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About Ryan Tripp

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

NBN Episodes hosted by Ryan:

General History June 28, 2022

Who Killed Jane Stanford?

A Gilded-Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University

Richard White

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the …
General History January 4, 2022

The Transcendentalists and Their World

Robert A. Gross

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
In The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), Robert A. Gross offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord …
General History November 17, 2021

Genesis and Validity

The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History

Martin Jay

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity …
General History October 1, 2021

Deconstruction

An American Institution

Gregory Jones-Katz

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to …
General History August 30, 2021

Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

The Making of Frank Prewett

Joy Porter

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
In Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), Joy Porter examines the extraordinary life of Frank “Toronto” Prewett and the history of trauma, literary …
General History July 30, 2021

The Persistence of Party

Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Max Skjönsberg

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
Political parties are taken for granted today, but how was the idea of party viewed in the eighteenth century, when core components of modern, representative politics were trialled? From Bolingbroke …
Native American Studies June 28, 2021

Native Providence

Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast

Patricia E. Rubertone

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the nineteenth century. Patricia E. Rubertone's Native Providence …
General History June 7, 2021

The Free World

Art and Thought in the Cold War

Louis Menand

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual …
General History May 4, 2021

American Writers and World War I

David A. Rennie

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
In American Writers and World War I (Oxford University Press, 2020), David A. Rennie argues that authors' war writing continuously evolved in response to developments in their professional and personal lives. He examines …
General History March 29, 2021

The Time of Enlightenment

Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One

William Max Nelson

Hosted by Ryan Tripp
A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human …
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 …
General 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 …
General 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 …
General 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …
General History 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 …