When we discuss the death penalty we usually ask two questions: 1) should the state be in the business of killing criminals?; and 2) if so, how should the state put their lives to an end? As Austin Sarat shows in his fascinating book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford UP, 2014), these two questions are intimately related. The reason is pretty simple: if the state can’t find a legally and morally acceptable way to execute malefactors, then perhaps we need to ask seriously whether the state should be killing criminals at all. If the means cannot be found, then the end may well be unacheivable.

In Gruesome Spectacles, Sarat analyses hundreds of executions in an attempt to assess the degree to which we can kill criminals in legally and morally acceptable ways. What he discovers is that about three in a hundred American executions over the past century or so have gone badly wrong. Criminals who were supposed to have been put to death in a humane way were strangled, decapitated, set on fire, suffocated, and slowly poisoned. Apparently American authorities–however laudable their intentions–have found it quite difficult, practically speaking, to avoid “cruel and unusual punishment” when executing wrongdoers.

It’s important to note that Gruesome Spectacles is not an anti-death penalty book. Sarat’s presentation of botched executions is balanced by consideration of the horrible crimes for which the ultimate penalty was imposed. What Sarat does–and we should thank him for it–is provide hard evidence on a crucial question: can we, realistically speaking, put criminals to death humanely?

Olivier Zunz is the author of Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press 2014). The paperback addition of the book has recently been published with a new preface from the author. Zunz is Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

The book tracks the origins of philanthropy in America as a pact between the very rich and reformers. This was a movement that began in the Northeast, but then spread to the South where the construction of schools for African American children dominated the philanthropic agenda. The book also unearths the historic legal precedents related to how nonprofit organizations are regulated today, the introduction of tax exemption, and prohibitions on lobbying. In sum, Zunz places philanthropy, big and small, into the center of a conversation about the development of American democratic practices. It is a worthy ready for those interested in American politics, the role of the US in world affairs, and the nonprofit sector.

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Why do we study the history of science?

Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies and opinions. Jane Maienschein‘s new book is a model of the kind of careful, balanced, and beautifully written history of science that makes a significant contribution not just to the historiography of science, but also to the public understanding of science and its lived consequences. Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life (Harvard University Press, 2014) traces the historical transformations in the observation and observability of the earliest stages of developing life. Maienschein’s account is a focused and thoughtfully organized book that gradually reveals aspects of the history of early stages of life, carefully curating the elements of her narrative such that they collectively inform broader debates over embryo-related policy in the contemporary United States. Readers follow animal and human embryos in their metamorphoses from hypothetical to observed entities, seeing them sequentially transform into experimental, computational, and engineered objects. The final chapter considers the implications of the story in light of recent debates on topics such as fetal pain, paying special attention to the distinction between making policy decisions based on metaphysics vs. science. Embryos Under the Microscope is equally well-suited to academic historians of science wanting a clear introduction to the history of developmental biology, general readers seeking an introduction to a crucial topic of social and political debate, and teachers interested in assigning one or more of the chapters in relevant undergraduate courses. Enjoy!

You can find the related Embryo Project Encyclopedia, a wonderful digital and open access resource, here.

Listeners might also be interested in this recent article on slate.com.

What processes must take place in order for countries to radically redefine who is a citizen? Why was Russia able to finally remove ethnicity from internal passports after failing to do so during seven decades of Soviet rule? What led German leaders to finally grant guest workers from Southern and Eastern Europe the path to citizenship after nearly five decades? How was Turkey able to move beyond the assimilation-based model that had guided the Turkish republic for eight decades and move toward a multi-cultural society?

In his book Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Sener Akturk makes a carefully constructed argument for how states can redefine “regimes of ethnicity” through the confluence of three key processes – the rise of new counter-elites, the development of new discourses, and the emergence of hegemonic majorities, which together can give governments the power to change laws on citizenship. His argument not only explains processes that took place at the dawn of the 21st century in Germany, Turkey, and Russia, but offers a glimpse of how other states can address questions of integration in an increasingly globalized world.

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With Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2013), Cymene Howe offers an ethnography of activism. Woven into Nicaragua’s political history of revolution and U.S. intervention, the struggle for sexual rights there takes place on three stages: in intimate settings of lesbian discussion groups, in the public sphere marked by demonstrations, press conferences and celebrations, and in visual and print media. Howe’s informants (activists, advocates, students, educators, television actors, members of Nicaragua’s queer community) illustrate the transformations and continuities in the culture of sexuality in Nicaragua.

Emery Roe is the author of Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (Duke UP 2014). Roe is senior associate with the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Roe’s book navigates between economics, ecology, and public policy. He challenges the notion that all messes are bad, and points to how public administrations can learn from messes and turn them into good messes. In doing so, public administrators can better design regulatory and administrative regimes to deal with future financial, environmental, and related messes.

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I imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject is taught.

I will do just that after reading Mark Levene‘s new two volume work The Crisis of Genocide (2 Vols. Devastation:  The European Rimlands, 1912-1938; Annihilation and The European Rimlands, 1938-1953) (Oxford University Press, 2014).  These books, a continuation of Mark’s earlier volumes titled Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, offer a rich and thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which the changing expectations and culture of the international system interacted with local events and personalities to drive mass violence.  The work is more analytical than narrative.  It is complex and requires careful attention to argument and evidence.  But it amply repays this effort with a reading of modern European history that made me rethink how I understood the period.  I learned much from the book about the details of violence in Anatolia and the Balkans.  But it was his broader treatment of the changing norms  of international relations that really made me think hard.

Levene’s earlier volume established his work as a must-read for historians of genocide and mass violence.  His new volumes deserve equal praise.

Hans Noel is the author of Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Noel is an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University. He is also the co-author of The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.

To most casual observers of politics ideology and party affiliation are synonymous. Noel argues that, while that may largely be the case today, it wasn’t always so. He employs a novel method to trace the articulation of ideology over the 19th and 20th centuries, to explore the way liberalism and conservatism evolved. He writes: “The clear pattern is that in the 19th century, ideology was not unidimensional, but it became increasingly so over the 20th century.”

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John Hudak is the author of Presidential Pork: White House Influence over the Distribution of Federal Grants (Brookings Institute Press 2014). Hudak is a fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings Institution. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Vanderbilt University. Hudak analyzes the often understudied side of presidential power: the power to disburse money through grants and contracts. He argues that president’s use this power in similar ways to legislators, advancing electoral and other political interests in key states. The book uses novel data and makes a compelling argument for electoral reforms.

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This spring, I taught a class loosely called “The Holocaust through Primary Sources” to a small group of selected students. I started one class by asking them the deceptively simple question “When did the Holocaust end?” The first consensus answer was “1945.” After some discussion, the students changed their answer. The new consensus was simple. It hasn’t yet.

This came to mind when reading Susan Thomson‘s powerful new book Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). While writing the book,  Thomson talked at length with a variety of ‘ordinary’ people in Rwanda.  Their stories remind us that recovery, both societal and personal, from the events of 1994, has been both halting and problematic.  Her account, like that of Jennie Burnet, also draws our attention to the ways governments’ efforts to shape and reshape cultures of remembrance impact individuals decades after violence is over.

With historians and others paying more and more attention to the aftermaths of mass violence, Thomson’s book sheds light both on issues specific to Rwanda and more generally to the history of remembrance and reconciliation.