New Books in History

How best to teach history and, for that matter any social science subject, to college students? The traditional answer has been to lecture them. Given that the typical length of an attentive lecture-listener is about 15 minutes, this might not be the best way to get the job done.

Beginning in the late 1990s, a group of professors offered another technique now called "Reacting to the Past." You can read all about it here. Essentially, the "Reacting" technique asks students to play the roles of historical actors and to re-enact particular events and situations. The instructors using the method have had great success.

Today I talked to Kelly McFall, a "Reacting" practitioner, about the techniques and his experience using it. McFall created a "Reacting" module called The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations, and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994 (W. W. Norton, 2018). In the interview, McFall talks about how the particular modules are created, how they are used in the classroom, and how any college teacher can become involved in creating new modules.

Here are some resources for those interested in using "Reacting" series and getting involved in creating new modules.

--The "Reacting to the Past" website is here.

--The publisher's (W. W. Norton) website on the "Reacting to the Past" series is here.

--The "Reacting to the Past" Facebook group is here.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]

 

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America’s most famous hymn was created in very unusual circumstances. Julia Ward Howe had travelled close to the front line and had witnessed a skirmish between Union and Confederate troops. Returning to her hotel, she entered a reverie, and, as she later explained it, was inspired to write new lyrics to a popular marching song. Her new composition – subsequently entitled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” – described an almost apocalyptic intervention in which the evil of slavery would be thoroughly defeated. But the song took on a life of its own. Taken up in new causes, and internationally, the song that pronounced divine vengeance on the southern armies was considered as a national anthem for the United States before becoming an anthem for international peace. In this episode, we are joined by Richard M. Gamble, the Anna Margaret Ross Alexander Professor of History and Politics at Hillsdale College, MI, to talk about his outstanding new work, A Fiery Gospel: The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War (Cornell University Press, 2019).

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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America’s most famous hymn was created in very unusual circumstances. Julia Ward Howe had travelled close to the front line and had witnessed a skirmish between Union and Confederate troops. Returning to her hotel, she entered a reverie, and, as she later explained it, was inspired to write new lyrics to a popular marching song. Her new composition – subsequently entitled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” – described an almost apocalyptic intervention in which the evil of slavery would be thoroughly defeated. But the song took on a life of its own. Taken up in new causes, and internationally, the song that pronounced divine vengeance on the southern armies was considered as a national anthem for the United States before becoming an anthem for international peace. In this episode, we are joined by Richard M. Gamble, the Anna Margaret Ross Alexander Professor of History and Politics at Hillsdale College, MI, to talk about his outstanding new work, A Fiery Gospel: The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War (Cornell University Press, 2019).

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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

How best to teach history and, for that matter any social science subject, to college students? The traditional answer has been to lecture them. Given that the typical length of an attentive lecture-listener is about 15 minutes, this might not be the best way to get the job done.

Beginning in the late 1990s, a group of professors offered another technique now called "Reacting to the Past." You can read all about it here. Essentially, the "Reacting" technique asks students to play the roles of historical actors and to re-enact particular events and situations. The instructors using the method have had great success.

Today I talked to Kelly McFall, a "Reacting" practitioner, about the techniques and his experience using it. McFall created a "Reacting" module called The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations, and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994 (W. W. Norton, 2018). In the interview, McFall talks about how the particular modules are created, how they are used in the classroom, and how any college teacher can become involved in creating new modules.

Here are some resources for those interested in using "Reacting" series and getting involved in creating new modules.

--The "Reacting to the Past" website is here.

--The publisher's (W. W. Norton) website on the "Reacting to the Past" series is here.

--The "Reacting to the Past" Facebook group is here.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]

 

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

Cassia Roth's new book A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2020) examines women's reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the onset of republicanism in 1889, women's reproductive capabilities―their ability to conceive and raise future citizens and laborers―became critical to the expansion of the new Brazilian state. Analyzing court cases, law, medical writings, and health data, Cassia Roth argues that the state's approach to women's health in the early twentieth century focused on criminalizing fertility control without improving services or outcomes for women. Ultimately, the increasingly interventionist state fostered a culture of condemnation around poor women's reproduction that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination.

