New Books in History

By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains a controversial cosmetic practice. Lynn M. Thomas’ new book, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Duke University Press, 2020), investigates what she calls its “layered history.” Focused principally on South Africa, the book quickly makes evident how closely connected skin lightening is to the history of the United States and other parts of the African continent. Over the course of the twentieth century, and particularly in the context of minority rule in South Africa, skin lighteners have raised thorny debates about race, respectability and self-regard. Thomas examines these questions but shows how class and gender intersect with race to complicate our understanding of who brightens, and why. A complex history of capitalism, medicine, media and technology informs Thomas’ intimate portrayal of these perilous cosmetics. Beneath the Surface is a deeply social history of a singularly fraught commodity.

Dr. Elisa Prosperetti teaches African and global history at SciencesPo Paris. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at www.elisaprosperetti.net.

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We are all familiar with the story of how in early 1919 heads of state and diplomats from around the world came to Paris to negotiate a peace settlement with a defeated Germany and its allies. Many of us are aware of how nationalists such as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, the future Hồ Chí Minh, tried to gain access to the official meetings. But far fewer of us know of the roles played of activist women such as the French Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger, the African American Ida Gibbs Hunt, and the Chinese Soumay Tcheng.

In her new book Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights After the First World (Columbia University Press, 2020), Professor Mona L. Siegel explores the previously neglected history of a diverse group of women from around the world who fought for women’s rights as male politicians forged a new world order. Written like a true global history, Peace on Our Terms links the meeting rooms of Paris to street demonstrations in Cairo to the revolutionary underworld of Shanghai. Not only does Siegel gender the history of 1919, but she also offers a serious critique of traditional narratives of the American women’s movement by bringing in issues of race and class. Based on her research in archives in several countries on both sides of the Atlantic, Siegel explores troves of previously untouched documents. This is a scholarly work written in a style accessible for a general audience.

Mona L. Siegel of Sacramento State University earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2004, she published The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940 with Cambridge University Press. In addition to awards from the Peace History Society and the History of Education Society, Siegel received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for research on feminist activism and peace negotiations after World War One.

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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Alberto Harambour's new book Soberanías Fronterizas. Estados y capital en la colonización de Patagonia (Argentina y Chile, 1840s-1920s) (Universidad Austral de Chile, 2019) examines the explosion of foreign-owned sheep farming, the fitful expansion of Argentine and Chilean sovereignty, and the violence of primitive accumulation and genocide in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Soberanías Fronterizas wrestles with the multiple and competing sovereignties articulated during the Age of Empire, Latin America’s export boom, and the dispossession of autonomous indigenous peoples through settler colonialism. It asks how, over the course of less than a century, this vast territory described by Europeans and outsiders as inhospitable, unknowable, and uninhabited, came to be a wildly profitable export enclave.

Harambous uncovers how foreign (predominantly British) capital came into possession of millions of hectares of land for sheep raising, effectively establishing sovereign control at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants, Chile, and Argentina. To do this, he reconstructs how foreign investors, merchants, and elites and politicians in Santiago and Buenos Aires built networks of corruption to facilitate land acquisitions, infrastructural improvements, and immigration of labourers. This process, however, was anything but smooth. It came through violence (extermination of Fueginos such as the Selknam, extreme military repression of labour movements, and sheep latifundista resistance to customs).

Jesse Zarley is assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where he teaches Latin American, Caribbean, and Global History. His research interests include the Mapuche, borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of revolution, particularly in Chile and Río de la Plata. Heis the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Paige Glotzer is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. How the Suburbs Were Segregated examines the history surrounding how modern housing segregation was purposefully planned out beginning at the turn of the 20th Century. Looking at the intersection of transnational finance, suburban developers, and local, regional, and federal policymaking, Glotzer illustrates the myriad of people and institutions involved in simultaneously creating the idea of the modern suburb and racializing housing.

Paige Glotzer is an Assistant Professor of history and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains a controversial cosmetic practice. Lynn M. Thomas’ new book, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Duke University Press, 2020), investigates what she calls its “layered history.” Focused principally on South Africa, the book quickly makes evident how closely connected skin lightening is to the history of the United States and other parts of the African continent. Over the course of the twentieth century, and particularly in the context of minority rule in South Africa, skin lighteners have raised thorny debates about race, respectability and self-regard. Thomas examines these questions but shows how class and gender intersect with race to complicate our understanding of who brightens, and why. A complex history of capitalism, medicine, media and technology informs Thomas’ intimate portrayal of these perilous cosmetics. Beneath the Surface is a deeply social history of a singularly fraught commodity.

