New Books in History

From submarines to the suburbs--the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh's eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world's leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. 

In Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers. Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh's suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh's elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city. Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the "renewal" of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice.

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News and media outlets have become especially attentive to the political leanings of a particular subset of American Protestants: the Evangelicals. Leading historian of American Christianity, Thomas S. Kidd, wrote Who Is An Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis (Yale UP, 2019) to offer a wide range of readers an easy and accessible summary of this contested religious identity. He shows how gradually a theological identifier has become associated with an ethnic and political markers. In this succinct overview of the movement, Kidd helps to both explain how those political associations were formed, and also how pollsters and popular media presentations overlook groups who might claim this theological heritage, as evangelicalism continues to become a global phenomenon. 

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche stands among the canon’s most-cited figures, with aphorisms dotting texts on a variety of topics, and his name evokes strong responses from almost anyone who has ever heard of him. His aphoristic and poetic writing style have made it difficult at times to understand what he meant, although the wealth of commentaries pulling him in a variety of different directions points to the fact that he did mean something. On the political right he has been credited as an influence among many reactionary political movements, but even on the left he is cited as an emancipatory figure, suspicious of the powers that be. Aside from these, his writings on art and psychology have remained influential for many. It would seem then that there are numerous Nietzsche’s one can pull from, and due to the loose nature of his writing, one would seem to be warranted in reading Nietzsche a bit more freely. However, that freedom and flexibility misses that there may in fact be a unifying thread to Nietzsche’s thought, and it may in fact be a much darker thread than many of his apologists have realized.

This is the main argument of the book we’ll be discussing today, Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Balance Sheet. Originally published about 20 years ago in Italian, it has recently been delivered to English audiences by Gregor Benton and with an introduction by Harrison Fluss as part of the Historical Materialism book series. Clocking in at just over 1000 pages, it is both a literal and figurative bombshell, delivering a rigorous and systematic account of Nietzsche’s thought. A major part of the books length comes from the fact that Losurdo refuses to treat Nietzsche in isolation, and instead spends a large amount of time recreating Nietzsche’s various contexts, 19th century Germany and Europe more broadly, as a way of making the political orientation of Nietzsche’s thought all the more explicit. Through his investigation, Losurdo reveals a Nietzsche who is committed to fighting against the democratic movements happening all around him and being an advocate for a superior elite at the expense of everyone else, whose main purpose in life is to serve them.

Domenico Losurdo was an Italian Marxist historian and philosopher. 

Harrison Fluss received his PhD in philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is a professor at Manhattan College, NYC and wrote the introduction to the English edition of The Aristocratic Rebel.

Daniel Tutt studied at American University and the European Graduate School. He teaches in the philosophy department at George Washington University. He reviewed The Aristocratic Rebel for Historical Materialism.

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Marko Dumancic's book Men Out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties (University of Toronto Press, 2021) charts conversations and polemics about masculinity in Soviet cinema and popular media during the liberal period - often described as "The Thaw" - between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The book shows how the filmmakers of the long 1960s built stories around male protagonists who felt disoriented by a world that was becoming increasingly suburbanized, rebellious, consumerist, household-oriented, and scientifically complex. The dramatic tension of 1960s cinema revolved around the male protagonists' inability to navigate the challenges of postwar life.

Selling over three billion tickets annually, the Soviet film industry became a fault line of postwar cultural contestation. By examining both the discussions surrounding the period's most controversial movies as well as the cultural context in which these debates happened, the book captures the official and popular reactions to the dizzying transformations of Soviet society after Stalin.

Jill Massimo is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton University Press, 2020), the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated reality of changing and uneasy relationships among philanthropy, democracy, and capitalism.

With a fresh eye and lucid prose, and relying on previously untapped sources, Berman shows that from its nineteenth-century roots to its apex in the late twentieth century, the American Jewish philanthropic complex tied Jewish institutions to the American state. The government’s regulatory efforts―most importantly, tax policies―situated philanthropy at the core of its experiments to maintain the public good without trammeling on the private freedoms of individuals. Jewish philanthropic institutions and leaders gained financial strength, political influence, and state protections within this framework. However, over time, the vast inequalities in resource distribution that marked American state policy became inseparable from philanthropic practice. By the turn of the millennium, Jewish philanthropic institutions reflected the state’s growing investment in capitalism against democratic interests. But well before that, Jewish philanthropy had already entered into a tight relationship with the governing forces of American life, reinforcing and even transforming the nation’s laws and policies.

The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex uncovers how capitalism and private interests came to command authority over the public good, in Jewish life and beyond.

Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Making of New York by Frederick M. Binder, David M. Reimers, and Robert W. Snyder (Columbia University Press, 2019) covers almost 500 years of New York City’s still unfolding story of cultural diversity and political conflict, economic dynamism and unmatched human diversity. This briskly paced volume – which updates a first edition originally published in the mid-1990s – reminds us that today’s hot button debates about immigration, inequality, and globalization have, in various earlier forms, long played roles in the evolution and development of one of the world’s great cities.

