New Books in History

In this episode, I look at Eisler’s last days in England, where he found that the Oxford readership he had been promised before being sent to Dachau was taken by someone else, a paper shortage had put a stop to academic publishing, and that foreign Jews without visas were being imprisoned in a British internment camp on the Isle of Man. I also talk with astrology scholar Dr. Nicholas Campion about Eisler’s scathing criticisms of newspaper astrological columns and unpack Eisler’s final scholarly works on folklore, philology, and ethics. This episode officially concludes the story of Robert Eisler, but there will be a tenth and final episode in the near future that reflects on this project and academic podcasting as a whole after I have had time to hear some feedback. On that note, now that you have heard the story, I would love to hear what you think about it!

Guests: Steven Beller (independent scholar), Nicholas Campion (Principal Lecturer in History at Bath Spa University and Director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture)

Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb Crawford

Additional voices: Brian Evans and Chiara Ridpath

Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra.

Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.

Special thanks to the Warburg Institute and the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.

 

Bibliography and Further Reading:

Campion, Nicholas. History of Western Astrology: Volume II, the Medieval and Modern

Worlds. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and

Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1951.

———. “The Passion of the Flax.” Folklore 61, no. 3 (1950): 114-133.

———.“The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation.” Ethics 59, no. 2, part 1 (January 1949):

77-94.

———. “Danse Macabre.” Traditio 6 (1948): 187-225.

———.The Royal Art of Astrology: With a Frontispiece, Sixteen Plates, Forty-Eight

Illustrations in the Text and Five Diagrams. London: Herbert Joseph, Ltd., 1946.

The Mass Observation Archive. http://www.massobs.org.uk/.

Scholem, Gershom. “How I Came to the Kabbalah,” Commentary 69, no. 5 (May

1980): 39-53.

Follow us on Twitter: @averysquarepeg

Associate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at [email protected].

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2020 had been an intense year for Americans reflecting on their nation’s history. From attacks on statues to public debates about the 1619 Project to the release of Hamilton on a streaming service, Americans have been taking a hard look at how the history of the founding of the United States is memorialized.

Anne Lindsay’s Reconsidering Interpretation of Heritage Sites: America in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2020) explores a number of tourist attractions that play a crucial role in teaching Americans about their past. This thoughtful and critical book notes the ways in which enslaved Blacks, women, Native Americans, and working people are often neglected by plantation tours, historic houses, and other popular cultural attractions such as Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Colonial Williamsburg. She argues that in addition to including these silenced voices, such sites should also engage environmental history and colonial America’s global context. Based on a decade of research and field work, Anne Lindsay challenges these heritage sites to do a better job at integrating current historiography into their interpretations. While grounded in the coastal settlements of the East Coast of the United States of America, her arguments have relevance to larger conversations about history and memory, transcending her geographic and temporal area of expertise.

Dr. Anne Lindsay is an Associate Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. She earned her Ph.D. in Public History at the University of California, Riverside, and taught at the University of Central Florida before returning to California. She runs Sac State’s Capital Public History Program. In addition to being a scholar, she is a public history practitioner, focusing on historic preservation and heritage tourism.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, commerce, music, art, architecture, communications, food, and every other corner of society. Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2020), written by the historian of innovation and the RSA’s resident historian Anton Howes, is the fascinating story of this unique institution.

Drawing on exclusive access to a wealth of rare papers and artifacts from the Society’s own archives, Howes shows how the Society of Arts has constantly reinvented itself to keep in step with changing times. The Society has served as a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, purchased and restored an entire village, encouraged the planting of more than sixty million trees, and sought technological alternatives to child labour. Arts and Minds reveals how a society of public-spirited individuals tried to make their country a better place, and draws vital lessons from their triumphs and failures for all would-be reformers today.

Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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

In this episode, I look at Eisler’s last days in England, where he found that the Oxford readership he had been promised before being sent to Dachau was taken by someone else, a paper shortage had put a stop to academic publishing, and that foreign Jews without visas were being imprisoned in a British internment camp on the Isle of Man. I also talk with astrology scholar Dr. Nicholas Campion about Eisler’s scathing criticisms of newspaper astrological columns and unpack Eisler’s final scholarly works on folklore, philology, and ethics. This episode officially concludes the story of Robert Eisler, but there will be a tenth and final episode in the near future that reflects on this project and academic podcasting as a whole after I have had time to hear some feedback. On that note, now that you have heard the story, I would love to hear what you think about it!

Guests: Steven Beller (independent scholar), Nicholas Campion (Principal Lecturer in History at Bath Spa University and Director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture)

Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb Crawford

Additional voices: Brian Evans and Chiara Ridpath

Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra.

Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.

Special thanks to the Warburg Institute and the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.

 

Bibliography and Further Reading:

Campion, Nicholas. History of Western Astrology: Volume II, the Medieval and Modern

Worlds. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and

Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1951.

———. “The Passion of the Flax.” Folklore 61, no. 3 (1950): 114-133.

———.“The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation.” Ethics 59, no. 2, part 1 (January 1949):

77-94.

