Conversations in World History

Dr. Max Lazar is a social studies teacher and department chair at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in NYC. He earned his doctorate in history from U.N.C. Chapel-Hill. His dissertation focused on Jewish integration in Frankfurt between 1914-1938. Max teaches a course called "Dual Narratives" at the Heschel School and he shares his insights and experience providing a balanced historical approach to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict to students at a pluralistic Jewish high school.

Resources recommended by Max:

Zionism: A Short History of a Big Idea by David Engel

The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank by Raja Shehadeh

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everybody Needs to Know by Dov Waxman

City on a Hilltop by Sara Yael Hirschhorn

Christopher Goscha is a professor of history at Université du Québec à Montréal, specializing in the Cold War in Asia as well as questions of colonisation and decolonisation in the Afro-Asian world. Chris  has published several books including The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2022), The Penguin History of Vietnam (Penguin/Random House, 2016), Vietnam, A New History (Basic Books, 2016, American version of the preceding book and winner of the 2017 John K. Fairbank Prize – American Historical Association finalist for the The Cundhill History Prize).

We speak about his book Vietnam: A New History, specifically discussing Vietnam in the ancient, medieval, and early modern world as well as Vietnam after the Vietnam War. For many who know only about America's involvement in Vietnam, there will be much of interest and much to learn here.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of the great British Abolitionist Thomas Clarkson who died on September 26, 1846. In recognition and remembrance of Clarkson's monumental and tireless work to end the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire, I am re-airing my fascinating conversation with the journalist Adam Hoschchild, author of one of my favorite history books: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. We also just listened to this episode in my class and I hope other teachers and students can benefit from it!

Dr. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau recently wrote the book Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition, which is the focus of our conversation. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and now is the chair of the Religious Studies Program at Principia College. She is a professor who cares about teaching, earning the Chancellor’s Outstanding Teaching Award at the University of Kentucky in 2001 as well as the Horace Edwin Harper Jr. and Evelyn Wright Harper Award for Teaching Excellence at Principia College in 2020. Gretchen's first book, In the Shadow of the Virgin (Princeton University Press, 2003), was a finalist for the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in history.

Here are three books recommended by Gretchen:

Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics

Village Infernos and Witches' Advocates by Lu Ann Homza

A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews

We also mentioned this book in the conversation:

The Friar and the Maya: Diego de Landa and the Account of the Things of the Yucatan

I speak with Professor David Troyansky of Brooklyn College, a specialist in the French Revolution and the history of aging. Professor Troyansky has been teaching and writing at the university level for almost 40 years. 

Wolf Gruner is a professor of history at USC-Dornsife, chair of Jewish Studies, and author of the recently published book Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany. We discuss his book as well as the state of Holocaust Studies. 

Wolf recommends two other books on the Holocaust for a general reader:

David Engel's The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews

Marion Kaplan's Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

Sarah Clunis is the Curator of African Collections at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Dr. Clunis has taught art history for over twenty years at public universities and historically Black colleges and universities. Her research and classes have focused on the history of African art and the display of African objects in Western museum settings. 

Host: David Sherrin

Learn about him at davidsherrin.com or @david_writer.sherrin on Instagram

John Schwaller is a scholar of early colonial Latin America, and of Nahuatl and the Nahua (the Aztec language and people) Dr. Schwaller is the author of five books and the editor of three others. Matthew Restall is a Colonial Latin American Historian with areas of specialization in Yucatan and Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. He has published thirty books and eighty articles/essays.

John Schwaller is a scholar of early colonial Latin America, and of Nahuatl and the Nahua (the Aztec language and people) Dr. Schwaller is the author of five books and the editor of three others. Matthew Restall is a Colonial Latin American Historian with areas of specialization in Yucatan and Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. He has published thirty books and eighty articles/essays.

John Schwaller is a scholar of early colonial Latin America, and of Nahuatl and the Nahua (the Aztec language and people) Dr. Schwaller is the author of five books and the editor of three others. Matthew Restall is a Colonial Latin American Historian with areas of specialization in Yucatan and Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. He has published thirty books and eighty articles/essays.