Best L C M Press Podcasts (2025)

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Erika Pani, "Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867" (UNC Press, 2025) 57:37

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9d ago57:37

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Between the late 1840s and the late 1860s, the United States and Mexico had quite a bit in common. Both suffered from reactionary succession movements, both faced brutal civil wars, and both had to figure out a method of reconstructing broken nations in their aftermath. In Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexi…

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Pyet DeSpain, "Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking" (HarperOne, 2025) 50:45

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Chef Pyet DeSpain joins the New Books Network to discuss her new cookbook, Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking (HarperOne, 2025). Drawing from her Potawatomi and Mexican heritage, DeSpain shares recipes that connect past and present, including bison meatballs with Wojape BBQ sauce, raspberry mezcal quail, and poblan…

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Pierre-Yves Donzé & Maki Umemura, "Pierre-Yves Donzé & Maki Umemura, Japan and the Great Divergence in Business History" (JESB, 2025) 32:37

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For much of the late 20th century, Japanese business historians were core contributors to the global field. They published, collaborated, and shaped debates. But something shifted after 2000. Their international visibility - and participation in emerging theoretical conversations - declined. In Japan and the Great Divergence in Business History (Do…

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Vania Smith-Oka, "Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals" (Rutgers UP, 2021) 49:05

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In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experience…

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Fang Yu Hu, "Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule" (U Washington Press, 2024) 1:01:17

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In Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule (U Washington Press, 2024), female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in T…

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Christopher Nelson, "When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa" (Duke UP, 2025) 1:08:00

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Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices--living and dead, visible and immaterial--that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the…

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Stephen C. Mercado, "Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito's Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War" (Pen & Sword Military, 2025) 38:33

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War, and the threat of war, spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weapons. Imperial Japan, ahead of the Second World War, was no exception. After the First World War, Japan set up the Noborito Research Institute: a division of scientists and technicians to invest in overt and clandestine warfare. Stephen Mercado dives into…

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Rick A López, "Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570-1914" (U Arizona Press, 2025) 50:26

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Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, in …

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Joe Watkins, "Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future" (U Arizona Press, 2025) 44:06

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In Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future (University of Arizona Press, 2025), archaeologist Joe E. Watkins provides a comprehensive look at the rich history and cultural resilience of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan, tracing their journey from ancient times to their contemporary struggles for recognition. Relaying th…

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Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025) 55:18

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Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence the world's perception of Mexico. Mexico's so-called drug war, as generally conceived by journalists and academics, was the product of recent cartel turf wars, the end of the PRI's single pa…

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Stevie Suan, "Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) 58:38

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A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question--what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production? In Anime's I…

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Martin Austin Nesvig, "The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 1:00:47

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The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women - the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the…

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M. G. Sheftall, "Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses" (Penguin Random House, 2025) 53:42

2M ago53:42

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Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses (Penguin Random House, 2025) is the second volume in a prize-worthy two-book series based on years of irreplicable personal interviews with survivors about each of the atomic bomb drops, first in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, that hastened the end of the Pacific War. On August 6, 1945, the United States unleashed a weapo…

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Aaron L. Miller, "Basketball in Japan: Shooting for the Stars" (Routledge, 2024) 1:03:34

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Today we are joined by Aaron Miller, Lecturer in Kinesiology at California State University, East Bay and the author of Basketball in Japan: Shooting for the Stars (Routledge, 2025.) In our conversation, we discussed the beginnings of basketball in Japan, the ongoing legacy of Samurai culture in Japanese sport, and what Japanese basketball’s succes…

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Martin Austin Nesvig, "The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 1:04:49

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The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women – the mulata of Seville…

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Brian A. Stauffer, "Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion" (U New Mexico Press, 2019) 1:02:15

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In Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement--organized by indigenous, Afro-…

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Maren A. Ehlers, "Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018) 1:08:51

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Maren A. Ehlers’s Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) examines the ways in which ordinary subjects—including many so-called outcastes and other marginalized groups—participated in the administration and regulation of society in Tokugawa Japan. Within this context, the book focuses…

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Victoria Young, "Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature: Inciting Difference" (Routledge, 2024) 56:21

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Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature: Inciting Difference (Routledge, 2024) examines contemporary debates on such concepts as national literature, world literature, and the relationship each of these to translation, from the perspective of modern Japanese fiction. By reading between the gaps and revealing tensions and bli…

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Philis Barragán-Goetz, "Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas" (U Texas Press, 2020) 52:04

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Debates about Ethnic Studies in K-12 and Higher Education have highlighted the importance of culturally inclusive pedagogy in schools. Despite discussions about Ethnic Studies, there is a more extended history of Mexican-origin people pushing for culturally responsive education. In Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a…

