New Books in History

Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised particular products, set up department stores, and facilitated the promotion of certain luxury consumer products (notably wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines)—all in the Mao era. Though not typically considered to be a period of Chinese history driven by consumerism, Gerth’s beautifully researched book shows how, in the early People’s Republic, the Communist Party expanded consumerism and built ‘state capitalism’, and the ferocity of consumer impulses and behaviors that followed.

Challenging, provocative, and precisely written, Unending Capitalism is sure to appeal to anyone interested in modern Chinese history and histories of capitalism, as well as any readers looking for a book that uses some really fascinating sources to complicate the dominant narrative of China’s ‘socialist’ history.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She works on Manchu language books and book history and loves anything with a good kesike in it. She can be reached at [email protected]  

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In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'normal' male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected].

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In 1927, the Hollywood stars (and spouses), Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr stood outside their California home, arms raised in fascist salute. The photo’s caption, referencing the couple’s trip to Rome the previous year, informs fans that the couple “greet guests at their beach camp in true Italian style.” How did “America’s sweetheart” and her husband, a swashbuckler on and off screen, both patriots who had promoted Liberty bonds following the United States’ entry into World War I, come to normalize something like Italian Fascism in its first decade? How did the Italian-born divo, or star, of Hollywood’s silent cinema, Rudolph Valentino come to function as foil and counterpart to Benito Mussolini’s, the duce, in public opinion in American culture in the 1920s?

Winner of the 2019 award for best book in film/media from the American Association for Italian Studies, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America (University of California Press, 2019) tells the story of the relationship between celebrity culture, charismatic leadership and national sovereignty as it plays out on both sides of the Atlantic from roughly 1917 to the end of 1933.

Giorgio Bertellini asks how two racially othered foreigners, Valentino and Mussolini, became leading figures in America and how these two icons of chauvinist Latin masculinity became public opinion leaders in a nation undergoing a major democratic expansion in terms of gender, equality, social mobility, and political representation. In the post-WWI American climate of nativism, isolationism, consumerism, and the democratic expansion of civic rights and women’s suffrage, the divo and the duce became surprising paragons of both authoritarian male power as well as mass appeal. Bringing together star studies, screen studies, political science, Italian Studies, and American Studies Bertellini’s study teaches us to think in new ways about cinema, political authority, masculinity, and race in Italian cinema and beyond. Meticulously archived, the author pays especial attention to the mediators between screens and the polity, a vast cast of players including journalists, photographers, ambassadors and other functionaries of state, advertisers, sponsors, and publicity agents, all of whom, on concert, work to promote the “ballyhoo” of the day.

Thanks to the efforts of TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America is available free in an open access edition.

 

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What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi, Associate Professor of History at McGill University in his new book Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), offers a radically different account, restoring agency to regional powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and revealing how regional and national developments shaped the course of the global Cold War. Despite their elevated position in 1945, the United States, Soviet Union and United Kingdom quickly realized that their political, economic, and military power had surprisingly tight limits given the challenges of decolonization, Asian-African internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab–Israeli antagonism, and European economic developments. A series of Cold Wars ebbed and flowed as the three world regions underwent structural changes that weakened or even severed their links to the global ideological clash, leaving the superpower Cold War as the only major conflict that remained by the 1980s. While not everyone will necessarily agree with all aspects of this at times hyper-revisionist account of the conflict that we call the Cold War, scholars and lay person alike will be ultra-impressed by the wide range of this narrative history, as well as the breath of research displayed by Professor Luthi. In short this is a book that is required reading for anyone interested in, or specializing in the Cold War.

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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dWho Wrote That?: Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov (Northern Illinois University Press) is Harvard historian Donald Ostrowski’s sustained reflection on what we can learn from comparison of authorship controversies. Ostrowski covers nine different cases of disputed authorship, from the Shakespeare canon, to the letters between the Russian Prince Kurbskii and Ivan IV, to the ancient Hebrew Pentateuch.

This book lays out evidence from all points of view in an even-handed way, and in doing so, Ostrowski is able to define a number of general principles that ought to animate all scholarship that attempts to answer the question: “Who wrote that?”.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'normal' male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected].

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Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised particular products, set up department stores, and facilitated the promotion of certain luxury consumer products (notably wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines)—all in the Mao era. Though not typically considered to be a period of Chinese history driven by consumerism, Gerth’s beautifully researched book shows how, in the early People’s Republic, the Communist Party expanded consumerism and built ‘state capitalism’, and the ferocity of consumer impulses and behaviors that followed.

