Episodes

  • Adelina Stefan, "Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain" (Cornell UP, 2024)

    Adelina Stefan, "Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain" (Cornell UP, 2024)
    Feb 17 2025
    Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco's Spain (Cornell UP, 2024) examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic modernization to acquire hard currencies. By the end of the 1970s though, the two countries achieved rather different results in terms of tourism development, despite the fact that both shared many features in the 1940s and 1950s. By comparing the rise and evolution of international tourism on different sides of the Iron Curtain, Adelina Stefan provides a different assessment of the geopolitics of postwar Europe and that further refines the Cold War's geographies separating eastern and western Europe. As a result, Vacationing in Dictatorships reveals a new perspective on the Cold War that reveals not only the developmental similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe, but also the ideological struggle that pitted socialist East against capitalist West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

    Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
    Feb 9 2025
    There is a common misconception that the Jewish religion does not believe in an afterlife. While it’s true that Judaism is focused on actions, intentions and thoughts in this life, it also believes in an afterlife, and has a variety of points of view about what happens after death. Today’s guest, Professor Joseph Stern, will discuss Maimonides’ unique understanding of the afterlife, per his recent article, "A Guide to the AfterDeath: Maimonides on olam ha-ba’", Religious Studies (2024), 60, S74–S90 Professor Josef Stern is a renowned scholar of Jewish philosophy and thought, specializing in the works of Moses Maimonides. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he has contributed significantly to the study of medieval Jewish philosophy, particularly the intersection of philosophy, theology, and intellectual history. With a deep focus on Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and religious thought, Professor Stern has published extensively on themes such as skepticism, intellectual perfection, and the nature of religious language. His work often bridges Jewish thought with broader philosophical traditions, including Aristotelian and Islamic philosophies. Known for his clear, incisive analysis and ability to connect historical ideas to contemporary debates, Professor Stern remains a leading voice in Maimonidean scholarship. His recent studies on concepts like Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come) provide fresh insights into Maimonides' revolutionary vision of the afterlife and human perfection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    41 mins
  • Adam Franklin-Lyons, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" (Penn State Press, 2022)

    Adam Franklin-Lyons, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" (Penn State Press, 2022)
    Jan 30 2025
    Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam Franklin-Lyons applies contemporary understandings of complex human disasters, vulnerability, and resilience to explain how these famines occurred and to describe more accurately who suffered and why. Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon details the social causes and responses to three events of varying magnitude that struck the western Mediterranean: the minor food shortage of 1372, the serious but short-lived crisis of 1384–85, and the major famine of 1374–76, the worst famine of the century in the region. Shifts in military action, international competition, and violent attempts to control trade routes created systemic panic and widespread starvation—which in turn influenced decades of economic policy, social practices, and even the course of geopolitical conflicts, such as the War of the Two Pedros and the papal schism in Italy. Providing new insights into the intersecting factors that led to famine in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean, this deeply researched, convincingly argued book presents tools and models that are broadly applicable to any historical study of vulnerabilities in the human food supply. It will be of interest to scholars of medieval Iberia and the medieval Mediterranean as well as to historians of food and of economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

    Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
    Jan 29 2025
    Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent. How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying. Jorge Flores in his book Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2024) explains how the Portuguese tried to learn more about their more powerful neighbors. Jorge Flores is Senior Researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Empire of Contingency. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    56 mins
  • Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, "Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend" (Getty, 2023)

    Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, "Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend" (Getty, 2023)
    Jan 19 2025
    Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come. Elizabeth King, a sculptor and writer, is professor emerita of sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond. W. David Todd is associate curator emeritus and former conservator of timekeeping at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a collections management intern in the public sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    51 mins
  • Andrew Laird, "Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Andrew Laird, "Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Jan 18 2025
    Andrew Laird, of Brown University, discusses Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2024). In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and Aristotelian philosophy to native youths in central Mexico. The remarkable linguistic and cultural exchanges that would result from that initiative are the subject of this book. Aztec Latin highlights the importance of Renaissance humanist education for early colonial indigenous history, showing how practices central to humanism — the cultivation of eloquence, the training of leaders, scholarly translation, and antiquarian research — were transformed in New Spain to serve Indian elites as well as the Spanish authorities and religious orders. While Franciscan friars, inspired by Erasmus' ideal of a common tongue, applied principles of Latin grammar to Amerindian languages, native scholars translated the Gospels, a range of devotional literature, and even Aesop's fables into the Mexican language of Nahuatl. They also produced significant new writings in Latin and Nahuatl, adorning accounts of their ancestral past with parallels from Greek and Roman history and importing themes from classical and Christian sources to interpret pre-Hispanic customs and beliefs. Aztec Latin reveals the full extent to which the first Mexican authors mastered and made use of European learning and provides a timely reassessment of what those indigenous authors really achieved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    44 mins
  • Byron Ellsworth Hamann, "The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844" (Getty, 2022)

    Byron Ellsworth Hamann, "The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844" (Getty, 2022)
    Jan 18 2025
    The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844 (Getty, 2022) is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain's pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain--spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history--were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructed a scholarly apparatus that made it easier to imagine the history of the Americas as independent from the history of Europe, and vice versa. In this meticulously researched book, Byron Ellsworth Hamann explores how building layouts, systems of storage, and the arrangement of documents were designed to foster the creation of new knowledge. He draws on a rich collection of eighteenth-century architectural plans, descriptions, models, document catalogs, and surviving buildings to present a literal, materially precise account of archives as assemblages of spaces, humans, and data--assemblages that were understood circa 1800 as capable of actively generating scholarly innovation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    52 mins
  • Alec Goldstein, "Maimonides on the Book of Exodus" (Kodesh Press, 2019)

    Alec Goldstein, "Maimonides on the Book of Exodus" (Kodesh Press, 2019)
    Jan 16 2025
    Today I talked to Alec Goldstein about Maimonides on the Book of Exodus (Kodesh Press, 2019). Rabbi Moses son of Maimon, known in Hebrew as Rambam and in English as Maimonides, is one of Judaism’s most influential and enduring figures. His works have shaped Jewish thought for centuries, combining legal precision, philosophical brilliance, and profound spirituality. While Maimonides never authored a linear commentary on the Torah, his writings are replete with references to and interpretations of biblical verses. These insights offer a glimpse into his unique approach to understanding the narratives, commandments, and themes of the Torah. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    37 mins