Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Almost a decade in the making, Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland(Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws on collaboratively collected oral histories of two social movements in western Madhya Pradesh, the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) and the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan (AMS). This longue-durée approach allows Alf Gunvald Nilsen to unravel the Indian state's everyday tyranny against its adivasi citizens. The deep tentacles of caste and class power embodied as the state reach into the Bhil everyday, not tethered to single issues of "development" induced displacement or the disappearing commons, but as an all-encompassing structural violence manifested in the realities of malnutrition, agricultural debt and seasonal migration. Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria. Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.

One of the themes of the era of Donald Trump is whiteness and white identity. From his first steps into the public eye, Trump used race to frame his positions and relevance. His presidency has been no different. White identity, though, has remained a confusing topic to understand and precisely measure. What does it mean to hold the identity of the dominant racial group? Does white identity even exist? And if it does, what does it mean? Ashley Jardina answers dozens of questions like these in her timely new book, White Identity Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Jardina is assistant professor of political science at Duke University. Where past research on whites' racial attitudes emphasized out-group hostility, Jardina brings into focus the significance of in-group identity and favoritism. White Identity Politics shows that disaffected whites are not just found among the working class; they make up a broad proportion of the American public - with major implications for political behavior, policy preferences, and the future of racial conflict in America.

In this episode, cross-posted from from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Yael Schonbrun takes a dive into evolutionary psychology with professor and author, Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams. Steve’s recent book, The Ape That Understood the Universe: How Mind and Culture Evolve (Cambridge University Press, 2018) offers an opportunity to step away from our held understanding of human nature by taking on the alien perspective. Steve’s vast knowledge and wonderful sense of humor will give you new perspectives on emotions and drives, and new ideas to guide values and behaviors. This interview explores such topics as: How Knowledge Of Our “Human Design” Can Help Us To Make Better Choices In Our Everyday LivesHow And Why Men And Women Differ In Our Desire For Casual Sex, Our Preferences In Partners, And In Our Preferred Levels Of Parental InvestmentHow Knowing That We Are Not Blank Slates Can Empower Us To Be More Effective In Building Value-Driven LivesSteve Stewart-Williams is an associate professor of psychology at Nottingham University, Malaysia Campus. His research explores how evolutionary biology can offer insights into the human mind and human behavior and he focuses, in particular, on sex differences and altruism. Steve has written two books, most recently The Ape That Understood the Universe. Go to Steve’s university website or personal website to find out more about his work. Dr. Yael Schonbrun is a clinical psychologist in private practice, an assistant professor at Brown University, and a co-host of the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock.

Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire. While scholars have often addressed this phenomenon through the lenses of academic anatomy and natural history, Seth suggests that medical care and theories of pathology were central to how Britons began to see their bodies as fundamentally distinct from other peoples. After the Seven Years War, medical thinkers started contributing to British imperial ambitions by interpreting the distinct disease environments of the empire’s disparate parts. Initially, a “seasoning sickness” was thought unavoidable as colonists entered a new clime, for the body’s complexion had to adapt to the qualities of the new environment. Through numerous iterations and variations, this Hippocratic sense of a porous and variable body was abandoned as illness and vulnerability became ever more tightly tied to inherited somatic traits and behaviors. This figured strongly in debates over abolition and the legitimacy of slavery and provided the precedent for nineteenth-century scientific racism. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of bringing colonial peripheries and non-Western spaces into the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

A fundamental problem in science, and in philosophy of science, is that of theory choice. Scientists propose theories to explain data, but when two scientific theories can both explain the same data, what criteria do scientists use to choose between them? And given that even very popular scientific theories can turn out to be wrong, how are the criteria for theory choice related to truth? Do scientists even aim at true theories, as realists hold, or, as anti-realists hold, do they just care that the theories can explain what's observed? In Theoretical Virtues in Science: Uncovering Reality Through Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Samuel Schindler lays out an extended case for realism based on a close critical look at the main virtues that scientific theories are thought to aim for besides empirical adequacy, such as simplicity, explanatory scope, and fruitfulness. On Schindler's view, the extra-empirical virtues are also epistemic: for example, a simpler theory is also more likely to be true, and so scientists are epistemically justified in choosing a simpler theory over an empirically adequate but more complicated rival. Schindler, who is associate professor at the Centre for Science Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark provides an excellent discussion of the theoretical virtues themselves, their roles in actual theory choices, and their roles in realist-anti-realist debates about the nature of scientific theories.

2018 has been a great year for books about sub-national government in the United States. The year ends with another to add to the list. Jessica Trounstine has written Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities(Cambridge University Press, 2018). Trounstine is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. Segregation by Design draws on a century of data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments design policies that create race and class segregation. Trounstine maps the historical development of segregation and the ways that suburbanization has fit with patterns of residential segregation. Zoning laws and public goods have been used to advance the goal of some residents for racially segregated neighborhoods. She argues that local governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor.

