New Books in History

[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh's ThoughtCast.] Author Megan Marshall has recently written a well-received biography of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). The Peabodys were key players in the founding of the Transcendentalist movement in the early to mid 19th century. Elizabeth, the oldest, was intellectually precocious, learning Hebrew as a child so she could read the Old Testament. Mary was the middle sister, somewhat subdued by the dominant – and bossy – qualities of Elizabeth, and by the attention paid to the youngest, Sophia, who was practically an invalid. Nonetheless, Mary managed to become a teacher, writer and reformer. Sophia, beset by devastating migraines, spent most of her early years in bed. But when she had the strength, she painted. In an interview with ThoughtCast, Megan Marshall continues the tale…

[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh's ThoughtCast] At a time when the country’s attention is focused on the ever-expanding list of American war dead, Carol Bundy’s biography of a Union officer who sacrifices his life in the Civil War is eerily apt. The Nature of Sacrifice. A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005) tells the story of the short, heroic life of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., an elite young cavalryman who embodied the promise of his generation. An ardent abolitionist and reformer, Lowell was also a brilliant battlefield strategist, and he turned the tide at the Battle of Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, a crucial victory for the North just two weeks shy of Lincoln’s re-election. Shot twice during the fighting, Lowell died at dawn the following day.

Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: “We lost the war because we, individually and therefore communally, were ill.” And it explains victory: “We won the war because we, individually and there communally, were healthy.” And it suggests a program for political progress: get healthy and stay that way. It’s an old idea. We find it among the Greeks, the Romans, and throughout the various 19th- and early 20th-century programs for “national renewal” that swept Europe and Asia. In his excellent book Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (Oxford UP, 2010), Erik Jensen explores how Germans of the Weimar era were seduced by this “self-wellness = national-wellness” logic. They’d lost a war, and they couldn’t understand why. They knew that German culture wasn’t the problem. They believed–and with some good reason–that it was the most advanced in the world. So perhaps, they thought, the problem was some failure in themselves. They had grown weak and ill. Yes, that was it. So something had to be done about it. As Jensen shows, it was. And here’s the really interesting part, at least by my lights: it wasn’t done by the state. The Weimar government itself, though hardly disinterested, did not lead the campaign to make the German body well. Rather, “ordinary Germans” did. They began to play and follow sports, and to form countless clubs that played and followed sports. Sports became, well, “progressive” among the “right thinking people.” Rich and poor. Men and women. Everyone played. For Germany.

When I was in college I had a summer job once working in an aircraft factory. My task was to count screws. Nope, I’m not kidding. I put together parts-kits that were then taken to another station “down the line” for assembly. It wasn’t much fun, and it taught me that I did not want to pursue a career as a screw-counter. But it’s important to remember that the benefits of mechanical production are largely due to making work mechanical. To get all that cheap stuff we know and love, we have to turn what were once complex jobs into simple jobs. In his excellent book Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century (Cornell UP, 2009), Daniel Sidorick tells how the Campbell company made the cooking of soup–a magical art to many–into a mechanical process. The results were contradictory. On the one hand, soup became homogenous (though pretty tasty), portable, and very cheap. On the other, the soup-makers were made, as Marx might have put it, into appendages of soup-making machines. Management tried to make production lean and keep profits high; labor tried to keep work safe and wages high. But in the end, the two couldn’t make ends meet, at least in Camden: Campbell moved its production out of NJ in the 1980s. Not an unfamiliar story, I think, but still a very important one to tell and re-tell.

