The links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism and the denial of political rights, Pan-Africanism became one expression of a transnational fight for equality. The first Pan-African Conference was held in 1900 in London, and in the wake of World War II, the joint struggles for civil rights in the United States and political independence from European powers heated up. Nicholas Grant’s Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) builds on the earlier work of scholars by focusing in closely on the connections between U.S. activists and black South Africans facing dual repression from anticommunism and racist regimes.

Grant begins by describing the factors that drove the U.S. government and South African governments together. Increasing financial investment in South Africa by American businessmen created economic linkages and anticommunism pushed the two governments into a Cold War alliance, with the South African government even trying to improve its anticommunist laws by consulting with American lawyers. From there, Grant goes on to describe various ways that African Americans and black South Africans were in conversation with one another. One chapter focuses on the effects of travel, while another focuses on print and musical culture. Grant examines the effect of anticommunist repression on the international black left as well as incarceration and the depictions of imprisonment before concluding with links between African American women and black South African women.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

 

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How do social movements remember the past? How do collective memories affect their current strategic choices? In his book Social Movements, Memory and Media: Narrative in Action in the Italian and Spanish Student Movements (Palgrave, 2018), Lorenzo Zamponi provides an answer to these questions by analyzing the representations of specific episodes related to the Italian and Spanish student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the recollection of those events by current student activists.

By bridging the disciplines of memory studies and social movement studies, Lorenzo makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how cultural factors shape political action. Collective memories can serve as a way of legitimation and mobilization to social movements, but they can also limit their strategic choices by imposing certain past identities and contentious repertoires.

Researchers from all disciplines interested in the intersect between memory and social movement studies are encouraged to answer to the Call for Papers for a special issue to be published in Mobilization, edited by the author.

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of California Irvine. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than focus on the city itself or the republic’s higher-profile naval forces, Ongaro examines the workings of the Venetian land forces—its cavalry, militia, and fortress structures. Financing and supplying these forces required increasingly sophisticated administrative measures that, as in so many European states at the time, drove the expansion of state institutions. Most previous studies have assumed that such expansion came at the expense of local power structures and that state administrations existed in competition with local elites. By examining the records of municipal and rural archives in the Venetian hinterland, Ongaro instead shows that while the central state had the power to make demands, those demands were most often satisfied in cooperation with local forces, rather than in competition. Local elites benefitted from the contracts to provision fortresses or supply saltpeter, for example, and so did not resist state directives as a matter of course.

This detailed economic history will expand your horizons and your understanding of early modern military history.

 

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Author, journalist and sometime park ranger Ken Ilgunas has written an argument in favor a “right to roam.”  This concept, unfamiliar to most Americans, is one of an ability to traverse public and private property for purposes of enjoying nature.  In This Land is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back (Plume, 2018), Ilgunas compares U.S. property laws with the traditions and laws of England, Scotland and Scandinavian countries.  In these nations a right to roam has been recognized and, Ilgunas argues, has been a boon to citizens’ enjoyment of their nations’ lands, while also protecting the property rights of private owners.  Ilgunas addresses owners’ concerns about the use and enjoyment of their land and makes the case that a “right to roam” would be beneficial to owners and members of the public alike.  Yet, Ilgunas also acknowledges the obstacles to creating such a right in the United States: popular understandings of the sacredness of private property, fears of lawsuits, the existence of public lands as alternative venues, and the federal and state systems of land management.  Ilgunas also concedes that a “right to roam” is not merely a legal problem but a problem regarding long-held perceptions of the moral rightness of private property and the ability to exclude others from using one’s land.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

 

 

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Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than...

How do social movements remember the past? how do collective memories affect their current strategic choices? In his book Social Movements, Memory and Media: Narrative in Action in the Italian and Spanish Student Movements (Palgrave, 2018), Lorenzo Zamponi provides an answer to these questions by analyzing the representations of specific...

How are the vulnerabilities of older adults in need of care and their care workers intertwined? In Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care (New York University Press, 2018), Elana Buch considers this question and more. Using ethnographic methods, Buch enters the homes and lives of older adults who are receiving home care services in addition to becoming a part of two home care agencies to understand the lives of home care workers. This new book sheds light on the ins and outs of daily life for these two populations and contributes to the literature by considering how their lives are interdependent. Buch also considers the narrative around independence and how older adults continue to maintain their independence, as well as how home care workers help them to maintain it even when they are dependent on the worker. This book does a really nice job of sharing the lived experiences of both groups, while maintaining a focus on social inequality between and within these groups.

This book speaks widely to issues of social inequality. Readers across the board will find it interesting and accessible. Sociologists, gerontologists, and anthropologists may find it particularly useful for understanding care work in the states. This book would be a great addition to any upper level undergraduate or graduate level sociology of aging, or social inequality class.

Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

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In his engaging and original book The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Harvard Professor Mihir A. Desai takes on the daunting task of explaining the world of finance through the prism of the humanities, yes the humanities. Using stories from literature, film, music, popular culture and daily life, Desai argues that rather than being an impenetrable jumble of algorithms used to strip the innocent of their money, the core concepts of modern finance can be used to understand how people make everyday decisions small and large about their lives. Diversification, leverage, risk and return, agency costs—all can be seen and explained without dense mathematical formulas. Whether you agree with this effort or not, you will never read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or see Mel Brooks’ The Producers the same way again.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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In Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) to argue that photography, in its capacity as a visual and technological practice, can be a powerful tool for understanding and shaping what modernity meant in the region.

Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

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After the U.S. presidential election in 2016, discussions about white nationalism, supremacists, and neo-Nazis went from being a niche topic to mainstream news. For those who hadn’t been keeping tabs on what we’re now calling the “alt-right,” it was as though they simply burst on to the national stage with the election of Donald Trump. The reality of course was that white power groups had been organizing for a long time, though many of their followers were dismissed as cranks, or if they acted violently, lone wolves. Much of the media coverage that they received actually helped them to remain under the radar by treating their activities as isolated and unique.

Kathleen Belew’s new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018), traces the evolution of a paramilitary movement and the effect it had on white power advocates in the United States. The Vietnam War was particularly transformative in this regard. It culturally alienated many returning veterans from their government and left them feeling that they had been betrayed, but it also provided a certain amount of tactical instruction about how to organize their groups in an effective way. Groups became decentralized and organized around paramilitaries as their relationship with the U.S. government became increasingly hostile, eventually becoming committed to violent revolution. This new method of organizing into small cells went unrecognized in part by the government and segments of the press, which were inclined to treat violent incidents as isolated. This allowed the movement to grow in scope, culminating in part with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

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