Sweet potatoes were among the American crops Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe—where they were thought to be an aphrodisiac. In China, this versatile root became a staple that fueled rapid population growth. Introduced to Japan to stave off famine, sweet potatoes later sustained the country’s imperial expansion. Because this hardy plant can thrive in almost any soil, it has long been cultivated as a subsistence crop in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In recent years, Western health experts have begun touting the humble sweet potato as a “superfood” with numerous nutritional benefits.

Considering these events and many others, Staple to Superfood: A Global History of the Sweet Potato (Columbia UP, 2025) explores the sweet potato’s rich history and remarkable global influence. Dr. Q. Edward Wang demonstrates how this resilient root has not only nourished communities but also defined their identities. Tracing its journeys through the intricate networks of global trade and cultural exchange, he shows how the sweet potato transformed agricultural practices, culinary traditions, and social structures worldwide. From the Americas to Europe to Asia and the Pacific, the spread of this crop illuminates the varied paths that global development has taken. Dr. Wang also contrasts the sweet potato with its botanically unrelated namesake, the white potato. Blending agricultural, cultural, and historical perspectives, Staple to Superfood offers a fresh look at the power of food to transform societies. It is a compelling exploration of how the sweet potato shaped the modern world and continues to influence global food systems 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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International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025) edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera uses an interdisciplinary approach to discuss international law and conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, covering topics such as maritime security, climate change and international relations.

Detailing how international relations and particular state interests govern regional and global partnerships, the book provides suggestions for the future of the Indo-Pacific region. Exploring how conflict within the region has international repercussions, topics covered include the role of South-East Asian countries, and the role of statehood of small islands in Oceania. Detailing harmonization of laws and policies in the context of international security and maritime law, the book focuses on the impact of climate change and other topical issues such as cyber security and the protection of cultural identity.

The book will be of interest to researchers in the field of international law, law of the sea, international relations and security.
Dr. Joanna Siekiera is an expert in international law, NATO consultant, trainer, and educator. She currently works as the Assistant Professor at the War Studies University in Warsaw, Poland. She is also a fellow at the U.S. Marine Corps University in Quantico and supports various military institutions as a legal SME and course facilitator.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

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"The Coast has been battered for years by decisions made by those who don’t live there and don’t have any connection to the place. It started early."

Based on his investigative Newsroom series, Aaron Smale’s Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone (Bridget Williams, 2024) goes deep into the region’s struggle with colonial legacies and environmental mismanagement.

Through personal stories, interviews and critical analysis, Smale uncovers the multifaceted impacts of pine plantations, land confiscation and climate events of increasing severity on a landscape and its people.

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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Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth century. From uranium extraction to nuclear testing, Australia’s lands became sites of imperial exploitation under the guise of national development. The continent was subject to rampant nuclear colonialism. However, this history is not just one of imposition. Aboriginal communities, bearing the brunt of these processes, have persistently resisted, reclaiming their rights to Country and demanding reparations.
As Dr. Jessica Urwin shows in Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia (U of Washington Press, 2025 & Melbourne University Press, 2026), extraction, weapons testing, and nuclear waste disposal have caused incalculable physical, spiritual, and cultural harm to Aboriginal communities and lands. Yet Indigenous peoples all over the world have not only survived nuclear colonialism but challenged it time and time again. Tracking the colonial mechanisms Australia used to pursue a nuclear industry, Dr. Urwin simultaneously highlights how Aboriginal peoples refused and reshaped those same mechanisms over time. A groundbreaking book, Contaminated Country reveals how Australia’s deep nuclear past has been entangled with colonialism locally, nationally, and internationally.

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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This episode, which is co-hosted with Delaney Chieyen Holton, features Dr. K. Ian Shin discussing his recently published book, Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America’s Pacific Century (Standford UP, 2025).

Imperial Stewards argues that, beyond aesthetic taste and economics, geopolitics were critical to the United States’ transformation into possessing some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated collections of Chinese art between the Gilded Age and World War II. Collecting and studying Chinese art and antiquities honed Americans' belief that they should dominate Asia and the Pacific Ocean through the ideology of imperial stewardship—a view that encompassed both genuine curiosity and care for Chinese art, and the enduring structures of domination and othering that underpinned the burgeoning transpacific art market.

Tracing networks across both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, K. Ian Shin uncovers a diverse cast of historical actors that both contributed to US imperial stewardship and also challenged it, including Protestant missionaries, German diplomats, Chinese-Hawaiian merchants, and Chinese overseas students, among others. By examining the development of Chinese art collecting and scholarship in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, Imperial Stewards reveals both the cultural impetus behind Americans' long-standing aspirations for a Pacific Century and a way to understand—and critique—the duality of US imperial power around the globe.