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan(Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an incisive study of continuity as well as change in Pakistan that has moved the country towards religious conservatism and increased authoritarianism. Akhtar, a political scientist and self-confessed left-wing activist, documents the development of political power in Pakistan that with the military dictatorship in the 1980s of General Zia ul-Haq ended an era of more liberal and left-wing politics and put the country on a path of right-wing religious ultra-conservatism from which it has yet to deviate. In tracking that development, Akhtar’s book makes a significant contribution by focussing not only on its ideological but also its economic aspects as well as the religious right’s appeal to urban shopkeepers and traders. He projects the religious right as a vehicle for subordinate classes to access the state and claim a stake in status quo politics. Akhtar’s contribution with this book is also his analysis of the waning of counter-hegemonic and transformative politics in Pakistan. Akhtar notes that the perceived benefits of carving out a stake in a patronage-based system far outstrip the cost and risk of efforts to transform the system. It is that cost-benefit analysis that has given Pakistan politics resilience and undergird a system in which religion is the ultimate source of legitimacy at the expense of any opposition to class and state power. In looking at how subordinate classes cope through the politics of common sense, Akhtar’s book represents a significant and innovative addition to the study not only of Pakistan but of an era in which religious, nationalist and populist forces are on the rise.

Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parties in the non-Western world’s two major attempts to establish a post-colonial secular state. The secular experiments in Turkey and India were considered success stories for the longest period of time but that has changed with the rise of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in India and the capture of state power by political forces with an anti-secular vision of nationhood. In his ground-breaking book, Bose attributes the rise of secularism to the fact that non-Western states like Turkey and India never adopted the Western principle of separation of state and church and instead based their secularism on the principle of state intervention and regulation of the religious sphere. In doing so, Bose distinguishes between the embedding of secularism in Turkey in authoritarianism entrenched in the carving out of the modern Turkish state from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and the fact that secularism in India is rooted in culture and a democratic form of government. With the anti-secular trend in Turkey and India fitting into a global trend in which cultural and religious identity is gaining traction, Bose’s study constitutes a significant contribution to the study of the future of secularism and the often complex relationship between religious parties and the secular state. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

In his book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dr. Jonathon Earle illustrates the rich and diverse intellectual history of Buganda, an East African kingdom that came to be incorporated into the modern state of Uganda. Earle constructs the intellectual biographies of four important Ganda activists who articulated and debated ideas about kingship, political pluralism, citizenship, and justice. Their views on state and society were drawn from a diverse range of sources such as religious texts, classical political thinkers and local histories. Earle’s book shows that often used distinctions between “sacred” and “secular” or “African” and “European” oversimplify and obscure what was a more pluralistic intellectual milieu. In writing this book, Earle uses a wide range of primary and secondary sources among which are several private archival collections that had not been previously available to historians. The book is currently a finalist for the 2018 Bethwell A. Ogot Prize presented by the African Studies Association to the author of the best book in East African Studies. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

If the universe was even slightly different in some of its fundamental physical properties, life could not exist – such is the claim of ‘fine tuning’ of the universe for life. The topic of fine tuning has received attention from physicists, philosophers and the popular press. In A Fortunate Universe:...

Following a historic election, we return again to the question of turnout. Who turned out in large numbers to shift power in the House back to the Democrats? What we know about the past is that there are substantial gaps in turnout between different groups. White Americans have turned out in larger numbers that many other racial and ethnic groups. This much is well-know, but what explains these gaps? Is it political interest, barrier to voting, or something else? Such is the focus of Bernard Fraga’s new book The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Fraga is assistant professor of political science at Indiana University. Fraga finds that the common explanations don’t always hold up when you examine rigorous data and use advanced methods. He argues for a theory of electoral influence based on the relative size of the racial and ethnic population in a voting district. In districts where minority groups make up a relatively small portion of the electorate, turnout tends to be low. In other districts, where the group makes up a larger portion, turnout tends to be much higher. These findings, and others, explain a lot about the 2018 election and future elections and campaigns.

It’s been an article of faith among scholars and activists alike that poor Americans are ignored in national politics. But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong, and poor people, at least rhetorically, are in fact as commonly referred to by Presidents in their State of the Union addresses and in Party platforms as many other supposedly more favored groups? Kristina C. Miler’s Poor Representation: Congress and the Politics of Poverty in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018) simultaneously gives the lie to these claims while offering rich new evidence to describe how and why most members of Congress fail to follow through on such rhetoric, even if they represent poor districts, and what we might do to remedy this imbalance. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the story of Ottoman Egypt and astronomy, looking at how astronomy tied together the state and religious practice. We talk about how religious authority was negotiated through astronomy, the zij (the genre of astronomic handbooks used by astronomers), translation, and how print affected the distribution of astronomic knowledge. Stolz also contends with the specter of the nahda, or the Arabic language intellectual renaissance, and he tells us how he deals with it in his work. As always, we check in with the field of Middle Eastern history and ask what one should do with increasingly limited access to archives. Daniel Stolz is an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was previously a visiting assistant professor of history at Northwestern University, where he was also affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. He received his PhD from Princeton University in Near Eastern Studies. He is a historian of the modern Middle East, specializing in Egypt and the late Ottoman Empire. He is the author of many articles on science and religion in Egypt and the monograph discussed in this interview. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

