In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war “urban renewal,” that is, the process by which the Washington, big city governments, big city banks, and big city developers came together to clear “slums” and erect modern (really “modernist”) apartment blocks and complexes of apartment blocks. Think “the projects” (or, more generally, “public housing“). In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the New York City Housing Authority supervised the construction of a lot of them. Today roughly 500,000 New Yorkers live in them. And many of them, I would guess, probably wish they lived in “pre-war buildings.” Sandy Zipp does a wonderful job of telling the story of this re-making of New York in his fascinating book Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford UP, 2010). Along the way, myths are busted (“the projects” were not built for poor folks), villains are redeemed (Robert Moses wasn’t really such a bad guy), and ugly buildings are explained (many serious people really thought tower blocks were beautiful). The book makes plain why large chunks of Manhattan (and many other cities) look the way they do and why they are thought of the way they are. Read it and find out.

Today’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or not, of artworks have historically been tied to the notion of beauty, there are plenty of works of art and genres of art that succeed aesthetically only when they cause non-pleasurable responses. Horror films and tragedies are typical examples. These kinds of art are philosophically puzzling. How is it that things that we know are not real can cause emotional responses as if they were real? Why do we experience the adrenalin rush and the racing pulse of fear when we know very well that Hannibal Lector is just a character on the screen? How can an aversive experience be aesthetically valuable? How can something that repels be aesthetically attractive? These paradoxes of fiction and aversion arise in spades when it comes to the emotion of disgust. In this podcast, we talk with Carolyn Korsmeyer, professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, about her new book is Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2011). Professor Korsmeyer discusses the nature of disgust as an emotion, the aesthetic allure of the disgusting, and the kind of aesthetic experience that we get in disgusting art. Do we really feel disgust when we confront this art, or must our disgust be denatured in some way before we can regard the object aesthetically? How can the disgusting also be attractive? What does disgust add to aesthetic experience that other emotional responses don’t? Korsmeyer claims that disgust is more varied than we tend to think, that it has certain features that overcome the problem of fiction and aversion, and that successful works of art that aim to evoke disgust elicit a special kind of aesthetic response, the sublate.

In his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of reading in the United States. Where some would argue that there are too few people doing the wrong kind of reading, Jacobs argues the contrary. He believes that literature is flourishing, pointing to the existence of enormous booksellers like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, as well as the influence of Oprah’s Book Club as evidence. In our interview, we talked about why our reading muscles have weakened over time, the importance of reading at whim, and the wondrous reading silence of children immersed in books. Read all about it, and more, in Jacob’s thought-provoking new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already.

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come.

Many entries in our lexicon have an interesting history, but it’s very seldom the case that the currency of a phrase has global repercussions. In his book The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2011), Adam Hodges makes a compelling case that the expression “War on Terror” became part of a political narrative that was sufficiently powerful to gain public support for at least two major wars. Hodges traces the characterisation of America’s “War on Terror” from George Bush’s first speeches after 9/11 all the way to the end his Presidency. He explores how the narrative grew to encompass Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and how systematically it was presented to the public. He considers how the pre-eminence of this narrative marginalised alternative world-views and shaped political debate, as well as influencing the public’s perception of reality. At the same time, his book is a theoretically sophisticated work of applied discourse analysis and a compelling exploration of the role of language in domestic politics and international relations. In this interview, Hodges discusses the trajectory of the narrative, its reception among the public and the political classes, and the potential role of discourse analysts in contributing to a better public understanding of political actions.

For many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origination) as something fearful to be escaped. Many scholars, especially recently, have told this story of the transition from pre-modern to modern Buddhism, but often with no other purpose than to dismiss modern Buddhism as inauthentic, a departure from the “real” Buddhism of ritual chanting and sacred relics. David McMahan‘s book The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008) tells the story of Buddhist modernism in a balanced way, one that acknowledges its novelty yet remains sympathetic to its concerns and interests. McMahan, who is a professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College, theorizes not only Buddhism but also modernity. Using Charles Taylor’s account of modern life, he explores the forces that changed Buddhism in recent centuries. McMahan discusses typically cited factors (e.g., the emphasis on meditation, the belief in science), but also seldom mentioned (though important) elements of Buddhist modernism like affirmations of nature, interdependence, and everyday life.

I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone said, were bent on ruling the world. Detente had been a ploy to lull us to sleep. In Afghanistan, the Communists had renewed their campaign. We had to do something. So we didn’t go to “their” Olympics. Oddly, that brave gesture failed to bring them around to our way of thinking. There are two really wonderful things about Sir Rodric Braithwaite‘s new book Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (Oxford UP, 2011). First, Sir Rodric shows in excruciating detail just how wrong we got it. The tiny cabal of Soviet leaders who sent the Red Army into Afghanistan weren’t imperialists pursuing some grand strategy to conquer the globe. They were scared, sometimes confused old men in a situation that was made impossible by conflicting, contradictory aims. They wanted to protect the USSR’s southern boarder; they wanted to keep the US out of the region; they wanted to stop the local Communist Party from turning Afghanistan into another Cambodia; they wanted to protect their personal friends and allies, people they knew, trusted, and liked; and, almost more than anything else, they wanted to give the Afghanis peace, stability, and prosperity so they just wouldn’t have to think about Afghanistan ever again. That’s right, the men in the Kremlin were not evil; they wanted to do good, if only for their own sake. The trouble was–and this brings us to the second wonderful aspect of Sir Rodric’s book–they couldn’t accomplish all these things. They knew this: the horrible example of America’s effort to “help” Vietnam was right before their eyes. But they were frightened, prone to catastrophic thinking, and didn’t want to appear weak. So they had to do something. They couldn’t very well refuse to go to their own Olympics. So, by steps, they invested Afghanistan. First there were advisors. Then there were troops to protect the advisors. Then there was political unrest, calls for help, and the dispatch of larger army units to “restore order.” Order was not restored, so the generals (though not all of them) reasonably asked for more troops. And so it went until the Soviets conquered Afghanistan but did not hold it; ruled it but did not govern it; won every battle in it but lost the war against it. If this sounds familiar to Americans, it should.

