In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is the author of Politics at Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers into Lobbyists (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University. We often think of corporate political power expressed in campaign donations, political advertising, and lobbying. Darrell West, Ray LaRaja and Brian Schaffner, and Erica Fowler have all been on the podcast in the past to talk about this side of money and politics. Hertel-Fernandez is focused elsewhere to discover how companies influence politics. He sets his sights on the internal politicking that companies engage in with their own employees. Through rigorous surveys and interviews, he discovers that a quarter of American employees have experienced some type of political influence from their employer, including encouragements to register to vote and pressure to vote for favored candidates. And once contacted by an employer, many employees feels pressured to act, sometimes out of fear of retribution, docked pay, or dismissal from the job. While this is hardly a brand new corporate tactic, Hertel-Fernandez explains how it has grown since the 1990s and also why this is a worrisome trend for the democracy and employees.

Deondra Rose has written Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is an assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Citizens by Degree examines the development and impact of federal higher education policy, specifically the National Defense Education Act, the Higher Education Act, and Title IX. Rose argues that these policies have been an overlooked-factor driving the progress that women have made in the United States. By significantly expanding women’s access to college, they led to women to surpassing men as the recipients of bachelor’s degrees, while also empowering them to become more economically successful and politically engaged. The book focuses on how Southern Democrats shaped U.S. higher policy development during the mid-twentieth century, expanding opportunities for women, while maintaining discriminatory practices for African Americans.

As a believer in free thought, a campaigner for women’s rights, and as a supporter of abolition, Ernestine Rose had no shortage of causes to advocate. In The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (Oxford University Press, 2017), Bonnie Anderson explores the life of a remarkable 19th-century activist who dedicated herself to changing society for the better. Even as a young girl growing up in Russian-occupied Poland, Rose questioned the limitations imposed her by the beliefs of her time. As a teenager, she resisted the demands of her community and set out on her own by moving to Berlin. From there she made her way to London, where she encountered Robert Owen and embraced his philosophy. Upon her move to the United States in 1836 she became a public speaker and activist, working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and others to change public opinion and advance reform. Though Rose saw her efforts to end slavery vindicated with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, ill health forced her to return to England just a few years later, where she continued to campaign for women’s suffrage up to the end of her long life.

When the state takes over, can local democracy survive? Over 100 school districts have been taken over by state governments since the late 1980s. In doing so, state officials relieve local officials, including those elected by local residents, of the authority to operate public schools. In cities with an increasingly powerful group of African-American leaders, a state takeover has the potential to roll-back gains in descriptive representation and democratic governance. How this has played out is the purpose of Domingo Morel‘s new book, Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Morel focuses on two cities, Central Falls, RI and Newark, NJ, as well as original quantitative data from cities across the country. What he discovers is a very real threat to local democracy, but one that has played out different ways. The case of Newark differs greatly from Central Falls, and Morel shows what we can learn about racial and ethnic politics by focusing on the changing ways that schools are operated. Morel is assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University, Newark.

Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (Oxford University Press, 2017) by Fareen Parvez is a rich ethnographic analysis of Islamic Revival movements in France (Lyon) and India (Hyderabad). In her study, Parvez maps the complex ways in which Muslims, especially women, engage in religious and political activism in secular states where they are minorities. Her study challenges many notions of secularity and political Islam, particularly as it intersects with complex class identities (i.e., those who are marginalized socio-economically) both in India and France. Moving through everyday spaces, such as schools (Islamic and secular), conferences, mosques, and cafes, Parvez’s study attunes us to the intricate realities of women’s political and religious activism. This study is of great importance to scholars invested in minority and Muslim politics in India and France, as well those working on secularism, Muslim women, and political Islam, while Parvez’s ethnographic methodologies and reflections would be of great value for those working in anthropology. M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 201800) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected].

Reiko Ohnuma‘s Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful treatment of animals in Indian Buddhist literature. Although they are lower than humans in the paths of rebirth, stories about animals show them as virtuous and generous—and often the victim of human failings. In the life stories of the Buddha, animals serve as “doubles,” thereby adding nuance and complexity to various episodes in the Buddha’s life. Ohnuma, in this groundbreaking study, argues that animals in Indian Buddhist literature serve to illuminate what it means to be a human being. Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at [email protected].

Five decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the French border. Many years, and thousands of documents later, Professor Robert Darnton has published a new book, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018). Apart from illuminating the everyday life of the trade that enabled and shaped French reading practices, the book is a methodological feat that mines an impressive array of sources to access the financial, legal, political, and cultural history of book distribution before the French Revolution. Following the trail of Jean-Francois Favager, a sales rep of the S.T.N. who toured France in 1778, Darnton’s thirteen chapters trace his journey from Neuchatel, across the border into France, down the southeast to Lyon and Marseille, west towards Bordeaux, then north before crossing back to Besancon and home (with many stops in between). As the book pursues Favager’s story, the reader learns about the challenges of travel by horse in this period, including border-crossings, the network of roads that connected French towns and cities in the eighteenth century, and the many obstacles that arose along the way. A history of the movement of foreign books into a French market, A Literary Tour de France also explores the histories of smuggling, piracy, contract and business law and values. Focused on the world of books in the French provinces, rather than Paris, this study offers today’s reader insight into the demands and supplies of their eighteenth-century counterparts and the range of booksellers who sold their wares. The result is a rich and textured account of how and what many French people were able to read in the decades before the upheaval of 1789. I encourage all of you to visit the books companion website, including a treasure of primary sources that will enhance and extend the reading of A Literary Tour de France. 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/.

Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lot of people who live in “Russia” who are in important senses not Russians. There are Ingush, Buryats, Chechens, Mordvinians, Tatars, and many others. Russia, then, is a “Federation” of Russians and non-Russians. But even that’s not quite right. As Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny point out in their excellent book Russia’s Empires (Oxford University Press, 2016), Russia is really an empire, and has long been. Since the 16th century, Moscow has gathered, conquered, colonized, assimilated, or otherwise brought to heel a great number of places occupied by people who were not Russians. Russians built this empire for different reasons at different times; it grew and (especially recently) it shrank. But it was always there, and still is. Kivelson and Suny convincingly argue that nothing about Russia—past or present—can really be understood outside the context of Russia as an empire. Listen in to our lively conversation.

True crime is as popular as ever in our present moment. Both television and podcast series have gained critical praise and large audiences by exploring largely unknown individual crimes in depth and using them to consider broader questions surrounding the justice system, guilt and innocence, class and racial inequality, and evidence. Rarely do we get to think historically about these broader topics through the lens of individual, especially unknown, cases in light of the challenges posed by researching historical crimes. Kali Nicole Gross, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University New Brunswick, has done incredible research to do just that in her new book, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, Hardcover 2016, Paperback 2018). The book won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction. The book tells the story of the discovery of a torso, the investigation of the murder, and the life of the accused—Hannah Mary Tabbs. The body was discovered in 1887 and drew an unusual amount of attention in the segregated areas in and around Philadelphia, especially given the victim and accused were black. In this episode of the podcast, Gross discusses why the case caught the eye of the public and investigators at the time. She also explains some of the broader context and insights of the case. Finally, she talks about her research process. We don’t give away the resolution of the case in our conversation, but will introduce you to Hannah Mary Tabbs and the world of post-Reconstruction Philadelphia in which she lived. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected].

Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, including the present book Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia (Oxford University Press, 2016) which won the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize. Bringing together two of her longstanding areas of research interest in this book, Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and applies it to the evolving political situation in Catalonia. In this interview, Woolard discusses the key theoretical and contextual elements of the book, broadly following its three-part structure. First, the concepts of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, sociolinguistic naturalism are introduced, and Woolard sets out the changing ideological grounding of linguistic authority there over the course of twenty years of fieldwork in Catalonia. Next, Woolard’s theoretical framework is applied to the case of a popular satirical television program which catalyzed the sociolinguistic rehabilitation of a Catalonian president whose Castilian Spanish was better than his Catalan. Finally, Woolard discusses her early and recent fieldwork in a Catalan-medium high school, and her experiences of following up on research informants first interviewed twenty years ago. This is a typically rich and fascinating volume from a pioneer of linguistic anthropology. Positioned as a corrective against the banal nationalism of mainstream media discourse about Spain and Catalonia, the book calls on us to rethink our ideologies of language, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which have become so polarized in the West in recent years. Kathryn Woolard wrote a post for Indiana University’s Communication, Media and Performance Anthropology blog (08/14/2017) in which she discusses ideas we talked about in the podcast. You can find it here. John Weston is an Yliopistonopettaja (Associate Lecturer) at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyvaskyla. His research focuses on the relationships between language variation, knowledge and ethics. He can be reached at [email protected].

American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a compelling exploration of the political life of Governor Mario Cuomo as well as the concepts of American liberalism, presidential politics, our understandings of governors in the United States, and the geographic and political shifts that transpired during the latter half of the twentieth century. While Saladin Ambar‘s book focuses specifically on Cuomo’s life, his engagement with Democratic politics, his speeches, it is much broader in scope and in importance as an analysis of the changing dynamics in American politics as the sun set on the New Deal and, in its place, we observed the rise of the Reagan Revolution and the Conservative movement. Ambar examines Cuomo not just as a politician and elected official, but also as theorist about the role of government in the lives of modern Americans. This is why he is dubbed the American version of the Cicero. Ambar’s book would be of interest to those who study American political development and American history, American Political Thought, and, in particular, the connection between political parties, electoral politics, governors.

In the last few weeks, minimum wage workers in 18 states saw their wages go up; in Maine a full dollar increase. Why states have taken the lead on raising the minimum wage is the topic of the new book from Christopher Witko and William Franko, The New Economic Populism: How States Respond to Economic Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2017). Witko is associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina; Franko is assistant professor of political science at West Virginia University. In the book, they argue, despite rising inequality, the federal government has been unable to muster the will to address the problem. Instead, we are seeing many states actively addressing economic inequality, often through direct democracy. Franko and Witko show that the states that address inequality are not necessarily those with the greatest levels of inequality, but instead are those states where citizens are aware and concerned with growing inequality. They examine how various factors have shaped state policies that boost incomes at the bottom (the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit) and reduce incomes at the top (with top marginal tax rates) between 1987 and 2010. Heath Brown, associate professor, City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Grad Center, hosted this podcast. Please rate the podcast on iTunes and share it on social media.

