New Books in History

[Cross-posted from New Books in Genocide Studies] Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies.  He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field:  the intentionalist/functionalist discussion about when, why and how the Germans decided to annihilate the Jews of Europe, and the question of why individual perpetrators killed. His new book, then, seems like something of a departure.  Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (W. W. Norton, 2010), examines the labor camp at Starachowice, Poland.  Starting before the Nazi invasion, Browning tracks the members of the Jewish community in the region throughout the war, from their  initial encounters with Nazi presence through their deportation to Auschwitz  to their eventual return (or not) to their homes after the war.   The book engages deeply questions of survival, resistance and community and family in the life of the Jewish captives. But, as Browning suggests during the interview, the book is really a continuation of his previous strategy of using case studies to shed light on questions of broad significance.  This time, by studying a labor camp, Browning is able to examine both the captives and those wo held them prisoner.  The result is  every bit as rich as his previous work. Browning speaks as carefully and thoughtfully as he writes.  We talked both about the story he tells in the book and some of the methodological issues he confronted in writing it.   There’s more in the book than we could get to in an hour.  I hope you’ll listen to the interview and then go out and read the book.

You sometimes see bumper stickers that say “What would Jesus do?”  It’s a good question, at least for Christians. You don’t see bumper stickers that say “What would Washington do?”  But that, Logan Beirne says, is a question Americans should be asking. In Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency (Encounter Books, 2013), Beirne shows that the American presidency was born as much out of the personality of one man–George Washington–as it was out of the political philosophies of the founding fathers. After all, the framers had never seen a presidency before–almost all previous states were led by monarchs, and that was not an option for the new American Republic. So they looked at Washington, what he had done during the Revolutionary War, and modeled the presidency after him. Not surprisingly since Washington was a military man, they got a presidency that was, well, rather martial. Listen in and find out why.

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] What can be gained from another biography of Abraham Lincoln? A lot, it turns out. Michael Burlingame has been researching the life and times of Abraham Lincoln during his entire career as a historian. As he explains in this interview, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Paperback; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) is based on decades of archival research, much of it stemming from the observations of personal secretaries, journalists, colleagues, and other people who knew Abraham Lincoln personally. Burlingame does not hesitate to make bold assessments about Lincoln’s personality, his relationship with his wife and father, and his evolution as a war leader.  Those interpretations, combined with new source materials and a highly readable style, will make this new biography the definitive one for Lincoln studies for years to come.

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Parthasarathi says that those forces were economic. English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn’t produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. They did. According to Parthasarath, the “Industrial Revolution” was born out of economic competition and innovation (with, of course, a helping hand from the state). That makes a lot of sense.

Terrorism seems like the kind of thing that has existed since the beginning of states some 5,000 years ago. Understood in one, narrow way–as what we call “insurgency”–it probably has. But modern terrorism is, well, modern as Martin A. Miller explains in The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society, and the Dynamics of Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Miller traces our kind of terrorism to the French Revolution or thereabouts, and specifically to the formation of the idea that “citizens” have a right (and indeed duty) to rebel against their wayward governments “by any means necessary.” Take that notion and another–that there are several different “legitimate” ways to organize governments–and you have modern terrorism: campaigns designed to change or overthrow governments that are deemed by political radicals to be acting illegitimately or to be wholly illegitimate.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010), Fabio Lanza offers a masterfully researched, elegantly written, and thoughtful consideration of the emergence of “students” as a category in twentieth-century China. Urging us to move away from a kind of historical view that takes the trans-historical existence of categories (like “students”), places (like cities or universities), and communities for granted, Lanza argues that it was only after and as a result of the May Fourth Movement and the events of 1919 that “students” emerged as a coherent notion connected with the specific spaces of the city of Beijing, Beijing University, and Tiananmen Square. The parts of the book successively introduce different sorts of space that were both produced by and helped generate the history that unfolds here, including everyday lived spaces, intellectual spaces, and political and social spaces. Lanza argues that new forms of everyday, lived practice in these spaces allowed student activism to emerge in the gaps where politics was separated from the state, and that the category of “students” as a signifier of a politics outside the state ended only with the government intervention ending the Red Guards in the late 1960s. In the course of this wonderfully readable history, we are offered glimpses into the classrooms and dorms of Beijing University, the bodily practices of early Beida students, and the streets of early twentieth-century Beijing. Enjoy!

