New Books in History

Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude.

Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Indiana UP, 2018) argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memorialization and a comparison of Soviet and Nazi mass crimes. While it has been over 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, the full extent of the ways violence was used against prisoners of war and civilians is only now coming to be fully understood. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe provides new insight into the scale of the violence suffered and brings fresh urgency to the need for a deeper understanding of this horrific moment in history.

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As the leader of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles during the 1980s, Father Luis Olivares brazenly defied local Catholic authorities and the federal government by publicly offering sanctuary to Central American migrants fleeing political violence and civil war, and later extending it to undocumented Mexican immigrants unable to legalize their status after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Twenty-five years after the priest’s death, Mario T. García has written the definitive account of Olivares’ life and the beginnings of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles.

In Father Luis Olivares, A Biography: Faith Politics and the Origins of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles (UNC Press, 2018), García traces Olivares’ humble beginnings as a poor boy growing up in San Antonio’s west side barrio to his improbable rise as the “Gucci priest” of the Claretian order. After becoming involved with the Farmworker Movement, which led to an unexpected meeting with César Chávez in the mid-1970s, Olivares experienced a conversion that transformed him from the politically connected “GQ priest” to a community-centered cleric committed to achieving social justice for his barrio parishioners. Later, after assuming the leadership of Our Lady Queen of Angels Church (La Placita Church) in 1981, Olivares was transformed again, this time by Central American migrants seeking refuge from U.S. backed authoritarian regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Combining liberationist theology with Saul Alinsky-styled grassroots activism, Father Olivares shepherded La Placita Church and the City of Los Angeles into the center of U.S.-Central American geopolitics and the budding national Sanctuary Movement. In this in-depth and intimate portrait of Los Angeles’ Latino priest, Garcia has not only written a biography of an unquestionably important individual, but also of a community and movement that continues to transform American society and politics.

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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In 2015, University of Toronto professor Julie MacArthur decided to follow a couple more leads in the search for the long-missing, feared-lost transcript of the trial of legendary Mau Mau leader Dedan KImathi. She found herself amidst the papers of an anti-colonial London lawyer Ralph Millner who assisted the august barrister Dingle Foot in defending Kimathi before the Court of Appeals in colonial Kenya. There she found the full file of not only the appellate case, but the original trial as well, transcripts, exhibits, and police reports.

The file showed that a dubious file of the trial transcript in the Kenyan National Archives to be a forgery, but its discovery prompted the release of further files in Kenya. This momentous discovery not only sheds light on this key figure in Kenyan history, and the trauma and the Mau Mau rebellion, but also unstable nature of archives and historical memory. Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion (Ohio University Press, 2017) not only reproduces the entire trial transcript, in all its original discordant glory, but a set of insightful essays by major scholars of Kenyan history and literary culture, including David Anderson, John Lonsdale, Nicholas Kariuki Githuku, Simon Gikandi, and Lotte Hughes. Her own introduction and a forward by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo provide a helpful framework for considering the meaning of this important artifact of Africa’s colonial interlude. For anyone in Kenya in February 2020, you can catch the launch of her book at the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri on February 18 and at the United States International Univeristy of Africa in Nairobi on February 21.

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Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude.

Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Indiana UP, 2018) argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memorialization and a comparison of Soviet and Nazi mass crimes. While it has been over 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, the full extent of the ways violence was used against prisoners of war and civilians is only now coming to be fully understood. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe provides new insight into the scale of the violence suffered and brings fresh urgency to the need for a deeper understanding of this horrific moment in history.

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Today we are joined by Roger Gilles, Director of the Honors College and Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University, and author of Women on the Move: The Forgotten Era of Women’s Bicycle Racing (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of women’s velodrome racing in the American Midwest in the 1890s, the business of six-day cycling, and the gender politics of women’s racing.

In Women on the Move, Gilles recovers the history of women’s cycle racing in the 1890s. Female scorchers like Tillie “The Terrible Swede” Anderson, Lizzie Glaw, and Dottie Farnsworth barnstormed across the Midwest from Oklahoma City to Pittsburgh. Their sport proved to be popular, even more so than men’s endurance six-day events. They raced on steeply banked short tracks, pedalled at speeds up to 30 miles per hour, braved severe injuries from crashes, dealt with wardrobe malfunctions, and won enormous prizes. They were America’s first famous female athletes.

Gilles’ work traces the intersections that gave rise to women’s bicycle racing in the 1890s. Tillie Anderson and the other racers navigated the cycling boom, which followed the invention of the safety bike; the rise of the suffrage movement; the increasing industrialization of midwestern cities; the migration of millions of Europeans to the United States; and the gender politics of the Victorian era.

The craze ended almost as quickly as it began in the early 20th century – replaced by automobile racing, undermined by charges of fixing, undercut by lower revenues, and damaged by the increasingly strategic and tactical insight of the racers that made the sport more professional but less exciting for spectators.

Women on the Move restores women’s racing to the pantheon of 19th century American sport and will appeal to readers interested in the overlap between cycling, sports business, migration, and gender.

Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at [email protected].

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In 2015, University of Toronto professor Julie MacArthur decided to follow a couple more leads in the search for the long-missing, feared-lost transcript of the trial of legendary Mau Mau leader Dedan KImathi. She found herself amidst the papers of an anti-colonial London lawyer Ralph Millner who assisted the august barrister Dingle Foot in defending Kimathi before the Court of Appeals in colonial Kenya. There she found the full file of not only the appellate case, but the original trial as well, transcripts, exhibits, and police reports.

The file showed that a dubious file of the trial transcript in the Kenyan National Archives to be a forgery, but its discovery prompted the release of further files in Kenya. This momentous discovery not only sheds light on this key figure in Kenyan history, and the trauma and the Mau Mau rebellion, but also unstable nature of archives and historical memory. Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion (Ohio University Press, 2017) not only reproduces the entire trial transcript, in all its original discordant glory, but a set of insightful essays by major scholars of Kenyan history and literary culture, including David Anderson, John Lonsdale, Nicholas Kariuki Githuku, Simon Gikandi, and Lotte Hughes. Her own introduction and a forward by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo provide a helpful framework for considering the meaning of this important artifact of Africa’s colonial interlude. For anyone in Kenya in February 2020, you can catch the launch of her book at the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri on February 18 and at the United States International Univeristy of Africa in Nairobi on February 21.

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

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

As the leader of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles during the 1980s, Father Luis Olivares brazenly defied local Catholic authorities and the federal government by publicly offering sanctuary to Central American migrants fleeing political violence and civil war, and later extending it to undocumented Mexican immigrants unable to legalize their status after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Twenty-five years after the priest’s death, Mario T. García has written the definitive account of Olivares’ life and the beginnings of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles.

In Father Luis Olivares, A Biography: Faith Politics and the Origins of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles (UNC Press, 2018), García traces Olivares’ humble beginnings as a poor boy growing up in San Antonio’s west side barrio to his improbable rise as the “Gucci priest” of the Claretian order. After becoming involved with the Farmworker Movement, which led to an unexpected meeting with César Chávez in the mid-1970s, Olivares experienced a conversion that transformed him from the politically connected “GQ priest” to a community-centered cleric committed to achieving social justice for his barrio parishioners. Later, after assuming the leadership of Our Lady Queen of Angels Church (La Placita Church) in 1981, Olivares was transformed again, this time by Central American migrants seeking refuge from U.S. backed authoritarian regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Combining liberationist theology with Saul Alinsky-styled grassroots activism, Father Olivares shepherded La Placita Church and the City of Los Angeles into the center of U.S.-Central American geopolitics and the budding national Sanctuary Movement. In this in-depth and intimate portrait of Los Angeles’ Latino priest, Garcia has not only written a biography of an unquestionably important individual, but also of a community and movement that continues to transform American society and politics.

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

Today I spoke with professor Peter J. Boettke the author of a great new book on Friedrich August von Hayek. Dr. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at George Mason University, USA.

F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores the life and work of Austrian-British economist, political economist, and social philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. Professor Boettke correctly argues that: ‘There is certainly little doubt that Hayek was among the most prodigious classical liberal scholars of the twentieth century. Though his 1974 Nobel Prize was in Economic Science, his scholarly endeavors extended well beyond economics.'

Peter argued that his political influence (Thatcher, Reagan...) is overemphasized because '...his relationships with those in political power was remote at best as Hayek was never a political consultant to any leader in power; he was always a critical scholar who tried to speak truth to power from the outside.'

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

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What did the American Civil War look like from Diné Bikéyah and Apacheria? This is just one of the many questions that drives historian Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which details the Civil War’s impact on a diversity of historical actors vying for control, opportunity, and survival in the continental southwest. As both the Union and the Confederacy vied for claim to Indigenous lands, Diné, Apache, and other Indigenous nations fought back. The narratives of Juanita, a Diné woman who resisted Union encroachments upon her community and Diné lands, and Mangas Coloradas, a Chiricahua Apache chief who sought to expand and protect Apache territories, reveal the difficult choices Indigenous peoples made in the face of competitive expansion.

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian with a background in the American Civil War, U.S. western history, and American culture. In The Three-Cornered War, Nelson combines meticulous research in military records, letters and diaries, oral histories, and photographs with novel-like prose to tell the story of the American Civil War through the experiences of nine individuals. As Nelson shows how each of these individuals shaped and were shaped by the Civil War in the continental southwest, the result is a history of the American Civil War truly continental in its scope yet deeply individual in its impact.

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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Today I spoke with professor Peter J. Boettke the author of a great new book on Friedrich August von Hayek. Dr. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at George Mason University, USA.

F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores the life and work of Austrian-British economist, political economist, and social philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. Professor Boettke correctly argues that: ‘There is certainly little doubt that Hayek was among the most prodigious classical liberal scholars of the twentieth century. Though his 1974 Nobel Prize was in Economic Science, his scholarly endeavors extended well beyond economics.'

Peter argued that his political influence (Thatcher, Reagan...) is overemphasized because '...his relationships with those in political power was remote at best as Hayek was never a political consultant to any leader in power; he was always a critical scholar who tried to speak truth to power from the outside.'

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

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