New Books with Miranda Melcher

Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, including photographs. Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Photography and Identity in a Global City (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Dr. Nancy Micklewright reconstructs a complex fashion history, and the dramatic changes that took place in women's lives in this period, and given the diverse population of Istanbul in terms of ethnicity, class, race and religion, attends to the differing clothing habits of the women of the city. The book focuses particularly on elite women as fashion tastemakers and on the dress of enslaved and working women.Appealing to scholars across a range of fields, including fashion history, Ottoman studies, women's and gender history, visual culture and photography history, Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul provides a fascinating insight into women's histories, writing and dress practices in a rapidly changing Istanbul.

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 March 1953 and May 1955, government officials—including the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), the US Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission—released nuclear bombs on two model towns at Nevada Test Site, the continental nuclear test facility during the Cold War. These so-called “Doom Towns” were designed to illustrate in the most vivid way possible what might happen to a “typical American home” caught in a Soviet atomic blast. Instead of training troops for war overseas, the Doom Towns literally brought the Cold War home.

Drawing on newspaper articles, FCDA reports, and corporate documents, in Doom Town, USA: The Nevada Test Site as Ground Zero of 1950s American Culture (University Press of Kansas, 2026), Dr. John Wills brings readers into Doom Town, USA—a place where life-size mannequins of the archetypal Mr. and Mrs. America walked the streets in JCPenney clothes, drove Chrysler cars, and lived in the latest trailer homes, tailor-made to escape in the event of nuclear war. The two Doom Towns of Operation Doorstep (1953) and Operation Cue (1955) were far more than just an exercise in developing a new civilian home front. They were a media spectacle and a cultural flashpoint, attracting corporate sponsors, drawing in atomic tourists, and generating new consumer products. The atom bomb may have been bad for world peace, but it was good for business. In the excitement about these experiments, real people even volunteered to be living test subjects—but most were turned away.

Doom Town became an unusual but effective banner for corporate and consumer life in the 1950s. Doom Town was an effective simulacrum of white middle-class America, right down to the racially segregated social spaces and the hierarchical gender roles of the dummies living in their classic suburban homes. But these homegrown Hiroshimas also contributed to a broader culture of catastrophe and fear in the late 1950s. Concerns over Communist invasion, Soviet spies, and ICBM missiles coalesced in the Nevada desert, framing a national culture of anxiety. The sudden explosion of the model towns revealed the shocking fragility of postwar living, calling into question the 1950s American Dream and the survivability of American ideals. The cultural crater left by these nuclear test sites exists even today in the many movies, television shows, and video games that dwell on the existential crisis of impending apocalypse.

Doom Town, USA is an eye-opening tour guide of one of the most bizarre and uniquely American places in history.

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 century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its
story remains largely unknown—even to the hundreds of motorists who
annually attempt
the 30,000-kilometer drive from far northern Alaska to the tip of
Tierra del Fuego. There is more to the highway, however, than the
persistent allure of the open road. In Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World's Longest Highway
(University of California Press, 2026), historian Dr. Shawn William
Miller unveils a larger tale of lofty ideals and bedrock greed, romantic
adventure and pragmatic diplomacy, immigrant desperation and Indigenous resistance.

This
book journeys to the early 1920s when everyday Americans invented the
idea of a road that would spread fraternity, democracy, and prosperity
across the hemisphere. It looks at the commercial and geopolitical
interests that shaped the highway—often with little concern for those
living along its margins—and explains why the road became an escape
route for millions of migrants rather than a corridor for tourists. Dr.
Miller contends that the highway’s troubled past points to an unresolved
future, offering insights into the growing costs of continuing down
well-worn paths.

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

British
daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth
century, ballooning in size and radically reorganizing staffing and
production decade by decade. By mid-century, newspapers had grown from
the folded single sheets of the previous century to large multi-page
broadsheets, so impressive in the quantity of print they held and their
speed of production that one of their nicknames was 'the daily miracle'.

Traditional
news history has overlooked a key fact for understanding this era of
news: that Victorian daily newspapers were high-pressure systems. As
demand for newspapers outpaced their original production capacity,
newspaper organizations began to build complex technical and production
mechanisms to continue to grow and compete. As these systems expanded,
newspapers became dependent on them, and decisions about how daily
journalism should develop began to pass from editorial choice to
systemic necessity. The previously untold story of Victorian daily news
is that the personalities of editors and owners and the larger social
forces at work in that era were not the only (or even primary) drivers
of its history. Once set in motion, the systems of Victorian news gained
major shaping agency over their own development.

Combining deep archival research and traditional historical analysis with modern data mining methods, News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885
(Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Dallas Liddle reconstructs the
systemic workings of Victorian daily news in unprecedented detail,
offering new and counterintuitive accounts of when and why daily papers
expanded, how and why steam-powered printing machines developed, how
specialized news discourses evolved, and how newspaper leadership was
organized.

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

Between
the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting
underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on
canvas instead of wood or walls. Nowhere was more important to this
shift than Venice, where painters experimented with canvas with
remarkable creativity and innovation. In Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting (Princeton
University Press, 2026), Dr. Cleo Nisse investigates why Venetian
artists adopted canvas and how it revolutionized their art between 1400
and 1600. Intertwining approaches from art history and art
conservation, and
featuring stunning new photographs that show details as never before,
the book presents groundbreaking research based on close study of
Venetian artworks, archival sources, art-making treatises, and early
modern art criticism. It sheds new light on the materiality of early
modern canvas, its production and supply, and the influence of climate
on its use. The book offers fresh interpretations of iconic works and
important concepts such as pittura di macchia and non finito, and
demonstrates how canvas contributed to the radical new style of painters
such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. But above all else, it shows
how canvas changed the making and meaning of paintings. 

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