New Books with Miranda Melcher

There’s a familiar story about us humans: we went from hunting and gathering to farming, wandering bands to villages and cities, clans and chieftains to states and kings. But Lost Worlds offers a new narrative of humanity’s deep history. In Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World (HarperCollins, 2026) beloved podcast host Dr. Patrick Wyman focuses on the 10,000-year span between the end of the Ice Age and the decline of the Bronze Age—the period when civilization as we understand it emerged, introducing social hierarchies, urbanism, complex political organizations, and the written word.

In this nuanced retelling, human progress is no longer a straight march from caves to cities: Farming didn’t always replace foraging, villages didn’t automatically spark agriculture, and cities didn’t necessitate rigid hierarchies. For thousands of years, humans merely improvised. By the end of the Bronze Age, the world had become unrecognizable: mammoths and giant sloths replaced by cattle and sheep, scattered nomadic bands replaced by millions living in cities, and farming on nearly every continent. Dr. Wyman argues that the rise of states and steady food production wasn’t inevitable, but rather, the outcome of countless choices that reshaped the planet and made us who we are today.

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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During a robbery on 10 March 1844, 14-year-old servant Mary Doherty was murdered in a farmhouse near Culdaff, Co. Donegal. There was no doubt locally about the perpetrator’s identity, but there was insufficient evidence against Daniel McKeeny, and he was eventually transported for a separate offence of sheep-stealing. Based on original research, Finding Mary: The untold story of an Inishowen murder, 1844 (Four Courts Press, 2025) by Dr. Angela Byrne reconstructs the world of a north Donegal village on the eve of the Great Famine to explore the approaches to justice taken by the local community and agents of the state, and examines the survival of the murder in local folklore to reflect on memory, remembrance and whose stories get to be told.

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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Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuries-from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory-along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender/sexual identity.
Glitter is part of the Object Lessons series: short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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.
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Co-operative enterprises, which are democratically owned and governed by their workers, customers, or suppliers, have long captured the imagination of activists and social scientists alike. In centering economic democracy and a collectivist-democratic logic, and in embodying a "third way" alternative to profit-maximizing corporations and state-owned enterprises, co-operatives offer the promise of a more sustainable and equitable economy.

Despite extensive study of co-operatives' real and imagined benefits, we know little about the conditions under which they achieve the lasting scale needed to be a viable alternative and transform the economy. Under what conditions can co-operatives achieve such scale? And are such conditions present in the United States, where, despite repeated organizing efforts, co-operatives remain exceptionally rare at scale?

Through a rigorous comparative-historical analysis of co-operative enterprises in different national contexts, Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American? (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jason Spicer seeks to answer these questions. Deploying two different variants of the new institutionalism, Dr. Spicer treats the United States as a central case of comparative failure, as contrasted to three rich democracies where the co-operative business model has been more successful: Finland, France, and New Zealand.

The cause of co-operatives' comparative weakness in the United States is identified as reflecting the joint effect of economic liberalism and structural racism. Only in the United States did the co-operative face, in its initial development, two well-entrenched incumbents operating with competing ownership models: the investor-owned firm and the race-based chattel slavery system of ownership of people. Proponents of these two models acted to deprive the co-operative movement of resources, and undermined the solidarity at the co-operative business model's heart, splintering the American co-operative movement in the process. In subsequent waves of co-operative organizing, advocates have never fully succeeded in overcoming these initial obstacles, resulting in a different outcome in the United States, consistent with broader conceptions of the United States as a perennial outlier (i.e., ""American exceptionalism""). In contrast, in the successful cases, advocates were better able to leverage resources to animate a national solidarity and procure the necessary political and economic resources to achieve scale.

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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Reverberations of Culture: Racialized Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Musical Variety by Just a Buncha Clowns (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Shane Breaux examines musical variety clowns and the broad array of racial and ethnic impersonations they performed on four distinct touring circuits and apparatuses: the African American Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), the Chinese American so-called Chop Suey Circuit, the Mexican and Mexican American carpas tours, and Country American barn dances.

This book explores the overlooked history of touring clown performers in early twentieth-century musical variety shows, addressing both their historical marginalization and their significant impact on popular entertainment. By examining these performers' widespread presences both on and off stage, the work challenges traditional historical narratives that have excluded diverse voices, particularly women and non-white performers. The research corrects a common misconception that racial impersonation in musical variety was exclusively the domain of white male performers. Instead, it reveals how performers and managers from various backgrounds actively challenged prevailing ideas about American identity, whiteness, and cultural inclusion. Through this lens, the book demonstrates that musical comedy performance and management were not exclusively white privileges, but rather spaces where diverse artists contributed significantly to early twentieth-century entertainment culture and beyond.

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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