New Books in History

Despite the competition it posed to the Romans’ eastern empire and the longevity it enjoyed compared to its Iranian predecessors, English-language histories of the Sassanian Empire are few and far between. In The Last Empire of Iran (Gorgias Press, 2020), Michael R. Jackson Bonner fills this gap with a work that surveys the empire’s history from its rise in the 3rd century CE to its conquest by Muslim invaders in the 650s. To Bonner, a key reason for the empire’s longevity was the degree of centralization of its government, which was far greater than that of its Parthian predecessors. Thanks to that centralized control and the access to resources that it afforded them, the Sassanians were able to deal with the various challenges their empire faced on its many frontiers, from Roman legions to assaults from Central Asian nomads. Thanks to their effective administration and their military effectiveness, the Sassanians not only persevered against these threats but they succeeded in driving the Roman frontier back westward in the early 7th century, though the extended struggle and the civil war that followed left the Sassanians too weak to face the challenge that arose from the Arabian peninsula just a few years later.

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

Who owns the street? This is the question that animates The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914-1945 (Cambridge University Press) by Molly Loberg.

Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence.

The Nazi Party relied on how people already experienced the city to stage aggressive political theater, including the April Boycott and Kristallnacht. Observers in Germany and abroad looked to Berlin's streets to predict the future. They saw dazzling window displays that radiated optimism. They also witnessed crime waves, antisemitic rioting, and failed policing that pointed toward societal collapse.

Recognizing the power of urban space, officials pursued increasingly radical policies to 'revitalize' the city, culminating in Albert Speer's plan to eradicate the heart of Berlin and build Germania. The book was awarded the prestigious Hans Rosenberg Book Prize of 2018 and has recently been released in paperback.

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.

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

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship.

Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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

Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been America's most consistently praised--and reviled--public figure. He was hailed as a "miracle worker" for his peacemaking in the Middle East, pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, negotiation of an end to the Vietnam War, and secret plan to open the United States to China. He was assailed from the left and from the right for his indifference to human rights, complicity in the pointless sacrifice of American and Vietnamese lives, and reliance on deception and intrigue. Was he a brilliant master strategist--"the 20th century's greatest 19th century statesman"--or a cold-blooded monster who eroded America's moral standing for the sake of self-promotion?

In Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography (Hill and Wang, 2020), the renowned diplomatic historian Thomas A. Schwartz  offers an authoritative, and fair-minded, answer to this question. While other biographers have engaged in hagiography or demonology, Schwartz takes a measured view of his subject. He recognizes Kissinger's successes and acknowledges that Kissinger thought seriously and with great insight about the foreign policy issues of his time, while also recognizing his failures, his penchant for backbiting, and his reliance on ingratiating and fawning praise of the president as a source of power. Throughout, Schwartz stresses Kissinger's artful invention of himself as a celebrity diplomat and his domination of the medium of television news. He also notes Kissinger's sensitivity to domestic and partisan politics, complicating--and undermining--the image of the far-seeing statesman who stands above the squabbles of popular strife.

Rounded and textured, and rich with new insights into key dilemmas of American power, Henry Kissinger and American Power stands as an essential guide to a man whose legacy is as complex as the last sixty years of US history itself.

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

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

In Hinduism in America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) Jeffrey D. Long traces two worlds that converge – that of Hindu immigrants to America who strive to preserve their traditions in a foreign land, and that of American spiritual seekers who turn to Hindu practices and ideas. Long explores the influence of concepts such karma, rebirth, meditation and yoga on the American consciousness, along with Hindu temples in America.

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

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

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship.

Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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

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

Who owns the street? This is the question that animates The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914-1945 (Cambridge University Press) by Molly Loberg.

Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence.

The Nazi Party relied on how people already experienced the city to stage aggressive political theater, including the April Boycott and Kristallnacht. Observers in Germany and abroad looked to Berlin's streets to predict the future. They saw dazzling window displays that radiated optimism. They also witnessed crime waves, antisemitic rioting, and failed policing that pointed toward societal collapse.

