New Books in History

Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press) asks: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta?

This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta.

The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.

Debjani Bhattacharyya is Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She was a Junior Fellow of the American Institute of India Studies, and a former Research Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden. Currently, she is a visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University

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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On the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, Americans often present increased polarization as the result of Trumpian extremism or America’s complex racial history but David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution (Oxford UP, 2020) cautions Americans to look back to the 1970s with an eye to class to better understand our political tribalism.

On May 8, 1970, just four days after the killings at Kent State, New York construction workers brutally attacked peaceful protestors in Manhattan’s financial district. Though the police had advanced knowledge of the attack, they provided little protection to the protestors and over 100 were severely injured. The Hardhat Riot recalls this often forgotten violent attack to illuminate the nuances of the current polarization in the U.S. – asking us to shift the lens from race to class, especially white working class men.

For Kuhn, the riot occurred at a turning point for two distinct groups: “hardhats” and “hippies.” The anti-war protestors were mostly the college-educated children of affluent, suburban, middle-class families. The blue-collar construction workers and tradesmen increasingly felt the effects of the economic and social realities of a post-industrial nation. A strange confluence of events – especially the concentration of construction workers at the World Trade Center site juxtaposed with the student protests near Wall Street – sparked the attack. Kuhn highlights the bitterness and anger held by the workers towards an intellectual middle class distanced from the draft and consequences of the war in Vietnam.

In Kuhn’s telling, the hardhats become the stand-ins for the white-working-class voters who were part of FDR’s Democratic Party but became the members of Nixon’s Silent Majority. The protestors are “hippies” and liberal elites disconnected from the dangers of serving in Vietnam. New York City also stands in for what would soon happen to the rest of the country as a result of deindustrialization. The book’s larger claim is that the “two tribes” of the Hardhat riot contextualize Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 – and the continuing resentment from white, working-class voters in the United States.

In the podcast, Kuhn details how the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s ineffective and self-serving “investigation” of themselves ironically enabled this carefully researched book based on their own squashed information. In a 40-page document, the NYPD acquitted itself but ACLU affidavits meant that the documents used to create the report were preserved and provided Kuhn with remarkable contemporary accounts. Kuhn was able to compare those accounts to his contemporary interviews of these same witnesses and participants.

David Paul Kuhn is an author, reporter, and political analyst who has served as a senior and chief political writer for Politico, RealClearPolitics, CBS and other outlets. Many listeners may be familiar with his articles in the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times – as well has his work as a political analyst on networks ranging from the BBC to Fox News. He has two previous books – “The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma” (St. Martin’s, 2007) and a novel, What Makes It Worthy published in 2015 that addressed the tabloidization of American politics and the power dynamics between the press and public officials.

Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Kenneth Austin, who teaches history at the University of Bristol, UK, is well-known for his work on Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. His new book, The Jews and the Reformation (Yale University Press, 2020), offers the most thorough description and analysis of its subject to date. Austin describes the long and complex history of the two traditions, shows how both religions defined themselves in opposition to each other, and how competing confessional communities that emerged out of the European reformations adopted quite different attitudes to their Jewish neighbors. This outstanding work promises to revolutionize the ways in which future scholars will approach this complex and demanding subject.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020).

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Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press) asks: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta?

This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta.

The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.

Debjani Bhattacharyya is Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She was a Junior Fellow of the American Institute of India Studies, and a former Research Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden. Currently, she is a visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University

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.

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

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

On the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, Americans often present increased polarization as the result of Trumpian extremism or America’s complex racial history but David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution (Oxford UP, 2020) cautions Americans to look back to the 1970s with an eye to class to better understand our political tribalism.

On May 8, 1970, just four days after the killings at Kent State, New York construction workers brutally attacked peaceful protestors in Manhattan’s financial district. Though the police had advanced knowledge of the attack, they provided little protection to the protestors and over 100 were severely injured. The Hardhat Riot recalls this often forgotten violent attack to illuminate the nuances of the current polarization in the U.S. – asking us to shift the lens from race to class, especially white working class men.

For Kuhn, the riot occurred at a turning point for two distinct groups: “hardhats” and “hippies.” The anti-war protestors were mostly the college-educated children of affluent, suburban, middle-class families. The blue-collar construction workers and tradesmen increasingly felt the effects of the economic and social realities of a post-industrial nation. A strange confluence of events – especially the concentration of construction workers at the World Trade Center site juxtaposed with the student protests near Wall Street – sparked the attack. Kuhn highlights the bitterness and anger held by the workers towards an intellectual middle class distanced from the draft and consequences of the war in Vietnam.

In Kuhn’s telling, the hardhats become the stand-ins for the white-working-class voters who were part of FDR’s Democratic Party but became the members of Nixon’s Silent Majority. The protestors are “hippies” and liberal elites disconnected from the dangers of serving in Vietnam. New York City also stands in for what would soon happen to the rest of the country as a result of deindustrialization. The book’s larger claim is that the “two tribes” of the Hardhat riot contextualize Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 – and the continuing resentment from white, working-class voters in the United States.