Dr. Elisa Prosperetti teaches African and global history at SciencesPo Paris. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at www.elisaprosperetti.net.

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In Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration (Cornell University Press 2018), Robert C. McGreevey explores the contested meaning and limits of citizenship for Puerto Ricans from the late nineteenth century to the late 1930s. This timely monograph brings together legal, cultural, and labour history to understand the complicated ways that Puerto Ricans on the island and on the US mainland challenged racialized notions of fitness for citizenship. The narrative that results from such an approach presents US power as a dynamic, contested, and transnational. This monograph suggests the deep historical resonances between the early history of US formal control of the island and the contemporary second-class status of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. McGreevey’s monograph will interest scholars of the United States in the world, legal historians, historians of Latin America, and historians of migration.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at [email protected] and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

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We are all familiar with the story of how in early 1919 heads of state and diplomats from around the world came to Paris to negotiate a peace settlement with a defeated Germany and its allies. Many of us are aware of how nationalists such as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, the future Hồ Chí Minh, tried to gain access to the official meetings. But far fewer of us know of the roles played of activist women such as the French Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger, the African American Ida Gibbs Hunt, and the Chinese Soumay Tcheng.

In her new book Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights After the First World (Columbia University Press, 2020), Professor Mona L. Siegel explores the previously neglected history of a diverse group of women from around the world who fought for women’s rights as male politicians forged a new world order. Written like a true global history, Peace on Our Terms links the meeting rooms of Paris to street demonstrations in Cairo to the revolutionary underworld of Shanghai. Not only does Siegel gender the history of 1919, but she also offers a serious critique of traditional narratives of the American women’s movement by bringing in issues of race and class. Based on her research in archives in several countries on both sides of the Atlantic, Siegel explores troves of previously untouched documents. This is a scholarly work written in a style accessible for a general audience.

Mona L. Siegel of Sacramento State University earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2004, she published The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940 with Cambridge University Press. In addition to awards from the Peace History Society and the History of Education Society, Siegel received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for research on feminist activism and peace negotiations after World War One.

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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At Newman I co-teach a class titled "The Holocaust and its Legacies." I teach the course with a Professor of Theology and it's designed to help students understand the ways in which the Holocaust shaped the world they live in. It is, in a sense, designed to help students gain insight.

John K. Roth's new book Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide (Cascade Books, 2020) may become a required text in this course.  His book is different than, I think, any other books I’ve discussed on the show. It is a reflection, a tribute, and perhaps a kind of valedictory all at once. John reflects on the people who have taught him, in all the different ways teaching can happen, and the lessons that he’s learned over decades of thinking and writing about the Holocaust. In doing so, he offers the reader an insight both into his own development and into the way historians, theologians, philosophers and artists have responded to the Holocaust over time.

It's a revealing book, sober, reflective and occasionally inspiring. Roth offers us an intellectual biography that puts his other work into context. But he also challenges his readers to be better scholars and better people while recognizing the world is far too big for one person to change.

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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Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged the country during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. TB was a plague of epic proportions in industrializing Japan, particularly affecting young women workers in the new textile factories. These marginalized laborers, many from rural villages, were not a priority for Japan’s first modern administrations, who focused their energies elsewhere and left the welfare of tuberculosis patients to the private sector. The opening left by this choice was filled by American evangelicals, who saw an opportunity to advance their missionary work in Japan.

Perelman identifies a kind of twinned moral entrepreneurship, arguing that a tacit agreement was hammered out between the two sides, with the government accepting the evangelical groups’ assistance with this public health emergency in exchange for noninterference in their efforts to spread Christianity. The history of TB in Japan is well studied and understood, but American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan breathes new life into this old story by its attention to different actors and dynamics. It will be of interest not only to scholars of Japanese and East Asian history and culture, but also to historians of science, medicine and public health, and Christianity.

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Romeo Guzman's and his colleague's East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers University Press, 2020) is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history.

East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives-stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labour organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.

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