This terrific book follows the itinerary of Eric Walrond’s peripatetic life. Born in Guyana in 1898, Walrond lived in Barbados, Panama, New York, Paris, London. As a writer and sharp observer of those around him, he produced trenchant critiques of racial dynamics, imperialism, and labor relations in short stories, journalism, essays, and historical narratives. His book Tropic Death (1926), a searing rendition of Caribbean life, was widely read. Yet he struggled toward the end of his life as he became increasingly isolated both professionally and socially. In Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean (Columbia University Press, 2015), James Davis draws on numerous and surprising sources to build a complex but eminently readable portrait of this man, his work, his friends and acquaintances in diasporic communities of the transatlantic Caribbean.

 

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In Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015), Jason Mokhtarian, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the Indiana University, puts the Babylonian Talmud in its Persian context. He lays out a research program for Talmud studies that is contextual, rather than literary or exegetical. Analyzing references to Persians and Persian loanwords in the Talmudic text, as well as ancient seals and bowl spells, he argues that we need to understand ancient Iran, as a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, to fully understand rabbinic identity and culture.

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Mark R. Stoll is associate professor of history and Director of Environmental Studies at Texas Tech University. His book Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a history of environmentalism emerging from a religious aesthetics and moral vision. Stoll argues that environmentalism began with Calvinists theological commitments regarding the divine relationship with nature and humanity. The Reformed branch of Christianity held that God spoke through scripture and “the book of nature.” Believers expressed this idea not only in literature but also through landscape paintings and a tradition of natural science and conservation. Preferring unpeopled landscapes, art was to capture both the truth of God’s creation and the sublime and the beautiful. Humanity had a moral responsibility to preserve the land for the common good and future generations. The book is filled with creative and colorful characters, well known and lesser known, whose commitment to preserving the earth was undergirded by religious ideals. The children of the Reformed tradition promoted biological holism, nature’s unity and diversity, and gave birth to ecology, conversation, and land improvement. National parks, American cities and their parks, and agriculture all bear their imprint. By 1870, the Reformed tradition faded and conservation and ecology were taken up by Transcendentalist, progressive Presbyterians, and denominations with an individualist ethic such as the Baptist to shape modern environmentalism. Stoll demonstrates how the children of these traditions challenge the often-assumed historical divide between religious ideas and environmentalism.

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We’ve been hearing a lot about economist John Maynard Keynes’ midcentury economic plans for the U.S. since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. Are the measures that Keynes and FDR took to combat the Depression in 2008 relevant to the present? What is the difference between fiscal and monetary policy, and how might changing our national approach to the monetary supply help our economic circumstances? Listen to Eric Rauchway discuss his book The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (Basic Books, 2015) and find out!

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The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of attention, particularly with regard to the middle class experience of education. Dr. Nicola Rollock, Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Race & Education and Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, along with her co-authors, explores this under researched area in The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes (Routledge, 2014). Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the idea of intersectionality, and Bourdieu, the book depicts the strategies associated with choosing schools, the narratives of families’ educational experiences, along with the legacy of racism within the British education system. The book is an important intervention into recent debates around educational attainment, charting the changing strategies, and changing perceptions, held by this section of middle class society. Ultimately despite so much attention given to other sociological categories, such as class or gender, when thinking about education race remains vitally important. This conclusion, alongside its wealth of empirical material and highly accessible style, make it essential reading.

 

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There is no shortage of talk about our public schools being broken. Some critics say we need to embrace a reform agenda that includes more standardized testing and a longer school day for students and performance pay and an end to tenure for teachers. Others respond that the effects of these measures are overstated or counterproductive and that the most sensible place to start is to dramatically increase funding for public schools in their current form. Whatever their positions or priorities, both sides in this debate are likely making the same key assumption — public schools are the best way to promote socio-economic mobility. This means that they still envision a lot of the same things, like an adult teaching a large group of children, who are approximately the same age, content that someone else has decided is important for them to learn. What if they instead accepted that other social programs would be a more effective means of achieving equity in our society? What if they believed that public education was a worthwhile endeavor, but that its true power was in its ability to facilitate creativity, critical thinking, civic participation, and self-direction? That would result in a much richer discussion with ideas that look completely different from the schools we recognize today. In Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Education Malpractice (Doubleday, 2016), Nikhil Goyal makes the case for completely rethinking our conception of school and its purpose and presents models we can look towards to take it in a radically new direction.

Goyal joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at@nikhilgoya_l. You can reach the host on Twitter at@tsmattea.

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What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts that metadata powers our digital society. After defining metadata-data that has the potential to provide information about an object-Pomerantz considers the various kind of metadata. This raw material provides descriptions about individuals and most every other thing in the world. This data allows people, places, and things to be found. According to Pomerantz, metadata has become infrastructural as it plays such a pivotal role about in all of the things we do, yet, it is invisible. This invisible foundational material is created and collected all the time, and has vast implications for governments, corporations, and individuals.

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George Whitefield was a complex man driven by a simple idea, the new birth that brought salvation. Because of such passion, Whitefield received both enthusiastic support, preaching to audiences numbering in the thousands, and bitter criticism for violating religious doctrine or political convention. As such, Whitefield remains someone who continues to stir debate and devotion even to this day. In her fascinating new book, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (University Press of Mississippi, 2015), Dr. Jessica Parr explores the life and afterlife of George Whitfield, focusing particularly on how the conflict he spurred and the veneration he received have shaped memories of him. Parr’s work is fascinating and accessible, making it a good read for both the scholar of American religious history and for students in an undergraduate classroom.

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For most of recorded history, single rulers such a kings, queens, chiefs, and emperors exercised authority over human populations. Jeroen Duindam (Professor of Early Modern History, Leiden University) examines an important part of this story in his new book Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He employs an easy-to-follow, four-level comparative framework that explains how dynastic power evolved in kingdoms as diverse as the Qing Empire, Mughal Empire, France, and Dahomey in Africa. The use of this framework allows Duindam to move beyond the pitfalls of many comparative works. With careful attention to detail, he recounts how “divergent practices” of dynastic rule “can be seen as part of the same pattern,” as well as how “striking similarities hide profound differences (14).” This approach allows him to illustrate the tendency of scholars to overstate the differences between “Eastern” and “Western” dynasties; it also puts him in a strong position to make astute observations about the role women played in the functioning of dynastic power. Just as important, Duindam’s analysis of dynastic power raises important questions about how modern governments maintain their authority and how the “masses” view the exercise of power over them. Whatever one thinks of Duindam’s specific arguments, he has authored a well-crafted, thought-provoking work that should be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about global history and the exercise of power.

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David Sartorius‘s recent book Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Duke University Press, 2014), examines Cuban society in the nineteenth century, and the islanders’ proclamations of loyalty to the colony and to Spain. He challenges the notion that Cubans grew increasingly independent minded as events transpired during that century. Instead, he shows that both free and enslaved, white and nonwhite, men and women, all regularly made claims of loyalty to the imperial regime throughout the period. Although these declarations could be self-serving, they were also part of a rhetoric of loyalty at the heart of Cuban culture. This goes some way in explaining Cuba’s late independence in Latin America, but more importantly it provides a more complicated picture of everyday individuals’ political alignments in the Caribbean. Ever Faithful is part of an open-access pilot project, and can be downloaded for free at the Duke University Press website.

 

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