New Books in History

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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Omar H. Ali’s Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford University Press, 2016), provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar.

It offers a rare look at an individual who began in obscurity in the Horn of Africa and reached the highest levels of South Asian political and military affairs in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ambar's rise from slavery in the Horn of Africa to rulership in South Asia sheds light on the diverse mix of people, products, and practices that shaped the Indian Ocean world during the early modern period.

Originally from Ethiopia--historically called Abyssinia--Ambar is best known for having defended the Deccan from being occupied by the Mughals during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. His ingenuity as a military leader, his diplomatic skills, and his land-reform policies contributed to his success in keeping the Deccan free of Mughal imperial rule.

Omar H. Ali is Dean of Lloyd International Honors College and Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Through archival and ethnographic research he explores issues of power and culture across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds from the early modern period through the present. He is the author of several books, including Islam in the Indian Ocean World: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016).

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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The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a region on the other side of the planet. And it has facilitated capitalist-led globalization. However, as both the US and and Saudi governments have tried to hide the relationship from their respective citizens, it also has been poorly understood.

Victor McFarland, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri, has sorted through the secrecy and head-spinning complexities of the US-Saudi relationship, examining everything from petrodollars to military contracting. His new book, Oil Powers: A History of the US-Saudi Alliance (Columbia University Press) is a testament to that hard work.

In Oil Powers, McFarland, traces the history of the US-Saudi alliance across the twentieth century. He shows how the alliance contributed to financialization; how it helped entrench a world order based on oil; and how it tugged both countries rightward in the 1970s, both in economic and foreign policy. As can be surmised from this sample of the book’s arguments, McFarland makes our contemporary moment a lot more comprehensible.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

 

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The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (University of New Mexico Press) is a recent addition to the growing scholarship on Ainu identity and settler colonialism in Japan.

Combining ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Ainu communities and organizations with museum and archival research, Dr. Lewallen shows how Ainu women engage in the “self-craft” of identities and cultural viability through clothwork. Through the embodied ancestral knowledge of clothwork, Ainu women are able to transition from “being Ainu” to “becoming Ainu,” empowering themselves through the “semiotic weight” of cloths in the face of state regulation and assimilation campaigns.

Dr. Lewallen argues in this book that, using cultural production as an idiom of resistance against Japanese settler colonialism, Ainu women have enabled network-building with indigenous women globally, however challenging Japanese and Eurocentric models of feminist discourses via an indigenous Ainu feminism at the same time.

Ann-elise Lewallen is Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional networks of Buddhism connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and Imperial Japan.

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The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a region on the other side of the planet. And it has facilitated capitalist-led globalization. However, as both the US and and Saudi governments have tried to hide the relationship from their respective citizens, it also has been poorly understood.

Victor McFarland, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri, has sorted through the secrecy and head-spinning complexities of the US-Saudi relationship, examining everything from petrodollars to military contracting. His new book, Oil Powers: A History of the US-Saudi Alliance (Columbia University Press) is a testament to that hard work.

In Oil Powers, McFarland, traces the history of the US-Saudi alliance across the twentieth century. He shows how the alliance contributed to financialization; how it helped entrench a world order based on oil; and how it tugged both countries rightward in the 1970s, both in economic and foreign policy. As can be surmised from this sample of the book’s arguments, McFarland makes our contemporary moment a lot more comprehensible.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

 

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

The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (University of New Mexico Press) is a recent addition to the growing scholarship on Ainu identity and settler colonialism in Japan.

Combining ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Ainu communities and organizations with museum and archival research, Dr. Lewallen shows how Ainu women engage in the “self-craft” of identities and cultural viability through clothwork. Through the embodied ancestral knowledge of clothwork, Ainu women are able to transition from “being Ainu” to “becoming Ainu,” empowering themselves through the “semiotic weight” of cloths in the face of state regulation and assimilation campaigns.

Dr. Lewallen argues in this book that, using cultural production as an idiom of resistance against Japanese settler colonialism, Ainu women have enabled network-building with indigenous women globally, however challenging Japanese and Eurocentric models of feminist discourses via an indigenous Ainu feminism at the same time.

