New Books in History

Superstitions flourish in our world—think of the elaborate rituals of baseball players, or knocking wood to avoid tempting fate, or that bit of happiness (or relief) we might experience from finding a lucky (heads up only!) penny. Yet it is part of the mythology of modernity that ours is a “disenchanted” age (or at least so said German sociologist Max Weber in a famous 1918 lecture). Since the Enlightenment, there has been a tradition of invoking a superstitious Middle Ages as a supposed counterpoint to “our” own rationalized and intellectualized times (to paraphrase Weber). The Middle Ages was one of the historical entities against which European modernity in many senses constituted itself, and it continues popularly to be imagined as uniformly saturated with superstition. Yet as Michael D. Bailey’s latest book, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 2013) shows, that age had its own, highly developed, intellectually rigorous and contentiously debated notions of what was superstitious in practice and in thought. In the book, Bailey looks at how university-based academics and clerics, using the systematizing methods of scholasticism, formulated ideas about what was superstitious over two centuries—between, roughly, 1300 and 1500. He offers us, in other words, a history of evolving ideas of superstition and of what was considered superstitious by the most learned men of that era. Much as the category of superstition has been used to establish and manage putative boundaries between modern and not, late medieval scholars and clerics debated superstition—locating it in practices as varied as learned astrology, necromancy, and everyday medicinal charms—to patrol the shifting boundaries both of legitimate science and of proper religion.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asia Studies] James A. Milward’s new book offers a thoughtful and spirited history of the silk road for general readers. The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013) is part of the Oxford “A Very Short Introduction” series. The book is organized into six chapters that each take a different thematic approach to narrating aspects of silk road history from 3000 BCE to the twenty-first century, collectively offering a kind of snapshot introduction to major conceptual approaches to world history writing. In the course of learning about the Xiongnu and the history of dumplings, then, the reader simultaneously gets a crash course in environmental, political, bio-cultural, technological, and artisanal historiographies. Millward has filled the pages of this concise and very readable text with evocative (and sometimes very funny) stories, vignettes, and objects from the historical routes of Central Eurasia, weaving together the histories of lutes, horses, and silkworms with a sensitive and critical reading of the modern historiography of the Eurasian steppe. Enjoy!

[Cross-posted from New Books in Biography] The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challenges of writing biography- one must become expert on so many things- and also one of the pleasures of reading it: the fact that a biography can reveal something not simply about another person, but also provide an in-depth glimpse into other worlds. Such is the case with Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite‘s Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) which, in the course of exploring a grisly unsolved murder, immerses the reader in the 1930s Paris underworld. In 1937, Laetitia Toureaux was discovered in the first class car of a Métro train with a 9-inch knife stuck in her neck. In Murder in the Métro, Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite untangle Toureaux’s complicated life—she was, at one time, simultaneously spying for the Italian government, the Paris police, and the French terrorist organization the Cagoule—in an effort to give a plausible explanation for how and why she might have died. However, their work extends beyond sleuthing; Murder in the Métro is a gripping story, but it’s also an effort to call scholarly attention to the use of terrorism during France’s Third Republic and, following World War II, the subsequent downplaying—even, at times, obfuscation—of such acts. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite write that, in 1937, Toureaux’s life and death “offered a perfect tableau for the press to explore and expound upon the issues of gender and, to a lesser extent, class.” Today, she still acts as a tableau of sorts, her history merging with that of the Cagoule to provide a canvas from which scholars—with Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite leading the charge—can explore the nuances of the times in which she lived: a period marked by progress and innovation, but also violence and political unrest, all set against the clouds of a fast-approaching war.

