New Books in History

In Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (Harvard University Press, 2019), Alec Ryrie, the award-winning author of Protestants offers a new vision of the birth of the secular age, looking to the feelings of ordinary men and women―so often left out of the history of atheism.

Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, but in this lively and startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through their hearts more than their minds.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith.

These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records.

Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics.

In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age.

Alec Ryrie is Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, specializing in the history of Protestant Christianity, England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School.His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew) and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: [email protected]

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Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Clifford Mason, celebrated actor, director, writer, and playwright, and author of thirty-four plays, is a sweeping history of Black theatre from the early nineteenth century through 1959. With an “Introduction” section, and six concise chapters, Macbeth in Harlem traverses such subjects as the Black hero, plot, narrative, and the African American intellectual in the history of African American theater including an entire chapter on Paul Robeson. From the Black Shakespearean troupe formed in 1821 Greenwich Village, that performed Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth in the 1820s, through the emergence of minstrelsy in the mid-nineteenth century, to the work of Robeson and Lorraine Hansberry at the rise of the Civil Rights Era, Mason tells the story of Black performers, and intellectuals, in the development of American theater. He details how integral Black artists have been in the history of American theater while “fighting against the odds” to demand freedom of expression and human dignity.

In the first chapter, Mason discusses early Black theater and theater troupes in Greenwich Village which was a center of Black life within the Manhattan section of New York City in the early nineteenth century. The African Grove Theatre, as Mason notes, was a group of Black actors including James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge that performed Macbeth as a “the heart of their repertoire” (9). This group was self-sustaining and produced shows without the support of white benefactors. Both Hewlett and Aldridge rose to acclaim and were recognized for their craft by the larger entertainment world. The evolution of minstrelsy in the long nineteenth century is the focus of Chapter Two and the degradation of the Black image as illustrated with the proliferation of stereotypes that emerged at this time. Minstrel shows led to the rise of the Tom shows then the “coon” shows amid the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century. African Americans and the rise of vaudeville and the musical through the New Negro Era is the focus of the next chapter. Mason assiduously notes the impact that Black actors and entertainers had on the development of musical theater in America in this Third Chapter of the book. The final three chapters focus on Black theater in the twentieth century including some discussion of milestones such as Lorraine Hansberry’s Raison in the Son and the rise and fall of Paul Robeson. Macbeth in Harlem is a noteworthy text that reveals some unknown history about the integral place of African Americans in the history of American theater. It is easily a text that might be used in courses on African American history, theater history, and American intellectual history.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). You can follow Dr. Williams on Twitter:  @DrHettie2017

 

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Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of baseball in Taiwan, the role of baseball in the Japanese imperial system, and the complicated nature of Taiwanese national identity.

In Empire of Infields, Harney engages with the historiography of baseball in Taiwan. He argues that baseball was not necessarily a place for the formation of a Taiwanese nationalist identity, nor was it a space for colonial resistance to the Japanese, but instead it was a site for mutual engagement and cultural genesis with the Japanese and different groups of Taiwanese people. He considers Taiwanese baseball transnationally within the larger frames of the Japanese imperial nation-state and the Kuomintang’s retrocession Sinicization project. He shows how and why indigenous Taiwanese players travelled the empire, young Japanese and ethnically Chinese Taiwanese people competed in the same international high school baseball competitions, and postwar Japanese students won the Little League World Series.

His discussion of Taiwanese identity encompasses the islands diverse populations throughout the twentieth century. He focuses less on baseball as resistance and instead is interested in the way that baseball helped to produce lasting connections between Taiwan and Japan. In the postwar, Chiang Kai-Shek responded ambivalent to the Taiwanese game. Baseball offered the regime ties to the United States and opportunities to compete internationally, but it also threatened to produce Taiwanese nationalism that would undermine their argument for continued rule of the mainland. Taiwan’s post-imperial connections with Japan remained important as Taiwanese baseball remained linked with the metropole. Taiwanese players competing in Japan and Japanese news regularly appearing in their erstwhile colony.

Although Harney’s work proceeds largely chronologically, he balances between two periods: the era of Japense colonialism (1895-1945) and the postwar period (1945-1968). Within each section, his work moves thematically, engaging with related issues of Taiwanese nationalism, Japanese educational systems, race under empire, the Cold War, and the trans-Pacific histories of sports.