Earlier this year, we heard from Suzanne Mettler and her book on the politics of policies hidden from view. Mettler explained that most Americans are benefiting from numerous public policies, but often fail to notice it because participation is hidden in the tax code. This leads to a disconnect between many citizens and the government. This week, we return to similar terrain, with an excellent new book on homeownership policy. Chloe Thurston has written At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Thurston is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University. In the book, Thurston traces the evolution of homeownership policy since the Great Depression. These federal policies were a lifeline for many Americans, providing a variety of ways to promote homeownership through federally-backed insurance programs and policies embedded in the tax code. Not all Americans were so lucky. Thurston shows the ways that federal policy makers excluded African Americans from the benefits of the policies in the 1930s and 40s, and later the way women were shut out of homeownership policies in the 1970s. The focus of the book, though, is on the organized response of groups like the NAACP and NOW to challenge these discriminatory policies and challenge the status quo.

How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, tells the story of the professor in children’s books since 1850. The book details the history of highly problematic depictions of academics, usually as kindly old men, baffled buffoons, or evil madmen, depictions that exclude those who are not white, often middle class origin, men. Terras’ work is a great example for digital humanities scholarship, offering a powerful case for new methods to answer crucial questions of equality and diversity for humanities scholars and across universities more generally. Alongside the analysis, Terras has published an anthology, The Professor in Children’s Literature, including some of the works discussed in the book. Both Picture-Book Professors and the accompanying anthology are open access and free to read, and will be of interest to every academic as well as the wider public too!

In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s, many Native people participated in similar debates as they confronted white cultural expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian in modern American society. Using close readings of texts, images, and public performances, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), examines the literary output of four influential American Indian intellectuals who challenged long-held conceptions of Indian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Kiara M. Vigil traces how the narrative discourses created by these figures spurred wider discussions about citizenship, race, and modernity in the United States. Vigil demonstrates how these figures deployed aspects of Native American cultural practice to authenticate their status both as indigenous peoples and as citizens of the United States. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and as a dimension of imperialism through the development of the Portuguese empire. The global connections forged by seafaring empires demanded new ways of conceiving a unified world. As the Portuguese were first to discover, the ancient canon provided little guidance, and far-flung colonies all seemed unique and defied coherent categorization. Through efforts to interpret, control, and economize a their outposts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the Portuguese developed novel and creative methods of producing knowledge within a globalizing world. Late in the 17th century, some of these efforts would coalesce around the idea of the tropics as physicians attempted to consolidate their authority over the health of the empire. A space of prodigious nature and profuse disease, the tropics soon became an orienting notion of modern race theory and empires. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

The failure of democracy during the Weimar Republic is currently at the center of public discussion due to the global populist wave of the last few years. In his new book, Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Larry Eugene Jones examines how the republic’s final presidential election contributed to its dissolution. He synthesizes evidence from a vast number of German archives as well as a career spent as an internationally recognized specialist of Weimar political history. Assessing both Hitler, Hindenburg, and other prominent figures from the era, such as Heinrich Brüning and Alfred Hugenberg, Jones illustrates the fragmentation of the non-Nazi right wing and the triumph of personal charisma over issue-based politics in 1930s Germany. Jones’s new book is essential for anyone interested in Germany’s transformation from democracy to dictatorship. Larry Jones recently retired as Professor of History at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the Fall of 2018.

The 1973 oil crisis was an event of world-historic proportions, but the stories we tell about it often center the Global North. For instance, the first images that probably come to mind are of the long gas-station queues of Americans in their cars waiting to fill up at the height of the oil shortage. Christopher Dietrich, in his new book, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) approaches the oil crisis with a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the American consumer’s struggles or the State Department’s outlook, Dietrich foregrounds oil elites from the Global South. Dietrich documents how these elites overcame political and ideological differences to form OPEC, and how they sought to transform the global economy. By exploring, what he calls, “the economic culture of decolonization,” Dietrich shows how the material conditions and shared interests of oil elites facilitated their successful drive to organize and to raise oil prices. It is not an entirely happy story, however, as Dietrich traces the line from “sovereign rights” to the sovereign debt crisis of the 1980s. The book is an impressive feat of scholarship and should reach a wide audience, including scholars of the Global South, resource politics, global governance, intellectual history, and U.S. foreign relations. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

We met with Prof. Ulrich Witt to discuss his recent book (co-edited with Andreas Chai), Understanding Economic Change, Advances in Evolutionary Economics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). This collection of essays is divided into five parts: Part I (Introduction), Part II (Conceptual and Methodological Problems), Part III (Perspectives on Evolutionary Macroeconomics), Part IV (Advances in Explaining and Assessing Institutional Evolution), Part V (Evolutionary Perspectives on Welfare and Sustainability). Ulrich Witt, from the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, is a leading figure in the evolutionary approach to economics. He contributed to define the conceptual basis of this approach and he applied it in several fields of economics, focusing on the historical transformations and the endogenous changes. Geoffrey M. Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire, UK) commented that: ‘As Ulrich Witt and Andreas Chai put it in their introduction, it is time for some stocktaking concerning progress in evolutionary economics. This excellent collection of essays performs that task admirably: a number of leading authors review developments in the field with erudition and careful criticism. This is a milestone volume.’ Viktor J. Vanberg (University of Freiburg, Germany) contextualizes historically his comment: ‘More than one century after Thorsten Veblen coined the label evolutionary economics there is still no consensus on what constitutes the core of an evolutionary approach in economics. This volume will be welcome by readers interested in learning about the current state of the field and its prospective development. The essays collected represent the principal versions of evolutionary thinking in contemporary economics, covering methodological, theoretical and normative issues. The editors’ Introduction provides helpful guidance in tracing the history of the field, placing the collected essays into a broader context and pointing to prospects for theoretical convergence and integration.’ This is definitely an important book, ‘a milestone volume’, for scholars either from within or outside the evolutionary approach. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

