During the 20th century, El Salvador suffered from one of the longest periods of military rule and political domination in the Americas, beginning with the 1931 coup against the democratically-elected Arturo Aurajo, and culminating in a bloody civil war that lasted from 1979 to 1992. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), Erik Ching examines the origins of this history of authoritarian governance in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. What he reveals is a seemingly paradoxical political system, in which frequent elections and high voter turnout and political engagement coexisted with frequent coups and a near-total lack of actual democratic influence on governance. This system led to a peculiar national understand of “democracy” that colored the behavior of El Salvador’s military rulers.

Marshaling a wide range of documents, including electoral records, political correspondence, and press articles, Ching presents pre-1931 Salvadorian politics as controlled by networks of political patronage that controlled voting at the local level. Rather than disenfranchising poor and indigenous citizens, these networks provided them a limited degree of political influence. Ching argues that the incorporation of poor and indigenous Salvadorians into regional and eventually national political networks was a key factor in some of the most distinctive features and events in the country’s early-20th Century history: the actions of the paramilitary Liga Roja, composed largely of peasants; the 1932 uprising of indigenous farmers, which he locates partly in response to a sense of electoral disenfranchisement; and the actions of the post 1931 military regime, which brutally surpressed the 1932 uprising, but went on to promote land reform and other measures to keep the peasantry in the political fold.

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Donald P. Haider-Markel and Jami K. Taylor are the editors of Transgender Rights and Politics: Groups, Issue Framing and Policy Adoption (University of Michigan UP, 2014). Haider-Markel is professor of political science and chair at the University of Kansas, Taylor is associate professor of political science and public administration at the University of Toledo.

Last week, Frank Baumgartner came on the podcast to talk about his newest book on policy process theory at the national level of US government. Haider-Markel and Taylor’s new edited volume draws on similar literature, but applies it to state and local politics. They also have collected up an array of excellent research on an understudied issue: transgender politics. Chapters by Anthony Nownes on transgender interest groups and Mitchell Sellers and Rod Colvin on how local governments have adopted transgender policies are particularly noteworthy.

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Martyrdom, writes Emma Anderson, is anything but random. In beautiful prose and spectacular historical detail, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Harvard University Press, 2013), takes readers on a journey of more than 300 years, exploring how a group of eight Frenchmen were selected from the amongst the thousands of victims of a brutal seventeenth-century encounter between natives and Europeans to become celebrated martyrs. Anderson explores the details of the deaths themselves, as well as the meaning of ‘good deaths’ in Iroquois and European cultures, before turning to the saints’ afterlives, their continual remembering and reinvention in the “popular, protean collective imagination from their time to our own.” Myriad voices come together in the book’s pages, each one claiming and contesting the meaning of the Jesuits’ deaths, continually refashioning the religious and national identities bound up in the politics of martyrdom.

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The 1960s marked a “new era of vaccination,” when Americans eagerly exposed their arms and hind ends for shots that would prevent a range of everyday illnesses–not only prevent the lurking killers, like polio. Medical historian Elena Conis shows that Americans’ gradual acceptance of vaccination was far from a medical fait accompli: it was–and remains–a political accomplishment that has stemmed from a patchwork of efforts to expose children, in particular, to compulsory vaccine programs. Grown in the culture of postwar American politics, vaccines deliver more than prophylactics. They succor a set of assumptions about economic inequality, racial difference, sexual norms, and gendered divisions of labor. Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization (University of Chicago, 2014) is a timely and accessible social history of American policy and practices towards vaccination that shows how support for vaccination has rarely advanced for medical reasons alone.

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What is Ska music?

This is a deceptively complicated question. In this podcast Heather Augustyn, the author of Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation(Scarecrow Press, 2013) discusses ska’s journey from a local music in 1950s and 1960s Jamaica, its journey to Great Britain and its fusion with punk and other 1970s musical forms, and then its arrival and dissemination across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Even as the music developed in different locations and responded to local conditions, it retained its core sound and its central themes and imagery. Augustyn draws on her decades-long research as she tells the story of ska’s growth and development.

Heather Augustyn is a journalist and writing teacher living in Chesterton, Ind. She author of Ska: An Oral History (with a foreword by Cedella Marley) which was nominated for the ARSC Award for Excellence, Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World’s Greatest Trombonist (with a foreword by Delfeayo Marsalis). Her website is http://skabook.com and she blogs at Foundation Ska.

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The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s most well known text written with Max Horkheimer, is reassessed in a new book of philosophy by Martin Shuster. Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how autonomy might exist under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, following the disastrous inhumanity of events in the twentieth century.

