New Books in History
8,208 episodes - English - Latest episode: 8 days ago - ★★★★ - 190 ratingsInterviews with Historians about their New Books
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Episodes
Gene Luen Yang, “Boxers & Saints” (First Second, 2013)
January 08, 2015 13:26 - 1 hourI love picking up a historical monograph in which the footnotes count for a quarter or more of the total pages. Most students don’t share this strange love of mine. I’m therefore always trying to figure out ways to bring in other sorts of works that will engage students without giving up anything in terms of historical richness or depth of thought. To this end, I often assign “graphic histories” in my classes (aka comics). One that I recently used in class, and was deeply impressed with, was ...
Erik Braun, “The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
January 08, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourErik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the social, political, and intellectual historical contexts that gave rise to this development. Braun accomplishes this by focusing on the role that the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) played in this movement, drawing primarily on L...
Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen, “War on the Silver Screen” (Potomac Books, 2014)
January 05, 2015 17:37 - 1 hourWar has been a constant topic for feature films since the invention of the motion picture camera. These events made for interesting stories and dynamic visual representations. In their book, War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America’s Perception of History (Potomac Books, 2014), Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen discussed a number of films that dealt with conflicts over the last 100 years. Beginning with World War I through the present War on Terror, the authors reviewed how selected films d...
Stephen L. Harp, “Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France” (LSU Press, 2014)
January 05, 2015 16:43 - 1 hourIn the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louisiana State University Press, 2014) explains how this came to be. A study of nudist ideas, activity, and sites from the interwar years to the mid-1970s, the book is a fascinating history of the people (the Durville brothers, Kienne de Mongeot, and Albert Lecocq) and places (the Ile du Levant, Montali...
Carl H. Nightingale, “Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities” (U of Chicago Press, 2012)
January 02, 2015 17:21 - 54 minutesWe often think of South Africa or America when we hear the word ‘segregation.’ Or — a popular view — that social groups have always chosen to live apart.But as Carl H. Nightingale shows in his new book, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the racial phenomenon is both modern and international. To be sure, laws and informal practices separating individuals by membership in a caste can be found everywhere in the ancient and medieval world. Those ...
Randy J. Sparks, “Where the Negroes Are Masters” (Harvard UP, 2014)
January 01, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourA kind of biography of the town of Annamaboe, a major slave trading port on Africa’s Gold Coast, Randy J. Sparks‘s book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Harvard University Press, 2014) focuses on the African women and men who were the crucial middle figures in the African slave trade, the largest forced migration of people in human history. The millions of people caught up in the trade who ended up toiling on plantations in the New World (or who ne...
James Mace Ward, “Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia” (Cornell UP, 2013)
December 25, 2014 18:59 - 1 hourIn his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man who has been both honored and vilified since his execution as a Nazi collaborator in 1947. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2013) is also a fascinating look at Catholicism, nationalism and human rights as moral standards in 20th century East Central Europe. The book explo...
Peter Peverelli, “One Turbulent Year – China 1975” (Boekscout, 2013)
December 24, 2014 15:50 - 1 hourChina today attracts one of the largest foreign student populations in the world. In 1975, though, very few foreign students were allowed to study in then-isolated China, especially Western students. But, Dr. Peter Peverelli was a part of a small cohort of students who studied in Beijing Language Institute at the tail end of the turbulent Cultural Revolution. In One Turbulent Year – China 1975 (Boekscout, 2013), Dr. Peverelli writes on his experiences in Beijing as one of the first Western st...
Thomas Kuehne, “Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945” (Yale UP, 2013)
December 23, 2014 13:14 - 1 hourAs a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the impression given was that the Gestapo were all knowing and ever present. We now know differently, of course. But knowing that the Nazi state functioned as much or more through consensus as coercion has led historians to think again about the way in which this consensus was created and sustained. And i...
