New Books Network

We know Abraham Lincoln as the eloquent, compassionate leader of a
nation torn by civil war. But he had another, less visible side, equally
central to his character and leadership: Lincoln was a master of party
politics. Schooled as a Whig in the rough-and-tumble of Illinois
electioneering in the 1830s, Lincoln skillfully navigated treacherous
partisan crosscurrents and helped build the Republican party into a
viable force. His decades of experience as a party leader proved
invaluable to him as president and commander in chief during the Civil
War.

Matthew Pinsker’s groundbreaking Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2026) draws extensively on Lincoln’s
private correspondence to move beyond the marble icon and realize a
flesh-and-blood character in Boss Lincoln. Behind closed doors he was
shrewd and insistent, capable of deft manipulation, blunt intimidation,
or thoughtful argument as needed. As a decision-maker he was attentive
to detail but kept his own counsel and trusted his own acumen. His aides
noted that in cabinet meetings Lincoln had the final say, and “there is
no cavil.” Devoted to elections, he kept careful, handwritten tallies
of party turnout, even gifting one to Mary Todd, another partisan,
during their courtship. His hymn to democracy at Gettysburg in 1863
carried a partisan message to the political leaders gathered there: The
fight for the union would take place at the polls as well as on the
battlefield. Boss Lincoln often sacrificed candor for purpose. He used
his White House meeting with Frederick Douglass in 1864, ostensibly
about emancipation, to send a message to radicals about his need for
their support. With emancipation and the war’s outcome at stake, facing
withering criticism from all sides, Lincoln won reelection by building a
new political coalition through the Union party. Here was Boss Lincoln
at his height, captured in absorbing detail in this indelible portrait
of our greatest president.
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In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected
by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay
and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and
Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a
question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live
together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities?

Bombay
sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major
imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean
merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped
ideas cross borders.

At the same time, British censuses and
representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia
contained the world’s largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were
increasingly classified as a political minority within India.

Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh
is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world,
joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate
Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony’s College. He is
currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester.

His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow
the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political
destiny. Along the way, we’ll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl
merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely
Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the
nation-state.

Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi,
a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the
Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the
Australian National University.
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The Ethics of Argumentation (Routledge, 2025) offers a new approach to the theory of argumentation that conceptualizes argumentation as a fundamentally ethical activity whose norms are grounded in, and must be selected according to, moral reasons. Current normative approaches to argumentation do not treat ethics as an integral part of argumentation theory. This is at least in part due to a methodological commitment not to address internal states of the arguers, such as intentions and beliefs, which makes moral theorizing about argumentation difficult. This book presents three arguments for why ethics ought to be a central element in normative theorizing about argumentation. First, it shows that ethics is needed for providing normative argumentation theory with its foundation and for offering arguers reliable guidance for decision-making both about which norms ought to govern their arguing and how they should shape each argument they make. Second, it addresses some of the most persistent problems faced by currently dominant normative approaches to argumentation, most notably that they are only reliable under the assumption that unrealistic background conditions are fulfilled. Finally, it provides the groundwork for a systematic ethics of argumentation. It does so by showing how a function of argumentation can be justified via moral reasons and by providing the outlines for both an applied ethics of (meta-level) normative argument design and an applied role-ethics of object-level arguing. The Ethics of Argumentation (Routledge, 2025) is essential reading for researchers and graduate students in a wide range of disciplines-including philosophy, communication studies, linguistics, and rhetoric-who are interested in argumentation, critical thinking and social epistemology"

Katharina Stevens is a philosopher and argumentation theorist working at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. She is one of the editors of the journal Informal Logic and one of the directors of the Critical Thinking and Citizen Engagement Lab at the University of Lethbridge.
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Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2024) examines one of the most revered art historical narratives of Western
art: the famous turning point for painting and sculpture usually
emblematized by the works of Édouard Manet and then the Impressionists.
Instead of the usual revaluation of this turning point, Sara Pappas
argues for the importance of the failure to find a cohesive story for
the art world in the period itself, a difficulty that carries forward to
galleries today. In order to demonstrate the importance of incongruity
and disorder, Pappas brings together two worlds that may seem
incompatible: nineteenth-century literary writers involved in naturalism
and the organization of permanent collections of later
nineteenth-century French art in today's museums. Drawing on the art
novels and art criticism of these writers, the book provides optimal
access to the questions that continue to haunt the categorization and
display of nineteenth-century art.

Guest Sara Pappas is Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture
at the University of Richmond. In addition to this volume, she has
published articles on topics from 19th century art criticism by literary figures such as Baudelaire and Zola to the Expositions universelles
to contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s influence on French art, as well
as co-curating an exhibit of Nineteenth Century French and Russian Art
at the Harnett Museum of Art.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of
Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and
speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism
to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan
France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under
review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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Queer theory and reproductive justice need each other—now more than ever. As liberals and leftists increasingly frame reproductive justice in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, often adopting the language of “queerness,” it has become difficult to see that their political demands and strategies are often quite conservative. In Reproductive Justice, Queerly (U California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen examines typical reproductive justice issues—including abortion, surrogacy, crisis pregnancy centers, paid parental leave, and parenting—in queer ways. She shows what can happen when we bring queer theory and reproductive justice together: a queerer, more powerful articulation of what we are fighting for.

Your host Yining Pan is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
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