New Books in History

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Colin Rose, Assistant Professor of History at Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, Canada, about his new book, A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Seventeenth-century Bologna saw a severe uptick of homicide, the result of several factors that we discuss here. Beyond just a discussion of the book and its impact on our understanding of early modern Italy, Colin talks about his source material in detail, providing a small primer on the workings of an early modern criminal court. This makes for a lively conversation between two very happy historians about the joys of archival work.

Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective.

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Debates about Ethnic Studies in K-12 and Higher Education have highlighted the importance of culturally inclusive pedagogy in schools. Despite discussions about Ethnic Studies, there is a more extended history of Mexican-origin people pushing for culturally responsive education. In Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2020), historian Philis M. Barragán-Goetz argues that through cultural negotiation, escuelitas (community schools) shaped Mexican American identity and civil rights activism in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Barragán Goetz weaves in oral histories, government documents, newspapers, and archival sources to demonstrate the power in grassroots organizing for educational justice in Texas. She debunks a popular myth that Mexican Americans have not cared for education throughout history. Barragán Goetz writes that the progressive education movement in the late 19th century was not all that progressive if we examine the lived experienced of Mexican-origin people. Activists such as Idar Family, Villegas de Magnon, Maria Villarreal, Maria Renteria, and many involved in the two main Mexican American civil rights organizations of the time provided a foundation for Latina/os to be part of the fight for educational inclusion in the 20th century. Reading, Writing, and Revolution is not merely a book about educational history; it is a trailblazing study on how Mexican Americans have relied on any tools available to create a more inclusive educational system for themselves and their community.

Philis M. Barragán Goetz is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University - San Antonio. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She can be found on Twitter: @philismaria

Tiffany Jasmin González, Ph.D. is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez

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As much of the world’s population is currently discovering, living through a historical cataclysm is a more common fact of human existence than one might think. Perhaps one reason why this is easily forgotten is the fact that it is hard to make the empathetic leap between oneself and other people from other times and cultures.

For this and many other reasons, Xiaoqiao Ling’s Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center) offers readers a richly revealing window into sensory worlds at a particularly cataclysmic time, showing how Chinese literati dealt with the traumatic transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, and the Manchu conquest of the Han world which brought this about.

Exploring writing in numerous genres from plays to memoirs and erotic novels, and translating extensively from these captivating works, Ling demonstrates the striking level of embodied intimacy that these men professed as they wrestled with commitments to community, family and selfhood in their own era of political and social upheaval.

Xiaoqiao Ling is Associate Professor of Chinese at Arizona State University.

Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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“Four score and seven years ago…” Those are some of the most famous words in American history. Most of us know that President Abraham Lincoln spoke them in what is now known as the Gettysburg Address in 1863, at the official dedication of a cemetery for men who had fallen during the Battle of Gettysburg. And most of us know that Lincoln was referring to 1776 and the Founding Fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But why did Lincoln mention that year and that event in the very first line of his speech that day?

That is one of the questions that Lucas E. Morel answers in his short but illuminating book, Lincoln and the American Founding (SIUP, 2020). In a time when some Americans are vandalizing statues and other artistic representations of the Founding Fathers and even some of Lincoln and going so far as portraying the men of the founding generation as villains, Morel’s book is vital reading. Morel tells us which of the founders Lincoln particularly admired, why the Declaration was of greater import to Lincoln’s political thinking than the Constitution and how Lincoln turned to the Declaration again and again throughout his adult life as ammunition in his argumentation and as a source of personal inspiration and aspiration for the nation as a whole.

Morel also brings into focus long-ago debates such as that over the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 and explains why Lincoln was so reluctant to declare himself an abolitionist but also why he was adamant that as the newly elected president and head of the quite new Republican party, he could not make any concessions to the Secessionists. Morel makes the case for Lincoln as master logician in his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 as Lincoln tried to persuade his fellow white Americans that not only was slavery unjust but that it was a unsustainable foundation on which to base governance in any part of the growing nation.

This is a gem of a book by a scholar for a general audience in need of an understanding of how the founders influenced Lincoln and, thereby, all of us.

Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Colin Rose, Assistant Professor of History at Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, Canada, about his new book, A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Seventeenth-century Bologna saw a severe uptick of homicide, the result of several factors that we discuss here. Beyond just a discussion of the book and its impact on our understanding of early modern Italy, Colin talks about his source material in detail, providing a small primer on the workings of an early modern criminal court. This makes for a lively conversation between two very happy historians about the joys of archival work.

Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective.

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

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

As much of the world’s population is currently discovering, living through a historical cataclysm is a more common fact of human existence than one might think. Perhaps one reason why this is easily forgotten is the fact that it is hard to make the empathetic leap between oneself and other people from other times and cultures.

For this and many other reasons, Xiaoqiao Ling’s Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center) offers readers a richly revealing window into sensory worlds at a particularly cataclysmic time, showing how Chinese literati dealt with the traumatic transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, and the Manchu conquest of the Han world which brought this about.