Through his work as a scholar and critic, Alain Locke redefined African American culture and its place in American life. Jeffrey Stewart‘s book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2018) offers a detailed examination of Locke’s life, one that reveals his many achievements and how they changed the nation. Born into a middle-class family in Pennsylvania, his mother worked to ensure that Locke had the best education possible. After graduating from Harvard and spending three years in Europe as the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Locke returned to the United States and took a position at Howard University. In the 1920s he encouraged African Americans to embrace their own cultural past, becoming one of the leading promoters of the Harlem Renaissance then emerging in the country. Though his relationship with its leading figures was often fraught with tension, Locke never gave up his advocacy of Afro-American cultural identity, which he continued for the rest of his life through his writings, his lectures, and his sponsorship of African American artists.

Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2016), a multi-authored volume co-edited by Catherine Grant and Huib Schippers, examines a range of musical traditions from cultures around the world. The book deliberately places endangered musical practices alongside vibrant traditions like western opera and Hindustani music, each assessed along five domains: systems of learning music, musicians and communities, contexts and constructs, regulations and infrastructure, and media and the music industry. Doing so allows for both “vertical reading” (reading chapters in sequential order) and “horizontal reading” (in which one examines one or a handful of domains and focuses on these across different chapters). Beyond the book, information from the project is also available on the website soundfutures.org. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet.

At the start of Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), five different, and competing, approaches to populism. It has been used to describe those on the left and the right, those in power and those seeking out power. Into this confusion, Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser offer clarity and brevity to the challenge of figuring out what populism is exactly. Mudde is associate professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia; Kaltwasser is associate professor of political science at the Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile. Mudde and Kaltwasser suggest that an ideational approach to populism offers needed clarification. They argue that populism is centered on specific ideas about The People, The Elite, and The General Will. Whether populism emerges in the form of a social movement, like Occupy Wall Street, or political parties, such as the populism parties spread across Europe, or even populist leaders, these ideas distinguish populists. But they also suggest that the thin-centeredness of populism means it often is connected to other ideologies, such as socialism or authoritarianism. Populism then can manifest in a specific political context as a left-wing movement or a charismatic strongman. Gender, too, matters, as masculinity and definitions of the role of women, feature prominently in populism. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown.

One of the most neglected areas of musicological research is art music written by nineteenth-century American composers, thus Douglas Shadle‘s book Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a welcome, and much needed, addition to the field. It is the first comprehensive survey of American nineteenth-century orchestral music. Organized chronologically, each chapter also features a detailed critical analysis of a major work. Shadle unearths, analyzes, and advocates for a repertoire that has been erased almost completely from the historical and performance record. Along the way, Shadle debunks or nuances some of the most common narratives in musicological historiography on American music. Written in a lively, approachable style, he provides contemporary assessments of the music, while also contextualizing American symphonic works within the musical, cultural, and political history of the United States. Despite focusing on nineteenth-century music and composers, Shadle’s work resonates with and informs some of the controversies that dog classical music today, including the continued dominance of pieces by white male composers in the repertoire of the nations leading orchestras. He challenges the arguments that critics made then, and some continue to make today, that uphold the systemic exclusion of non-canonical music and works by composers from marginalized groups. Learn more about Orchestrating the Nation here. Douglas W. Shadle is an assistant professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University whose research centers primarily on American orchestral music and American musical culture in the nineteenth century. His work has appeared in many journals and collected editions including American Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and MLA Notes. His article How Santa Clause Became a Slave Driver: The Work of Print Culture in a Nineteenth-Century Controversy won the 2016 Society for American Music Irving Lowen’s Article Award and a 2015 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise has been well-reviewed not only by musicologists, but also in the popular press in venues such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. It was also honored with an ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2017. Currently, Shadle is working on a short monograph for the Oxford Keynote Series on Antonin Dvořak’s New World Symphony. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis, author of two recent accounts of the war that together offer a sharp reassessment of the American effort. In Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017) Daddis challenges many existing perceptions of the readiness and roles of MACV’s two most prominent commanders, Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, as well as their struggles with the Washington defense establishment during the war. By centering his study on the strategic planning and its execution, Daddis not only acknowledges the centrality of Vietnamese agency in the outcome of the war, he also reveals how some historians have misjudged the war’s outcome to present flawed visions of possible victory.

It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped make the case for the twenty Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who took part in the bloodshed. The truth was, of course, far more complicated, as Lakota activists like Joseph Horn Cloud would prove in an effort to gain restitution and justice from the American government. Surviving Wounded Knee is an important story about what happens to a massacre site once the smoke clears, and is a testament to the power of public history. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

It’s intuitive to think that statements of the form “lying is wrong” ascribe a property—that of wrongness—to acts of the type lying. In this way, one might think that statements of this kind are much like statements of the form “Bill is left-handed,” which also seems to attribute a property—left-handedness to Bill. But what about a statement like “Bill is a Wookie?” As there is no property of being a Wookie, the statement seems then to be false. What’s called the error theory is the view that statements that attribute moral properties are always false, because no such properties exist. In Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgments (Oxford University Press, 2017), Bart Streumer offers a fascinating kind of defense of the error theory as it applies to all normative judgments: Streumer argues that the error theory cannot be believed, and its unbelievability makes the error theory more likely to be true.

