New Books in History

This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian. 

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (UNC Press, 2020) provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Jean DeBernardi, professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, has written an outstanding account of the evolution of evangelical protestantism in south-east Aisa. Christian Circulations: Global Christianity and the Local Church in Penang and Singapore, 1819-2000 (NUS Press, 2020) her third book from the National University of Singapore Press, reconstructs the complex relationships between European and south-east Asian influences on Christian religion in two multi-cultural contexts. DeBernardi demonstrates the agency of local Christians, and the benefits of an historical approach that looks beyond linear denominational narratives to seek to understand the circulation of religious ideas.

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John Heilbron, professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of our most distinguished - and prolific - historians of science. His latest book, The Ghost of Galileo In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2021), records how, during a tour of an English country house, he stumbled across what might be the earliest visual reference to Galileo outside portraiture. Heilbron's quest to understand this reference has resulted in a long and extraordinary account of debates in early modern science, religion, and medicine. Heilbron explains that there are reasons why a jobbing artist, working in the royalist base of Oxford during the first English civil war, might include in a double portrait of a tutor and his melancholy pupil this reference to recent trends in cosmology. In this lavishly illustrated and copiously argued book, Heilbron sets new agendas for our understanding of the politics of royalism, the material contexts of portraiture, and the religious significance of science.

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Xiaomei Chen's Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda (Columbia UP, 2016) examines the changing place of revolutionary propaganda in a changing China. Chen analyzes the "grey areas" in deceptively simple plays and films, showing how a contemporary film about Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping can also be read as an indictment of the corruption and inequality of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." In our discussion we also touch on Xiaomei's family's history as prominent Chinese actors and her own intellectual journey, beginning as a Red Guard and ending as a tenured professor at UC Davis.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Michael J. Pfeifer's The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience (NYU Press, 2021 traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast, and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholics creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts. They emphasized notions of republicanism, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender, resulting in a unique form of Catholicism that dominates the United States today. The book also offers close attention to race and racism in American Catholicism, including the historical experiences of African American and Latinx Catholics as well as Catholics of European descent.

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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Laura Eastlake’s Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature were at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire. These manifold and often contradictory representations were used as vehicles equally to capture the martial virtue of Wellington and to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde.

In the works of Thomas Macaulay, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, among others, Rome emerges as a contested space with an array of possible scripts and signifiers which can be used to frame masculine ideals, or to vilify perceived deviance from those ideals, though with a value and significance often very different to ancient Greek models.

Using approaches from literary and cultural studies, reception studies, and gender studies, and ranging across the topics of education, politics, empire, and late Victorian decadence, this volume offers the first comprehensive examination of the importance of ancient Rome as a cultural touchstone for nineteenth-century manliness and Victorian codifications of masculinity.

Dr. Laura Eastlake is a senior lecturer in English literature at Edge Hill University in the UK, with degrees in the Classics, classical reception, and Victorian literature, with additional research interests in sensation fiction, Victorian humour and substance-use, and the late-Victorian Gothic. Check out her exhibition at The Atkinson museum: Fatal Attraction: Lilith and Her Sisters.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how China’s pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a significant social and political influence during a dramatic transition for the People’s Republic.

China's Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society Under Mao (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist.

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In the Anthropocene, the thawing of frozen earth due to global warming has drawn worldwide attention to permafrost. Contemporary scientists define permafrost as ground that maintains a negative temperature for at least two years. But where did this particular conception of permafrost originate, and what alternatives existed?

The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (University of Toronto Press, 2021) provides an intellectual history of permafrost, placing the phenomenon squarely in the political, social, and material context of Russian and Soviet science. Pey-Yi Chu shows that understandings of frozen earth were shaped by two key experiences in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. On one hand, the colonization and industrialization of Siberia nourished an engineering perspective on frozen earth that viewed the phenomenon as an aggregate physical structure: ground. On the other, a Russian and Soviet tradition of systems thinking encouraged approaching frozen earth as a process, condition, and space tied to planetary exchanges of energy and matter. Aided by the US militarization of the Arctic during the Cold War, the engineering view of frozen earth as an obstacle to construction became dominant. The Life of Permafrost tells the fascinating story of how permafrost came to acquire life as Russian and Soviet scientists studied, named, and defined it.

Pey-Yi Chu is an associate professor of history at Pomona College, where she teaches courses in modern European history. 

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Providing a fresh perspective is one of the biggest challenges for historians of New York City. Kara Murphy Schlichting, however, has managed to do just that in her recent book, New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book shifts our gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City.

Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another. Residents of the Bronx in the nineteenth century organized groups like the Department of Street Improvements to ensure that their vision of urban expansion was realized, including implementing the grid-system to attract public and private investors from the urban core. Individuals along the East Bronx waterfront in the early-twentieth century similarly redefined the area according to their own wants and needs, converting temporary summer camp colonies into permanent bungalow communities outside, yet within reach, of Manhattan. By the 1930s, Robert Moses’ powerful State Parks Department, bolstered by New Deal and World’s Fair preparation funds, filled the natural marshlands of Flushing Meadows, connected Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx by constructing the Triborough Bridge, and lined area with new ‘modern’ recreational facilities. While differing in size and scope, each aforementioned case contributed to New York City’s conceptual and physical transition into a truly regional city.

Garrett Gutierrez is a Ph.D. Candidate of United States History at New York University. His research interests include urban/suburban history, race & ethnicity, informal economy, and youth subcultures.

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Michael Hattem’s Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale, 2020) is a fascinating new look at how eighteenth-century Americans thought about the past. Not merely an academic exercise, history was a catalyst of colonial and early republican identity. This historical consciousness was not, Hattem argues, static—on the contrary, as North Americans went from British subjects to rebels to independent Americans, so too did their attitudes toward the past change.

Hattem roots his analysis in a broad range of evidence spanning from history books to almanacs, newspaper articles, novels, and museums. How did North Americans think about the colonial past? How did they understand their past in relation to the British past? How immediately relevant was the past to their own political activities? How did thinking about the past foster national unity? All these questions and many more besides find nuanced engagement in Past and Prologue, a book that is sure to appeal to anyone interested in how America came to be.

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