New Books in History

At the end of World War II, the Western Allies seized pretty much every official German document they could find and moved the lot out of Germany and often overseas. They had, effectively, taken the German past. And they kept it for the better part of a decade. Why did they take the records and why did they eventually return them? In her fascinating book The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Astrid M. Eckert explains. The Western Allies saw that the archives could be used for a number of purposes: military intelligence (the Germans knew a lot about the Soviets), occupational administration, prosecuting war criminals, and making sure that the history of World War II was written just the way they wanted it written. And they used them in all these ways. The Germans, of course, wanted their documents back. They wanted to write their own history. But the Western Allies were skeptical that the Germans could really manage their archives (many German archivists had been active Nazis) or portray their past truthfully (it was, after all, a rather ugly past). In the end, the Allies relented and the archives were given back, new archivists were trained, and Germans faced their past themselves.

When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was there to “make the scene,” which is to say see and be seen by my peers. As Jennifer Hall-Witt explains in her fascinating book Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), that’s apparently why English notables went to the opera in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They dressed up, went out, and “made the scene.” All the while there was an opera being performed, but it doesn’t seem anyone was paying close attention to it. They milled about, traded glances, visited each other’s boxes, talked, joked and generally had a good time. That all changed in the second half of the century. Most significantly, people began to watch and listen to the opera instead of each other. Jennifer tells us why.

There is exactly one strong woman in the movie “The Godfather,” and she’s not Italian. (It’s “Kay Adams,” played by the least Italian-looking actress alive, Diane Keaton.) Such is the stereotype about Italian women, at least in the U.S. They are always in the background, sometimes cooking for la famiglia, sometimes counting rosary beads, sometimes simply missing (as in the case of “The Godfather” films). Alas, it’s all wrong. In her pathbreaking book Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Smith College historian Jennifer Guglielmo dives into the archives to show that before the First World War Italian women were at the forefront of radical, predominantly socialist politics in the New York City region. They organized parties and unions; protested and marched for fairness and against injustice; they struck and stood fast on the picket line; they wrote and published newspapers, flyers and books. And, in their daily lives, they tried as best they could to “live the Revolution.” As Jennifer points out, though, Italian women had to adapt. The ways they did so involved becoming both American and “white.” It’s a fascinating story remarkably well told. I urge you to read it.

Though most people would rightly consider capitalists to be the founders and masters of the science of “marketing,” communists had to try their hands at it as well. In the Soviet Union, they had a particularly “hard sell.” The Party promised freedom, peace, and prosperity; it delivered oppression, war, and poverty. So how do make people believe in what will be rather than what manifestly is? David Brandenberger explores how the Party did it in his terrific book Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin (Yale University Press, 2012). The answer, in short, is badly. At first, the message they sent–clashing -isms, class struggle, “contradictions”–was too abstract for most folks on the street. The people wanted heros. So the Soviet propagandists gave them heros: flyers, arctic explorers, and, of course Lenin and the “Old” Bolsheviks. That worked pretty well until Stalin et al. began to kill the heroes in the Purges. The problem wasn’t that dead heroes don’t make good heroes. They do. Discredited dead heros, however, an another story. They can’t be heros at all. In fact, they have to be rubbed out of history  entirely. And so they were. So, once “the dialectic” campaign had failed and the “heroes” campaign had foundered, what was left for the propagandists to work with. Well, Stalin still worked, and he in fact crowded most everyone out of the picture (“Father of Nations!” “Universal Genius!” “Greatest General of All Time!”). But was that enough? Perhaps not. So the propagandists fell back on some very bourgeois totems: the Church and Nation. See how they did it in David’s wonderful book!

Every person must confront death; the only question is how that person will do it. In our culture (I speak as an American here), we don’t really do a very good job of it. We face death by fighting it by any and every means at our disposal. Why we do this is hard to figure, as the struggle against death is often terribly painful (not to mention costly) and always futile. In his new book In Heaven as it is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012), Samuel Morris Brown tells us how Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, told his followers to prepare for and confront death. It didn’t come to him all at once. A certain amont of what would become Mormon dogma was revealed to him; a certain amount was borrowed from other creeds; and a certain amount was Smith’s own invention. The doctrine he evolved was profoundly humane. He rejected the idea that we would meet our maker alone. God gave us families and he would never, ever take them away. In heaven, God would re-unite us with our kin and we would enjoy, effectively, eternal life in the bosom of our loved ones. There was, therefore, nothing to fear in death, for it was but a continuation of life, albeit more perfect for being in the proximity of God. I don’t know if it is easier for Mormons to die than for the rest of us, but I can easily imagine that it is.

You’ve probably heard of the Berkeley, The Village, and Haight-Ashbury. That’s where “the scene” was in the late 1960s, right? But have you heard of Yorkville? I hadn’t until I’d read Stuart Henderson‘s terrific social history Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s (University of Toronto Press, 2011). Turns out (and, Canadians, pardon my ignorance) that Canada had its own “scene” and it was in the Yorkville district of Toronto. Henderson, who is the L.R. Wilson Fellow in department of history at MacMaster University, does a remarkable job of tracing the rise and fall of Yorkville as a kind of “counter-cultural” capital. He also shows how Yorkville was part of a more general international cultural movement, one that spread all over North America and the World. The book is a fascinating look at a significant moment on Canadian and international history.