In his work, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Sedgwick maps the ideational processes that have led to the development of contemporary western Sufism. Sedgwick showcases how Neoplatonism influenced Arab philosophy and subsequently Sufism. Pre-modern Sufism then appealed to Jewish and Christian mystics, who framed Sufism as a non-Islamic tradition, in effect emphasizing its universalism. With this historical mapping Sedgwick masterfully showcases how, even in its earliest period, Sufism was engaged with by Muslims and non-Muslims, and thus the fluidities noted in western Sufism in the contemporary context is by no means unique, but rather reflective of an age-old process of textual, philosophical and mystical transmissions. Moving between questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, universal and Islamic, this study naturally challenges how we think and frame Sufism. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Sufism, especially in modern western Sufism. M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected].

What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve the wartime suffering of your family with their moral culpability for the Holocaust? Roger Frie explores the thorny issue of historical memory and intergenerational trauma in his new award winning book Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017). In an intensely personal confrontation with the Nazi past in his own family, Roger searches for ways to navigate historical traumas and reconcile the memory of his grandfather with the knowledge of his deeds. Roger Frie is a registered psychologist and interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and history. He publishes and lectures widely on historical trauma, culture, memory, and human interaction. Roger has also edited a collection of essays bringing together historians and psychoanalysts to further examine the dynamics of intergenerational trauma entitled History Flows Through Us: Germany, the Holocaust, and the Importance of Empathy (Routledge, 2018). Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of modern Europe specializing in Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix

Kevin Bartig’s new book Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores multiple facets of one of the most famous film scores of the twentieth century, as well as the cantata Prokofiev adapted from the original music. Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film Alexander Nevsky, about a thirteenth-century Russian national hero who defeated the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire, premiered in July 1938 in the Soviet Union amid rising tensions with Nazi Germany. While Eisenstein’s film was a propaganda piece designed to encourage Soviet patriotism at a time of growing fears about the Nazi regimes aggression, it is also one of the great motion pictures of the twentieth century because of its technical mastery and climactic half-hour Battle of the Ice scene. Using extensive archival sources, Bartig recounts the unusually close collaboration between Eisenstein and Prokofiev that produced the score, the investigates the music’s reception in Russia and abroad from its premiere until today, and explores questions raised by the connections between music and politics. Part of the Oxford University Press’s new Keynotes series, the relatively short book uses the close analysis of one work to examine Soviet cultural politics, the creation of film scores, the power of accessible music, and the afterlife of works of propaganda after their original contexts disappear. Kevin Bartig is an associate professor of musicology at Michigan State University and specializes in music and culture in Eastern Europe and the US. He has received multiple grants and fellowships including awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He was also a Lilly Teaching Fellow during the 2011-12 academic year. His publications include Composing for the Red Screen: Sergey Prokofiev and Soviet Film (Oxford University Press, 2013), as well as articles, reviews, and essays in several collected editions. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

Music is frequently connected to leftist politics and seen as the soundtrack to social protest movements, most notably the civil rights movement. But the far right groups use music too. Benjamin Teitelbaum‘s Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Swedish and Nordic far right parties deployed music in the 2000’s to expand the reach of their ideas. Consciously rejecting the sounds of White Power music and the image of skinheads in favor of pop music, hip-hop, and reggae, leaders of Sweden’s far right parties used the change in music to make in-roads into mainstream political discourse. In this podcast Teitelbaum discusses the shifting theoretical landscape that undergirds the radical nationalism and how this led to a variety of approaches toward music by far right parties. We explore how far right musicians and audiences came to use African-inspired musical forms in their effort to spread their ideas about Swedish nationalism. In addition to exploring questions of race, the conversation also examines the changing role of women in far right music and the vexed position of folk music. The podcast concludes with drawing some comparisons and contrasts between far right movements in the United States and Sweden. Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado. Teitelbaum’s commentary on music and politics has appeared in major European and American media outlets, in addition to scholarly venues. He has contributed as an expert for NPR, Swedish Radio, Norwegian Radio, the BBC, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Helsinge Sanomat and Berlingske, and he has authored op-eds in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Dagbladet and the Wall Street Journal. Teitelbaum is also a musician who specializes in Swedish folk music and Sweden’s unofficial national instrument, the nyckelharpa. More information about him can be found on his website. The host for this episode is Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law and the co-editor of African American Culture and Legal Discourse.

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of victory, all sides were looking for a quick exit but had few prospects of finding one. In 1917, the Germans gambled in escalating their submarine warfare, which drew the hesitant Americans into the conflict, the French faced mutinies, and the Russians plunged the throes of Revolution. The war thus raged, spreading across two oceans to four continents, finally turning toward its conclusion. In this episode of the podcast, David Stevenson discusses the causes, course, and effects of these events with us, and shares his insights about judging historical forces and human agency, evaluating counterfactuals, and drawing comparisons between 1917 and subsequent events of the last 100 years, including the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and conflicts of the twenty-first century. Professor Stevenson is Stevenson Chair of International History at the London School of Economics, and has published several important works on the World War I including With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, and 1914-1918: The History of the First World War. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.

Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectives, integrating the concept of temporality to considerations of liberty and justice within an analysis of American political thought and history, especially in the period following the Civil War. Laski’s complex and sophisticated text will have great appeal to political theorists and political philosophers as well as scholars of American political development and American letters and literature. Laski explores the idea of temporality in context of American democracy, and democracy generally, and the concept of progress as we often consider it in relation to post-slavery America. Untimely Democracy highlights an often-under-explored area of American politics, in the post-bellum writers and their discourse that examines a period of stasis as Reconstruction comes to an end and African-American liberty does not, in fact, expand. Laski approaches these theoretical considerations through post-Civil war writers like Stephen Crane, Pauline Hopkins, Callie House, W.E.B Dubois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass and others. The thrust of this exploration is to reposition, in a sense, the concept of racial progress and the quest for liberty—providing a counter-discourse to the expected linear arc generally associated with racial progress. Laski’s examination is multilayered and examines these written and rhetorical works, especially within an analysis that explores our understanding of time, memory, recollection, and progress as an only-forward moving trajectory. This book takes the reader on a journey through concepts of temporal distinctions or horizons within a democratic quest, examining what Laski titles “untimely democracy”—neither clear progress, nor a forgetting of the past, but a consideration of democracy and the concept of expanded liberty from within a context that is bracketed in time and that explores this tension within time.

Are we good people? Or do we just think we are? In his new book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017), author Christian B. Miller tackles these questions and more, breaking down what character is, how to measure it, and how to distinguish good from bad moral behavior. In our interview, Miller talks to us about finding his way into this area of study and what research says about our tendencies to display our best and worst qualities. His insights and findings offer us the chance to better understand whats going on when we witness ourselves, our loved ones, and even our highest-ranking leaders behaving in ways that run against consciously-held morals. They also offer pathways for developing and inspiring more upstanding behavior. Christian B. Miller is A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Director of the Character Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 75 papers as well as two books with Oxford University Press,Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013) and Character and Moral Psychology (2014). He is also the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford University Press), and several other volumes. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute, where he also chairs their monthly LGBTQ Study Group.

I was in graduate school during Bosnia and Rwanda. Like everyone else, I watched the video footage and journalistic accounts that came from these two zones of atrocity. Like everyone else, I wondered how humans could do such things to each other. And like everyone else, I asked in anguish “why can’t we do something.” Much of the scholarship about Rwanda focuses on this question. Most of it is good, solid, passionate work. but as Herman Salton points out, it largely concentrates on nation-states and their interaction with each other. Salton’s new book, Dangerous Diplomacy: Bureaucracy, Power Politics and the Role of the UN Secretariat in Rwanda (Oxford UP, 2017), asks ‘why couldn’t we do something’ through a new lens, that of the UN and its various administrative units. Salton, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Asian University for Women reminds us that the UN, rather than being monolithic or powerless, had (and has) its own internal politics and actors. Salton argues that interactions between UN leaders and structures greatly shaped the decisions made by the Security Council and by UN representatives and soldiers on the ground in Rwanda. By doing so, he sheds new light on the decision to create UNAMIR, on the behavior of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, on the decision to remove UNAMIR early in the crisis and on the long-term impact of Rwanda on UN decisions about humanitarian intervention. Moreover, in the interview itself, Salton draws on his own experience in the UN to highlight the way the culture of the Security Council itself shapes the debates and decisions in that body. This podcast is part of an occasional series on the genocide in Rwanda. The series began with interviews with Michael Barnett and Sara Brown. Future interviews will feature Erin Jessee, Tim Longman, and others. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Hes the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994.

Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2017) is to use Owen’s voluminous writings on religion to provide new insights into this critical Puritan figure. Born in 1616, Owen grew up in an Anglican faith increasingly influenced by Arminian doctrine. Though Owen sided with Parliament during the English Civil War, it was hearing a sermon in London that had a far more profound impact on Owen’s life by triggering a born again experience. Thanks to a succession of wealthy patrons, Owen rose to prominence during the war, preaching before Parliament and serving as a chaplain in Oliver Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland. For his support Cromwell appointed him vice chancellor of Oxford University, a post that Owen held until the Restoration led to his removal. Though offered opportunities in Massachusetts colony, Owen elected to remain in England, where he wrote and preached until his death in 1683.

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restoration. Based on a recently discovered cache of letters between Marie von Clausewitz and her renowned husband, Carl, it also dramatically expands our understanding of the process by which Carl’s famous treatise, On War, came to be. Vanya E. Bellinger, currently a visiting professor at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, argues that Marie was a crucial foil for the development of Carl’s ideas over many years. Marie’s connections to the Prussian court (she was born into the prominent von Bruhl family) also helped to secure her husband’s often precarious position. Bellinger freely acknowledges Carl’s military genius but places Marie alongside her husband as an intellectual partner and political confidante, who played an important role in bringing one of the most famous works of military theory to the world.

Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president. Today’s racial and gender politics have long historic roots, according to Elizabeth McRae, the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Gillespie McRae is an associate professor of history and director of the graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University. Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the local workers who promoted the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. In rural communities and cities, white women performed various duties that upheld segregation and racism: rejecting marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of neighbors, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. And the work of white women was not restricted to the South. McRae also shows how this politics of Massive Resistance to de-segregation and civil rights plays out in cities in the North.

In her latest book, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sarah Fishman offers reader a social history of French families in the years that followed the Second World War. Fishman is focused here on illuminating the daily and practical lives of the men, women, and children who worked and often struggled to transition from wartime to peacetime. After 1945, French families had to negotiate a variety of changes that shaped, and were shaped by, shifting ideas and attitudes about gender roles and relations, love, sexuality, marriage, and parenting. To access the lives of French working and lower-middle class families, Fishman draws on a wide range of sources, including previously neglected popular press publications that reflected the politics and experiences of working people. She also uses juvenile court records from the period that detail family lives and dynamics, as well as state and societal norms and expectations. Tracing the contours of a broad transformation from a vision of family centered on (paternal) authority to an emphasis on relationships, including fatherhood, the book also considers the impact of the ideas of figures like Freud, Beauvoir, and Kinsey on the everyday beliefs and behaviors of ordinary people. Attentive to the continuities and changes that ran throughout the period from 1940 to the late 1960s, the book places the postwar in a context that remembers the war while also setting the stage for the eruption of French political, social, and cultural life in 1968. 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/.

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015), Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs chronicles the medical researcher whose success in developing a successful polio vaccine in the 1950s made him an international celebrity. Born to immigrant parents, Salk studied hard to graduate for college and earn his medical degree. His interest in helping all of humanity led Salk to pass on a career as a clinician in favor of one as a researcher in the burgeoning field of virology. After work during World War II on the first successful influenza vaccine Salk moved to Pittsburgh, where he soon found himself involved in a coordinated effort to defeat the disease. Salk’s vaccine became the first to achieve this. Yet as Jacobs demonstrates, the fame Salk won for his achievement came at a price. Though lionized the world over he found himself engaged in a lifelong campaign to prove the superiority of his vaccine, while his efforts to develop vaccines against other diseases never achieved the same degree of success.

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University. As a feminist and moral philosopher, Manne examines an idea that has been inadequately addressed in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017). She argues that misogyny is on the wane as a working concept and situates her analysis in recent news stories and events. She offers a definition that is not psychological but rather considers it a system of social control. Manne brings a fresh analysis to our understanding of “misogyny” and the related term “sexism.” Misogyny is selective because it targets those who fail to uphold the patriarchal standards of a woman’s place in a masculine world and works as the policing and enforcement branch of the ideology of sexism. Women caught in “asymmetrical moral support” roles are expected to offer respect, deference, admiration, and gratitude to favorably situated men and provide, especially elite men, with comfort, care, and sexual and emotional labor in many different situations. Misogyny shows up in conversation; office politics; and the dispensation of favors flowing from a man’s relative status, wealth, or celebrity. Rewards come to those who comply. In this scenario, women act as human givers rather than full and equal human beings. Manne’s book is one for the moment. This episode of New Books in American 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. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press.

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the ‘worst of the worst.’ The 1976 decision ushered in the ‘modern’ period of the US death penalty, resulting in the execution of over 1,400 inmates, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Each chapter of Frank Baumgartner‘s, Marty Davidson’s, Kaneesha Johnson’s, Arvind Krishnamurthy’s, and Colin Wilson’s Deadly Justice : A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2017) addresses a specific factual question and provides statistical evidence about how the modern death penalty has functioned. Baumgartner is Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina. Davidson, Johnson, Krishnamurthy, and Wilson were all students at North Carolina during the research for the book.

Who do people turn to when they want to talk about serious issues in their life? Do they end up confiding in people they list as confidants? In his new book, Someone to Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mario Luis Small uses in-depth interviews with first-year graduate students to uncover how intimate conversations are executed in real time. This book is interesting in the way that the interviews unfold; readers will find themselves nodding in agreement and thinking about social networks in new ways. A common theme throughout the book is how our behavior differs from what we may answer on a survey and under what circumstances it does so. For instance, weak ties, not strong ties, are relied upon more often than previous research would suggest. At the end of the book Small turns to empirical and theoretical generalizability finding many examples and surveys of non-graduates students echoing his study. In an era of big data Small encourages us to not lose sight of the human behavior we are studying and the stories behind the data. This book is rich with ideas and stories but would be easily digested by many different types of readers. Sociologists, and particularly those studying social networks, will find the book useful. Graduate students, advisers, and graduate program chairs will find the insights in the book invaluable. This book is a clear fit for a Social Networks class, but would even work as an example in a methods or theory class. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology, and other human-directed perspectives as these are constrained by evolution. In The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2017), Owen Flanagan sets out to clarify the landscape of moral possibility for actual human beings. He defends a perspective on human morality that he describes as an “oughtology” based in naturalism, gleaned from comparing Western, Chinese, and Indian moral traditions. Flanagan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, considers how diverse moral traditions converge on some features basic to moral psychology, such as compassion, yet differ in other ways, such as whether anger is a justified and beneficial moral emotion or whether it should be extirpated. He also examines different views of the self, including the Buddhist view in which there is no self.

