New Books in History
8,057 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★ - 187 ratingsInterviews with Historians about their New Books
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Episodes
Rodric Braithwaite, “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89” (Oxford UP, 2011)
August 26, 2011 16:58 - 1 hourI was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone said, were bent on ruling the world. Detente had been a ploy to lull us to sleep. In Afghanistan, the Communists had renewed their campaign. We had to do something. So we didn’t go to “their” Olympics. Oddly, that brave gesture failed to bring them around to our way of thinking. There are two really...
Charles King, “Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams” (W.W. Norton, 2011)
August 22, 2011 20:06 - 58 minutes“Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America,” wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a way, it’s not too farfetched that Twain saw his homeland in the Black Sea port city. Odessa was very much a modern city with its right-angled streets, buzzing markets, and cultural bricolage. “What Twain saw in the streets and courtyards of Odessa,” writes Charles King in his Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams, (W. W. Norton, 2011), “was...
Mark Bradley, “Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire” (Oxford UP, 2010)
August 15, 2011 19:12 - 1 hourThe Greco-Roman world was the prism through which the British viewed their imperial efforts, and Mark Bradley’s compendium Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010) explores the various ways in which this reception of the classics occurred. From museums, to oratorical texts, to theories of race, the classical world was a reference point for the imperial British. Bradley’s book looks at how the British thought about the classical world at a time when they ...
Vinayak Chaturvedi, “Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India” (University of California Press, 2007)
August 11, 2011 14:39 - 1 hourThe odds are that if you don’t figure in an administration’s records, you won’t figure in the historical record. But what do you do to get into those records? Raising a ruckus is one way. But that works only if someone else hasn’t managed to raise more of a ruckus than you can ever hope to – and this, as Vinayak Chaturvedi tells us in Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (University of California Press, 2007) was exactly the situation the peasants of Gujarat faced during the las...
Robert Thurston, “Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective” (Ashgate, 2011)
August 05, 2011 19:16 - 1 hourIt takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks. You can find this thesis in numerous monographs, textbooks, and in the popular press. It’s one of those things “everybody knows.” But according to Robert Thurston’s provocative new book Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Ashg...
Eric Rath, “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2010)
August 04, 2011 17:15 - 1 hourCuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture, practices, performance, and literature of food in early modern Japan. Rath takes us from medieval culinary manuscripts penned by men of the knife, all the way to sukiyaki recipes clipped fr...
Michael Neiberg, “Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I” (Harvard University Press, 2011)
August 04, 2011 17:00 - 49 minutesAs we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the conflict. Many books will certainly promise much, but in the end deliver little. Fortunately this is not the case with Michael Neiberg‘s latest book Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011). In this important new view of the opening months of the war, Neiberg offers a fresh look at the July Crisis, ho...
Louis Siegelbaum, “Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile” (Cornell UP, 2008)
July 22, 2011 20:28 - 1 hourA recent editorial in the Moscow Times declared that in Moscow “the car is king.” Indeed, one word Muscovites constantly mutter is probka (traffic jam). The boom in car ownership is transforming Russian life itself, and for some not necessarily for the better. “The joy of personal mobility — that is, automobile ownership — has completely eclipsed the value of community life. But the joy of car ownership has long ceased being a joy and has instead become a burden, with traffic jams causing fre...
Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
July 18, 2011 13:44 - 1 hourOne of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time–plate tectonics, the orientation of the Earth’s axis relative to the sun, volcanic activity–were distinct from the forces that drove human time–evolution, technological change, population growth. To be sure, they interacted. But the causal arrow always went from geologic change to human change. As ...
Dov Zakheim, “A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan” (Brookings Institution Press, 2011)
July 15, 2011 21:41 - 45 minutesIn his new book, A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Dov Zakheim, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, describes his time as a Vulcan, one of the elite group of eight foreign policy experts who advised President Bush’s presidential campaign, most of whom later served in the Bush administration. Zakheim brings an insider’s perspective to the Department of Defense’s management...
Deborah Whaley, “Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities” (SUNY, 2010)
July 15, 2011 20:44 - 55 minutesDeborah Whaley’s new book Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (SUNY Press, 2010) may be the first full-length study of a Black Greek-Letter Organization (BGLO) written by a non-BGLO member. But that’s not the only reason to read her book. Whaley takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study, which includes a personal rumination on her family’s relation to BGLO’s, interviews with sorority sisters, ethnographic partici...