Bruce Cory is editorial advisor at The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.

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In American Writers and World War I (Oxford University Press, 2020), David A. Rennie argues that authors' war writing continuously evolved in response to developments in their professional and personal lives. He examines texts by Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Mary Borden, Thomas Boyd, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Laurence Stallings, and Ernest Hemingway.

Recent research has focused on constituencies of identity--such as gender, race, and politics--registered in American Great War writing. Rather than being dominated by their perceived membership of such socio-political categories, this study argues that writers reacted to and represented the war in complex ways which were frequently linked to the exigencies of maintaining a career as a professional author. War writing was implicated in, and influenced by, wider cultural forces such as governmental censorship, the publishing business, advertising, and the Hollywood film industry.

American Writers and World War I argues that even authors' hallmark "anti-war" works are in fact characterized by an awareness of the war's nuanced effects on society and individuals. By tracking authors' war writing throughout their entire careers--in well-known texts, autobiography, correspondence, and neglected works--this study contends that writers' reactions were multifaceted, and subject to change--in response to their developments as writers and individuals. This work also uncovers the hitherto unexplored importance of American cultural and literary precedents which offered writers means of assessing the war. Ultimately, the volume argues, American World War I writing was highly personal, complex, and idiosyncratic.

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In the political ferment of early twentieth century New York City, when socialists and reformers battled sweatshops, and writers and artists thought a new world was being born, an immigrant Jewish woman from Russia appeared in the Yiddish press, in Carnegie Hall, and at rallies. Her name was Rose Pastor Stokes, and she fought for socialism, contraception and workers’ rights.

What set her apart was not just the strength of her speeches or the passion of her commitments, but her marriage to James Graham Phelps Stokes, the wealthy Episcopalian son of one of the oldest and most elite families in the United States. Over the course of their marriage they lived in an apartment on the Lower East Side, a private island in Long Island Sound, and a townhouse in Greenwich Village.

The book Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) explores her life, her unlikely marriage and the great hopes of the Progressive Era in New York City.

Hochschild, a master of deeply researched narrative history, is the author of ten books—among them King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa and Spain In Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. He has won widespread recognition for his writing and received the Theodore Roosevelt—Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Historical Association.

Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University, is co-author of both All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York (Columbia) and Metropolitan lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (Norton/Smithsonian).

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Since the beginnings of organized archaeology in the Middle East in the 19th century, western archaeologists have typically employed large “gangs” or “teams” of locals to perform the manual labor of excavating a site. Frequently considered “unskilled” workers, their contributions to archaeology have often been overlooked and underappreciated. Allison Mickel disrupts this narrative, demonstrating the myriad ways in which archaeological site workers in the Middle East are immensely knowledgeable about sites, finds, and their interpretation—albeit in sometimes different ways than the archaeological staff.

Despite intimate, and incredible knowledge of local archaeology, site workers, Mickel observes, are often reluctant to consider themselves “experts,” choosing to mask their familiarity of archaeological method and practice. Mickel calls this phenomenon “lucrative non-knowledge,” where locals often benefit financially by feigning ignorance or performing an expected role rather than declaring their great expertise. Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor (UP Colorado, 2021) breaks down the Catch-22-esque factors that cause local site workers to downplay their experience and proposes ways for archaeological projects to craft more suitable, community-minded labor management practices.

Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent is based on Allison Mickel’s research at the Temple of the Winged Lion Cultural Resource Management project at Petra, Jordan & the Çatalhöyük Research Project in Turkey. Allison is currently a Fellow at the American Center of Research in Amman. Jordan has been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 Pandemic; please consider donating to the GoFundMe to support the Bedul community of Petra.

Samuel Pfister is the collections manager at the Badè Museum in California's East Bay.

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In Give Me Liberty: A History of America's Exceptional Idea (Basic Books, 2019), Richard Brookhiser has written a history of an idea, liberty, using an unconventional format of a review of documents from America’s past that touch upon different understandings of liberty. Brookhiser reviews thirteen documents from each era of America’s past. He starts with the 1619 document noting the beginning of representative and deliberative self-government in Jamestown, Virginia. He includes a review of notable, well known documents, from the Seneca Falls Declaration from 1848 to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address from 1863 to William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 to Ronald Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech in 1987. Yet, Brookhiser also analyzes some “hidden history,” covering documents that are less well known. For example, he reviews the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, wherein common people in New York publicly demanded liberty of conscience, not for themselves, but for a religious minority and for religious beliefs they did not personally embrace. Instances such as these reveal the widespread and deeply felt sense that liberty is endemic to humans and should be recognized by positive law and protected by government.

Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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