How did African-American slaves react to slavery? What factors, particularly religion, might shape those reactions, even making them violent? Patrick Breen, in his carefully researched and cogently written The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2015) sheds light on these questions through a meticulous study of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. With its careful attention to the historiography of the rebellion, its consideration of the veracity of “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (the primary source that serves as the center of studies on the rising), and its treatment of how churches reacted to the rising, this work is not only of interest to scholars, but could easily be adopted into a college-level survey of American history or a course introducing the historian’s craft.

Today I talked to Vicky Neale about her new book Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book details one of the most exciting developments to happen in the last few years in mathematics, a new approach to the Twin Primes Conjecture. The story involves mathematicians from five different centuries and probably every continent except Antarctica. Vicky does a great job of telling not only what the problem is and how work on it has proceeded, but also how mathematical research has evolved given the resources available in the twenty first century. If you like numbers, you’ll love this book—and if you don’t like numbers, maybe this book can help you appreciate them.

The idea of being a “political prisoner” may seem timeless. If someone was imprisoned for his or her political beliefs, then that person is in some sense a “political prisoner.” Think of the Tower of London and its various occupants. But, as Padraic Kenney points out in his fascinating new book Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2017), the modern reality of what we might call “political prisoner-ship” is very different and very modern. He shows that you really couldn’t have modern political prisoners until you had all kinds of other modern institutions, most importantly, the modern state-run prison, the modern mass press, and more generally, modern political movements (think parties, nationalist movements, revolutionary causes). These things came together to produce a kind of incarceration that was essentially a political statement made by the prisoners to whomever might listen. Kenney does a wonderful job of explaining how this form of extreme form of political protest evolved in the 19th and early 20th century. He gives lots of fascinating examples from all over the globe: Russia, Poland, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, among others. And, yes, the United States right now. What are, he asks, the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay but political prisoners? Listen in.

Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents readers with the connected histories of military cadres and intellectuals in Peru and Spain c. 1770-1830. The book advances the argument that a Crown-sponsored change in the idea of “merit” in the Spanish Empire made possible the rise to power of new military cadres and the renewal of the Hispanic republic of letters. Ricketts argues that these changes had important consequences as these two cohorts of individuals battled over who had the merits to rule the Empire during the captivity of Spanish king Ferdinand VII under Napoleon, and after independence in Peru. Such shift in the conception of merit accounted for the rise of men like Agustin Gamarra and Andres de Santa Cruz, two of the most prominent leaders of independent Peru, to high military rank in the Spanish imperial armies first, and in the revolutionary ones later. The quest for an intellectual renewal in Spain and Spanish America also led to a reinvigoration of a Spanish Atlantic republic of letters. There too new men rose to prominence based on their literary and intellectual achievements. Part of these Spanish Atlantic intellectuals would battle with the men of the military concerning whom had the most “merits” to govern in Spain and Spanish America. Ricketts’ book stimulates the reader to ask questions regarding the origins of “meritocratic” thinking in Spain and Latin America, as well as how coherent military bodies came into public life. Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at [email protected].

Rapidly changing politics. Debates over the meaning of immigration. Widespread violence against minority groups. An economy undergoing a radical shift in form. The thirty years after the end of the Civil War have much in common with the United States in the second decade of the twenty first century, argues Stanford historian Richard White in The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford University Press, 2017). In this ninth volume of the long-running Oxford History of the United States series, White tells the story of a period in American history too long thought of as historical “flyover country.” Rather than merely an era of institutional failures and mediocre presidents, the Reconstruction Era and Gilded Age are critical to understanding the politics and society of the modern United States (though there were still plenty of failures and uninspiring politicians along the way). Americans often used the image of the home, ubiquitous though often hiding in plain sight, to argue about free labor, racial equality, and environmental crises. In The Republic for Which it Stands, White makes a strong case for a wholesale reevaluation of the long period after the Civil War as more than just decades of missed opportunity; Americans spent those years fundamentally reshaping the republic itself. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perpetrators were the same, and that they were all driven by the same bass motivations. Largely a synthesis of material previously only available in German, Lewy presents a typology of perpetrator types and dispels the idea that it was impossible for killers to walk away. He also presents arguably the most accessible analysis of the post-war justice available in English. Undoubtedly a must-read for anyone wishing to understand how and why people participate in acts of mass violence. Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University. His dissertation, Political Civil Servants and the German Administration under Nazism, explores the dynamics of Civil Service behaviour under National Socialism, asking why senior administrators assisted the regime in pursuit of its ideological goals. He has forthcoming publications with the Journal of Contemporary History and the Routledge Studies in Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. He can be contacted at [email protected] or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of this discontent? Nuclear power. Not weapons. Electricity. How did anti-nuclear protest become a debate about the future of society? What united farmers, housewives, hippies, and anarchists against the state? Find out in our conversation with Andrew S. Tompkins about his new book Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2016). By weaving government documents and police records with activist newspapers and oral history interviews, Andrew explains how a transnational network of activists emerged around the issue of nuclear power despite social divides and diverse interests inside the movement. Andrew S. Tompkins is a historian specializing in modern Europe. He is a lecturer at University of Sheffield, a former Humbolt Fellow, and current research associate of the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix.