Ian Shin is Assistant Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, where he is also a core faculty member in the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program. In addition to Imperial Stewards, his articles and reviews on topics that range from the Boy Scout movement in New York's Chinatown to the role of colleges and universities in 19th-century U.S.-China relations to the history of museums of American art have appeared in Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and Connecticut Historical Review.

Donna Doan Anderson is the Mellon research assistant professor in U.S. Law and Race at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Delaney Chieyen Holton is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Stanford University.

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In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that most Pacific Islanders are in fact 'inter-islanders', or people defined by their movement across the ocean and between islands, rather than 'trapped' in islands in a far sea. Thomas also described the European discovery of the Pacific, and emphasizes the role Pacific Islanders played in teaching European explorers about the Pacific. 'European' knowledge of the Pacific, Thomas claims, was very much 'intercultural' and relied on indigenous Pacific knowledge of the region.

In this episode of the podcast, Nick sits down with Alex Golub to discuss his book and the history of the Pacific. They talk about the influence of Epeli Hau‘ofa's writings on Nick's concept of 'inter-islanders' and discuss the complexities of intercultural contact in the nineteenth century Pacific which are exemplified by 'Tupaia's Chart' -- the map made for Captain Cook by Tupaia, the Tahitian navigator who led Cook to Aotearoa/New Zealand. Overall, Voyagers is an excellent introduction to Pacific history which can be read by anyone with an interest in the Pacific.

Associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a conflict that solidified SPAM’s place in global food culture. Created by Hormel Foods in 1937 to utilize surplus pork shoulder during the Great Depression, SPAM became an essential resource during the Second World War, and helped shape perceptions of American culture. SPAM: A Global History (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Kelly Spring explores SPAM’s complex history, from its inception to its resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting its enduring legacy in places like Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Okinawa and South Korea. It demonstrates how SPAM, a long-lasting and valuable protein, played a crucial role during wartime and continues to influence dietary practices worldwide.

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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The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Beginning with a Spanish galleon that came ashore in northern Oregon in 1693 and continuing into the recent past, Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific (University of Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Coll Thrush includes stories of many vessels that met their fate along the rugged coast and the meanings made of these events by both Indigenous and settler survivors and observers.
Commemorated in museums, historical markers, folklore, place-names, and the remains of the ships themselves, the shipwrecks have created a rich archive. Whether in the form of a fur-trading schooner that was destroyed in 1811, a passenger liner lost in 1906, or an almost-empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast opens up conversations about colonialism and Indigenous persistence. Dr. Thrush’s retelling of shipwreck tales highlights the ways in which the three central myths of settler colonialism—the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past—proved to be untrue. As a critical cultural history of this iconic element of the region, Wrecked demonstrates how the history of shipwrecks reveals the fraught and unfinished business of colonization on the Northwest Coast.

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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On the podcast today I am joined by socio-cultural anthropologist, Tuomas Tammisto, who is an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampere University. Tuomas is joining me to talk about his recently published book, Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier (Helsinki UP, 2024)

Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea. It provides elaborate, rich ethnography to make sense of how the Mengen engage with their land and outside actors like companies, NGOs, and the state through agriculture, logging, plantation labor, and environmental conservation. These practices have shaped the Mengen’s lived environment, while also sparking debates on what is considered valuable and how value is created.

The book is the result of hard work: for years Tuomas Tammisto has gained rich empirical research to detail how indigenous Mengen people perceive and live with the threats of logging. The chapters are not only rich in ethnography and theory, but they are also interlaced with beautiful photos and poetic song lyrics both in the original and translated languages, to provide an eye-opening window into Mengen perceptions of their complex lived environment.

The book is Open Access and available to read for free here.

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Bringing concepts from critical transitional justice and peacebuilding into dialogue with education, Schooling, Conflict and Peace in the Southwestern Pacific: Becoming Enemy Friends (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. David Oakeshott examines the challenges youth and their teachers face in the post-conflict settings of Bougainville and Solomon Islands.

Youth in these places must reconcile with the violent past of their parents’ generation while also learning how to live with people once on opposing ‘sides'. This book traces how students and their teachers form connections to the past and each other that cut through the forces that might divide them. The findings illustrate novel ways to think about the potential for education to assist post-conflict recovery.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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