The Greco-Roman world was the prism through which the British viewed their imperial efforts, and Mark Bradley’s compendium Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010) explores the various ways in which this reception of the classics occurred. From museums, to oratorical texts, to theories of race, the classical world was a reference point for the imperial British. Bradley’s book looks at how the British thought about the classical world at a time when they were confronted by their own role as empire builders. There was the desire to reinforce, to justify their claims to being the greatest imperial power after Rome. There was doubt; the need to reconcile the colonized to their rule even as they learnt how ancient Britons had resisted Roman rule. There was a certain humbled pride that they had managed to supplant the Romans insofar as claims to being the ‘greatest imperial power’ were concerned. There was also puzzlement; the jewel in the crown, India, was nothing like any Roman province or territory-how did this place them in relation to the Romans, who after all went about subjugating ‘barbarians’ as opposed a people with a highly sophisticated civilization of their own? These are some of the issues that concerned the Britons of the Empire, and that this book analyses with great sensitivity.

Copyright is one of those topics over which even two saints disagreed. The legend has it that Saint Columba and Saint Finnian engaged in an argument as Columba had secretly, and without the latter’s permission, copied a Latin Psalter owned by Finnian. When Finnian found out about it, he requested the copy, but Columbia refused to give it back. Dermott, the King of Ireland, decreed “to every cow belong its calf, so to every book belong its copy.” In 1925 the former Assistant Register of Copyrights in the United States, Richard De Wolf, pointed out that “the progress of copyright law does not take place by revolutions, but by successive stages. It resembles the growth of a city, in which, as time goes on, some parts are torn down and others are devoted to new uses..” However, this process has been historically riddled with controversy and disagreement, and not only among saints. Authorship rights and other questions related to the intellectual property became issues of major importance with the advent of the industrial revolution, in particular, with the advancement of printing technologies. Even figures like Charles Dickens were concerned with the free circulation of British books abroad. English statutes to protect intellectual property were adopted as early as in 1624. As the international legal mechanisms protecting intellectual property have solidified, the critique, mainly emanating from the global south, about its monopolizing and exclusionary nature has intensified as well. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains provisions regarding the protection of private property as well as intellectual property. In particular, Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that “everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” But is it proper to think of the world of ideas and knowledge, the world, which as Rajshree Chandra argues, is inexhaustible and socially distributed, in the same way as we think of the world of tangibles such as clothes, cars, or houses? And what are the main problems associated with relying on normative justifications for private property while we consider moral underpinnings of property rights over knowledge? And if indeed the moral groundings of the right to intellectual property are the same as those of the right to the ownership of property, what conclusions should be made from the distributional consequences of the transnational enforcement of these rights? Chandra takes up all these questions and more in her fine new book Knowledge as Property, Issues in the Moral Grounding of Intellectual Property Rights (Oxford University Press, 2010).

In our attempts to know and understand the world around us, we inevitably rely on others to provide us with reliable testimony about facts and states of affairs to which we do not have access. What is the nature of this reliance? Do testifiers simply provide us with especially compelling evidence? Should we regard the testimony of others as only so much more local data in our cognitive environment? Or is there a deeper sense in which much of our knowledge depends on others? In his new book, Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2010), Sanford Goldberg argues for the striking thesis that in cases of testimonial knowledge, part of our justification in believing another’s testimony resides in the mind/brain of the testifier. This thesis runs counter to what Goldberg regards as a widespread and insufficiently examined premise at the heart of most views in contemporary epistemology, namely, individualism, which is the view that a believer’s justification never extends outside of the believer’s mind/brain. Goldberg argues that, over a significant range of cases, a believer’s justification depends upon irreducibly social factors, and thus that an individual’s justification sometimes resides in part in the cognitive processes of others.

What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework? In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthesis of four hundred years of philosophical thought about the nature of ordinary objects, such as cats or dogs or stones. After examining hundreds of original texts (many only available in the original Latin) Pasnau focuses on metaphysical debates involving the central scholastic concept of substance, understood as a composite of matter and form. He discusses the crushing effect of the Inquisition on innovative metaphysical thought in this period, emphasizes the continuity of scholastic views even among critics of scholasticism, and considers why the dominant metaphysics that succeeded the scholastic framework, which he calls corpuscularianism, was not inevitable. Indeed, as he points out, the new metaphysics brought with it a host of new difficulties that are by now familiar, such as the mind-body problem, the nature of identity over time, and the distinction between appearance and reality.

How can those in African, Africana, and African American Studies strengthen their disciplinary ties? What do these connections have to do with Kwasi Konadu‘s recent study The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford 2010)? How can the scholarship produced in African, Africana, and African American Studies serve the interests of people of African descent across the globe? Indeed, how can the history of the Akan people help us to better understand slavery and the history of the Americas? What does it mean for a scholar who is the descendant of Ghanaians, born in Jamaica and reared in America to make his life work about African history? And how does that scholar feel about his personal role in the legacy of the Diaspora, about a being a Black father in the U.S.? Kwasi Konadu speaks about all of this and more in his New Books in African American Studies interview. Konadu’s intellectual commitment to uncovering and explaining the Akan people, their language, culture, and performative practices is inspiring. In fact, he seeks to encourage his colleagues in Africana Studies–broadly construed to include African American and African studies–“to get the story straight,” that is, to cultivate a rich appreciation for the narrative histories of the peoples of the African Diasporas (plural) and to explore what those narrative histories mean for our teaching and even our lives. I am persuaded by Konadu and personally plan to take up his call in my own teaching and research. I ask myself, “How could I not after talking to him, especially since he gives suggestions that are easy to implement?” I bet that after listening to him that you too will become a believer. Enjoy the interview, and let us know what you think!

