New Books in History

The Atlantic magazine recently asked its readers to name the greatest athlete of all time.  The usual suspects were present among the nominees: Jesse Owens, Pelé, Wayne Gretzky, Don Bradman.  Given that these were readers of The Atlantic, there were some more thoughtful answers as well: Canadian athlete and cancer-research activist Terry Fox, Czech distance runner Emil Zápotek, and Milos of Croton, the six-time wrestling champion of the ancient Olympics.  If we put that question to historians Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul, their likely response would be someone who rarely gets a mention on best-athlete lists, but certainly deserves a place:  Duke Kahanamoku.  A five-time Olympic medalist in swimming, Duke traveled the world to give swimming exhibitions, drawing thousands at each stop.  And wherever there was a beach and a break, Duke also demonstrated the sport he had mastered at Waikiki Beach, where he had grown up.  The surfing cultures of Southern California and Australia have their origins in visits by Duke Kahanamoku in the early 1910s.  In the words of Westwick and Neushul, the Duke was a combination of world-champion swimmer Michael Phelps and world-champion surfer Kelly Slater (both of whom appeared on The Atlantic’s greatest-athlete list). Duke Kahanamoku is one of the main characters in Westwick and Neushul’s book The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing (Crown, 2013).  Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton also appear, as do Gidget, Kahuna, and the Beach Boys. But as the sub-title indicates, this is a history that goes beyond the great surfers and the sport’s influence on pop culture.  As historians of science and technology, Westwick and Neushul look at the developments that have fueled surfing’s popularity, such as the invention of foam-and-fiberglass boards (easier to manage than Duke’s 16-foot-long wooden boards) and the neoprene wetsuit, which has allowed surfers to enter waters around the world.  Westwick and Neushul are also scholars of environmental history, and their history of surfing looks at how beaches have been transformed by developers and engineers.  A customary part of a vacation at Waikiki is a surfing lesson.  But the shoreline and even the waves that tourists encounter today are completely different from those of the Duke’s childhood.  As Peter and Peter argue, the changes that took place on the shore are just as important to the story of this sport as what the surfers accomplished in the water.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Gender Studies] How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an array of rich sources — from Treasury Department archives to trial records, congressional investigation files to films and novels, popular weeklies and dailies to postcards, advertisements to confession magazines, private papers to employment advice guides – Julie Berebitsky takes the reader on a discovery of sexuality in the white collar-office from the Civil War to the present day. Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power and Desire (Yale University Press, 2012) analyzes sexual relations, non-consensual and consensual, among co-workers, arguing that the 19th-century ideal of the passionless woman gave way by World War One to an ideal of feminine attractiveness, one that was later transformed by Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s into a professional strategy for its time. At the same time, feminist groups and the secretarial labor movement coalesced to fight back against decades of discrimination and sexual violence in the office against women workers. Berebitsky concludes her book with an analysis of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case, which brought the issue of sexual harassment into the living rooms of Americans. This case, and the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton affair, demonstrate that there is both continuity and change in American attitudes towards sex at the office.

When historians think oceanically, when they populate their books with characters that include seas and monsoons along with human beings, what results is a very different way of thinking about time, space, and the ways that their interactions shape human and terrestrial history. In Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard University Press, 2013), Sunil S. Amrith has produced an elegant, sensitively-wrought account of hundreds of years in the life of the Bay of Bengal. This history of the Bay is also history of the movements and circulations it has engendered, from ocean currents to Tamil migrants, from steamships to Indian laborers, from paper passports to trickles of dammed water, from pails of liquid rubber to wheels on US automobiles. Crossing the Bay of Bengal is simultaneously a political, social, cultural and environmental history: at the same time that it carefully contextualizes the emergence of boundaries (be they the disciplines of area studies or the forms of modern citizenship that follow the emergence of nation-states), it urges readers to transcend those boundaries to produce more integrated narratives of forms of modern life. This wonderful book will be of special import to readers interested in the histories of empire, commerce, labor, migration, the environment, and the maritime world, but it will reward attention regardless of a reader’s background or expertise.

