New Books in History

In this book, Antonio Gasparetto studies in detail the legal history of the state of exception during the First Republic in Brazil (1889-1930). 

Atmósfera de plomo: las declaraciones de estado de sitio en la Primera República Brasileña (Tirant lo Blanch, 2019) explores the origins as well as the transnational use of the term in international legislation in order to understand the particularities of the Brazilian case. 

Gasparetto studies the use of the state of exception, a measure originally created to defend countries from external threats, but which was eventually used to repress opposition to government measures. The state of exception gradually became a tool for state repression, which in Brazil resulted in the death of about 15,000 people, as well as the exile of many others.

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Religion has become a vital element in identity politics globally after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States of America. And so the question of how religious tolerance may be secured in the modern world can no longer be avoided. Can religious tolerance be placed on a firmer footing by finding grounds for it within the different faiths themselves? This book addresses that question. In Religious Tolerance: A History (Harper Collins, 2019), Arvind Sharma examines Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Daoism and Shinto - whose followers together cover over two-thirds of the globe - to identify instances of tolerance in the history of each of these to help the discussion proceed on the basis of historical facts. This is a timely book - the first of its kind in scope and ambition.

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Dr. Juan José Ponce Vázquez's new book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 (Cambridge UP, 2020) tracks the importance of smuggling to the society, economy, and politics of the island of Hispaniola in this “long seventeenth century.” Smuggling, in his words, made people's lives on the island, an island that had suffered from imperial commercial neglect and a declining sugar industry. Concomitant with this endemic smuggling, local elites began asserting their authority over local and imperial institutions on the island, taking advantage of royal officials’ isolation from the Spanish metropole and their need for local alliances. These factors, Dr. Ponce Vásquez argues, allowed local elites to gain immense wealth and power, alter the course of European inter-imperial struggles, limit, redirect, and suppress the Spanish crown’s policies, and thus take control of the destinies of Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish Empire in the region during this period.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. 

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William Still looms large in the history of the Underground Railroad, both for his role coordinating the Eastern Line and the records he maintained of the fugitives he saved. In William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), William C. Kashatus provides his readers with both an account of Still’s life and a comprehensive database compiled from the many interviews his subject conducted with the runaway slaves he assisted. Himself the son of former slaves, Still grew up in the free black community of Philadelphia, at that time the largest in America. Employed by the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), Still worked alongside many of the leading figures of the abolitionist movement throughout the 1850s, playing a vital role in helping people escape from bondage. Though Still left PASS in 1861 for a successful career in business and philanthropy he remained a prominent figure in the postwar civil rights movement, while his authorship of the first published history of the Underground Railroad provided subsequent generations with a priceless resource about the hundreds of people he aided.

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What is the relationship between print culture, religious identity, and formations of social consciousness in the modern period? In her brilliant new book, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life (Oxford UP, 2020), Megan Robb explores this question through a vigorous and exciting micro-history of a major 20th-century Urdu newspaper Madinah that was at the center of critical political, theological, and sociological currents in Muslim South Asia. The distinguishing feature of this book lies in its focus on the place and space of the qasbah, or small towns, as fascinating and often overlooked theaters of individual and communal identity formation and contestation. What competing notions of Islam, politics, and time emerge in a marketplace of ideas animated and engine by the technology and materiality of print culture, especially, the newspaper? Robb examines this question through a probing analysis that brings together vivid portraits of social and intellectual life in early 20th-century Northern India, with productive theoretical interventions on conceptualizing the interaction of print, religion, and politics in colonial modernity.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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In Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020) Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China's Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations. 

Li proposes a critical framework for understanding the documentation and transmission of the socialist past that mediates between nostalgia and trauma, anticipation and retrospection, propaganda and testimony. Assembling each chapter like a memorial exhibit, Li explores how corporeal traces, archival documents, camera images, and material relics serve as commemorative media. Prison writings and police files reveal the infrastructure of state surveillance and testify to revolutionary ideals and violence, victimhood and complicity. 

Photojournalism from the Great Leap Forward and documentaries from the Cultural Revolution promoted faith in communist miracles while excluding darker realities, whereas Mao memorabilia collections, factory ruins, and memorials at trauma sites remind audiences of the Chinese Revolution's unrealized dreams and staggering losses.

Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki.

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In Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory, and History in the Circum-Caribbean (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), Dr. Njoroge M. Njoroge highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Njoroge illuminates musics of the circum-Caribbean as culturally and conceptually integrated within the larger history of the region. Njoroge examines the deep interrelations between music, movement, memory, and history in the African diaspora. He finds the music both a theoretical anchor and a mode of expression and representation of Black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways for the author to re-theorize the intersections of race, nationalism and musical practice, and geopolitical connections. Further, music allows Njoroge a reassessment of the development of the modern world system in the context of local, popular responses to the global age. The book analyzes different styles, times, and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.

Dr. Njoroge Njoroge is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations

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The Puritans of Early America did not start out with gendered society and piety. Instead, Monica D. Fitzerald suggests, growing tensions between lay men and clergy over what was perceived as a feminized piety led toward a gradual separation of masculinity and femininity into distinct spheres. In Puritans Behaving Badly: Gender, Religion, and Punishment in Early America (Cambridge UP, 2020), Fitzgerald presents original research in the church disciplinary records of censure cases among Puritan congregations in the first three generations of American Puritanism. The records tell a fascinating story about how, even though the Puritan ministers advocated a holistic spirituality that was at once inwardly pietistic and externally dutiful, the lists of sins and confessions recorded in the chronicles of church discipline cases indicate that only men were being held accountable for sins of duty and honor, and only women for sins of personal spirituality and heart religion. Filled with vivid tales of squabbles, rifts, and deadly rivalries, Fitzgerald's book is sure to fascinate and delight readers interested in the development of religion and culture in early America. Follow Monica on Twitter (@mofitz66), or visit her book page on Cambridge Core. 

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Who were your heroes during your formative years? As a child of the 1970s, many of mine were journalists, especially those reporting on war and revolution in Southeast Asia and Latin America. I wanted to be Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, James Woods in Salvador, or even Nick Nolte in Under Fire. It was all so exciting and glamorous, but all of these role models were men. As a teenager I idealized that romantic image of the hard drinking, rugged, tough guy journalist. When I read When the War was Over for a college seminar on the politics of revolution, I added a real-life heroine to my pantheon: Elizabeth Becker. She covered the horrors of the American bombing of Cambodia, the barbaric civil war, and the unfathomable brutality of the Khmer Rouge. She was there, on the ground in Cambodia, when so much of the world turned away. Now she has written a book about her heroes, three female journalists who covered the American War in Vietnam, the Second Indochina War, and the way it spilled into Cambodia. You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War is a profile of these three journalists, but it also works as a narrative of the war in Vietnam and in Cambodia. Obviously, this book genders our understanding of the war and the reporters who told the world about this war.

Like the three women she profiles in You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (PublicAffairs, 2021), Elizabeth Becker began her career as a war correspondent in Southeast Asia. She arrived Cambodia in early 1973. Writing for the Washington Post, she covered the American bombing and the war between the Lon Nol government and the Khmer Rouge. She wrote a major exposé of the Khmer Rouge leadership. During the Khmer Rouge regime, she was one of a handful of Westerners allowed into the country and met Pol Pot. She was almost killed by assassins during that surreal trip. She has been the Senior Foreign Editor for National Public Radio and a New York Times correspondent covering national security, economics and foreign policy. She has won accolades from the Overseas Press Club and was part the Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of 9/11. She is the author of When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, which has been in print for 35 years and remains one of the best books on the Khmer Rouge. She has also written Bophana, America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History, and Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, an exposé of the travel industry. She also served as an expert witness in the Khmer Rouge genocide trials in Phnom Penh.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity

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Dr. R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was a pastor, theologian, and trusted teacher. Most fundamentally, he was a man in awe of the holiness of God.

In R.C. Sproul: A Life (Crossway, 2021),  Dr. Stephen Nichols provides a close look at the beloved founder of Ligonier Ministries. These pages detail Dr. Sproul’s childhood and formative education, his marriage and partnership with his cherished wife, Vesta, his friendships with key Christian figures, and the enduring impact of his teaching on the global church. Meet the man used by God to awaken generations to the majesty of His character, the truth of His Word, and the glory of His gospel.

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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