New Books Network

About Ryan Tripp

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges.

NBN Episodes hosted by Ryan:

Critical Theory January 26, 2021

Migrants in the Profane

Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization

Peter E. Gordon

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theory, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University …
History December 28, 2020

The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution

Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding

Simon J. Gilhooley

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution: Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding (Cambridge University Press, 2020) argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American …
History November 27, 2020

The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration

Gaby Mahlberg

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 changed the lives of English republicans for good. Despite the Declaration of Breda, where Charles II promised to forgive those who had …
History November 11, 2020

Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought

Joanne Paul

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
While it has often been recognized that counsel formed an essential part of the political discourse in early modern England, the precise role that it occupied in the development of …
British Studies September 24, 2020

Inventing the English Massacre

Amboyna in History and Memory

Alison Games

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sandy Hook: the place names evoke grief and horror, each the site of a massacre. Massacres-the mass slaughter of people-might seem as old as time, but …
American Studies September 15, 2020

Bohemians West

Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth-Century America

Sherry L. Smith

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
The opening years of the twentieth century saw a grand cast of radicals and reformers fighting for a new America, seeking change not only in labor picket lines and at …
Critical Theory July 15, 2020

Splinters in Your Eye

Frankfurt School Provocations

Martin Jay

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Although successive generations of the Frankfurt School have attempted to adapt Critical Theory to new circumstances, the work done by its founding members continues in the twenty-first century to unsettle …
British Studies February 10, 2020

Walter Ralegh

Architect of Empire

Alan Gallay

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the …
American Studies January 29, 2020

The Second American Revolution

The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic

Gregory P. Downs

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name the "Civil War." In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not …
Literary Studies January 14, 2020

Thomas Mann's War

Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

Tobias Boes

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
In Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Cornell University Press, 2019), Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most …
American Studies December 19, 2019

The Puritans

A Transatlantic History

David D. Hall

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding …
American Studies December 12, 2019

Eloquence Embodied

Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

Céline Carayon

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (University of North …
British Studies December 11, 2019

Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans

The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution

Richard Whatmore

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans …
Literary Studies December 3, 2019

'There Is a North'

Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War

John L. Brooke

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and abolitionists despaired, complaining that the “North, the poor timid, mercenary, driveling North” offered no forceful opposition to the power …
Literary Studies December 2, 2019

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples

Kerry Driscoll

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples (University of California Press, 2018; paperback edition, 2019) is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal …
Critical Theory November 22, 2019

The Habermas-Rawls Debate

James Gordon Finlayson

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are perhaps the two most renowned and influential figures in social and political philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1990s …
American Studies November 12, 2019

Heirs of an Honored Name

The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America

Douglas R. Egerton

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
John and Abigail Adams founded a famous political family, but they would not witness its calamitous fall from grace. When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow …
European Studies November 11, 2019

Before Boas

The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

Han Vermeulen

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize …
European Studies November 1, 2019

Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885

Julia Nicholls

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), is the first comprehensive account of French revolutionary thought in the years between the crushing of France's last nineteenth-century …
African American Studies October 25, 2019

Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds

A History of Slavery in New England

Jared Hardesty

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area’s indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution …
American Studies October 23, 2019

The Partisan Republic

Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s

Saul Cornell and Gerald Leonard

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account …
Literary Studies October 16, 2019

Incorrigibles and Innocents

Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics

Lara Saguisag

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Histories and criticism of comics note that comic strips published in the Progressive Era were dynamic spaces in which anxieties about race, ethnicity, class, and gender were expressed, perpetuated, and …
African American Studies October 9, 2019

After Appomattox

Military Occupation and the Ends of War

Gregory P. Downs

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
On April 8, 1865, after four years of civil war, General Robert E. Lee wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant asking for peace. Peace was beyond his authority to negotiate …
African American Studies October 8, 2019

Caribbean New Orleans

Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society

Cécile Vidal

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute, 2019), offers a lively …