New Books Network

Amy Weitzman interviews Emily Sneff on her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News and the graduate school experience.

In 1776 people could hear the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in public squares and could read it in the pages of their local newspapers. Stories of the Declaration typically recount the work that took place inside the Continental Congress, focusing on the men tasked with drafting the text. Although Congress declared independence, the work of spreading the news involved printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators.

When the Declaration of Independence Was News reveals the stories behind how the Declaration was communicated in the United States and around the Atlantic. Tracing the travels of the founding document of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, Boston, Charleston, London, Leiden, Paris, and beyond, Emily Sneff shows how people both celebrated the Declaration and critiqued it. In the weeks after the document was penned, it was printed in the columns of newspapers, translated into German and French, and shared with Native American allies. The document induced some people to make public their privately held beliefs about whether they wanted the United States to be independent or to reconcile with King George III. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution.

Published for the 250th anniversary of American independence, When the Declaration of Independence Was News returns to a time before the legacy of these words and the outcome of the war against Great Britain were known to reconsider what the founding of the United States meant to the people who were living through it.
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Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times (Bloomsbury, 2025) describes tacit knowledge, what it is, how it used
and its role in our current data driven world. Author James Cortada
argues that fuzzy, hard-to describe information is greater and more, important than just hard
facts. What is tacit knowledge? It is what we might consider knowledge
that is unable to be fully communicated; knowledge that we understand
implicitly, but it is a bit hard to explain. For example, it is the kind
of knowledge one needs to ride a bicycle, but that cannot be described
precisely on paper in the way one might be able to explain how to cook a
dish. Tacit knowledge is the least understood type of information and
one of the most difficult to communicate. Yet there is more tacit
knowledge in our lives than the specific facts one can find in a book,
on the Internet or in the simple form of a fact. This book is designed
to introduce the reader to the concept of tacit knowledge and how to
recognize and use it. This book offers definitions of tacit knowledge
and compares the topic to explicit knowledge, then describes how the
former is used today. The author argues that both types are used today
and explains how one can use both types of knowledge in their lives.
This book is essential primer to understanding tacit knowledge and learning how to use it to your advantage.

Guest: James
(Jim) Cortada is a senior research fellow at the University of
Minnesota. He is a leading authority on the role of modern information.
He holds a PhD in modern history but worked at IBM Corporation for
nearly 40 years in sales and consulting. He has written
several books on the business history of the computer industry and just
over a dozen on the history and use of information over the past two
centuries. So, he straddles the subject between historical evolution and
its current uses.

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna
is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator
and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.
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Dr. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel’s Seeking Freedom in Indian Country: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Resistance within the Five Tribes, 1790–1861 (LSU Press, 2026) is the first comprehensive study of African chattel
slavery within the Five Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw,
Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Dr. Oertel examines how chattel
slavery functioned among all Five Tribes before and during the removal
process, how the tribes reconstituted slavery post-removal in Indian
Territory, and how enslaved Black people promoted freedom-seeking
strategies at each stage. Furthermore, her work considers how the
conflict over slavery in Indian Territory contributed to the larger
national debate over slavery’s fate on the eve of the Civil War.

Historians
have examined how the practice of African enslavement emerged within
one or two tribes, how forced migration affected slavery within
particular nations,
and how the debate over slavery divided multiple Indigenous nations.
Dr. Oertel, however, is the first to examine Indian Territory as a
whole, its significance to the sectional debates, and its role as an
incubator of emancipation policies in the United States. Knitting
together these individual tribal narratives and supplementing them with
extensive primary research on how slavery functioned across Indian
Territory, she integrates Indian country into the antebellum march
toward the Civil War.

Seeking Freedom in Indian Country
joins a rising chorus of studies that integrate southern and western
history, which, by default, also pulls together the history of the
so-called Indian Wars with the Civil War. Dr. Oertel suggests that we
cannot fully understand the causes of the Civil War without also
considering the changes brought about by the forced removal of Indians.
She argues that settler colonialism and the expansion of African chattel
slavery together set the stage for sectional conflict to explode in the
West. Ironically, both Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and
Black resistance to slavery challenged white supremacy in ways that
foretold the end of slavery but also furthered the settler colonial
project.

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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J.J. Crayhill's Raleigh and the Pirates (Raconteur Press, 2026) is the launch of The Adventures of Midshipman Raleigh — a science fiction adventure series built on the bones of the great naval tales, transplanted to the lawless frontier of space. Anthony is small, undertrained, and deeply motivated, which turns out to be a dangerous combination — for everyone involved.

Midshipman Anthony Raleigh wasn't supposed to be the hero. He was barely supposed to be on the bridge.

When a pirate warship drops out of hiding to ambush the cargo freighter Pegasus, Captain Smith has one mission for his youngest crew member: take the shuttle, run, and bring help. Simple enough — except the pirates got there first.

With the shuttle sabotaged and the crew captured at gunpoint, Anthony is alone, unarmed, and hunted through corridors, air ducts, and — when things get truly desperate — across the outside of the ship in a malfunctioning spacesuit.

He has three things going for him: an AI named Fuse who enforces regulations with terrifying consistency; a security key the pirates will do anything to obtain; and a grudge against pirates that burns considerably hotter than fear.

That is going to have to be enough.

When he gets his hands on a classified space fighter hidden inside the Pegasus' sealed cargo pod, the pirates are going to find out exactly what a midshipman with something to prove looks like when he decides he has had enough.

And when the pirate captain makes one final play — a shocking claim about Anthony's supposedly dead father — the stakes shift from saving a ship to something far more personal.
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Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932
(Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the
architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s,
examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades,
with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that
these environments were as constitutive of the Corporation’s identity as
the programmes and people that they housed. Borrowing from the
architectural writer Christopher Hussey’s characterisation of
Broadcasting House as a ‘palace of the ether’ Dr. Darling asks how the
immaterial medium of the broadcast was given material and spatial form
by the BBC, and the engineers, architects and designers whom they commissioned.

The
book traces the development of the BBC both technologically and
organisationally, and the changing demands it had of the spaces which
accommodated it. It shows how associational networks and personal
affiliations affected who was commissioned to work on what became
Broadcasting House and offers a detailed account of the work of Val
Myer, who designed the exterior and shell of the new building, and the
team of architects who designed the studio interiors (Serge Chermayeff,
Wells Coates, Edward Maufe, Raymond McGrath and Dorothy Warren). In
documenting the design of Broadcasting House, and the responses to it, Palace of the Ether offers new insights into British architectural culture at a pivotal moment in the profession’s 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. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network