New Books in History

“The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” – Genesis 8:21

“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” - William Shakespeare

We share with other animals the experiences of violence; of pain, fear and loss, but human beings are the only species that reflects on those experiences and names their sources evil. From earliest times to yesterday’s news, humankind has always been concerned – some might even say obsessed – with evil. Nevertheless, so far we have failed to understand evil fully. Scholars and philosophers, theologians and psychologists, and thinkers of all persuasions continue to struggle with the existence of evil. This book presents the contemporary stage in that struggle.

The History of Evil from the Mid-Twentieth Century to Today: 1950-2018 (Routledge, 2018), edited by Jerome Gellman, Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister, treats topics arising after the atrocities of World War II, while also exploring issues that have emerged over the last few decades. It exhibits the flourishing of analytic philosophy of religion since the war, as well as the diversity of approaches to the topic of God and evil in this era.

Renee Garfinkel is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at [email protected] or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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

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

In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape. How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? To what extent did their new lives remain explicitly Jewish?

In Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sarah Wobick-Segev tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews as they made their way in European society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Jewish communities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. At a time of growing political enfranchisement for Jews within European nations, membership in the official Jewish community became increasingly optional, and Jews in turn created spaces and programs to meet new social needs. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of "traditional" Jewish spaces into sites of consumption and leisure, sometimes to the consternation of Jewish authorities. Wobick-Segev argues that the social practices that developed between 1890 and the 1930s―such as celebrating holydays at hotels and restaurants, or sending children to summer camp―fundamentally reshaped Jewish community, redefining and extending the boundaries of where Jewishness happened.

Sarah Wobick-Segev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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

Political Scientist and presidential expert Lori Cox Han has written an absorbing analysis of the many, many memos that Pat Buchanan wrote while working in Richard Nixon’s White House. Buchanan was in the Nixon White House from the very beginning until the very end, and many of his memos are now available to study at the official Richard M. Nixon Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Cox Han has had an interest in these memos and Buchanan’s particular role in the Nixon White House for quite some time, and this book fits into her long-standing research stream examining presidential administrations, especially their communications structures and strategies. As Cox Han notes, Buchanan had a unique position in the Nixon White House and this also helps to contextualize these many memos and Buchanan’s thinking while working for Nixon. In her analysis of these memos, Cox Han lays out the role that Buchanan played in the Nixon White House as a strategic thinker in terms of the shifting political dimensions, especially in the Republican Party at the time and the growing conservative movement. Advising Nixon: The White House Memos of Patrick J. Buchanan (UP of Kansas, 2019) brings together over a hundred of Buchanan’s memos, either written directly to President Nixon or to other close advisors to the president. These memos, chronologically arranged and annotated by Cox Han, provide readers and scholars with insight into not only the president himself, but the structure and processes of the Nixon Administration, from the campaign trail in 1968 through the last days of his presidency as Richard Nixon resigned amidst the Watergate scandal.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

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

In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape. How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? To what extent did their new lives remain explicitly Jewish?

In Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sarah Wobick-Segev tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews as they made their way in European society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Jewish communities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. At a time of growing political enfranchisement for Jews within European nations, membership in the official Jewish community became increasingly optional, and Jews in turn created spaces and programs to meet new social needs. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of "traditional" Jewish spaces into sites of consumption and leisure, sometimes to the consternation of Jewish authorities. Wobick-Segev argues that the social practices that developed between 1890 and the 1930s―such as celebrating holydays at hotels and restaurants, or sending children to summer camp―fundamentally reshaped Jewish community, redefining and extending the boundaries of where Jewishness happened.

Sarah Wobick-Segev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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

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

Political Scientist and presidential expert Lori Cox Han has written an absorbing analysis of the many, many memos that Pat Buchanan wrote while working in Richard Nixon’s White House. Buchanan was in the Nixon White House from the very beginning until the very end, and many of his memos are now available to study at the official Richard M. Nixon Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Cox Han has had an interest in these memos and Buchanan’s particular role in the Nixon White House for quite some time, and this book fits into her long-standing research stream examining presidential administrations, especially their communications structures and strategies. As Cox Han notes, Buchanan had a unique position in the Nixon White House and this also helps to contextualize these many memos and Buchanan’s thinking while working for Nixon. In her analysis of these memos, Cox Han lays out the role that Buchanan played in the Nixon White House as a strategic thinker in terms of the shifting political dimensions, especially in the Republican Party at the time and the growing conservative movement. Advising Nixon: The White House Memos of Patrick J. Buchanan (UP of Kansas, 2019) brings together over a hundred of Buchanan’s memos, either written directly to President Nixon or to other close advisors to the president. These memos, chronologically arranged and annotated by Cox Han, provide readers and scholars with insight into not only the president himself, but the structure and processes of the Nixon Administration, from the campaign trail in 1968 through the last days of his presidency as Richard Nixon resigned amidst the Watergate scandal.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

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

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

Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that eras main figures.