Challenging, provocative, and precisely written, Unending Capitalism is sure to appeal to anyone interested in modern Chinese history and histories of capitalism, as well as any readers looking for a book that uses some really fascinating sources to complicate the dominant narrative of China’s ‘socialist’ history.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She works on Manchu language books and book history and loves anything with a good kesike in it. She can be reached at [email protected]  

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What are the African Middle Ages? A place, certainly, and a time period, evidently. But also a “documentary regime,” argues François-Xavier Fauvelle. How do we reconstruct these centuries of the African past in the face of a daunting lack of sources? In thirty-four thoughtful vignettes, Fauvelle takes us along for the ride as he wrestles with this question. From Aksum to the Swahili coast, and Sijilmâsa to South Africa, the distances covered by The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (Princeton UP, 2018) are vast. But we are in expert hands. Combining the skills of a historian and an archeologist, Fauvelle explores possible readings of the sources available while always acknowledging the limits of what is knowable. We are left with a distinct sense of loss, at how much history we may not ever be able to tell, but also filled with wonder for Africa’s “golden age.”

Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at: www.elisaprosperetti.net.

 

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Stephanie Newell, Professor of English at Yale University, came to this project, which explores the concept of “dirt” and how this idea is used and applied to people and spaces, in a rather indirect way, having read the memoirs and journals of merchant traders – particularly the white British traders who were writing about their visits to many of the African colonies. In observing the ways in which these traders discussed the people they encountered in West Africa, Newell notes that the traders cast these encounters as, unsurprisingly, binary. Obviously, the traders also brought their racial, class, and imperial perspectives to these memoirs of their travels. Newell shifts the narrative focus and the voices heard, centering the Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos (Duke UP, 2019) in Nigeria, specifically, Lagos, since a broad part of the analysis is spotlighting how urban environments are particularly cast and imagined in context of dirt. There is also a comparative dimension in the research, since the initial project also included fieldwork and analysis in Nairobi, Kenya, and the overarching analysis of colonial and postcolonial urban history and culture in West Africa.

Newell, along with a team of researchers across a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, explore this idea of “dirt” across the long 20th century. Histories of Dirt explores these concepts in three distinct research areas, using different methodological approaches to not only understand the concepts, but also to recenter the voices and considerations of Lagosians themselves. The book traces the views and understandings of this idea and how it has contributed to “social and political life” in Lagos, but the basis for this understanding comes from different sources and different ways to capture public opinion over the course of more than 100 years. The initial basis for the analysis comes from the perspectives of the Lagosians in contrast to the writings and policies of the British colonists. These perspectives are derived from a variety of considerations, including how public health films were understood by the Lagosian populations in the early part of the 20th century. The colonial archives were also used – to excavate the perspectives of Lagosians as well. Newall explains that the research that focuses on the middle period of the 20th century came from a variety of newspapers that were owned and run by Nigerians and thus provided data and information from Lagosian perspectives, though there are also dynamics around class that come through this media-based data and information. The final section of research comes from focus group interviews with current residents of Lagos. By using a multi-method approach, Newall is able to keep the focus on the words and voices of the Lagosians themselves, teasing out the information from their perspectives, as opposed to having those voices mediated by colonizers or western commercial encounters. While the subtitle of this book might suggest that the study is narrow, the analysis and interpretation of this concept of dirt and how the idea and the terminology surrounding it are understood through different lenses and contexts makes this work important on a much broader scale. And because of the variety of data sources and analytical perspectives, this research is truly interdisciplinary in scope. Histories of Dirt is a fascinating exploration and analysis and will be of interest to a wide array of scholars, researchers, and readers.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

 

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Chhaya Goswami’s Globalization Before Its Time: The Gujarati Merchants from Kachchh (Penguin Random House India) asks: How did the Kachchhi traders build on the Gujarat Advantage?

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the dying days of the Mughal empire, merchants from Kachchh established a flourishing overseas trade. Building on a rich legacy of free trade in pre-modern times between the many ports of Gujarat and the Middle East, the Kachchhis dealt in pearls, dates, spices and ivory with the faraway lands of Muscat and Zanzibar.

The Kachchhi merchants behaved much like today’s venture capitalists. They knew how to grow capital, seek new markets, and create them where they didn’t exist. They also had a phenomenal risk appetite. What they were able to practice was nothing less than the traits of globalization before its time. This new book in The Story of Indian Business series tells their fascinating story.

Chhaya Goswami is the head of the History Department, S. K. Somaiya College, Mumbai, India. She specializes in the maritime history of South Asia and the western Indian Ocean. She has authored the award winning book by the Indian History Congress, The Call of the Sea, Kachchhi Traders in Muscat and Zanzibar c.1800–1880 (Orient Blackswan, 2011). Her current research project focuses on ‘Maritime Trade and Piracy in the Gulfs of Kachchh and Persia 1650–1820.’

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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