Charles F. Walker, “The Tupac Amaru Rebellion” (Harvard UP, 2014)
December 23, 2014 06:00 - 39 minutesCharles F. Walker‘s book The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Harvard University Press, 2014) charts the rise, fall, and legacy of a massive uprising in colonial Peru. Indigenous societies in the Andes labored under heavy taxes, tributes, and discrimination imposed by the Spanish imperial state. Walker’s monograph follows the rebellion of a multiethnic group of indigenous, mestizo, and creole subjects, led by José Gabriel Tupac Amaru in 1780. Along with his wife Micaela Bastidas, Amaru’s leadership...
Rian Thum, “The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History” (Harvard UP, 2014)
December 22, 2014 18:52 - 1 hourIn his fascinating new book, Rian Thum explores the craft, materiality, nature, and readership of Uyghur history over the past 300 years. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Press, 2014) argues that understanding Uyghur history in this way is crucial for understanding both Uyghur identity and continuing relationships with the Chinese state. Rather than writing a narrative of “Xinjiang,” Thum instead crafts his history as a story of the shifting spaces of Altishahr, an Uygh...
Daniel O. Prosterman, “Defining Democracy: Electoral Reform and the Struggle for Power in New York City” (Oxford UP, 2013)
December 20, 2014 13:34 - 1 hourDaniel Prosterman‘s new book Defining Democracy:Electoral Reform and the Struggle for Power in New York City (Oxford University Press, 2013) investigates a neglected topic in U.S. history: the occasional efforts by reformers over the years to bring proportional representation to America. No democracy in the world today is less representative by the standard of “one person, one vote.” (In 2000, three states with more than a quarter of the population, had just six Senators, for example. The sev...
S. Duncan Reid, “Cal Tjader: The Life and Recordings of the Man Who Revolutionized Latin Jazz” (McFarland, 2013)
December 18, 2014 13:55 - 1 hourS. Duncan Reid has written a meticulously researched and detailed account of the performances and recording career of Bay Area-raised and small group Latin-jazz innovator and vibraphonist Cal Tjader. Tjader’s high-energy yet lyrical and melodic playing introduced new demographics of jazz listeners to the soulful sound of Latin jazz for four decades beginning in the 1940s and ending with Tjader’s untimely death at the age of 56 in 1982. In Cal Tjader: The Life and Recordings of the Man Who Re...
Matthew A. Sutton, “American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism” (Harvard UP, 2014)
December 17, 2014 15:08 - 1 hourMatthew Avery Sutton is the author of three books: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (2007), Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (2012), and, most recently, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2014), which is the subject of this interview with Raymond Haberski for New Books in Intellectual History. Sutton makes a provocative argument in the introduction of this book tha...
Jason Sokol, “All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn” (Basic Books, 2014)
December 17, 2014 14:00 - 1 hourWhen it came to race relations, the post-World War Two North was different — better — than the South. Or so white people in the northeast told themselves. While Jason Sokol argues that there was a real basis for what he calls the “northern mystique,” his new book All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn (Basic Books, 2014) shows that this conviction disguised a deep, rich vein of racism that blocked progress and justice for people of color. Examining Jackie Robinson, Sh...
Mark R. Anderson, “The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony” (UP of New England, 2014)
December 15, 2014 18:52 - 1 hourMy most current guest is Mark R. Anderson, author of The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America’s War of Liberation in Canada, 1774-1776 (University Press of New England, 2014). Anderson’s award-winning book presents the most detailed and nuanced study of the entire Quebec campaign in print today.Long an under-represented campaign in the general historiography of the American Revolution, the 1775 Canada expedition is brought to life in Anderson’s treatment, as he presents the story from mu...
Lyman Johnson, “Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776-1810” (Duke UP, 2011)
December 13, 2014 19:31 - 58 minutesLyman Johnson‘s book Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776-1810 (Duke University Press, 2011) analyzes the economic, political, and social lives of working people in Argentina’s colonial capital. Johnson traces the economic challenges facing plebian workers in Buenos Aires, including competition from foreign goods, the arrival of enslaved Africans into the city’s economy, difficulties in labor organization, and transformations in colonial governance. It p...
Susan Schulten, “Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
December 12, 2014 18:56 - 50 minutesOur everyday lives are saturated with maps. We use maps on our smart phones to help us navigate from place to place. Maps in the newspaper and online show us the spread of disease, the state of the planet, and the conflicts among nations. Susan Schulten‘s Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines how the very idea of a map radically changed it the nineteenth century. Author Susan Schulten shows the pivotal role maps...