Malinda Lowery, “Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation” (UNC Press, 2010
July 15, 2011 16:40 - 1 hourWhen an Atlantic Coastline Railroad train pulled into Red Springs, North Carolina, the conductor faced a difficult dilemma. Whom to allow in coach class with whites and whom to relegate to the back? In an effort to clarify the matter, the mayor of neighboring Pembroke demanded that the railroad build three separate waiting rooms at the town train station. Such confusion was common place in Robeson County, North Carolina, during the height of the Jim Crow era. That’s because Robeson is home t...
Robert Pasnau, “Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671” (Oxford UP, 2011)
July 15, 2011 15:05 - 1 hourWhat was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework? In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthe...
Tony Collins, “A Social History of English Rugby Union” (Routledge, 2009)
July 15, 2011 14:57 - 1 hourMost modern sports have some creation myth that usually links them to an almost-sacred place of origin. Baseball has its Cooperstown. Golf its St. Andrews. Basketball its Springfield College. If you are a football fan, whether of the All Blacks or the Springboks, the Magpies or the Swans, the Longhorns or the Stampeders, your ancestral shrine is a centuries-old boarding school in the West Midlands of England. It was at this place in 1823, according to legend, that schoolboy William Webb Ellis...
Nile Green, “Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
July 15, 2011 14:50 - 1 hourBombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written about Bombay’s divers religions and peoples and the interactions between them. Now here comes a fantastic new book on the much touted ‘cosmopolitan culture,’ as the natives call it, of colonial Bombay- with a twist. Nile Green‘s well received Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (Cambridge University Pre...
Konrad H. Jarausch, “Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front” (Princeton University Press, 2011)
July 12, 2011 20:24 - 57 minutesKonrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton University Press, 2011), a collection of his father’s missives from Poland and Russia during the early years of the Second World War, now translated into English. As you can imagine, this was an intensely personal project, and one that says almost as much about the...
Michael Kevaak, “Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking” (Princeton UP, 2011)
July 12, 2011 19:40 - 1 hourIn the course of his concise and clearly written new book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2011), Michael Keevak investigates the emergence of a “yellow” and “Mongolian” East Asian identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Becoming Yellow incorporates a wide range of sources in its exploration of the European imagination of an East Asian racial identity, including poetry, travel accounts, medical and anthropological texts, and child...
Daniel Treisman, “The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev” (Free Press, 2011)
July 05, 2011 20:39 - 1 hourSince the collapse of the Soviet Union, journalists, academics, and policymakers have sought to make sense of post-Soviet Russia. Is Russia an emerging or retrograde democracy? A free-market or crony capitalism? Adopting Western values or forever steeped in Asiatic mores? Is Russia in transition, and if so, transition to what? Usually the answers to these questions are rooted in Russophilia or Russophobia, colored by teleological assumptions and crude stereotypes. As if to reaffirm Churchill’...
Todd Denault, “The Greatest Game: The Montreal Canadiens, the Red Army, and the Night that Saved Hockey” (McClelland & Stewart, 2010)
July 05, 2011 20:03 - 1 hourWhen sports fans list the greatest games, they talk about close contests, outstanding performances, and dramatic finishes. Think of game six of the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and the Reds, or Boston College’s 47-45 win over the University of Miami in 1984, capped by Doug Flutie’s miraculous touchdown pass. But when sports historians draw up their lists of the greatest games, they point to contests that had significant influence on the development of a sport yet might have been one-...
Robert Parthesius, “Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the Dutch East India Company Shipping Network in Asia 1595-1660” (Amsterdam UP, 2010)
July 05, 2011 18:38 - 1 hourThe Dutch broke the Portuguese commercial and colonizing monopoly in the East in 1595; the seal might have been said to have been set on this triumph when they took over the port of Melaka in 1641, effectively replacing the Portuguese as the masters of maritime Asia. The famed ‘Dutch spirit of commerce’ was, as Robert Parthesius’s fine book Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the Dutch East India Company Shipping Network in Asia 1595-1660 (Amsterdam UP, 2010) demonstrates, a ve...
