New Books in History

From pre-contact, to first-contact, to colonization and beyond, Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba (University of Florida Press, 2018) by Luis Martínez-Fernández is an easy-to-read, yet incredibly fascinating and informative book on the history of early Cuba. In this interview, Martínez-Fernández talks about his Latin American upbringing, the history of pre-contact Cuba, the historical context of Western Europe in 1492, the deep connection between sugar production and slavery, and so much more. Key to the New World manages to effortlessly combine multiple elements of Cuban history, people, cultures, and stories with an objective tone and appealing style. As we continue to learn more about the truths of the “discovery” of the Americas, Martínez-Fernández’s book is an essential read toward a further understanding of those truths.

Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida. Born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Lima, Peru and San Juan, Puerto Rico, he holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in History from the University of Puerto Rico and a Ph.D. in History from Duke University. He is recognized as one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field of Caribbean Studies. He is the author of numerous publications and his new book, Key to the New World, is the winner of the 2018 Florida Book Awards' Bronze Medal for Nonfiction.

Colin Mustful is the author of four historical novels about Minnesota’s settlement and Native history. He holds an MA in history and an MFA in creative writing. He is the founder and editor of a small independent press called History Through Fiction. You can learn more about Colin and his work at colinmustful.com.

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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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From pre-contact, to first-contact, to colonization and beyond, Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba (University of Florida Press, 2018) by Luis Martínez-Fernández is an easy-to-read, yet incredibly fascinating and informative book on the history of early Cuba. In this interview, Martínez-Fernández talks about his Latin American upbringing, the history of pre-contact Cuba, the historical context of Western Europe in 1492, the deep connection between sugar production and slavery, and so much more. Key to the New World manages to effortlessly combine multiple elements of Cuban history, people, cultures, and stories with an objective tone and appealing style. As we continue to learn more about the truths of the “discovery” of the Americas, Martínez-Fernández’s book is an essential read toward a further understanding of those truths.

Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida. Born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Lima, Peru and San Juan, Puerto Rico, he holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in History from the University of Puerto Rico and a Ph.D. in History from Duke University. He is recognized as one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field of Caribbean Studies. He is the author of numerous publications and his new book, Key to the New World, is the winner of the 2018 Florida Book Awards' Bronze Medal for Nonfiction.

Colin Mustful is the author of four historical novels about Minnesota’s settlement and Native history. He holds an MA in history and an MFA in creative writing. He is the founder and editor of a small independent press called History Through Fiction. You can learn more about Colin and his work at colinmustful.com.

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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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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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Following the Iranian Revolution of 1978—79, public and scholarly interest in Iran have skyrocketed, with a plethora of attempts seeking to understand and explain the events which led up to that moment. However, navigating the terrain of Iran’s modern historical trajectory has proven to be a daunting task which has only intensified, given the muddled public discourse that tends to frame it within the paradigm of a perennial conflict between the “religious,” “traditional,” and “despotic” East versus the “secular,” “modern,” and “enlightened” West.

The emergent field of Iranian intellectual history has long sought to rectify and complicate this framing, and numerous prominent works have been published to that effect. With his provocative and timely addition to the field, Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Professor Afshin Matin-Asgari deftly punctuates his mark both as a constructive critic and as a contributor of those efforts.

Through a careful study and critical overview of the current historiography of Iranian intellectual history as it relates to the decades leading up to the Revolution, Matin-Asgari uncovers the intellectual “missing links” both within and without Iran concerning the formation of Iranian national identity. He highlights overlooked trends in contemporary Iranian historiography by drawing the reader’s attention to factors such as the Russian and Ottoman influence on Iranian constitutionalism, early twentieth-century German political culture’s impact on Iranian authoritarianism, and the understudied phenomenon of Islamic socialism. As a result, he concludes that the intellectual history of modern Iran is “both Eastern and Western.”

By framing the development of Iranian national identity in the twentieth century as a discursive project intimately tied to the contingencies of contemporaneous global currents, Matin-Asgari demonstrates that there was nothing inevitable about the dominance of particular streams of Iranian nationalism over others. This book will serve as a useful tool for students of modern Iran and for anyone interested in how to better understand modern global intellectual history as a whole.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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Who are the Jews from Arab countries? What were relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? And what lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East?

This neglected piece of history, as ancient as the Bible, and as modern as today’s news, is urgently relevant today, as minorities continue to face discrimination, persecution, ethnic cleansing and even genocide in parts of the Middle East.

Jews lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for almost 3,000 years, long predating the rise of Islam. Yet, as Lyn Julius explains in her new book Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018), their indigenous communities throughout the region almost totally disappeared as more than 99 percent of the Jewish population fled. Those with foreign passports and connections generally left for Europe, Australia, or the Americas. The rest - including a minority of ideological Zionists - went to Israel. Today over 50 percent of Israel's Jews are “Mizrahim”, refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, or their descendants.

This same process is now repeating in Christian and other minority communities across the Middle East.

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

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Following the Iranian Revolution of 1978—79, public and scholarly interest in Iran have skyrocketed, with a plethora of attempts seeking to understand and explain the events which led up to that moment. However, navigating the terrain of Iran’s modern historical trajectory has proven to be a daunting task which has only intensified, given the muddled public discourse that tends to frame it within the paradigm of a perennial conflict between the “religious,” “traditional,” and “despotic” East versus the “secular,” “modern,” and “enlightened” West.

The emergent field of Iranian intellectual history has long sought to rectify and complicate this framing, and numerous prominent works have been published to that effect. With his provocative and timely addition to the field, Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Professor Afshin Matin-Asgari deftly punctuates his mark both as a constructive critic and as a contributor of those efforts.

Through a careful study and critical overview of the current historiography of Iranian intellectual history as it relates to the decades leading up to the Revolution, Matin-Asgari uncovers the intellectual “missing links” both within and without Iran concerning the formation of Iranian national identity. He highlights overlooked trends in contemporary Iranian historiography by drawing the reader’s attention to factors such as the Russian and Ottoman influence on Iranian constitutionalism, early twentieth-century German political culture’s impact on Iranian authoritarianism, and the understudied phenomenon of Islamic socialism. As a result, he concludes that the intellectual history of modern Iran is “both Eastern and Western.”

By framing the development of Iranian national identity in the twentieth century as a discursive project intimately tied to the contingencies of contemporaneous global currents, Matin-Asgari demonstrates that there was nothing inevitable about the dominance of particular streams of Iranian nationalism over others. This book will serve as a useful tool for students of modern Iran and for anyone interested in how to better understand modern global intellectual history as a whole.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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

Who are the Jews from Arab countries? What were relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? And what lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East?

This neglected piece of history, as ancient as the Bible, and as modern as today’s news, is urgently relevant today, as minorities continue to face discrimination, persecution, ethnic cleansing and even genocide in parts of the Middle East.

Jews lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for almost 3,000 years, long predating the rise of Islam. Yet, as Lyn Julius explains in her new book Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018), their indigenous communities throughout the region almost totally disappeared as more than 99 percent of the Jewish population fled. Those with foreign passports and connections generally left for Europe, Australia, or the Americas. The rest - including a minority of ideological Zionists - went to Israel. Today over 50 percent of Israel's Jews are “Mizrahim”, refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, or their descendants.

This same process is now repeating in Christian and other minority communities across the Middle East.

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

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