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Raymond Jonas, "Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire" (Harvard UP, 2024) 1:05:12

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For a few years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mexico was ruled by an Austrian and defended by a French army. This often neglected story is more than just historical trivia - it's a way of understanding 19th century imperial politics, and global insurgencies today. In Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Em…

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Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2025) 1:04:46

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In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II a…

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Eiko Maruko Siniawer, "Ten Moments that Shaped Tokyo" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 49:03

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How did Tokyo—Japan’s capital, global city, tourist hotspot and financial center—get to where it is today? Tokyo–or then, Edo–had a rather unglamorous start, as a backwater on Japan’s eastern coast before Tokugawa decided to make it his de facto capital. Eiko Maruko Siniawer picks ten distinct moments in Edo’s, and then Tokyo’s, history to show how…

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Sarah E. K. Smith, "Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America" (UBC Press, 2025) 34:00

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hat is the relationship between culture and trade? In Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America Sarah E. K. Smith, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Art, Culture and Global Relations, examines the history of cultural relatio…

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Daniel Morales, "Between Here and There: The Political Economy of Transnational Mexican Migration, 1900-1942" (Oxford UP, 2024) 1:00:46

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Between Here and There is the first history of the creation of modern US-Mexico migration patterns narrated from multiple geographic and institutional sites. This book analyzes the interplay between the US and Mexican governments, civic organizations, and migrants on both sides of the border and offers a revisionist and comprehensive view of Mexica…

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Frank Jacob, "Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence" (Praeger, 2018) 1:06:07

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When you mention Japanese War crimes in World War Two, you’ll often get different responses from different generations. The oldest among us will talk about the Bataan Death March. Younger people, coming of age in the 1990s, will mention the Rape of Nanking or the comfort women forced into service by the Japanese army. Occasionally, someone will men…

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Sarah Teasley, "Designing Modern Japan" (Reaktion Books, 2022) 1:43:12

4M ago1:43:12

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Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, focusing on continuities and disruptions within communities and practices of design. Designing Modern Japan explores design in the unfolding contexts of modernization, empire and war, defeat and…

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Alison J. Miller, "Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868-1952" (Routledge, 2024) 36:14

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Envisioning the Empress illuminates dynamic and powerful empresses who impacted not only women in their own time but whose influence extended to later generations of royalty, creating a greater role for imperial women and elevating the status of women’s roles at a crucial juncture in Japanese history. The central focus of this book is visual monarc…

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James D.J. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025), 39:49

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The Russians came late to Japan, arriving after the Portuguese and other European powers. But as soon as they arrived, Russia tried to use spies and espionage to learn more about their neighbor—with various degrees of success. Sometimes, it failed miserably, like Russia’s early attempts to make contact with pre-Meiji Japan, or the debacle during th…

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Sonia C. Gomez, "Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America" (NYU Press, 2024) 1:01:46

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Picture Bride, War Bride examines how the institution of marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period of Japanese exclusion. Gomez’s work joins together an analysis of picture brides, or Japanese women who migrated to the United States to join husbands whom they married [in absentia] in the early 20th …

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Jürgen Buchenau and David S. Dalton, "Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913-1940" (Simon and Schuster, 2024) 1:02:36

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Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1940 examines anti-Catholic leaders and movements during the Mexican Revolution, an era that resulted in a constitution denying the Church political rights. Anti-Catholic Mexicans recognized a common enemy in a politically active Church in a predominantly Catholic nation. Many books have elucidated t…

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Zev Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025) 44:54

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For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chinese. In southern China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, people used Chinese to read and write–and never thought it was odd. It was, after all, how things were done. Even today, Cantonese speakers use Chinese …

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NIAS Podcast from the University of Tartu Asia Centre: Migration Policies and Realities in Estonia and Japan 33:53

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This Nordic Asia Podcast episode explores how Estonia and Japan, two countries under demographic pressure with different immigration histories, are managing the integration of foreign labour. Despite Estonia’s EU membership and Japan’s more recent policy shifts, both nations face labour shortages due to rapidly ageing populations. Estonia maintains…

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Sven Saaler, Kudō Akira, and Tajima Nobuo eds., "Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010" (Brill, 2017) 1:08:05

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Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010 (Brill, 2017) examines the mutual images formed between Japan and Germany from the mid-nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, and the influence of these images on the development of bilateral relations. Unlike earlier research on Japanese-German relations, which focused on the sim…

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Elena Jackson Albarran, "Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas" (Brill, 2024) 39:42

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A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill, 2024) by Dr. Elena Jackson Albarran explores how and why cultur…

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Lieba Faier, "The Banality of Good: The UN's Global Fight Against Human Trafficking" (Duke UP, 2024) 55:44