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] Is there an institution in the United States that enjoys a better reputation than the American Red Cross? In her thorough, accessible new book The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), Marian Moser Jones (associate professor of family science, University of Maryland School of Public Health) traces the history of the American Red Cross as a humanitarian relief organization. The book shows how the ARC developed from a local, national organization into one with worldwide scope. As it did, it had to cope with trials that challenged its original structure and mission. Progressives and professionals contested Clara Barton’s informal style of leadership and management. Crises oversees and domestically put tension on the ARC’s commitment to maintaining neutrality in order to preserve access to the suffering. And the increasing scope of federal and state authority forced it to rethink it’s role in an increasingly crowded humanitarian marketplace.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Religion] Jesus has inspired millions of people to both strive for social justice and commit horrific acts of violence. In the United States, Jesus has remained central in the construction of American identities and debates about Jesus have frequently revolved around his skin color and bodily appearance. In The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), we get a history of Americans’ encounters with images of Jesus and the creation of them. Edward J. Blum, professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, professor of history at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have carefully mined a plethora of sources, including paintings, drawings, music, poetry, sermons, visions, and other historical documents, to reveal the rich conversation Americans have had around religion and race. The Color of Christ offers a chronological history from the colonial period to the present that weaves through the construction of Jesus’ image in various Christian groups consisting of primarily white members, and appropriations and challenges within Native Americans and African Americans communities. In our chat, Blum and Harvey discuss the ups and downs of American religious history, offering various vignettes of Jesus’ role in determining opinions about race. They also help us think about being an author, including issues of public scholarship, hustling as an academic, creating a book website, successful peer review, editorial control, and co-writing a book.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Genocide Studies] Few history books sell better than biographies of Nazi leaders. They attract anyone even tangentially interested in World War Two or Nazi Germany.  It’s not surprising, then, that there are dozens of biographies of Himmler, Goering, and Hitler himself. Oddly, though, Reinhard Heydrich is relatively understudied.  Robert Gerwarth’s wonderful new biography of Heydrich, titled Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (Yale UP, 2012), fills this gap admirably.  Gerwarth’s book is part of a new wave of serious biographies that have appeared in the last years.  All are characterized by a thoughtful engagement with recent research on the Holocaust.  All devote considerable attention to their subjects’ lives in the period before the Nazi takeover.  All emphasize the choices made by their subjects and the way these choices were not predetermined.  Hitler’s Hangman is an outstanding example of this new scholarship. Gerwarth’s work, in particular, is distinguished by its particularly effective writing.  He synthesizes a great deal of information gracefully, a demanding task in a biography this concise.  At the same time, he preserves space for anecdotes and details that illuminate his topic and add color to his narrative. Hitler’s Hangman has been widely praised by reviewers across the spectrum.  It is praise that is richly deserved.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Matthew Mosca’s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of Qing and global history. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press, 2013) traces a shift in the Qing state’s external relations from a “frontier policy” at the height of the Qianlong Emperor’s power in the middle of the eighteenth century, to a “foreign policy” by the time Qing scholars, officials, and rulers of the mid-nineteenth century perceived the weakness of their empire when faced with European rivals. At the crux of this change, Mosca demonstrates, was a major shift in the way the empire collected and interpreted information about the world both within and beyond Qing borders. With Qianlong’s death, private Qing scholars who began to take an interest in the empire’s administration transformed the geographical epistemology of the empire, creating a standardized geographical lexicon, a means of reconciling diverse place names in many different languages, and a way of comparing different local reports on major events that were impacting the state. Mosca illustrates this history by taking the Qing understanding of India (and British activities therein) as a case study, but the book is absolutely not limited to the case of India in the scope of its arguments and the potential reach of its conclusions about Qing geopolitics. Readers from beyond the field of Chinese studies will find useful discussions here of multiple Qing modes of cartography, geography, and lexicography that inform a broader historical epistemology of the early modern world. Enjoy!

When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant they traded property for money, yes. But that would make everyone who traded things for money over the past, say, 5,000 years, a “proto-capitalist.” If it meant that they thought of their property as capital to be used for maximizing profit, then no. As Martha C. Howell points out in her excellent Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge UP, 2010), early modern merchants–at least in the Low Countries–didn’t really think of their property as “capital” at all, and they certainly didn’t use it exclusively for the maximization of profit. Their idea of property was, according to Howell, as much medieval as modern. Essentially, they adapted received (medieval) categories of property to novel commercial conditions. The result was a unique hybrid of the old and new. In hindsight, their understanding of property might seem “proto-capitalist.” But really it was just the way they conceived of property.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Military History] Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military culture and absolutism. By examining the frequent civil wars of the early seventeenth century in France, Sandberg demonstrates that the French nobility were neither merely resisting the spread of the absolutist state nor sitting idly by while modern economic and military forces swept them into obscurity. Rather, by examining the many local and regional conflicts of the era, Sandberg shows that the French nobles of the era were capable actors in a complex arena dominated by a culture of honor, sophisticated systems of credit, and dangerous civil conflicts.

For decades, the American Right and Left argued about the degree to which the KGB infiltrated the U.S. political and scientific establishment. The Right said “A lot”; the Left said “Much less than you think.” Both sides did a lot of finger-pointing and, sadly, slandering. Things got very ugly. At the crux of the problem, though, was a lack of reliable information about exactly what the KGB had done and how successful (or not) they had been in recruiting Americans. That changed in the mid-1990s. The United States de-classified the results of the “Venona Project,”–an intelligence initiative that involved the surveillance of secret Soviet cable traffic during World War Two–and Alexander Vassiliev, a Russian journalist, made his notebooks on KGB activities in the U.S. available to researchers. For the first time, scholars such as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr could measure the success of KGB spying in the U.S. during the Cold War. The results are eye-opening, as Haynes and Klehr explain in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press, 2009). Though it’s probably unwise to speak of “winners and losers” in the debate over KGB spying in the U.S., Haynes and Klehr show that the Soviets, though often bungling, had done a pretty fair job of tapping sympathetic American Leftists and stealing American secrets. That said, they also discovered that some of those the Right had accused of spying (e.g., Robert Oppenheimer) were in fact innocent. This is a fascinating book and should be read by everyone interested in Cold War espionage.

