New Books In History

Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp”

Kelly McFall — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:23:24 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Genocide Studies] Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field: the intentionalist/functionalist discussion about when, why and how the Germans decided to annihilate the Jews of Europe, and the question of why individual [...]

Logan Beirne, “Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency”

marshall poe — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:02:22 +0000

You sometimes see bumper stickers that say “What would Jesus do?” It’s a good question, at least for Christians. You don’t see bumper stickers that say “What would Washington do?” But that, Logan Beirne says, is a question Americans should be asking. In Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency (Encounter Books, [...]

Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life”

Dan Kilbride — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:48:36 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] What can be gained from another biography of Abraham Lincoln? A lot, it turns out. Michael Burlingame has been researching the life and times of Abraham Lincoln during his entire career as a historian. As he explains in this interview, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Paperback; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) is based on decades [...]

Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850″

marshall poe — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:25:36 +0000

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, [...]

Martin A. Miller, “The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society, and the Dynamics of Political Violence”

marshall poe — Fri, 31 May 2013 17:43:15 +0000

Terrorism seems like the kind of thing that has existed since the beginning of states some 5,000 years ago. Understood in one, narrow way–as what we call “insurgency”–it probably has. But modern terrorism is, well, modern as Martin A. Miller explains in The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society, and the Dynamics of Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, [...]

Fabio Lanza, “Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing”

Carla Nappi — Thu, 30 May 2013 17:45:04 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010), Fabio Lanza offers a masterfully researched, elegantly written, and thoughtful consideration of the emergence of “students” as a category in twentieth-century China. Urging us to move away from [...]

Mary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France”

Roxanne Panchasi — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:00:01 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts’ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of [...]

Christian Caryl, “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century”

marshall poe — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:22:49 +0000

What do Margaret Thatcher, Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping, and Pope John Paul II have in common? At first thought, you wouldn’t think much. But according to Christian Caryl, they were all radicals who began to change the world in 1979. In Strange Rebels:1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (Basic Books, 2013), Caryl argues that these very [...]

Kathleen J. Frydl, “The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973″

marshall poe — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:20:54 +0000

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by historical standards, high and our prisons are full of people–many of whom are hardly drug kingpins–who have violated drug [...]

Lance R. Blyth, “Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880″

marshall poe — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:53:08 +0000

Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an important part of social status and earning a [...]

Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, “Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party”

Shawn Hamilton — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:47:12 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in African American Studies] German military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz observed that many of the important variables in war exist in ‘clouds of great uncertainty’ which create disconnects and confusion that persist even after the fighting has ended. The conflict between the Black Panther Party and the United States government is [...]

Richard Rashke, “Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals”

marshall poe — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:06:08 +0000

You may have heard of a fellow named Ivan or John Demjanuik. He made the news–repeatedly over a 30 year period– because he was, as many people probably remember, a Nazi war criminal nick-named “Ivan the Terrible” for his brutal treatment of Jews (and others) in the Sobibor death camp. The trouble is, as Richard Rashke points [...]

Azar Gat, “Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism”

marshall poe — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:23:48 +0000

When I went to college long ago, everyone had to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I think I read it in half-a-dozen classes. Today Marx is out. Benedict Anderson, however, is in. You’d be hard-pressed to get a college degree without reading or at least hearing about his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the [...]

Nicholas Popper, “Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance”

Carla Nappi — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 17:09:18 +0000

Nicholas Popper’s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and [...]

Mary Heimann, “Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed”

marshall poe — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:12:57 +0000

Americans love Prague. They visit and have even moved there in considerable numbers. They like the place for a lot of reasons. One is that Prague is a very beautiful city. But another is that the Czech Republic has a widespread repuation in the U.S. (and more generally, I think) as a very liberal, democratic [...]

Melissa R. Klapper, “Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940″

marshall poe — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:34:46 +0000

Many people have probably heard of Betty Friedan, Bela Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Andrea Dworkin, all stars of Second Wave Feminism. They were also all Jewish (by heritage if not faith). As Melissa R. Klapper shows in her new book Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (New York University Press, 2013), this was no accident. Freidan et [...]

