New Books in History

Though theology is often regarded as dealing primarily with abstract issues of belief, the prolific 17th-century English Puritan John Owen focused much of his attention on the role of Christian faith in one’s everyday life. In his book An Introduction to John Owen: A Christian Vision for Every Stage of Life (Crossway, 2020), Owen biographer Crawford Gribben details his subject’s conception of the roles that belief and doctrine should play in the lives of Christians. As Gribben explains, this vision was a product not just of Owen’s interpretation of the Bible, but of his experiences over the course of his own life. From these triumphs and setbacks Owen drew lessons that informed the place of Christian faith in a person’s life from birth to death, which he detailed in his voluminous writings. Gribben shows how this vision had an impact long after Owen’s life, as his ideas informed the development of students such as John Locke and shaped the emergence of Evangelicalism in the 18th century as well.

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"It used to be," soon-to-be secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright said in 1996, "that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views felt was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador's lap."

This world of US diplomacy excluded women for a variety of misguided reasons: they would let their emotions interfere with the task of diplomacy, they were not up to the deadly risks that could arise overseas, and they would be unable to cultivate the social contacts vital to success in the field. The men of the State Department objected but had to admit women, including the first female ambassadors: Ruth Bryan Owen, Florence "Daisy" Harriman, Perle Mesta, Eugenie Anderson, Clare Boothe Luce, and Frances Willis. These were among the most influential women in US foreign relations in their era.

In Breaking Protocol: America's First Female Ambassadors, 1933-1964 (University Press of Kentucky, 2020), Philip Nash examines the history of the "Big Six" and how they carved out their rightful place in history. After a chapter capturing the male world of American diplomacy in the early twentieth century, the book devotes one chapter to each of the female ambassadors and delves into a number of topics, including their backgrounds and appointments, the issues they faced while on the job, how they were received by host countries, the complications of protocol, and the press coverage they received, which was paradoxically favorable yet deeply sexist. In an epilogue that also provides an overview of the role of women in modern US diplomacy, Nash reveals how these trailblazers helped pave the way for more gender parity in US foreign relations.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Sara Mayeux is the author of Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Free Justice explores the rise, both in the idea and practice, of the public defender throughout the 20th Century. More than just a strict legal history of the profession, Dr. Mayeux’s work looks beyond the confines of the courtroom or law firm to explore how the public defender was representative of changing ideas of not just law, but American identity. Free Justice expands our knowledge of how and why public defenders became as ubiquitous as they are today.

Dr. Mayeux is an Associate Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University.

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Buddhism has always been a world religion, but its popularity in the West really dates only from the late nineteenth century, when much of the Buddhist world was subject to European colonial rule. Of all those Westerners who became interested in, and sought to promote Buddhism at this time, perhaps no-one is more unusual and interesting than U Dhammaloka, an Irishman who “went native” and became a Buddhist monk in British Burma at the turn of the twentieth century. U Dhammaloka is now the subject of a fascinating new book, The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020) cowritten by Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox, and Brian Bocking. Beyond the story of this intrepid Irishman, this book is also a social history of British Burma at the height of European imperialism. But what is distinctive about this social history is its focus on white, working-class Europeans in the highly cosmopolitan colonial states at this time. Some of them, and U Dhammaloka was one, shared political sympathies with the Asian subjects of these colonial states.

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In her new book, The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy (Belknap Press), Dr. Victoria de Grazia takes the story of Attilio Teruzzi and explores the social history of fascism.

When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a rising young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, after being promoted to commander of the Black Shirts, Teruzzi renounced his wife.

In fascist Italy, a Catholic country with no divorce law, he could only dissolve the marriage by filing for an annulment through the medieval procedures of the Church Court. The proceedings took an ominous turn when Mussolini joined Hitler: Lilliana Teruzzi was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws.

The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous seduction and inconvenient marriage―brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records―to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, loyal, lecherous, and impetuous Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer, an exemplar of fascism’s New Man.

Why did he abruptly discard the woman he had so eagerly courted? And why, when the time came to find another partner, did he choose another Jewish woman as his would-be wife? In Victoria de Grazia’s engrossing account, we see him vacillating between the will of his Duce and the dictates of his heart.

De Grazia’s landmark history captures the seductive appeal of fascism and shows us how, in his moral pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.

Victoria de Grazia is the Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mass Vaccination. Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell University Press), Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases.

Mass Vaccination tells the story of the people, materials, and systems that built these campaigns, exposing how, by improving the nation's health, the Chinese Communist Party quickly asserted itself in the daily lives of all citizens. This crusade had deep roots in the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when researchers in China's southwest struggled to immunize as many people as possible, both in urban and rural areas. But its legacy was profound, providing a means for the state to develop new forms of control and of engagement.