Recognizing the power of urban space, officials pursued increasingly radical policies to 'revitalize' the city, culminating in Albert Speer's plan to eradicate the heart of Berlin and build Germania. The book was awarded the prestigious Hans Rosenberg Book Prize of 2018 and has recently been released in paperback.

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.

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

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

Despite the competition it posed to the Romans’ eastern empire and the longevity it enjoyed compared to its Iranian predecessors, English-language histories of the Sassanian Empire are few and far between. In The Last Empire of Iran (Gorgias Press, 2020), Michael R. Jackson Bonner fills this gap with a work that surveys the empire’s history from its rise in the 3rd century CE to its conquest by Muslim invaders in the 650s. To Bonner, a key reason for the empire’s longevity was the degree of centralization of its government, which was far greater than that of its Parthian predecessors. Thanks to that centralized control and the access to resources that it afforded them, the Sassanians were able to deal with the various challenges their empire faced on its many frontiers, from Roman legions to assaults from Central Asian nomads. Thanks to their effective administration and their military effectiveness, the Sassanians not only persevered against these threats but they succeeded in driving the Roman frontier back westward in the early 7th century, though the extended struggle and the civil war that followed left the Sassanians too weak to face the challenge that arose from the Arabian peninsula just a few years later.

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

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

There are two key elements of today’s professional baseball that are informed by Lou Hernandez’s wonderful book Bobby Maduro and the Cuban Sugar Kings (McFarland, 2019): the increased presence of Latinos both on the field and off in MLB, and the interest of MLB to promote its game internationally, particularly in places such as Latin America. The life and career of Bobby Maduro sheds light on both of these topics.

First, Maduro was greatly responsible for the Cuban League’s recognition by professional baseball (in the US). Within this framework, many Americanos played baseball in Cuba, and were exposed to the level of talent not only from that nation, but from elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking baseball world. This helped open the door to even more Latinos to make it into the higher levels of the minors, as well as eventually into the Majors. Second, Maduro was responsible for bringing AAA-level competition to Cuba. With the positive response of the fans (even in the midst of revolutionary turmoil), it did seem that, someday, the Sugar Kings’ slogan would come to fruition: “Un paso mas, y llegamos” (“One more step/level, and we’ll arrive”) meaning that Havana would have had its own MLB franchise before cities such as Montreal and Toronto. Unfortunately, as with so many other tragic results of the Castro dictatorship, that dream is now not only on hold, but it is surely dead for at least one or two more lifetimes.

Bobby Maduro almost made that dream a reality. An examination of his career, and that of the Sugar Kings, provides great contextualization to the realities of MLB in the early 21st century. Hernandez’s book accomplishes this task very effectively.

Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University.

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

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

A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes, or were captured and trafficked across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Rescue the Surviving Souls is the first book to examine this horrific moment of displacement and flight, and to assess its social, economic, religious, cultural, and psychological consequences. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in twelve languages, Adam Teller traces the entire course of the crisis, shedding fresh light on the refugee experience and the various relief strategies developed by the major Jewish centers of the day.

Teller pays particular attention to those thousands of Jews sent for sale on the slave markets of Istanbul and the extensive transregional Jewish economic network that coalesced to ransom them. He also explores how Jewish communities rallied to support the refugees in central and western Europe, as well as in Poland-Lithuania, doing everything possible to help them overcome their traumatic experiences and rebuild their lives.

Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 17th Century (Princeton University Press, 2020) offers an intimate study of an international refugee crisis, from outbreak to resolution, that is profoundly relevant today.

Adam Teller is a Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Princeton University. He is the author of Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwiłł Estates.

Robin Buller is a Doctoral Candidate in History at UNC Chapel Hill and a 2020-2021 dissertation fellow with the Association for Jewish Studies.

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