Empire of Infields will appeal to readers interested in Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese history as well as people fascinated by international baseball.

Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at [email protected].

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When Americans think about trials of Holocaust perpetrators, they generally think of the Nuremberg Trials or the trial of Adolf Eichmann or perhaps of the Frankfort trials of perpetrators from Auschwitz. If they think of Polish trials at all, they likely assume these were show trials driven by political goals rather than an interest in justice.

Gabriel Finder and Alexander Prusin's book Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland (University of Toronto Press, 2018) shows that the truth was considerably more nuanced. The book is a comprehensive account of the trials of Nazi perpetrators conducted in liberated and postwar Poland. But it’s more than that—it’s a reflection on how politics impact justice, on what trials can teach us about perpetrator behavior, and on the ways in which ordinary Poles responded to the Holocaust. Finder and Prusin show that the trials were shaped by their political context. But this context allowed and sometimes encouraged the participation of a variety of actors and for a careful and thorough examination of documentary evidence and the testimony of survivors.  As a result, the trials were largely successful in achieving a kind of justice, as imperfect as that might be.

Prusin died shortly before the book was published. This interview is dedicated to his memory.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.

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Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of baseball in Taiwan, the role of baseball in the Japanese imperial system, and the complicated nature of Taiwanese national identity.

In Empire of Infields, Harney engages with the historiography of baseball in Taiwan. He argues that baseball was not necessarily a place for the formation of a Taiwanese nationalist identity, nor was it a space for colonial resistance to the Japanese, but instead it was a site for mutual engagement and cultural genesis with the Japanese and different groups of Taiwanese people. He considers Taiwanese baseball transnationally within the larger frames of the Japanese imperial nation-state and the Kuomintang’s retrocession Sinicization project. He shows how and why indigenous Taiwanese players travelled the empire, young Japanese and ethnically Chinese Taiwanese people competed in the same international high school baseball competitions, and postwar Japanese students won the Little League World Series.

His discussion of Taiwanese identity encompasses the islands diverse populations throughout the twentieth century. He focuses less on baseball as resistance and instead is interested in the way that baseball helped to produce lasting connections between Taiwan and Japan. In the postwar, Chiang Kai-Shek responded ambivalent to the Taiwanese game. Baseball offered the regime ties to the United States and opportunities to compete internationally, but it also threatened to produce Taiwanese nationalism that would undermine their argument for continued rule of the mainland. Taiwan’s post-imperial connections with Japan remained important as Taiwanese baseball remained linked with the metropole. Taiwanese players competing in Japan and Japanese news regularly appearing in their erstwhile colony.

Although Harney’s work proceeds largely chronologically, he balances between two periods: the era of Japense colonialism (1895-1945) and the postwar period (1945-1968). Within each section, his work moves thematically, engaging with related issues of Taiwanese nationalism, Japanese educational systems, race under empire, the Cold War, and the trans-Pacific histories of sports.

Empire of Infields will appeal to readers interested in Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese history as well as people fascinated by international baseball.

Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him 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

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Clifford Mason, celebrated actor, director, writer, and playwright, and author of thirty-four plays, is a sweeping history of Black theatre from the early nineteenth century through 1959. With an “Introduction” section, and six concise chapters, Macbeth in Harlem traverses such subjects as the Black hero, plot, narrative, and the African American intellectual in the history of African American theater including an entire chapter on Paul Robeson. From the Black Shakespearean troupe formed in 1821 Greenwich Village, that performed Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth in the 1820s, through the emergence of minstrelsy in the mid-nineteenth century, to the work of Robeson and Lorraine Hansberry at the rise of the Civil Rights Era, Mason tells the story of Black performers, and intellectuals, in the development of American theater. He details how integral Black artists have been in the history of American theater while “fighting against the odds” to demand freedom of expression and human dignity.