In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

Drawing on materials from archives in eight southern US states, Melissa Milewski’s Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how African Americans utilized courts for disputes over property, personal injury, and workplace compensation, among other fields. She argues for a reexamination of African American agency through the use of the courts. In a fascinating juxtaposition, Milewski‘s work also addresses the white lawyers, juries, judges and, of course, often plaintiffs or defendants within these cases, some of whom operated out of concern, some through paternalism, and some, either overtly or not, in order to maintain white supremacy.

In 1898, a new metropolis emerged from the consolidation of New York City with East Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the western part of Queens County. In Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mike Wallace describes the first two decades of this city’s expanded history, a period in which it led and embodied the developments that were taking place nationally. As he explains, consolidation was a trend throughout America during this era. Big business was at the forefront of this, as Wall Street provided the financing necessary for numerous industries to form dominant corporate combinations through mergers and takeovers. The enormous wealth controlled by these titans was prominent throughout the city, both in the new skyscrapers rising to dominate the city’s skyline and in the cultural and educational institutions that flourished with infusions of their capital. Similar mergers took place in many sectors and aspects of city life, from entertainment to labor, with even the criminal underworld consolidating in a reflection of the times. Wallace’s book chronicles all of this, as well as the developments in the many communities of a richly diverse city that during these years experienced dramatic growth and changes wrought by a global war.

Seeing is often a good reason for believing—when things go well. But suppose we have a case like this: Jill believes that Jack is angry, although she has no good grounds for this belief. Nevertheless, when she sees him, she sees his face as angry even though it is neutral. Is it reasonable for Jill to believe he is angry on the basis of what she sees? No, argues Susanna Siegel: her perception has been hijacked by her prior unfounded belief, and so it cannot turn around and justify that belief even if Jill thinks it does. In The Rationality of Perception (Oxford University Press, 2017), Siegel articulates a new framework for understanding how to assess the capacity of perceptions to justify. On her view, perceptions, like beliefs, can be appraised as rational or irrational, and can be inferred from beliefs. She uses her view in turn to explain when and how the influence of a prior outlook on a perceptions ability to justify that outlook can be downgraded or upgraded.

In his recent book, The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2016), John Powers presents a comprehensive overview of propaganda employed by the People’s Republic of China related to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, showing not only how Han Chinese come to believe it, but also how Tibetans work to resist it. Drawing on previously untranslated material collected from both inside and outside of Tibet and China, this book outlines the narratives constructed by the PRC in an attempt to inform and control Tibetan Buddhist beliefs and practices. In addition to the well-known “patriotic re-education programs,” Powers also describes a booklet entitled Interpreting Tibetan Buddhist Doctrines, which attempts to re-frame Tibetan Buddhism in Chinese contexts for monks and nuns. The book also highlights the ways in which the PRC attempts to inform people’s views of foreign countries that are perceived as being sympathetic to the Dalai Lama and the so-called “Dalai Clique,” while simultaneously presenting the Dalai Lama as a nefarious, but ultimately ineffectual figure. In our conversation, Powers argues that the goal of this book is not to persuade readers to believe anything in particular about the effectiveness of Chinese propaganda, but rather to present and contextualize these materials so that readers can draw their own conclusions. This controversial book draws on years of research and personal experiences in the Tibet Autonomous Region and surrounding areas, and is a comprehensive and engaging read.

The categories religion and race share a common genealogy. The modern understanding of these terms emerges within the European enlightenment but grasping their gradual production requires us to investigate further. In Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press, 2016), Theodore Vial, Professor at Iliff School of Theology, argues that the intersection of religion and race can be better understood by looking at the work of nineteenth-century German romantics. In the post-enlightenment period religion becomes a racialized category. Vial examines the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Max Muller, and Johann Gottfried Herder in order to outline the linked nature of race and religion as social categories. He puts their definitions and positions to work to determine the conceptual framework these authors deploy for theorizing difference. In our conversation we discuss Immanuel Kant on race, Schleiermacher as theologian and scholar of religion, the symbolic power of Max Muller within contemporary Religious Studies, the role of language and nation in the construction of religion and race, W. E. B. Du Bois, theological anthropology, analyzing Australian aborigines, and the legacy of nineteenth-century German constructions of race and religion for Religious Studies today. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].

Secularism is an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe. It is embodied in the conflict between secular republics—from the US to India—and the challenges they face from resurgent religious identity politics; in the challenges faced by religious states like those of the Arab world from insurgent secularists; and in states like China where calls for freedom of belief are challenging a state-imposed non-religious worldview. In Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2017), Andrew Copson tells the story of secularism, taking in momentous episodes in world history, such as the great transition of Europe from religious orthodoxy to pluralism, the global struggle for human rights and democracy, and the origins of modernity. Andrew Copson is Chief Executive of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He became Chief Executive in 2010 after five years coordinating Humanists UKs education and public affairs work. He is also President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). His writing on humanist and secularist issues has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and New Statesman as well as in various journals. Copson has represented Humanists UK and the humanist movement extensively in national news including on BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as on programs such as Newsnight, The Daily Politics, the Today programme, Sunday Morning Live, and The Big Questions. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City.