Ann-elise Lewallen is Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional networks of Buddhism connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and Imperial Japan.

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

Omar H. Ali’s Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford University Press, 2016), provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar.

It offers a rare look at an individual who began in obscurity in the Horn of Africa and reached the highest levels of South Asian political and military affairs in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ambar's rise from slavery in the Horn of Africa to rulership in South Asia sheds light on the diverse mix of people, products, and practices that shaped the Indian Ocean world during the early modern period.

Originally from Ethiopia--historically called Abyssinia--Ambar is best known for having defended the Deccan from being occupied by the Mughals during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. His ingenuity as a military leader, his diplomatic skills, and his land-reform policies contributed to his success in keeping the Deccan free of Mughal imperial rule.

Omar H. Ali is Dean of Lloyd International Honors College and Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Through archival and ethnographic research he explores issues of power and culture across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds from the early modern period through the present. He is the author of several books, including Islam in the Indian Ocean World: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016).

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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In the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Professor of City and Urban Planning at UC Berkeley) examines the novel phenomenon of the conversion of agrarian landowners into urban shareholders in India’s newly emerging “corridor cities.”

Working at the unique intersection of urban planning and agrarian politics in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, the book centers an unusual cast of characters based in agrarian space -- propertied sugar elites, marginal cultivators, landless workers – in explaining the production of India’s new urban corridors.

Through a meticulous case-study of three privately developed real estate enclaves, the book empirically teases out the tensions between economic liberalization and political decentralization. In the first two corridor cities, the author shows how local, decentralized structures of democratic governance (exemplified in village councils or Gram Sabhas) could not be activated to challenge the unequal processes of economic transformation, but in third enclave, Gram Sabhas were able to be much more active.

Through this comparative study, we learn of the critical factors which determine democratic horizons in rural land politics. With its keen attention to the historical production of spatial unevenness and its textured ethnography of a crucial yet understudied topic in Indian social science, this book will be essential reading for geographers, anthropologists, historians, and urbanists working across South Asia and beyond.

Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University with interests in agrarian capitalism in rural Rajasthan.

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Today we are joined by Jorge Iber, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science at Texas Tech, and Mario Longoria, a long-time author and educator who received his PhD in English in 2014.

The two are the authors of Latinos in American Football: Pathbreakers on the Gridiron, 1927 to the Present (McFarland and Co Publishers, 2020). In our conversation we discussed the origins of Latino American football, the role of World War II and the Civil Rights movement in expanding opportunities for Latino sportsmen, and the ongoing obstacles to Latino participation in the game that many love.

In Latinos in American Football, Iber and Longoria recover the history of Latino participation in American football at the high school, college, and professional level. Although each chapter includes a series of case studies of Latino players, often undergirded by interviews conducted by the two scholars over thirty years, their work does more than recount histories on the field. They instead contextualize Latinos determination to play gridiron football within the broader history of migration, assimilation, and liberation.

Iber and Longoria’s account encompasses football across America and to a lesser extent in Cuba and Mexico. They illustrate the early days of Latino football when Latino athletes challenged stereotypes of physical inferiority and mental incapability – the first Latin professional football player was Cuban Ignacio Molinet who played football for Cornell in the 1920s before being hired by the forerunner of the Philadelphia Eagles in 1927.

Over the next hundred years, Latino’s presence in the gridiron game expands almost inexorable alongside their demographic expansion. Nevertheless, even as Latino footballers won great and growing acclaim on the field and on the sidelines, they faced significant obstacles to their participation including being overlooked by NFL and NCAA coaches despite their talent, poorly financed schools and athletic programs, and prejudice from opponents and referees.

Latinos in American Football will appeal broadly to people interested in sports history, but also particularly to anyone interested in the history of American football and in Latinos place in American society.

Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at [email protected].

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Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, and visual artifacts. Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience.

To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely.

In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS's dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets.

Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery's vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery's appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place.

Featuring more than seventy-five illustrations, Selling Antislavery offers a thorough case study of the role of reform movements in the rise of mass media and argues for abolition's central importance to the shaping of antebellum middle-class culture.

Teresa A. Goddu is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural American women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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