What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that rested “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.” The charismatic leader is not like us. In fact, he is not like anyone. He is sui generis, a mysterious force of nature, a sort of political demiurge. According to Jonathan Steinberg, Weber may well have had Otto von Bismarck in mind when he defined charismatic authority. In his wonderful Bismarck: A Life (Oxford UP, 2011), Steinberg argues that Bismarck’s successes (and some of his failures) can be largely attributed to the awesome force of his personality. Not “social structures.” Not “historical patterns.” Not “underlying forces.” But charisma pure and simple. Time and again Steinberg finds those around Bismarck attesting to the fact that he just wasn’t like everyone else. He was smarter, wittier, stronger, more willful, more cunning, more temperamental, and in most ways larger than life. And this was the nearly uniform (though not always positive) assessment of the some of the most impressive figures of his day. It’s a compelling case. And it provokes a question about German political culture, for Bismarck was not the first or the last “genius” to rule some or all of the Reich. Fredrick the Great preceded him, and Hitler followed. What are we to make of that? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

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

On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and South Ossetia were located not on the southeastern seaboard of the United States, but in a mountainous region south of Russia called the Caucasus. The war was short, a mere four days, but during that time it became an campaign issue between Barack Obama and John McCain, a moment made memorable when McCain declared “We are all Georgians now.” For the Cold Warriors of yesteryear the world was remade familiar: Russia was enemy no. 1 again, Mikheil Saakashvili’s was a victim of Russian imperialism, and the Cold War was back as if it had never left. Those familiar with the South Caucasus know that the region is allergic to Cold War binaries. Its ethnic, linguistic, and religious complexity defy even the best social scientific models. Persistent conflicts mark the region. Azerbaijan and Armenia are at odds over Nagorno-Karabakh. Georgia has had to contend with separatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both Russian protectorates. Of course, we can’t forget that the region also hosts two important energy pipelines–the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline–making the South Caucasus a geopolitical focus of the United States, the EU, and Russia. The 2008 South Ossetian War might have brought the region to the attention of many, but its origins have deep roots in the intricacies of the region’s history. Luckily, to make sense of the South Caucasus’ complicated past and volatile present, we have Thomas de Waal‘s The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford UP, 2010). De Waal clearly and succinctly outlines the morass that is the South Caucasus by laying out the histories, relations, and issues that drive present day Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and their place in the world. Whether as a refresher or an initiation, The Caucasus: An Introduction is an important primer.

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

People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the case that somebody else’s ancestors once lived on “this land,” and somebody else’s before that. From the very earliest moments of human history, people have been taking each other’s territory. This seemingly endless cycle is the subject of David Day’s excellent new book Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford UP, 2008). Day points out that the process of “supplanting” has a kind of deep structure, no matter when or where it occurs. Claims are made, territories are mapped, colonists settled, soil is tilled, natives are moved about or exterminated, and comforting stories are told, often about how “our ancestors have always lived here.” It’s a rather sad spectacle, though we should thank David for holding this mirror up to us.

My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or “Thuds.” He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called “Thud Ridge.” He’d come home on leave and tell us that it was okay “over there” and not to worry. I didn’t because I was sure “we” would win and my uncle would come home a hero. Of course, neither of these things happened (though my uncle did come home). Since then, I’ve read many books about the war In an effort to try to figure out “what happened,” which is to say why it all went so horribly wrong. But I’d never read one quite like Mark P. Bradley’s Vietnam at War (Oxford University Press, 2009). Mark succeeds in doing something very unusual–and perhaps unique–in the American literature on the Vietnam conflict: he shows us the war from the Vietnamese point of view, and more particularly the North Vietnamese point of view. He’s mined Vietnamese archives, literature, and popular culture to see the war through Vietnamese eyes, and he’s done a marvelous job of it. My uncle’s war was very different from the one Mark presents. He fought the “Vietnam War”; they fought the “French War” and the “American War.” He saw it from a cockpit; they lived it on the ground, under the bombs. He was in their country; they were in their own country. He was sure he would leave; they were sure they would stay, and grasp victory once the invaders were gone. Now that I think about it, there is something strangely familiar about this story.

What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war? Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The book is part of the National History Center‘s Reinterpreting History series. The pieces in it are wide-ranging: some see the war from the heights of international diplomacy, others from the hamlets of the Mekong Delta. They introduce new themes, for example, the role of American racial stereotypes in the conflict. More than anything else, however, they are nuanced. Their authors provide no simple answers because there are none. You will not find easy explanations, good guys and bad guys, or ideological drum-beating in these pages. What you will find is a sensitive effort to understand an event of mind-boggling, irreducible complexity. There’s a lesson here: we may think we know what we are doing on far-away shores, but we are fooling ourselves. Reminds one a bit of Tolstoy’s thoughts on the philosophy of history at the end of War and Peace. Still worth a read, as is this book.

