New Books in History

In this episode, we meet Dr. Jill Massino, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina who is fascinated researching everyday life under dictatorships. We discuss her first book Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (Berghahn, 2020). This book which is based on more than one hundred oral histories and extensive work with archival material, shows convincingly that people and societies are complex and elude clear-cut generalizations. The author looks through the prism of everyday life, following the cycle of growing up, marriage, parenthood, and also discussing the materiality that structures one’s life – the accessibility of consumer goods and the efforts going into procuring them when they are scarce. “For me the important thing about everyday life history is that […] it provides a fuller portrait of the politics, of the economic system, of the society you are focusing on and it allows to see how people were both effected by and responded to state policies,” Massino explains. People did suffer under the Eastern European socialist regimes, the author says, and not only in prison and labour camps, but also juggling careers and family responsibilities, witnessing the gulf between the state’s delusional propaganda and reality, queuing for hours in the cold or trying to find infant formula through connections. On the other hand, Massino shows that this was also a time of meaningful experiences – some people escaped poverty and explored their talents, pursued fulfilling careers, and spent their family vacations on the Black Sea. The focus of the book is on women’s experiences; the author looks at their inclusion in the labour force – simultaneously encouraged and failed by the state, their reproductive struggles, as well as the shifts but also the patriarchal residues in gender roles at the work place and in the family.

Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.

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In this episode, we meet Dr. Jill Massino, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina who is fascinated researching everyday life under dictatorships. We discuss her first book Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (Berghahn, 2020). This book which is based on more than one hundred oral histories and extensive work with archival material, shows convincingly that people and societies are complex and elude clear-cut generalizations. The author looks through the prism of everyday life, following the cycle of growing up, marriage, parenthood, and also discussing the materiality that structures one’s life – the accessibility of consumer goods and the efforts going into procuring them when they are scarce. “For me the important thing about everyday life history is that […] it provides a fuller portrait of the politics, of the economic system, of the society you are focusing on and it allows to see how people were both effected by and responded to state policies,” Massino explains. People did suffer under the Eastern European socialist regimes, the author says, and not only in prison and labour camps, but also juggling careers and family responsibilities, witnessing the gulf between the state’s delusional propaganda and reality, queuing for hours in the cold or trying to find infant formula through connections. On the other hand, Massino shows that this was also a time of meaningful experiences – some people escaped poverty and explored their talents, pursued fulfilling careers, and spent their family vacations on the Black Sea. The focus of the book is on women’s experiences; the author looks at their inclusion in the labour force – simultaneously encouraged and failed by the state, their reproductive struggles, as well as the shifts but also the patriarchal residues in gender roles at the work place and in the family.

Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.

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The 1790s were a decade of turmoil and strife across the West. With the French Revolution, a new era of wars began that invoked the language of equal rights. In The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution (University of California Press, 2020), Niklas Frykman recounts how these two factors combined to shape the mutinies that took place throughout the era. As he explains, recruiting crews for the navies of the era was typically a coercive process, one that took sailors away from more remunerative work in the merchant marine. Crowded aboard wooden warships, these men were often discontent and receptive to the idea of a more democratic process for governing ship life. This radical vision was reflected in the demands made by sailors when they mutinied and by the alternate forms of management they adopted. Such mutinies jeopardized operations in navies throughout Europe, until the growing influence of nationalism helped to counteract the influence of the transnational “maritime republic.”

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Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2020), co-edited by Pedro Machado, Joseph Christensen, Steve Mullins) is the first book to examine the trade, distribution, production, and consumption of pearls and mother-of-pearl in the global Indian Ocean over more than five centuries. While scholars have long recognized the importance of pearling to the social, cultural, and economic practices of both coastal and inland areas, the overwhelming majority have confined themselves to highly localized or at best regional studies of the pearl trade. By contrast, this book stresses how pearling and the exchange in pearl shell were interconnected processes that brought the ports, islands, and coasts into close relation with one another, creating dense networks of connectivity that were not necessarily circumscribed by local, regional, or indeed national frames. By encompassing the geographical, cultural, and thematic diversity of Indian Ocean pearling, Pearls, People, and Power deepens our appreciation of the underlying historical dynamics of the many worlds of the Indian Ocean.

Pedro Machado is a global and Indian Ocean historian with interests in commodity histories, labor and migratory movements, and the social, cultural, environmental, and commercial trajectories of objects. He is based at Indiana University, Bloomington.

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What if there had been no World War I, or no Russian Revolution? Or if the German Spring Offensive of 1918 had succeeded? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1815, or if Martin Luther had not nailed his complaints to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, or if the South had won the American Civil War, or at least not lost it? The questioning of apparent certainties or "known knowns" can be fascinating and, indeed, "What if?" books are very popular. However, this speculative approach, known as counterfactualism, has had limited impact in academic histories, historiography, and the teaching of historical methods.

In Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures (Indiana University Press, 2015), premier historian and public commentator Professor Jeremy Black, CMG offers a guide to the subject, one that is designed to argue its value as a tool for public and academe alike. Professor Black focuses on the role of counterfactualism in demonstrating the part of contingency, and thus human agency, in history, and the salutary critique the approach offers to determinist accounts of past, present, and future. An all-round splendid book by one of the historical profession’s past masters.