[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts’ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of the D-Day landings and the months that followed. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013) draws on a wealth of material from French and American archives to show us that the war was an experience saturated with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Battles were critical, of course, but so too was sex. The American GI in war-torn France was a soldier, a tourist, a liberator, and also a destroyer. Military propaganda represented the Normandy campaign as a soldier’s opportunity for sexual adventure, framing the invasion and occupation of France in terms of the rescue of damsels in distress by heroic tough guys from a manly nation. Convinced of the hyper-sexuality of French women and culture, many American soldiers courted, paid for sex with, and even assaulted women they met in French homes, streets, hotels, and brothels. This is a book about what American GIs thought about France; what they did while they were “over there”; how French women and men received and responded to the “advances” of American troops; and the lasting impact of this complex set of encounters on individual lives, communities, and politics.

What do Margaret Thatcher, Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping, and Pope John Paul II have in common? At first thought, you wouldn’t think much. But according to Christian Caryl, they were all radicals who began to change the world in 1979. In Strange Rebels:1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (Basic Books, 2013), Caryl argues that these very different people from these very different places were brought together by one thing: a belief that the future would not be secular and socialist (as most of the old-line socialist and liberal establishment thought), but rather religious and capitalist. The Marxist project in all its forms, they said, had failed. People did not abandon their faiths, nor did they accept socialist economies. They wanted to worship and they wanted to be free. Thatcher, Khomeini, Xiaoping, and John Paul’s reactionary revolution, as it turned out, was successful. We live in the world they helped create.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by historical standards, high and our prisons are full of people–many of whom are hardly drug kingpins–who have violated drug laws. And, of course, it all costs a fortune. What to do? In her book The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), historian Kathleen J. Frydl argues that there is a better way to control drugs. She points out that prior to the “War on Drugs” the Federal government had controlled the distribution of narcotics and other drugs largely (though not entirely) by means of taxation. The “Federal Bureau of Narcotics” was a branch of the Department of the Treasury. The run up to Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and the war itself changed all that: enforcement of drug laws was transfered to the Department of Justice. Essentially, the Fed had criminalized drug distribution and use and told the states to aggessively pursue distributors and users, or else. According to Frydl, this was a disastrous move. Better, she says, to de-criminalize and even legalize drugs, control them by means of taxation, and support prevention and treatment initiatives. It’s a controversial position, and near the end of the interview we debate it at some length. I hope you enjoy the discussion.

Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an important part of social status and earning a living? What if, say, you couldn’t get married unless you had gone to war? What if, say, you couldn’t feed your family without raiding your enemies? Such was the case with Chiricahua Apache of the Southwest. As Lance R. Blyth shows in his terrific book Chirichahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880 (Nebraska UP, 2012), war was a necessary part of Chiricahua life, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries. They needed to fight the Spanish in Janos, and there was nothing the Spanish could really do to stop them, at least in the long term. Of course the Spanish–who were, it should be said, invaders–fought back. And so the two communities entered into a two century-long struggle that only ended with the “removal” of the Chiricahua Apache by the United States in the nineteenth century. Listen to Lance tell the fascinating story.

[Cross-posted from New Books in African American Studies] German military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz observed that many of the important variables in war exist in ‘clouds of great uncertainty’ which create disconnects and confusion that persist even after the fighting has ended. The conflict between the Black Panther Party and the United States government is in ways illustrative of this phenomenon–or ‘the fog of war’ as it has come to be called–and helps explain why the Party is so well known yet misunderstood. For many, the Black Panther Party exists in image fragments: bullet-pocked storefronts, raised fists, drawings of mutant-pig policemen, Huey P. Newton on a wicker throne. For others, it exists in biographies of its leaders: Revolutionary Suicide, Seize the Time, This Side of Glory, A Taste of Power, just to name a few. Historians and political theorists have weighed in as well exploring the excesses of COINTELPRO, the failures of party leaders, gender inequity, missed opportunities, failed alliances, and endless betrayals. Yet there is still much to learn. In Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2013),  authors Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin do an excellent job of putting the movement in its historical and philosophical context as not merely a challenge to American racism, but to American empire. Joshua was kind enough to speak to us about his book. I hope you enjoy.