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

Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler than any other figure in modern history. Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin and a few others might give him a run for his money, but I’d bet on Hitler. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him. Surely Thomas Weber knew this when he began to work on Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford UP, 2010). After all, a new book on Hitler’s wartime experience had come out in 2005. What more is there to say? It turns out that there is quite a lot if you know where to look. And Weber does. He uses an interesting approach to uncover novel information about Hitler. Weber acknowledges that the documentary record relating directly to Hitler’s personal wartime experience is thin (a few letters, some military reports) and, when it is thicker, biased (more than a few axe-grinding memoirs from a much later time). These documents, all of which have been pored over by historians, will not shed any new light on Hitler. So Weber turns to a much larger and more trustworthy body of sources: that produced by the officers and soldiers in Hitler’s unit, the List Regiment. Though these papers usually do not mention Hitler by name, they enable Weber to reconstruct what he must have experienced, to see what was typical and what was not in Hitler’s service record, and, on the basis of this information, judge the veracity of claims made by Hitler, Nazi propagandists, and historians about the impact of World War I on the the Nazi dictator. The result is a serious revision. Hitler (et al.) said that World War one “made” him the person he became. Weber shows in detail that this claim is false. Fundamental elements of Hitler’s worldview either pre-date the war (his German nationalism) or seem to post-date it (his radical anti-semitism). In fact, the war did two things for Hitler: it gave him credibility he could use as he entered politics and it convinced him that he was an expert in military affairs. He ran for office as a humble Gefreiter (private), a holder of the Iron Cross First Class; and he ran the war as a dilettantish know-it-all, often with disastrous consequences. The only revelation Hitler had in the trenches was a common one, namely, that war is a very nasty business. That he went on to start another, even bloodier one has less to do with his experience of World War One than the ideas he brought to the conflict and absorbed after it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Here’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of humanity. For instance, it is at least imaginable that one day everyone will believe that zoos were [NB] profoundly immoral. The future will condemn us for imprisoning animals. The future will ask “How could they have done such a barbaric thing?” And the future, more than likely, will answer “Because they were evil.” When looking into humanity’s sordid past, we often say this sort of thing. Why did American slaveholders trade in human flesh? Because they were evil. Why did the Nazis persecute the Jews? Because they were evil. Why did the Khmer Rough murder countless innocent Cambodians? Because they were evil. In 1940, Mochulsky was tapped by the NKVD (it ran the GULAG system) to build railroads north of the Arctic Circle. He thereby came to control the lives of a great number of what were essentially slave-laborers. He, of course, did not see them as such. “Because they were evil,” however, is not an explanation; it’s an ethical judgment. It might make you feel morally superior; and indeed you might well be morally superior. But it will not help you comprehend anything. For if you really want to understand why seemingly ordinary people did what you feel are truly awful things, you have to listen to them explain why. In Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir (Oxford UP, 2010), Deborah Kaple gives us just this opportunity. She presents us with Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky–ordinary fellow, Communist Party member, and GULAG officer from 1940 to 1946. Born in Belorussia after the Revolution, Mochulsky was raised on Bolshevik ideas. Not surprisingly, he believed in the project; he wanted to help create a bright future for humankind. So he trained as an engineer, because building socialism was all about building in those days. In 1940, Mochulsky was tapped by the NKVD (it ran the GULAG system) to build railroads north of the Arctic Circle. He thereby came to control the lives of a great number of what were essentially slave-laborers. He, of course, did not see them as such. To him, they were “enemies of the people” and had received their just (if somewhat harsh) reward. Under his direction, many of them suffered and died. This bothered him a bit, but not enough to question “the system.” He thought it was basically sound, though perhaps in need of better implementation. And that is the way he saw his role: he was improving “the system” without ever asking whether “the system” itself was bankrupt. Of course, looking back on what he did (he wrote the memoir in the 1990s), he has regrets. But he had none at the time. Mochulsky believed in what he was doing, just the way you believe that it’s fine to imprison animals. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Try to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part of our daily experience. Just look up and you’ll probably see one, or at least its vapor trails. Go to your local airport and you can fly in one pretty inexpensively. Heck, if you like, you can learn to pilot one yourself at any one of hundreds of flying schools. There is just nothing unusual or even very exciting about airships. It wasn’t always so. In the first quarter of the 20th century, airplanes were new. People had long dreamed of flight (see “Icarus and Daedalus”) and by the 19th century they’d done a little of it in balloons. But most folks could hardly conceive of a man (or woman) taking to the air like a bird. But men (and soon women) did just that. To many contemporary observers, flying in winged airships was nothing short of a miracle. Surely, pundits claimed, conquest of the air would usher in a new modern age. It did, but not in all the ways expected. As Thomas Kessner shows in his wonderfully told The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation (Oxford University Press, 2010), the experience of Charles Lindbergh is a case in point. To be sure, Lindbergh was an extraordinary pilot–skilled, meticulous, and remarkably brave. That, however, did not set him apart from the hundreds of other fly boys of the age. What did set him apart was: 1) luck (many of his contemporaries died in crashes, and he nearly did on many occasions); 2) a single insight, doggedly pursued (that a plane with one engine, one pilot, and an 2,385 pounds of fuel could make it from New York to Paris); and 3) the fact that after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic he became the most famous person in the world. Tom pays due attention to all three of these characteristics, but I found the last of them–Lindbergh’s incredible celebrity and its impact on him and the world–the most interesting. It’s arguable that Lindbergh was the first “superstar.” Though he had indeed done something extraordinary, he was the creation of a finely tuned, corporate-backed publicity campaign and a frenzied, tireless, and completely meritorious press corps. The people around Lindbergh understood that if they handled his “image” correctly they all could make a fortune. And so they took this gangly, taciturn, strangely aloof son of the prairie and made him the symbol of all that was good (and marketable) in the newly christened air age. The problem was that, eventually, Lindbergh refused to play along. He was who he was, and who he was was a loner. Celebrity wore on him. Now when most people get tired of attention, they go home. But after the Paris flight Lindbergh had no home. His entire life was public. So he did what so many frustrated celebrities with considerable resources (think Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, J. D. Salinger) after him have done: he became a crank. He tried to find a way to live for ever, dabbled in ‘scientific racism,’ and eventually got mixed up with the Nazis. Lindbergh, the arch-individualist, got tired of having people tell him who he was; he wanted to be his own man. And, in the end, he was, for good and ill. The lesson? If you are in the business of making and selling role models, it’s probably not a good idea to pick a 27-year old who has focused his life on some narrow pursuit to the exclusion of all others, even if he’s really good at it. You just don’t know what they’re going to “be” when they grow up. (For more, see “Michael Jackson,” “Lindsey Lohan,” “LeBron James,” etc., etc.) Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on

