Rabbi Professor Shomo Pereira discussed his book "Monuments of Paper and Parchment: Hebrew Printing in Portugal in the Late 15th Century." He explained that while Portugal lacks physical Jewish monuments due to natural disasters, earthquakes, and persecution, the book highlights the country's rich Jewish history through its manuscript and printing heritage of the late 15th century. He explained how Hebrew printing in Portugal was a vibrant force, contributing to the spread of knowledge and influencing printing practices in the Ottoman Empire.

Pereira also detailed the contributions of Rabbi Abraham Zakuto, a Jewish scientist and astronomer who developed crucial navigational tools and was recognized for his work by having a crater on the moon named after him.

Pereira discussed his book on Iberian Jewish history, emphasizing contributions to scholarship, mathematics, astronomy, and poetry during the late 1400s, when many Spanish Jews fled to Portugal. He explained his goal is to highlight these accomplishments to build bridges with non-Jewish communities and enrich Iberian history, while acknowledging the context of persecution. Pereira clarified that during this period, most Jews in Portugal were Spanish, and he uses "Iberian Jews" to reflect this diversity.

Pereira emphasized the unique characteristic of Iberian commentators, who often included personal experiences in their writings, contrasting this with the more detached approach of commentators like Rashi.

Pereira explained the complexity of uncovering colophons in historical Jewish texts, noting that simple colophons provide basic information about the work's completion, printer, sponsor, and date, while more sophisticated ones use cryptic biblical references that modern AI cannot translate. He discussed the challenges in interpreting colophons from historical Jewish texts, particularly those printed in 1494 and 1498 in Spain and Portugal. He explained that the dates and years in these colophons are often confused due to the use of astrological and astronomical coincidences.

Rabbi Shlomo Pereira emphasized that history is about how we perceive and learn from the past, rather than just focusing on the past itself.

This bilingual book on Hebrew printing in Portugal, highlighting its significance in Jewish and Iberian history is published by Chabad Portugal Press in 2025, and is available on Amazon and other platforms.

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Little is known about the African women who came to Europe from the 1870s onwards, nor do we dare to imagine them as wealthy, elegantly dressed individuals with refined tastes and fluent in several languages. The Krio Fernandino represented a multisited, multilocal, transnational, transcontinental and Afropolitan community that lived between Africa and Europe from the late 19th century onwards. African Women’s Histories in European Narratives: The Afropolitan Krio Fernandino Diaspora (1850-1996) (Leuven University Press, 2025) explains how the Krio Fernandino, and particularly their women, transcended the barriers of race and gender in colonial Africa and in Spain.

Aixelà-Cabré highlights a fascinating journey across cultures and continents, unearthing a compelling narrative of African women's empowerment in their home continent and in Catalonia. This research highlights a women's history that resonates on regional, national and transcontinental levels; a genuine Euro-African and Afro-European legacy to be preserved for future generations.

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to JSTOR's Path to Open pilot.

Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré is Senior Researcher in Anthropology at the IMF center of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research-CSIC.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast.

In 1775, Spanish King Carlos III ordered the capture of American pelicans for his wildlife park in Madrid. The command went to the only Spanish fort on the Texas coast—Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía in present-day Goliad. But the overworked soldiers stationed at the fort had little interest indulging a king an ocean away. Their days were consumed with guarding their community against powerful Indigenous peoples and managing the demands of frontier life. The royal order went ignored.

Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios (U Texas Press, 2025) brings to life the world of Presidio La Bahía’s Hispano soldiers, whose duties ranged from heated warfare to high-stakes diplomacy, while their leisure pursuits included courtship, card playing, and cockfighting. It highlights the lives of presidio women and reveals the ways the Spanish legal system was used by and against the soldiers as they continually negotiated their roles within the empire and their community. Although they were agents of the Spanish crown, soldiers at times defied their king and even their captain as they found ways to assert their autonomy. Offering a fresh perspective on colonial Texas, Wrangling Pelicans recreates the complexities of life at the empire’s edge, where survival mattered more than royal decrees.

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In her new book Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester UP, 2021), Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo explains how the modernization of this great city shaped and was shaped by print media and mass culture. A growing population, industrial immigration, mass connection with the wider world (making it both smaller and bigger), and the twilight of an empire shaped the Madrileños, their sense of identity, and their feelings of being modern and visually aware. A history of print media—and itself an example of print media—the book shows how people adapted to the dawning of a transnational, information age (perhaps a timely and familiar topic for today’s listener?) and presents a remarkable ‘glocal’ history of this event.

