New Books in History

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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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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Most Americans have a limited understanding of the history of segregation in the United States. While many are taught that segregation was as an institution of social control that dominated Southern society, economics, and politics from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, a much smaller proportion realize that Jim Crow policies and practices existed in cities throughout the north and west. In Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018), David G. García makes a substantial contribution to the history of segregation in the US by examining its implementation and preservation in the city of Oxnard, California from 1903 to 1974. Located about an hour north of Los Angeles, García explains how the “white architects” of Oxnard instituted segregationist policies in housing and education during the initial decades of the twentieth century, which ultimately shaped life chances and outcomes for Mexican Americans. Although de jure segregation of ethnic Mexicans was not permitted in California schools, García uncovers four strategies implemented by local power brokers to accomplish just that.

One of the unique features of segregation in Oxnard involved the “school-within-a-school model of racial separation” that was employed by city and district officials in three elementary campuses from 1903-1939. Blurring the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, García argues that the “systematic subordination” of ethnic Mexicans in Oxnard was accomplished through daily acts of “mundane racism” at the individual and institutional level. Despite efforts to normalize their marginalization, Mexican Americans did not stand idle. Rather, partnering with African Americans in a “shared struggle” against the district’s segregationist policies, parents and community activists filed and won a class-action lawsuit (Soria v. Oxnard School Board of Trustees, 1974) that proved the school board was guilty of intentional de jure segregation and ordered immediate and affirmative remedies to achieve a racially balanced school system.

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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Based on extensive field research in Turkey, Istanbul, Christopher Houston's new book Istanbul, City of the Fearless: Urban Activism, Coup D’Etat, and Memory in Turkey (University of California Press, 2020) explores social movements and the broader practices of civil society in Istanbul in the critical years before and after the 1980 military coup, the defining event in the neoliberal reengineering of the city. Bringing together developments in anthropology, urban studies, cultural geography, and social theory, Christopher Houston offers new insights into the meaning and study of urban violence, military rule, activism and spatial tactics, relations between political factions and ideologies, and political memory and commemoration. This book is both a social history and an anthropological study, investigating how activist practices and the coup not only contributed to the globalization of Istanbul beginning in the 1980s but also exerted their force and influence into the future.

Robert Elliott is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History, Duke University

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In Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement--organized by indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mestizo parishioners in Mexico's central-western Catholic heartland--the Religionero rebellion erupted in response to a series of anticlerical measures raised to constitutional status by the Lerdo government. These "Laws of Reform" decreed the full independence of Church and state, secularized marriage and burial practices, prohibited acts of public worship, and severely curtailed the Church's ability to own and administer property. A comprehensive reconstruction of the revolt and a critical reappraisal of its significance, this book places ordinary Catholics at the center of the story of Mexico's fragmented nineteenth-century secularization and Catholic revival.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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Based on extensive field research in Turkey, Istanbul, Christopher Houston's new book Istanbul, City of the Fearless: Urban Activism, Coup D’Etat, and Memory in Turkey (University of California Press, 2020) explores social movements and the broader practices of civil society in Istanbul in the critical years before and after the 1980 military coup, the defining event in the neoliberal reengineering of the city. Bringing together developments in anthropology, urban studies, cultural geography, and social theory, Christopher Houston offers new insights into the meaning and study of urban violence, military rule, activism and spatial tactics, relations between political factions and ideologies, and political memory and commemoration. This book is both a social history and an anthropological study, investigating how activist practices and the coup not only contributed to the globalization of Istanbul beginning in the 1980s but also exerted their force and influence into the future.

Robert Elliott is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History, Duke University

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

Most Americans have a limited understanding of the history of segregation in the United States. While many are taught that segregation was as an institution of social control that dominated Southern society, economics, and politics from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, a much smaller proportion realize that Jim Crow policies and practices existed in cities throughout the north and west. In Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018), David G. García makes a substantial contribution to the history of segregation in the US by examining its implementation and preservation in the city of Oxnard, California from 1903 to 1974. Located about an hour north of Los Angeles, García explains how the “white architects” of Oxnard instituted segregationist policies in housing and education during the initial decades of the twentieth century, which ultimately shaped life chances and outcomes for Mexican Americans. Although de jure segregation of ethnic Mexicans was not permitted in California schools, García uncovers four strategies implemented by local power brokers to accomplish just that.

One of the unique features of segregation in Oxnard involved the “school-within-a-school model of racial separation” that was employed by city and district officials in three elementary campuses from 1903-1939. Blurring the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, García argues that the “systematic subordination” of ethnic Mexicans in Oxnard was accomplished through daily acts of “mundane racism” at the individual and institutional level. Despite efforts to normalize their marginalization, Mexican Americans did not stand idle. Rather, partnering with African Americans in a “shared struggle” against the district’s segregationist policies, parents and community activists filed and won a class-action lawsuit (Soria v. Oxnard School Board of Trustees, 1974) that proved the school board was guilty of intentional de jure segregation and ordered immediate and affirmative remedies to achieve a racially balanced school system.

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

In Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement--organized by indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mestizo parishioners in Mexico's central-western Catholic heartland--the Religionero rebellion erupted in response to a series of anticlerical measures raised to constitutional status by the Lerdo government. These "Laws of Reform" decreed the full independence of Church and state, secularized marriage and burial practices, prohibited acts of public worship, and severely curtailed the Church's ability to own and administer property. A comprehensive reconstruction of the revolt and a critical reappraisal of its significance, this book places ordinary Catholics at the center of the story of Mexico's fragmented nineteenth-century secularization and Catholic revival.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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The Trail of Tears, during which the United States violently expelled thousands of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands in the southeast, was anything but inevitable. Nor was it not the only manifestation of the federal government’s hotly debated Indian Removal policy of the 1830s. In his latest book Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (W. W. Norton, 2020), historian Claudio Saunt shows how coalitions between southern slaveholders, social and religious reformers, financiers and speculators, and politicians produced what Saunt argues to be an unprecedently massive deportation initiative aimed at eliminating all Indigenous peoples living east of the Mississippi River.

Starting with Jeffersonian policies towards Indigenous lands and communities, Saunt traces the evolution of federal policy through the now infamous Jacksonian removal policy. Saunt shows how controversial the Indian Removal Act was among American politicians, and how a wide-ranging coalition of pro-removalists consistently struggled to force Indigenous communities from their homes. At the crux of pro-removalists troubles were the many forms of resistance Indigenous peoples, communities, and nations used to refuse whatever fate was conjured for them. Unworthy Republic foregoes an oft-repeated history of inevitable erasure, recounting instead how Native resistance and refusal shaped the aggressions and animosity of proponents of removal.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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In his book Yoga in Modern Hinduism: Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Sāṃkhyayoga (Routledge, 2017), Knut A. Jacobsen examines the Kāpil Maṭh, a Sāṃkhyayoga institution emerging in the late nineteenth century Bengal. This movement (developing contemporaneously with modern yoga) is centered on the cave-dwelling renunciant yogin Hariharānanda Āraṇya. This book offers a rare glimpse into Sāṃkhyayoga as a living tradition in terms of documenting the practices of modern Sāṃkhyayogins. It moreover maps the production of a novel sort of yogin forged by the nineteenth-century transformations of Bengali upper class religious culture.

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

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