New Books In History

Randy Roberts, “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man”

Bruce Berglund — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:32:51 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] “I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” acknowledged Jackie Robinson, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.” To Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis was an inspiration and an idol. “I just give lip service to being the greatest,” said Ali in 1981, [...]

David Stahel, “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East”

Jay Lockenour — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:06:28 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Military History] This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press). One of our previous guests, Matthias Strohn, recommended the book, and I am glad he did. Stahel’s book [...]

Cynthia Wachtell, “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914″

marshall poe — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:01:52 +0000

My favorite book as a teenager (and in fact the only book I ever read as a teenager) was All Quiet on the Western Front. I liked it mostly for the vivid scenes of trench warfare. Teenage boys love that stuff (or at least I did). But even then I recognized that it was essentially [...]

Michael David-Fox, “Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941″

marshall poe — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:18:49 +0000

People who care about other places (and that’s not everyone) have always thought of Russia as a strange place. It doesn’t seem to “fit.” A good part of Russia is in Europe, but it’s not exactly “European.” Russia has natural resources galore, but it’s surprisingly poor. Russians have written a lot of great literature, but [...]

Gerald Steinacher, “Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice”

marshall poe — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:35:22 +0000

When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). There was “The Boys from Brazil” (“The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, 90s, [...]

Kariann Akemi Yokota, “Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation”

marshall poe — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:11:58 +0000

The founding fathers–and mothers, sons and daughters–were British. Sort of. It’s true that they were subjects of the British crown, and that they looked, talked, acted and had the tastes of folks in London. But they were always different. Though they carried with them a sort of “British cultural package,” what they changed that cultural [...]

Jay Rubenstein, “Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse”

marshall poe — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:22:04 +0000

You’ve got to be pretty creative to get anything like “holy war” out of the New Testament, what with all that trespass-forgiving, cheek-turning, and neighbor-loving. By all appearances Jesus didn’t want his followers to fight for their faith, but rather to die for it as he had. And during the first three centuries of Christianity–in [...]

David Ciarlo, “Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany”

marshall poe — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:11:12 +0000

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or part from stock characters in American minstrel shows, largely because they suggested to white consumers a comforting though bygone hospitality. Aunt Jemima said “You might not have a loving mammy to do [...]

Colin Woodard, “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America”

marshall poe — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:31:11 +0000

Europeans like to say that “America” (aka the “United States”) is not a nation. They are right and wrong. It’s true that Americans come from all over the place, unlike, say, Germans. Just ask an American where she comes from. She’s likely to reply that she comes from Ireland, Africa, Korea or Germany even if [...]

Rosamund Bartlett, “Tolstoy: A Russian Life”

marshall poe — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:35:43 +0000

I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be. For this I blame (or credit) my liberal arts education, which convinced me that there was really nothing I couldn’t master but gave me little or no [...]

David Potter, “The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium”

Bruce Berglund — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:08:47 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] Modern sports carry the DNA of the games of ancient Greece and Rome. This genetic inheritance will be most apparent next summer, when London hosts the 30th Summer Olympic Games. But these genes are also expressed any time we visit a stadium or arena to watch athletes compete. The [...]

Sally Ninham, “A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American Postgraduate Degrees, 1949-1964″

Bob Wintermute — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:34:22 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Despite its focus on education, Sally Ninham‘s recent book, A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American Postgraduate Degrees, 1949-1964 (Connor Court Publishing, 2011), covers a lot of ground: the waning of Australian-British ties, the rise of Australian identity, post-war Australian-US relations, and much more. The book is also personal: it [...]

Edith Sheffer, “Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain”

marshall poe — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:13:51 +0000

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now the “border,” for in order for borders to be borders, [...]

Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment”

marshall poe — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:28:45 +0000

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curran explain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have [...]

Steven Barnes, “Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society”

Sean Guillory — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:47:09 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies] Most Westerners know about the Gulag (aka “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies”) thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s eloquent, heart-wrenching Gulag Archipelago. Since the publication of that book in 1973 (and largely thanks to it), the Gulag has come to symbolize the horrors of Stalinism. [...]

Sandy Zipp, “Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York”

marshall poe — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:25:08 +0000

If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war “urban renewal,” that is, the process by which the Washington, big [...]

Charles McKinney, Jr., “Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina”

marshall poe — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:09:48 +0000

When I was an undergraduate, I noticed that there were certain books that seemed to be unavoidable (at least at my liberal arts college). They were assigned in many classes, and they were discussed in many others. Reading them seemed to be a secret requirement for graduation. These ”liberal-arts essentials” included Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Lockes’ [...]

