New Books in History

Kenesha N. Grant, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University, at the beginning of her new book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century (Temple University Press, 2020), poses a question to consider in context of trying to understand the realignment of voters within American political parties. This question is about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities, and how this changed the political dynamics in many of the places where African Americans settled and built new lives. Grant’s examination focuses specifically on the impact in terms of politics, how and where African American individuals engaged in politics, as voters, and in running for and being elected to office. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party concentrates on three cities where the population changed and shifted given the influx of black citizens; and the political dynamics in Detroit, Chicago, and in New York City all came to reflect, in different ways, the influx of new voters and politically active citizens. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party focuses on the local, state, and national Democratic Party, since these voters were not only politically engaged at the local level, they were also able to contribute to voting blocs within states, at times making the difference in terms of the Electoral College and presidential candidacies.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party traces the changes in the political parties over the course of the 20th century, exploring the shifts of voters across parties, with specific attention to Black voters’ movement from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. Grant examines this shift in context of the movement of voters from one part of the United States to other parts of the United States, but also through the lens of how white Democratic elected officials in northern cities approached and engaged Black voters, and how both black and white citizens in these large urban centers participated in politics. Ultimately, Grant positions the Great Migration as a key dimension of some of the shifts and changes that have occurred in the parties over the past century. In tracing the political impact of the great migration, Grant also concludes her work with some analysis of the re-migration of African Americans back to the South, and how active citizens and voters may once again change the dynamics in American politics.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Today I talked to Richard McBride II about Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). The book is a comprehensive study of the Koryŏ (918-1392) Buddhist exegete, Ŭichŏn, that convey’s his life and work through letters, speeches, memorials, addresses, and poetry, from three epigraphical accounts. During a time of contention between the the doctrinal (敎) and meditation (禪) schools, Ŭich’ŏn traveled to Song (宋), China (960-1270) to study with the Huayan (華嚴) master, Jinshui Jingyuan (晉水淨源) (1011-1088). During his fourteen-month stay in China, he became well-acquainted with monks of the Huayan, Tiantai, Vinaya, Chan, and Consciousness-only schools. Upon his return to Koryŏ, he compiled the "New Catalog of the Teachings of All the Schools," the first comprehensive catalog of essays and commentaries that reflects a pan-East Asian tradition. Ŭich’ŏn has been historically associated with abandoning his affiliation with the Huayan school, and founding the Ch’ŏnt’ae (Tiantai, 天 台) order of Korean Buddhism. Despite this, letters to Master Jinshui Jingyuan, in combination with addresses to novice disciples reveal that Uicheon did not abandon Huayan thought,but advocated that all forms of doctrinal knowledge be thoroughly understood in an age of declining dharma.

Trevor McManis is a student at California State University, Stanislaus, who specializes in cultural geography with an interest in applying geographic thought to the study of East Asian Religions.

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For much of the last century, ballet class has been a rite of passage for millions of little girls in the United States. Some of these students have gone on to professional careers as dancers, but many more take class for a few years—or many years—before moving on to other pursuits. But the sheer prevalence of the experience has created an educated and appreciative audience that supports dance companies and dance training. It has also created a whole subset of “girl culture”: ballet books and films, pink tutus and sparkly tiaras, an inundation of princesses and swans.

In Ballet Class: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2020), Melissa R. Klapper explores how this phenomenon developed. From the misperception that boys never take ballet class to the racist assumption that members of a corps de ballet need to resemble one another physically, ballet has mirrored the larger society in negative respects as well as positive ones, and it has evolved together with the culture as a whole. For this and many other reasons that Klapper lays out through rich and complex analysis delivered in lively, compelling prose, the history of ballet class really does open a window onto the development of American culture between World War I and the present.

C. P. Lesley, a historian and amateur dancer, hosts New Books in Historical Fiction. Under this pen name, she also writes historical novels. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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What do you think about these days when you hear the words, “Supreme Court?” Salacious news coverage of the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh? Gushing profiles of feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg? High school and vaguely recalled lectures about cases the details of which you dutifully read (or didn’t and flunked the test on) like McCulloch v. Maryland or Marbury v. Madison?

Or, in this age on the Coronavirus and the sudden need to determine as a citizen what the respective powers of governors and presidents are in times of crisis, are you suddenly aware that a grasp of seemingly arcane terms like “enumerated powers” is imperative for each and every one of us and not just constitutional scholars?

Are you suddenly out of a job and thinking now of attending law school and are not sure you could master the material? Have you suddenly found yourself homeschooling a bright late adolescent in need of a text and an associated online resource about the key legal cases that have determined our destiny as a nation and affect virtually every aspect of our individual lives? Do you simply want a solid but approachable book that provides vignettes of crucial moments of American legal, social and political history? Want to know under what pretexts a local government can seize your house?

Have I got the book and online study guide for you: An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know (Wolter Kluwer, 2019) by Josh Blackman and Randy E. Barnett—published in 2019. Randy Barnett is one of the leading constitutional scholars of our time. He and his co-author Blackman have boiled down to a handy hundred what they believe are the cases that most matter—some of which are notorious (or what they term, “anti-canonical”). Let’s see if you agree with their picks. Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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In his book Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford University Press 2016), Victor Uribe-Urán compares the cases of Spain, and the late-colonial societies of Mexico and Colombia, in a historical moment characterized by corporate patriarchy and enlightened punishment. Focusing on crimes of spousal murders, Uribe-Urán asks intriguing questions: who were the men and women that committed these crimes, and what were their reasons for doing so? How did the law, both royal and ecclesiastical, responded to such murders? In which instances did the monarch decide to forgive or show leniency, and when did justice opt for harsher punishment?

