments, where they served strategic and symbolic functions for their users. The result is a thorough and surprising examination of an object that both ordinary and extraordinary Americans used to influence social, cultural, economic, and political change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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