Best Aaron Weiner Podcasts (2025)

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Scott Beekman, "The Last Gladiator: William Muldoon and the Making of American Sports" (U Texas Press, 2025) 41:21

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2d ago41:21

41:21

William Muldoon was an infamous athlete whose prowess, savvy, and chicanery across his six-decade career led him to wealth, cultural importance, and political power. Muldoon, the child of poor Irish immigrants, began wrestling in the 1870s and quickly became one of the most famous athletes of the post–Civil War era. He started acting and modeling a…

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John L. Campbell, "Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 34:35

3d ago34:35

34:35

Since the Reagan era, conservatives in the United States have championed cutting taxes, especially for wealthy individuals and corporations, as the best way to achieve economic prosperity. In his new book, Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich (Cambridge UP, 2025) John L. Campbell shows that while these claims are highly influenti…

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Aaron Cayer, "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire" (U California Press, 2025) 34:35

3d ago34:35

34:35

By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than entire countries, employed more people than were housed in most cities, and rented offices in more nations than comprised the UN. Within them, architects were designing not single buildings but urban systems, including the multinational infrastructures…

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Debra Michals, "She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II" (Rutgers UP, 2025) 43:55

4d ago43:55

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In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders—and women themselves—saw small business ownership as a viable economic solution. In just five years, US women owned nearly a million of the nation’s businesses. In the decades since, women have moved increasingly int…

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Ecodefense: Dave Foreman and Earth First!’s Deep Ecology 59:58

4d ago59:58

59:58

A cowboy hat-wearing Goldwater conservative named Dave Foreman got religion and then founded the most radical environmental group of recent memory, Earth First! They dreamed of a ‘deep ecology’ that recognized the inherent value of nature, and they committed to protecting that nature at almost any cost. Yet, in putting the earth first, did Dave For…

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Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025) 1:07:26

5d ago1:07:26

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This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance Bailey, discusses the process of selecting, compiling, and publishing the volume with the subject himself, award-winning author, Kiese Laymon. Conversations with Kiese Laymon provides an in-depth look at…

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Mark Archuleta, "The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again" (U North Texas Press, 2025) 39:56

5d ago39:56

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In 1921 headlines across the country announced the death of Henry Starr, a burgeoning silent film star who was killed while attempting to rob a bank in Harrison, Arkansas. Cynics who knew the real Starr were not surprised. Before becoming a matinee idol, Starr had been the greatest bank robber of the horseback bandit era. Born in 1873, Cherokee out…

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Kate Haulman, "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America" (Oxford UP, 2025) 39:57

6d ago39:57

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In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to the battlefields at Gettysburg or Antietam, nor to Mount Vernon, but to the gravesite of Mary Ball Washington, mother of George. While dedicating the new monument that marked it in Fredericksburg, Virginia,…

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Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century" (Mariner Books, 2025) 51:34

7d ago51:34

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In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in Italy, I bought the book as soon as it came out. The second non-fiction book I ever bought in English. The book was riveting. It kickstarted my interest in the CIA and covert operations. Now, Tim Weine…

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Bob Wyss, "Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal" (University of California Press, 2025) 47:28

7d ago47:28

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For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals, and lighting the dark. In the coalfields and beyond, in Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal (University of California Press, 2025) Bob Wyss describes how this magical elixir sparke…

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Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, "Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism" (UP of Kansas, 2025) 1:01:30

8d ago1:01:30

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Nicholas Jacobs (Colby College) and Sidney Milkis (University of Virginia) have a new book, Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism (UP of Kansas, 2025), focusing on the idea of presidentialism, which is a way to think of political systems that include a dominant president or executive. In the United States, with …

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Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025) 1:04:55

8d ago1:04:55

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Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His books include The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, and Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery. He lives in Tempe, AZ. The long history of the racial we…

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Jonathan White and Lucas Morel, "Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln" (Reedy Press, 2025) 38:33

9d ago38:33

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In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. White assemble Frederick Douglass’s most meaningful and poignant statements about Abraham Lincoln, including a dozen newly discovered documents that have not been seen for 160 years. Readers will encount…

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Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025) 1:04:57