I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but in some ways telling. Many historians and history readers genuinely have a bias against the older periods, and particularly against the history of the pre-Hellenic Ancient World (roughly 10,000 BCE to 500 BCE). That’s really too bad for a whole host of reasons. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just list three “biggies”: 1) The Ancient World witnessed the greatest single break in the history of humankind, that is, the transition from hunter-gather to sedentary agricultural life; 2) The deepest roots of our civilizations (Western, Eastern, you name it) are mostly to be found in the Ancient World; 3) Finally, the basic institutions of what we think of as “modern” life were all hammered out for the first time in the Ancient World. Take, for example, diplomacy. As Amanda Podany shows in her engaging new book Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East (Oxford University Press, 2010), the rulers of Sumer, Akkad, Syria, Egypt and the rest developed a way of dealing with one another that will be strikingly familiar to anyone who follows modern international relations. They regularly sent envoys to one another. Those envoys were given safe passage, provided with diplomatic immunity, and treated as special guests. Royal representatives followed strict instructions from their masters. They negotiated formal treaties, which included such things as the conditions for international trade. They presented gifts from their masters to their hosts and expected gifts in return. They arranged for diplomatic marriages of the kind any student of European history would recognize. All this is nothing if not strikingly “modern.” Yet, as Amanda points out, the entire system was invented over 4,000 years ago. And, thanks to Amanda, you can read all about it. If you do, you won’t think of “that old stuff” as really that old, or at least odd. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally told the Stasi–the East German secret service–to watch them (which they did). After the fall of the Wall, the Stasi files were opened and my friend requested to see her dossier. I have to say, it was disappointing. For some reason (perhaps having to do with John le Carre), I thought the Stasi was a ruthlessly efficient, super-clandestine, surveillance-repression machine. But I couldn’t find that machine in my friend’s file. It was boring. She did this, did that, she did the other thing. Why would anyone care? Read Gary Bruce‘s wonderful The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (OUP, 2010) and you can find out why. But don’t expect it to make any sense, because the picture Gary paints is of a kind of Bizarro World. Like their handlers in the Soviet Union, the East German communist party was mindlessly paranoid. They saw–or at least claimed to see–“enemies” under every rock. This (mis)perception was the pretext for the creation of the Stasi: it would protect the revolution from said “enemies.” (It would also prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West, but that was just an added bonus.) How? First, they needed agents. These weren’t hard to get in the post-war years. There were lots of idealistic communists who were quite willing to go to work for the cause. One of the revelations of Gary’s work is that many (most?) Stasi agents believed in what they were doing. Those that didn’t recognized that the pay was good. Next, you needed your trusty agents to recruit “co-workers,” that is, informants. This was not as easy. Gary’s subjects worried a lot about meeting their recruitment quotas; really good informants were hard to find. But generally they found them (or made them up). Finally, you had to have your agents work their informants, that is, meet with them regularly and pump them for valuable information. This was the hardest job of all. Gary’s work makes clear that most Stasi agents viewed the regular meeting (again, they had quotas) as a hassle. More than that, they were generally seen as completely unproductive. We now know what the Stasi agents could doubtlessly have told us long ago: there were no “enemies.” With the singular exception of Poland, no Eastern Bloc state ever hosted anything like an organized “opposition” to communism or anything else. A lot of folks were unhappy with, for example, Party hypocrisy, the price of sausage, or the inability to travel abroad. But there was no “underground” to go into to fight for, well, whatever one might fight for. This being so, the vast majority of Stasi agents worked for decades without ever turning up anything beyond the occasional extra-marital affair–hardly the kind of thing that would endanger the “republic.” What they did accomplish, and perhaps what the Stasi itself was meant to accomplish, was to frighten the populace. You don’t need to watch everyone to give the impression that everyone is being watched and, if “seen,” being punished. In the end, the myth of the Stasi was more important for the stability of the East German regime that its practice. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known to history as the “Tuskegee Airmen.” In light of the honorable service record of countless African Americans, allowing blacks to become fighter and bomber pilots might not seem very “experimental” to you, but you have to put yourself in the mindset of the era in question to understand how “experimental” it was. Jim-Crow segregation was nearly universal, especially, though not exclusively, in the South. The armed forces were similarly segregated, with blacks serving in what might be mildly called “auxiliary roles” and whites doing all the commanding and fighting. There were few black officers (and they never supervised white troops) and no black military pilots. Most of the (nearly all white) “brass” could not conceive of integrated units and doubted the ability of African Americans to serve as line officers; most of those in the majority white voting public shared these views. When the argument to native ability failed (after all, black units had performed well in the Civil War and World War I), opponents of integration fell back on a familiar argument: if “we” allow “them” to serve with “us,” chaos will ensue and fighting effectiveness will suffer. But black leaders didn’t buy it; they wanted integration. The Roosevelt administration sat on the fence. It clearly couldn’t embark on full-scale integration (and, it must be said, FDR himself had doubts about it), but it couldn’t forgo black votes. So it compromised: blacks would get one high-profile flying unit, but integration would be deferred. And so the great experiment began. Todd Moye has mined the archives and talked to the airmen to tell the tale of how said experiment proceeded in his terrific Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (OUP, 2010). It’s a tale I found both uplifting and shocking. I’m not usually one to heap praise on people, but the pilots themselves were remarkably brave. It is hard for me to imagine what they went through to get their wings and fight for the country they loved. I found myself again and again asking “How could they do that?” Todd does a terrific job of setting the scene and helping us understand their struggle. I confess I find it just as hard to enter the mindset of those whites who stood against them. They were racists and more frighteningly racists with absolutely clean consciences. When they said that blacks didn’t have the “right stuff” to become pilots, to command troops, to serve in integrated units, they believed it. Their testimony, again very ably related by Todd, is simply difficult to read. Here too I found myself asking again and again “How could they do that?” It was a different world. Parts of it, however, are obviously still with us. What is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” but the executive branch’s attempt to find a “middle way” between integrationists and their opponents? Harry Truman, where are you now? Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact–and it is a fact–that we see remarkable diversity in the historical record. The past, we say, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But there are also political reasons to hold to the idea that we have no essence, that everything is “socially constructed.” Where, for example, would modern liberalism be without this concept? If our natures are fixed in some way, then what should we do to improve our lot? Given the strength and utility of the “blank slate” doctrine, anyone hoping to question it successfully must possess considerable political savvy and, more importantly, an overwhelming mass of evidence. When the first modern challenge was issued–by the Sociobiologists of the 1970s–they had the latter (I would say), but not the former. Happily, their successors–principally the practitioners of “evolutionary psychology”–have both (again, in my opinion). Azar Gat is a good example. In his pathbreaking War in Human Civilization (Oxford UP, 2006), he explains in politically palatable and empirically convincing terms just why, evolutionarily speaking, our evolved natures guided the way we have fought over the past 200,000 years. He rejects the notion that we have anything like a “violence instinct.” Rather, we have a kind of “violence tool,” given to us by natural selection. In certain circumstances, we are psychologically inclined to use it; in others, not. In this way we are no different than many of our fellow species, the primates in particular. Of course, unlike them, our use of collective violence has an (extra-genetic) history. Azar does a masterful job of describing and explaining how, even while our nature has remained the same, the way we fight has changed. And here the news is good: believe it or not, we–humanity as a whole–have been becoming more peaceful over the past 10,000 years, and radically more peaceful (at least in the developed world) over the past 200 years. Azar can explain this too, and does in the interview. I cannot emphasizeenough how important this book is, both as a model of what I would call “scientifically-informed” history and a sort of guide to those of us who, despite having abandoned the “blank slate,” believe that we have the capacity to create a better world. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

