New Books in History

Eric H. ClineView on AmazonIt quickly sold out in hardback, and then, within a matter of days, sold out in paperback. Available again as a 2nd edition hardback, and soon in the 10th edition paperback with a new Afterword by the author, Eric H. Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2015) is THE must have, must read book of 2014, and 2015. Why? Because it's serious archaeology, history and anthropology, but it reads like a mystery novel. The prose is superb; so good that it's hard to put down. Homer wrote about the Age of Olympians: Zeus and Apollo, Odysseus, Achilles and Hector. Cline writes about the Minoans and Mycenaeans, the Trojans and the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians. And both epics, one mythology and one history, are about the same extraordinary time. Cline recreates the late Bronze Age in fascinating detail and then describes its utter and complete destruction. City after city, empire after empire, civilization after civilization: annihilated to extinction, one right after another, and in a shockingly short amount of time. What caused a catastrophe so extreme that the First Dark Age descended over the world: a mysterious invading culture–the Sea People, plague and pestilence, earthquake, climate change, all of the above? 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed discusses each possibility in turn. A great interview with a world-class researcher–it easily could have gone for three-hours.

Juanita De BarrosView on AmazonAs slavery came to an end in the Caribbean's British colonies, officials and local reformers began to worry about how and whether they would convince their newly freed workforce to continue working. More specifically, they worried about underpopulation, and whether the formerly enslaved population was reproducing quickly enough. This was the source of instruments of surveillance such as the census, as well policies and institutions meant to ensure the continuing reproductive health of the populace. This is the point of departure for Juanita De Barros' terrific book Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery (UNC Press, 2014) as it explores the dynamics and the multiple actors involved, including poor women, Caribbean reformers, midwives, colonial officials and many others. De Barros offers an innovative way to understand the everyday lives of Caribbean women as she explores the debates and policies centered on sex, health and colonial policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

John KinderView on AmazonJohn Kinder brings to life the challenges and problems faced by the disabled veteran in American history from the Civil War to the current day in his evocative book, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Considered by many reviewers to be one of the most important books in recent years on the human cost of war, Paying with Their Bodies blends lively anecdotal accounts of individual veterans with the complex questions of their imagined and real place in society before, during, and after their time served. Not surprisingly the answers are at times even more disheartening as Kinder uncovers a pattern of promises made and unfulfilled, in which the only consistencies across time are episodes of exploitation for political and personal gain by others and the eventual neglect as the public memory of their sacrifice fades.

James E. StrickView on Amazon"Life must have a father and mother…Science! I'm going to plant a bomb under its ass!" The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A "midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s" who was famed for his work on the science of orgasm, was widely maligned as a charlatan and pseudoscientist, did extensive work on the science of cancer, had his books and instruments publicly burned by the US government, and died in prison: it's hard not to find Wilhelm Reich fascinating. In his new book, James E. Strick reminds us that Reich was also a diligent and accomplished laboratory scientist whose work has potentially important implications for the modern biosciences. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard University Press, 2015) takes readers into the making of this modern scientist, from his early relationships with Freud and dialectical materialism, to his work on the orgasm as a kind of "electrophysiological discharge," to his research into potential treatments for cancer. The book concludes by considering why understanding Reich's scientific work matters for us today, including a brief introduction to some recent experimental work related to Reich's research. It is an absorbing story that's also a pleasure to read, and pays careful attention to Reich's scientific work while still translating it in clear terms for non-specialist readers.

Lawrence M. FriedmanView on AmazonIn the first legal history course I took as an undergraduate, I read Lawrence M. Friedman 's A History of American Law and American Law in the 20th Century and have been fascinated with the subject ever since. His most recent work, The Big Trial: Law as Public Spectacle (University Press of Kansas, 2015) combines the scintillating narrative style that he employs as the author of several mystery novels with the keen insights about law and society that he has revealed time and again in his numerous cornerstone works of legal scholarship. Per the book jacket, "The trial of O. J. Simpson was a sensation, avidly followed by millions of people, but it was also, in a sense, nothing new. One hundred years earlier the Lizzie Borden trial had held the nation in thrall. The names (and the crimes) may change, but the appeal is enduring–and why this is, how it works, and what it means are what Lawrence Friedman investigates in The Big Trial. What is it about these cases that captures the public imagination? Are the "headline trials" of our period different from those of a century or two ago? And what do we learn from them, about the nature of our society, past and present? To get a clearer picture, Friedman first identifies what certain headline trials have in common, then considers particular cases within each grouping. The political trial, for instance, embraces treason and spying, dissenters and radicals, and, to varying degrees, corruption and fraud. Celebrity trials involve the famous–whether victims, as in the case of Charles Manson, or defendants as disparate as Fatty Arbuckle and William Kennedy Smith–but certain high-profile cases, such as those Friedman categorizes as tabloid trials, can also create celebrities. The fascination of whodunit trials can be found in the mystery surrounding the case: Are we sure about O. J. Simpson? What about Claus von Bulow–tried, in another sensational case, for sending his wife into a coma? An especially interesting type of case Friedman groups under the rubric worm in the bud. These are cases, such as that of Lizzie Borden, that seem to put society itself on trial; they raise fundamental social questions and often suggest hidden and secret pathologies. And finally, a small but important group of cases proceed from moral panic, the Salem witchcraft trials being the classic instance, though Friedman also considers recent examples. Though they might differ in significant ways, these types of trials also have important similarities. Most notably, they invariably raise questions about identity (Who is this defendant? A villain? An innocent unfairly accused?). And in this respect, The Big Trial shows us, the headline trial reflects a critical aspect of modern society. Reaching across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the latest outrage, from congressional hearings to lynching and vigilante justice to public punishment, from Dr. Sam Sheppard (the "fugitive") to Jeffrey Dahmer (the "cannibal"), The Rosenbergs to Timothy McVeigh, the book presents a complex picture of headline trials as displays of power–moments of "didactic theater"" that demonstrate in one way or another whether a society is fair, whom it protects, and whose interest it serves." Some of the topics we cover are: (1) Classifications of the different types of headline trials; (2) How telling the story of headline trials also tells the story of the rise of mass media; (3) Why big trials are considered didactic theater. (4) The effect the familiarity we now have with celebrities has upon the trials that involve them. Lawrence Friedman is Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