Katharine E. McGregor, “History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of Indonesia’s Past” (NUS Press, 2007)
July 05, 2011 16:44 - 1 hourNugroho Notosusanto (1930-1985) never pursued a military career; but all the same he did his bit for the Indonesian armed forces. He was co-opted into the Armed Forces History Centre as a young academic, and dedicated the greater part of his life to writing official histories of post-colonial Indonesia in the format prescribed by the Centre of which he was an integral part ever since its inception. Katharine E. McGregor‘s book, History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of In...
Don Van Natta, Jr., “Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias” (Little, Brown, and Company, 2011)
June 23, 2011 19:09 - 57 minutesMy older daughter is twelve years old. Like many girls her age, she has spent countless hours on the soccer field. She has played volleyball and run cross-country at her school. She was the catcher for her Little League baseball team. Now she is taking up fencing. My daughter is not athletically gifted nor in any way competitive, but she takes the opportunity to play sports–any sport. It’s fun, she says simply. My daughter lives in a world that Babe Didrikson Zaharias helped to create. Late...
Christopher Krebs, “A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich” (Norton, 2011)
June 22, 2011 18:50 - 1 hourBeing a historian is a bit of a slog: years in graduate school, more years in dusty libraries and archives, and even more years teaching students who sometimes don’t seem interested in learning what you have to teach. But the job does have its pleasures, and one of the greatest–and surely the guiltiest–is watching people screw history up. Not a day goes by when we don’t see someone get it wrong, dead wrong, or so wrong that it’s not even wrong. To us, history is firmly anchored in authenticat...
Christopher DeRosa, “Political Indoctrination in the U.S. Army from World War II to the Vietnam War” (University of Nebraska Press, 2006)
June 20, 2011 16:04 - 1 hourOne of the greatest challenges American military leaders have faced since the American Revolution has been to motivate citizens to forego their own sense of private identity in favor of the collective identity needed to wage war effectively. This problem became more acute in the twentieth century, when mass conscript armies were raised from a disparate American landscape of ethnic enclaves and highly localized regional communities. These challenges, and the US Army’s response from the start o...
Lori Meeks, “Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010)
June 20, 2011 14:35 - 58 minutesScholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism. And while a lot of this attention overshadows other equally important periods of Japanese Buddhist history, there is still much to be learned. Take the Buddhist convent known as Hokkeji, located in the old capitol of Nara. Founded in the eighth century, the complex fell into decline and was all but forgotten for centuries bef...
Richard C. Hall, “The Modern Balkans: A History” (Reaktion Books, 2011)
June 17, 2011 20:31 - 57 minutesSome parts of the world seem to suffer from rather too much history. The Balkans, that mountainous peninsula situated between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, is most certainly one of them. Perhaps it’s because the Balkans stands on so many of Europe’s historical fault lines: Asia v. Europe; Eastern v. Western Roman Empires; Orthodox v. Catholic; Christianity v. Islam; Habsburg v. Ottoman; Axis v. Allied; Capitalism v. Communism. Whatever the reason, the Balkans’ surfeit of history has usually...
Eric C. Schneider, “Smack: Heroin and the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
June 15, 2011 18:18 - 1 hourWhen I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grateful Dead had two drummers, but that still didn’t help…); and, of course, they did heroin. Or at l...
Tilman Nachtman, “Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain” (Cambridge UP, 2010)
June 14, 2011 18:25 - 1 hourThe many penniless English servants of the East India Company who landed at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in the eighteenth-century were not terribly interested in uplifting the natives. They were, however, very keen to enrich themselves. And, by wheeling and dealing in the markets and courts of the subcontinent, a good number of them did just that, going, as we say, from rags to riches. This class of imperial nouveau riche might have gone unnoticed if, like their successors in the Indian Civ...
Gregory Koger, “Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate” (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
June 14, 2011 16:18 - 1 hourIn recent months, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about filibustering in the Senate, about how Senate Democrats acquired a filibuster-proof majority in the 2008 elections only to lose it by the midterm elections of 2010 when Scott Brown was elected to replace Ted Kennedy. Filibustering has become the norm in the Senate, so much so that it is taken for granted that the Senate minority party will threaten filibustering more often than not. This has led Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Senate Majo...
Jason Clower, “The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism” (Brill, 2010)
June 10, 2011 15:42 - 1 hourThe 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Bril...