The Civil War was even more disastrous than we thought. Joan Cashin, already a distinguished scholar of the period, looks afresh at the war through the lens of environmental history and material culture and finds only more terrors and even greater suffering. War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws from a dizzying cache of research from nearly four dozen archives to capture the brutality and desperation of the wars that raged beyond the battlefield—over food, timber, shelter, and the control of people themselves. Most of these struggles were not between the armies, but between soldiers and civilians. Despite Lost Cause slurs against Sherman and his ilk, Cashin finds both armies fully capable of emptying the stores, robbing the woodlots, and torching the homes of white noncombatants. To have two massive armies with nearly inexhaustible appetites for resources crisscrossing the South ensured widespread devastation. But the destruction was all the greater because soldiers on both sides paid little attention to military codes regulating pillage and plunder, and their commanders were usually unwilling or unable to reign them in. So, Cashin argues, the war caused starvation, deforestation, the razing of villages, and an underappreciated amount of hostage-taking and abuse of civilians. After the war, there was no reckoning, no recompense for the toll both armies took on white southerners, and the scars were bandaged with myths that deceive us still. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

This week we met Prof. Kurt Dopfer (Universität St Gallen, Switzerland) to talk about Modern Evolutionary Economics: An Overview (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a book he co-authored with eight other economists. Kurt attended in Nice the 30th annual edition of the EAEPE conference, the sponsor of the Economics channel at NBN. The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy is the scholarly home for the authors of this book. We tried to contextualize evolutionary economics within heterodox economics and to delineate the history of this approach to economics thanks to this book and the great and long career of Prof. Dopfer. The book is described by Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University) as ‘An excellent summary of what has been achieved in the field of evolutionary economics. I would hope that this book would be read by scholars steeped in ‘neoclassical’ economics and make them appreciate the power and potential of this scholarship.’ S. Metcalfe (University of Manchester) commented that ‘The publication of this clear and comprehensive introduction to the evolutionary dynamics of modern capitalism could not be more timely. The nature, causes and consequences of economic change are at the heart of current debates about the nature of capitalism, its virtues and vices locally, nationally and globally. This work draws on a wealth of economic thinking, old and new, to elucidate the primary role of innovation to the economic process and I can think of no better introduction to the pervasive and incessant role of human creativity to the operation of capitalism as an ordered but far from equilibrium system.’ Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

‘Create two, three—many Freuds!’ That, Dagmar Herzog shows, was the forgotten slogan of the Cold War. With Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Prof. Herzog carries forward the groundbreaking research program into the politics of desire that already brought us Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany and Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and The Future of American Politics. The book offers fresh readings of the work of such titanic (and sadly misunderstood) figures as Karen Horney, Robert Stoller, Félix Guattari and Konrad Lorenz—and it will change the way you think about trauma, libido and the New Left. Our conversation focused primarily on the radical currents in Cold War psychoanalysis and what happens when the world comes crashing through the bedroom window. David Gutherz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research centers on the history of the human sciences and revolutionary politics, with a special interest in Fascist and Post-Fascist Italy.

This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and transport. It wasn’t the first time that France’s cheminots (railway workers) have taken a stand, and it certainly won’t be the last. Another major strike is scheduled for early October of this year. In Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ludivine Broch examines the history of railway worker resistance and collaboration during the Occupation years. The project departs from a fundamental question about the role the national railways (and their personnel) played in the Holocaust in France. The resulting book is an in-depth labour history that considers class struggle and wartime economic pressures, complicating moral questions about what the cheminots did and didn’t do to enable and/or impede persecutions, deportations, and genocide during the Second World War. In the chapters of Ordinary Workers, readers will find a rich history of the social and political consciousness of railway workers in France that reaches back to the nineteenth century. Considering Vichy a turning point for cheminot political engagement and activism, the book accords an important place to the question of the resistance of railway workers to the transport of French Jews and other victims during the war. Ordinary Workers also shows that questions of integrity and commitment were paramount for this distinct labour group of thousands of men (and very few women) whose sense of professional identity was intimately tied up with the trains and rail lines they served. Their increased resistance during the Occupation included theft and protest. Sabotage, however, remained an extreme action for these workers who loved their machines and held colleague and passenger safety as high priorities. Drawing on a range of materials, including company archives, memoirs and postwar testimonies, as well as interviews the author conducted with cheminots throughout France, Ordinary Workers poses serious questions about the beliefs, everyday lives, and actions of a professional group whose experiences, choices, and stories connected French national spaces and politics during a most difficult period of the nation’s history. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

In Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Utah State University Assistant Professor of History Seth Archer traces the cultural impact of disease and health problems in the Hawaiian Islands from the arrival of Europeans to 1855. Colonialism in Hawaiʻi began with epidemiological incursions, and Archer argues that health remained the national crisis of the islands for more than a century. Introduced diseases resulted in reduced life spans, rising infertility and infant mortality, and persistent poor health for generations of Islanders, leaving a deep imprint on Hawaiian culture and national consciousness. Scholars have noted the role of epidemics in the depopulation of Hawaiʻi and broader Oceania, yet few have considered the interplay between colonialism, health, and culture – including Native religion, medicine, and gender. This study emphasizes Islanders’ own ideas about, and responses to, health challenges on the local level. Ultimately, Hawaiʻi provides a case study for health and culture change among Indigenous populations across the Americas and the Pacific. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Elizabeth F. Cohen’s new book, explores the concept of time, which is both temporal and theoretical, and how time has been integrated into so many aspects of democratic life. Cohen argues that this complex idea has become a form of boundaries that we, as citizens, rarely think about even as we come up against them. This is part of the overall arc of Cohen’s book, where she delves into the actual political value that has been allocated to time, in such forms as waiting periods, carceral sentences, naturalization processes, curfews, and governmental deadlines. Our lives and our understanding of the structures and processes of government are often arranged through allocations or allotments of time that we rarely question or consider. We have, in fact, given time, or spans of time, particular forms of political power because these allocations govern aspects of our lives. This is an important book that explores and examines the role of time in democratic life and in regard to the rights and capacities of citizenship. Cohen clearly explains what she means by durational time and how it works within our understanding of civic life. This book will appeal to a broad range of scholars across disciplinary boundaries, including political theorists, sociologists, philosophers, economists, policy experts, and citizens. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj.

John H. McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written academic books on creole linguistics, including the book we’ll be talking about today, but also a number of popular books on language (including The Power of Babel), and black identity in the United States. He is a regular columnist for several US broadsheets; he’s a two-time TED talker; and he has a weekly podcast dealing with issues related to language called Lexicon Valley which is worth checking out if you’re listening to New Books in Language. In this interview, McWhorter discusses his recent book The Creole Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Making the case that prominent scholars in creole studies have systematically mischaracterized the nature of creole languages, McWhorter calls for a more intellectually honest engagement with the empirical evidence, both from “syntactocentric” formal linguists, and from creolists concerned that treating creoles as typologically distinct is tantamount to neocolonialism. John Weston is an Yliopisto-opettaja (University Teacher) in the Language Centre at Aalto University. His research focuses on the relationships between language variation, knowledge and ethics. He can be reached at [email protected] @johnwphd.

In his Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Allan Greer, Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University in Montréal, examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of ‘property formation’ to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent’s resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book’s geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) invites readers to recognize just how often educational encounters crop up throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus. By attending to the ways that violence, deceit, suspicion, sexual desire, concealed identities, and various temptations modulate the relationship between teacher and student, and the ways that shocking and moving stories fix knowledge in the mind and demonstrate relationships—even grammatical relations—in unforgettable ways, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature offers readers interested in the history of pedagogy an exploration of the relationships between Anglo-Saxon students and teachers that tangles with both scholarly and popular expectations of the medieval mind. Addressing Anglo-Saxon uses of the culture of late antiquity, especially the form of the dialogue, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature reveals scenes heavily invested in the tensions between teacher and student, portrayals of engagement between parties that complicate relations of power and creation of knowledge. In the texts under consideration, the lesson for the reader (or hearer) grows from the conflict, rather than concord, between student and teacher. Focused on spiritual education and literacy, often closely linked in Anglo-Saxon texts, Dr. Dumitrescu’s work considers the Anglo-Saxon interest in negative emotions like fear, curiosity, erotic longing, and mistrust; and the potential cognitive uses of these emotions as they emerge in the faceoffs, desert journeys, revenants, riddles, letter battles, sea voyages, and challenges to memory that provide the narrative substance of Anglo-Saxon writing. Rereading the standard texts of the Anglo-Saxon corpus, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature demonstrates the ways in which texts like The Life of St. Mary of Egypt speak to broader medieval interests in learning, and drives toward a grasp of Anglo-Saxon beliefs about the purposes of teaching. Chapters on Solomon and Saturn I, Aelfric Bata’s Colloquies, and Andreas follow an approach to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History which suggests that the common focus on Caedmon’s Hymn draws attention away from the John of Beverly miracle: a story at the crossroads between miraculous Latin learning and English poetry in a mode of vernacular liberation. Treating urges and passions as sparks that give the learning process a necessary heat, even as they threaten to scorch it beyond utility, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature sketches a subtle and sophisticated approach to human emotion and cognition in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him with a taste for the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