You may have heard of a fellow named Ivan or John Demjanuik. He made the news–repeatedly over a 30 year period– because he was, as many people probably remember, a Nazi war criminal nick-named “Ivan the Terrible” for his brutal treatment of Jews (and others) in the Sobibor death camp. The trouble is, as Richard Rashke points out in his new book Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals (Delphinium, 2013), Demjanuik was not a Nazi, was not “Ivan the Terrible,” and, though he was certainly a guard at Sobibor, it’s not entirely clear what he did (though it was likely very bad). Again and again he was brought to trial for his alleged crimes. Again and again the courts failed to agree on what he had done. Demjaniuk was and remains something of a mystery, a vital mystery that we badly want to solve but cannot. After all, we need to know who is a war criminal and who is not. What’s most interesting about Demjaniuk–at least to this reader–is the moral complexity of his story. As Rashke shows, he was repeatedly compelled to make life and death choices as he tried to stay survive in Stalinist Russia, in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, and even after the war. He had options, but they were almost always bad ones, and often deadly ones. He was a “collaborator” to be sure. But, Rashke asks, what exactly is a “collaborator”? Could he have chosen differently and hoped to survive? Could he have acted “morally” in the context within which he found himself? Rashke says “yes.” Listen in and find out why.

When I went to college long ago, everyone had to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I think I read it in half-a-dozen classes. Today Marx is out.  Benedict Anderson, however, is in. You’d be hard-pressed to get a college degree without reading or at least hearing about his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). That book says, in a phrase, that nations were invented, and quite recently at that. The trouble is that according to Azar Gat, Anderson is wrong. In his new book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Gat musters a significant amount of evidence suggesting that humans are more-or-less hardwired for kin and ethnic preference–we’ve always liked people who look, talk and act like “us” more than “strangers” because we are built to do so. We didn’t “invent” the nation; it was–and remains–in us. Moreover, he shows that the historical record itself makes clear that something like nations have been with us since the state appeared 5,000 years ago. To be sure, their form has; but they were always around. This is important for the way we think about the world today. Marx thought classes were going to disappear  They didn’t. Anderson and those who follow him seem to think that nations are going to disappear. They aren’t.

Nicholas Popper’s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven of his many years of incarceration in the Tower of London excerpting, rearranging, editing, and recopying passages from his 500+ volume library to produce a book that has been read and interpreted in many different (and sometimes conflicting) ways in the hundreds of years since its initial printing. Popper’s book uses a very focused account of the texture of this single book as a basis from which to offer a wonderfully expansive account of the practices of history in the Renaissance, and the ways that Ralegh’s work and associated practices of historical analysis ultimately transformed European politics, religion, and scholarship. Along the way, there are fascinating accounts of the origins of the modern archival mode of historiography, the differences between causal and narrative accounts of the past, and the many ways that early modern historical practices were inextricable from scriptural exegesis. Popper’s study is both inspired by the methods and insights of the historiography of science, and offers a way to think about the practices of knowledge-production that help identify what we’re talking about when we talk about early modern “science.” Enjoy!

Americans love Prague. They visit and have even moved there in considerable numbers. They like the place for a lot of reasons. One is that Prague is a very beautiful city. But another is that the Czech Republic has a widespread repuation in the U.S. (and more generally, I think) as a very liberal, democratic place. Czechs, we think, are different and long have been. In many ways, they are, of course. But as Mary Heimann suggests in her controversial book Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed (Yale UP, 2009; paperback, 2011), the Czechs (and Slovaks) were not as exceptional, historically speaking, as many think, and certainly not as exceptional as some historians have led us to believe. Czechoslovakia was not immune to some of the more harmful movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth century–strident nationalism, fascism, and communism among them. Sometimes Czech and Slovak leaders acted liberally and democratically; sometimes they did not. In that way, they were like all their European neighbors, that is, not exceptional at all. Listen to Mary explain why.