New Books in History

Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018), Abigail Shinn, who teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, opens up a broader range of conversion narratives than literary or historical scholars have previously discussed. By expanding the chronological and geographical range of her sources, and so expanding their religious affiliation of her authors and drawing into discussion larger numbers of women, she shows how the representation of conversion changed from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and how disparate narratives relating experiences of Protestant, Catholic and Islamic conversion nevertheless continued to show similar rhetorical characteristics.

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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Notwithstanding the fact that slavery is almost as old if not older than human civilization itself, involving almost every country and continent on the face of the planet, the vast majority of scholarly attention tends to be focused on the North American continent and for less than two-hundred years. In an endeavor to bring a wider and historically more accurate view of this utterly human institution, University of Exeter, Professor of History Jeremy Black discusses various aspects of the subject at length with Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society in this new episode of 'Arguing History: Slavery in World History'.

Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.”

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, Professors of History at California State University—Fresno, discuss their co-authored book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press, 2018), competing narratives about slavery in the South, and the fraught history of race, memory and memorialization in the region.

Hailed by the New York Times as a “fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most,” Denmark Vesey’s Garden “maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country” (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.

As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, “Kytle and Roberts’s combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston’s history and empathy with its inhabitants’ past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called “a stunning contribution, ” Denmark Vesey’s Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018 is the first history of its kind in English. An open access ebook, this study literally “unburies” the identities of over two-hundred girls and women who lived in Italy between 1878 and 2018, and were killed by members of the organized crime from different regions of Italy, including the camorra (Naples), Cosa Nostra (Sicily), ’ndrangheta (Calabria), and the United Sacred Crown (Puglia). By providing their background, the circumstances of their deaths, and the often unsatisfactory (if any) legal conclusions of their stories, this impressive counter-archive of the past raises several related questions on the women of Dead Silent. Some played a role within the clan, others were simply mafiosis’ daughters or wives, many had no relationship at all with the mafia and were killed accidentally, others were kidnapped for a ransom, and, finally, some were well known antimafia judges or journalists. How are the women’s individual stories related, as a whole, to the collective issue of the mafia in their communities? How do they become “bodies of evidence” and connect with the “history of the Italian nation”? In which ways does the form of the catalog, which Dead Silent adopts, replace the lack of commemoration and justice? But the most important issue that emerges concerns the study’s open access format: In addition to the broader circulation and availability (and the resulting security issues), what are the other positive effects that open-access can inherently produce? How does this format assert the scholar’s freedom and responsibility in the larger society?

Nicoletta Marini-Maio is co-founder and editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/italy. Recent scholarly publications center on Italian cinema, particularly the intersections between politics, gender power relations, and collective memory; and auteur cinema. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la future consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Ellen Nerenberg (forthcoming, Rubbettino, Italy).

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Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the author Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell.  While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

 

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Notwithstanding the fact that slavery is almost as old if not older than human civilization itself, involving almost every country and continent on the face of the planet, the vast majority of scholarly attention tends to be focused on the North American continent and for less than two-hundred years. In an endeavor to bring a wider and historically more accurate view of this utterly human institution, University of Exeter, Professor of History Jeremy Black discusses various aspects of the subject at length with Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society in this new episode of 'Arguing History: Slavery in World History'.

Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.”

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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

Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, Professors of History at California State University—Fresno, discuss their co-authored book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press, 2018), competing narratives about slavery in the South, and the fraught history of race, memory and memorialization in the region.

Hailed by the New York Times as a “fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most,” Denmark Vesey’s Garden “maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country” (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.

As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, “Kytle and Roberts’s combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston’s history and empathy with its inhabitants’ past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called “a stunning contribution, ” Denmark Vesey’s Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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

Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018 is the first history of its kind in English. An open access ebook, this study literally “unburies” the identities of over two-hundred girls and women who lived in Italy between 1878 and 2018, and were killed by members of the organized crime from different regions of Italy, including the camorra (Naples), Cosa Nostra (Sicily), ’ndrangheta (Calabria), and the United Sacred Crown (Puglia). By providing their background, the circumstances of their deaths, and the often unsatisfactory (if any) legal conclusions of their stories, this impressive counter-archive of the past raises several related questions on the women of Dead Silent. Some played a role within the clan, others were simply mafiosis’ daughters or wives, many had no relationship at all with the mafia and were killed accidentally, others were kidnapped for a ransom, and, finally, some were well known antimafia judges or journalists. How are the women’s individual stories related, as a whole, to the collective issue of the mafia in their communities? How do they become “bodies of evidence” and connect with the “history of the Italian nation”? In which ways does the form of the catalog, which Dead Silent adopts, replace the lack of commemoration and justice? But the most important issue that emerges concerns the study’s open access format: In addition to the broader circulation and availability (and the resulting security issues), what are the other positive effects that open-access can inherently produce? How does this format assert the scholar’s freedom and responsibility in the larger society?

Nicoletta Marini-Maio is co-founder and editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/italy. Recent scholarly publications center on Italian cinema, particularly the intersections between politics, gender power relations, and collective memory; and auteur cinema. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la future consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Ellen Nerenberg (forthcoming, Rubbettino, Italy).

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

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

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the author Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell.  While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

 

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

Starting in the early 1930s, a small group of academics and writers met weekly in a pub in Oxford, England to discuss literature, religion, and ideas. Known as the Inklings, it was in part from their companionship that some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature were produced. In their book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski focus on four key members of the group to show how their interactions shaped the development of their thinking and of the writings they produced.

As Carol Zaleski explains, the four men came to Oxford from different backgrounds and professing different ideas, all of which were at play in their wide-ranging conversations. In gatherings in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College they read aloud drafts of their works, with their subsequent suggestions helping such works as Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet taking the forms by which readers know them today. Through their writings and their growing public celebrity, Zaleski demonstrates, their relationships helped to transform Christian faith and Western culture in ways still being felt today.

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