What is a historian? How are they trained? What do they do? What should they do? Are they doing it well? These important questions addressed in James M. Banner, Jr.‘s excellent Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Banner knows whereof he speaks: he’s been working historical trade in various capacities (far more varied than most, I’m happy to say) for half a century. He’s a careful observer, a trenchent critic, and (something I found refreshing) an unrelenting optimist. In this interview he talks about the historical discipline, professional historians, and historians (including history majors!) working in a great variety of occupations. If you are a thinking about studying history, already study history, or are in one of the historical trades, you would do well to read this book.

Alan Christy [Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] We don’t often make the chance to properly acknowledge the importance of translation to the understanding of history, let alone to talk about it at any length. Alan Christy has done a wonderful service in his careful, elegant, and accessible translation of Amino Yoshihiko’s Rethinking Japanese History (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2012). Originally a two-volume Japanese text published in the mid-1990s, Amino’s work is a clearly written account of major themes in Japanese historiography. It is full of the evidence of his self-reflexivity as a scholar who was perpetually learning and transforming his own understanding of history, and simultaneously eager to share that knowledge to help others forge their own paths through the history of Japan and beyond. The chapters range across many topics – pirates and bandits, maritime history, the nature of writing, the assumptions of “agrarian fundamentalism,” pollution, women in history – all the while keeping a thematic cohesion around key points that were central to Amino’s work as a historian. In our conversation, Christy and I spoke about many of these key themes, as well as the practice of translating Amino’s work and the importance of a historiographical mode that is in conversation with ethnographic practice. It is a fascinating work that deserves wide recognition, and it was a great pleasure to talk with Christy about it. Enjoy!

When I was a kid I loved the movie “The Flying Tigers.” You know, the one with John Wayne about the intrepid American volunteers sent to China to fight the Japanese before the United States really could fight the Japanese. I recall building a model of one of their P-40 Warhawks with their distinctive “shark’s mouth”  nose art. And though I knew a lot about The Flying Tigers, I didn’t really know much about the Big Picture in which they operated. Thanks to Gregory Crouch‘s fine China’s Wings: War, Intrigue, Romance, and Adventure in the Middle Kingdom during the Golden Age of Flight (Bantam Books, 2012), I do. Greg does not tell the story of The Tigers; he tells the story of the aviation pioneers who made The Tigers possible. These were the man of the China National Aviation Corporation. They brought commercial aviation to China, which is an excellent tale in itself. But they also volunteered to fight the Japanese even before The Tigers entered the picture. Importantly, they also blazed “the Hump,” the dangerious trans-Himalayan air route between India and China that kept the Nationalist Chinese in the game and generally provided aid and comfort to anti-Japanese forces. This is a wonderful book full of remarkable characters and unbelievable adventures. There’s a bit of romance as well. I asked Greg during the interview whether he’d sold the film rights. I imagine he will soon.

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.” In a remarkably short period of time, they transformed Japan: what was a thoroughly traditional, quasi-feudal welter of agricultural estates became a modern industrial nation-state. Since the inspiration for these reforms came from the West (the Japanese had seen what the Western Powers had done in China), the question of women’s status had to be dealt with. How did the Japanese–men and women, elite and commoner–do it? In A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), Marnie Anderson attempts to answer this question. It’s a fascinating story, and Marnie does a terrific job of telling it (despite, I should say, of working in a remarkably thin and difficult documentary environment). This book is essential reading for anyone interested in East Asian and Gender Studies.

Joseph Ward [Cross-posted from New Books in European Studies] Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was the true ‘World City’. We threw around a couple of ideas – it seems obligatory to mention something connected to China these days – before deciding that the city where we both sat was the true holder of that title. London has its frustrations, and as somebody who recently moved out of London I am acutely aware of some of them: the crowds, the transport system, the sheer expense! But it is also a quite remarkable and exciting place (as the Olympic games seem to have demonstrated), full of energy, history and a sense of occasion that belies its location in the corner of a slightly damp island off the north west coast of the Eurasian landmass. How this place became a real World City is the underlying story at the heart of Robert Bucholz and Joseph Ward‘s London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). England and London in 1550 were slightly peripheral places, and certainly in the shadow of some of the true great cities of Europe and beyond. By 1750, however, London had been transformed into a place of innovation, wealth, power and progress, and England was well on the path to becoming a nation that was to shape much of the history of the world over the next two centuries. The story is also deeply human and very colourful, involving lashes of gin, some terrible smells, lots of sex, and countless accounts of amazing lives and shabby deaths. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and talk.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His book traces the intellectual history of marijuana from Europe to Mexico and the ways in which usage of the drug was portrayed – as a source of madness and violence — in the Mexican media. Campos turns on its head the popular myth that drug regulation in Mexico derives from US sources. For political scientists and for all those interested in the issue, the book offers a deep historical context for the current “war on drugs” and related violence in the US and in Mexico.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Human Rights] It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity—perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on—with the executioner’s aid—the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless. Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a necessary evil. They had come to view execution as a sort of ultimate banishment, and not as an opportunity for an object lesson. It was a tool for getting rid of people—the quicker and quieter, the better. In fact, the French government finally put an end to public executions in 1939 when one particular guillotine collided with photo journalism. No matter how speedy the blade, the shutter was faster. Historian Paul Friedland concludes his rich and expansive new book, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France (Oxford University Press, 2012), by drawing back the curtain on this aspect of the guillotine’s past. Even more importantly, moreover, Friedland demonstrates that modern preoccupations with exemplary deterrence as a justification for punishment have led to distortions in how we understand public executions as they happened in the past. He begins his study in the medieval period, where he observes that public executions functioned mainly as rituals for repairing damage to the social fabric. He then follows the thread over half a millennium, tracing many evolutions in attitudes and practice, but never finding deterrence theory at work quite as some commentators have. Paul Friedland is an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2011-2012).