Several recent guests on New Books in Political Science have talked about the path to political polarization in the US, including Lilliana Mason, Dan and Dave Hopkins, and Sam Rosenfeld. The deep divides between the parties have an obvious geographic dimension, but what is the cause? What has allowed people to sort themselves into cities, suburbs, and rural areas of the country? Clayton Nall has an answer to these questions: highways. Nall has written The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermine Cities (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In the book, Nall connects the federal programs to expand highway construction through the country to differences in political attitudes. In short, highways have contributed to sorting and polarization, allowing people to live and work much farther away than in the past. Using a variety of interesting sources of data, Nall also shows how this sorting has had different impacts on attitudes about transportation spending, with Republicans and Democrats holding distinct views on how federal money should support the physical connections between communities. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). But how do climate scientists reach these conclusions? In Philosophy and Climate Science (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Eric Winsberg presents the elements of climate science in an accessible but rigorous framework that emphasizes their relation to a variety of key debates in the philosophy of science: the relation between evidence and theory, the nature and uses of models and simulations, the types of probability involved, the role of values in science, and others. Winsberg, who is professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, both explains how climate scientists try to understand the chaotic and complex system that is the earth’s atmosphere, and uses climate science as an extended case study of how scientific knowledge is created and debated before it is used to inform public policy.

William Kuby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His book, Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018), examines the complicated legal and cultural history of heterosexual marriage. Long before the controversy over same-sex marriage, Americans found multiple ways to object to certain heterosexual marriages and divorce. The commercialization of courtship through advertisements and marriage bureaus, trial and common law marriages, rising divorce and remarriage rates, interracial coupling, and onerous waiting periods and requirements created a marriage crisis in law. It also created a crisis in social policy and norms as people experimented with unconventional unions and attempted to redefine gender roles and expectations. The marriage market was rife with unrealized expectations. Often the attention from conservative critics and journalists was greater than any real threat to marriage and the family. Kuby has shown us how marriage has been an area of legal contest and the how it continually generated anxiety about the foundations of society. This episode of New Books in Gender Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. She is the author of The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018).

In the early 20th century, thousands of Haitian men, women and children traveled to Cuba in search of work and wages. In Matthew Casey’s, Empire’s Guestworkers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba During the Age of US Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2017) digs deep into the archives, reading along and across the grain to...

The contemporary moment has brought to the forefront the question of what constitutes an American citizen. The legal question in popular understanding stems from the Fourteenth Amendment and its use of birthright citizenship as a central identifier of what makes a citizen. In Dr. Martha S. Jones’ newest book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018) skillfully demonstrates that by the time the amendment was passed, Black Baltimoreans had already personally conceived of themselves as birthright citizens because of their lived experiences in the antebellum era. By using the country’s largest free Black population as a proxy to discuss the performance of citizenship by Black Baltimoreans, Dr. Jones re-conceptualizes our understanding of what the politics of belonging meant for this very important antebellum Black community. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

We’re all familiar with some of the ways that time figures into our political environment. Things such as term limits, waiting periods, deadlines, and criminal sentences readily come to mind. But there are also protocols, accords, mandates, and contracts, and these frequently invoke temporal bounds of various kinds. In fact, when you think of it, a full range of political phenomena are structured by time. And yet time seems to have eluded political theorists and philosophers. In The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cohen undertakes an examination of the role temporality plays in liberal democratic politics. She develops a fascinating argument according to which time is both a political value and an instrument that can distort value.

What role did Christianity play in Algeria before, during, and after the war of independence? In Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Darcie Fontaine pursues this crucial question while refusing the notion of a homogeneous Christianity at any stage after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Emphasizing the ways religious ideas and practices were subject to change and deep contestation, the book attends to important differences—between Catholics and Protestants; between institutions and individuals; between Christianity as a tool and ideology of the settler state on the one hand, and a site of resistance to its many injustices on the other. A social history of theology that considers the interaction between religion and politics in Algeria and France, Decolonizing Christianity traces the movement of Christians, their beliefs and activisms, across the Mediterranean in both directions. While the book tracks broad shifts at the levels of the colonial state and Church hierarchies, its chapters stay close to the experiences and impact of Christians “on the ground” in Algeria. The compelling stories of committed individuals and groups of faith figure centrally throughout: the life and work of Léon-Etienne Duval, the Archbishop (and later Cardinal) of Algiers; the 1957 trial of a group of “progressivist” Christians accused of supporting Algerian nationalism; the thousands of Christians who remained in Algeria after the large-scale “exodus” of settlers in 1962. Beyond the French imperial and postcolonial Algerian context, the book “provincializes” the history of Christianity by exploring the broader international meanings and effects of the Algerian case in the era of decolonization. Circumstances and events in Algeria shaped the practices and policies of Catholics and Protestants beyond the new state’s borders as Christians (and their churches) grappled locally and globally with the challenges of responding to (and surviving) the ends of empires. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time. In Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Lisa Walters offers a very different interpretation of Cavendish’s thought, revealing the nuance and complexity of Cavendish’s thinking on a variety of subjects. As an aristocrat, Cavendish served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria and her family served the Royalist cause during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Yet as Walters demonstrates, Cavendish’s writings contain many radical ideas about women and gender relations, about the makeup of matter, and of political systems. Through an analysis of Cavendish’s writings that draws out commonalities between her fictional works and her nonfiction treatises, Walters provides a very different understanding of this under-appreciated contributor to Western thought.