Derek J. PenslarView on AmazonIn Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton University Press, 2015), Derek J. Penslar, the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford and the Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History at the University of Toronto, explores the expansive but largely forgotten story of Jews in modern military service. Over more than three centuries, millions of Jews have joined, voluntarily and not, the military of their home country.  Military service offered an opportunity to demonstrate masculine pride, to show worthiness for emancipation, or for upward mobility.  The history of Jewish military service sheds light on the experience of Jews and power in the modern world.

View on AmazonEric Tagliacozzo, Peter C. Perdue, and Helen F. Siu's "Asia Inside Out" project is a model for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in all kinds of ways. Planned as a trilogy, the first two volumes were released this year. Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (Harvard University Press, 2015) collects essays by historians, art historians, and anthropologists that each take a particular year as an inflection point when "certain major cultural processes changed direction." These include key turning points in religious, economic, and political formations across land and sea since the sixteenth century, and they bring us into a wide range of localities from Macau to the Dutch East Indies to Yemen, Japan, Bangalore, and beyond. Asia Inside Out: Connected Places (Harvard University Press, 2015) gathers essays that collectively emphasize connectedness and motion by moving beyond regional and national boundaries to look at a series of "spatial moments" that were shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and post-modernity. In the course of our brief conversation we talked about the genesis of the project, what's to come in the third volume, and how others might take inspiration from the project to think anew about where we might go from here.

Tom JunesView on AmazonIn the conventional narratives of Communist Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, student activism tends to get short shrift. While the role of students in 1956 is unavoidable and widely acknowledged, after that their role and their relationship to the society at large has been minimized.  The famous Kuron-Modzielewski letter of 1964 is treated first and foremost as an intra-elite affair, while the failure of the student protests in 1968 to provoke a broader movement as well as students' subsequent lack of involvement in the protests of December 1970 have been taken as evidence of students' lack of connection to broader society.  Only in the late 1970s did was that gap bridged, first with founding of KOR after the strikes of 1976 and then during the Solidarity era. This account has been pervasive since the 1970s, and even people with only passing knowledge of Polish history have been exposed to it through Andrzej Wajda's 1981 film "Man of Iron." There the student turned factory worker Maciej Birkut recounts first being told by his father the former Stakhanovite turned worker activist that 1968 is not the right time to challenge the governments and then stands by in spite during the strikes of 1970 only to learn of his father's death. Yet as so often happens when a historian take up a topic that has become so engrained that most people do not even stop to question it. In his new book Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent (Lexington Books, 2015), Tom Junes  reveals that received narrative to be a myth that bears only partial connection to the truth. Covering the development of student politics in Poland from 1946 until the end of Communism, Junes argues that there were 8 distinct generations of students during that period, beginning with the students of the immediate postwar period whose worldview was shaped by their pre-War and War experiences to the students of the 1980s who embraced Solidarity, but felt betrayed by the roundtable negotiations that brought an end to Communist rule in 1989.  It is a scrupulously researched book drawing on oral history as well as conventional primary source documents, and it was a pleasure to speak with Junes recently about his research.

David SehatView on AmazonDavid Sehat is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University. His book The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and the Our Politics Inflexible (Simon and Schuster, 2015) is part narrative history, part political analysis. Beginning with George Washington's administration to the 2012 Congressional budgetary crisis, Sehat provides a long sweep of the continual conflicts over the meaning of the U.S. constitution and the intent of the founders. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton represented two different interpretations and set the course for subsequent debates over first principles that by Lincoln's time escalated into civil war. The differences revolved largely on the role of the federal government, states rights and the limits of economic freedom. After the Civil War and as America faced becoming a modern nation the founders as a standard of ideals went into eclipse.  The oppositional rhetoric of the American Liberty League to Roosevelt's New Deal, and constitutional reinterpretation, once again turned to the founders.  Modern political rivals have continued to call on the legacy of the founders to support their arguments and making them a test of political orthodoxy. Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign, the Reagan Revolution, and the Tea Party movement drew from the founders with radically different understandings of the past and the future. Liberals pointed to changing nature of constitutional governance arguing for context and adaptation. Conservatives held to a static and binding view of the constitution asserting original intent. Arguments that found their way to the Supreme Court. Sehat argues that conflict over the intent of the founders, and the meaning of the constitution, has kept the nation paralyzed in dealing with the present. By asking what the founder's would do, we foreclose productive debate.