The past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybody and his brother is going to start digging into your past to see what kind of “dirt” they can find. It’s true now, and it was true when Thomas Jefferson was running for president in the late eighteenth century. Jefferson had had an eventful, largely public life, so there was a lot of “material” to be mined by his foes. Most of the accusations “didn’t stick,” but one that did was that he was a coward. Jefferson was the governor of Virginia during a good portion of the Revolutionary War and, as such, charged with defending the place (and the Revolution) against the British. As Michael Kranish shows in his terrific book Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War (Oxford UP, 2010), he had a rough time of it. Jefferson had no military experience, didn’t like “standing” armies, and received only tepid support from his continental allies. The British invaded, invaded, and invaded again. Jefferson fled, fled, and fled again. What was he supposed to do? His political opponents didn’t care if he had no choice but to run or not–the fact that he didn’t stand and fight was enough to prove he was a “coward.” This charge wounded Jefferson deeply and he fought it for much of his life. The episode sort of reminded me of a certain presidential candidate a few years back and (shameful, in my opinion) questions about his military service. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as far as I know). But we might call it an “Easter Rising victory” after the Irish Republican revolt of 1916. The Republicans took over several buildings in Dublin, declared an Irish republic, and then were promptly obliterated by the British Army. Their leaders were executed, their republic disbanded, and their enemies remained in control of the island. They lost. Or did they? Shortly after the disastrous uprising, the Republican cause began to gather force. Its fallen leaders became martyrs to the Irish nation, the idea of a republic grew in popularity, and once moderate Constitutional Nationalists began to fight the British. Within a short three years, the Irish republic was back; in another three years the “Irish Free State”–not exactly independent of London, but much closer than before–was established. In The Rising. Ireland: Easter, 1916 (Oxford, 2010), Fearghal McGarry does a terrific job of describing the complicated ins and outs of the Rising and its impact on Irish politics. The book really shows us the revolt “from below,” that is, from the point of view of those who fought in it. Fearghal is able to gain this perspective because of a remarkable source. In the 1940s, the Irish authorities, knowing that witnesses to the Rising were passing, had the presence of mind to conduct a large survey of participants. They collected well over 1,000 accounts, all of which became available in 2002. Fearghal mines these reports to reconstruct how the men- and women-on-the-street experienced the revolt. The results are remarkable. The Rising appears anew as an event at once tragic, terrifying, and farcical. In hindsight, we can see that the Rising changed Irish politics forever; at the time, amidst the bravery, blood, and rubble, few saw any such thing. Most were just scared. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its legacy; both are profoundly multiethnic and multiracial; both have spent much of their respective histories settling a vast “wild” frontier (though, to be fair, it was already “settled” by indigenous people); and, most importantly for our purposes, both are car-crazy, and indeed for almost the same reason. In the United States, the automobile meant modernity. It was the implement with which we, Americans of every stripe, would “tame” a continent and thereby realize our national potential. The Brazilians, according to Wolfe, feel the same way. Joel does a masterful job of explaining how the promise of this crucial technology entered the Brazilian psyche and became not only the vehicle of modernity (pardon the pun) but also the symbol of everything modern. Along the way Joel explodes one of the foundational myths of modern anti-globalism (and what used to be called “anti-imperialism”), namely, that powerful “multinational corporations” muscled their way into undeveloped countries and fostered a crippling “dependency.” Not in Brazil. The Brazilians invited Ford, GM, and VW into the country with a full understanding of what they were getting; they embraced the values these corporations fostered, all of which were seen as “modern”; and when things weren’t working out, they essentially forced them to act according to Brazilian interests. The Brazilians were, so to speak, in the driver’s seat of automobilismo; the supposedly all-powerful multinationals were along for the ride. In the end, both enjoyed the journey, despite some rough patches. I’m happy to say, however, that this book has no rough spots at all. You will drive carefree from the first to the last page. Have a good trip. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

There’s a concept I find myself coming back to again and again–“speciation.” It’s drawn from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology and means, roughly, the process by which new species arise. Speciation occurs when a species must adapt to new circumstances; the more new circumstances, the more new species. Thus one kind of Finch (to take a relevant example) becomes many kinds of Finches when those Finches are compelled to adapt to the circumstances presented by, say, a set of different Islands. To each Island its own Finch. The same process occurs in human history though we don’t really have a name for it (though “ethnogenesis” comes close). When people of one culture spread to many different locales, their cultures “speciate,” that is, become adapted to those new locales and thereby differentiate from the “parent” culture. This process can be very striking in places places where lots of different locales (however defined) are packed into a tiny geographic area. So it is in the Caucasus. Its geography is remarkably diverse, the result being a plethora of what are (to continue the analogy) separate ecological islands. As people moved from island to island, they speciated: their cultures adapted to local conditions and differentiated. To each island its own culture. This is why the Caucasus, though small, is so remarkably complex: it presents huge variety in a small space. And it is this complexity, together with the fact that the Caucusus stands at the nexus of three major empires (the Persian, Turkish, and Russian), that make its story so complicated. There are just a lot of moving parts in the “system.” Happily, we have Charles King to help us make sense of it all. In The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford, 2008), he draws together the many threads of Caucasian history into one rich, dense, though supple cloth. Much of the considerable beauty of this book is found precisely in Charles’ ability to weave many complicated themes into one easy-to-follow story, and all in artful but not arty prose. This is a book you can read. Charles also pays considerable attention to the imaginary Caucusus, that is, the one that lived in the heads of the Persian, Turkish, and Russia imperialists who dominated the place for centuries, and the one that, at least in my case, continues to lead and mislead today. Suffice it to say that what you think you know about the Caucusus, you probably don’t. So I suggest you pick up this book and let Charles remove the scales from your eyes. It’s an enjoyable experience. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