In the podcast, Kuhn details how the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s ineffective and self-serving “investigation” of themselves ironically enabled this carefully researched book based on their own squashed information. In a 40-page document, the NYPD acquitted itself but ACLU affidavits meant that the documents used to create the report were preserved and provided Kuhn with remarkable contemporary accounts. Kuhn was able to compare those accounts to his contemporary interviews of these same witnesses and participants.

David Paul Kuhn is an author, reporter, and political analyst who has served as a senior and chief political writer for Politico, RealClearPolitics, CBS and other outlets. Many listeners may be familiar with his articles in the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times – as well has his work as a political analyst on networks ranging from the BBC to Fox News. He has two previous books – “The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma” (St. Martin’s, 2007) and a novel, What Makes It Worthy published in 2015 that addressed the tabloidization of American politics and the power dynamics between the press and public officials.

Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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

Kenneth Austin, who teaches history at the University of Bristol, UK, is well-known for his work on Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. His new book, The Jews and the Reformation (Yale University Press, 2020), offers the most thorough description and analysis of its subject to date. Austin describes the long and complex history of the two traditions, shows how both religions defined themselves in opposition to each other, and how competing confessional communities that emerged out of the European reformations adopted quite different attitudes to their Jewish neighbors. This outstanding work promises to revolutionize the ways in which future scholars will approach this complex and demanding subject.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020).

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

It is 1969 and Jody A. Forrester is in her late teens, transitioning from a Sixties love child to pacifist anti-Vietnam War activist to an ardent revolutionary. Guns Under the Bed: Memories of a Young Revolutionary (Odyssey Books) revolves around her three years in the Revolutionary Union, a Communist organization advocating armed overthrow of the ruling class. In readiness for the uprising, she sleeps with two rifles underneath her bed.

One of millions protesting the war, what sets Jody apart her from her peers is her decision to join a group espousing Mao Tse Tung's ideology of class war. But why? How does she come to embrace violence as the only solution to the inequities inherent in a capitalist empire? To answer that question, Jody goes into her past, and in the process comes to realize that what she always thought of as political is also deeply personal.

More than a coming-of-age story, this memoir tells universal truths about seeking a sense of belonging not found in her family with themes of shame, pride, secrecy, self-valuation, and self-acceptance explored in context of the culture and politics of that volatile period in American history.

Jody A. Forrester was born and raised in Los Angeles during the uneasy Fifties and tumultuous Sixties. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Sonora Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, WriteRoom, Dreamers Writing, Citroen Review, Gazelle and several others.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ingested them.

By investigating the different contexts and practices associated with the British long-distance trade in patent medicines, Zachary Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets, health concerns, and colonial warfare. He argues that from the late seventeenth-century, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways, providing solutions to the problems of labor shortages in the armed forces, trading companies and plantations, while also informing the categories of difference that organized such institutions.

Zachary Dorner is the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in history at Johns Hopkins University.

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It is 1969 and Jody A. Forrester is in her late teens, transitioning from a Sixties love child to pacifist anti-Vietnam War activist to an ardent revolutionary. Guns Under the Bed: Memories of a Young Revolutionary (Odyssey Books) revolves around her three years in the Revolutionary Union, a Communist organization advocating armed overthrow of the ruling class. In readiness for the uprising, she sleeps with two rifles underneath her bed.

One of millions protesting the war, what sets Jody apart her from her peers is her decision to join a group espousing Mao Tse Tung's ideology of class war. But why? How does she come to embrace violence as the only solution to the inequities inherent in a capitalist empire? To answer that question, Jody goes into her past, and in the process comes to realize that what she always thought of as political is also deeply personal.

More than a coming-of-age story, this memoir tells universal truths about seeking a sense of belonging not found in her family with themes of shame, pride, secrecy, self-valuation, and self-acceptance explored in context of the culture and politics of that volatile period in American history.

Jody A. Forrester was born and raised in Los Angeles during the uneasy Fifties and tumultuous Sixties. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Sonora Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, WriteRoom, Dreamers Writing, Citroen Review, Gazelle and several others.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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

The Beatles’ sojourn in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg during the early 1960s is part of music legend. As Julia Sneeringer reveals in A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69 (Bloomsbury, 2018), though, this was just the most famous episode in the neighborhood’s momentous engagement with rock ‘n’ roll during that period, one of importance not just to music history but to the history of modern Germany. Located as it was outside the walls of the medieval city, St. Pauli was known for centuries as the entertainment quarter of Hamburg. The neighborhood had only recently recovered from the hardships of the postwar era when German club owners began booking English bands to play the new style of music that had just been introduced in Europe. The performances quickly proved a hit among teenage Germans, who flocked to out-of-the-way venues to watch the acts perform. As Sneeringer details, the encounters changed everyone involved, giving the musicians the chance to hone their skills and develop their style while through their participation the young men and women in the audience pushed against the conservative social boundaries imposed on them by their families and their society.

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