Historians tell stories, and stories have beginnings and ends. Most human eras, however, are not so neat. Their beginnings and ends tend to blend into one another. This is why historians are often arguing about when eras–the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, etc.–started and stopped. One usually learns very little from these debates, primarily because the established beginnings and endings were agreed upon for good reason. Nothing really big had been missed, so nothing really big has to be changed. But there are exceptions, times when historians discover–or at the very least bring to light–evidence that truly moves the chronological bounds of an era or movement. One such exception is Susan D. Carle‘s excellent new book Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915 (Oxford UP, 2013). I will only speak for myself, but I always considered the formation of the NAACP in 1909 to be the beginning of the organized, national effort to fight discrimination against African Americans. Having read Susan’s book, I now know that I was wrong. She ably tells the stories of a number of national organizations that pursued the agenda of the NAACP (and, for that matter, the Urban League) decades before the NAACP (and the Urban League) was founded. It would, I think, be a mistake to see Carle’s book as a “pre-history” of the organized struggle for racial justice; rather, it is more appropriate to see it as a book about the true beginning of that struggle. Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemüller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The opening is the illumination of a grave as you, the reader, turn on a light to read the sunken stone. In the space between these two moments, each centered on a thing displayed (a map on a wall, a body under your feet), the story of a third object emerges from amid the threads of the people, languages, relationships, wars, and seas with which it has been entangled for more than 400 years. Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer (Bloomsbury, 2013) explores the secrets of a map in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. In a beautifully written historical mystery, Timothy Brook follows the map from its arrival at the Library after the death of a late owner, a scholar who helped found the field of international law and found himself jailed by two kings along the way. Brook takes us backward through the historical currents that informed the visible features of this map, those features including a compass rose, a gourd with Coleridgian resonances, a network of sea routes, a pair of Gobi Desert butterflies, and much more.  As it changes hands among a host of characters that include a business man trading in cloves and pornography from Japan to England, an unlikely teacher and student of the Chinese language, Samuel Purchas of Purchas his Pilgrimage, and a trouble-making lawyer, the map traces a global history of the seagoing world before it comes to rest on a wall next to the flayed tattooed skin of a Pacific Islander, and ultimately on two library tables before the gaze of a curious historian. It is a wonderful story and a fascinating mystery.

For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we know the answers to both questions: Oswald killed Kennedy and he did so alone. These facts won’t keep people from speculating–everyone loves a mystery–but they might allow us to focus on more pertinent questions about what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. One such question is this: “Why did Oswald do it?” Obviously, the answer will not be straightforward. Assassinating the President of the United States is, well, not really something a rational person would attempt, so we should not expect a completely rational explanation. Oswald was not crazy, but he was doubtless mentally ill. He had “reasons” for killing the president; it’s just that his “reasons” are not going to make much sense to us. To comprehend why he did what he did, then, we must comprehend how his “reasons” made sense to him. In his insightful, well-researched book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Savodnik helps us do just this by investigating Oswald’s decision to defect to, live in, and ultimately abandon the Soviet Union. He convincingly argues that Oswald’s Soviet Period was part of a larger pattern, one that dominated his entire life: that of taking on and abandoning identities, always unsuccessfully. Even as a child (and, as Peter points out, Oswald had a horrific childhood), “Lee” never really “fit.” He could never find a group of people he could rely on, a social context in which he could thrive, a community that would respect him.  As he matured, he began to search for an identity–in politics, in the Marines, and in the Soviet Union. Yet he was always, as Peter says, an “interloper”: he never lasted long in the skin of any given “Lee.” To this reader, the fact that Oswald was essentially an interloper goes a long way in explaining why he murdered Kennedy. It was his last attempt to fit in, to establish who he really was, to find an identity.