When I was in high school I had several friends who went to Wichita’s only prep school. They were nice guys, played D&D, andsaid they were “Libertarians.”I thought that “Libertarian” might have something to do with the library, so I wanted to have nothing to do with it. But they really wanted to spread the Gospel. So I listened. What they said made sense. We’re born free. We should be able to do whatever we want so long as we don’t hurt anyone. The authorities should get off our backs. Now this, I thought, was philosophy for a 16-year old. They told me to read Ayn Rand. I didn’t. Her books had too many pages. But my mother did, and I noticed a lot of other folks I knew did to. Rand, I was told, was a genius. I never really understood the Rand phenomenon until I read Jennifer Burns‘ page-turning biography Goddess of the Market. Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009). Almost by accident, the foreigner Rand tapped into a deeply-rooted American desire to be LEFT ALONE. All teenagers want to be left alone, but America is the only country in world history to have a political culture built on the idea. Rand’s radical, romantic individualism was the pitch-perfect echo of Americans’ frustration with the growth of the modern state (and teenagers’ frustration with the stupidity of their parents). That and she was really entertaining. She wrote, said, and did outrageous things. She said they were all consistent with her philosophy, “Objectivism.” Maybe. But they were also consistent with amphetamine addiction. It goes without saying that her personal life was a train-wreck, though a very interesting one given that it was informed by a philosophical system (and drug abuse). The American desire to be LEFT ALONE has not vanished (cf. Ron Paul), and neither has America’s fascination with Rand’s remarkable life. We should thank Jennifer for telling us about it. Thanks to Anne is a Man! for suggesting this book. If you like podcasts, you should visit his site. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is offering in conjunction with the National History Center. The NHC and Oxford University Press have initiated a book series called “Reinterpreting History.”The volumes in the series aim to convey to readers how and why historians revise and reinterpret their understanding of the past, and they do so by focusing on a particular historical topic, event, or idea that has long gained the attention of historians. The first contribution to the “Reinterpreting History” series is Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2008). Today we’ll be talking to the editors of the volume, Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. You may think that historians normally study states or nations, like France and China. But they also study areas of international or imperial interaction. The most famous example of this sort of “international” history is Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), but there are many others. Among them one finds contributions to “Atlantic History,” itself a relatively new field. Its object is the “Atlantic World,” roughly, the history of the interaction of four continents (Africa, Europe, North America, and South America) from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. In this podcast, Greene and Morgan talk about the origin of the field, its work to date, and its prospects. For an introduction to Atlantic history, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History. Concepts and Contours (Harvard University Press, 2005) andJ. H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2006).There is also a lively Atlantic history discussion list. See H-Atlantic. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

It’s hard to be a Christian. It’s even harder to be a good Christian. But being a good Christian on the frontier of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century seems to have been next to impossible. That’s one possible gloss of Kevin Kenny‘s eye-opening new book Peaceable Kingdom Lost. The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (Oxford, 2009). William Penn was a Quaker, which means he and his followers were trying to be very good Christians indeed. They hoped to take their good intentions to the New World, where they would create (as Penn said) a “peaceable kingdom.” Alas, it was a poor choice of venue to begin a Utopian experiment in godly-living. Pennsylvania was wild and woolly, a mixture of idealistic English Quakers, German Lutherans and Mennonites, Ulster Presbyterians, and, of course, aggrieved Native Americans of many different sorts. Also, just to stir the pot further, the British and French kings were, shall we say, in a rather “heated discussions” about which parts of the New World each would control. It’s not surprising that the lion did not lie down with the lamb in Pennsylvania, or that William Penn’s “holy experiment” broke apart on the rocky shoals of North America. Kevin does a wonderful job of telling the sad, though distressingly familiar, tale of good intentions gone horribly wrong. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Ever wonder where the term “populist” came from? It came from “Populism,” a nineteenth/early twentieth-century American political movement. Of course the Populists weren’t really the “Populists,” they were the “People’s Party.” But even that isn’t a very good description. It would be better to call them the “Farmers’ Party,” because most of them were farmers. Most, but not all. A lot of them were urban types, and particularly union members. All this and more I learned from Charles Postel and his award-winning book The Populist Vision (Oxford, 2007). The Populists have a bad name (as does Populism, for that matter). It seems that historians erroneously branded them “backward-looking” because most of them were, well, farmers, and farmers are always “backward-looking” don’t you know. Charles does a terrific job of correcting this libel. The Populists were the farthest thing from “backward-looking.” By almost any contemporary measure, they were forward-looking. They favored market rationalization, labor organization, welfare, education, and even the emancipation of women. They also hated the Gold Standard, which is progressive in my book. There were some warts–the Populists generally favored racial segregation, which they viewed as progressive (so did a lot of other folks at the time). But they look pretty good in hindsight. Maybe we need a new People’s Party? Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Like it or not, governments need to mobilize their populations in times of crisis and one of the ways they do it is to disseminate propaganda. Now this is uncomplicated if you are, say, Stalin and claim to know what’s best for everyone and control the media (and most everything else) completely. But what if you are, say, McKinley, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, or Bush (II) and you don’t claim to know what’s best for everyone or control the media (or much anything else) completely? What does “propaganda” look like in a liberal democratic context where the government’s line can be challenged by you, me and everyone else? This is the important question Susan Brewer addresses in her fascinating new book Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (Oxford, 2009). The answer is not simple. American presidents were always running up against citizens–sometimes organized and sometimes not–who simply wouldn’t swallow the administration’s line about this or that war. Stalin could tell the Ministry of Truth to tell the people what the Truth was; American presidents couldn’t. They had to send their messages out into the “Marketplace of Ideas.” Sometimes people bought what was on offer (World War II), sometimes they didn’t (Vietnam). And Susan does a fine job of telling the whole story. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