In answering these questions, Uribe-Urán challenges some traditional notions of how honor is supposed to work in Iberian societies. Also, he contributes to a growing scholarship that demonstrates that far from being secluded in their homes, women in colonial Spanish America had active public lives. This book is a fascinating read for those interested in Atlantic history, and also, for those who want to understand the long history of domestic and gender violence. As Uribe-Urán tells us by the end, domestic violence is the most widespread human right’s violations today; histories of this phenomenon, widespread and pervasive, are necessary for our contemporary quest for truly making domestic violence the serious crime that it really is.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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The history of the Caribbean Island of Trinidad bears witness to an important interplay between the religious practices of peoples of South Asian and those of peoples of African descent, and in particular the manner in which colonial religious categories shaped that interplay. In The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Alexander Rocklin draws on colonial archives and ethnographic work in this pioneering examination of the realities of indentured workers in colonial Trinidad wherein he illuminates in tandem the roots of the Caribbean Hindu diaspora and the very roots of Hinduism itself and its status as a World Religion. Join us on the follow up interview on Rocklin’s fascinating findings.

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

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In the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay on foot in human caravans thousands of people long. Recently, images of a similar scale of deprivation have resurfaced in India as the COVID-19 crisis has once again forced the laboring poor to migrate in duress, this time in the opposite direction from city to country.

Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington Press, 2019) seems like a book written to explain precisely this moment. It asks: how can we understand the relationship between “the city” and its laboring poor? Inaugurating a paradigm shift in how we think of cities and urban space, the author Sheetal Chhabria argues that cities are not naturally occurring spaces or innocent administrative categories marked by lines on a map: instead they are spaced produced by constant labors of inclusion and exclusion which serve to keep capital flowing while stigmatizing the laboring poor. The book shows how “the wellbeing of the city–rather than of its people” took precedence starting in the late 19th century, thereby “positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded” rather than as constitutive parts of city space.

This argument is crucial. It shows that the injustices faced by the laboring poor are not mistakes or signs of incomplete or failed urbanism. Those injustices are instead the very essence of what it means to mark a space as a “city.” Combining theoretical acuity and empirical depth with an abiding concern for economic justice, the book takes us on a journey through colonial Bombay as it lurched from crisis to crisis at the turn of the 20th century: poverty, famine, plague, and political unrest. In this volatile climate, it was the continual appeals to the “health of the city” which served to render class warfare subterranean, to generate consensus on anti-poor measures across the colonial divide, and to invent a stigmatized object called “the slum” which could be used as a perpetual foil to the city, making the results of deep capitalist inequality (poverty, unsanitary dwellings, hunger) appear instead like vestiges of an incompletely capitalist society which could then be further commercialized. This book is a must read for everyone interested in urban, housing, and economic justice, as well as for scholars of South Asia concerned with the subcontinent’s enduring inequalities.

Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India.

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Despite a reign that lasted for over two decades, the Mughal emperor Jahangir has often been regarded as a weak ruler who was hobbled by his addictions and dominated in his later years by his wife Nur Jahan. As Lisa Balabanlilar reveals in The Emperor Jahangir: Power and Kingship in Mughal India (I. B. Tauris, 2020), this portrayal often exaggerates Jahangir’s defects and glosses over many important aspects of his rule. Much of this this distortion, she notes, originated with his memoir, in which Jahangir was often frank in his assessment of his own failings. This was exploited by his son and successor, Shah Jahan, who sought to justify his rebellion against his father late in Jahangir’s reign once he ascended to the throne. Balabanlilar shows how this image obscures important aspects of the workings of the Mughal emperorship during the early 17th century. These she uncovers by examining Jahangir’s court, his empire’s relations with other kingdoms, and his patronage of the arts, revealing him in the process as a more capable and consequential monarch than his traditional depiction allows.

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In his book Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford University Press 2016), Victor Uribe-Urán compares the cases of Spain, and the late-colonial societies of Mexico and Colombia, in a historical moment characterized by corporate patriarchy and enlightened punishment. Focusing on crimes of spousal murders, Uribe-Urán asks intriguing questions: who were the men and women that committed these crimes, and what were their reasons for doing so? How did the law, both royal and ecclesiastical, responded to such murders? In which instances did the monarch decide to forgive or show leniency, and when did justice opt for harsher punishment?

In answering these questions, Uribe-Urán challenges some traditional notions of how honor is supposed to work in Iberian societies. Also, he contributes to a growing scholarship that demonstrates that far from being secluded in their homes, women in colonial Spanish America had active public lives. This book is a fascinating read for those interested in Atlantic history, and also, for those who want to understand the long history of domestic and gender violence. As Uribe-Urán tells us by the end, domestic violence is the most widespread human right’s violations today; histories of this phenomenon, widespread and pervasive, are necessary for our contemporary quest for truly making domestic violence the serious crime that it really is.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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

The history of the Caribbean Island of Trinidad bears witness to an important interplay between the religious practices of peoples of South Asian and those of peoples of African descent, and in particular the manner in which colonial religious categories shaped that interplay. In The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Alexander Rocklin draws on colonial archives and ethnographic work in this pioneering examination of the realities of indentured workers in colonial Trinidad wherein he illuminates in tandem the roots of the Caribbean Hindu diaspora and the very roots of Hinduism itself and its status as a World Religion. Join us on the follow up interview on Rocklin’s fascinating findings.

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

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