Best Spencer Wright Podcasts (2026)

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David Broder, "Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy" (Pluto Press, 2023) 1:15:07

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14h ago1:15:07

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The fastest-rising force in Italian politics is Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia - a party with a direct genealogy from Mussolini's regime. Surging to prominence in recent years, it has waged a fierce culture war against the Left, polarised political debate around World War II, and even secured the largest vote share in Italy's 2022 general elect…

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Stuart Klawans, "Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges" (Columbia UP, 2023) 52:08

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In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948--The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek among them--all from screenplays he alone had written. Stuart Klawans' Crooked, But Never Common:…

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Jeffrey Ahlman, "Ghana: A Political and Social History" (Zed Books, 2023) 41:36

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Over the last two decades, historians have steadily moved away from writing longue durée national histories. Especially in the wake of the global history wave, national histories can seem decidedly 20th century. But what if you’re asked to take up that task, and you accept the challenge? Today, I’m discussing that question with a historian who has …

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Rob Harvilla, "60 Songs That Explain The 90s" (Twelve, 2023) 53:03

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A companion to the #1 music podcast on Spotify, this book takes listeners through the greatest hits that define a weirdly undefinable decade. The 1990s were a chaotic and gritty and utterly magical time for music, a confounding barrage of genres and lifestyles and superstars, from grunge to hip-hop, from sumptuous R&B to rambunctious ska-punk, from…

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Kendra D. Boyd, "Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 57:48

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The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit's status as a mecca for Black entrepreneu…

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Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 1:00:58

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How do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a double-helix structure when they observed Franklin’s image 51, or how did Hodgkin and Huxley reason that sodium ions carried the current flowing into the membrane of a voltage-clamped giant squid axon…

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Graeme Brooker, "The Story of the Interior: How We Have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us" (Thames & Hudson, 2025) 50:49

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From traditional nomadic dwellings to state-of-the-art airports, through monumental temples and Baroque palaces to high-rise apartments and high-fashion boutiques, The Story of the Interior: How We Have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us (Thames & Hudson, 2025) by Professor Graeme Brooker explores an exciting array of inside spaces from around the …

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Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025) 45:19

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Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim that the hand gave humans dominion over all other species? Why did psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff climb into the primate cages of the London Zoo, taking hundreds of delicate palm prints? Why did Franci…

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Bruce Berglund, "The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Power" (Triumph Books, 2026) 1:03:25

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An eye-opening account of how Russia's leaders have used sports as a political tool to solidify their global power "Victories in sport do more to cement the nation than a hundred political slogans." This was the pep talk Russian athletes heard in 2000 from their new president, Vladimir Putin. And so, for more than two decades, Putin has used sports…

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Barry G. Webb, "Job: Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary" (Lexham Academic, 2023) 20:17

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The Book of Job confronts the troubling issues that life throws at us as we try to live in trusting obedience to God. How do we live in relation to God when we don't have answers for all of life's problems? Join us as we speak with Barry Webb about his recent commentary on Job, a book that reveals a God we can trust, even in our darkest moments. Wi…

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Amitav Acharya, "The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West" (Hachette UK, 2025) 56:59

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Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers—especially China—threaten to unravel today’s Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But the West has never had a monopoly on order. Surveying five thousand years of global hi…

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Domonique Foxworth on Harbaugh's next move, Mike McDaniel fired, NFL playoffs begin | 01.09 1:00:20

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Domonique Foxworth joins Bomani Jones to discuss everything going on in the NFL. First, they discuss the Ravens' firing of John Harbaugh and what his next move should be. Later, they react to the breaking news that the Dolphins fired Mike McDaniel and break down what went wrong in Miami. Finally, they preview what is on the line for teams in the NF…

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Jo Mackiewicz, "Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace" (Springer, 2025) 1:02:24

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This open access book describes and explains a fifty-year-old woman’s process of developing trade competences. Drawing from daily journal entries, photographs, interviews from 10 fabrication shops, and online forums about trades, this autoethnography details the author's learning process at Howe’s Welding and Metal Fabrication, where she has worked…

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J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023) 57:06

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In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity (U of Minnesota Press, 2023), J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category…

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Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026) 40:02

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How can cultural industries survive in the twenty-first century? In Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future Caitlin Vincent, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of Melbourne, examines the past, present and future of Opera to understand how music, performance, institutions and audiences battle to su…

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Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us" (HarperCollins, 2021) 1:13:36

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An astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoir. On April 10, 2019, award-winning astrophysicist Heino Falcke presented the first image ever captured of a black hole at an international press conference—a turning point in astronomy that Science ma…

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Danielle Alesi, "Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700" (Taylor & Francis, 2025) 45:27

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Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700 (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) by Dr. Danielle Alesi examines how the perceived edibility of animals evolved during the colonization of the Americas. Early European colonizers ate a variety of animals in the Americas, motivated by factors like curiosity, starvation, …

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Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025) 48:52

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Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violen…

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John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2025) 1:35:17

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The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about slavery revolved around one central question: How could free persons be made into slaves? John Samuel Harpham shows that English authors found answers to this question in a tradition of ideas that stre…

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Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (Manchester UP, 2023) 1:04:06

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Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate: Following a Migration Category (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sarah Kunz interrogates the contested category of 'the expatriate' to explore its history and politics, its making and lived experience. Drawing on ethnogr…

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Moritz Föllmer, "The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 1:15:06

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What does it mean to see oneself as free? And how can this freedom be attained in times of conflict and social upheaval? In this ambitious study, Moritz Föllmer explores what twentieth-century Europeans understood by individual freedom and how they endeavoured to achieve it. Combining cultural, social, and political history, this book highlights th…

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Anita Gonzalez, "Shipping Out: Race, Performance, and Labor at Sea" (U Michigan Press, 2025) 25:21

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Shipping Out: Race, Performance, and Labor at Sea (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Anita Gonzalez provides a rare perspective on performance by staff above and below deck on Caribbean cruise ships, as viewed through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Drawing on her experiences as a destination lecturer on Caribbean cruise lines for t…

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Re-examining the Women’s Movement in Cold War South Korea and Beyond 26:29

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In the past decade, feminism has become one of the heated topics in public debate in South Korea. Feminism is embraced by activists, attacked in election campaigns, and increasingly framed as the source of conflict between men and women. In this episode, Outi Luova talks to Katri Kauhanen to trace the historicity behind the contemporary debates and…

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How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend 44:47

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Your brain is the most remarkable thing in the known universe. Always trying to mend itself, and always trying to protect you, it’s in a constant state of flux — adapting, reconfiguring, finding new pathways. And it has an astonishing capacity for recovery. Rachel Barr struggled through years of devastating loss, heartache, and uncertainty until ne…

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Tomer Persico, "In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:05:39

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Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University, and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His fields of expertise include contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Isra…

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Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being" (Simon and Schuster, 2025) 33:54

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Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and environment, with a special emphasis on the natural environment. He has devoted his life to studying it. If you sometimes feel drained, distracted, or depressed, Dr. Berman has identified the elements …

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Barbara Jane Brickman, "Suffering Sappho! Lesbian Camp in American Popular Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2023) 1:16:03

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An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman lurches through a city skyline begging Steve to stop her. A twisted queen of sorority row crashes her convertible trying to escape her queer shame. A suave butch emcee introduces the sequined and feathered stars of the era’s most celebrated drag revue. For an unsettled and retrenching postwar America, the…