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t even that, because the people who lived in what we now call “Europe” didn’t think of themselves as “Europeans” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but no matter…). There were, however, other Ages of Exploration. Giancarlo Casale‘s wonderful book is about one of them, one you haven’t heard of. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford UP, 2010) and is about–you guessed it–the Ottoman Age of Exploration. Like their “European” counterparts, the Ottoman explorers were pursuing two interests: spices and salvation. The former were found (largely) in Southern Asia and the latter was of course in Mecca. To ensure access to both, the Ottomans built–nearly from scratch–an large, ocean-going navy and set out to dominate the Indian Ocean. And they almost did it, though they faced fierce competition from the Portuguese, Safavids, and Mughals. Read all about it in Casale’s terrific book. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just people you don’t like very much. Not so in post-War West Germany. There, too, it was common to call people “fascists. But in the Federal Republic they may well have been fascists, that is, Nazis. Despite the efforts of the most thorough-going de-Nazifiers, post-war West German government, business and society was shot through with ex-Nazis. Young people, and especially university students in the BRD, were keenly aware of this fact, and they wondered how it could be that the so-called “Auschwitz generation” could have changed their tune so quickly. Under the influence of some rather clever left-leaning philosophers (those of the Frankfurt School), some of them came to the conclusion that they hadn’t and that, therefore, Germany was still a fascist state. This conclusion (erroneous as it was) gave them striking moral clarity: there was only one thing to do when faced with fascism–resist it by any means necessary. And that is what they did. In his enlightening Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia UP, 2010), veteran journalist and policy analyst Hans Kundnani tells their story. It’s somewhere between a farce and a tragedy, at least in my reading. On the one hand, to think that West Germany was a fascist state, to classify Zionism as a kind of Nazism, and to believe that the leftist students were persecuted “new Jews” is of course absurd. At least some of the West German radicals were so out of touch with reality that it defies understanding. On the other hand, they were in fact surrounded by ex-fascists, keenly aware that Israel was (to put it delicately) “asserting itself” in the middle east, and constantly on the run from Federal authorities. In such a situation I might lose touch with reality too. For the terrorists, who never regained their senses, it all ended badly. But for those whose heads cleared (Joschka Fisher, for example), it ended in power, though a different power than they had imagined in 1968. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

I remember clearly the day I was offered my first credit card. It was in Berkeley, CA in 1985. I was walking on Sproul Plaza and I saw a booth manned by two students. They were giving out all kinds of swag, so I walked over to see what was to be had. T-shirts, I think. I asked them if I could get a credit card, sure that the answer had to be “no.” But the answer was an enthusiastic “yes.” I asked them if they understood that: a) I had no income beyond a tiny graduate student stipend; b) that I was carrying a debt from college that had been kindly “deferred”; and c) that my long-term prospects, money-making wise, were poor (the market in early Russian history degrees not being very hot). They said they didn’t know any of that, but it didn’t matter. All I had to do was to fill out a form and the card would arrive in the mail. I declined. As Louis Hyman tells us in his excellent and important Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton UP, 2011), it wasn’t always so. Before the 1920s, most people could get no credit at all, least of all from a financial institution. But then, thanks to a confluence of odd interests, consumer credit expanded mightily. Companies that made expensive stuff (cars) and companies that handled large pools of idle money (banks) found, much to their surprise that if you lent ordinary folks large sums of money at moderate interest, they would pay it back. The producers and banks lent more; consumers borrowed and bought more; and, in turn, the producers and banks used higher profits to increase productivity, putting still more money in the pockets of consumers. And so the cycle continued, ultimately fostering the largest expansion in production and consumption the world had ever seen. Whether it will continue is a subject of some dispute today.

