New Books with Miranda Melcher

Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is an Element which centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Pacific brought white supremacy and colonial rule into alignment. It also threw into greater relief the contradictions of US
citizenship and national identity as legalized segregation and rising anti-Black violence foreclosed Reconstruction's possibilities. Race accrued dynamic new meanings in the age of new imperialism.

Focusing on the earliest of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1900–09) and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7), in this Element, Dr. Edlie L. Wong examines the formative role of magazine and periodical writings in the development of early Black transpacific internationalism.

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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Henry VIII is England’s most famous king. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant, the religious disruptor and the much-married glutton.

Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII (Birlinn, 2026) is a groundbreaking study of Henry’s life examines and destroys many of the long-repeated myths about this complex monarch: he was not particularly gluttonous, not particularly prudish, and not particularly messy in his religious changes. Nor did he see himself as simply King of England. Drawing on archival sources from across the British Isles, Dr. Steven Veerapen reveals how Henry fashioned an image of himself as a law-abiding and benevolent emperor who dreamed of uniting England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and swathes of France under Tudor rule.

Yet the image was false and the dream a nightmare for his queens, his ministers and many of his subjects. This new portrait shows Henry for what he really was: a self-aggrandising actor who, by fair means and foul – murder plots, marriage negotiations and military ventures – did all he could to realise his imperial fantasy.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A woman miscarries—and is charged with murder. A new mother tests
positive for a drug her hospital administered—and loses custody of her
newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children
they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia—and spend
nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager
takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work—and is sentenced to 126
years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system
that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but
for who they are.

In the United States, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted
women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all. In Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
(New Press, 2026), Dr. Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence
Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia
Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies—a child’s sudden death, a
husband who dies in his sleep—are transformed by prosecutors into
murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions
disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are
recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched
stereotypes.

Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Dr. Beety
exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and
cultural panic converge—and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe
v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the
reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal
system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood,
and queer identity itself.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Empire and Frontier: Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Valiant Iroquois in King William's War: 1689-1701
(Pegasus Books, 2026) by Samuel Marquis presents a
powerful episode of early American history, revealing the very human
story of friendship and alliance between Colonel Peter Schuyler and the
Iroquois during King William’s War (1689–1701). Like Philbrick’s Mayflower and Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, this new book reveals how fragile alliances and cross-cultural diplomacy changed the course of empires in North America.

At the heart of the book is Peter Schuyler, a Dutch-American
mayor of Albany, Indian Affairs commissioner, and militia colonel who
earned deep trust among the Iroquois. Decades ahead of his time in his
respect for Native diplomacy and sovereignty, Schuyler helped forge and
sustain a fragile alliance between English colonists and the
Haudenosaunee (Five Nations of the Iroquois) during a decade of brutal
warfare. That alliance, known as The Covenant Chain, not only blocked
French ambitions in the region, but also shaped the political and
military landscape of the American frontier for the next one hundred
years.

Told
through multiple perspectives, the book also follows two unforgettable
Indigenous figures during the conflict. Lawrence, a Mohawk war captain,
serves as Schuyler’s compatriot on the battlefield, working for and
navigating the survival of his people. Hilletie van Olinda, a biracial
Mohawk-Dutch woman, becomes a key translator and diplomatic go-between,
using her language skills and cultural fluency to mediate between the
Iroquois and English.

Across
a decade of war, espionage, and political intrigue—from the 1689
Leisler’s Rebellion and 1690 Schenectady Massacre to the climactic Grand
Settlement of 1701—these intertwined stories reveal the human cost and
political complexity behind one of early America’s most consequential
alliances.

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. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life
(MIT Press, 2026) explores the far-reaching influence of the Japanese
department store on modern life and our imaginations. In this gorgeously
illustrated volume, Dr. Nozomi Naoi explains how Japanese department
stores modeled
“the new modern Japanese life and identity” through print media and
design, physical and imagined space, and the new experiences that these
spaces offered. The stores created the notion of a modern subject
enjoying a “land of happiness”—and this, in turn, shaped the wider
sociological context, including emerging roles for women and perceptions of coloniality.

The
book focuses on three areas: the mediascape of proliferating department
store posters, advertisements, commercial design, promotional
magazines, and merchandise; the physical space, such as the
Western-style architecture that characterized many of these early
department stores, and the imagined “modern space” created within their
walls; and, finally, the production of a novel “dreamworld,” which
included dining spaces with children’s menus, new technology such as
elevators and escalators, and more.

Although
the research on department stores and their role in the quotidian
experience is vast, there is nothing like this study, which is uniquely
grounded in an art-historical approach that draws on the visual media
environment of early twentieth-century Japan and its impact on the
everyday.

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. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices