New Books in History

David A. Bateman’s fascinating new book opens with a puzzle. In 19th-century America, why was mass democratization – abolishing property and tax qualifications – accompanied by the mass disenfranchisement of black, male citizens? The book highlights the importance of understanding democratization as both a process of extending political rights and a deliberate effort to change the composition and character of a particular community. Democratization is not simply a neutral set of procedures but a conflict over people-making and Bateman explores the political importance of these narratives with both a deep dive into the American case and two complementary case studies: the United Kingdom and France in the early and late 19th century.

Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the US, the UK, and France (Cambridge University Press, 2020) first explores democratization at the time of the American revolution – finding that democratization was neither connected to disenfranchisement nor focused on race. But, in the early Republic, bi-sectional factions within the Jeffersonian coalition contested black citizenship and the necessity of a white man’s republic. Understanding both the revolutionary and early republican narratives clarifies the mass disenfranchisement of black men in the antebellum period. Chapters on the United Kingdom and France explore the power of political narrative and the construction of “The Other” based on religion, gender, and class. Bateman connects all three cases to contemporary narratives of “real Americans” or “make American great again” arguing that these are new examples of how “the people” can be reconfigured to create hierarchies of worth.

Disenfranchising Democracy won the American Political Science Association’s J. David Greenstone Award for the best book in history and politics. The podcast includes a trenchant analysis of New Jersey as a radical leader in democratization – for free people of color and independent property-owning women.

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).

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David A. Bateman’s fascinating new book opens with a puzzle. In 19th-century America, why was mass democratization – abolishing property and tax qualifications – accompanied by the mass disenfranchisement of black, male citizens? The book highlights the importance of understanding democratization as both a process of extending political rights and a deliberate effort to change the composition and character of a particular community. Democratization is not simply a neutral set of procedures but a conflict over people-making and Bateman explores the political importance of these narratives with both a deep dive into the American case and two complementary case studies: the United Kingdom and France in the early and late 19th century.

Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the US, the UK, and France (Cambridge University Press, 2020) first explores democratization at the time of the American revolution – finding that democratization was neither connected to disenfranchisement nor focused on race. But, in the early Republic, bi-sectional factions within the Jeffersonian coalition contested black citizenship and the necessity of a white man’s republic. Understanding both the revolutionary and early republican narratives clarifies the mass disenfranchisement of black men in the antebellum period. Chapters on the United Kingdom and France explore the power of political narrative and the construction of “The Other” based on religion, gender, and class. Bateman connects all three cases to contemporary narratives of “real Americans” or “make American great again” arguing that these are new examples of how “the people” can be reconfigured to create hierarchies of worth.

Disenfranchising Democracy won the American Political Science Association’s J. David Greenstone Award for the best book in history and politics. The podcast includes a trenchant analysis of New Jersey as a radical leader in democratization – for free people of color and independent property-owning women.

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).

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Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health traces the life of pharmaceuticals in Vietnam under French rule. In The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Laurence Monnais examines the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, looking at both circulation and consumption, considering access to drugs and the existence of multiple therapeutic options in a colonial context. She argues that colonialism was crucial to the worldwide diffusion of modern medicines and speaks to contemporary concerns regarding over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, drug toxicity, self-medication, and the accessibility of effective medicines. Retracing the steps by which pharmaceuticals were produced and distributed, readers meet the many players in the process, from colonial doctors to private pharmacists, from consumers to various drug traders and healers. Yet this is not primarily a history of medicines as objects of colonial science, but rather a history of medicines as tools of social change.

Laurence Monnais is a Professor of History at the University of Montreal.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

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"The intellectual historian has to start with the words." – Richard Whatmore, What is Intellectual History?

When political theorists write about the principle of popular power, that is, who are the people and what kind of power do they have – the language of ‘constituent power’ is a key concept in this regard. In her new book, Constituent Power: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Lucia Rubinelli, a researcher in the history of political thought at Robinson College, Cambridge, retraces a history of the language of constituent power. Her book examines five key moments from Sieyes and the French Revolution, Schmitt over the Weimar Republic era, Arendt’s thought into the 1960s as well as less recognizable European jurists of the 19th and 20th centuries – all theorizing through these two words an understanding of popular power as an alternative notion to sovereignty as understood in their own contingent historical moments.

This is the latest book in Cambridge University Press’s renowned ‘Ideas in Context’ series, as this well-researched thesis illuminates the history of key institutions of modern democracy from representation, electoral systems and constitutional courts among others in relation to the language of constituent power. Professor Rubinelli’s analysis brings to life what amounts to an intellectual history of the pivotal reinterpretations of Sieyes’s political thought and confirming with a flourish what Whatmore made clear in his book on intellectual history – "…it has to start with the words."

Lucia Rubinelli is a junior research fellow in Robinson College at the University of Cambridge.

Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai.

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Anne Heffernan's new book Limpopo’s Legacy, Student Politics and Democracy in South Africa (James Currey, 2019) is a thoroughly researched account of the Black Consciousness Movement, student activism, and politics in South Africa from the 1960s to the present. Heffernan focuses specifically on black student activism at the University of the North at Turfloop, a rural university in the Northern Transvaal, the modern-day Limpopo province. She compellingly argues that rural uprisings shaped politics nationally as contestations between university students, administrators, and apartheid officials escalated. Heffernan importantly demonstrates that these confrontations and the bureaucratic responses to them assisted the diffusion of radical politics nation-wide, especially in the years leading up to the Soweto Uprisings of 1976.

Heffernan’s biographical sketches of William Kgware, Abram Tiro, Julius Malema, Peter Mokaba, and others outline the political legacies and imprints that residents, students, and activists from Limpopo had and continue to have on post-apartheid politics. In extending her investigation to include student and youth politics after Soweto, Heffernan explores how politics in the Northern Transvaal remained central to national contestations between Black Consciousness and ANC-aligned youth groups throughout the 1980s. Heffernan’s unwavering focus on Limpopo reframes our understanding of national politics and student activists’ central role in shaping them. Limpopo’s Legacy is a foundational text that provides the historical context for understanding contemporary student movements and electoral politics in South Africa today.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of his work and the sources for his rich literary worlds often defy easy assessment. In The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), Carl Rollyson uses both an extensive range of archival collections and Faulkner’s wide-ranging literary output to assess the author’s life and the development of his many famous works. Growing up in Mississippi, young William absorbed his family’s tales and the larger history of the region to which it was tied. Yet it took Faulkner’s journeys outside of his community – first to Canada to train as a pilot for the Royal Air Force, then his extended visits to New York and Europe – to gain the perspective necessary to best use them in his writing. After an early foray into poetry Faulkner focused on writing prose, emerging by the end of the 1920s as an acclaimed author of novels and short stories. As Rollyson shows, this fame brought Faulkner to Hollywood, where he demonstrated quickly his ability to write as well for the rapidly emerging medium of talking pictures. 

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"The intellectual historian has to start with the words." – Richard Whatmore, What is Intellectual History?

When political theorists write about the principle of popular power, that is, who are the people and what kind of power do they have – the language of ‘constituent power’ is a key concept in this regard. In her new book, Constituent Power: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Lucia Rubinelli, a researcher in the history of political thought at Robinson College, Cambridge, retraces a history of the language of constituent power. Her book examines five key moments from Sieyes and the French Revolution, Schmitt over the Weimar Republic era, Arendt’s thought into the 1960s as well as less recognizable European jurists of the 19th and 20th centuries – all theorizing through these two words an understanding of popular power as an alternative notion to sovereignty as understood in their own contingent historical moments.

This is the latest book in Cambridge University Press’s renowned ‘Ideas in Context’ series, as this well-researched thesis illuminates the history of key institutions of modern democracy from representation, electoral systems and constitutional courts among others in relation to the language of constituent power. Professor Rubinelli’s analysis brings to life what amounts to an intellectual history of the pivotal reinterpretations of Sieyes’s political thought and confirming with a flourish what Whatmore made clear in his book on intellectual history – "…it has to start with the words."

Lucia Rubinelli is a junior research fellow in Robinson College at the University of Cambridge.

Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Anne Heffernan's new book Limpopo’s Legacy, Student Politics and Democracy in South Africa (James Currey, 2019) is a thoroughly researched account of the Black Consciousness Movement, student activism, and politics in South Africa from the 1960s to the present. Heffernan focuses specifically on black student activism at the University of the North at Turfloop, a rural university in the Northern Transvaal, the modern-day Limpopo province. She compellingly argues that rural uprisings shaped politics nationally as contestations between university students, administrators, and apartheid officials escalated. Heffernan importantly demonstrates that these confrontations and the bureaucratic responses to them assisted the diffusion of radical politics nation-wide, especially in the years leading up to the Soweto Uprisings of 1976.

Heffernan’s biographical sketches of William Kgware, Abram Tiro, Julius Malema, Peter Mokaba, and others outline the political legacies and imprints that residents, students, and activists from Limpopo had and continue to have on post-apartheid politics. In extending her investigation to include student and youth politics after Soweto, Heffernan explores how politics in the Northern Transvaal remained central to national contestations between Black Consciousness and ANC-aligned youth groups throughout the 1980s. Heffernan’s unwavering focus on Limpopo reframes our understanding of national politics and student activists’ central role in shaping them. Limpopo’s Legacy is a foundational text that provides the historical context for understanding contemporary student movements and electoral politics in South Africa today.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall

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

Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health traces the life of pharmaceuticals in Vietnam under French rule. In The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Laurence Monnais examines the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, looking at both circulation and consumption, considering access to drugs and the existence of multiple therapeutic options in a colonial context. She argues that colonialism was crucial to the worldwide diffusion of modern medicines and speaks to contemporary concerns regarding over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, drug toxicity, self-medication, and the accessibility of effective medicines. Retracing the steps by which pharmaceuticals were produced and distributed, readers meet the many players in the process, from colonial doctors to private pharmacists, from consumers to various drug traders and healers. Yet this is not primarily a history of medicines as objects of colonial science, but rather a history of medicines as tools of social change.

Laurence Monnais is a Professor of History at the University of Montreal.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of his work and the sources for his rich literary worlds often defy easy assessment. In The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), Carl Rollyson uses both an extensive range of archival collections and Faulkner’s wide-ranging literary output to assess the author’s life and the development of his many famous works. Growing up in Mississippi, young William absorbed his family’s tales and the larger history of the region to which it was tied. Yet it took Faulkner’s journeys outside of his community – first to Canada to train as a pilot for the Royal Air Force, then his extended visits to New York and Europe – to gain the perspective necessary to best use them in his writing. After an early foray into poetry Faulkner focused on writing prose, emerging by the end of the 1920s as an acclaimed author of novels and short stories. As Rollyson shows, this fame brought Faulkner to Hollywood, where he demonstrated quickly his ability to write as well for the rapidly emerging medium of talking pictures. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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