Kwasi Konadu, “The Akan Diaspora in the Americas” (Oxford UP, 2010)
June 09, 2011 19:53 - 1 hourHow can those in African, Africana, and African American Studies strengthen their disciplinary ties? What do these connections have to do with Kwasi Konadu‘s recent study The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford 2010)? How can the scholarship produced in African, Africana, and African American Studies serve the interests of people of African descent across the globe? Indeed, how can the history of the Akan people help us to better understand slavery and the history of the Americas? What does...
Elizabeth Abel, “Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow” (University of California Press, 2010)
June 07, 2011 16:14 - 57 minutesI think this is really interesting. Among the thousands of iconic and easily recognizable photographs of segregated water fountains in the American South, you will almost never find one that features a black woman, a white woman or a white man drinking. They are nearly all of black men drinking. Why is that? In her fine and thoughtful book Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010), Elizabeth Abel tells us why. Segregation, like many social phe...
Matthias Strohn, “The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
June 03, 2011 16:44 - 55 minutesMatthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an important challenge to the existing literature on interwar German military doctrine. The stunning German victories in 1939 and 1940 have usually been attributed to their practice of “Blitzkrieg” (Lightning War). The inventive use of armored divisions and airpower allowed the Wehrmacht to sweep its enemies from the battlef...
Bradley Shreve, “Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011)
May 31, 2011 19:37 - 52 minutesFor most non-native Americans, the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s appeared out of nowhere. Convinced of triumphalist myths of the disappearing (or disappeared) Indian, white America relegated native communities to the margins of society. Then, “like a hurricane” (in the words of Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith), the take-over of Alcatraz Island in 1969, the seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972, and finally the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee–a dramatic series of events...
Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
May 31, 2011 18:19 - 59 minutesIn her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor official in southern China, Song has earned a major reputation among scholars of Chinese history for writing the Tiangong kaiwu, a work on practical knowledge ...
Gavin Mortimer, “The Great Swim” (Walker Books, 2008)
May 31, 2011 15:49 - 1 hourI have the habit of reacting audibly when reading good works of non-fiction. Members of my household and strangers on airplanes have been startled by my hmms and huhs of surprise, my ews and ughs of disgust, and my wows of disbelief. I put my whole vocabulary of interjections to use while reading Gavin Mortimer‘s book The Great Swim (Walker Books, 2008). Mortimer, an English writer based in Paris, tells the story of four Americans who attempted in 1926 to become the first woman to swim the E...
Adam Hochschild, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918” (Houghton Mifflin, 2011)
May 30, 2011 18:45 - 1 hourToday is Memorial Day here in the United States, the day on which we remember those who have fought and died in the service of our country. It’s fitting, then, that we are talking to Adam Hochschild about his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin, 2011). The book itself is a memorial of sorts, or rather a reminder of what may, in hindsight, seem to us to have been a kind of collective insanity. The Great Powers fought World War I over nothing in parti...
Chuck Korr, “More Than Just a Game–Soccer vs. Apartheid: The Greatest Soccer Story Ever Told” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010)
May 26, 2011 19:34 - 1 hourChances are, if you were one of the 700 million people who watched the 2010 World Cup, you likely heard mention of the soccer games that prisoners on Robben Island played during the decades of apartheid rule. The stories of these soccer matches on the barren island, played by political prisoners sentenced to years of hard labor, were cast as evidence of the sport’s power to lift the human spirit, to bring inspiration in the midst of oppression. But the matches on Robben Island were much more...
Jonathan Steinberg, “Bismarck: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2011)
May 24, 2011 16:36 - 1 hourWhat is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that rested “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or orda...
Kurt Kemper, “College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era” (University of Illinois Press, 2009)
May 20, 2011 13:57 - 1 hourWhen we think of sports and the Cold War, what typically comes to mind are steroid-fueled East German swimmers, or the Soviets’ controversial basketball win at the Munich games, or Mike Eruzione’s game-winning goal in 1980 (or Paul Henderson’s goal in 1972, if you’re so inclined). What we don’t think of is football, meaning American football, because it’s so, well, American. But that is the point of Kurt Kemper‘s book College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era (University of I...