In the first chapter, Mason discusses early Black theater and theater troupes in Greenwich Village which was a center of Black life within the Manhattan section of New York City in the early nineteenth century. The African Grove Theatre, as Mason notes, was a group of Black actors including James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge that performed Macbeth as a “the heart of their repertoire” (9). This group was self-sustaining and produced shows without the support of white benefactors. Both Hewlett and Aldridge rose to acclaim and were recognized for their craft by the larger entertainment world. The evolution of minstrelsy in the long nineteenth century is the focus of Chapter Two and the degradation of the Black image as illustrated with the proliferation of stereotypes that emerged at this time. Minstrel shows led to the rise of the Tom shows then the “coon” shows amid the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century. African Americans and the rise of vaudeville and the musical through the New Negro Era is the focus of the next chapter. Mason assiduously notes the impact that Black actors and entertainers had on the development of musical theater in America in this Third Chapter of the book. The final three chapters focus on Black theater in the twentieth century including some discussion of milestones such as Lorraine Hansberry’s Raison in the Son and the rise and fall of Paul Robeson. Macbeth in Harlem is a noteworthy text that reveals some unknown history about the integral place of African Americans in the history of American theater. It is easily a text that might be used in courses on African American history, theater history, and American intellectual history.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). You can follow Dr. Williams on Twitter:  @DrHettie2017

 

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Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910) (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020) argues that Argentine scientific projects of the era were not just racial encounters, but were also conditioned by sexual relationships in all their messy, physical reality.

The writers studied here (an eclectic group of scientists, anthropologists, and novelists, including Estanislao Zeballos, Lucio and Eduarda Mansilla, Ramón Lista, and Florence Dixie reflect on Indigenous sexual practices, analyze the advisability and effects of interracial sex, and use the language of desire to narrate encounters with Indigenous peoples as they try to scientifically pinpoint Argentina's racial identity and future potential.

Kerr's reach extends into history of science, literary studies, and history of anthropology, illuminating a scholarly time and place in which the lines betwixt were much blurrier, if they existed at all.

Ashley Kerr is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Idaho.

Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. You can tweet her and suggest books at @MariniCandela

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In Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (Harvard University Press, 2019), Alec Ryrie, the award-winning author of Protestants offers a new vision of the birth of the secular age, looking to the feelings of ordinary men and women―so often left out of the history of atheism.

Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, but in this lively and startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through their hearts more than their minds.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith.

These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records.

Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics.

In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age.

Alec Ryrie is Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, specializing in the history of Protestant Christianity, England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School.His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew) and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: [email protected]

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

New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should they opt for a home birth or head for a hospital?

Whatever they “choose,” they will be sure to find plenty of medical expertise from health practitioners to social media “influencers” telling them that they’re making a series of mistakes. As intersectional feminists with two small children each, Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan draw from their own experiences as well as stories from a range of caretakers throughout.

You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise (Rutgers University Press, 2019) investigates the storied history of mothering advice in the media, from the newspapers, magazines, doctors’ records and personal papers of the nineteenth-century to today’s websites, Facebook groups, and Instagram feeds.

Johnson and Quinlan find surprising parallels between today’s mothering experts and their Victorian counterparts, but they also explore how social media has placed unprecedented pressures on new mothers, even while it may function as social support for some.

They further examine the contentious construction of prenatal and baby care expertise itself, as individuals such as everyone from medical professionals to experienced moms have competed to have their expertise acknowledged in the public sphere.

Exploring potential health crises from infertility treatments to “better babies” milestones, You’re Doing it Wrong! provides a provocative look at historical and contemporary medical expertise during conception, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and infant care stages.

Bethany L. Johnson (MPhil, M.A.) is a doctoral student in the history of science, technology and the environment at the University of South Carolina and an associate member to the graduate faculty and research affiliate faculty in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Margaret M. Quinlan (PhD) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies and core faculty in the interdisciplinary Health Psychology Ph.D. Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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In her new book Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga (Oxford University Press, 2020), Anya Foxen traces several disparate yet entangled roots of modern yoga practice to show that much of what we call yoga in the West stems not only from pre-modern Indian yoga traditions, but also from Hellenistic theories of the subtle body, Western esotericism and magic, pre-modern European medicine, and late-nineteenth-century women's wellness programs.

As such, this book richly contributes to the discussion of cultural appropriation as pertains to modern Western yoga.

Anya Foxen is Assistant Professor, California Polytechnic State University.

For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com.

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