New Books in History

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As Sabine Hildebrandt reveals in The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich (Berghahn, 2017), however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the “future dead.”

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Today we speak with Luca Scholz, a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. Dr. Scholz has varied interests: wide-ranging data analysis, the collection of that data, broad trends over space and time, all of which intersect in the topic of today’s talk, his first monograph, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford University Press).

The book draws on sources discovered in twenty archives, from newly unearthed drawings to first-hand accounts by peasants, princes, and prisoners. Scholz's maps shift the focus from the border to the thoroughfare to show that controls of moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century.

Uncovering a forgotten chapter in the history of free movement, the author presents a new look at the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe. We delve deeply into the issues under discussion, particularly the conceptions of borders and free movements. We hope you enjoy our conversation.

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Today we speak with Luca Scholz, a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. Dr. Scholz has varied interests: wide-ranging data analysis, the collection of that data, broad trends over space and time, all of which intersect in the topic of today’s talk, his first monograph, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford University Press).

The book draws on sources discovered in twenty archives, from newly unearthed drawings to first-hand accounts by peasants, princes, and prisoners. Scholz's maps shift the focus from the border to the thoroughfare to show that controls of moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century.

Uncovering a forgotten chapter in the history of free movement, the author presents a new look at the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe. We delve deeply into the issues under discussion, particularly the conceptions of borders and free movements. We hope you enjoy our conversation.

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How do the political afterlives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. continue to shape American democracy? How does a common myth of opposition distort our understanding of civil rights?

In his dual biography, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic Books, 2020), Peniel E. Joseph (Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin) interrogates the lives and philosophies of both Dr. King and Malcolm X. Although the two leaders were often depicted as advocating rival visions, Joseph unpacks the false binaries to reveal the many ways they influenced and persuaded one another. For Joseph, they shared a revolutionary path in search of black dignity, citizenship, and human rights.

Using the metaphor of the sword and the shield, Joseph contrasts Malcolm X’s belief in self-defense with Dr. King’s adherence to non-violence. Joseph reveals the manner in which King – as an insider raised in black Christianity – articulated the dream of equal citizenship as black America’s chief defense attorney. In contrast, Malcolm X – an outsider who reimagined himself while in prison using tenets from black nationalism and Islam – acted at the prosecuting attorney who unflinchingly accused white America of creating a cultural, political, and legal nightmare that deprived black citizens of their dignity.

But Joseph cautions against overstating familiar binaries. Based on nuanced, archival research, Joseph rejects Dr. King as a primarily conciliatory figure and Malcolm X as his “evil twin.” Both were radical figures who increasingly came to share a political vision. Rather than symbolizing a divided America, King and X’s strategies often furthered or clarified the other’s message: radical black citizenship as inextricably connected to radical black dignity. Joseph reveals both leaders as complex individuals who cannot be fully or accurately understood through simple binaries. Both were black revolutionaries and “kindred spirits whose very presence helped them fulfill their respective roles.”

In the podcast, Joseph emphasizes the role of women in the fight for civil rights, the disparate messages of the white and black press, and the profound effect the assassination of Malcolm X had on Dr. King. Reflecting on the 2020 national protests, Joseph sees the visions of both men in the Black Lives Matter movement – as well as concern with how police brutality reflects the racial caste system in the U.S.

Bernadette Crehan assisted with this podcast.

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 (August 2020).

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How did an authoritarian regime help lay the cornerstones of human rights and international law? Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal  (Oxford University Press, 2020) argues that Anglo-American dominated histories capture the moment while missing the story.

Drawing upon secret archives open for a few brief years during Russia’s liberalization, Francine Hirsch takes readers behind the scenes to private parties and late-night deliberations where the Nuremberg Principles took shape. A vital corrective told through the messy and all too human negotiations behind a trial that changed everything and almost never happened.

Francine Hirsch is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2005) received the Herbert Baxter Adams, Wayne S. Vucinich, and Council for European Studies book prizes. She specializes in Russian and Soviet History, Modern European History, Comparative Empires, Russian-American Engagement, and the History of Human Rights.

Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix.

 

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Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As Sabine Hildebrandt reveals in The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich (Berghahn, 2017), however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the “future dead.”

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In this interview, we talk to Takashi Miura, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Arizona, about his book Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan, (University of Hawaii Press, 2019).

The book examines a category of Japanese divinities that centered on the concept of “world renewal” (yonaoshi). In the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), a number of entities, both natural and supernatural, came to be worshipped as “gods of world renewal.”

