New Books with Miranda Melcher

The twelfth century was a pivotal time in Japan’s history. It witnessed intense factionalism at the imperial court in Kyoto, Japan’s first national civil war, and above all the rise of warriors to national prominence, culminating with the establishment of Japan’s first warrior government, the Kamakura Shogunate. This dramatic power shift has understandably dominated historical debates. However, focusing almost exclusively on military and political narratives led scholarship to overlook the extraordinary economic transformation that unfolded in parallel.

Beginning in the mid-twelfth century, Japan transformed from a rice economy to one based on cash coins imported from China. For the next three centuries, transactions, tax collections, and even fines were expressed in terms of copper coins, which in turn spurred the emergence of trade cities, new classes of merchants and artisans, and the establishment of guilds. And yet not a single coin was issued in Japan. This “minting-less” monetization seemingly stood in sharp contrast to developments in medieval Europe, where monetization went hand in hand with rulers who struck their own coins.

In The Disease of Money: Japan’s Monetization in the Early Middle Ages (U Hawai’i Press, 2026), Dr. Mikael Adolphson offers an analysis of this initial import of Chinese coins and its subsequent monetization through three lenses. First, he provides a contextual and macroeconomic explanation by looking at the context of East Asian trade, where the political and economic developments in Song China also played an especially vital role. Second, the matter of agency behind the import of and demand for coins is dealt with in depth, revealing that several groups played key roles, but above all that Chinese merchants were the most influential agents. Finally, in an effort to put Japan’s medieval monetization into a disciplinary perspective, a comparison is made with Scandinavia around the same time. It shows that while Japan took a different route to its monetization, there were also comparable situations in Europe.

By moving beyond the warrior-centric view, The Disease of Money uncovers a richer, more complex portrait of medieval Japan—one of innovation, adaptation, and global economic connectivity.
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.

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Tablet computers appear commonplace today, yet for decades they represented an ambitious—and often unrealized—vision of personal computing. The Tablet Computer: The Idea of a Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) traces the long history of this idea, from early conceptual designs in the 1970s to the consumer devices of the twenty-first century. Dr. Elizabeth R. Petrick examines the tablet as a shifting concept shaped by expectations about learning, productivity, accessibility, and human–computer interaction.
Across multiple generations of failed prototypes, partial successes, and rebranded technologies, developers imagined tablets as book-sized, portable, networked computers operated through touch. These visions promised to transform education, support workers of various kinds, and redefine how humans interact with machines—promises that were repeatedly revised or deferred. Approaching the subject through intellectual history, Dr. Petrick follows how engineers, designers, corporations, and users debated what a tablet should be, who it was for, and what role it might play in everyday life. Projects such as the Dynabook, personal digital assistants, and early consumer tablets reveal how technological futures are shaped as much by aspiration and failure as by market success.
The Tablet Computer offers a fresh perspective on the history of computing by showing how devices are built from ideas that evolve over time. It will appeal to historians of technology, media scholars, and readers interested in how familiar machines carry the traces of unrealized futures.
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.

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Constructing a Renaissance Pope: Rhetoric, Ceremony, and Authority in the Age of Leo X (1513-1521) (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth McCahill examines the rhetoric and ceremony of the papal court during the pontificate of Pope Leo X (1513-1521).
The son of Lorenzo de' Medici, Leo has been celebrated for bringing a Golden Age of cultural efflorescence to Renaissance Rome, but he has also been excoriated for the prodigality, nepotism, and corruption that provoked Martin Luther first to criticize and then to split from the church. This study does not focus on Leo as a historical individual but analyses the collaborative efforts of curial officials, humanists, and ceremonial experts to construct his image. Although personal loyalty and private self-interest motivated these bureaucrats and scholars, so too did commitment to a traditional vision of papal authority, a vision facing new challenges in an era of rapid spiritual, social, and political change.
Weaving together material from the diaries and manuals of Paris de' Grassi, the papal Master of Ceremonies, and a variety of letters, orations, and other humanist texts, the book situates papal image-making techniques within the broader context of Renaissance culture. It argues that the scripted rites and Ciceronian rhetoric on which the papal court spent so much time and money served as tools of persuasion, creating a rarefied arena in which power, hierarchy, and tradition were continually enacted and negotiated. By embedding curial activities within the geopolitical and cultural landscape of early sixteenth-century Europe, the book illuminates the tension between the mystique of traditional authority and the new technologies, political norms, and religious dissent that conspired to destabilize the papal role.
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.

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Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War (Stanford UP, 2026) reveals how illicit exchanges of money and commodities involving sexual encounters between Korean and Japanese women and US soldiers provided the material foundations of the regional economy across Korea and Japan during the Korean War. Against the conventional view that illicit exchanges exist outside the formal economy and legal regulations, Dr. Jeongmin Kim examines how the interlinked markets for transactional sex and goods crucially constituted the transpacific formation of US military base capitalism in post-World War II East Asia. Going beyond what is commonly categorized as prostitution and violence in Cold War archives, Dr. Kim weaves together stories from the myriads of mundane records scattered around multilingual archives to document larger transnational webs of the war economy.
From Korean women who brought camel blankets and whiskey to local markets in Seoul, to middle-aged Okinawan women dealing in US military notes, Dr. Kim uncovers the crucial roles that local women played in circulating war supplies and currency across the region through their sexual and intermediary labor. The result is an intimate and global history of the Korean War that urges us to rethink the often-antithetical relationship between sexual intimacy and market economies in the context of war and occupation.
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.

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The oil industry today sponsors dozens of citizen advocacy organizations. Often called 'front groups' or 'astroturf,' they have become key actors in fossil fuel companies' political efforts across the US and Canada. People For Oil: Citizen Mobilization in the U.S. and Canadian Fossil Fuel Industries (Cambridge UP, 2026) by Dr. Tim Wood digs into these groups and the day-to-day ways they shape our energy future. Drawing on interviews with pro-oil organizers and citizen joiners, Dr. Wood explains why these groups form, why people join, and how these organizations intervene in governance. He shows that while we tend to think of all corporate grassroots mobilization as financially secretive, many campaigns today are openly sponsored and long-lasting. This allows industry lobbyists to stake a claim to representing citizen voice. By making sense of the backstage logics and affective politics of pro-oil organizing, People for Oil equips readers to better understand important new players in today's climate and energy politics.
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.

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