Mikaila Lemonik Arthur, “Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education”

marshall poe — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:57:48 +0000

Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it. Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in most “colleges of liberal arts and sciences”–history, chemistry, sociology, physics, and so on–has remained remarkably stable for many decades. How, exactly, is that “radical?” Yet as Mikaila [...]

Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse”

marshall poe — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:35:07 +0000

When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines!” What in the heck did that mean? I’d never seen a “Swed-ish [...]

Rodric Braithwaite, “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89″

marshall poe — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:58:36 +0000

I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone said, were bent on ruling the world. Détente had been a ploy to lull us to sleep. In Afghanistan, the Communists had renewed [...]

Keith Pomakoy, “Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue”

marshall poe — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 19:18:07 +0000

It’s safe to say that nobody but genocidaires likes genocide. It’s also safe to say that everyone but genocidaires wants to halt on-going campaigns of mass murder and prevent future ones. The question, of course, is how to do this in practice. Keith Pomakoy’s significant new book Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue (Lexington Books, [...]

Robert Thurston, “Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective”

marshall poe — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 19:16:36 +0000

It 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 [...]

Anthony Penna, “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History”

marshall poe — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:44:20 +0000

One 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 [...]

Christopher Krebs, “A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich”

marshall poe — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:50:58 +0000

Being 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 [...]

Eric Schneider, “Smack: Heroin and the American City”

marshall poe — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:18:21 +0000

When 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 [...]

Elizabeth Abel, “Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow”

marshall poe — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:14:41 +0000

I 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 [...]

Adam Hochschild, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918″

marshall poe — Mon, 30 May 2011 18:45:11 +0000

Today 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 [...]

Jonathan Steinberg, “Bismarck: A Life”

marshall poe — Tue, 24 May 2011 16:36:51 +0000

What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that [...]

Blair Ruble, “Washington’s U Street: A Biography”

marshall poe — Wed, 18 May 2011 13:40:11 +0000

I 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 [...]

Ricardo Duchesne, “The Uniqueness of Western Civilization”

marshall poe — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:22:12 +0000

One 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 [...]

Francis Fukuyama, “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution”

marshall poe — Tue, 03 May 2011 20:07:06 +0000

When 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, [...]

David Shneer, “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust”

marshall poe — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:09:37 +0000

We 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 [...]

Michael Reynolds, “Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918″

marshall poe — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:44:28 +0000

Most 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 [...]

Megan Marshall, “The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism”

Jenny Attiyeh — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:23:17 +0000

[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh's ThoughtCast.] Author Megan Marshall has recently written a well-received biography of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). The Peabodys were key players in the founding of the Transcendentalist movement in the early to mid 19th [...]

Carol Bundy, “The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64″

Jenny Attiyeh — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:38:56 +0000

[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh's ThoughtCast] At a time when the country’s attention is focused on the ever-expanding list of American war dead, Carol Bundy’s biography of a Union officer who sacrifices his life in the Civil War is eerily apt. The Nature of Sacrifice. A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, [...]

Erik Jensen, “Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity”

marshall poe — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 18:34:12 +0000

Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: “We lost the war because we, individually and therefore communally, were [...]

Daniel Sidorick, “Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century”

marshall poe — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:12:02 +0000

When I was in college I had a summer job once working in an aircraft factory. My task was to count screws. Nope, I’m not kidding. I put together parts-kits that were then taken to another station “down the line” for assembly. It wasn’t much fun, and it taught me that I did not want [...]

Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration”

marshall poe — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:04:31 +0000

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t even that, because the people who lived in what we now call “Europe” didn’t think of themselves as “Europeans” in the fifteenth and [...]

Hans Kundnani, “Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust”

marshall poe — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 22:07:19 +0000

It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just people you don’t like very much. Not so in post-War West Germany. There, too, it was common to call people “fascists. But in the Federal Republic they [...]

Louis Hyman, “Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink”

marshall poe — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:58:43 +0000

I remember clearly the day I was offered my first credit card. It was in Berkeley, CA in 1985. I was walking on Sproul Plaza and I saw a booth manned by two students. They were giving out all kinds of swag, so I walked over to see what was to be had. T-shirts, I [...]