Exploring writing in numerous genres from plays to memoirs and erotic novels, and translating extensively from these captivating works, Ling demonstrates the striking level of embodied intimacy that these men professed as they wrestled with commitments to community, family and selfhood in their own era of political and social upheaval.

Xiaoqiao Ling is Associate Professor of Chinese at Arizona State University.

Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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

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

Debates about Ethnic Studies in K-12 and Higher Education have highlighted the importance of culturally inclusive pedagogy in schools. Despite discussions about Ethnic Studies, there is a more extended history of Mexican-origin people pushing for culturally responsive education. In Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2020), historian Philis M. Barragán-Goetz argues that through cultural negotiation, escuelitas (community schools) shaped Mexican American identity and civil rights activism in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Barragán Goetz weaves in oral histories, government documents, newspapers, and archival sources to demonstrate the power in grassroots organizing for educational justice in Texas. She debunks a popular myth that Mexican Americans have not cared for education throughout history. Barragán Goetz writes that the progressive education movement in the late 19th century was not all that progressive if we examine the lived experienced of Mexican-origin people. Activists such as Idar Family, Villegas de Magnon, Maria Villarreal, Maria Renteria, and many involved in the two main Mexican American civil rights organizations of the time provided a foundation for Latina/os to be part of the fight for educational inclusion in the 20th century. Reading, Writing, and Revolution is not merely a book about educational history; it is a trailblazing study on how Mexican Americans have relied on any tools available to create a more inclusive educational system for themselves and their community.

Philis M. Barragán Goetz is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University - San Antonio. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She can be found on Twitter: @philismaria

Tiffany Jasmin González, Ph.D. is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez

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

In the century from the death of Captain James Cook in 1779 to the rise of the sugar plantations in the 1870s, thousands of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) men left Hawai‘i to work on ships at sea and in na‘aina‘e (foreign lands)—on the Arctic Ocean and throughout the Pacific Ocean, and in the equatorial islands and California. Beyond Hawai‘i tells the stories of these forgotten indigenous workers and how their labor shaped the Pacific World, the global economy, and the environment. Whether harvesting sandalwood or bird guano, hunting whales, or mining gold, these migrant workers were essential to the expansion of transnational capitalism and global ecological change.

Bridging American, Chinese, and Pacific historiographies, Beyond Hawai‘i: Native Labor in the Pacific World (University of California Press, 2018) is the first book to argue that indigenous labor—more than the movement of ships and spread of diseases—unified the Pacific World.

Gregory Samantha Rosenthal is Assistant Professor of Public History at Roanoke College in Salem, VA

Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific @HolgerDroessler

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In his book From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), Will Smiley examines the emergence of rules of warfare surrounding captivity and slavery in the context of Ottoman-Russian military rivalry between 1700 and 1878. This remarkably well-researched and carefully argued monograph uncovers a vibrant inter-imperial legal regime, challenging many conventional narratives about the expansion of modern international law and the European states system. Its pages provide ample material with which we can rethink the supposed linear decline of Ottoman state power and the nature of pre-modern diplomacy, sovereignty, and governance in Eurasian empires.

While traditional accounts of modern international law mainly focus on intellectual and political developments in the Western world, Smiley shows how two states on the European periphery worked out their own rules – their own international law governing the movement of captives, slaves, and prisoners of war across imperial frontiers. The story that emerges is not one of the Ottoman state’s joining an outside system of law. On the contrary, both in the eighteenth century and the even more challenging nineteenth, the Sublime Porte actively shaped the rules by which it was bound.

Will Smiley is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of New Hampshire and a historian of Eurasia, the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and international law.

Vladislav Lilić  is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at [email protected].

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“Four score and seven years ago…” Those are some of the most famous words in American history. Most of us know that President Abraham Lincoln spoke them in what is now known as the Gettysburg Address in 1863, at the official dedication of a cemetery for men who had fallen during the Battle of Gettysburg. And most of us know that Lincoln was referring to 1776 and the Founding Fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But why did Lincoln mention that year and that event in the very first line of his speech that day?

That is one of the questions that Lucas E. Morel answers in his short but illuminating book, Lincoln and the American Founding (SIUP, 2020). In a time when some Americans are vandalizing statues and other artistic representations of the Founding Fathers and even some of Lincoln and going so far as portraying the men of the founding generation as villains, Morel’s book is vital reading. Morel tells us which of the founders Lincoln particularly admired, why the Declaration was of greater import to Lincoln’s political thinking than the Constitution and how Lincoln turned to the Declaration again and again throughout his adult life as ammunition in his argumentation and as a source of personal inspiration and aspiration for the nation as a whole.

Morel also brings into focus long-ago debates such as that over the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 and explains why Lincoln was so reluctant to declare himself an abolitionist but also why he was adamant that as the newly elected president and head of the quite new Republican party, he could not make any concessions to the Secessionists. Morel makes the case for Lincoln as master logician in his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 as Lincoln tried to persuade his fellow white Americans that not only was slavery unjust but that it was a unsustainable foundation on which to base governance in any part of the growing nation.

This is a gem of a book by a scholar for a general audience in need of an understanding of how the founders influenced Lincoln and, thereby, all of us.

Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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

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