New Books in History

In today's program, Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, discusses her recently-published monograph, The Kizilbash/Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics, and Community (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 

The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia, winner of the 2020 SERMEISS Book Award for outstanding scholarship in Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies, is the first monograph to address the social history of Kizilbashism/Alevism. It explores the origins of the Kizilbash/Alevis within the context of cosmopolitan Sufism in the Middle East. Using newly surfaced sources generated from the Kizilbash/Alevi milieu, she traces the transformation of the Kizilbash from a radical religio-political movement into a religious order of closed communities. In doing so, she breaks with paradigms that have dominated the study of Kizilbash/Alevis and offers an alternative approach to the study of 'heterodox' religious communities in the Islamic world.

Deren Ertas is a PhD student in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. You can reach her on Twitter @drnrts.

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Are we in the midst of a financial bubble? Do the current valuations of the electronic vehicle stocks or their SPACs make you raise an eyebrow? The trouble with bubbles is that they are hard to spot from within, and much easier to define and analyze after the fact.  In their new book, Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles (Cambridge University Press, 2020), William Quinn and John D. Turner analyze past instances of extreme speculation to come up with a typology of the phenomenon. Using what they call the Bubble Triangle of Marketability, Easy Money, and overt Speculation, they have created a tool for financial economists, and the rest of us, to judge what makes a bubble and what makes it pop. Given the unusual nature of the capital markets at the present time, you will want to be familiar with their analysis as you view your own investments.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinvestor.com

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The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford UP, 2021) offers a state-of-the-art summary of scholarship on Edwards by a diverse, international, and interdisciplinary group of Edwards scholars, many of whom serve as global leaders in the burgeoning world of research and writing on 'America's theologian'. As an early modern clerical polymath, Edwards is of interest to historians, theologians, and literary scholars. He is also an interlocutor for contemporary clergy and philosophical theologians. All such readers--and many more--will find here an authoritative overview of Edwards' life, ministry, and writings, as well as a representative sampling of cutting-edge scholarship on Edwards from across several disciplines.

The volume falls into four sections, which reflect the diversity of Edwards studies today. The first section turns to the historical Edwards and grounds him in his period and the relevant contexts that shaped his life and work. The second section balances the historical reconstruction of Edwards as a theological and philosophical thinker with explorations of his usefulness for constructive theology and the church today. In part three, the focus shifts to the different ways and contexts in which Edwards attempted to realize his ideas and ideals in his personal life, scholarship, and ministry, but also to the ways in which these historical realities stood in tension with, limited, or resisted his aspirations. The final section looks at Edwards' widening renown and influence as well as diverse appropriations. This Handbookserves as an authoritative guide for readers overwhelmed by the enormity of the multi-lingual world of Edwards studies. It will bring readers up to speed on the most important work being done and then serve them as a benchmark in the field of Edwards scholarship for decades to come.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

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Elizabeth L. Jemison, who teaches American religious history at Clemson University, South Carolina, has written an outstanding new book, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Focusing on the Lower Mississippi River Valley, and working from the 1860s to 1900, Jemison explains how white and African-American protestants developed strikingly different accounts of Christian citizenship. Paying attention to the variety of perspective within and between the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian denominations, and to the perspectives of men and women, Jemison asks troubling questions about white violence and the religious character of the segregated society to which the white protestant counter-revolution eventually led.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

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The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the most barbaric massacres and crimes against humanity in recent history.

Roberto returned from war-torn El Salvador to find the United States on the verge of unprecedented crises of its own. There, he channeled his own pain into activism and journalism, focusing his attention on how trauma affects individual lives and societies, and began the difficult journey of confronting the roots of his own trauma. As a child, Roberto endured a tumultuous relationship with his father Ramón. Raised in extreme poverty in the countryside of El Salvador during one of the most violent periods of its history, Ramón learned to survive by straddling intersecting underworlds of family secrets, traumatic silences, and dealing in black-market goods and guns. The repression of the violence in his life took its toll, however. Ramón was plagued with silences and fits of anger that had a profound impact on his youngest son, and which Roberto attributes as a source of constant reckoning with the violence and rebellion in his own life.

In Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas (Harper, 2020), Roberto interweaves his father’s complicated history and his own with first-hand reportage on gang life, state violence, and the heart of the immigration crisis in both El Salvador and the United States. In doing so he makes the political personal, revealing the cyclical ways violence operates in our homes and our societies, as well as the ways hope and tenderness can rise up out of the darkness if we are courageous enough to unforget.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

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This one's personal.

Tyler Sonnichsen's Capitals of Punk: DC, Paris, and Circulation in the Urban Underground (Palgrave, 2019) was an amazing book for me to read and speak with its author about. While I am always fascinated by the different approaches to and thematic areas covered by the books I explore for the podcast, this one took me back to my years as a Montreal teenager, cutting my own hair, sewing my own dresses/skirts, and running around town after the loudest, fastest (sometimes angriest) music I could find. And it brings the stories of some of my favourite sounds from that era (and since) together with my love of and fascination for France and French culture. That's never happened before for me on the podcast. 

Capitals of Punk looks at the movement -between France and the United States, Paris and DC- of music, people, a broader (sub)cultural phenomenon that included writing, art, ideas, an ethos for creating and living. Drawing on interviews and the extensive archives kept by musicians, promoters, and fans on both sides of the Atlantic, the book traces how the underground music scenes of these two capital cities learned from and influenced each other. A musical geography that illuminates a counterculture across spaces and times, the book will appeal to punks young and old (!), and to anyone interested in the varieties of French and American music and urban history.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

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A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present.

In The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One (University of Toronto Press, 2021), William Max Nelson argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

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The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the expansion of settler colonialism in Australia. These processes were all tied together by commerce, empire, and the spread of racial ideologies, yet their histories have largely been written separately. Until now.

Zach Sell’s new book Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) highlights the connections between the “second slavery” in the Deep South of the United States, efforts to socially engineer mono-crop agriculture in India by a British colonial state that lip service to laissez-faire and free labor even as it tried to import plantation management techniques from the US south, how the attempt to create plantation-style agriculture in Queensland, Australia bumped up against the logic of white settler colonialism and attempts to expand plantation agriculture in Belize in the age of so-called “free” labor using indentured labor from Asia. This is a story of racial formation on a global scale, and of the limits of capital’s ability to remake social relations and environments in its own image, despite the capacity for organized brutality that it had at its disposal. This book is particularly important at a time when many American, British and French commentators have tried to downplay the violence of expansion and colonialism and to portray white supremacy as some sort of American peculiarity and relic of the past.

Zach is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and was previously Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavery and Justice at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

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We are here today with Sara Ritchey, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, about her new book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health, out with Cornell University Press this year, 2021.

The author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and numerous articles, including “Caring by the Hours: the Psalter as a Source of Gendered Healthcare,” “Health, Healing, and Salvation: Hagiography as a Source of Medieval Healthcare,” “The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence: The Experience of God in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript,” Dr. Ritchey discusses her profound understanding in the intersection of religious practice (writ large) and the practice of medicine (writ large) in the Medieval era.

In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical.

The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns.

Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Dennis Frost’s More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan is a history of disability sports in modern Japan. The 1964, 1998, and upcoming Paralympics are important case studies, but Frost’s interests go far beyond this pinnacle of international, competitive disability sports. More than Medals explores the history and development of disability sports, highlighting Japan as an international actor, Oita prefecture as a domestic and international disability sports mecca, and most of all the ongoing tension between two visions of the purpose of disability sports: one which is primarily rehabilitative and the other which emphasizes elite athletic competition. This, as Frost shows, is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of accessibility and inclusivity in disabled sports. More than Medals will appeal to readers interested in the history of Japan, sports, and mega-events such as the Paralympics, as well as to those interested in disability studies.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University.

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