In West Germany in September and October of 1977, a group of self-described urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. In exchange for Schleyer, the RAF demanded the release of its imprisoned leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. Those months in 1977 following the abduction of Schleyer are often referred to as the German Autumn, and they represent a crescendo of leftist political violence that had its origins, in some ways, almost a decade before. Terror prompted a crisis in the 70s for the West German government and German democracy. Of course, 1977 was not the first time in history that a German republic had been tested by a group of radicals intending to bring it down. That had already happened in the 1930s. But 1977 turned out very differently than 1933—when the Nazis “captured” power in a profoundly embattled and dysfunctional democracy. In fact, as Karrin Hanshew argues in her fascinating book, “West Germany’s terrorist crisis helped to usher in the relatively stable civil society that still defines Germany today. Karrin Hanshew‘s new book Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is, at once, a political history of the FRG, a history of democracy, a history of political theory in the abstract and in action, and a history of social movements, among many other things. I learned so much from it and I think that you will too.

In the United States, World War II is now called “The Good War,” as opposed to bad ones, I suppose, like Vietnam. Moreover, the Americans who fought in World War II are now called “The Greatest Generation,” as opposed to lesser generations, I suppose. Now most of the Americans of “The Greatest Generation” who fought in “The Good War” were men. What made them the “greatest” was that they had proved not only their willingness pro patria mori, but also their masculinity. They were, well, “real men.” But what about those American men who, though of “The Greatest Generation,” did not actually fight in “The Good War?” There were millions of them. Early in the war Washington designated certain industries essential to the war effort and therefore exempted those who worked in them from the draft. These men “fought” on the Home Front, of course. But they knew very well that fighting on the “Home Front” was not the same as fighting on the actual front. As men of fighting age but not fighting, they were the object of a certain skepticism. “Why,” they imagined people asking, “weren’t they in uniform?” Maybe they weren’t “real men…” In his path-breaking new book Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Matthew L. Basso explores the ways in which American men on the “Home Front” protected their masculinity during the War, and the ways in which those efforts reverberated in the decades that followed it. It’s a fascinating story. Listen in.

Occasionally you hear shrill news reports about American Nazis. Judging by the pictures of them, they are almost always skin-headed morons who can’t put two words together (other than “Sieg Heil” or some such). Often it’s not clear whether they are really Nazis or are just parodies of Nazis. Or maybe, hoping for a sick laugh, they’re just having us on. One thing is clear: they are very, very few. I can say with some confidence that National Socialism is not popular in the United States and never has been. Yet as Arnie Bernstein points out in his book Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), there was a brief moment when some Americans took National Socialism seriously, namly the 1930s. This fact, of course, is hard for us to wrap our minds around. It is, however, important to remember that there was a time when Fascism was not seen as pure evil, but rather as a viable alternative to democratic Capitalism and authoritarian Communism. Fortunately for Americans (but unfortunately for the American Nazis), the “German-American Bund” was led by someone who was, well, not very serious–one Fritz Kuhn. He was not a skin-headed moron. He was, as Arnie makes clear, an opportunistic, philandering, unprincipled, pilfering buffoon. So much the better for us. Listen in to this fascinating–and largely forgotten–story.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), Aaron Stephen Moore critiques this account in a study of the relationship between technology and power in the context of Japanese fascism and imperialism. Moore traces the emergence of a “technological imaginary” in wartime Japan, exploring how different groups (including intellectuals, technology bureaucrats, engineers, and state planners) invested the term “technology” with ideological meaning and power in the course of discussing and shaping national policy. Paying careful attention to the ways that technological and colonial development co-produced and challenged each other, Moore’s story respects the archives of both text and practice: the book deeply cuts into into the intellectual history of technology in the context of Japanese empire, while also following the activities, material difficulties, and large-scale products of many thousands of engineers as they traveled to Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo, and China to build roads, canals, ports, dams, cities, irrigation, sewage and water works, and electrical and communications networks. It is a fascinating case study that informs a larger global historiography of the modern technosciences, while also using the social study of technology to extend the historiography of Japanese empire.

Germany embarked on the age of imperialism a bit later than other global powers, and the German experience of empire was much shorter-lived than that of Britain or France or Portugal. Nonetheless, empire was fundamental, Jeff Bowersox argues, to Germans’ self-understanding and sense of place in the world in an era marked by sweeping changes, including rapid industrialization and economic growth; the rise of an urban proletariat in ever-expanding cities; and the emergence of mass consumer culture and mass politics. Indeed, Bowersox notes, a linkage between German identity and empire long outlasted the German Empire itself. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2013) looks specifically at youth in this context, and at how young Germans encountered their nation’s overseas empire through a variety of media from the founding of the German nation-state to the eve of World War One. Germany was not only a brand-new country in this period, as Bowersox points out, it was also a decidedly youthful one: in the first decade of the twentieth century, four in five Germans were under the age of 45. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire looks at how a nation of young people experienced exotic places, at least imaginatively, through material culture, mass education, and social movements like Scouting. The book uses truly fascinating sources—toys, games, school books, cartoons, among many others—to make new and engaging arguments about the German experience of colonialism in the age of European imperialism.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] One of the most exciting approaches in the contemporary study of China is emerging from work that brings together archaeological and historical modes of reading texts and material objects to tell a story about the past. In Ancient Central China: Centers and Peripheries Along the Yangzi River (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen draw from extensive archaeological fieldwork, supplemented by careful analysis of textual accounts of early China and a thoughtful rendering of the historiography of Chinese archaeology, to trace some major transformations in Central China from the late third millennium BC through the late first millennium BC. By reading the remains of walls, oracle bones, tiger teeth, burial chambers, sacrificial pits, ceramics, saline traces, weapons, figurines, and other objects, Flad and Chen reframe how we think about the spaces of history. In the late prehistorical and early historical period, two political cores developed in Central China: the Sichuan Basin and the Middle Yangzi. At the same time peripheral regions between and around them were both developing their own trajectories and were becoming central in their own right, with the Three Gorges region as a paramount example. Arguing that a focus on “political centers” and “archaeological cultures” has dominated the way we think about the history and prehistory of China, Ancient Central China offers a different way to map Chinese history by reading environmental, historiographical, economic, ritual, and material landscapes of these three regions as part of a coherent story.  The analysis potentially has wide-ranging implications for how we understand other regions and eras of East Asian history, and how we conceptualize and study the topographies of the past. Flad was kind enough to talk with me about the book, and I hope you enjoy!

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America  (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Marga Vicedo explores the emergence of the science of children’s emotional needs in the twentieth century. Masterfully bringing together approaches from the history and philosophy of the biological sciences, Vicedo’s book focuses on British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907-1990), whose ethological work became one of the most influential and controversial psychological theories of the 20th century. Vicedo uses the story of Bowlby’s science to explore a broader modern history of work on animal and human behavior that includes Konrad Lorenz, Anna Freud, Benjamin Spock, and Niko Tinbergen, among others. Along the way, The Nature & Nurture of Love chronicles the emergence of a kind of anthropomorphic material culture of the human sciences, inhabiting its story with a fascinating cast of robots, dolls, geese, monkeys, and stuffed animals, as well as humans. It is a fascinating and gripping trans-disciplinary story and an absolute pleasure to read.

If you think about it, pretty much everything has a history insofar as everything exists in time. Historians, however, usually limit themselves to the history of humans and the things humans make. Occasionally, of course, they make forays into the history of animals, the environment and even the universe (see “Big History”), but these excursions are exceptions to the all-human rule. In Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV (Oxford UP, 2013), Dorothy H. Crawford–a biologist–breaks new historiographical ground by tracing the history of a virus, namely HIV. She is, naturally, interested in the tragic human story of HIV and AIDS. But her focus is on the virus itself. Where and when, she asks, was HIV born? In what populations did it live before it jumped to humans? And, most importantly, where and when did it jump to humans? Using an array of sophisticated tools, a group of biologists-cum-detectives were able to give credible answers to these historical questions. Crawford tells their story.

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Simon Newman takes us to the tiny Caribbean island of Barbados to trace the beginnings of African slavery in British America. The cotton slavery we know from the killing fields of Mississippi and Louisiana can be traced back to the sugar regimen that developed in Barbados. And that slavery, Newman shows, must be understood amidst the larger trajectory of bound labor in England and Scotland, and even in the British forts on Africa’s Gold Coast. A New World of Labor shows how the regime of bound servant labor — not the institution of West African slavery — provided the foundation for slavery as it developed in Britain’s New World plantation colonies.