9d ago1:04:57

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Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea (Penguin Group, 2025) is a gripping history of stowaway slaves and the vessels that carried them to liberty. Up to 100,000 fugitives successfully fled the horrors of bondage in the A…

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Rebecca Nagle, "By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land" (Harper, 2024) 39:18

12d ago39:18

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In 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled, in a surprise decision, that treaties still on the books as US law meant that the Muscogee people of Oklahoma maintained legal jurisdiction over a large portion of the state; in short, that much of Oklahoma remained Indian Country. McGirt v. Oklahoma has been fought over in the court system since, but the implic…

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Michael Poznansky, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025) 32:20

13d ago32:20

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In the wake of World War II, the United States leveraged its hegemonic position in the international political system to gradually build a new global order centered around democracy, the expansion of free market capitalism, and the containment of communism. Named in retrospect the "liberal international order" (LIO), the system took decades to buil…

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Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025) 37:48

13d ago37:48

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Discover the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine, with over 90 recipes for the modern home cook—from the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Famer and star of the Netflix docuseries High on the Hog. One of our preeminent culinary historians, Dr. Jessica B. Harris has conducted deca…

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Lucy Sante, "Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022) 36:51

15d ago36:51

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From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City’s ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry. West of the…

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Keisha N. Blain, "Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights" (W.W. Norton, 2025) 40:59

15d ago40:59

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Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable. Over the course of two hundred years, they were at the forefront of national and international movements for social change, weaving connections between their own and others’ freedom struggles around …

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Laura Hobson Faure, "Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust" (Yale UP, 2025) 1:12:22

17d ago1:12:22

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The first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. H…

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Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, "Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 1:06:57

18d ago1:06:57

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Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) tells the story of an extraordinarily influential group of business executives at the helms of the largest US multinational corporations and their quest to drive globalization forward over the last eight decades. Janick Marina Scha…

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Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023) 59:37

19d ago59:37

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“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as true now as ever in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023), however, Thomas Graham provides an expert perspective on Russian history and statecraft …

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Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes" (Princeton UP, 2025) 57:32

19d ago57:32

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Why Americans favor progressive taxation in principle but not in practice Most Americans support progressive taxation in principle, and want the rich to pay more. But the specific tax policies that most favor are more regressive than progressive. What is behind such a disconnect? In Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax At…

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Alfred L. Martin Jr. and Taylor Cole Miller eds., "The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai" (Rutgers UP, 2025) 1:12:09

19d ago1:12:09

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The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai (Rutgers UP, 2025) is an accessible collection that explores the cultural, industrial, and historical impact of that beloved American sitcom. Edited by Taylor Cole Miller and Alfred L. Martin, Jr., this anthology brings together a diverse range of voices that model different media studies approaches to researc…

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Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus 34:42

20d ago34:42

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Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as the Queen of Beauty; to Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; to Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These astoundin…

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Is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? with Damon Linker 1:07:49

21d ago1:07:49

1:07:49

We begin the new season of International Horizons by asking a crucial question: is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? RBI Deputy Director, Eli Karetny talks with political writer and scholar Damon Linker about how Trump’s movement sees presidential power, why it challenges long-standing rules and institutions, and what it means for America’…

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Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, "Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System" (Southern Illinois UP, 2025) 24:20

21d ago24:20

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While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice system. Scholars recognized the unique opportunity to study crime and the justice system’s response during this period, though they soon realized that determining the pandemic’s effects would…

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Kevin J. Hayes, "Understanding Hunter S. Thompson" (U South Carolina Press, 2025) 43:55

22d ago43:55

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Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in Understanding Hunter S. Thompson (University of South Carolina Press, 2025), Kevin J. Hayes provides a broad and nuanced analysis of Thompson's multifaceted career and unique …

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Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System" (Columbia UP, 2025) 43:30

23d ago43:30

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We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to …

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Molly Worthen, "Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025) 1:05:57

23d ago1:05:57

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Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. How did we get here? In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to …

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Daniel Horowitz, "Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America" (Duke UP, 2025) 48:37

24d ago48:37

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From teddy bears and Winnie-the-Pooh to Smokey Bear, Yogi Bear, and Cocaine Bear, American popular culture has been fascinated with real and fictional bears for more than two centuries. Bears are ubiquitous, appearing in advertisements, as logos for sports teams, and as central characters in children’s books, cartoons, movies, and video games. In B…