Gregory E. O'MalleyView on AmazonGregory E. O'Malley examines a crucial, but almost universally overlooked, aspect of the African slave trade in his new book Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014).  Although most work on the topic focuses on the "Middle Passage" – the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean – O'Malley chronicles the "final passages" that many captives faced from the Caribbean to ports scattered throughout the Americas.  A significant percentage of enslaved people faced these added voyages, which could often be more brutal and unhealthy than the Middle Passage.  O'Malley traces the effect of the intercolonial trade on African captives, as well its influence on the creation of an enslaved culture in the Americas.  He also examines in great detail how this intercolonial trade shaped the markets of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, which in turn dramatically affected diplomatic relations between European powers in the period.

Richard C. KellerView on AmazonIn August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as "the forgotten," people who died alone and whose bodies were never claimed. Known as the "forgotten," their stories are at the heart of Richard C. Keller's fascinating new book Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Official narratives of the disaster focused narrowly on the problem of the elderly who died alone, seemingly because their families were too busy vacationing to check in or claim their relatives. Yet, as Keller shows, these official narratives were incomplete and often incorrect. Moreover, by focusing so intently on elderly victims, these narratives have shaped subsequent public health initiatives, which have collectively identified the elderly as the most vulnerable population in the event of heat, all the while ignoring other similarly vulnerable groups. Fatal Isolation pushes past official narratives to provide the first historical treatment of the disaster. By drawing on disaster studies, social theory, ethnography, demography, and sociology, Keller weaves together the August vacation, housing policy, architecture, and debates over the place of the aging in French society. In the process, Fatal Isolation uncovers a much longer, much richer, and much more complex history of the disaster and French society's own contributions to it.

View on AmazonThe Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge UP, 2015) is a new contribution to the study of Islam and more specifically to the history of Islamic Law and its development. Guy Burak, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies librarian at New York University, explores the Ottomans' adoption of one branch of the Hanafi legal tradition as the official school (madhhab) of the dynasty. The period of time in which this process occurred was during the 15th to 18th centuries, and Burak focuses on the lands of Greater Syria. What Burak seeks to illustrate is that through the adoption of an official school of law, the Ottoman hierarchy played a significant role in how the school of law was shaped. Examples Burak provides to demonstrate this phenomenon are the institutionalization of the position of mufti, the formalization of genealogical literature (tabaqat), and the canonization process of books essential to the school. In addition to examining the propagators of official Ottoman positions, Burak also examines how scholars not part of the Ottoman mainstream branch functioned and responded to these changes. Overall, this work represents and important contribution to the study of Islam, the history of Islamic Law, and Ottoman Studies.

Roberto Lint SagarenaView on AmazonThe (re)making of place has composed an essential aspect of Southern California history from the era of Spanish colonialism to the present. In Aztlán and Arcadia: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Creation of Place (NYU Press, 2014) Associate Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College Roberto Ramón Lint Sagarena examines the competing narratives of Anglo American conquest and ethnic Mexican reconquest following the U.S. War with Mexico in the mid-19th century. Employing a transnational lens that illuminates the commonalities between Spanish colonizers, Mexican criollos, Anglo American settlers, and ethnic Mexican Californians, Dr. Lint Sagarena argues that the ethno-nationalist histories of Aztlán and Arcadia share commonalities in logic, language, and symbolism that are rooted in religious culture and history. From Anglo American Hispanophilia to Chicana/o indigenismo, Professor Lint Sagarena sheds new light on the region's long and conflicted history over its multi-ethnic past as well as the understanding by many of its inhabitants that "owning place requires owning history."

Jenny ShawView on AmazonJenny Shaw's recent book Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013) analyzes how social, religious, and ethnic categories operated in Barbados and the Leeward Islands. She documents the arrival of Irish migrants into the Caribbean who came in some cases involuntarily, and in other cases with dreams to make their own fortunes in the islands' booming sugar trade. Their Catholicism and social standing long kept them from joining the ruling class. But, Shaw traces how the simultaneous arrival of enslaved Africans complicated those social standings, while also helping to simplify them at a later date. In the process, her study injects new life into the question of racial ideology in the British Americas, as well as the role and influence of religion in the Anglo-Caribbean.

Leonard CassutoView on AmazonThe discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of them want to become professors, but most of them won't. Indeed a disturbingly large minority of them won't even finish their degrees. It's little wonder graduate students are, as a group, somewhat depressed. In his thought-provoking book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015), Leonard Cassuto tries to figure out why graduate education in the U.S. is in such a sad state. More importantly, he offers a host of fascinating proposals to "fix" American graduate schools. Listen in.