New Books in History

History in the making can be messy. As a tale told years later by historians, it is usually a clean narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and a mostly logical and foreordained end. Much of that messiness gets lost. Not in Jonathan Schneer's new book, The Lockhart Plot: Love Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia (Oxford UP, 2020). Schneer's recounts the story of a young British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, sent to Soviet Russia soon after the October Revolution in 1917. Initially seeking some sort of accommodation with the Bolsheviks, Lockhart ends up plotting to overthrow the regime. The plot--set for September 1918--fails for all sorts of reasons, not least of which the plotters were outsmarted at every turn by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the newly formed Cheka. The plot and its failure are a minor footnote of history. The book's great value is its description of the chaos in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Western intelligence efforts, the political geography of early Soviet Russia, and the personal lives of many of the leading characters. Lockhart's leading lady at the time of the plot, Moura von Benckendorff, is her own "force of history." For her, the Lockhart plot would end up being only one of many exciting moments of a long and dramatic life.

 

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An essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (Liveright, 2018) mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community. Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue- collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. The aftermath was no less traumatic—families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors’ needs—revealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall. Yet the impassioned activism that followed proved essential to the emergence of a fledgling gay movement. Tinderbox restores honor to a forgotten generation of civil-rights martyrs.

Robert W. Fieseler is the 2019 National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association "Journalist of the Year" and the acclaimed debut author of Tinderbox-- winner of the Edgar Award and the Louisiana Literary Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Queer literary icon Andrew Holleran reviewed Tinderbox as "far more than just a history of gay rights," and Michael Cunningham praised it as "essential reading at any time." Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is a recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. Born and raised in Chicago, Fieseler now lives with his husband and dog in New Orleans.

Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel - Memoirs of a Cajun Boy, published in April 2020 by the University Press of Mississippi. His blog, "Parenthetically Speaking," about the food and culture of Louisiana and his life as a New Yorker, can be found at morrisardoin.com. 

John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com Twitter: @marsjf3

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Ranging from Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and James Baker, America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy (Twelve, 2020), tells the delightful story of the history of American diplomacy since 1776.

Recounting in a superb fashion the leading actors and events of U.S. foreign policy, Robert Zoellick, former President of the World Bank, Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy White House chief of Staff, identifies the five traditions that have emerged from America's encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose. These traditions frame a closing review of post-Cold War presidencies, which Zoellick foresees serving as guideposts for the future of American diplomacy.

Both a sweeping work of history and an insightful guide to U.S. diplomacy past and present, America in the World serves as an informative companion and practical adviser to readers seeking to understand the strategic and immediate challenges of U.S. foreign policy during an era of transformation and change. All by one of the leading practitioners of American diplomacy of our era. Perfect reading for the lay educated reader who has an interest in either American history or contemporary events.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Michael Stamm’s book Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) begins with the simple but thought-provoking premise that, not too long ago, newspapers were almost exclusively physical objects made out of paper. This meant that producing a newspaper implied industrial production, mills, and a distribution system that could deliver daily-produced issues to individual consumers. But most of all, it meant trees. Lots and lots of trees. Newspapers acquired timber lands, chopped down trees, and managed international supply chains. A simple premise then opens up an entire world of industrial processes that might appear distant from us denizens of the digital age.

In this highly innovative work of media history, Stamm, a Professor of history at Michigan State University, pulls readers into that world, guiding them through newspaper boardrooms in big American cities, lumber camps and company towns across Canada, and laboratories that were experimenting with newsprint waste so as to synthesize new products and squeeze ever more revenue out of the process (who knew that the parent company of the Chicago Tribune was one of the largest manufacturers of synthetic vanilla in the 1950s?). The book will interest communications scholars, media historians, historical scholars of political economy, and many others.

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Tell This in my Memory : Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press) is a study of slavery, liberation, and remembrance between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Examines the mechanisms of enslavement and emancipation through narratives told by captive and their descendants as well as European missionaries.

The power of the narrative Eve Troutt-Powell puts forward is further strengthened by the fact that she looks at slavery through a global lense integrating histories of Europe and the Atlantic with African, Egyptian, Circassian, and Ottoman history by not imposing upon it geographical limits imposed by a specific field of study, The author brings forth a fresh and integrated perspective on the slave trade.

The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries in a post 19th century middle east confronted or didn’t the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these imprinted memories of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.

The book presents an interesting easy read, where key ideas are not lost in academic jargon.It speaks to an audience beyond those studying middle east history and culture . The author asks probing questions about the lives and stories of slaves through perceptive readings of chronicles, memoirs, photographs, and other sources.It explores the geographic, spiritual and personal stories of enslaved people.

Furthermore the book, acts as living memory as it not only explores the stories of slaves but also the memories of people who owned or were slaves. By exploring these narratives as such Troutt-Powell has chosen to show readers the choices her subjects made, the lives they were forced to lead, and the ways in which they came to accept their fate.

The book aims to humanize the experiences of silenced people and stories that would not have otherwise been heard and these narrative are only brought alive by not limiting the narrative to the enslaved but also using the voices of those who enslaved. In doing so she offers valuable insights into how slaves interpret foreigners and how foreigners understand or misunderstand them.

Troutt- Powell uses several other “fragments of autobiography” to illustrate the point that narratives, where they do exist, are subject to the filters and prejudices of the translator, the interviewer, or the intended reader. Often they do not help and, on occasion, they can even degrade the person telling the story.

Eve M. Troutt Powell is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a contributor to Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean

Yasmine Al Bastaki is a Masters Student at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy studying International Affairs and Diplomacy. She has a general interest in M.E.N.A studies and issues of Identity. She can be reached at [email protected]. Listener’s feedback, questions and book suggestions are most welcome.

