In The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967 (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Jeffrey S. Gurock, the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, imagines an alternate history of American Jewry had there been no Holocaust. Contributing to the increasingly popular genre of alternate history, Gurock uses historical sources to create a plausible, but fictional, narrative about mid-century American Jews, their relationship with their coreligionists in Europe and Israel, and their acceptance in American society (or lack thereof). Each chapter in Gurock’s tale ends a short section that describes what really happened.

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The poem fragments in Hope Wabuke‘s Movement No. 1: Trains (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) function more as meditations than portions of a whole. They meditate on movement’s power over the body and mind. What are the vessels that carry our bodies through cities, from home to beyond? Who are the people inhabiting our thoughts, moving our mind from idea to emotion to dream?

the city is color electric, neon; the humming static pulsing

further away. and she understands the way a charge moves through

air in the meeting of two bodies, but she does not understand the

afterwards, the pressing of a thing into the shape of something else.

These poems appear gentle but do not be deceived by the calm voice. Trains shudder and jolt, tracks shift and bump. There is a recognition of longing present each time the beloved is invoked, and a reluctant understanding that when in motion, the familiar becomes foreign.

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Dr. Edmund Hamann, Dr. Stanton Wortham, Dr. Enrique G. Murillo (Eds.) have provided a fascinating and expansive volume on Latino education in the US that features an array of scholars from around the world, entitled Revisiting Education in the New Latino Diaspora (Information Age Publishing, 2015), part of the Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies series. This volume is actually an in-depth update from a pervious book, Education in the New Latino Diaspora, with new demographics, lenses, and perspectives, on new trends and happenings in this ever-changing space.

Dr. Hamann joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd.

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Ruben Flores is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. His book Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) is the winner of the 2015 book award of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Flores recast the long U.S. civil rights movement by framing it within the exchange of ideas between Mexican and U.S. pragmatists. In a thoroughly research transnational history he demonstrates how post-revolutionary Mexican reformers adopted John Dewey’s pragmatism and Franz Boas’s cultural relativism in fostering assimilation of diverse native people into a pan-ethnic republic. Mexican educators Moises Saenzand Rafael Ramirez both studied under Dewey at Columbia University and were eager to apply his philosophy at home. In turn, U.S. reformers looked to Mexico’s scientific state as a living laboratory and a model for assimilating native people and Hispanics of the southwest, and blacks in the south into the “beloved community.” American educator George I. Sanchez, the psychologist Loyd Tireman, and the anthropologist Ralph L. Beals applied what they learned from Mexico’s three-tiered rural education program, administrative structure, and the concept of the Mexican “melting pot” to post-world war II school desegregation and civil rights battles in the U.S. As radical liberals, they believed in the power of government and education embodied in Mexico as effective in fostering cross-ethnic cooperation and a common vision. Flores has skillfully demonstrated how “backroads” intellectuals with a mutual desire for national unity and the preservation of local difference, along with a pragmatic belief in the connection between thought and action, crossed borders and fueled civil rights gains in the U.S.

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Today’s podcast marks the beginning of what I hope might become a regular feature on the podcast. The session was recorded live on the campus of Bryant University at the end of weekend conference with the title Genocide in World History, sponsored by the New England region of the World History Association. I’m hoping that occasional reports from conferences will help shed light on new research and new directions in the field. They will of necessity be a bit rawer than ordinary interviews. But I think the benefits far outweigh occasional blemishes.

The conference at Bryant stressed the need to see genocide through the lens of the discipline of world history. Individual panels tended to focus on specific cases. But several papers took an explicitly comparative perspective. And the capstone session looked carefully at what it might mean to study genocide from the perspective of a world historian.

The podcast features four participants from the conference: Jonathan Bush, Jon Cox, Tommy O’Connell and Michael Bryant. I hope you find their contributions interesting.

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How has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative platemaking. The multi-disciplinary approach allows Performing Policy to speak directly to the history of arts funding, in the context of the U.S.’s culture wars, as well as to the contemporary question of the role and purpose of the artist in society, along with how those artists might be educated. The book will be important reading for cultural policy and arts management students, as well as those in cultural studies.

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We treat children differently than we treat adults. For example, if we would like children to do something, we use directives with them, rather than asking them. When we do ask them to do something, we expect them to do it, even if they are busy or uninterested. In fact, we would be surprised, annoyed, or angry if they refused. Although something said to a child might be phrased as a question, it is rarely a choice. Perhaps this is not a problem as long as adults have the best interests of children in mind. But what if they do not? Are we treating children fairly? Do they have any advocates without conflicting interests? In Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (CreateSpace, 2013), John Holt compares the plight of children to other oppressed groups and outlines ways for adults to show greater respect to children in their lives as well as his rationale for extending basic rights afforded to adults to any child who would like to invoke them.

Pat Farenga, the president of Holt Associates, recently republished the text for the first time in 25 years, and he joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with Holt Associates on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at@patfarenga. You can reach the host on Twitter at@tsmattea.

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Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who famously made the decision in the 1970s to henceforth only produce his creative work in his native Gikuyu, rather than in English, authors the foreword to Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2013), which he calls a “historic intervention in the debates about African philosophy.” The collection offers a balanced representation, along an east-west axis, of the continent, with essays in Luo, Gikuyu, Amharic, Igbo, Akan (also known as Twi), and Wolof. The dual-language format allows readers to see the text (including Ethiopic script) as written by the authors, with the English translation on the facing page. In this engaging interview, Chike Jeffers, editor of Listening to Ourselves, describes the genesis of the anthology and the project’s import for the expression and dissemination of African thought, going forward.

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In Building A Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (UNC Press, 2014), Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis Sonia Song-Ha Lee challenges two common misperceptions surrounding the Civil Rights Movement. The first is the presumption that Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans played marginal roles in the advancement of civil rights and social justice causes, and second, that the aims and methods of Latinos diverged from those of African Americans preventing the two groups from building interracial coalitions and cooperating in their pursuit of racial and socioeconomic justice. Focusing on the social and political context of postwar New York City, Dr. Lee describes the issues, people, and organizations that were central in establishing cross-racial coalitions between Puerto Rican and African American parents, students, and activists. Realizing their shared struggle against racism, poverty, and marginalization, Professor Lee argues that Puerto Ricans and African Americans developed an “overlapping” sense of ethno-racial identity in which notions of blackness and Latinidad were “intertwined and mutually reinforced” through social and political activism.

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In the 1850s, when the majority of the population of Colombia (known then as New Granada) embraced the emancipation of the remaining 17,000 people still enslaved, the lettered elite quickly tied emancipation to emerging ideas of universal citizenship in the Colombian republic. Yet there was no agreement over the rights that emancipatory citizenship would provide. Jason McGraw explores the political struggles over citizenship–and the recognition of that citizenship–in the six decades after emancipation in his book, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (UNC Press, 2014). Combining social, political, and intellectual history, McGraw carefully shows how lettered elites, who mostly succeeded in eliminating illiterate Colombians from formal politics, never managed to silence fully the rich vernacular politics of the working classes. In the process, The Work of Recognition argues for the centrality of Afro-Colombians, the Caribbean region, and the legacy of emancipation to Colombian national political struggles of the nineteenth century and the emergence of robust labor politics in the early twentieth.

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