In the past three years, three important new books have reassessed Hitler's life, beliefs and actions. Two of the authors, Volker Ulrich and Peter Longerich, are historians of Germany who are German. The third, our guest for today's interview, is British. In his new book Hitler: A Global Biography (Basic Books, 2019), Brendan Simms  offers us a different Hitler, one much more focused on global capitalism and on the Anglo-American world than either Ulrich of Longerich.  Simms argues that fears that Germany would lose the economic and demographic competition with Britain and especially the US sat at the heart of Hitler's world view. Anti-Semitism, fears of German particularism, scientific understandings of race, all of these appear in Simms' portrait of Hitler. But they are joined by a constant fear that the American system was simultaneously seductive and corrupting, and that Germans and Germany would not be able to resist. This, Simms argues, drove many of Hitler's decisions, especially in the 1920s and 30s.

We had some technological problems getting connected for the interview and had only 30 minutes to talk. But Simms does a marvelous job using that time to lay out the broad outlines of his argument and to sketch in some of his main lines of defense. It's a fascinating interview. Not everyone will agree with his conclusions. But at the least the book will prompt a stimulating debate about the role of the west in HItler's thinking.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.

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

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature and humanity, and their intersecting histories.

Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in fostering new ways of thinking about the capacity of humans and nature to change each other on a planetary scale. In the hands of Protestant and Catholic writers from across Europe and its American colonies, the biblical story of Noah's Flood became a vehicle for imagining the power of sin to wreck the world, the dangers of overpopulation, the transformative effects of shifting landforms on the course of human history, and the impact of a changing climate on human bodies, health, and lives.

Following Noah's Flood as a popular topic of debate through long-distance networks of knowledge from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Barnett reveals how early modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by gender, evangelism, empire, race, and nation. After the Flood illuminates the hidden role and complicated legacy of religion in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness.

Interviewed by Lukas Rieppel. Visit my personal website here, or find me on twitter here.

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

In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. Yaacob Dweck's new book Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who, alone among Jewish leadership, challenged Sabbetai Zevi’s improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers.

The story of a lone voice against the crowd, the story of a lonely man of faith who insisted on reason in the face of mass passion, Dissident Rabbi is the revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty. It is a revealing examination of how Sasportas’ life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers.

Although his name may not be widely known, Sasportas’ impact continues in Jewish life today.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at [email protected] or tweet @embracingwisdom

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

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature and humanity, and their intersecting histories.

Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in fostering new ways of thinking about the capacity of humans and nature to change each other on a planetary scale. In the hands of Protestant and Catholic writers from across Europe and its American colonies, the biblical story of Noah's Flood became a vehicle for imagining the power of sin to wreck the world, the dangers of overpopulation, the transformative effects of shifting landforms on the course of human history, and the impact of a changing climate on human bodies, health, and lives.

Following Noah's Flood as a popular topic of debate through long-distance networks of knowledge from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Barnett reveals how early modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by gender, evangelism, empire, race, and nation. After the Flood illuminates the hidden role and complicated legacy of religion in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness.

Interviewed by Lukas Rieppel. Visit my personal website here, or find me on twitter here.

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

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

Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that eras main figures.

In the past three years, three important new books have reassessed Hitler's life, beliefs and actions. Two of the authors, Volker Ulrich and Peter Longerich, are historians of Germany who are German. The third, our guest for today's interview, is British. In his new book Hitler: A Global Biography (Basic Books, 2019), Brendan Simms  offers us a different Hitler, one much more focused on global capitalism and on the Anglo-American world than either Ulrich of Longerich.  Simms argues that fears that Germany would lose the economic and demographic competition with Britain and especially the US sat at the heart of Hitler's world view. Anti-Semitism, fears of German particularism, scientific understandings of race, all of these appear in Simms' portrait of Hitler. But they are joined by a constant fear that the American system was simultaneously seductive and corrupting, and that Germans and Germany would not be able to resist. This, Simms argues, drove many of Hitler's decisions, especially in the 1920s and 30s.

We had some technological problems getting connected for the interview and had only 30 minutes to talk. But Simms does a marvelous job using that time to lay out the broad outlines of his argument and to sketch in some of his main lines of defense. It's a fascinating interview. Not everyone will agree with his conclusions. But at the least the book will prompt a stimulating debate about the role of the west in HItler's thinking.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.

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

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