Shuster explores the nature of autonomy in four ways. The book opens with a re-reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as a means to engage and critique Kant’s notion of autonomy. The text then turns to consider a potential ‘response’ from Kant, in the form of Kant’s conception of a rational theology. It is here where Shuster considers the importance of God to Kantian ethics, most notably the role of God as establishing the value of humanity in the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is juxtaposed with Adorno’s later work, which Shuster argues provides a way to think about autonomy that moves beyond and between the totalizing dialectic of enlightenment and Kant’s rational theology. The book closes with a consideration of Hegel’s relationship to this reading of Adorno, reassessing topics such as the teleology of history in Hegel through to the contemporary work of Stanley Cavell. The conclusion provides a practical call to arms based on the conception of autonomy developed in the book. The chapter on Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a stimulating reassessment of a text central to the critical theory tradition and should attract a general readership looking to add depth to their knowledge of this work. However the book itself will also be of interest to all readers of contemporary philosophy, holocaust studies and those wondering how we should live now.

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Scholars studying the history of Christianity are used to writing about different Christian traditions. But what does it mean to write from within a particular Christian tradition? How can a Christian be a historian who does academically respectable work while remaining true to his or her religious commitments? How can Christian historians contribute, as both Christians and historians, to historical scholarship? In The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition and the Renewal of Catholic History (Christendom Press, 2014), Dr. Christopher Shannon and Dr. Christopher Blum explores these questions from a Catholic perspective. They argue that Catholic historians can write from within their tradition while contributing to historical inquiry by embracing a historical perspective that emphasizes the drama of human life, focuses on asking and answering questions that help us better to pursue “the good,” and understands human beings as having an eternal destiny. Shannon and Blum have provided a fascinating meditation on the historian’s craft that anyone, Catholic or not, can read and grow from.

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Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s. Lumumba’s short tenure as prime minister was marked by an uncompromising defense of Congolese national interests against pressure from international mining companies and the Western governments that orchestrated his eventual demise.

Cold war geopolitical maneuvering and efforts by Lumumba’s domestic adversaries culminated in his assassination, with the support or at least tacit complicity of the U.S. and Belgian governments, the CIA, and the UN Secretariat. Georges Nzongola‘s concise book Patrice Lumumba (Ohio University Press, 2014) provides a contemporary analysis of Lumumba’s life and work, examining his strengths and weaknesses as a political leader. It also surveys the national, continental, and international contexts of Lumumba’s political ascent and his elimination by the interests threatened by his ideas and reforms.

Lumumba’s death, his integrity and dedication to ideals of self-determination, self-reliance, and pan-African solidarity assure him a prominent place among the heroes of the 20th century African independence movement and the African Diaspora.

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Contemporary advances in technology have in many ways made the world smaller.  It is now possible for vast numbers of geographically disparate people to interact, communicate, coordinate, and plan.  These advances potentially bring considerable benefits to democracy, such as greater participation, more inclusion, easier dissemination of information, and so on.  Yet they also raise unique challenges, as the same technology that facilitates interaction also enables surveillance, as well as new forms of exclusion.

In Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Carol Gould aims to develop a conception of democracy that acknowledges the new democratic possibilities while being attuned to the need to protect human rights, cultural differences, and individual freedom.  The result is a fascinating discussion of modern democracy.

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Tamara Chin‘s new book is a tour de force and a must-read for anyone interested in early China, the history of economy, or inter-disciplinarity in the humanities. Focusing on the reign of Han Emperor Wu (r. 141-87 BCE), Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) carefully considers how this earliest period of expansion of China’s markets and frontiers inspired scholarly debates over the relationships of frontier, market, word, and world. In a series of three chapters that each treat a discursive genre (philosophical dialogue, epideictic fu, and historiography) and two chapters that look at social practices (kinship and money), Savage Exchange traces the literary innovations that emerged within contexts of political economic debate. Chin’s story reads Han literary texts in a way that uncovers and traces multiple, sometimes conflicting narratives instead of the kind of linear story that often accompanies traditional readings of these works. The book shows that the “savagery of imperialism,” for many, was not about borders between the civilized and the barbarian, but instead was about modes and rituals of exchange across boundaries of gender, morality, numeracy, kinship, and materiality. Chapter 5 will be of particular interest to historians of money, and the final chapter of the book is a special treat for readers interested in the broader implications of Chin’s methodology, as it covers the importance of literary scholars engaging with the materials and texts produced by frontier archaeology, of comparative literature engaging with premodern histories of contact, and of the historiography of world systems engaging a broader set of approaches to documents and data.

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