Timothy Michael Law, “When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible” (Oxford UP, 2013)
December 10, 2014 11:46 - 58 minutesWhen a contemporary reader opens up their Bible they may be unaware of the long historical process that created the pages within. One of the key components in this history is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures between the third century BCE and the second century CE. Timothy Michael Law, Lecturer in Divinity in the University of St. Andrews, offers a thorough chronicle of the creation and afterlife of the Septuagint in When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making...
Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
December 09, 2014 13:02 - 1 hourDaniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growt...
Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa” (Ohio UP, 2014)
December 04, 2014 16:54 - 1 hourIn her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about theaskari, Africans soldiers recruited in the ranks of the German East African colonial army. Praised by Germans for their loyalty and courage, the askari were reviled by Tanzanians for the violence and disruptions the askari caused in their service to the colonial state. Moyd questions th...
Todd H. Weir, “Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
December 01, 2014 14:13 - 1 hourIf you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word. If a government is secular, it can’t be religious. If a court is secular, it can’t be religious. If a party is secular, it can’t be religious. But, as Todd H. Weir points out in his fascinating book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century G...
Henry Nau, “Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Reagan, Truman, and Polk” (Princeton UP, 2013)
November 28, 2014 15:00 - 1 hourThe recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have raised important questions about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy and how Americans can best exercise power abroad in the coming years. Commentators have not shied away from offering advice. Some defend the record of the George W. Bush administration and blame Barrack Obama’s “weakness” for the current disorder that wracks large sections of the Middle East. In their view, the United States must continue to carry out “unilateral” military...
Victor Pickard, “America’s Battle for Media Democracy” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
November 25, 2014 18:22 - 30 minutesThe media system in the United States could have developed into something very different than what it is today. In fact, there was an era in which significant media reform was considered. This was a time when media consumers were tired of constant advertising, bias, and control by corporate entities, and instead wanted more “public-oriented” content. Sound at all familiar? In his new book, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media R...
Brian Purnell, “Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings” (UP of Kentucky, 2014)
November 25, 2014 15:29 - 1 hourScholars interested in the history of the civil rights movement in the North will definitely be interested in Brian Purnell‘s new book, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings:The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (University Press of Kentucky, 2014). Thiscase study of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Brooklyn joins one of the fastest-growing areas of research in the field: the roots and experience of the black freedom struggle above the Mason-Dixon. Challenging many of the na...
Wai-yee Li, “Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature” (Harvard Asia Center, 2014)
November 24, 2014 13:46 - 1 hourWai-yee Li‘s new book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, about women, and/or in a feminine voice. In a series of chapters that showcase exceptionally thoughtful, virtuosic readings of a wide range of texts, Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) considers how conceptions of gender mediate experien...
Kathleen Lopez, “Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History” (UNC Press, 2013)
November 21, 2014 12:55 - 1 hourSuccessive waves of migration brought thousands of Chinese laborers to Cuba over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The coolie trade, which was meant to replace waning supplies of slaves, was but the first. In the twentieth century, a sugar boom in Cuba facilitated the entry of thousands more. Many of these itinerant workers stayed, and this book uses Chinese and Spanish languages sources and microhistorical methods to trace their lives as they married, raised children, formed associatio...
Edward Ross Dickinson, “Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
November 18, 2014 16:35 - 1 hourIn this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pathologization of homosexuality, to the formation of new sexual subjectivities and the emergence o...
Michael Gibbs Hill, trans., Wang Hui, “China from Empire to Nation-State” (Harvard UP, 2014)
November 17, 2014 11:09 - 1 hourMichael Gibbs Hill‘s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui‘s 4-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, 2004). China from Empire to Nation-State (Harvard University Press, 2014) thus makes available to an English-reading audience a fascinating perspective on the history and historiography of modern China in the context of a larger global frame. Hill’s translation offers a view of Chinese history tha...
Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, “Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012” (Oxford UP, 2013)
November 14, 2014 13:12 - 1 hourVahid Brown and Don Rassler‘s Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012 (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a meticulously researched and remarkably detailed exposition of the Haqqani network’s growth and ongoing importance among Pakistani militant organizations. Beginning with an expansive history of the Haqqani family’s background, and subsequent emergence as a critical lynchpin in the Pakistani – and by extension US – anti-Soviet efforts in Afghanistan, the book goes on to cover t...
Caterina Pizzigoni, “The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650-1800” (Stanford UP, 2012)
November 13, 2014 06:00 - 52 minutesCaterina Pizzigoni’s book The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650-1800 (Stanford University Press, 2012) provides a close examination of indigenous society in central Mexico. Analyzing more than 200 testamentary documents, Pizzigoni chronicles what Nahua homes looked like, who lived within them, and how indigenous households regulated their property and kinship connections. It is a fascinating portrait of daily life in an area that held firmly onto its Nahua ...
Steven Conn, “Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century” (Oxford UP, 2014)
November 12, 2014 14:59 - 57 minutesAmericans have a paradoxical relationship with cities, Steven Conn argues in his new book,Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014). Nearly three-quarters of the population lives near an urban center, the result of a centuries-old, global trend that reflects not just industrialization but the role cities have played as engines of economic, social, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Yet two-thirds of this “metropolitan” demograp...
Clark Chilson, “Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment” (University of Hawaii Press, 2014)
November 11, 2014 15:04 - 1 hourClark Chilson‘s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret groups of Shin (i.e., True Pure Land Buddhist) practitioners from the thirteenth century onward, but focuses primarily on the past 150 years. Although today at least thirty different lineages of secret Shin continue to operate, with a total estimated membership numbering in the tens of thousands, because they have been so successful at...
Edward E. Andrews, “Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World” (Harvard UP, 2013)
November 07, 2014 12:11 - 1 hourOften when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native Americans and people of African descent themselves who did much of the heavy lifting when it came ...
Kirsten Weld, “Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala” (Duke UP, 2014)
November 06, 2014 06:00 - 1 hourKirsten Weld‘s book Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014) tells the story of the 2005 discovery of a vast police archive in Guatemala. Officials had long denied that it existed, and for good reason, because it documented years of kidnapping and murder under the auspices of counterinsurgency. Weld’s book accounts for the repercussions of that discovery on many levels. It is at once an ethnography of human rights activists turned archivists, an ...
Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)
November 05, 2014 13:00 - 1 hourLawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking, Lipking traces it through the works of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Hooke, and many others, demonstrating that the ability to envision new...
Eric Allen Hall, “Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
November 04, 2014 17:32 - 48 minutesWhen he died from AIDS in 1993, Arthur Ashe was universally hailed as a man of principle, grace, and wisdom–a world-class athlete who had transcended his game. But a closer look at Ashe’s life reveals a more complex picture. Certainly, Ashe was an admirable figure. When tennis tournament organizers barred the teenage phenom because of his race, Ashe maintained his dignity. Decades later, when he was teaching a university course on African Americans in sport, Ashe couldn’t find a suitable text...
John Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons, “Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War” (University Press of Kansas, 2014)
November 04, 2014 14:41 - 1 hourJohn Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons share their insights on the story of the fabled 369th Infantry Regiment in their book, Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Our guests reveal a great deal about the state of African Americans in prewar New York civil and political society, while also presenting for the first time a complete narrative of the regiment’s service in the First World War, usin...
Mary C. Neuberger, “Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria” (Cornell UP, 2012)
November 04, 2014 13:25 - 44 minutesBy the late 1960s, Bulgaria was the world’s number one exporter of tobacco, perhaps the pinnacle of the place of tobacco in the economic, social and political development of modern Bulgaria. In Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press, 2012), Mary C. Neuberger deftly moves between tobacco production and practices of smoking, challenging assumptions about coffeehouses in the Ottoman empire, revealing the economic base of the Internal Macedonian Revolut...
