New Books in History

Joshua Simon’s The Ideology of the Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, compares the political thought of three Creole revolutionary leaders: Alexander Hamilton, Simón Bolívar and Lucas Alamán. By doing so, Simon brings together the intellectual histories of the US American Revolution and the Spanish American Revolutions of Mexico, and Gran Colombia (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panamá). Unlike previous scholars, Simon finds a set of striking commonalities that unites the histories of the Americas as a whole. In particular, he argues, the institutional context in which American independence movements unfolded profoundly shaped and influenced the ideologies that these intellectual leaders expounded. Although these Creole men were influenced by very different intellectual traditions, they embraced a contradictory ideology that incorporated anti-imperialist and imperialist positions at the same time. This “anti-imperial imperialism” shaped Creoles justifications to political autonomy vis-à-vis European imperial powers, the constitutional mechanisms they designed in their recently independent countries, and ultimately, the imperial policies that they put in place against indigenous and Afro-descendent population. From this new approach emerges a puzzle that Simon discusses at the end of our interview and that has important repercussions for the present: if the Americas were so similar at the moment of independence, why did the United States achieve greater economic prosperity and more stable political institutions while Latin America did not?

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Fordham University and former editor at Working Woman and Ms. magazines. Her biography Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) gives us the life of a women’s rights activist, labor lawyer, radical pacifist, writer and co-founder of what became the Civil Liberties Union. Her life was shaped by key relationships including with her mother Annis Ford Eastman and a close relationship with her brother Max Eastman, editor of the socialist magazine The Masses. Subsequently with her brother, she would launch The Liberator. Eastman spoke and wrote about a variety of social and political problems and was threatened by censorship and economic hardship. One of her chief concerns was how women could combine meaningful work with family life based on egalitarian ideals of independence and freedom. She attempted to live out her feminist ideals by redefining her marriage, motherhood and career. Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life offers a vivid portrait of a modern feminist navigating the hazards of private and public life as it unfolded in the progressive era.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the cultural history of feminist thought seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Genevan Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire.

Richard Whatmore brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights and the public good. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans shows how the massacre at Genevan Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets—in many respects the end of enlightenment itself.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Joshua Simon’s The Ideology of the Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, compares the political thought of three Creole revolutionary leaders: Alexander Hamilton, Simón Bolívar and Lucas Alamán. By doing so, Simon brings together the intellectual histories of the US American Revolution and the Spanish American Revolutions of Mexico, and Gran Colombia (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panamá). Unlike previous scholars, Simon finds a set of striking commonalities that unites the histories of the Americas as a whole. In particular, he argues, the institutional context in which American independence movements unfolded profoundly shaped and influenced the ideologies that these intellectual leaders expounded. Although these Creole men were influenced by very different intellectual traditions, they embraced a contradictory ideology that incorporated anti-imperialist and imperialist positions at the same time. This “anti-imperial imperialism” shaped Creoles justifications to political autonomy vis-à-vis European imperial powers, the constitutional mechanisms they designed in their recently independent countries, and ultimately, the imperial policies that they put in place against indigenous and Afro-descendent population. From this new approach emerges a puzzle that Simon discusses at the end of our interview and that has important repercussions for the present: if the Americas were so similar at the moment of independence, why did the United States achieve greater economic prosperity and more stable political institutions while Latin America did not?

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Genevan Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire.

Richard Whatmore brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights and the public good. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans shows how the massacre at Genevan Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets—in many respects the end of enlightenment itself.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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

Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Fordham University and former editor at Working Woman and Ms. magazines. Her biography Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) gives us the life of a women’s rights activist, labor lawyer, radical pacifist, writer and co-founder of what became the Civil Liberties Union. Her life was shaped by key relationships including with her mother Annis Ford Eastman and a close relationship with her brother Max Eastman, editor of the socialist magazine The Masses. Subsequently with her brother, she would launch The Liberator. Eastman spoke and wrote about a variety of social and political problems and was threatened by censorship and economic hardship. One of her chief concerns was how women could combine meaningful work with family life based on egalitarian ideals of independence and freedom. She attempted to live out her feminist ideals by redefining her marriage, motherhood and career. Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life offers a vivid portrait of a modern feminist navigating the hazards of private and public life as it unfolded in the progressive era.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the cultural history of feminist thought seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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

Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. The book I’m looking at today, Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) explores the complex interconnections between science, technology, and modernity in Canada. Edited by Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock, it draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. Organized around three key themes – bodies, technologies, and environments – the book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics as varied as colonial anthropology, scientific expeditions, electrotherapy, the occult sciences, industrial development, telephony, patents, neuroscience, aviation, space science, and infrastructure, the contributors explore Canadians’ modern engagements with science and technology and situate them within larger national and transnational contexts.

The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.

Edward Jones-Imhotep is a cultural historian of science and technology and an associate professor of history at York University. He is the recipient of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology for his book The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War.

Tina Adcock is a cultural and environmental historian of modern Canada and an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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In Greek mythology Prometheus is the trickster Titan who gives fire to humanity. As Wilson Jeremiah Moses explains in his book Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus (Cambridge University Press, 2019) America’s third president demonstrated many of the same traits as this legendary figure over the course of his long life of intellectual activity. As Moses reveals, this is reflected in the malleable nature of Jefferson’s legacy, which has been reinterpreted continuously by generations of politicians and historians in the generations since his death. To better understand Jefferson’s thinking, Moses dissects the corpus of Jefferson’s writings and examines the span of his activities to draw from them his views on everything from politics and economics to his understanding of the various fields of science which he explored. What emerges from this effort is the complex and sometimes contradictory stew of ideas which Jefferson applied over the course of his political career, during which he helped shape the ideology and institutions which Americans live with today.

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Winston Black's new book The Middle Ages: Facts and Fictions (ABC-CLIO, 2019) guides readers through 10 pervasive fictions about medieval history, provides them with the sources and analytical tools to critique those fictions, and identifies what really happened in the Middle Ages.

Aven McMaster and Mark Sundaram are historians and the hosts of the excellent podcast The Endless Knot.

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In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with A.R. Ruis about the 2017 book Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States – published in 2017 by Rutgers University Press. Ruis narrates the development of school lunch programs from the late 19th century to the present, describing the evolution from locally organized charitable initiatives into the federally funded and managed programs that we know today. While school lunches seem almost inseparable from the American public school experience, Ruis explains that it was not clear in the 19th century whether schools had the ethical obligation or even the legal right to provide food. Ruis argues that the decision to supply lunches for students extends from constitutive moments in history when schools became a site for distributing health and wellness services of many kinds.

Through case studies of Chicago, New York, and rural schools in the Midwest, Ruis demonstrates that while most schools followed a similar path to establishing lunch programs – starting with lunches provided by a private, charitable group and eventually being taken under school board control – the results varied greatly based on the challenges of the particular area and the philosophy of the school board. Through an extended discussion of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, Ruis describes a key tension still at work in school lunch debates today; that is, whether school lunch is a program for providing nutrition to children or providing a predictable market for surplus agricultural commodities. Ruis concludes, “History suggests that without development of a system that integrates eating and learning, that values skilled labor and community involvement, and that privileges children’s health over agricultural protection, malnourishment will continue to be ‘our greatest producer of ill health.’”

A. R. Ruis is a historian of medicine and a learning scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. You can find him on Twitter at @AndrewRuis.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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