How do unions and ideas around labor compare between the U.S. and Canada? And how did they come to be as they are today? In his new book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Barry Eidlin uses a variety of sources, including archives, to construct a comprehensive picture of the historical development of labor and unions in both countries. The book explores individual and structural explanations including the rise of service sector jobs as well as geographical shifts and preferences for unions. Eidlin also explores policy explanations in each country in turn, highlighting important cases and issues like the importance of the first contracts drafted between unions and management. He finds that political institutions, national character, internal union characteristics, and racial divisions help explain differences between the two countries. The book also breaks down trends over time, from party-class alliances in the US and Canada between 1932 -1948 followed by analysis of the period from 1946-1972. Eidlin brings it all together by focusing on class and regime structures from 1911 to 2016. In the conclusion, Eidlin gives general takeaways from the historical data but also leaves the reader with some road maps going forward. This book will be of interest to sociologists broadly, but especially those interested in labor and unions. This book would fit perfectly in a graduate level sociology of work class, or one focused on labor history. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

John Rawls is easily the most celebrated and influential political philosopher of the 20th Century, and his impact remains remarkably strong today. The central concepts with which his theory of justice begins are now components of the philosophical vernacular: The Original Position, Veil of Ignorance, Primary Goods, and his Two Principles of Justice (especially the Difference Principle) all will be well known to the majority of professional philosophers. It is less commonly acknowledged that the apparatus just referenced is but the beginning of his theory, and not its ultimate concern. Throughout his work, Rawls is attempting to address a fundamental philosophical question: Can a society committed to the freedom and equality of its citizens yet arrange social institutions in a way that reliably cultivate within persons the attitudes and dispositions required for social justice? In John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge UP, 2017), William A. Edmundson argues that Rawlsian justice calls for a socialist economic order. Could it be that America’s premiere political philosopher was a socialist?

Telling the story of a former colony post-independence is tricky, no matter if it’s a colony in Latin America, the Middle East or East Asia. Where does the idea of the ’nation’ slot in? Does it exist independent of colonialism? How does one talk about decolonization in post-imperial contexts? Then, you have to consider the interlocking concepts of language, race and even war. In the Sudanese case, that story can be told through the emergence of economic developmentalism. In Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Alden Young tells the story of how the Sudanese state was shaped post-independence as a result of economic planning. Through global, regional, and national notions of how to economically plan a state, Young traces the people, resources, and policies that would have consequences for generations to follow. Alden Harrington Young is assistant professor in the departments of History and of Global Studies and Modern Languages and director of Africana Studies, all at Drexel University. He received his BA from Columbia, his MA from the London School of Economics and Political Science and his PhD from Princeton University. He teaches African History, economic history and the history of Arab and African interactions. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships between armies and societies. In Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Barkawi argues that many scholars of Western armies tend to overstate the degree to which motivation and fighting spirit as well as the urge to commit atrocity derive from the characteristics, strengths or weaknesses of the societies the solders come from. Studying the British Indian Army in Burma during World War II, Barkawi sees instead the way that ritual, drill, and constructed traditions that are more internal to the army itself do more to explain how that army fought so relatively effectively. The Indian peasants who filled the ranks of the British Army shared little socially, politically or otherwise with the United States Marines who fought the Japanese on Guadalcanal. And yet they fought equally hard and with equal brutality against their foe—on behalf of their colonial overlords. Barkawi attends not only to larger political context of British India and to the recruitment and training of the British Army in India, he also describes in considerable detail specific engagements in Burma that make clear how group solidarity and the will to combat are constructed even in an army for whom the normal Western markers of belonging (patriotism, religion, ethnic heritage, even a common language) are absent.

To find out what Americans really think about their government, University of Texas-Austin Professor Roderick P. Hart read and analyzed approximately 10,000 letters to the editor, from 12 “ordinary” cities, written between 1948 and the present. In Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hart...

Ethan L. Menchinger‘s The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif (Cambridge University Press, 2017) traces the life and career of Ahmed Vasif (ca. 1735-1806), a prominent diplomat, historian, and intellectual of the early modern Ottoman Empire. This vivid biography places Vasif in the context of an Empire at a historical crossroads. Having witnessed his Empire’s defeat against Russia firsthand, Vasif struggled with how the Ottoman Empire could regain the prestige and power he felt it had lost. By carefully tracing Vasif’s fascinating career, Menchinger reveals a robust debate among Ottoman elites over morality, war, and Ottoman statecraft that drew on a rich imperial past and the exigencies of a new age. This crucial debate helped to frame the intellectual and political life in the Ottoman Empire’s final century. Menchinger’s book would be of interest to intellectual historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, as well as students and scholars interested more broadly in issues of decline, reform, and modernity.