Joy Wiltenburg, “Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany”

marshall poe — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:33:25 +0000

Many people complain about sensationalism in the press. If a man slaughters his entire family, a jilted lover kills her erstwhile boyfriend, or a high school student murders several of his classmates, it’s going to be “all over the news.” But it’s hard to blame the press, exclusively at least. Joy Wiltenburg‘s Crime & Culture in [...]

Eric Lohr, “Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union”

marshall poe — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:21:18 +0000

Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, it’s said they don’t much like foreigners. According to Eric Lohr‘s new book, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2012), this reputation is at once deserved and undeserved. It’s true that at various moments in Russian history, foreigners have not been permitted to enter [...]

John E. Murray, “The Charleston Orphan House: Children’s Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America”

marshall poe — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:49:21 +0000

There were always and will always be orphans. The question is what to do with them. In his terrific new book The Charleston Orphan House: Children’s Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), economic historian John E. Murray tells us how one Southern American city did it in the 18th and 19th centuries. [...]

Bernard Kelly, “Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen and the Second World War”

marshall poe — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:39:38 +0000

The Republic of Ireland (aka The Irish Free State, Éire) declared neutrality during the Second World War. That wasn’t particularly unusual: Portugal Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland did too. Yet around 60,000 “neutral” Irish volunteered to fight on one side (with the Allies, in this case). That was unusual. After the war, most of the Irish volunteers remained in the [...]

R. M. Douglas, “Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War”

marshall poe — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:40:45 +0000

I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive numbers of Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies. The results, of course, were catastrophic. Fewer listeners are probably well informed about the Allied effort after the War to remake Central and Eastern Europe [...]

Landon Storrs, “The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left”

marshall poe — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:20:58 +0000

Most people who listen to this podcast will have heard of Joseph McCarthy and HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities). His activities and those of HUAC were, however, only the tip of a very large iceberg. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government conducted something like a “purge” of federal employees with leftist pasts. Thousands [...]

Preston Lauterbach, “The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll”

Matt Smith-Lahrman — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:44:43 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] Where does rock ‘n’ roll begin? In The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll (W. W. Norton, 2011), Preston Lauterbach makes a strong case for its beginnings in the backwoods and small-town juke joints, fed by big-city racketeering, of the black American South. It begins, [...]

Mary Fulbrook, “A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust”

marshall poe — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 13:27:26 +0000

The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book [...]

Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin, “El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel”

marshall poe — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 14:10:43 +0000

Are you looking for a good Hanukkah gift? A good Christmas gift? Heck, any gift? Or maybe you just want to read a terrific book? Well I’ve got just the ticket: Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin‘s, El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel (Basic Books, 2012). Stavans and Scheinkin team up to perform a minor miracle: they not only tell the [...]

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia”

Carla Nappi — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 13:38:55 +0000

Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s new book explores translations across texts, images, and cultural practices in the early modern world. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2012) uses three key themes in early modern history – diplomacy, warfare, and visual representation – to show how commensurability across cultures, rather than existing [...]

Russell Martin, “A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage in Early Modern Russia”

marshall poe — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 20:17:04 +0000

You probably know the story about the king who issues a call for the most beautiful girls in the land to be presented to him as potential brides in a kind of “bride-show.” And you might think this is just a myth. But actually it’s not. As Russell Martin shows in his wonderful A Bride for the Tsar: [...]

Catherine Higgs, “Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa”

Carla Nappi — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:42:49 +0000

With elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled by the correspondence of Joseph Burtt, a man who had helped found a utopian commune before being sent by the chocolate magnate William Cadbury in [...]

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After”

marshall poe — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:07:00 +0000

On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross published a book about the subject that, very shortly thereafter, started a huge controversy about Polish participation in the Holocaust. In [...]