Lesley Hazleton, “After the Prophet: the Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split”

marshall poe — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:15:30 +0000

Sometimes a shallow explanation, the kind you read in newspapers and hear on television, is enough. “The home team was beaten at the buzzer” is probably all you need to know. Sometimes, however, it’s not. The intermittent conflict between the Shias and Sunnis in Iraq (and elsewhere) provides a good example. It is just not [...]

J. E. Lendon, “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins”

marshall poe — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 22:10:04 +0000

Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yard on which we had recess. We called it a “playground.” But we did not play on it. We did battle. [...]

Virginia Scharff, “The Women Jefferson Loved”

marshall poe — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:42:20 +0000

Most Americans could tell you who George Washington’s wife was. (Martha, right?) Most Americans probably couldn’t tell you who Thomas Jefferson’s wife was. (It was also Martha, but a different one of course). They might be able to tell you, however, who Thomas Jefferson’s alleged concubine was, as she has been in the news a [...]

Joyce Appleby, “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism”

marshall poe — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:34:39 +0000

Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and one of [...]

Catherine Epstein, “Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland”

marshall poe — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:31:55 +0000

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly [...]

Joyce Salisbury, “The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages”

marshall poe — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:20:30 +0000

I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and love them. When they die, I’ll be really sad. After having read Joyce Salisbury’s eye-opening The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2011), I know now how weird [...]

Nell Irvin Painter, “The History of White People”

marshall poe — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:06:39 +0000

We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call “race.” But, as Nell Irvin Painter shows in her fascinating new book The History of White People (Norton, 2010), it wasn’t always so. The Greeks didn’t do it, at least very seriously. The Romans didn’t do [...]

Ian Sample, “Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science”

marshall poe — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 19:08:28 +0000

You’ve probably read about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It’s the largest (17 miles around!), most expensive (9 billion dollars!) scientific instrument in history. What’s it do? It accelerates beams of tiny particles (protons) to nearly the speed of light and then smashes them into one another. That’s cool, you say, but why? Well, the [...]

Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead”

marshall poe — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:09:45 +0000

What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count [...]

David Shearer, “Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953″

marshall poe — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:55:38 +0000

The question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens during the Great Purges is one of the most important of modern history, primarily because it shapes what we are likely to think about communism. There are two schools of thought. On the one hand, there are [...]

Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War”

marshall poe — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:39:03 +0000

Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler than any other figure in modern history. Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin and a few others might give him a run for his money, but I’d bet [...]

Deborah Kaple, “Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir”

marshall poe — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:17:01 +0000

Here’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of humanity. For instance, it is at least imaginable that one day everyone will believe that zoos were [NB] profoundly immoral. The future will condemn us for imprisoning animals. The future [...]

Kyra Hicks, “This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces”

marshall poe — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:59:04 +0000

I’ll tell you something I’ve never really understood: the difference between “art” and “craft.” Yes, I get the sociological difference (“art” is made in New York and Paris; “craft” is made in Omaha and Wichita), but what about the substantive difference? One common way to differentiate the two is to say “art” is not functional [...]

Joe Maiolo, “Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931–1941″

marshall poe — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:24:59 +0000

In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931–1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but please read the book and judge for yourself) two remarkably insightful theses. The first is that the primary result of the disaster that was World War I was not the [...]

David Farber, “The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism”

marshall poe — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:52:55 +0000

I think that many smart people, particularly on the Left, make a really ill-considered assumption, to wit, that “Republican” means “Conservative.” I don’t mean lower case “c” conservative, as in wanting to maintain the status quo. Nearly all (there are important exceptions) twentieth-century Republicans were conservatives in that generic sense. Rather, I mean capital “c” [...]

Abbott Gleason, “A Liberal Education”

marshall poe — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:34:53 +0000

I fear that most people think that “history” is “the past” and that the one and the other live in books. But it just ain’t so. History is a story we tell about the past, or rather some small portion of it. The past itself is gone and cannot, outside science fiction, be revisited. And [...]

James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control”

marshall poe — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:37:13 +0000

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers [...]

Aram Goudsouzian, “King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution”

marshall poe — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 18:01:53 +0000

I imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I had to guard Antoine Carr in high school. I “held” Carr to 32 points. But no dunks! Russell’s opponents in college and the NBA rarely fared any better. Sports talk is full of hyperbole, but in Russell’s case most of [...]