These included disgruntled peasants who demanded their local governments repeal unfair taxation, government bureaucrats who implemented special fiscal measures to help the poor, and a giant subterranean catfish believed to cause earthquakes to punish the hoarding rich.

In the modern period, yonaoshi gods took on more explicitly anti-authoritarian characteristics. During a major uprising in Saitama Prefecture in 1884, a yonaoshi god was invoked to deny the legitimacy of the Meiji regime, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new religion Ōmoto predicted an apocalyptic end of the world presided over by a messianic yonaoshi god.

Using a variety of local documents to analyze the veneration of yonaoshi gods, Takashi Miura looks beyond the traditional modality of research focused on religious professionals, their institutions, and their texts to illuminate the complexity of a lived religion as practiced in communities.

He also problematizes the association frequently drawn between the concept of yonaoshi and millenarianism, demonstrating that yonaoshi gods served as divine rectifiers of specific economic injustices and only later, in the modern period and within the context of new religions such as Ōmoto, were fully millenarian interpretations developed. The scope of world renewal, in other words, changed over time.

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In his new book Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019), District Judge Richard M. Gergel asks pertinent questions for the Summer of 2020. How do tragic events awaken white people to the violence of structural racism? What do white people do about it? How do black leaders shape their agendas? Unexampled Courage connects the stories of Isaac Woodard, Harry Truman, and J. Waties Waring to illustrate how one incident fits into the larger history of civil rights.

On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was discharged from the United States military after serving in World War II. While traveling home by bus, Woodard, one of the 900,000 African American men to serve in WWII, was pulled off the bus and arrested for speaking disrespectfully to the white bus driver. While in the custody of police in Batesburg, South Carolina, Sergeant Woodard was beaten and blinded. Viewed in isolation, the blinding of Isaac Woodard appears to be one of many incidents of police brutality against African Americans but Gergel describes how this particular case – publicized widely by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the black press, and Orson Welles – reached President Harry Truman and set off a chain of events impacting 20th century American civil rights.

In this extensively researched book, Gergel details how the mistreatment of Isaac Woodard shocked President Truman into creating a presidential commission on civil rights “To Secure These Rights” and ordering the Justice Department to prosecute Lynwood Shull, the chief of police in Batesburg. Shull was tried in South Carolina with Judge J. Waties Waring presiding – and found not guilty by an all-white jury. The verdict surprised and outraged Judge Waring who moved to confront racism – his own and that of the institutions that he supported. Moving forward, he ruled against racial segregation in Briggs v. Elliott (1952) and his decision helped lay the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and the legal precedent that separate but equal is “inherently unequal.”

The book highlights how black Americans who fought for civil rights risked their livelihood, bodies, and lives while whites like Truman and Waring negotiated social disapproval, political backlash, and – sometimes – violence. Although the focus is on the white men who “awaken,” he demonstrates the importance of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP leadership in addressing how institutional inconsistencies (e.g. Department of Justice, FBI, jury procedures, racist law enforcement) produced a bystander government.

In the podcast, Judge Gergel connects this mid-century civil rights history to the death of George Floyd, the inability of Congress to pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in June 2020, and the challenges of legal reform that remain. He also reveals that the book will be the subject of a public television documentary.

Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.

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 (August 2020).

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In History of Europe: From Prehistory to the 21st Century, Jeremy Black presents a learned and yet entertaining exploration of the history: political, cultural and social of Europe from its prehistory to the 21st century.

Beautifully illustrated and written, the book provides the lay reader as well as the academic one Jeremy Black's deep reading of European history. A book to read and enjoy.

The perfect gift for that educated and intelligent friend or family member who wishes to embark upon that life-long relationship which is known as being enamored of history. Most especially European history.

Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Exeter. And a Senior Associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge with a First, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.”

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, and the University of Rouen’s online periodical Cercles.

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Was Weimar doomed from the outset?

In November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2020), Robert Gerwarth argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Forget 1929 and 1933, the collapse of Imperial Germany began as a velvet revolution where optimism was as common as pessimism. A masterful synthesis told through diaries and memories, Gerwarth reminds us that contemporaries live events before we have them act out history.

Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at UCD and Director of the Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Bismarck Myth (Oxford UP, 2005) and a biography of Reinhard Heydrich (Yale UP, 2011). His third monograph, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End was published by Penguin (UK) and FSG (US) in the autumn of 2016.

Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix.

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