[Cross-posted from New Books in African American Studies] The American Temperance Movement remains an interesting and important topic. Considering the various attitudes that influenced laws about alcohol sale and consumption of the past are often referred to when reviewing issues related to liquor legislation today. However, what may not be as readily considered is the role that interracial race relations affected and may still impact legislation today. In H. Paul Thomspon Jr.’s A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865-1887 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), we are given a front row seat to a 22 year period, from the end of slavery to the failure of Reconstruction, when blacks and whites in Atlanta, Georgia, were negotiating, wrangling and vying for various iterations of temperance, from prohibition to anti-prohibition. Thompson uncovers not only the role that race played in this period, but that religion and region (the North’s relationship to the South) played as well. This fascinating read is sure to capture the attention of any interested in religion, or region, or race, or prohibition during this fascinating and important period of history.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] “This is a history of promises.” So begins Nathaniel Comfort’s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history of the twentieth century. Based on a rich documentary and oral history archive, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale University Press, 2012) reframes the histories of early and contemporary human genetics. Rather than treating eugenics as “a contaminant of good, honest biomedicine,” the book shows that early human genetics had many of the same basic goals – human improvement and the relief of suffering – as genetic medicine today. At the same time, contemporary genetic medicine emerges as much less benign than it has often been depicted. All of this is accomplished through a sensitive historical tracing of two major approaches to understanding human heredity through the twentieth century: a Galtonian approach characterized by a concern with quantification, public health, and populations; and a Garrodian approach characterized by an interest in conceptualizing the human as individual, and in synthesizing heredity with other forms of knowledge. As we follow these threads along with Comfort, he introduces us to a bookful of colorful, vibrant characters from the history of medical genetics: the idealistic inventor of a “Gumption Reviver,” the sanitarium-operator who was fond of prescribing yogurt-enemas, and the medical geneticist with a talent for boogie-woogie piano, among others. These figures are embedded in an exceptionally carefully-wrought narrative of the spaces, practices, and events by which medicine became genetic, genetics became molecular, and molecules made the engineering of humanity possible in a new way. In the course of our discussion, we talked about the importance, for Comfort, of paying careful attention to elements of the writer’s craft when composing a historical work. The John McPhee essay on narrative structure that was mentioned in that part of the interview can be found here (A subscription to the New Yorker is required to read the full piece.) The Oral History of Human Genetics Project can be found here.

When Americans go overseas, they know just who they are–Americans. But what was it like for a citizen of the United States to go abroad before there was a clear idea of what an “American” was? This is one (among many) of the fascinating questions Daniel Kilbride addresses in his equally fascinating book Being American in Europe: 1750-1860 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). In the Revolutionary Period and for some decades after, Americans–nearly all affluent and white–went to Europe to see the “Old World” and to figure out who they were. They knew that their culture was in some sense European, but they did their best to tease out differences that would give them an “American” identity. Some admired Europe; some despised it. All saw themselves in it.

[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940 (Stanford University Press, 2013), historian Elizabeth Foster draws on a wealth of archival material to reveal the interests and negotiations of key powerbrokers in the colony from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Emphasizing the heterogeneity of French rule and the significance of local agency in its various forms, Foster interrogates the relationship between métropole and colony while exploring a religious landscape in Senegal that included French, African, and métis Catholics; Muslims; and animists. The book’s chapters explore a variety of fascinating themes and events, from a scandal involving a nun accused of becoming pregnant in 1886, to the trial of an African accused of murdering a Wolof agent of the French empire, to the impact of the First World War and the Popular Front in colonial Senegal. Rethinking French republicanism, laicité, and assimilation in their colonial manifestations during the Third Republic, Faith in Empire has much to offer readers interested in debates about the imperial past and its legacies; historical and contemporary struggles over secularism; and the complicated relationship between religion and politics in France.

Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical part of the “American Experience?” In his fascinating book Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America (Nebraska University Press, 2013), Lawrence R. Samuel examines the arrival, remarkable growth, and transformation of psychoanalysis in the United States. As Samuel shows, Americans have a kind of love-hate relationship with their “shrinks”: sometimes they love them and sometimes they loath them. The “shrinks” seem to know that their clients are fickle, and so they “re-brand” their technique with some regularity. Sometimes it’s “analysis,” sometimes it’s “therapy,” sometimes it’s just “counseling.” But, regardless of what it’s called, it’s always some variation on the “talking cure” and it can always be traced to Freud.