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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
Description: A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets
Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots.
In Threads of E...