New Books in History

It takes two to tango, right? Indeed it does. But it’s also true that someone has got to ask someone else to dance before any tangoing is done. Beginning in the 1960s, the American intellectual elite argued–and seemed to really believe–that the United States either started the Cold War full stop or played a very important (and knowing) role in setting it in motion. That consensus (if it was a consensus) has been destroyed by the work of a raft of historians who, having gotten fresh access to materials from the Soviet side, are now offering fresh–and revisionist–interpretations of the beginnings of the Cold War. One such historian is Robert Gellately. In his new book Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Knopf, 2013), Gellately argues that Stalin saw the world in binary terms: there were capitalists and communists. ALL the capitalists were bad. This was obviously true of the Nazi Germans. But it was also true of his wartime allies, the Democratic Americans, British, and French.  So when the war against the Germans was won, Stalin knew just what to do: stay the course and continue fighting for world communism against the capitalist imperialists. And, according to Gellately, that’s just what he did, beginning the Cold War and nearly making it hot one a number of occasions. Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] Brumaire. Ventôse. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican calendar that became official in 1793 (the calendar was back-dated to 1792, or Year I). In The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sanja Perovic explores the history and meanings of the republican calendar as a representation of the complexities of revolutionaries’ understandings of past, present, and future. As she examines the tensions between linear and cyclical visions of time during this pivotal period in French and world history, Perovic considers the calendar as both an object and an ideological project. The book is a history of the calendar itself and also a literary, intellectual, and political biography of Sylvain Maréchal, a revolutionary who played a pivotal role in the development of the new temporal order. Anyone who has ever wanted to know more about the massive cultural and political shifts of the French Revolution will be interested in reading this book. Perovic’s narrative and arguments speak to a wide range of scholarship on republican values and culture, as well as to the broader periodization and historiography of the French Revolution. At the same time, the book reaches further, reading the republican calendar as exemplary of the bigger picture of modern temporality, offering the reader much to think about in terms of the time structures and habits we use to understand our daily lives and our places in history.

[Cross-posted from New Books in African American Studies] The story of the rise of Jim Crow in Jacksonville, Florida is in many ways illustrative of the challenges facing newly emancipated African Americans throughout the South with local officials erecting barriers to black participation; blacks building institutions to overcome those obstacles; then Southern bigots using the reaction of blacks as justification for both the initial barriers and further draconian measures. This usually involved labeling black political action as in some way primitive, corrupt or unfairly self-interested. For example, many in the white establishment in Jacksonville resented that blacks voted for Republicans out of loyalty, yet they also attacked blacks for voting for ‘reform Democrats’ out of self -interest. So, the solution? Political education of some kind? Outreach perhaps? No, instead they implemented what was called the ‘Australian ballot’: a subway map style list of candidates with intersecting names and titles intended to either confuse or disqualify many black voters. This hostility to black political agency extended to all aspects of public life in Jacksonville, with each reaction forcing blacks further from power and from view. Robert Cassanello’s  To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville (University Press of Florida, 2013) explores this dynamic in rich detail, helping further our understanding of the post Civil War but pre- Civil Rights era in the South. Robert was kind enough to speak with me. I hope you enjoy.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What followed has become one of the most well-known accounts in the history of science and one of the most famous trials of twentieth-century America. In Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Adam R. Shapiro urges us to look beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both.  The story begins with a pair of Pinkerton detectives spying on a pair of textbook salesmen in the Edwards Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. Shapiro brings us from that hotel room into a series of classrooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms while exploring the battle over textbook reform in the twentieth-century US. Based on a close reading of high school curricular materials around the discipline of botany, with special attention to the emergence of “civic botany” as a pedagogical field, Shapiro’s book uses the debates over pedagogy, evolution, and the textbook industry to explore a number of issues that are of central importance to the history of science: the construction of authorship, the histories of reading practices, the co-emergence of economies and technologies, and the ways that urban and rural localities shape the nature of sciences and their publics. It is a gripping, moving, and enlightening story. Enjoy!

Presidents, you know, are people too. They read the newspaper (including the sports page and the funnies), settle in with books (yes, beach reading too), watch movies and TV (after all, they have a private theatre in the White House), and listen to music (“President Obama, what’s on your iPod?”). Ordinarily, we don’t pay a lot of attention to this sort of stuff, even in the White House. It can be funny in a “human interest story” sort of way,  but it’s rarely ever seen as important for understanding how our most important leaders lead. This neglect–or, rather, trivialization–of presidents’ popular cultural tastes, according to Tevi Troy, is a mistake. In his fascinating book What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House (Regency, 2013), Tevi not only tell us about the reading, watching, and tweeting habits of our Commanders-in-chief, but also why it has mattered and continues to do so. Listen in.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] During the interwar period (1918-1937), the city began to take its modern shape in Japan. At the same time, development in the Japanese provinces became a capitalist frontier in a new phase of industrial revolution. In Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (University of California Press, 2013), Louise Young traces these phenomena in an innovative and fluid narrative that is also a pleasure to read.  Young shifts our focus beyond Tokyo, the city that usually looms large in studies of Japanese modernity, and instead explores the worlds and the archives of the provincial city. Focusing on Sapporo, Kanazawa, Okayama, and Niigata, Young’s book is a fascinating study of the city as material network and social imaginary. The narrative celebrates and respects local differences in these very different urban localities, while at the same time tracing the emergence of shared spatial and temporal ways of living in the world. It is a careful, sensitive, and important study, and it changed the way I think about locality and Japan in history. Enjoy!

Kate Brown’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities—one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)—united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites’ hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people’s willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights—civil and biological—for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer’s alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] The book opens on a scene in the mountains of Gumna, Japan. A midwife kneels next to a mother who has just given birth, and she proceeds to strangle the newborn. It’s an arresting way to begin an inspiring new book by Fabian Drixler. Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950 (University of California Press, 2013) weaves together demographic analysis and cultural history to chart the transformations in infanticide, population, and society in Japan from the late seventeenth century through the twentieth century. Focusing on Eastern Japan as a unit of analysis, Mabiki bases its narrative on a rich source base compiled with the help of the work of “a thousand local historians.” In a rich account of cultures of family planning in Eastern Japan, Drixler both challenges dominant theories of fertility transitions in demographic history, while at the same time redefining what “fertility” might mean as a historical object. It is a fascinating book that speaks to a wide range of readers interested in the histories and life cycles of birth and death as locally emergent objects. Enjoy!

As you can read in any Russian history textbook, a series of seventeenth-century tsars culminating in Peter the Great attempted to “modernize” Russia. This is not false: the Romanovs did initiate a great wave of “Europeanizing” reforms. But it’s not exactly true either in the sense that they–the tsars themselves–didn’t generally do the work of Europeanizing reform because they knew next to nothing about Europe (Peter being something of an exception). In order to import and assimilate European institutions, the Russian elite needed, well, Europeans. In his fascinating book Moderniser of Russia: Andrei Vinius, 1641-1716 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Kees Boterbloem explores the life of an on-the-ground reformer who was perfectly fit to do the tsars’ reformist bidding–Andrei Vinius. He was not only European (Dutch, in fact), but he was also Russian (having been raised in Russia). Vinius was there at nearly every moment of top-down attempt to reform Muscovy. By investigating his life, however, we get to see the reform process from below. Just how was it done? Read Kees’ terrific book and find out.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Religion] Christians in the United States and around the world have varying images of Jesus, from one who turns the other cheek to one who brings the sword. Reza Aslan, in his highly popular and beautifully written new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House, 2013), approaches Jesus by first taking the context in which he lived – first-century Palestine – quite seriously. Aslan argues that Jesus’ time was one awash in a fervent nationalism that is important for understanding the man as well as his message. It is not a book about the Jesus of the Gospels. Indeed it is not even a book about Christianity. Rather, Aslan’s book attempts to grapple with how Jesus understood himself and his role during a volatile period in history. Zealot has shot to the best seller lists in recent weeks, partly due to a controversial interview Reza Aslan gave to Fox News during which he was questioned about why a Muslim would be interested in writing a book about the founder of Christianity. We also talk to Reza about his earlier books, No god but God and How to Win a Cosmic War, as well as his two edited collections, Tablet & Pen and Muslims and Jews in America. We talk to him about growing up Iranian, while pretending to be Mexican, in the United States during the 1980s, about graduate school, about Fox News and Islamophobia, and about writing for a popular audience, being a public intellectual, and the challenges involved with such endeavors.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Genocide] Hitler famously said about the Armenian genocide “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” For much of the last 75 years, few people did in fact speak of it.  When they did, the discussion largely revolved around the question of whether the killing deserved the label of genocide.  Scholarly analysis did exist.  But, in the public mind, it was largely swallowed up in a bitter debate about how to label, remember and interpret these events.  Tuning out the vitriolic rhetoric, many of my students thought about Armenia only in the context of the lessons Hitler apparently drew from it. This has gradually begun to change as historians and social scientists such as Taner Akça and Vahakn Dadrian have turned their attention to Armenia.  The book that forms the subject of today’s interview–A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2011), edited by Ronald Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman Naimark– is an outstanding example of this new scholarship.  All three have a deep and long-lasting engagement with the subject and have played an important role in creating a dispassionate dialogue about the genocide. A Question of Genocide forms one of the important outcomes of this dialogue.  Its essays are  models of careful analysis and research.  Rather than attempting to present a complete narrative of events, they engage specific locations, questions or subjects.  They demand careful attention and reflection.   But, put together, they offer an excellent synopsis of the state of research and opinion on the period and subject.