Blair Ruble, “Washington’s U Street: A Biography” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
May 18, 2011 13:40 - 51 minutesI used to live in Washington DC, not far from a place I learned to call the “U Street Corridor.” I really had no idea why it was a “corridor” (most places in DC are just “streets”) or why a lot of folks seemed to make a big deal out if it. Don’t get me wrong. It was nice. There are coffee shops, jazz clubs, and the place is full of beautiful late Victorian architecture. But I confess I really didn’t understand what the “U Street Corridor” was. Having read Blair Ruble‘s terrific Washington’s ...
Douglas Rogers, “The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals” (Cornell UP, 2009)
May 17, 2011 14:38 - 1 hourWhat are ethics? What are morals? How are they constituted, practiced, and regulated? How do they change over time? My own research is informed by these question; so is Douglas Rogers‘. So it was only natural that I would be drawn to Rogers’ new book The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Cornell UP, 2009). I was not disappointed. Blending history with ethnography, Rodgers carefully examines how the priestless Old Believer community in the small ...
Chad L. Williams, “Torchbearers of Democracy: African-American Soldiers in the World War I Era” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010)
May 13, 2011 20:13 - 48 minutesOne of the great “grey” areas of World War I historiography concerns the African-American experience. Even as the war was ending, white historians, participants, and politicians strove to limit the record of the African-American soldiers’ participation, while also casting the standard narrative of the war as a white American crusade against German militarism. The rich experience of the African-American community–from the quest for legitimacy and equality by educated black social and political...
Ricardo Duchesne, “The Uniqueness of Western Civilization” (Brill, 2011)
May 13, 2011 16:22 - 1 hourOne of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities, the rise of high culture, the industrial revolution–can, so most Western social scientists claim, be associated with some condition that compelled otherwise conservative humans to act in new ways. This premise is of course most closely linked to Marx, but it...
Michael Auslin, “Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations” (Harvard UP, 2011)
May 05, 2011 15:45 - 54 minutesHow have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin’s Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan, and how important that exchange has been, and continues to be, from a political per...
Francis Fukuyama, “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution” (FSG, 2011)
May 03, 2011 20:07 - 54 minutesWhen I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single, coherent theory of remarkable explanitory power. Alas, grand theoretical books like Spirit of the Laws are out of fashion today, not only because the human sciences are gripped by particularism (“more and more about less and less), but also because we don’t train students to think...
David Shneer, “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust” (Rutgers UP, 2010)
April 29, 2011 19:24 - 1 hourWe should be skeptical of what is sometimes called “Jew counting” and all it implies. Yet it cannot be denied that Jews played a pivotal and (dare we say) disproportionate role in moving the West from a pre-modern to a modern condition. Take the media. Most people know that Jews, though hardly alone, built much of the film industry. Fewer people will know, however, that Jews–again, though hardly alone–were central to the birth of photojournalism. Robert Capa, arguably the most famous photojou...
Laurie Manchester, “Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia” (NI UP, 2008)
April 24, 2011 20:59 - 55 minutesThe lives, let alone the fates, of Imperial Russia’s priesthood have garnered little attention among historians. I think the reason is partially because the research of most Russian historians has been focused on explaining the country’s torturous modernization. The orthodox clergy were hardly (so the story goes) modernizers, so they could be ignored. I, too, accepted the clergy as a moribund social caste after reading I. S. Belliustin’s Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia in graduate s...
Robert Citino, “Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942” (UP of Kansas, 2007)
April 22, 2011 19:15 - 1 hourRobert Citino is one of a handful of scholars working in German military history whose books I would describe as reliably rewarding. Even when one quibbles with some of the details of his argument, one is sure to profit from reading his work. When a Citino book appears in print, it automatically goes in my “to read” pile. Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (UP of Kansas, 2007), which recently appeared in a paperback edition for the first time, was one of the first books I wa...
Michael A. Reynolds, “Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
April 22, 2011 17:44 - 1 hourMost of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live in the Republic of X, then you probably speak X-ian, are a citizen of X, and would gladly fight and die for your X-ian brothers and sisters. If, however, you were born and live in the Republic of X and you are not–by self-proclaimed identity–X-ian, then you are, well, a problem. But it wasn’t always so. Prior to the nineteenth century, people generally did not live in a world of nations. They lived in a world of empires. Now in...