Sometimes a shallow explanation, the kind you read in newspapers and hear on television, is enough. “The home team was beaten at the buzzer” is probably all you need to know. Sometimes, however, it’s not. The intermittent conflict between the Shias and Sunnis in Iraq (and elsewhere) provides a good example. It is just not sufficient to say, as the major news outlets often do, that the Shias are fighting the Sunnis in Iraq because the Shias were oppressed by the Sunnis under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni. If this is all you understand about the conflict, you do not understand it. And you need to understand it. To even begin to comprehend the Sunni-Shia conflict, you need to know how, out of one revelation, Islam broke into two major parts; how, in the course of time, multi-national empires integrated those parts under one ostensibly pan-Muslim writ; how European imperialist broke up those empires, with their Shia and Sunni parts, and out of them made “nation states” where there were no nations; how Arab nationalists attempted to remake these faux-nations and their Shia and Sunni parts along “international socialist” lines; how radical Islamists, fed up with the aforementioned Arab nationalists, launched a fundamentalist revolt within Islam; how one such group, having decided, bizarrely, that the United States was somehow at fault for the oppression of Muslim “true believers” in the Middle East, murdered 3000 innocent people (from all over the world and of all confessions, it should be said) on September 11, 2001; how, in response, the president and the congress of the United States ordered the invasion of two Middle Eastern states believed to have suborned the attack and international terrorism more generally; how those invasions, and the complete breakdown of law and order that followed them, provided an opportunity for Sunni and Shia militants to settle very old scores in what the Western press blandly calls a “sectarian conflict.” This is not a tale anyone can tell in a headline or even 500 words. So if you want to grasp the “whys” of the Sunni-Shia struggle, you need to look beyond The New York Times. Lesley Hazleton’s marvelous After the Prophet: the Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split (Doubleday, 2009) is an excellent place to start. In terms of historical trade-craft, Hazleton has done something quite remarkable: she’s told a complicated story in writerly, yet concise way. You won’t get lost (though the cast of characters is long) and you won’t tire (though the tale stretches over centuries). Moreover, the book is written with great understanding and sympathy. Hazleton allows us to share the feeling of frustration (and worse) that the early followers of the Prophet felt as they tried to work out what Islam would be in his absence. In so doing, she gives us a sense of their frustration (and worse) as they continue to do so in places like Iraq.

Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yardon which we had recess. We called it a “playground.” But we did not play on it. We did battle. We did not fight for treats or for love or for sport. These things were trivial to us. No, we fought for honor. One achieved honor not by getting good grades, or by having the best lunch, or by making the most friends. Everyone knew that these things were the spoils of honor, not the causes of it. Rather, one gained honor by physical intimidation and, if necessary, combat. Honor was fair: it paid regard to neither sex, nor race, nor class. Girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich and poor could all have whatever honor they could earn. But honor was also brutal: the strong and brave (or should we say “reckless”) usually had it, while the weak and timid (or should we say “sensible”) usually did not. Interestingly, the former did not “bully” the latter very often. At least at Price Elementary School, humiliating a much weaker opponent was considered, somehow, dishonorable. But among the strong and brave there were constant contests of honor, often violent. The “hegemons,” if we may so speak, enjoyed high honor. But they also suffered from constant fear that they might lose it. And so anxious class champions would challenge one another, fight, and the victor would humiliate the vanquished (“Say ‘uncle’!”). For the defeated party, eager to regain his or her honor, there was only one honorable course: revenge–swift, ruthless, and public. So it went, day in and day out on the “playground” at Price Elementary School. And so it went, year in and year out, on the battlefields of fifth-century Greece. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Most Americans could tell you who George Washington’s wife was. (Martha, right?) Most Americans probably couldn’t tell you who Thomas Jefferson’s wife was. (It was also Martha, but a different one of course). They might be able to tell you, however, who Thomas Jefferson’s alleged concubine was, as she has been in the news a lot lately. (His slave, Sally Hemings). But actually there were a lot of women in Jefferson’s life–or should we say a lot of women had Jefferson in their lives. Virginia Scharff tells us about the most important of them (including Martha and Sally) in her literary-yet-historical new book The Women Jefferson Loved (HarperCollins, 2010). The “Jefferson Women,” if it may be allowed, were an interesting bunch. They were sturdy, intelligent, and sometimes rich. Jefferson did love them, but he didn’t really think they were the equals of men. He was hardly alone in this opinion. Even children of the Enlightenment like Jefferson felt God had made women for a distinctly womenly role, and Jefferson felt it was his duty to make sure they played it. Suffice it to say that they were pregnant a lot and became very good at managing domestic life on a plantation. That, of course, is nothing to discount, for in so doing they created the domestic and emotional context within which Jefferson lived. They were an important part of his world, and he of theirs. Thanks to Virginia for bringing this world alive for us.

Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and one of the most common ways we cooperate is through trade. Some form of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” lies at the heart of almost every human relationship. We are built for reciprocation, and we do it remarkably well. But, as Joyce Appleby shows in her provocative, readable, and thoroughly entertaining The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Norton, 2010), the natural impulse for reciprocal back-scratching did not capitalism make. A set of very unusual historical forces did. These historical forces were not everywhere and always. On the contrary, they came together in one place at one time: Northwestern Europe in what we might call the “long modern period,” roughly the 15th though 18th centuries. Of course people in other places and other times traded, and even traded a lot. But they did not develop the culture of capitalism, that is, a set of values that suggested making money was good not only for the money-maker but for everyone else. Alexander Pope, one of the early apologists of capitalism, put the capitalist ethic this way: “Thus God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame, and bade self-love and social be the same.” (An Essay on Man, 1733) Gordon Gekko, in the (anti-capitalist) film Wall Street (1987), put it more crudely: “Greed…is good.” Neither, it should be said, did pre-capitalist traders develop the institutions that make capitalism operate, that is, things like investment banks, credits, stock markets, insurance, and a whole host of government regulations (yes, government regulations) without which “free trade” could not be “free” at all. Caesar was not concerned about in the federal reserve. He didn’t even have a federal reserve to be concerned about. All of which leads to a single and startling conclusion: the culture and institutions of capitalism are Western. Thus when we in the West promote capitalism as the “best” way of going about things economic, we are engaging in a subtle form of cross-cultural persuasion. We may be right, capitalism may indeed be the best way to provision goods and services to the masses (I think it obviously is). But that doesn’t make capitalist culture any the less foreign to most of the world. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford UP, 2010). Greiser was a totalitarian if ever there were one. He believed in the Nazi cause with his heart and soul. He wanted to create a new Germany, and indeed a new Europe dominated by Germans. As the Gauleiter of Wartheland (an area of Western Poland annexed to the Reich), he was given the opportunity to help realize the Nazi nightmare in the conquered Eastern territories. But, as Epstein shows, he was often hindered both by his own personality and the chaos that characterized Nazi occupation of the East. Grieser emerges from Epstein’s book as someone who wanted to be a “model Nazi,” but couldn’t really manage it because he was a crooked timber working in a crooked system. His personal life was an embarrassing tangle of marriages, affairs, and break-ups that at points threatened his career. His professional life was marked by ambition, ego-mania, and fawning, none of which endeared him to most of his colleagues and superiors. And his murderous attempts to “work toward the Führer” in the Wartheland–by displacing Poles, murdering Jews and other “undesirables,” and populating the East with Germans–were stymied by the cross-cutting jurisdictions, conflicting agendas, and professional jealousies that were one of the hallmarks of Nazi rule. Grieser did his best (or his worst, depending on how you look at it) to Germanize the Wartheland. He improvised, maneuvered, and “worked the system” such as it was in pursuit of the Nazi totalitarian project. Thankfully, he failed, demonstrating again that totalitarian dreams, though they can be horribly distructive, are a far reach from totalitarian realities.

I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and love them. When they die, I’ll be really sad. After having read Joyce Salisbury’s eye-opening The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2011), I know now how weird all that is. People in the Middle Ages did not, so far as we know, love their animals. As Joyce points out, they used them, ate them, and even had sex with them. But they do not seem to have loved them, any of them. They did, or at least some of them, think about animals rather deeply. They wanted to know what animals were, really. They knew animals were God’s creatures. But there were nettlesome questions, like whether animals had souls. Well, probably not. Some of them, however, like lambs, were put forward as models for holy behavior (“the Lamb of God”). So do lambs, unlike all other animals, have souls? Another question: Could you eat animals? If they didn’t have souls, then you certainly could. But which ones? Not clear. The Christian Bible–unlike the Hebrew Bible–is rather short on dietary regulations. Yet another question: Could you have sex with animals? They were, after all, only things, and it didn’t really matter what you did with things (though “spilling your seed” in any case was a no-no). That said, having sex with an animal is rather unseemly. Still another question: If an animal killed someone, was it “guilty.” Aristotle said animals didn’t have reason, so that would suggest that animals couldn’t be “guilty” or “innocent.” Fine, but some animals were awfully smart, like the sly fox that everyone heard about in folk tales. So if some animals have some reason and are therefore human-like, are there some humans who are a touch bestial and therefore animal-like? Where exactly was the line between humans and animals? Thinkers of the Middle Ages had some interesting things to say about all these questions, many of which still have resonance today. Read Joyce’s fine book and learn all about it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call “race.” But, as Nell Irvin Painter shows in her fascinating new book The History of White People (Norton, 2010), it wasn’t always so. The Greeks didn’t do it, at least very seriously. The Romans didn’t do it, at least very often. And the folks of the Middle Ages didn’t do it, at least with much gusto. In fact, the people who invented the modern concept of “race” and the classification of people by skin color were Europeans and Americans of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era. Why then and there? As Painter points out, a number of historical trends coincided to produced “racial science” and its child “whiteness” in Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These trends included: the “discovery” of New Worlds (and the people in them) in the Americas, Asia, and Africa; the evolution of the African slave trade and with it the historically novel identification of “negroes” with slavery; the birth of proto-anthoropology and with its ancillary sciences (e.g., “craniometry”); nationalism, and desire of nationalists (especially Germans) to discover the intrinsic “greatness” of particular nations (notably theirs); the massive influx of “undesirable” Irish and Eastern Europeans into the United States; and the “progressive” idea that human populations could be bred for “superior traits,” that is, eugenics. All these things forced European and American elites to think hard about what kind of people they were. The conclusion they reached was that they were (variously) “Anglo Saxons,” “Nordics,” “Aryans” and eventually just “Whites.” That they believed themselves to be superior to all other “races” should not surprise us (humans being naturally prideful). But the muddle-headed quality of their thought on matters racial should raise some eyebrows, for these people were not dumb. They were, however, afraid, and fear often drives even well-intentioned, intelligent people to say foolish things. This they certainly did. Alas, some people still do. They should read Nell Painter’s fine book. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

You’ve probably read about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It’s the largest (17 miles around!), most expensive (9 billion dollars!) scientific instrument in history. What’s it do? It accelerates beams of tiny particles (protons) to nearly the speed of light and then smashes them into one another. That’s cool, you say, but why? Well, the simple answer is this: it was built to test the validity of the way most physicists understand the origins and essence of everything, that is, the “standard model.” You see, the standard model has a big gap in it: it can’t explain why certain essential particles have mass. In the 1960s, however, a group of theoretical physicists proposed an answer. These massive particles, they said, were bathed in a dense, universal field of other particles, now called “Higgs bosons.” The field gives them mass. To draw an analogy (always a dangerous thing to do in physics…), particles like protons have mass for the same reason straws stand up in milkshakes–they are “packed in,” so to say. The trouble, to continue this awkward analogy, is that no one has ever “seen” the milkshake. The scientists working at the LHC are trying to find it. If they do, the standard model remains standard and Nobel Prizes all ’round. If not, well, back to the drawing board. Ian Sample does a masterful job of telling the tale of the quest for the Higgs boson (aka the “God particle”) in his new book  Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science (Basic Books, 2010). You don’t need to know a thing about physics (though the author clearly does) to enjoy it. Sample has a talent for explaining things that are often obscured by mathematics (a kind of crutch, I think, for many scientists) in straightforward English prose. This skill, combined with the fact that Sample is a great storyteller with a great story to tell, make Massive an excellent read. You may not have liked science in school, but trust me when I say you’ll very much enjoy the history of science in the hands of Ian Sample. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.