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Brendan A. Shanahan, "Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965" (Oxford UP, 2025) 1:17:16

26d ago1:17:16

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Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is far less understood that the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the country remained primarily contested in the realms of state politics and law until the mid-to-late twentiet…

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Flannery Burke, "Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region" (U Washington Press, 2025) 36:18

26d ago36:18

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Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region (University of Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Flannery Burke flips the script of American regional narratives. In novels, travel narratives, popular histories, and dude ranch brochures, twenti…

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Wade Davies, "Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970" (UP of Kansas, 2020) 55:41

27d ago55:41

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The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game’s epicenter (as well as a pipeline to the NBA). While that is certainly a true statement, basketball is not limited to places such as New York City. In recent years scholars have written about the meaning of the game (and tri…

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Donald G. Nieman, "The Path to Paralysis: How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic" (Anthem Press, 2024) 53:45

28d ago53:45

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Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing deterministic about how we became polarised, and it happened more recently than many think. To fully understand the problem, we must take the long view, the perspective provided by history, wi…

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Glenn Ligon, "Distinguishing Piss from Rain" (Hauser & Wirth, 2024) 53:14

29d ago53:14

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An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today This long-awaited and essential volume collects writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose canonical paintings, neons and installations have been delivering a cutting examination of race, history, sexua…

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LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City" (Beacon, 2025) 1:08:03

1M ago1:08:03

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On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when white NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris, 10 years old at the time, felt the aftershocks of the trag…

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Andrew Fialka, "Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War" (U Georgia Press, 2025) 56:18

1M ago56:18

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Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Fialka illustrates two exceptional incidents of occupational and guerrilla violence in Missouri during the American Civil War. The first is a Union spy's two-week-long murder spree targeting civilians, and the second is …

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Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981" (U of Chicago Press, 2025) 30:20

1M ago30:20

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Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed…

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John Lisle, "Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA" (St. Martin's Press, 2025) 1:14:56

1M ago1:14:56

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The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves. Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous—even deadly—experiments. Among them: dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending d…

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Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025) 36:23

1M ago36:23

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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 p…

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Patrice D. Douglass, "Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence" (Stanford UP, 2025) 1:19:39

1M ago1:19:39

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In Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violabi…

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Steve Luxenberg, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation" (Norton, 2019) 48:16

1M ago48:16

48:16

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (Norton, 2019) It is unusual because it is chiefly an ensemble biography of Henry Brown, John Mars…

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Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta, "Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America" (Princeton UP, 2025) 53:22

1M ago53:22

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What does it mean to supervise a bank? And why does it matter who holds that power? In this episode, Sean H. Vanatta joins us to explore the hidden machinery behind American finance, as told in his new book Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America (Princeton UP, 2025), co-authored with Peter Conti-Brown. Spanning near…

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Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football 58:04

1M ago58:04

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Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college footba…

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Tracy Slater, "Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp" (Chicago Review Press, 2025) 42:03

1M ago42:03

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On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the Western U.S., sending them to cramped, hastily-constructed camps like Manzanar and Amache. One such Japanese-American was Karl Yoneda, a well-known labor activist–an…

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Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025) 42:50

1M ago42:50

42:50

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America. His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media are still taught today. Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forste…

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Timothy Messer-Kruse, "Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution" (LSU Press, 2024) 1:00:33

1M ago1:00:33

1:00:33

Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024) unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. While historians have generally acknowledged that patriot leaders assembled in response to postwar economic chaos, the threat of popular insurgencies, and the inability of the states…

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Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune" (Ballantine, 2013) 57:03

1M ago57:03

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Bill Dedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Empty Mansions, shares the extraordinary story of a reclusive copper heiress, the battle over her fortune, and the HBO series adaptation now in development. As an investigative journalist, Bill Dedman has built his career writing stories that chan…

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Elaine Weiss, "Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement" (Simon and Schuster, 2025) 1:05:45

1M ago1:05:45

1:05:45

Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly significance and narrative excellence, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement (Simon and Schuster, 2025), "the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore …