New Books in Geography

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

The First World War ended over four centuries of Middle East rule by the expansive, multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual Ottoman Empire. In its wake, Britain, France, and some groups within the region and its diaspora aspired to create ethnically, religiously, and nationally homogenous nation-states that would be kept separate from Arab Muslims majorities. In States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (University of California Press, 2017), Laura Robson traces the origins and nature of such campaigns, which sought to demographically engineer the Middle East through ethnic removal, population transfers, and partition. Drawing on a broad range of communities and newly-formed states in the Middle East, Robson shows that such schemes were often designed to bolster colonial control of the region and impose neo-imperial modes of governance on its people. In addition to shedding new light on the transformation of identity and communal subjectivity in the post-war Middle East, Robson also provides crucial historical context to several issues facing the region today, including the refugee crisis, increased migration, and intercommunal conflict. In doing so, Robson’s account serves as an important reminder that the kinds of demographic engineering frequently presented as contemporary solutions often create more problems than they solve. Joshua Donovan is a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s Department of History. His dissertation examines national and sectarian identity formation within the Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and the diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Is modern capitalism too far advanced in the U.S. to create common property regimes? Are there models for what an Urban Commons might look like? Join us as we speak with Amanda Huron, author of Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). She’ll help us understand the theory and practice of Limited Equity Housing Cooperatives and the affordability, control, stability, and community they can provide to low-income communities and the people who live in them. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

How to theorize what goes without saying? In The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given (University of Georgia Press, 2017), Rob Sullivan develops a general theory of everydayness as the necessary, if elusive, starting point for social and spatial theorists across disciplines. Proceeding in stepwise fashion, Sullivan builds an account of this concept that scopes over space, place, history, time itself, social and biological reproduction, embodiment, the object world, and the neural and perceptual dimensions of experience, folding high-level theorizing together with an eclectic range of empirical engagements. The book generously synthesizes insights from Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Marx, Torsten Hägerstrand, Jane Bennett, and other thinkers on or just off the map of critical geography today. It is an ambitious but conversational text, a committed work of exposition that might dovetail with many a seminar in geographic thought. As Sullivan sees it, materializing our own entwinement with the environment — accepting the complexity of “The TimeSpacePlace Thing” — just might incline future geographers to a richer, more affirmative sense of ethics and politics beyond the hermetic models of selfhood that, on his reading, still have wide appeal, even in an age when the costs of anthropocentrism seem all the more immediate. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), geographer Caitlin DeSilvey offers a set of alternatives to those who would assign a misplaced solidity to historic buildings and landscapes in order then to “preserve” or “conserve” them. DeSilvey reimagines processes of material decay, which always intermingle natural and cultural landscapes, as more animate, eventful, productive, and worthy of affirmation than prevailing practice would have it. Her narrative wends through Montana, Vermont, Germany’s Ruhr Valley, and numerous English sites, each of them rendered at close range, in lithe, sometimes experimental prose. Through these encounters, and with a remarkably light touch, she thinks in a key recognizable alongside, but never subservient to, many strands of recent geographic thought on the force or vitality of nonhuman matter. Curated Decay is an ethical intervention, too, posing difficult questions about vulnerability, rights, care, repair, maintenance, and how we might better respond to environments as they weather and fragment. Just this week, happily, the book was just awarded the Historic Preservation Book Prize by the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington. It will satisfy a wide and curious readership across diverse domains of theory and practice, and because the lines of questioning it opens are not easily closed down, it will stoke debate for some time to come. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What does it mean to say that a city can “die”? As Brian Tochterman shows in this compelling intellectual and cultural history, motifs of imminent death—of a “Necropolis” haunting the country’s great “Cosmopolis”—have been a persistent feature of discourse on the probable fate of New York City since the Second World War. The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) traces this “spatial narrative” across many domains of thought and cultural production: fiction and essays, planning theory and practice, humanistic and social-scientific criticism in the public square, and film in the age of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish. Throughout, Tochterman shows that New York intellectuals of diverse political inflections have made specters of urban “ungovernability” central to how America and the world look at New York—whether to compel remedies, to render the city’s very chaos alluring, or, especially, to argue for the futility of intervention. Tochterman sheds new light on such figures as E. B. White, Mickey Spillane, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Lionel Abel, Michael Harrington, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and John Lindsay, among other compass points in the urbanism and intellectual life of postwar New York. Between “Fun City” and “Fear City,” a new image of the metropolitan past, present, and future comes into focus. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Lawrence Halprin, one of the central figures in twentieth-century American landscape architecture, is well known to city-watchers for his work on San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Seattle’s Freeway Park, downtown Portland’s open-space sequence, the FDR Memorial on the National Mall, and the California planned community of Sea Ranch. Less well known is his distinctive, process-based approach to design—his theoretical commitment, on the one hand, to a dynamic “choreography” of bodies moving through space, and, on the other, the visually arresting notational techniques of “scoring” he devised to represent such movement and carry out his projects in consultation with the public. In City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Alison Bick Hirsch addresses Halprin’s built work and community workshops in equal measure, pointing up important tensions that his participatory “Take Part Process” never quite extinguished: between manipulation and facilitation, universality and difference, conscious choice and emergent chance. Through Lawrence Halprin and his wife, the modern dancer Anna Halprin, Hirsch opens onto a broader history of postwar landscape and urban design, and onto some of the complicated politics in which proponents and critics of Urban Renewal alike found themselves immersed. Hirsch has written a decisive work that joins the intellectual, social, political, and aesthetic histories of urbanism. Geographers, historians, and urbanists of many stripes will learn from her able analysis. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Tim Neale examines the controversy over the 2005 Wild Rivers Act in the Cape York Peninsula of Northern Australia. Through detailed analysis of the role of traditional owners, prime ministers, politicians, the media, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, crocodiles, and river systems, Neale reveals the ways in which the future of the north was contested. In the process, Wild Articulations reveals the overlapping, contesting, and sometimes surprising relationships between environmentalism, indigeneity, and development in Northern Australia. The book shows how the Act both revealed and fundamentally altered the politics of environmentalism and indigeneity. With implications stretching far beyond Australia, Wild Articulations asks questions such as ‘Who is or should—ethically or legally—be recognized as rightfully interested in indigenous country? What attachments to wild spaces are we willing to recognize as legitimate? What futures do those living in “wild” places want, and what can they expect?’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Natchee Blu Barnd examines how Indigenous populations create space and geographies through naming, signage, cultural practices, and artistic expression within the confines of settler colonialism in the United States. Native Space explores these acts as everyday cultural practices, and also examines how settler societies deploy the concept of Indian-ness to create colonial geographies. Barnd takes an interdisciplinary approach toward these subjects, and examines these concepts through the use of demographic and cartographic data, stories, and imagery, each of which underscores the different methods Native peoples use to unsettle settler society and reclaim Indigenous spaces. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

There is an alarming tendency to paint some topics with a broad brush, allowing for easy understanding, but losing the proper nuance that avoids stereotype. In her book, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (Belt Publishing, 2018), Elizabeth Catte presents a more complete look at a region that is regularly subject to ridicule and derision. In this interview, she balances some of the more obvious traits of Appalachia with other characteristics that presents a more developed look at the area. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Hello from Gabrielle at the NBN Fantasy and Adventure channel. This podcast will be about adventure, and what could be more adventurous than traveling to a far-away place thats hard to get to, and even more of a challenge to get around in. The Germans have another descriptive word for the Anglicized word wanderlust: Fernweh, or the pain of the distant. In this context, I would interpret pain as more of a yearning, an ache. These days, traveling to most places is a relatively painless process, with the availability of the Internet and flights to even remote locations. Centuries ago, it was different. Explorers braved hunger, disease, frostbite or dehydration and hostile natives to fulfill their longing for distant places. Books about explorers are like epic fantasy adventures without the magic and machinations. Most explorers had to learn from necessity to be team players, though some definitely leaned towards the limelight. A new work by Jo Woolf, The Great Horizon: 50 Tales of Exploration (Sandstone Press, 2018), features a varied palette of them, including some women. Amidst portraits of the well-known explorers, such as Sir Ernest Shackleton, Antarctic explorer, and Sir Edmund Hillary, who summited Everest along with Tenzing Norgay, a host of lesser explorers are introduced, such as Dame Freya Madeleine Stark, who explored the Middle East, beginning in 1928 and was still traveling when she was in her eighties. The Great Horizon was published in association with the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, which enabled Jo to use their archival material, including photographs, as well as travel journals and letters. We find out that Borge Ousland always packs an almond cake as a special treat for his solitary explorations of the polar regions. While we read an excerpt of a letter Himalayan explorer and plant collector Frank Kingdon Ward wrote, we can treat ourselves to a photograph of the Tsangpo Gorge that he reached and partially mapped back in 1924. And the photo of Fanny Bullock Workman on the Karakoram Siachen Glacier in 1912, holding a sign for the suffragette movement, is priceless. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Do we live in a country of red and blue states or something more purple-ish? The red state/blue state meme of 2000 has really never gone away, and scholarly debate, as well as frequent media attention, has argued for its merits and demerits. Are we a sharply divided and polarized nation or simply one divided by electoral rules that exacerbate relatively small partisan differences? In David A. Hopkins‘ Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), he sets out to reconcile many aspects of this debate. He argues for the importance of geography in the context of constitutionally-established electoral procedures, especially the Electoral College. He shows the ways that changes in party coalitions and the rising importance of ideology and issues for the two parties, relate to the electoral map. Hopkins is associate professor of Political Science at Boston College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Lisa Brooks, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018). Brooks narrates the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research, but in the land and communities of Native New England, illuminating the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Readers can also participate in a remapping of the “First Indian War,” later renamed “King Philip’s War.” Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Brill, 2017), Susan Smith Peter discusses the origins of the creation of distinct provincial identities in European Russia and how this process was encouraged and even promoted by the autocracy as a way to gain information about the territories under its control, to better manage resources and collect taxes. The Tsarist administration under Nicholas I encouraged and even mandated the creation of statistical bureaus, provincial newspapers and agricultural societies, which were staffed not just by nobles, but by priests’ sons, merchants and in some cases even peasants as a way to get a more thorough understanding of the territories governed. This allowed people in the provinces to become acquainted with their own particularities, customs and history and to speak directly to the government. However, as Smith-Peter notes, these voices changed from merely providing information to demanding participation in government, which the autocracy rejected. This became increasingly isolating to the nobles in particular as they were cut out of decisions on emancipating serfs and the creation of local government. Smith-Peter argues that the autocracy’s fostering of civil society for economic reasons followed by its rejection of political participation by the civil society it had created caused a rift in Russian society that eventually culminated in the revolutions of 1917. An excellent read for any interested in the development of regional identity and politics in Russia or the USSR. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Onigamiising is the Ojibwemowin word for Duluth and the surrounding area. In this book of fifty warm, wise and witty essays, Linda LeGarde Grover tells the story of the four seasons of life, from Ziigwan (Spring) to Biboon (Winter), using episodes from her own life as illustrations of the central Anishinaabe concept of mino bimaadiziwin (To live a good life). Educational in the most profound sense, these essays in Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) range back and forth between ceremony and tradition, intergenerational trauma and revitalization, domestic pleasures and feasts, and a life well lived. James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The Himalayas have long been at the crossroads of the exchange between cultures, yet the social lives of those who inhabit the region are often framed as marginal to historical narratives. And while scholars have studied religious diversity in the context of modern nation-states, such as India, Pakistan, Tibet, or Nepal, seldom has the Himalaya been the focus of examination in and of itself. Megan Adamson Sijapati, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Gettysburg College, and Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, remedy this scholarly void in their new collection of essays, Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya (Routledge, 2016). The volume explores religious responses to Himalayan modernity as witnessed in the cultural encounter with new social realities, expectations, and limits. The characteristics of the Himalayan region are fluid, moving beyond geographical boundaries, or mountain and valley zones, as are the contemporary human processes of meaning-making in the face of globalization and modernization. In our conversation we discuss how modernity operates, the social and political factors shaping the Himalayan religious environment, processes of emplacement, Tibetan Buddhist media, environmentalism and development, changing pilgrimage practices, the Nepali Goddess tradition, political limits to religious education, and the dynamics of perceived margins and discourses of peripherality. 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]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Studies in the United States. Salvatore claims that during the first half of the twentieth century scholars defined the contours of Latin American studies. Scholars did so both in the context of the ‘dollar diplomacy’ and the ‘good neighbor’ policy towards the region. Salvatore argues that, in contrast to the military interventions in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, the approach toward South America was defined by scholarly “disciplinary interventions.” Salvatore follows the life and work of five field-defining scholars who approached the South-American “terra incognita” from the vantage point of the hegemonic hemispheric power. An archaeologist (Hiram Bingham), a historian (Clarence Haring), a political scientist (Leo S. Rowe), a sociologist (Edward A. Ross), and a geographer (Isaiah Bowman), defined spaces of inquiry that were transnational in scope and scale. Salvatore argues that the creation of transnational fields of inquiry intended to render the region “visible” to audiences in the United States. The definition of new disciplinary spaces such as “South-American studies” contrasted with the then-prevalent domestic narratives focused on “national” topics. These new transnational spaces, Salvatore claims, were the product of the “imperiality” of the knowledge produced by the five scholars studied in Disciplinary Conquest. Nonetheless, the narrative proposed by the author defies a simplistic depiction of Haring, Rowe, Bingham, Ross, and Bowman as mere pawns of empire. Salvatore shows how some of them produced works that grappled with “anti-American” sentiment in the region while others tried to create alternatives to official policy designs. Moreover, Salvatore shows how these men approached South America as progressive intellectuals interested in democratic governance, social justice, and progress in the region. Salvatore notes how these concerns led to envisioning two different South Americas. One South America, positively appraised by these scholars, was made up of the “ABC powers” (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and by extension, Uruguay). The ABC countries showed promise, from the scholars point of view, regarding democratic development and social equality. Scholars construed another, less-promising from the U.S. perspective, South America by placing focus on the Andean region. Salvatore thus shows how these early iterations of Latin American studies resulted in the creation of various scholarly-defined, and externally-imposed, transnational fields of inquiry. Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Ryan Enos is the author of The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Enos is associate professor of government at Harvard University. Scholars have long wrestled with the impact of segregation on politics. The difficulty of connecting the causal dots between various forms of segregation and political outcomes has frustrated the solid social science conclusions desired by researchers. Does racial animus follow or lead segregation? Do residential patterns reflect or perpetuate bias? It has been hard to know. Enos’ new book applies cutting-edge experiments to this difficult task. Through laboratory and field experiments, he is able to test difficult questions about the impact of social geography on group interactions. From Boston to Arizona to Israel, The Space Between Us shows how distance and proximity have effects on perceptions of others and difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Where is the Caribbean? In An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke University Press, 2017) Ernesto Bassi makes the case for a transimperial space shaped by ships’ journeys and sailors’ imaginings. Defiance of exclusive trading restrictions and aspirations to create revolutionary alliances were instrumental, as were pragmatic commercial decisions and naming practices of emerging nations. 18th and 19th century actors produced a Caribbean space in this context, and then, in some places, engaged in deliberate forgetting. This book combines meticulous research with an innovative conceptual framework and wonderfully detailed glimpses into this period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

As the Middle East continues to become more topical to American and European audiences, a need for textbooks to teach the history of the region has become urgent. Some such textbooks take a topical approach, others use a chronological narrative. Betty Anderson‘s A History of the Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues (Stanford University Press, 2016) combines both. Taking us through the whirlwind of the last few centuries, she focuses on three types of actors: the titular rulers, rebels and rogues, where rulers rule, rebels rebel, and rogues operate somewhere in-between. Anderson demonstrates that all three have shaped the development of the Middle East politically, socially, culturally, intellectually, and economically. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The topic is certainly not new to scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, but as Bradley Camp Davis shows in Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2017), plenty of work remains to be done on the parallel processes of border and state formation in the region. Drawing on Chinese, Vietnamese and French written sources as well as hundreds of interviews with villagers in the uplands of Yunnan and northern Vietnam, Davis tells the story of a half-century of violence, trade and taxation at the hands of competing armed groups; of their alliances and wars with lowland states, and of the bandit as symbol in nationalist and local histories and memorials today. Bradley Camp Davis joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the malleability of bandits and banditry, Black Flags and Yellow Flags, the merits of oral traditions in study of history, and the place of the imperial bandit in movie and museum. You may also be interested in: Pamela McElwee, Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The dominant narrative in the history of the study of the Middle East has claimed that the Cold War was what pushed Middle East studies to develop, as part of a greater trend in area studies. Drawing on his previous work in 2004’s Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, Zachary Lockman‘s Field Notes: The Making of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2016) looks at the power of institutions, corporations, and foundations in the shaping of Middle East studies in the United States. It’s the story of how money changes hands and in the process, attempts to influence academic output; in many ways, this story complements what we already know of what research was being produced and how it was affecting the field at large. However, what we often neglect to mention is that universities themselves cannot found area studies centers alone and often receive the funding from wealthy benefactors. In Middle East studies, as in other fields, this also meant these benefactors had a research agenda; with area studies, there was a desire to break free of the disciplines history, philology, etc and establish unifying theories of area studies. While today’s Middle East studies is roughly bound together by a shared geographic interest and not by a unifying theory, this drive influenced how the field was shaped and the various infrastructures that still exist today. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012) provided a firm foundation for his reputation by exploring how imperial priorities shaped map-making of he dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and how these changed over the long century during which a fully independent Polish state did not exist. While focused primarily on Russian cartography is the primary focus of this work, Seegel places those developments in context with discussion of Polish nationalist map-making and a discussion of Habsburg map-making of the region as well. In so doing, he also offers intriguing portraits of the cartographers who ultimately made this research possible. It was a pleasure to interview him at last about this book and I invite you to listen to our discussion of his work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization by Michael Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, was published in November, 2016 by the South Asian Studies Association Press. The book is a winner of the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize (conferred by the American Institute of Indian Studies), and has been very well received by reviewers. Cultivating Community is based on the author’s two and a half years of field research in 1996-1999 with the Shetkari Sanghatana, a massive and influential anti-statist movement in India’s Maharashtra state. The book explores the creation of political meaning and the construction of collective identity in a mass social movement. In it, the author address fundamental questions in making sense of mass movements anywhere: Where do movement ideologies come from and what makes them compelling? What motivates diverse groups of ordinary people to rise together in common cause? How can we make sense of individual participants in a movement when their participation sometimes appears irrational and against their own interests? The book argues for a participant-centric view of the Shetkari Sanghatana, digging beneath the movement’s fantastical mythological idiom and the overarching demands that we hear articulated by leadership to see how the Sanghatana is experienced and constructed by individual participants on the ground. An important part of the analysis focuses on ways that participants and leaders together deploy a pool of shared but highly ambiguous spiritual and political symbols in an ongoing competition to define what the movement stands for, whose interests it represents, and what the future should look like. This is an anthropological ethnography that delves into history, political science, economics, cultural geography, folklore, and religion. Mike Youngblood received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at the School for International Training, the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, the Masters in Social Design program at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. Mike’s interests in social innovation, collaborative change, design thinking, and ethnographic methodology are central to his work both inside and outside of academe. His work has received a number of recognitions, including the Sardar Patel Award for Best American Dissertation on Modern India, the Percy H. Buchannan Prize for Writing on Asian Affairs, the Robert Miller Prize for Innovation in Anthropological Research, and the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize. He has been a Fulbright fellow, a Watson fellow, and an American Institute of Indian Studies fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Cuba and Mexico have a long history of exchange and interaction. Cubans traveled to Mexico to work, engage in politics from afar, or expand businesses. Dalia Antonia Muller‘s Cuban Emigres and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) restores lost histories of those migrations, focusing particularly on political exiles in the nineteenth century who found, in cities like Veracruz, Merida and Mexico City, other people and resources with which to engage in anti-colonial struggles from afar. The double story of diplomatic ambivalence towards Cuban struggles for independence alongside and in contrast to popular support for those struggles makes for fascinating reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. At first glance, these two events might appear to have little to do with one another. But in his new book, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017), Neil Maher examines the often contentious relationship between the NASA-led space program and the social movements of the era. Maher shows that civil rights activists questioned why the U.S. federal government spent billions on space exploration while many African Americans suffered in poverty and lived in dilapidated housing in the nation’s cities. He explains why New Left activists and environmentalists opposed NASA’s emphasis on big technology and the agency’s involvement with the military in Vietnam. And he describes how hippies with the counterculture rejected NASA’s techno-optimism and moved to communes to practice simpler living using smaller, appropriate technology. Neil Maher is associate professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of a previous book, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Rise of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press). Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and how to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Not quite a colony, not quite independent, fiercely nationalist, what is Puerto Rico’s status, exactly? Jorge Duany‘s Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers clear answers to complicated questions about Puerto Rico’s politics and history, as well as accounting for many phenomena that characterize the island today; migration to and from the island, the state of its economy, the role of language in shaping Puerto Rican identities. Whether you know nothing or a great deal, this book is sure to surprise and inform you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Latino City: Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots (Routledge 2017) Dr. Erualdo R. Gonzalez addresses the salient issue of gentrification and its effect on immigrant and working-class populations in the city of Santa Ana, California. Centering his analysis on one of the nations most “Mexican” cities, Gonzalez tracks redevelopment discourse and practice in the city of Santa Ana over the course of four decades. Engaging the concepts of new urbanism, creative class, and transit-oriented models of planning, he explains how city officials and developers have worked in concert to displace Latina/o businesses and populations through urban revitalization efforts. Equally important, Gonzalez illuminates the grassroots response of Santa Anas Latina/o community and their effect on planning discourse and policy. Combining archival research with participant observation, Latino City provides an in-depth community study that adds to the growing body of scholarly literature referred to as Latino urbanism. David-James Gonzales (DJ) has a PhD in History from the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the intersection of Latina/o civic engagement and politics on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The world order was in crisis at mid-century. Intellectuals in England and the United States perceived the rise of totalitarianism, the Second World War, the invention of the atomic bomb, the start of the Cold War, and the end of imperial rule as threats to stability and, in some cases, to mankind itself. But these intellectuals also theorized alternative political structures, legal frameworks, and communities and, thereby, sought to invent a new world order. Or Rosenboim’s The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950 (Princeton University Press, 2017), traces this exciting and uncertain moment in international thought. For Rosenboim, the period between the start of World War II in Europe and the beginning of the U.S.-led war in Korea witnessed the emergence of “globalism” itself. The book is a deep engagement with the ideas of an eclectic assortment of intellectuals–H.G. Wells, Lewis Mumford, Raymond Aron, Friedrich Hayek, just to name a handful–who all participated in discussions of the global. For these intellectuals, the global was both a geographic and conceptual space. This space, however, had notable gaps, particularly in relation to the Global South. Given that our present “global” moment inherited these intellectuals’ categories, this book should be read by scholars of history and IR, along with anyone interested in world politics. Or Rosenboim is a Junior Research Fellow in Politics at Queens College and POLIS, both at the University of Cambridge. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, interest in maps waned while electronic coordinate systems emerged. But this was not solely a shift in technology, as William Rankin writes in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). The shift from maps to coordinate systems, and then eventually to GPS produced novel geographical subjectivities, navigational experiences and geopolitical arrangements. It was a shift in the meaning of territory itself. By day, William Rankin is an assistant professor of history at Yale; by night, he is an award-winning cartographer, whose work you can find here. Rankin has also set up a website to accompany the book, at which readers can see the books images, data, and bibliography. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps us understand why that matters not just for how we understand outer space, but also for how we understand the Earth and ourselves. Based on 15 months of participant observation in 2009 and 2010 that included interviews, involvement in research projects, conferences, email exchanges, informal chats, and more, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016) guides readers through four different field sites in order to analyze the significance of four different activities of place-making therein: narrating, mapping, visualizing, and inhabiting. As we move from the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah (where Earth itself is transformed into a Martian place) to the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, to exoplanetary research at MIT, to Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, and more, we come to see how geological, digital, pedagogical, observational, and other tools help shape how we understand Mars, exoplanets, and the earth itself. It’s a fascinating study that will be of wide interest! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

As our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published by smaller presses without the huge PR machines of larger presses and ones that consequently are often overlooked by larger media outlets. For me, thats one of the rewards of hosting at the New Books Network: I have the chance to showcase important work that you might otherwise miss, work that adds to the richness and diversity of our national literary culture. Now you might be thinking that I’m about to ask you for a donation. I’m not. Though if you want to contribute to the New Books Network and its public mission to widen the intellectual life of America, by all means please do so. We’d appreciate it. No, what I want to do is make the point that, while books from small literary presses are one place that our literary culture thrives, it’s not the only one. Crucial to our national literature are the small journals and reviews that publish our writers. These venues–and there are hundreds of them in print and, increasingly, online–foster our younger writers and promote the work of our established one, especially work that is non-commercial or experimental. Literary journals and reviews offer readers diverse voices and diverse aesthetics. They’re the forum through which our literary culture thrives and expands and reinvigorates itself. And they are usually run by editors who work for almost nothing, on almost-nothing budgets, editors who believe in literature as much as the authors they publish. Today I talk to one of those editors. Tommy Mira y Lopez is the co-founder and co-editor of Territory, a new venue that has not only taken up the time-honored task of providing readers with new work from newer writers, but that’s also creating something like a new micro-genre of literature, one that combines visual maps and literary text. If you’ve ever found yourself looking at an old map and thinking how intriguing it is or, when reading a story, if you’ve ever imagined yourself picturing its imaginary landscape, you’ll be excited to explore Territory and the new terrains of literature its fostering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Almost daily in popular media the Muslim World is pinpointed as a homogeneous entity that stands separate and parallel to the similarly imagined West. But even scratching the surface of the idea of a Muslim World reveals the geographic, social, linguistic, and religious diversity of Muslims throughout the world. So what work is performed through the employment and use of this phrase? And in what context did the idea of the Muslim World emerge? Cemil Aydin, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tackles these questions in his wonderful new book The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017). It in he weaves distant and interconnecting social, intellectual, and political histories of modern Muslims societies with clarity and detail. Altogether, he reveals the complex story of how the concept is constructed as a device intended to point to a geopolitical, religious, and civilizational unity among Muslims. The term is defined and employed by Muslim and non-Muslim actors alike across imperial and national contexts over the past nearly 150 years. In our conversation we discussed the justifications for imperial conflicts, the effects of Christian nationalistic liberation and the colonization of Muslims, orientalism, social Darwinism, the racialization of Muslims, the global role of the Ottomans, European and Russian imperialism, Muslim modernists thinkers, the effects of the World Wars, and the changing political landscape of the late 20th century. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, editors, scholars, etc., the discussion gets complicated. The matter is that, when read, discussed, or analyzed, a book is situated in a specific environment that creates additional layers for consideration; furthermore, a printed item itself shapes the environment, revealing and producing further developments and proliferations. In From the Edge: Chicana/Chicano Border Literature and the Politics of Print (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Allison E. Fagan invites her readers to explore not only a magic world of the literature that arises out of collaboration of national, ethnic, political, social, literary borders, but also multilayered networks produced by books, which infiltrate readers’, writers’, editors’, publishers’, and translators’ communication. As the title prompts, From the Edge discusses border literature; however, Fagan makes a step further and includes in her analysis books which do not fall under the category of conventional border literature. Through this gesture, From the Edge broadens the area of inquiry and brings a wider scope of questions for the discussion: what is border literature and what borders do we (or should we) consider? The borders Fagan discusses and negotiates are connected with books as printed items. Outlining a theoretical framework which to some extent relies on the postmodern principles, Fagan seems to initiate a conversation about books as in-flux items: when printed and circulated among the participants of readership (understood in its broadest sense), books not only deliver different stories about writing, reading, and publishing, but also shape current discourses strengthening some aspects and weakening others. From the Edge shifts conventional margins to centers. This research offers a detailed discussion of paratextual elements: glossaries, typography, editorial paratexts, readers notes. In “My Book Has Been the Light of Day,” Fagan brings attention to recovery projects: books that were re-discovered and re-introduced to readers. While the stories about books that were once considered lost are intriguing and captivating, an academic inquiry brings forth a wide range of discussions: How are books re-discovered? How is their readership established? What do recovered books communicate about the past and present reading environments? What is accomplished through recovery projects? In her research, Fagan initiates, among others, these questions and invites readers, writers, editors, critics, scholars, translators to shift the boundaries of the existing conversations about print cultures and communication, literary traditions and language, ethnicity and nationality, self and identity. Allison E. Fagan is an assistant professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), Serhat Unaldi offers a provocative and original interpretation of the relationship between space, architecture and power in one of Southeast Asia’s biggest and most complicated cities. Climbing the towers and exploring the alleyways of Siam-Ratchaprasong, that part of Bangkok famous for its gaudy malls, pretentious hotels and tourist strips, Unaldi finds that the charismatic authority of the royal institution has combined with the political economy of the capitalist marketplace to form a highly potent yet unstable admixture of elements for modern state formation. The dense concentration of forces for elite domination of Thailand in these few city blocks at once affirms and celebrates the project’s success, enabling the dominant classes to be seen exactly as they would have themselves seen. But these spaces are also fraught with danger, subject to instability caused by realignments among erstwhile allies within, and to increasingly overt challenges to the status quo from opponents without — expressed most dramatically in the antigovernment protests of 2010, which left in their wake the smoldering ruins of the very architectural hierarchy intended to signify modernity via proper relations of inequality. Serhat Unaldi joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Siam Paragon and the politics of space, the appeal of Thaksin Shinawatra, the Erawan Shrine and its others, disappeared and hidden palaces, Phibun Songkhram and the making of Chulalongkorn University, and how all roads in Bangkok lead to the monarchy. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The crossing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one of the most famous scenes in the story of the Exodus out of Egypt. But can it be that for the last couple thousand years, historians, geographers, and scholars have had the wrong sea in mind? Dr. Glen A. Fritz believes the answer is yes, and he’s here to tell us why. Well be discussing his recent book, The Lost Sea of the Exodus: A Modern Geographical Analysis (Fritz, 2016). Glen A. Fritz has been involved in the study of the Exodus geography for seventeen years. He holds a PhD in environmental geography from Texas State University-San Marcos. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2006, pursued the location of Israel’s sea crossing. Listeners can visit his website: www.ancientexodus.com where Fritz explores questions of locating both the correct sea of the Exodus as well as the correct Mount Sinai. L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In recent years, scholarship on Burma, or Myanmar, has undergone a renaissance. Jayde Lin Roberts’ Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese (University of Washington Press, 2016) is a bellwether of exciting new books to come, and a model for how they might be done. Although Roberts completed much of her research for the book back under military dictatorship in the 2000s, she explores and situates the Sino-Burmese in downtown Rangoon, or Yangon, in a manner that anticipates and responds to the political changes of the 2010s, and with them, the current ethnographic turn towards Burma. In doing so, she delivers on the book’s title, telling the hitherto largely untold story of the in-between place that Rangoon’s Sino-Burmese community has occupied. But she does more than this, along the way drawing the readers attention towards the larger story of nation and state formation in Burma through the lens of a community that has for over a century struggled with how to be both local enough and Chinese enough in an enduringly colonial, yet distinctively postcolonial Southeast Asian city. Jayde Lin Roberts joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about temples as nested places, Chinese vernacular schooling, hungry ghosts, how tiger prawns built City Mart, and the tactical occupation of Rangoon’s public spaces through lion dances. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured professor who resigned from his academic post to earn a degree from the world-renowned University of Southern California film school. As a documentary filmmaker, Olson has sought to fuse critical thinking and Hollywood storytelling. And as the author or co-author of three books, Olson has shown how scientists and academics in general can improve their communication skills and harness the power of narrative to improve their writing and presentations. Narrative is an indispensable tool that geographers and others can use to communicate with our students and the general public. Yet Olson also shows how we can hone our narrative intuition and use our story sense to write better abstracts, articles, and grant applications. Houston, We Have a Narrative has gems of wisdom for physical geographers, human geographers, and academics of all stripes. Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and ways to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especially among Republican lawmakers. But why? In his recent book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (University of Washington Press, 2016), historian Joshua Howe seeks to answer this question. Howe traces the history of climate change from a scientific oddity in the late 1950s to a topic of fierce debate among politicians and environmental activists who fear that failure to tackle global warming will lead to stronger storms, fiercer wildfires, and rising seas. Scientists knew the most about the nuances of climate change, yet seemed unable to convince policy makers or the public to tackle the problem. Howe sees the climatologists narrow focus on the science of global warming as a partial reason for the inaction. Part history of science, part history of environmentalism, Behind the Curve is a provocative book exploring one of the most vexing issues of our time. Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson is also a former visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Regis Darques‘ Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans (Springer, 2016) offers the unique mapping perspectives on the Balkan region. By exploring a range of topics such as borderlands, contacts between the empires, transportation networks, changing geographies of borders, ghost borders, countless border crossing and walls, and lack of geographical data, this book also provides numerous resources for historians, political scientists and other scholars. This book shesd light on an apparent “chaos” of the Balkan geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Political states claim the moral right to rule the persons living within their jurisdiction; they claim the authority to make and enforce laws, establish policies, and allocate benefits and burdens of various kinds. But states also claim rights over their territories. These include rights to establish and protect borders, to control airspace, extract and use natural resources on and beneath their geographical region. Philosophers have long wondered about the basis for states claims to authority over persons. But there are additional questions regarding the territorial authority claimed by states. How do states come to possess rights to the natural resources that lie beneath the ground? How might the moral character of the initial acquisition of land impact a states present claims to authority? In Boundaries of Authority (Oxford University Press, 2016) A. John Simmons (University of Virginia) argues that leading accounts of state authority are insufficient to address successfully the distinctive questions regarding state boundaries. Building on his own Lockean individualist account of authority, Simmons develops a philosophical conception of how the moral rights claimed by states could be justified. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, assembles a new collection of essays to explore this question. The book develops the concept of a “sea narrative,” thinking through the connection between this and a variety of forms of cultural production. The essays are eclectic, but unified, reflecting the emerging interest in both the subject and the approach the book uses. The book travels across the globe as well as across the centuries since 1600, taking in French accounts of the Atlantic crossing; prisoners of war; newspaper articles; Soviet technology and propaganda; Irishness and Ireland’s sense of itself; Du Maurier’s understanding of the coast; A S Byatt’s work; the idea of the Anthropocene; and “coastal exceptionalism.” Each essay is fascinating in its own right, but the collection builds to reorientate the study of the sea for historians and literary scholars, as well as any academic interested in how we narrate and culturally produce the sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

How do new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join us as Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, talks about his and Nik Theodore’s new book, Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not only the destructive tendencies of urbanization, but also the remarkable ways in which nature survives in one of India’s largest cities. From the ecology of slum life and propensity for home gardens to the differing conceptions of parks and uses of trees, the book brings together the various ways in which nature changes and is changed by the city. As such, Nagendra offers a truly unique retelling of Bengaluru’s story that cuts across academic disciplines, making for an outstandingly innovative yet richly detailed book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized by the ancient Greeks. Neil Kent’s (University of Cambridge) Crimea: A History (Hurst & Company, 2016) recounts the history of the Crimea over three millennia. A crossroads between Europe and Asia, ships sailed to and from Crimean ports, forming a bridge that carried merchandise and transmitted ideas and innovations. Greeks, Scythians, Tartars, Russians, Armenians and Genoese are among those who settled the peninsula since antiquity, a demographic patchwork that reflects its geography. The religious beliefs of its inhabitants are almost as numerous: the Hebraicized beliefs of the Karaim Tartars, Islam, Judaisim, Russian and Greek Orthodoxy, as well as Roman Catholicism. This mosaic is also reflected in places of worship and the palaces which still adorn Crimea: imperial Romanov Massandra, the ‘noble nest’ of Prince Voronzov at Alupca or the Palace of Bakhchisaray built for the Tartar Khan. For some two centuries balmy Yalta and its environs were a veritable Black Sea Riviera, where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at the end of the Second World War. Beyond addressing these subjects, Kent succeeds in elucidating the complexities of Crimea’s contemporary history, especially its place in the Soviet Union. He also helps readers better understand the controversies surrounding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to annex the peninsula. Enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly turned to coal to heat their homes and power their businesses. As the amount of smoke produced by burning coal grew it prompted a variety of responses, from crown-directed efforts to prevent it from contaminating the royal space to its adoption in poems and plays as a symbol of modern urban life. As Cavert reveals, these efforts to grapple with the problem of coal smoke presaged the reaction to the much larger issue of industrial pollution throughout England during the Industrial Revolution and, in the process, framed many of these issues in ways with which people are familiar today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is destined to be demolished, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) weaves the experiences of these slum dwellers together with an analysis of middle class Resident Welfare Associations, legal rulings, influential reports, and idle chatter to argue that mapping and surveying are no longer the primary means for administering urban space. Rather it is a set of vague and powerful aesthetic norms derived from notions of what it is to be world class that set the contours of Delhi’s change.Theoretically stimulating and rich in narrative drive, Rule by Aesthetics opens up new ways for thinking about urban governance in India and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th through the 21st century to explore the various forms the Balkan region has taken in Europe’s political and cultural imagination. Her analysis of these literary works reveals concepts of belonging, multi-belonging and unbelonging among Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenes and even Austrians. Ana Foteva applies postmodern geography, literary, and colonial theories to demonstrate the relationship between the development of national identity, the pull of Habsburg imperial identity, the shaping of Yugoslav identity, and the fracturing of the Balkans in the 1990s. In our podcast conversation, she discusses and challenges stereotypes of the Balkans as a region of perpetual conflict. Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe (Peter Lang, 20speaks to complex identities in the region rarely seen in contemporary media accounts. Ana Foteva received her PhD in German literature at Purdue University. Currently she holds the position of Visiting Assistant Professor in German Studies at St. Lawrence University. Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Russian and East European history at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersections of national, Soviet and European identities in the Baltic countries. Recent publications include articles in Ab Imperio and Cahiers du Monde Russe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography