New Books with Miranda Melcher

Orchestrating Power: The American Associational State in the First World War⁠ (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores how the expansion of the American state for the First World War reshaped the nature of governance. This wartime state expansion is examined through the creation, structure, activities, and impact of the Council of Defense
system on the ability of the United States to mobilize for a significant conflict in a foreign land. 

Dr. Nathan K. Finney focuses on North Carolina's Council of Defense to describe how the council was mediated by specific people at various levels of society and the results of their decisions. The result is a compelling story about how individuals drove dynamic and compelling regional and national events that propelled a massive national wartime mobilization. 

Positioned between the national government and the people of North Carolina, the Council of Defense mediated the activities of public, private, and individual efforts in
support of mobilization activities. Because of this intermediary positioning, the council was instrumental in expanding state capacity and capability for military and resource mobilization and supporting an increase in the nation's ability to mobilize for the war. 

The council's intermediary role, however, also allowed those managing the state mobilization to prevent any significant challenge to the state's social and political structures, despite the dynamic changes wrought by the need to mobilize the nation for war. As a result, Orchestrating Power helps us understand the crucial decisions and developments of early
twentieth-century America, showing why the country mobilized for war in the specific ways that it did. 

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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By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from nearly forty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched together from the raw material of older films. At around the same time, the transition to synchronous sound added a transformative new element to the grammar of cinema: the voiceover narration. Together, the film inventory and offscreen commentary gave rise to the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that preserves and rewinds history.

In How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America (Columbia University Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas Doherty tells the story of the archival documentary, spotlighting the first films that set out deliberately to preserve history on screen. He shows how newsreels and documentaries challenged the era’s restrictive censorship and how film began to engage with the great political issues of the day. Doherty considers a range of films—some well-known, others obscure—including J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Laurence Stallings and Truman Talley’s The First World War (1934), Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), Max Eastman and Herbert Axelbank’s Tsar to Lenin (1937), and the March of Time screen magazine. Tracing the creation of the archival documentary, How Film Became History illuminates how motion pictures have come to shape our vision of the past.

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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In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "failed state" or economic insecurity and cultural backlash.

In ⁠Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the "Lazy Native" and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines⁠ (University of Georgia Press, 2026), however, Dr. George Baylon Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "terrorist," highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present.

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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In Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon (U Arizona Press, 2025), Dr. Georgia C. Ennis provides a comprehensive ethnographic exploration of Amazonian Kichwa community media, offering a unique look at how Indigenous broadcast and performance media facilitate linguistic and cultural reclamation in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

This work offers a critical analysis of how standardized language revitalization efforts, like the imposition of Unified Kichwa, can inadvertently perpetuate linguistic oppression. Dr. Ennis follows producers, performers, and consumers to understand the role of media in language reclamation. Through extensive fieldwork, she provides vivid portrayals of community efforts to sustain the language and cultural practices of their elders amid environmental and social upheaval.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Rainforest Radio is an essential work for anthropologists, linguists, and social scientists interested in language revitalization, Indigenous media, and environmental justice. This book showcases the transformative potential of community-driven media initiatives, highlighting the innovative responses of Napo Kichwa activists to the unique challenges they face. It serves as a powerful model for those working on similar issues worldwide, demonstrating the critical role of community media in language reclamation and cultural sustainability.

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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Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.

Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.

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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