By tracing how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and clinical practice, how obstetricians, public health officials, and legal practitioners approached fertility control, and how women experienced and negotiated their reproductive lives, A Miscarriage of Justice provides a new way of interpreting the intertwined histories of gender, race, reproduction, and the state―and shows how these questions continue to reverberate in debates over reproductive rights and women's health in Brazil today.

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Katherine Franke’s ambitious new book challenges Americans to face our collective responsibility for ongoing racial inequality. Rather than fall back on what Franke calls a “palliative history” that emphasizes granting freedom and rights after the Civil War, Franke insists that Americans acknowledge the failure to provide any meaningful reparation to formerly enslaved people in the 1860s. That failure has ongoing structural effects today.

The book replots this history through archival research on two post-war communities in which property ownership produced increased autonomy for freed people. Franke contrasts free and freed – and calls this the dangling ‘d’ the residue of enslavement. Using a myriad of primary documents from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Davis Bend, Mississippi, Franke details the successes and failures of these communities as they governed and organized their land. Repair demonstrates how government officials recognized the need for reparations (a term they used) and repair in the form of land ownership – an approach later reversed by President Johnson.

Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2020) reflects on these radical examples of 19th-century reparations in order to contribute to the modern call for reparations. For Franke, the atrocity of slavery is a festering national wound and the examples of history suggest ways in which we might funnel national wealth (though estate taxes) to a fund to empower black ownership and citizenship.

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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In his new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics.

Gavriel Rosenfeld is Professor of History in Judaic Studies at Fairfield University.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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If you haven’t been able to tell by the way I pronounce the word “about,” I should probably let you know that I’m from Canada. And I have to make a confession––growing up in Vancouver, I was fed the line that Canadian history was dull, that it lacked drama (i.e. no revolutionary war against England), and so my historical attention was always drawn to the US. It wasn’t until I was deep into college that I began to think otherwise. And, as a result, I know far too little about my country’s history.

Asa McKercher’s superb new book, Canada and the World since 1867 (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019), is a strong rebuttal to the Canadian-history-is-boring thesis. Surveying the history of Canada’s relations with the rest of the world, the book tracks Canada long decolonization from Britain, its ugly campaign against First Nations communities to take territory and move settlers westward, and how it dealt with having a superpower for a neighbour. The book should not be read, however, just by Canadians or Canadian historians, however. In examining the history of a medium-sized state’s foreign policy, McKercher’s book helps us understand how the international system itself works.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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Katherine Franke’s ambitious new book challenges Americans to face our collective responsibility for ongoing racial inequality. Rather than fall back on what Franke calls a “palliative history” that emphasizes granting freedom and rights after the Civil War, Franke insists that Americans acknowledge the failure to provide any meaningful reparation to formerly enslaved people in the 1860s. That failure has ongoing structural effects today.

The book replots this history through archival research on two post-war communities in which property ownership produced increased autonomy for freed people. Franke contrasts free and freed – and calls this the dangling ‘d’ the residue of enslavement. Using a myriad of primary documents from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Davis Bend, Mississippi, Franke details the successes and failures of these communities as they governed and organized their land. Repair demonstrates how government officials recognized the need for reparations (a term they used) and repair in the form of land ownership – an approach later reversed by President Johnson.

Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2020) reflects on these radical examples of 19th-century reparations in order to contribute to the modern call for reparations. For Franke, the atrocity of slavery is a festering national wound and the examples of history suggest ways in which we might funnel national wealth (though estate taxes) to a fund to empower black ownership and citizenship.

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).

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

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

In his new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics.

Gavriel Rosenfeld is Professor of History in Judaic Studies at Fairfield University.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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