When I was in college about a million years ago, we used to sit in bars and talk about the Revolution. Actually, it was this bar and something like this “Revolution.” Clearly nothing ever came of our planning (or drinking). But it wasn’t always so, as you can learn in Benjamin Carp’s remarkable Rebels Rising: Cities in the American Revolution (Oxford UP, 2007; 2009 pbk). When the American colonists got together to talk revolution in taverns, they made revolution. And, as Ben points out, drinking establishments weren’t the only revolutionary loci–docks, churches, assembly halls, and ordinary houses also served as locales in which anger against British “tyranny” was stoked and action against the same planned. Ben’s book is really about public spaces and how they aid in the process of “mobilization.” These are the places where “civil society” moves from fuzzy concept to real thing. This was true in the American Revolution in 1775, and it was true in the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989. It was not true in the Grinnell College pub circa 1984. Everyone knows that the real revolutionaries hung out at The Forum (which, I’m sad to report, is no longer “The Forum” but an IT building). Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though relatively poor, the USSR poured resources into the arts. The Party created a large, well-funded cultural elite of which only two things were expected. First, that they practice their art. Second–and here’s the rub–that they tow the Party’s ideological line. Art under Communism was intended to enlighten the working class. In practice, that meant hewing to hackneyed tropes (“Socialist Realism”). Worse still, the Party could and did change its line at will. What was “progressive” one day could be “reactionary” the next. This made the lives of Soviet artists unpredictable. It was hard to say what the Party bosses’ would want from one year to the next. In his masterful The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford UP, 2009), Simon Morrison offers an excellent example and analysis of the dilemmas Soviet artists faced. When Prokofiev came back to the Soviet Union in 1935, he was asked to accommodate his work to the “needs of the Party.” He did so and became a Party darling. But then things changed. Stalin–an expert in all things–decided that Prokofiev’s work was too “formal” (whatever that meant). And so he was out of favor, and remained so for the rest of his life. When he died–ironically on the same day as Stalin–his passing was hardly noticed. It’s a sad and instructive story, and we should all thank Simon Morrison for telling it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

There was a time when “history” was the history of powerful people. Shakespeare captures this notion of history in the prologue to Henry V: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then and for centuries afterward, princes were deemed the proper focus of the historical investigations. The history of history from about 1950 to the present has largely been one of “democratizing” that view of the past. Princes are still given their due, but now a host of previously invisible people are as well. In the hands of social historians, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, male and female, European and non-European have all been given a written history. Our guest today, Vicki Ruiz, is one of the pioneers in this effort. Her path-breaking From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford UP, 1998; Tenth Anniversary Edition, 2008) shed light on the lives of one of these invisible groups for the first time. Through interviews and extensive documentary investigation, Vicki does a masterful job reconstructing the experiences of immigrant women who have gone by many names–Mexicanas, Tejanas, Chicanas, Hispanas among them. She describes in vivid detail how they negotiated the life passages of school, marriage, motherhood, and work while trying to balance the forces of assimilation and tradition. Though the book is about Mexican women, the theme resonates with the American immigrant experience more generally. Their story is our story. Read From Out of the Shadows and find out how. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial relationship with “nature.” They fought the wild tooth and nail in a never-ending effort to bring it under human control. It never really occurred to them that this effort at pacification–and the wanton destruction it brought–was wrong. On the contrary, it was man’s right. As the Hebrew Bible says, God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Nature was ours, to do with as we pleased. John Muir was among the first people to take a different and more “modern” view. He, like others of the Romantic movement, felt that nature and divinity were intertwined. We should no more destroy a wilderness than we should take the Lord’s name in vain, for both the one and the other were sacred. In his remarkable A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford UP, 2008), Donald Worster tells us how Muir came by these rather odd sentiments and how he put them into practice. You know about Muir’s work: the Sierra Club, Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Park, Muir Woods National Monument. Now read Worster’s wonderful biography and learn about the man himself. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don’t like very much. Maybe it’s the long-winded anti-American diatribes. Maybe it’s the strident communism (to which he came rather late, truth be told ). Maybe it’s the beard. In any event, it’s clear that Eisenhower, JFK, and Johnson held personal grudges against the Cuban generalissimo. In fact, they all tried to kill him, as Howard Jones shows in his masterful The Bay of Pigs (Oxford, 2008). If you think the Bush administration’s foreign policy is ham-fisted, you really need to read this book. The Bay of Pigs makes it seem as if Kennedy’s “best and brightest” couldn’t have successfully organized a bake sale, let alone an invasion. The CIA got the intelligence wrong, the Joint Chiefs fouled up the military planning, and executive branch was living in bizarro world. Sound familiar? I would laugh, but the fact of the matter is that Kennedy and his crew left 1200 exiles–patriots all–to die on the Playa Giron. There are lessons here, if any one cares to draw them. Thanks to Howard Jones for bringing them to our attention when we need them most. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

I confess I sometimes wonder where we got in the habit of proclaiming, usually with some sort of righteous indignation, that we have the “right” to this or that as citizens. I know that the political theorists of the eighteenth century wrote a lot about “rights,” and that “rights” made their way into the the U.S. and French constitutions. But when did they begin to dominate political discourse in the way they do today? Christopher Capozzola has written a terrific book tracing the rights reflex to the aftermath of World War I. It’s called Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of The Modern American Citizen (Oxford UP, 2008). The book focuses on a particular aspect of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American political culture that Chris calls “coercive voluntarism”: putting pressure on one’s confederates to “voluntarily” participate in a state-sponsored enterprise. He finds echoes of it throughout the American experience in World War I, and sees its fallout as one of the origins of rights talk. I can’t force you to read this book, but if I could I would. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Today we are happy to have Colin Grant on the show. Colin is that rare breed of writer who is also an excellent historian. Or is that “rare breed of historian who is also an excellent writer?” I’m not sure, but I can tell you that Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford UP, 2008) is a great book. The subject matter couldn’t be more interesting and the prose is as delightful as it is instructive. There are many laugh-out-loud, I-wish-I were-that-clever sentences in this book: “Scott was not to know that the UNIA leader was of the school of thought that translated ‘no’ as ‘maybe’ and maybe’ as ‘yes.'” And many others that will make you sad. Grant is that kind of writer and Garvey that kind of figure. Go buy this book. Then read it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.