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] Deservedly or not, the members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) are often portrayed as one of history’s Good Guys. The Society was the first organized religious group to condemn slavery on moral and religious grounds. In Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730-1865 (University Press of Florida, 2012), Glenn Crothers probes below that simple idea to study how Quakers in a slave society–a lion’s mouth –coped with the inevitable tensions.  How did they deal with their slaveholding neighbors?  How did those neighbors cope with Quakers who–while very nice, hardworking, and honest folk–also condemned slavery as a sin against God?

We all know that the “victors” generally write history. The “losers,” then, often get a bum rap. Such was the case with King James II. He’s got a pretty poor reputation, largely due to the purveyors of the “Whig Interpretation of History.” They claimed that James II was a tyrant who tried to impose Catholicism on the United Kingdom. But, as Scott Sowerby shows in his new book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013), James II was really no such thing. Actually, he was the head of a movement to repeal many of religious restrictions (the “Test Act”) put in place after the Civil War. He favored toleration, at least of a limited sort. Listen to Scott tell his story and that of the “repealers.”

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] Scholars have pointed to various historical ingredients they see as necessary for the development of modern sport: political changes that allowed people to form associations, the rise of competitive capitalism, an emphasis on calculation and measurement, the advance of secularization.  But this attention to economic, social, and political factors has missed one important piece.  For games to have become modern, participants first had to think like moderns.  The peasant who had once celebrated seasonal festivals with some village game had to become an individual player—someone who wanted to beat his opponents, show off his prowess, and bask in the cheers. Historian Peter Hansen makes this point in his study of mountain climbing, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2013).  Prior to the 1700s, mountain peaks had been the preserve of gods and kings, while their crags and caves had been the hiding places of demons and spirits.  Even the miners and shepherds who worked in the mountains for centuries did not climb to the summits.  Why would they bother?  According to Peter, the birth of the modern sport of mountaineering thus required a fundamental change in thinking.  People had to look up at a peak and want to reach it, just for the sake of being at the top, and they had to think of themselves as able to do it. Peter’s book is a sweeping account of the history of mountain climbing and its connections to modern culture, from the first attempts to scale the Alps in the 18th century to mountaineering in the current age of climate change.  He focuses on two episodes in that history: the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786 by Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, and the 1953 climb of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.  As we learn in the interview, there are striking parallels between these two important chapters in mountaineering.  Above all, both feats tap into our fascination with high places and the solitary climber at the top.

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] What is a celebrity? And how has the definition of celebrity changed over the course of American history? Those questions are central to Charlene M. Boyer-Lewis‘s book Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Patterson, a beautiful and brilliant young woman from Baltimore, married Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, when she was only eighteen. They were quickly divorced at the emperor’s insistence, but her story does not end there. As  Boyer-Lewis shows, this strong-willed and opinionated woman created a cult of celebrity around herself, centered on her self-conscious adoption of aristocratic ways. Her story illuminates the ambivalence about aristocracy, the scope of women’s action, the nature of fame and celebrity, and the complexities of father-daughter relationships in the early American republic.