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football.  As past guests on the podcast have explained, widely followed, revenue-generating sports teams affiliated with universities are a distinctive feature of American sports culture, and college football has long been regarded as the one sport that best demonstrates American values.  For outsiders, a useful analogy to understand American college football’s popularity and cultural importance might be European football.  Like the soccer clubs of Europe, many college football teams date back to the 19th century, with long-standing rivalries and traditions.  The teams have unbreakable connections to particular localities, unlike American professional franchises that are sold, bought, and moved.  Generations of supporters attend Saturday games at storied grounds.  Dressed in team colors, they sing songs and perform other time-honored rituals.  And like European football, American college football is still fundamentally regional in organization.  Teams compete in various leagues, planted in specific parts of the country, with the top teams in the table advancing to national games.  College football fans tend to identify with the teams of their own regional league, arguing vigorously that “our” brand of football is better than “theirs.”  Of course, American college football teams are also like European soccer clubs in that they bring in a lot of money, from tickets, television, and branded merchandise.  According to one estimate, the top programs in American college football—if they could ever be sold—would be worth as much as clubs like Manchester City, Inter Milan, and Olympique Lyon. But of course, these teams can’t be sold.  Even though they draw hundreds of thousands of spectators in the fall season, millions of television viewers, and tens of millions of dollars in revenue, college football teams are the property of institutions of higher education, many of which are public, taxpayer-funded entities.  Other nations have sports teams affiliated with universities.  But only in the United States have college athletics become such a prominent part of the sports landscape.  The history of how this curious system emerged is surprising. In his book The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (University Press of Kansas, 2012), Brian Ingrassia shows that the early history of American football and the early history of the American university were intertwined.  As universities developed, and faculties and administrators sought to give them a public face, they saw football as a means of gaining the allegiance of people who would likely never visit a lecture hall or laboratory.  They argued that football was beneficial to players and spectators alike.  There were critics who warned of the dangers of football, and for a brief time in the early 20th century some West Coast schools even adopted rugby as an alternative.  But by the Twenties and Thirties college football was firmly established and hugely popular across the country.  Snobby academics today will grumble about the scourge of big-time college football.  However, the blame for its rise falls not on coaches, players, and boosters, but on university presidents and professors.

[Cross-posted from New Books in European Studies] One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s advance through the historic German lands of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia; and civilians in the cities bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s failure to stem the allied bombing campaign of the RAF at night time and the USAAF during the day. The staggering scale of losses during those last months of war also hints at why 1945 is such a grimly fascinating one from a historical perspective: Nazi Germany faced an inevitable end, yet continued to fight grimly until the bitter end, achieving a total defeat that was unprecedented in modern history. In doing so it created a ‘zero hour’ for the German people, who then set about rebuilding their lives, economic activity and ultimately Germany itself, with the Nazi era firmly in the past. The legacy of the Nazis, of course, was all around – not just in the sheer scale of destruction and suffering, but also in the survivors of Nazi camps, both Jewish and otherwise, and the foreign labourers, all of whom found themselves freed in a defeated nation. The country was divided into zones of occupation, each with their own character, their own challenges and their own solutions. In the midst of this a new Germany was born -or more accurately, two new Germanys). Much of the eventual political, economic and social achievements of West Germany were founded on the peculiarities of 1945, in particular the totality of the Nazi defeat and the yearning for stability after chaos and destruction. There was also – and this sounds peculiar to us looking back at the crimes of the Nazis – a distinct sense of victimhood. Richard Bessel‘s Germany 1945: From War to Peace  (Harper, 2009) is an excellent guide to that tumultuous and difficult year, from the military reverses of the early months to the immense challenges that rose in the wake of defeat. It was a book that I came across almost by chance, in a shop in Doha airport that frustratingly failed to provide me with a copy of The Economist to read on a flight back to London. I was already fifty pages in by the time we lifted off, and – once home – I got in touch with the author, hoping for an interview. I hope you enjoy listening to the results!