New Books in History

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Teresa Bergman of the University of the Pacific on The Commemoration of Women in the United States: Remembering Women in Public Space (Routledge, 2019). Examining the public memorialization of women in the US over the past century, with a particular focus on the late twentieth century and early twenty first, the book includes six case examples of memorialization, and explores broad themes of cultural representation.

Bergman argues that the construction, or relocation, of a series of prominent national memorials together form a significant moment of change in the ways in which women are commemorated in the US. The historic and present-day challenges facing such commemoration are examined, with reference to broader political debates.

The case examples explored are the Women in the Military Service for America Memorial; the Women’s Rights National Historic Park; the Vietnam Veterans Women’s Memorial; the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park; the Eleanor Roosevelt Statue in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial; and the Portrait Monument of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Providing insightful and grounded analysis of the history and practice of the commemoration of women in the US, this book makes useful reading for a range of scholars and students in subjects including heritage studies, communication studies, and history.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this interview and the book The Commemoration of Women in the United States.

Connect with the author @tbergman on Twitter and @teresa.bergman on Facebook.

Connect with your host @rhetoriclee on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Gmail. 

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Dr. Hilde Løvdal Stephens is a Visiting Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her first book is titled Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home (University of Alabama Press, 2019).

In it, Dr. Løvdal Stephens shows how Dr. James Dobson—child psychologist, author, radio personality, and founder of the Christian conservative organization Focus on the Family—reached millions of American evangelical households and shaped the cultural sensibilities and political attitudes of the U.S. culture wars.

Most poignantly, Dr. Løvdal Stephens analyzes how Dobson and other evangelicals defined and defended the traditional family as an ideal and as a symbol in an ever-changing world.

Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.

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Many people outside China, and indeed many urbanites living in the country, rarely think about its vast rural areas. Yet today’s People’s Republic in many ways owes existence to the countryside where, seven and more decades ago, a rural revolution brought the new state into people’s lives, and new people under the state’s stewardship.

Brian DeMare’s highly engaging Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2019) tells the story of this revolution, and indeed shows how the process was itself a story. Key to the psychological, political and economic transformations which unfolded in China’s million villages in the 1940s and ‘50s was a powerful narrative impulse – a Maoist “script” for revolution which gave shape to often chaotic and violent events. Untangling this script – and the relationship between the “literal and the literary” as DeMare puts it – is key to interpreting this formative cataclysm of the PRC’s recent past. 

Professor Brian DeMare specializes in modern Chinese history. A cultural historian studying the Communist Party's great enterprise, Professor DeMare researches how Chinese citizens have negotiated with the politicization of their everyday lives.

Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. 

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In Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (Columbia University Press, 2020), Minou Arjomand provides a startling account of the many intersections between theatre and trials in Germany and the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Through case studies of Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, and Edwin Piscator, Arjomand explores the use of trials as a theatrical form, as well as what theatre theory might tell us about political justice.

In doing so, Arjomand demonstrates that calling a trail theatrical is not a criticism but merely a starting point. In considering what type of justice is possible in a trial, we must ask what theatrical conventions are being used, and to what ends. Arjomand’s book both allows us to see pivotal theatrical artists in a new light and poses profound questions about the nature of theatre itself.

Andy Boyd  is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at [email protected].

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This book by renowned Professor of History Jeremy Black presents an insightful and hugely entertaining exploration of the political and cultural context of the Bond books and films. In The World of James Bond: The Lives and Times of 007 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Jeremy Black offers a historian’s interpretation from the perspective of the 21st century, assessing James Bond in terms of the greatly changing world order of the Bond years—a lifetime that stretches from 1953, when the first novel appeared, to the present. Black argues that the Bond novels—the Flemng books as well as the often-neglected novels authored by others after Fleming died in 1964—and films drew on popular fears and anxieties in order to reduce the implausibility of the villains and their villainy.

The novels and films also presented potent images of national character, explored the rapidly changing relationship between a declining Britain and an ascendant United States, charted the course of the Cold War and the subsequent post-1990 world, and offered an evolving but always potent demonology. Bond was, and still is, an important aspect of post–World War II popular culture throughout the Western world. This was particularly so after Hollywood commenced the Bond film series,

thus making him not only a character designed for the American film market but also a world product and a figure of globalization. Professor Black's well-informed and well-argued analysis provides a fascinating history of the enduring and evolving appeal of the character of James Bond.