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Russian Orientalism”

marshall poe — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:06:19 +0000

There’s a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar.” I’ve scratched a Russian (I won’t say anything more about that) and I can tell you that the saying is false: all I found was more Russian. It’s true, however, that Russians have always known a lot about Tatars because [...]

Fred Spier, “Big History and the Future of Humanity”

marshall poe — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 16:54:04 +0000

My son Isaiah likes to play the “why” game. Isaiah: “Why is my ice cream gone?” Me: “Because you ate it.” Isaiah: “Why did I eat it?” Me: “Because you need food.” Isaiah: “Why do I need food?” And so on. Isaiah naturally wants to know why things are the way they are. We all [...]

Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides”

marshall poe — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:18:14 +0000

Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of “dekulakization,” his pitiless deportation of “unreliable” ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to “cleanse” the Communist Party of supposed “enemies of the people”–all of these actions resulted in mass death. [...]

Thomas Kessner, “The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation”

marshall poe — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:11:45 +0000

Try to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part of our daily experience. Just look up and you’ll probably see one, or at least its vapor trails. Go to your local airport and you can fly in one pretty inexpensively. Heck, if you like, you can learn to pilot [...]

Kip Kosek, “Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy”

marshall poe — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:27:08 +0000

There’s a quip that goes “Christianity is probably a great religion. Someone should really try it.” The implication, of course, is that most people who call themselves Christians aren’t very Christian at all. And, in truth, it’s hard to be a good Christian, what with all that loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, and [...]

Elaine Tyler May, “America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation”

marshall poe — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:19:09 +0000

Don’t you find it a bit curious that there are literally thousands of pills that we in the developed world take on a daily basis, but only one of them is called “the Pill?” Actually, you probably don’t find it curious, because you know that the pill has had a massive impact on modern life. [...]

Valerie Hébert, “Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg”

marshall poe — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:49:52 +0000

Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, he might well have said war (or at least that war) was the “continuation of politics by any means.” Hitler was terribly specific [...]

Amanda Podany, “Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East”

marshall poe — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:28:34 +0000

I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but in some ways telling. Many historians and history readers genuinely have a bias against the older periods, [...]

Jeffrey Jackson, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910″

marshall poe — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:07:19 +0000

In the late 19th century, French sociologist Émile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern society, and particularly life in concentrated urban-industrial areas like Paris, left people without the sense of belonging that characterized “traditional” life. Durkheim was not alone in thinking that there was something fundamentally sick-making about modernity. [...]

Gary Bruce, “The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi”

marshall poe — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:11:07 +0000

I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally told the Stasi—the East German secret service—to watch them (which they did). After the fall of the Wall, [...]

Todd Moye, “Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II”

marshall poe — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:26:31 +0000

In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known to history as the “Tuskegee Airmen.” In light of the honorable service record of countless African Americans, allowing blacks to become fighter and bomber pilots might not seem very “experimental” to you, [...]

Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization”

marshall poe — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:33:50 +0000

Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact—and it is a fact—that we see remarkable diversity in the historical record. [...]

John Steinberg, “All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914″

marshall poe — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:24:47 +0000

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; no World War II, no Cold War). It’s little wonder, then, that historians have expended oceans of effort and ink trying to explain why and how it happened. The answer [...]

Michael Kranish, “Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War”

marshall poe — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:59:47 +0000

The past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybody and his brother is going to start digging into your past to see what kind of “dirt” they can find. It’s true now, and it was true when Thomas Jefferson was [...]

Jerry Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews”

marshall poe — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:51:01 +0000

I confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010). Capitalism is a touchy subject; Jews are a touchy subject. But capitalism and the Jews, that’s a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t suggest you try this, but just imagine what would happen if you started a water-cooler [...]

Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century”

marshall poe — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:08:03 +0000

If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is [...]

Joanna Levin, “Bohemia in America, 1858-1920″

marshall poe — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:53:10 +0000

You’ve probably heard of hipsters. Heck, you may even be a hipster. If you don’t know what a hipster is, you might spend some time on this sometimes entertaining website. Where do hipsters come from? Lets work backwards. Before hipsters (1990s), there were slackers (1980s): middle-class, college-going, white kids into Alternative rock. They were hipsters [...]

Heather Cox Richardson, “Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre”

marshall poe — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:27:46 +0000

Of all the events in American history, two are far and away the most troubling: slavery and the near-genocidal war against native Americans. In truth, we’ve dealt much better with the former than the latter. The slaves were emancipated. After a long and painful struggle, their descendants won their full civil rights. Though that struggle [...]

Audrey Kurth Cronin, “How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns”

marshall poe — Fri, 28 May 2010 18:56:11 +0000

It’s one thing to say that the study of history is “relevant” to contemporary problems; it’s another to demonstrate it. In How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns(Princeton UP, 2009), Audrey Kurth Cronin does so in splendid fashion. She poses a common and very important question: what should we do about [...]

Fearghal McGarry, “The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916″

marshall poe — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:23:41 +0000

Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as far as I know). But we might call it an “Easter Rising victory” after the Irish Republican revolt of 1916. The Republicans took over several buildings in [...]

Jeffery Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War”

marshall poe — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:09:05 +0000

You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of the early 20th century (the Edwardian Era). He left an enormous body of work, for which he was awarded the [...]

Greg Castillo, “Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design”

marshall poe — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:04:34 +0000

If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s in suburbia, you probably lived in a smallish ranch house that looked like this. That house probably had an “ultra modern” kitchen that probably looked like this. I grew up in such a house and it had such a kitchen. In fact, I think my mom, [...]

P. Bingham and J. Souza, “Death From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe”

marshall poe — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:44:48 +0000

Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any really scientific theory of history to be possible. Human history, they said, was chaos. The problem is that human history isn’t chaos at all. The [...]

Andrew Donson, “Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918″

marshall poe — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:18:21 +0000

I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as closely as a little kid can. I never thought for a moment that “we” could lose. “We” were a great country run by good people; [...]

Amy Bass, “Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle Over W. E. B. Du Bois”

marshall poe — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:05:04 +0000

I asked my wife if she knew who W. E. B. Du Bois was. She did, as would most Americans. I then asked her if she knew where Du Bois was born and raised. She did not, and most Americans wouldn’t either. The odd thing is that Du Bois, who was one of the founders [...]

Patrick Manning, “The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture”

marshall poe — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:36:00 +0000

Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standards) moved to nearly every habitable place on the globe. We are their descendants. The Africans never stopped migrating, but they began to do [...]

David Laskin, “The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War”

marshall poe — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:58:25 +0000

One night my wife and I were on the road, staying in a hotel in I-don’t-remember-where. I woke up in the middle of the night to find said wife missing. Happily, I saw a light under the bathroom door. There she is, I thought. I fell back asleep. I woke up again sometime later. It [...]

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew”

marshall poe — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:06:53 +0000

I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a doctor, lawyer, professor or businessman. Nope, the professions were not for him. He loved the American folk legend Woody Guthrie [...]

Joel Wolfe, “Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity”

marshall poe — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:12:27 +0000

Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its legacy; both are profoundly multiethnic and multiracial; both have spent much of their respective histories [...]

David Aaronovitch, “Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in the Shaping of Modern History”

marshall poe — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:53:42 +0000

In preparation for this interview I watched the documentary (that’s what the producers call it, anyway) “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup.” Of course it’s absolutely loony. In fact, it’s so loony that I began to wonder if the director, Dylan Avery, wasn’t having us on. It’s hard to tell whether “Loose Change” is a [...]

Charles King, “The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus”

marshall poe — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:28:39 +0000

There’s a concept I find myself coming back to again and again–”speciation.” It’s drawn from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology and means, roughly, the process by which new species arise. Speciation occurs when a species must adapt to new circumstances; the more new circumstances, the more new species. Thus one kind of Finch (to take [...]

Hilary Earl, “The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History”

marshall poe — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:15:10 +0000

Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the many interesting questions posed by Hilary Earl in her outstanding new book The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge UP, 2009). The book is [...]

Nicholas Thompson, “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War”

marshall poe — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:06:52 +0000

I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both occasions, I found him tough to read. He was a very dignified man–I want to write “correct”–but also quite distant, even cerebral. Now that I’ve read Nicholas Thompson‘s very writerly and engaging The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George [...]

Ben Kiernan, “Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur”

marshall poe — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:39:59 +0000

Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. The first is this: chimps are not programmed, so to say, to commit mass slaughter, while humans are so programmed. The second [...]

Brian Balogh, “A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in 19th-Century America”

marshall poe — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:18:00 +0000

Americans don’t like “big government” right? Not exactly. In the Early Republic (1789 to the 1820s) folks were quite keen on building up the (you guessed it) republic. As in res publica, the “things held in common.” The “founding fathers”–all “Classical Republicans”–designed a form of government that, though “checked and balanced,” gave the federal government [...]