What was Italy’s role in the Holocaust? Why is it that Italy is known as the Axis power that was benevolent to Jews, despite a scholarly consensus that many Italians actively participated in anti-Jewish persecution? In Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Shira Klein skillfully narrates the historical developments that belie this myth, and the complex process that have led to its perpetuation. By examining the experiences of Italian Jews during the Second World War from a wide chronological lens, Klein shows how the particular history of Italian Jews in the century prior to the Holocaust helped to mold their positive perception of Italy during and in the aftermath of genocide. Drawing from oral testimonies as well as unpublished memoirs, Klein reveals how a uniquely Jewish Italian patriotism was fostered in the decades leading up to (and even during) Fascism. Through their allegiance to Italy, she explains, many Jewish exiles and survivors themselves helped to spread the myth of Italian innocence. Shira Klein is Assistant Professor of History at Chapman University. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistence and continuities of Black radicalism from the end of the Second World War through the period of McCarthyism in the United States. Departing from an insistence on colonialism as the primary historical driver of the twentieth century, the book moves from the Popular Front politics of the interwar years to the beginning of the 1960s. Considering of “long civil rights movement” in relationship to the history of forms of colonialism and imperialism that were global in scope, the chapters of the book travel from key sites and events in the U.S. across the Atlantic to the U.K. and Europe, and further afield to spaces and conversations between activists in Asia and Africa. Reframing the history of Cold-War U.S. politics in relationship to broader histories of decolonization, The Anti-Colonial Front challenges analyses that over-emphasize national and generational differences in the social justice struggles and movements of the period, as well as those narratives that would have us believe that McCarthyism was wholly successful in suppressing radical political thought and activisms in the 1950s. Indeed, the book makes a contribution to our understanding of the origins of the revolutionary ideas and events of the 1960s. Drawing on a range of archival materials, the book examines the work of organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture. It also explores the lives and political work of individuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O’Dell and C. L. R. James. Engaging literary works, press and periodical literature across a political spectrum, the book interrogates the boundaries and histories of left and liberal politics in the period. The Anticolonial Front will be of tremendous interests to historians of American political culture, Black radicalisms, and the complex global past of anticolonialism and decolonization in the Cold-War era. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

In her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project that sought the reunification of Togoland. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans colonized the small territory of Togo in West Africa. During the first world war, the British and French invaded Togo and split it between them, introducing a new border that was criticized by the African inhabitants. After the second world war, in the era of decolonization, different visions of independence were put forward. One of these was ABLODE – meaning the reunification and joint independence of British and French Togoland. But the Ablode movement was defeated, and instead British Togoland was integrated with the Gold Coast, and became an integral part of an independent Ghana. The Fruits of Freedom tells the story of ABLODE.’ Kate Skinner is a lecturer in the History of Africa and Its Diasporas at the University of Birmingham. Her forthcoming publication is Ablode Safui (the Key to Freedom): Writing the New Nation in a West African Border Town 1958-63 (written with Dr. Wilson Yayoh of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana). Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY, Cortland. His research examines the ideologies and practices of development in Africa, south of the Sahara. He is the author of The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria. For more NBN interviews, follow him on Twitter @bekeh or head to bekeh.com.

In Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kathlene Baldanza explores the complex diplomatic exchanges between China and Vietnam from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Drawing on vast material of both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources, Baldanza challenges conventional narratives that focus...

Christy Ford Chapin, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written a history of the funding of America’s health care system: Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She begins with an account of the development of physicians’ practices in the mid-nineteenth century and traces the evolution of the American Medical Association’s role in shaping how physicians practiced medicine and how it was financed. The advent of the insurance model for funding health care was a creation of the Progressive period and became dominant in the late 1930s, during the New Deal. Chapin provides an account of the pitfalls of the insurance funding mechanism and recounts the battles between vested, competing interests, such as the AMA, independent physicians, corporate employers, labor unions, insurance companies (nonprofit and commercial), and the state and federal governments. Each of these entities shaped the health care system we have today. Chapin’s book helps explain how we got here and her critique of the insurance model suggests possible alternatives to our contemporary system of paying for health care.

How can war change women’s political mobilization? Using Rwanda and Bosnia as case studies Marie E. Berry answers these questions and more in her powerful new book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Berry provides the reader with a solid history and background of how war came to be in each of these countries respectively. The book starts off by shedding light on the transformative nature of war and women’s political mobilization. Berry notes three major changes that are key throughout the book: demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. Starting with Rwanda, Berry sheds light on women’s roles as caregivers during and after the war, and how groups they formed for emotional support lead to starting programs and organizations. Moving to Bosnia, Berry lays out how this situation was similar and also different from Rwanda, noting, interestingly, that NGOs were basically non-existent there before the war. She concludes by noting the ways in which women mobilized politically but also the ways in which the changes that occurred have been limited by systemic issues like victim hierarchies or patriarchal backlash. Overall, the book is rich with information and written in a very clear, organized, and accessible way. The book will be enjoyed by anyone interested in women and war. Folks in sociology, political science, history, women’s studies, as well as those interested in Rwanda and Bosnia specifically, will find this book fascinating. This would fit well in a graduate level Sociology course and would be a solid anchor for a substantive class on women and war. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

In her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Sandra Ott, Associate Professor of Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno examines German occupation of the Pyrenees. Particularly, Dr. Ott examines cases of collaboration and later justice and demonstrates how collaboration was often motivated out of base desires. She tells the story of this unique region through nine case studies of collaboration with a diverse group of characters bringing to life this fascinating history.