Anthony Bale, trans., “Sir John Mandeville’s The Book of Marvels and Travels”

Carla Nappi — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:42:54 +0000

Anthony Bale’s new translation of Sir John Mandeville’s classic account is an exciting and engaging text that’s accessible to a wide range of readers. The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford University Press, 2012) recounts a fourteenth-century journey across the medieval world, albeit one that was likely written as the result of a voyage through [...]

Astrid M. Eckert, “The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War”

marshall poe — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 22:12:44 +0000

At the end of World War II, the Western Allies seized pretty much every official German document they could find and moved the lot out of Germany and often overseas. They had, effectively, taken the German past. And they kept it for the better part of a decade. Why did they take the records and [...]

Jennifer Hall-Witt, “Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880″

marshall poe — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 19:18:49 +0000

When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was there to “make the scene,” which is to say see and be seen by my peers. [...]

Jennifer Guglielmo, “Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City”

marshall poe — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:58:19 +0000

There is exactly one strong woman in the movie “The Godfather,” and she’s not Italian. (It’s “Kay Adams,” played by the least Italian-looking actress alive, Diane Keaton.) Such is the stereotype about Italian women, at least in the U.S. They are always in the background, sometimes cooking for la famiglia, sometimes counting rosary beads, sometimes [...]

David Brandenberger, “Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin”

marshall poe — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:05:23 +0000

Though most people would rightly consider capitalists to be the founders and masters of the science of “marketing,” communists had to try their hands at it as well. In the Soviet Union, they had a particularly “hard sell.” The Party promised freedom, peace, and prosperity; it delivered oppression, war, and poverty. So how do make people believe [...]

Samuel Morris Brown, “In Heaven as it is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death”

marshall poe — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 19:48:05 +0000

Every person must confront death; the only question is how that person will do it. In our culture (I speak as an American here), we don’t really do a very good job of it. We face death by fighting it by any and every means at our disposal. Why we do this is hard to [...]

Stuart Henderson, “Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s”

marshall poe — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 19:44:37 +0000

You’ve probably heard of the Berkeley, The Village, and Haight-Ashbury. That’s where “the scene” was in the late 1960s, right? But have you heard of Yorkville? I hadn’t until I’d read Stuart Henderson‘s terrific social history Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s (University of Toronto Press, 2011). Turns out (and, Canadians, pardon my ignorance) [...]

James M. Banner, Jr., “Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History”

marshall poe — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:24:21 +0000

What is a historian? How are they trained? What do they do? What should they do? Are they doing it well? These important questions addressed in James M. Banner, Jr.‘s excellent Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Banner knows whereof he speaks: he’s been working historical trade [...]

Amino Yoshihiko, “Rethinking Japanese History: (Translated by Alan Christy)”

Carla Nappi — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:54:34 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] We don’t often make the chance to properly acknowledge the importance of translation to the understanding of history, let alone to talk about it at any length. Alan Christy has done a wonderful service in his careful, elegant, and accessible translation of Amino Yoshihiko’s Rethinking Japanese History [...]

Gregory Crouch, “China’s Wings: War, Intrigue, Romance, and Adventure in the Middle Kingdom during the Golden Age of Flight”

marshall poe — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 14:24:50 +0000

When I was a kid I loved the movie “The Flying Tigers.” You know, the one with John Wayne about the intrepid American volunteers sent to China to fight the Japanese before the United States really could fight the Japanese. I recall building a model of one of their P-40 Warhawks with their distinctive “shark’s [...]

Marnie Anderson, “A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan”

marshall poe — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:06:44 +0000

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.” In a remarkably short period of time, they transformed Japan: what was a thoroughly traditional, quasi-feudal welter of agricultural estates became a modern industrial nation-state. Since the inspiration for these reforms [...]

Robert Bucholz and Joseph Ward, “London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750″

Nicholas Walton — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 20:16:18 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in European Studies] Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was the true ‘World City’. We threw around a couple of ideas – it seems obligatory to mention something connected to [...]

Isaac Campos, “Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs”

Heath Brown — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 20:23:22 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His book traces the intellectual history of marijuana from Europe to Mexico and the ways in which [...]

Paul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France”

Andrew Ziaja — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 17:23:04 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Human Rights] It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity—perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in [...]

Brian Ingrassia, “The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football”

Bruce Berglund — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 11:26:41 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football. As past guests on the podcast have explained, widely followed, revenue-generating sports teams affiliated with universities are a distinctive feature of American sports culture, and [...]

Richard Bessel, “Germany 1945: From War to Peace”

Nicholas Walton — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 11:47:15 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in European Studies] One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s advance through the historic German lands [...]

Rob Fitts, “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan”

Bruce Berglund — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 21:18:01 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan. Another is Wally Yonamine, the Hawaii-born Nisei who played professional baseball in Japan in the 1950s [...]

Allen Fromherz, “Qatar: A Modern History”

Karl Morand — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:28:51 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Middle Eastern Studies] In his new book Qatar: A Modern History (Georgetown University Press, 2012), Dr. Allen Fromherz, a professor at Georgia State University, analyzes the cultural and political forces that have shaped Qatar’s history. Going beyond the common focus on Qatar’s oil economy, Dr. Fromherz discusses Qatar’s formation as an independent state, the [...]

Kimberly Zarecor, “Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960″

marshall poe — Thu, 31 May 2012 10:55:52 +0000

When I first went to the Soviet Union (in all my ignorance), I was amazed that everyone in Moscow lived in what I called “housing projects.” The Russians called them “houses” (doma), but they weren’t houses as I understood them at all. They were huge, multi-story, cookie-cutter apartment blocks, one standing right next to the [...]

Taylor Atkins, “Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945″

Carla Nappi — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:32:08 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Taylor Atkins‘ recent book is both an important contribution to East Asian Studies and an absolute delight to read. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945 (University of California Press, 2010) opens with a movie theater commercial in 2004 and closes with a metaphorical decapitation. In the intervening [...]

Matthew Dennis, “Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic”

Andrew Epstein — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:51:15 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Native American Studies] The birth of the American republic produced immense and existential challenges to Native people in proximity to the fledgling nation. Perhaps none faced a greater predicament than the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (popularly known as the Iroquois). Divided by the U.S.-English conflict, their landbase ransacked by [...]

Monica Black, “Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany”

marshall poe — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:48:10 +0000

Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans died as a result of World War II, or between 8% to 11% of the German population at the time.* It’s hardly any wonder, then, that [...]

Jen Huntley, “The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origins of America’s Most Popular National Park”

marshall poe — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:18:08 +0000

I used to hike in and around Yosemite National Park. To me (and I imagine thousands of other visitors), Yosemite was the embodiment of “nature,” something grand, pristine, and, well “natural.” Of course there is a sense in which that is true: Yosemite was not made by the hand of man. But in another sense that understanding [...]

Carolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854″

marshall poe — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:00:01 +0000

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which [...]

Francis Spufford, “Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream”

marshall poe — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:51:33 +0000

Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing history is fine as far as it goes. It does, however, have a significant drawback: it limits the [...]

John Bloom, “There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell”

Bruce Berglund — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:21:33 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network. Cosell was [...]

Ann Blair, “Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age”

Carla Nappi — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:33:17 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] Chewing on raw turnips and sand, keeping both feet in a tub of cold water, reading with just one eye open (to give the other a chance to rest) and sleeping only every other night: no, I am not describing the typical life of a pre-tenure [...]

Suman Seth, “Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926″

Carla Nappi — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:24:38 +0000

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology and Society] Though Einstein, Planck, and Pauli have become household names in the history of science, the work of Arnold Sommerfeld has yet to reach the same level of wide recognition outside the field of theoretical physics and its history. In Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice [...]

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 yardon which we had recess. We called it a “playground.” But we did not play on it. We did battle. We [...]

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 [...]