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Ranging from Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and James Baker, America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy (Twelve, 2020), tells the delightful story of the history of American diplomacy since 1776.

Recounting in a superb fashion the leading actors and events of U.S. foreign policy, Robert Zoellick, former President of the World Bank, Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy White House chief of Staff, identifies the five traditions that have emerged from America's encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose. These traditions frame a closing review of post-Cold War presidencies, which Zoellick foresees serving as guideposts for the future of American diplomacy.

Both a sweeping work of history and an insightful guide to U.S. diplomacy past and present, America in the World serves as an informative companion and practical adviser to readers seeking to understand the strategic and immediate challenges of U.S. foreign policy during an era of transformation and change. All by one of the leading practitioners of American diplomacy of our era. Perfect reading for the lay educated reader who has an interest in either American history or contemporary events.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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

Michael Stamm’s book Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) begins with the simple but thought-provoking premise that, not too long ago, newspapers were almost exclusively physical objects made out of paper. This meant that producing a newspaper implied industrial production, mills, and a distribution system that could deliver daily-produced issues to individual consumers. But most of all, it meant trees. Lots and lots of trees. Newspapers acquired timber lands, chopped down trees, and managed international supply chains. A simple premise then opens up an entire world of industrial processes that might appear distant from us denizens of the digital age.

In this highly innovative work of media history, Stamm, a Professor of history at Michigan State University, pulls readers into that world, guiding them through newspaper boardrooms in big American cities, lumber camps and company towns across Canada, and laboratories that were experimenting with newsprint waste so as to synthesize new products and squeeze ever more revenue out of the process (who knew that the parent company of the Chicago Tribune was one of the largest manufacturers of synthetic vanilla in the 1950s?). The book will interest communications scholars, media historians, historical scholars of political economy, and many others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Tell This in my Memory : Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press) is a study of slavery, liberation, and remembrance between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Examines the mechanisms of enslavement and emancipation through narratives told by captive and their descendants as well as European missionaries.

The power of the narrative Eve Troutt-Powell puts forward is further strengthened by the fact that she looks at slavery through a global lense integrating histories of Europe and the Atlantic with African, Egyptian, Circassian, and Ottoman history by not imposing upon it geographical limits imposed by a specific field of study, The author brings forth a fresh and integrated perspective on the slave trade.

The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries in a post 19th century middle east confronted or didn’t the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these imprinted memories of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.

The book presents an interesting easy read, where key ideas are not lost in academic jargon.It speaks to an audience beyond those studying middle east history and culture . The author asks probing questions about the lives and stories of slaves through perceptive readings of chronicles, memoirs, photographs, and other sources.It explores the geographic, spiritual and personal stories of enslaved people.

Furthermore the book, acts as living memory as it not only explores the stories of slaves but also the memories of people who owned or were slaves. By exploring these narratives as such Troutt-Powell has chosen to show readers the choices her subjects made, the lives they were forced to lead, and the ways in which they came to accept their fate.

The book aims to humanize the experiences of silenced people and stories that would not have otherwise been heard and these narrative are only brought alive by not limiting the narrative to the enslaved but also using the voices of those who enslaved. In doing so she offers valuable insights into how slaves interpret foreigners and how foreigners understand or misunderstand them.

Troutt- Powell uses several other “fragments of autobiography” to illustrate the point that narratives, where they do exist, are subject to the filters and prejudices of the translator, the interviewer, or the intended reader. Often they do not help and, on occasion, they can even degrade the person telling the story.

Eve M. Troutt Powell is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a contributor to Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean

Yasmine Al Bastaki is a Masters Student at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy studying International Affairs and Diplomacy. She has a general interest in M.E.N.A studies and issues of Identity. She can be reached at [email protected]. Listener’s feedback, questions and book suggestions are most welcome.

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

Warren Hoffman’s The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical, 2nd edition (Rutgers UP, 2020) explores the ways that race and racism have shaped the American musical from Show Boat to Hamilton. Perhaps surprisingly, Hoffman’s analysis isn’t limited to shows with characters of color like West Side Story; he writes about how the assumption of whiteness shapes apparently race-free musicals like The Music Man and Oklahoma! His book also includes a fascinating discussion of how diverse casting has created both opportunity and controversy, from an all-black Hello, Dolly! to Book of Mormon. This is a book equally valuable to theatre scholars and to fans of the Broadway musical who want to engage more critically with this rich and multi-faceted art form.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at [email protected].

 

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After reading How Dead Languages Work (Oxford University Press 2020), Coulter George hopes you might decide to learn a bit of ancient Greek or Sanskrit, or maybe dabble in a bit of Old Germanic. But even if readers of his book aren’t converted into polyglots, they will walk away with an introduction to the (in)famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is responsible for the inaccurate meme claiming that Inuits understand snow more deeply than other cultures because their language has one hundred (one thousand?) words for it. George criticizes this hypothesis, but through his six chapters, uses examples of ancient languages to argue that a subtler form of that hypothesis is apt: languages aren’t fungible, and the properties of different languages are interwoven with their literary traditions. The book takes readers through Greek, Latin, Old English and the Germanic Languages, Sanskrit, Old Irish and the Celtic Languages, and Hebrew, introducing their phonology, morphology, lexicons, grammar, and excerpting passages from texts such as the Illiad, Beowulf, and the Rig Veda, to illustrate how the flavor of a language is always lost a little in translation.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Indian philosophy of language and epistemology in Sanskrit. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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