New Books in History

In her new book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press), Gema Kloppe-Santamaría examines the history of violence enacted by groups against alleged transgressors who claimed to bring justice while acting beyond the rule of law.

Focusing on the 1930s to 1950s, this book explores the roots of a phenomenon often mistakenly assumed to be a result of neoliberalism in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Kloppe-Santamaría finds that extralegal violence was not a response to the absence of the state nor to increased crime levels, nor is it connected to traditional practices. Instead, lynching is a complex, political act that commonly occurred in urban and rural communities in Mexico.

In these locales, the state was not absent, but some citizens rejected its forms of justice and deplored modernization programs that sought to remake their everyday practices. But state officials could condone or even participate in lynchings. Communities also used extralegal justice to correct perceived crimes against the Church and Catholic values, or to target threatening individuals who could be accused of witchcraft or other mythical offenses.

The Mexican press avidly covered lynchings as spectacles, but the press did not always decry lynching and often suggested it was a necessary, moral act in the absence of speedy, fair legal justice from the state. This book is in dialogue with scholarship on lynching in the United States and illustrates the relevance of the Mexican case for scholars of extralegal violence in other places.

Gema Kloppe-Santamaría is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Loyola University Chicago.

Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her book manuscript in progress is titled Study Abroad, Transnational Youth, and the Politics of Modernization in Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational education program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew).

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“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America.

“I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud.

“I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” – Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, Announcement of Run for the Presidency

What is the political and intellectual legacy of Shirley Chisholm? Recent coverage of Chisholm – especially after the announcement of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s choice of Vice-Present – emphasizes ‘trailblazer talk.’ Chisholm’s extraordinary career included being both the first African-American woman elected to the United States congress and the first to run for the U.S. presidency. But emphasizing these “firsts” obscures Shirley Chisholm’s political and intellectual significance. She was a brilliant political strategist who deftly cultivated relationships that allowed her to accomplish her principled and wide-ranging political agenda. Shirley Chisholm said of herself that her achievement was having the "audacity and nerve" to run for the presidency of the United States: "I want history to remember me not as the first black woman to have be elected to the Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the united states, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself." Chisholm spoke and acted forcefully throughout her long career – Her slogan was “unbought and unbossed” – and she defined empowerment in the second half of the 20th century. She is better understood in the context of #BLM and than Kamala Harris.

POSTSCRIPT, a new series from New Books in Political Science, invites authors to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship. Dr. Anastasia Curwood and Dr. Zinga A. Fraser – imminent scholars of Shirley Chisholm’s political strategies and ideals – engage in a remarkable dialogue.

Shirley Chisholm is often “disremembered” and Drs. Curwood and Fraser emphasize the importance of evaluating her work in the context of the Black Power movement of the 1970s, Black Women’s history, and Black feminism. Chisholm’s feminism was central to both her principles and her practice. She spoke the language of intersectionality – emphasizing the overlapping identities of gender, race, and class – decades before it was a popular term in Critical Race Theory. She had a majority woman staff with a woman as her top legislative aid. Political Science often equates political strategy with masculinity – failing to adequately explore Chisholm’s brilliant strategy of cultivating relationships that allowed her to deftly construct cross-cutting alliances. Her understanding of power was complex. She did not care who got credit and artfully created unlikely coalitions that allowed her to accomplish her political goals – always her priority.

Dr. Anastasia Curwood is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and the Director of African-American and Africana Studies in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts and Sciences. 

Dr. Zinga A. Fraser is an Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College. In addition to her academic responsibilities she is also the Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism at Brooklyn College. 

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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Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices of early modernity brings to light the emergence of the early modern global south.

In The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge (Routledge, 2015), Young proposes a new set of terms with which to understand the racialized imaginary inscribed in the scholarly texts that presented the peoples of the south as objects of an inquiring gaze from the north. Through maps, images and even textual formatting, equivalences were established between ’new’ worlds, many of them long known to European explorers, she argues, in terms that made explicit the divide between ’north’ and ’south.’

This book takes seriously the role of form in shaping meaning and its ideological consequences. Young examines, in turn, the representational methodologies, or ’artes,’ deployed in mapping the ’whole’ world: illustrating, creating charts for navigation, noting down observations, collecting and cataloguing curiosities, reporting events, formatting materials, and editing and translating old sources. By tracking these methodologies in the lines of beauty and evidence on the page, we can see how early modern producers of knowledge were able to attribute alterity to the ’southern climes’ of an increasingly complex world, while securing their own place within it.

Sandra Young is Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London

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The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s―covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

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Today’s guest is journalist and author, Wendy Moore. Her new book, No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books) explores the WWI British military hospital known as Endell Street.

A hospital run by two suffragette doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. A hospital staffed almost completely by women who treated over 26,000 wounded soldiers. It’s an incredible book published by Atlantic Books in the UK and Basic Books in the US, in April 2020.

Wendy Moore is a journalist and author of several previous books, including How to Create the Perfect Wife and Wedlock, a Sunday Times bestseller.

Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon.

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Jacob Mundy is associate professor of PCON at Colgate University He’s written a great book titled Libya, published in 2018 in Polity Presses' "Hot Spots in Global Politics" series. Jacob’s book is part-history, part-political science to guide readers through the intricate maze of foreign and Libyan actors and institutions that define modern day Libya.

Mundy’s book is an accessible account of the complex political, security, and humanitarian crises that have engulfed Libya – Africa’s largest oil-exporting country – since the Arab Spring of 2011. His analysis centers on the roots of the anti-Gaddafi revolution. Mundy identifies new centers of power that coalesced in the wake of the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. The more these rival coalitions vied for political authority and control over Libya’s vast oil wealth, the more they reached out to external actors who were playing their own “great game” in Libya and across the region. In the face of such a multifaceted crisis, Libya’s conflict-free future is uncertain as the international community seems unable to bring peace to this divided and conflict-ridden nation.

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In his groundbreaking 500-year history entitled Germany: A Nation in its Time (Liveright, 2020), Helmut Walser Smith challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than many twentieth-century historians have imagined. Smith’s dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were largely pacific in temperament, and the pernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation’s history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and explains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation. Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, the book is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany from the age of the Reformation to the Berlin Republic.

Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018.

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Jacob Mundy is associate professor of PCON at Colgate University He’s written a great book titled Libya, published in 2018 in Polity Presses' "Hot Spots in Global Politics" series. Jacob’s book is part-history, part-political science to guide readers through the intricate maze of foreign and Libyan actors and institutions that define modern day Libya.

Mundy’s book is an accessible account of the complex political, security, and humanitarian crises that have engulfed Libya – Africa’s largest oil-exporting country – since the Arab Spring of 2011. His analysis centers on the roots of the anti-Gaddafi revolution. Mundy identifies new centers of power that coalesced in the wake of the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. The more these rival coalitions vied for political authority and control over Libya’s vast oil wealth, the more they reached out to external actors who were playing their own “great game” in Libya and across the region. In the face of such a multifaceted crisis, Libya’s conflict-free future is uncertain as the international community seems unable to bring peace to this divided and conflict-ridden nation.

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

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

Today’s guest is journalist and author, Wendy Moore. Her new book, No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books) explores the WWI British military hospital known as Endell Street.

A hospital run by two suffragette doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. A hospital staffed almost completely by women who treated over 26,000 wounded soldiers. It’s an incredible book published by Atlantic Books in the UK and Basic Books in the US, in April 2020.

Wendy Moore is a journalist and author of several previous books, including How to Create the Perfect Wife and Wedlock, a Sunday Times bestseller.

Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon.

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

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

The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s―covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

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