Vanesa Rodriguez Galindo is a cultural and visual historian, working in urban studies, print cultures in Spain and Latin America, transnationalism, and women’s studies. She holds an MA in Metropolitan History from the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and a PhD in History of Art from UNED, Madrid.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spain and the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

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Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis.

Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, in Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914 (University of Arizona Press, 2025) historian Dr. Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. Dr. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century.

This work traces how scientific intellectuals studied and debated what it meant to know and claim the flora that sprang from Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes—and the importance they placed on indigeneity. It also points to the short- and long-term consequences of these efforts. Dr. López draws on archival and published sources produced from the sixteenth century through the start of the twentieth century and gives special attention to the use of visual images such as scientific illustrations and landscape art. López employs the term “visualization” in recognition of the degree to which officials, botanists, and draftsmen produced imagery and also how they and others viewed nature.

Rooted in Place reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican 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.

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“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and again. In clear and engaging prose, Ferrer narrates five centuries of history from a decidedly different angle than previous one-volume studies; the main drivers of history in this book are not just familiar political figures and abstract historical forces, but a whole range of typically marginalized historical actors. Ferrer integrates the voices of the enslaved, ordinary Cubans, and her own family to reimagine what it means to tell the history of the island. Part of this reimagining also involves showing the many points of convergence between the history of the United States and Cuba. Ferrer uses many anecdotes—such as the story of the inauguration of a Vice President of the United States on a sugar plantation in Cuba—to suggest how the lines between Cuban and American history were often blurred together. The result is a finely crafted and deeply personal book that encourages readers to recognize Cuba’s contested past and its multiple identities.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at [email protected] and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

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Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards (Brepols, 2025) by Dr. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio focuses on enormous amounts of sculptures moved from Italy to Spain from ca. 1500-1750. An analysis of an important body of unpublished archival documentation regarding the practical issues involved in making and transporting sculpture, provide the basis for this study of the development of technologies, infrastructure, and labor organization necessary to make such challenging transports of moving sculptures by land and sea possible.

Artists, patrons, and agents had the eventual movement to a destination at the center of decision making when new sculptures were commissioned to send. Sending antiquities or second-hand works required even more planning and care. Divided into a series of case studies of major sculptures, Shipping Sculptures offers a new approach to the study of cross-cultural artistic exchange, state gifts, collecting and patronage, by examining the practical details of object movement over challenging geographies.

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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Making Antifascist War: The International Brigades' Transnational Encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a study of the 35,000 antifascists who joined the International Brigades in order to defend the Second Spanish Republic and of their encounters with civil-war Spain. Dr. Adrian Pole offers the first in-depth history of the rich array of cross-cultural encounters which emerged between the multinational soldiers of all five International Brigades and the people, places, politics and culture of the country which accommodated them for almost three years of civil war. He sets out to recover the place of these encounters within the making, imagining and running of a transnational fighting force, showing how they influenced the volunteers' experiences and emotions, underlined their ideas and identities, informed their motivations and actions, and ultimately underpinned their ability to imagine, wage and justify the war. In doing so, he demonstrates how they enabled thousands of transnational actors to define a deeply contentious conflict in their own very particular terms.

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The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women – the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the Canarian daughter of a Count who ate peyote and mixed her bath water into a man's mustard supply; the wife of a Spanish conquistador who let her hair loose and chanted to a Mesoamerican god while sweeping at midnight; the wealthy Basque woman with a tattoo of a red devil; and many others – routinely adapted Native ritual into hybrid magic and cosmology. Through a radical rethinking of colonial knowledge, Dr. Nesvig uncovers a world previously left in the shadows of historical writing, revealing a fascinating and vibrant multi-ethnic community of witches, midwives, and healers.

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 Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement--organized by indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mestizo parishioners in Mexico's central-western Catholic heartland--the Religionero rebellion erupted in response to a series of anticlerical measures raised to constitutional status by the Lerdo government. These "Laws of Reform" decreed the full independence of Church and state, secularized marriage and burial practices, prohibited acts of public worship, and severely curtailed the Church's ability to own and administer property. A comprehensive reconstruction of the revolt and a critical reappraisal of its significance, this book places ordinary Catholics at the center of the story of Mexico's fragmented nineteenth-century secularization and Catholic revival.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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