Brazelton considers the implications of vaccination policies for national governance, from rural health care to Cold War-era programs of medical diplomacy. By embedding Chinese medical history within international currents, she highlights how and why China became an exemplar of primary health care at a crucial moment in global health policy.

Mary Augusta Brazelton is University Lecturer in Global Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies. 

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Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published A Brief History of the Mediterranean (Little Brown, 2020), to offer readers an overview of this sphere from pre-history to the present day. Taking in the importance of geography, civilizational change and cultural representations, Black moves between disciplines to offer readers a compelling handbook to a region rich in historical significance.

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 John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). 

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Like so many Americans, American Jews supported President Roosevelt. They adored him. They believed in him. They idolized him.

Perhaps they shouldn’t have.

Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (Jewish Publication Society) reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s fateful policies during the Holocaust.

Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR’s consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away—actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war.

What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president’s private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt’s statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration’s policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans.

The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDR’s personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewry’s foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Rabbi Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDR’s policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administration’s realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives.

Rafael Medoff is founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and coeditor of the institute’s online Encyclopedia of America’s Response to the Holocaust.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel 

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Why is the scholarship and advocacy work of W.E.B. Du Bois so relevant for 21st century politics? Does his unique combination of both serve as a possible template for today’s freedom movements?

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly (assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College and 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar with the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago) new book in called W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (ABC-CLIO, 2019). In it, she argues that the application of Du Bois’s ideology, epistemology, and theory to practical action elucidates a road map for struggle against myriad forms of exploitation – and enduring features of his praxis provide lessons for our contemporary understanding and our ability to potential challenging of imperialism and racism.

Dr. Burden-Stelly works at the intersection of Critical Theory, Africana Studies, political theory, and political economy – and her analysis of Du Bois’s political and methodological contributions reflect these deep and broad scholarly traditions. She has revised Dr. Gerald Horne’s 2009 book substantively by refocusing on how Du Bois is part of and helps frame black radical history. He should be understood as a “veritable entrepôt of African-American, Pan-African, and radical Black History.” In order to create a book more accessible to those who do not specialize in Du Bois, political thought, or black history, Dr. Burden-Stelly has crafted helpful side-bars that help contextualize Du Bois’s political legacy, included and edited superb excerpts, and created a comprehensive chronology.

The most remarkable chapter of the book is “Why W.E.B. Du Bois Matters” in which she presents Du Bois as one of the “greatest activist-scholars in modern history” who took advantage of the best political-intellectual tools of his times – in a life that spanned almost 100 years and included 8 decades of political engagement. Du Bois’s “persistent engagement with the most pressing issues during his lifetime offers a template for scholar-activism that is still instructive today; his combination of ideological acumen and liberatory striving remains relevant to contemporary freedom movements.”

The podcast begins with some highlights of the intellectual biography including Dr. Burden-Stelly’s framing of Du Bois as a militant liberal and a militant anti-sexist (personally and professionally) who was able to simultaneously interrogate race, gender, and class. Engaging Du Bois’s work on Reconstruction allows Dr. Burden-Stelly to reveal the extent to which Du Bois should be understood as part of the Black Marxist tradition given that he analyzed the Civil War and beyond as “phases of capitalist exploitation, U.S. imperialism, global white supremacy, and Black labor insurgency.” Likewise, Du Bois shaped modern Pan Africanism such that Burden-Stelly considers him a father of modern Pan Africanism. Throughout all his scholar-activism, Du Bois nurtured deep and nuanced relationship that allowed him to both forge personal bonds and create institutions of enduring importance.

The podcast concludes with Dr. Burden-Stelly connecting Du Bois to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement focusing on political mobilization as a tool of liberation and analyzing the code that is being used to delegitimatize new liberatory projects.

Dr. Burden-Stelly is a veteran of the New Books Network and you can hear her earlier interview with me and her co-authors as we discussed Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present in June 2020.

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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John Barton is no stranger to Holy Scripture. Having spent much of his academic career as a chaplain and professor of theology at the University of Oxford, his latest book is an attempt to shed light on one of the world’s most influential texts – the Bible.

In A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book (Viking, 2019), John demonstrates that the Bible, while often thought of as monolithic, is anything but. He paints a vivid picture of the historical backdrop against which the books of the Bible were written, injecting a dose of depth and character to the stories, psalms, prophecies, and letters it comprises. He then turns to how the book was compiled, assembled, and disseminated before finally discussing the plethora of interpretations of the Bible, and its place in the world we live in today.

Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography.

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