Angela Stent, “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twentieth-First Century” (Princeton University Press, 2014)
November 03, 2014 14:14 - 1 hourIn 2005, the Comedy Central Network aired an episode of “South Park” in which one of the characters asked if any “Third World” countries other than Russia had the ability to fly a whale to the moon. During a press conference that took place two years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin lamented that he was the only “pure democrat” left in the world. The United States did not deserve such a title, he explained, in light of its “homeless citizens, detentions without normal court proceedings...
Terry Golway, “Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics” (Liveright, 2014)
October 31, 2014 12:04 - 54 minutesFor most Americans, Tammany Hall is a symbol of all that was dishonest, corrupt, illiberal, and venal about urban government and the political machines that ran it in the past, a shorthand for larceny on a grand scale. Not so, says Terry Golway. In his new book Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (Liveright, 2014) Golway argues that Tammany, a popular nickname for the Democratic organization of the County of New York (better known as Manhattan), introduced ...
Thierry Cruvellier, “The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer” (Ecco, 2014)
October 31, 2014 11:12 - 1 hourWhat is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Mast...
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
October 30, 2014 17:32 - 1 hourAfter the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism,...
Kenneth Brashier, “Public Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014)
October 29, 2014 11:27 - 1 hourKen Brashier’s new book is another tour de force and must-read for scholars of Chinese studies. Public Memory in Early China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) offers a history of identity and public memory in early China. An extensive introductory chapter lays a foundation for the rest of the book by exploring Han understandings of memory as concept and practice, including the import and nature of memorization within early manuscript culture and the ways that writing and recitation may h...
Catherine W. Bishir, ‘Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900’ (UNC Press, 2013)
October 28, 2014 12:20 - 1 hourSeeking to fill the gap in scholarship focused on African American artisans in the American South, Catherine W. Bishir uses the very specific location of New Bern, North Carolina to “dig a deep hole” and produce a longitudinal study of black artisans that moves chronologically from the colonial period, through the early national period to the period following the Civil War. Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 20...
Paul Copp, “The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism” (Columbia UP, 2014)
October 27, 2014 13:03 - 59 minutesPaul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dharani during the last few centuries of the first millennium. Based on extensive research on the material forms that these dharani took, Copp departs from a tradition of scholarship that focuses on the sonic quality and spoken uses of these spells, drawing our attention instead to how written a...
Mason B. Williams, “City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York” (W.W. Norton, 2013)
October 23, 2014 17:50 - 57 minutes“Today, many New Yorkers take the FDR to get to La Guardia,” Mason B. Williams jokes in the opening line of his new book City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (W.W. Norton, 2013) . And, depending on where they start, they pass any number of vital, iconic features in Gotham’s landscape that were built thanks to both men: Carl Schurz Park, the Triborough Bridge, Randall Island’s Stadium, the Astoria Pool, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, William Cullen Bryant High Schoo...
Claudio Saunt, “West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776” (W.W. Norton, 2014)
October 21, 2014 14:54 - 54 minutesFew years in U.S. history call to mind such immediate stock images as 1776. Powdered wigs. Founding fathers. Red coats. And if asked to place this assembly of objects and people, a few cities stand out: Boston. Philadelphia. Williamsburg, perhaps. This is the small world conjured by the Revolutionary era; the remainder of the continent, some 96% percent of the landmass exclusive of the original thirteen colonies that called themselves Continental, conceived of as a blank slate, awaiting inev...
Melvin Ely, “Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War” (Vintage Books, 2004)
October 21, 2014 10:42 - 47 minutesIn Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Vintage Books, 2004), Melvin Ely uses a trove of documents primarily found in the county court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia to unravel a rich story about the free blacks who inhabited “the gentle slope of Israel Hill.” The story begins in 1796 when Richard Randolph, a prominent Virginian and cousin to Thomas Jefferson, left a will full of fiery abolitionist sentiment that ema...
Eugene Y. Park, “A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea” (Stanford UP, 2014)
October 20, 2014 12:47 - 1 hourEugene Y. Park‘s A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces this history by focusing on the Miryang Pak family. The history of transformations in the family’s social status and geography parallels that of modern Korea, and each chapter treats these different levels of Park’s story, extending from the medieval period through today. A Family of No Prominence is particularly reflective about the nature of geneal...