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R. H. Helmholz's book Natural Law in Court (Harvard UP, 2015) serves as a guide to the uses of natural law in the past. It shows how lawyers, judges and jurists used natural law to reason and argue about all areas of the law, be they procedural or substantive. Far from being a polemic, this book delves into the legal record of multiple countries to compare, contrast and shed light on the role natural law played in actual legal disputes. Due to the renewed interest in natural law today, this book serves as an important counter-point to legal thinkers who too often rely on purely philosophical or theoretical notions of natural law in their arguments to show how natural law was (and potential can be) deployed to make effective legal arguments in actual legal proceedings.

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Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is an ambitious exploration of modernity, history, and time in post-colonial Guatemala. Set in the Q’eqchi Maya highlands of Alta Verapaz from the 19th century into the 20th, Julie Gibbings explores how Q’eqchi, ladino, and German immigrant actors created the overlapping, messy and contentious political worlds of modern Guatemala, with attention to the “asymmetric information, expectations, and power ...their mutual misunderstandings and distinct worldviews” of each of these groups. More specifically, Gibbings argues that in the state and coffee planters’ active erasure of Maya political ontologies and worldviews in the nineteenth century created an explosive twentieth century where modernity was always unfulfilled and imminent, but deeply desired by ladino and Maya communities alike.

Gibbings seeks to unsettle our view of Guatemalan modernity, and demands that readers attend to the innovative politics and the historical agency of Q’eqchi elites and laborers as well as that of ladinos and Germans. In order to do this, Our Time is Now makes use of sources as diverse as myths about half human cows who haunt German plantations and community interpretations of devastating weather patterns in order to show how Q’eqchi activists’ engaged with both liberal political worlds and their own autonomous values. While Ladino liberals and German settlers both insisted that Mayans were anti-modern, uncivilized, and thus not ready for citizenship by definition, Mayan patriarchs and Q’eqchi liberals argued for their own rights and developed distinct visions of progress. Q’eqchi actors’ engagement with liberal modernity and insistence on their own agency created a “revolutionary time” that “diverged from nineteenth century teleological and linear history.” In the twentieth century, the unfulfilled promises of modernity created revolutions and unrest over and over again.

Dr Gibbings is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History and a Lecturer in the History of the Americas for the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. She is also the co-editor of Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution in Post-Peace Guatemala, out this year from the University of Texas Press.

Dr Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Union College. She is working on a manuscript about mineworkers, race, and revolution in Bolivia.

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Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is an ambitious exploration of modernity, history, and time in post-colonial Guatemala. Set in the Q’eqchi Maya highlands of Alta Verapaz from the 19th century into the 20th, Julie Gibbings explores how Q’eqchi, ladino, and German immigrant actors created the overlapping, messy and contentious political worlds of modern Guatemala, with attention to the “asymmetric information, expectations, and power ...their mutual misunderstandings and distinct worldviews” of each of these groups. More specifically, Gibbings argues that in the state and coffee planters’ active erasure of Maya political ontologies and worldviews in the nineteenth century created an explosive twentieth century where modernity was always unfulfilled and imminent, but deeply desired by ladino and Maya communities alike.

Gibbings seeks to unsettle our view of Guatemalan modernity, and demands that readers attend to the innovative politics and the historical agency of Q’eqchi elites and laborers as well as that of ladinos and Germans. In order to do this, Our Time is Now makes use of sources as diverse as myths about half human cows who haunt German plantations and community interpretations of devastating weather patterns in order to show how Q’eqchi activists’ engaged with both liberal political worlds and their own autonomous values. While Ladino liberals and German settlers both insisted that Mayans were anti-modern, uncivilized, and thus not ready for citizenship by definition, Mayan patriarchs and Q’eqchi liberals argued for their own rights and developed distinct visions of progress. Q’eqchi actors’ engagement with liberal modernity and insistence on their own agency created a “revolutionary time” that “diverged from nineteenth century teleological and linear history.” In the twentieth century, the unfulfilled promises of modernity created revolutions and unrest over and over again.

Dr Gibbings is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History and a Lecturer in the History of the Americas for the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. She is also the co-editor of Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution in Post-Peace Guatemala, out this year from the University of Texas Press.

Dr Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Union College. She is working on a manuscript about mineworkers, race, and revolution in Bolivia.

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What if there had been no World War I, or no Russian Revolution? Or if the German Spring Offensive of 1918 had succeeded? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1815, or if Martin Luther had not nailed his complaints to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, or if the South had won the American Civil War, or at least not lost it? The questioning of apparent certainties or "known knowns" can be fascinating and, indeed, "What if?" books are very popular. However, this speculative approach, known as counterfactualism, has had limited impact in academic histories, historiography, and the teaching of historical methods.

In Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures (Indiana University Press, 2015), premier historian and public commentator Professor Jeremy Black, CMG offers a guide to the subject, one that is designed to argue its value as a tool for public and academe alike. Professor Black focuses on the role of counterfactualism in demonstrating the part of contingency, and thus human agency, in history, and the salutary critique the approach offers to determinist accounts of past, present, and future. An all-round splendid book by one of the historical profession’s past masters.

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The 1790s were a decade of turmoil and strife across the West. With the French Revolution, a new era of wars began that invoked the language of equal rights. In The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution (University of California Press, 2020), Niklas Frykman recounts how these two factors combined to shape the mutinies that took place throughout the era. As he explains, recruiting crews for the navies of the era was typically a coercive process, one that took sailors away from more remunerative work in the merchant marine. Crowded aboard wooden warships, these men were often discontent and receptive to the idea of a more democratic process for governing ship life. This radical vision was reflected in the demands made by sailors when they mutinied and by the alternate forms of management they adopted. Such mutinies jeopardized operations in navies throughout Europe, until the growing influence of nationalism helped to counteract the influence of the transnational “maritime republic.”

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history