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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Today we are joined by Allan Downey, Associate Professor of History and Indigenous Studies at McMaster University, and author of The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood (University of British Columbia Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of lacrosse, the cultural genocide of North America’s indigenous nations, and the games use as a site of empowerment and resistance.

In The Creator’s Game, Downey examines the role that lacrosse played and continues to play in the construction of settler-colonial and indigenous identity in Canada. He illustrates the way that the Canadian settler-colonial state appropriated the indigenous tradition of lacrosse to help promote white, masculine identities in the 19th century and how First Nation’s people used the game at the same time to reassert their own notions of indigenous identity, including ideas of pan-indigeneity and nested sovereignty.

Downey’s work relies upon a wide range of sources including archival documents, extensive secondary source materials, and oral histories. He also makes use of indigenous epistemologies, taking seriously creation stories, medicine rituals, and the orenta power of physical objects. Throughout he mobilizes new methodologies as a way of explaining the special role of lacrosse among indigenous communities, including writing his own subjectivity as an indigenous person and lacrosse player into his history with chapter framing conversations with the trickster/transformer Usdas.

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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The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. 

The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020) tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once taught as a natural process. 

Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to John Dewey’s vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century—but their organic account was not to last.

Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful. 

This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science’s power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question. 

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here. 

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Every great book has a great backstory. In Joe Geisner’s new edited work, Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books (Signature Books, 2020), well-known historians describe their journeys of writing books that have influenced our understanding of the Mormon past, offering an unprecedented glimpse into why they wrote these important works.

Writing Mormon History is a must-read for anyone interested in Mormonism--historians, students of history, scholars, and aspiring authors. The volume’s contributors are: Polly Aird, Will Bagley, Todd Compton, Brian Hales, Melvin Johnson, William MacKinnon, Linda King Newell, Gregory Prince, D. Michael Quinn, Craig Smith, George D. Smith, Vickie Cleverley Speek, Susan Staker, Daniel Stone, John Turner

The majority of the essays appear here for the first time.

Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American religious history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books, 2018). He has taught history courses at the University of Detroit Mercy and Florida Atlantic University, and currently, he works as a research archivist for a private library/archive in Detroit, Michigan. 

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Is modern racism a product of secularization and the decline of Christian universalism? The debate has raged for decades, but up to now, the actual racial views of historical atheists and freethinkers have never been subjected to a systematic analysis. 

In his new book, Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914, Nathan Alexander sets out to correct the oversight. The book centres on Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when popular atheist movements were emerging and skepticism about the truth of Christianity was becoming widespread. 

This newly embraced secularization created a paradox. How could Western civilization represent the pinnacle of human progress, as most white atheists accepted, when the majority of these societies still believed in Christianity? The result of this tension was a profound ambivalence regarding issues of racial and civilizational superiority. At times, white atheists assented to scientific racism and hierarchical conceptions of civilization; at others, they denounced racial prejudice and spoke favorably of non-white, non-Western civilizations.  

Covering racial and evolutionary science, imperialism, slavery, and racial prejudice in theory and practice, Alexander’s book provides a much-needed account of the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas espoused by the transatlantic community of atheists and freethinkers. It also reflects on the social dimension of irreligiousness, exploring how working-class atheists’ experiences of exclusion could make them sympathetic to other marginalized groups. 

Nathan Alexander is a Canadian historian, researching the history of race and racism, and the history of atheism and secularization. He finished his PhD at the University of St Andrews in the UK and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies with the University of Erfurt, Germany.  

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. 

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Today we are joined by Allan Downey, Associate Professor of History and Indigenous Studies at McMaster University, and author of The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood (University of British Columbia Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of lacrosse, the cultural genocide of North America’s indigenous nations, and the games use as a site of empowerment and resistance.

In The Creator’s Game, Downey examines the role that lacrosse played and continues to play in the construction of settler-colonial and indigenous identity in Canada. He illustrates the way that the Canadian settler-colonial state appropriated the indigenous tradition of lacrosse to help promote white, masculine identities in the 19th century and how First Nation’s people used the game at the same time to reassert their own notions of indigenous identity, including ideas of pan-indigeneity and nested sovereignty.

Downey’s work relies upon a wide range of sources including archival documents, extensive secondary source materials, and oral histories. He also makes use of indigenous epistemologies, taking seriously creation stories, medicine rituals, and the orenta power of physical objects. Throughout he mobilizes new methodologies as a way of explaining the special role of lacrosse among indigenous communities, including writing his own subjectivity as an indigenous person and lacrosse player into his history with chapter framing conversations with the trickster/transformer Usdas.

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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