———. “Danse Macabre.” Traditio 6 (1948): 187-225.

———.The Royal Art of Astrology: With a Frontispiece, Sixteen Plates, Forty-Eight

Illustrations in the Text and Five Diagrams. London: Herbert Joseph, Ltd., 1946.

The Mass Observation Archive. http://www.massobs.org.uk/.

Scholem, Gershom. “How I Came to the Kabbalah,” Commentary 69, no. 5 (May

1980): 39-53.

Follow us on Twitter: @averysquarepeg

Associate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at [email protected].

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

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

Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), offers an alternative history of East Africa in the Indian Ocean world. Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai highlights many complexities in the history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange.

Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attention to lives and literatures long neglected by traditional scholars, Desai introduces rich, interdisciplinary ways of thinking not only about this specific region but also about the very nature of ethnic history and identity. Traveling from the twelfth century to today, he concludes with a look at contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggle to decide how best to participate in the development and modernization of their postcolonial nations without sacrificing their political autonomy.

Gaurav Desai is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Micheal Rumore is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His work focuses on the Indian Ocean as an African diasporic site. He can be reached at [email protected].

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 Politics of Disease Control. Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Mari K. Webel tells a history of colonial interventions among three communities of the Great Lakes region of East Africa. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Eastern African societies faced a range of social, political and economic challenges, many of which were connected to the establishment of British and German colonial regimes. In the midst of these, African societies experienced an epidemic outbreak of human African Trypanosomiasis, commonly known as “sleeping sickness.” The epidemic posed a serious threat to the economic prospects of colonial regimes who felt it necessary to authorize and fund large scale campaigns aimed at researching a treatment that could cure and stop the spread of the disease. Dr. Webel locates these colonial interventions in the context of the rich intellectual worlds that Great Lakes’ communities used to make sense of experiences of misfortune and illness. She argues that only by understanding the concepts and strategies that Africans had historically used to navigate challenging times, can we explain how and whether they chose to interact with the health efforts promoted by colonial authorities. The book highlights the long, largely neglected, and mostly unsuccessful, quest to eradicate or treat human African trypanosomiasis. It explains the impact that early campaigns to contain the disease had on the rationale and design of subsequent public health interventions in other parts of Africa, and how colonial narratives continue to affect modern research agendas into tropical diseases. Moreover, the book underscores the importance of paying attention to local, cultural and historical factors in the design of any public health campaign.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

 

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In Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford Univeristy Press), Charlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development and professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, examines the intersection of racial justice movements, technology, and culture.

McIlwain names the often ignored or neglected African American pioneers of computer and Internet technology. At the same time, he explores how technological innovations are deployed on Black and other marginalized communities. In connecting these threads, McIlwain demonstrates the centrality of African Americans to both the history and future of the Internet.

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Although it has largely been erased from the collective memory of American Christianity, the debate over eugenics was a major factor in the history of 20th-century religious movements, with many churches actively supporting the pseudoscience as a component of the Social Gospel.

In Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion (University of California Press, 2020), Dr. Melissa J. Wilde, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to white supremacist views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny. We discuss how birth control use and promotion was conceived as a religious duty, how Biblical exegesis was used in support of eugenics, how the fear of “race suicide” motivated predominantly White denominations to limit reproduction among marginalized people, how groups like the Catholics and the Orthodox Jews pushed back against the pro-eugenics tide, the hidden racist legacy of contemporary progressive churches, and the silence that continues to exist around the issue today.

Diana Dukhanova received her PhD from Brown University, where she is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies, in 2018. Her work focuses on gender, religion, and sexuality in Russian religious culture. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Jesus of Bethlehem: Vasily V. Rozanov’s Russian Family Values.

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In Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford Univeristy Press), Charlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development and professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, examines the intersection of racial justice movements, technology, and culture.

McIlwain names the often ignored or neglected African American pioneers of computer and Internet technology. At the same time, he explores how technological innovations are deployed on Black and other marginalized communities. In connecting these threads, McIlwain demonstrates the centrality of African Americans to both the history and future of the Internet.

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

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

Although it has largely been erased from the collective memory of American Christianity, the debate over eugenics was a major factor in the history of 20th-century religious movements, with many churches actively supporting the pseudoscience as a component of the Social Gospel.

In Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion (University of California Press, 2020), Dr. Melissa J. Wilde, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to white supremacist views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny. We discuss how birth control use and promotion was conceived as a religious duty, how Biblical exegesis was used in support of eugenics, how the fear of “race suicide” motivated predominantly White denominations to limit reproduction among marginalized people, how groups like the Catholics and the Orthodox Jews pushed back against the pro-eugenics tide, the hidden racist legacy of contemporary progressive churches, and the silence that continues to exist around the issue today.

Diana Dukhanova received her PhD from Brown University, where she is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies, in 2018. Her work focuses on gender, religion, and sexuality in Russian religious culture. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Jesus of Bethlehem: Vasily V. Rozanov’s Russian Family Values.

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

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