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In The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts…

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James D. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025) 29:18

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Richard Sorge is one of history’s most famous spies. This hard-drinking, womanising, motorcycle-crashing Soviet officer penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo during the 1930s and gathered intelligence credited with changing the course of the Second World War. It is an intriguing tale; but Sorge’s spy ring was just one chapter in a much longer hist…

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Jeremy A. Yellen, "Japan at War, 1914-1952" (Routledge, 2024) 1:00:12

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Japan at War, 1914-1952 is a synthetic and interpretive history that highlights the centrality of war to the modern Japanese experience. The author argues that war was central to Japanese life in this period--the era when Japan rose and fell as a world power. The volume examines how World War I set off profound changes that led to the rise of a pol…

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Fernando Pérez-Montesinos, "Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands" (U Texas Press, 2025) 1:11:56

6M ago1:11:56

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Fernando Pérez-Montesinos's first book, Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands (University of Texas Press, 2025), focuses on the Purépecha people of Michoacán, Mexico, and examines why and how long-standing patterns of communal landholding changed in response to liberal policies, railroad expansio…

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Jon L. Pitt, "Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan" (Cornell UP, 2025) 45:13

6M ago45:13

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Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become …

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Gennifer Weisenfeld, "The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan" (Duke UP, 2025) 42:44

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Commercial art is more than just mass-produced publicity; it constructs social and political ideologies that impact the public’s everyday life. In The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan (Duke University Press, 2025), Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic desi…

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Michelle H. S. Ho, "Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies" (Duke UP, 2025) 39:28

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In Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies (Duke UP, 2025), Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo renowned for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in josō and dansō cafe-and-bars, establishments wher…

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Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Diaz, "Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic" (Amsterdam UP, 2024) 46:49

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Emily Colbert Cairns of Salve Regina University and Nieves Romero-Díaz of Mount Holyoke join Jana Byars to talk about Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). It is the first volume to emphasize women's personal experiences and their life trajectories as mothers within the Peninsula and across the Atlanti…

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Alison J. Miller and Eunyoung Park, "Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia" (Brill, 2024) 35:13

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Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia (Brill, 2024) explores the visual culture of national recollection in modern and contemporary East Asia by emphasizing memories that are under the continuous process of construction, reinforcement, alteration, resistance, and contestation. Expanding the disc…

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Nolan L. Cabrera and Robert S. Chang, "Banned: The Fight for Mexican American Studies in the Streets and in the Courts" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 33:36

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In Banned: The Fight for Mexican American Studies in the Streets and in the Courts (Cambridge UP, 2025), readers are taken on a journey through the intense racial politics surrounding the banning of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. This book details the state-sponsored racism that led to the elimination of this highly successful program…

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Stephanie Schmidt, "Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain: Missionary Narratives, Nahua Perspectives" (U Texas Press, 2025) 49:20

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A cornerstone of the evangelization of early New Spain was the conversion of Nahua boys, especially the children of elites. They were to be emissaries between Nahua society and foreign missionaries, hastening the transmission of the gospel. Under the tutelage of Franciscan friars, the boys also learned to act with militant zeal. They sermonized and…

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Zev J. Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025) 43:26

7M ago43:26

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While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs—are long extinct, Chinese characters, invented over three thousand years ago, are today used by well over a billion people to write Chinese and Japanese. In medieval East Asia, the written Classical Chinese language knit the region together in …

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Diana Graizbord, "Indicators of Democracy: The Politics and Promise of Evaluation Expertise in Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2024) 50:44

7M ago50:44

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The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country's citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the pol…

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Judith Vitale, "The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan" (Harvard UP, 2024) 1:03:29

7M ago1:03:29

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Although Japan was never conquered by the Mongol empire, the 1274 and 1281 Mongol invasions were commemorated, remembered, and imagined in Japanese historical writings. How did history books, genealogies, gazetteers, local histories, and artworks represent the Mongol invasions? What role did the idea of the invasions play in the creation of cultura…

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Television, Translation, and Algorithms on Netflix 53:56

7M ago53:56

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How do media producers appeal to international audiences in the streaming era? In this episode of the Global Media & Communication podcast, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez interviews Elia Cornelio Marí about her research on Mexican melodramas, Netflix algorithms, and television in translation. In this episode you will hear about: Why melodrama becam…

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Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War" (Oxford UP, 2025) 1:00:22

7M ago1:00:22

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In our conversation about The Battle of Manila (Oxford University Press, 2025), Nicholas Evan Sarantakes explains how U.S. forces under General Douglas MacArthur won a climactic battle in the Pacific during World War II, but at a terrible cost. In 1945 the United States and Japan fought the largest and most devastating land battle of their war in t…