The Harvard Brief

The study of Christianity, international relations, and the United States is going through something of a boom period at the moment. Scholars are working to understand how Christians looked at the outside world at various moments in U.S. history, how they understood their actions to be in line with their faith, and their actions shaped both domestic politics and foreign policy. Heather Curtis’ Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, published by Harvard University Press in 2018 contributes to this burgeoning field by analyzing what motivated evangelical humanitarian aid in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

To tell this story, Dr. Curtis focuses on one intra-denominational Christian newspaper, the Christian Herald. Founded in 1878, the Christian Herald was founded in part out of concern that the American Protestant community was becoming divided over doctrinal disputes and an underlying fear that the Christian identity of the United States was being undermined. International aid for humanitarian causes was one way to evangelize while also uniting American Protestants around a specific issue. The Christian Herald raised funds for famine relief in India and Russia, humanitarian relief in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and to support Armenians being persecuted in the Ottoman Empire. Curtis also notes the tension between the Christian Herald and the American Red Cross as both organizations sought to become the premier relief organizations in the U.S.

By focusing on the Herald, Curtis sheds light on the occasionally contradictory motives that informed this aid, unveiling a tension between cosmopolitan charity that sought to provide help to anybody, and a kind of “tribal charity” that went to people who were similar to the benefactors. She highlights how techniques of publicizing catastrophes were refined, particularly the emphasis on suffering victims (as well as criticisms of those techniques coming from afflicted regions). Lastly, she exposes ongoing debates as to what it meant to be an American and a Christian.

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].

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2018), Alexander Bevilacqua uncovers a different side of the European Enlightenment, at least with regards to its engagement with Arabic and Islam. Instead of polemics, he tells the story of how books and ideas moved across continents and were studied in Europe, where they were considered a serious object of engagement. He first tracks the movement of books to Europe, then the translation of Arabic’s most famous book—the Qur’an—culminating in the study of Arabic-language materials, which he refers to as the Republic of Arabic Letters. He draws on sources in multiple languages to paint a picture of a vibrant long-distance intellectual community (or the Republic of Arabic Letters) that, for a brief period before European colonial encounters, admired, rather than derided the Arab and Muslim intellectual traditions. He talks to us about the inspiration for the book, why he thinks this intellectual community was so important, and where he sees his work amidst the greater sea of scholarship.

Alexander Bevilacqua is an Assistant Professor of History at Williams College. He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (ca. 1450 to 1800). He was educated at Harvard College, University of Cambridge, and Princeton University. From 2014 until 2017 he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. His work has appeared in History of European Ideas, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Past and Present. He has edited, along with F. Clark, Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations (Forthcoming in December 2018 with University of Chicago Press) and he won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize of Harvard University Press for The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose epistemologies are so divergent that they espouse radically diverse ways of perceiving reality. However, this a rather reductive approach to what is ultimately a complex and nuanced intellectual relationship. Indeed, throughout human history the technological and supernatural, the scientific and the spiritual have repeatedly interacted, informing each other’s respective discourses and reinventing themselves based on encounters with new ideas. In the nineteenth century, when a period of sustained and rapid scientific advancement transformed the human understanding of the universe, new discoveries about the invisible forces that shaped our lives – from the electromagnetic spectrum to soundwaves and the subatomic universe – encouraged many to believe that the invisible realm of the supernatural could be similarly understood through recourse to scientific principles and methodologies.

It is this intersection of the scientific and the supernatural that forms the basis of Christopher G. White’s exciting new publication, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions. Published in 2018 by Harvard University Press, Other Worlds offers a unique insight into the relationship between religion and scientific thought at a time of rapid social, cultural and intellectual change. In the book, White focuses primarily on the imaginative power and pervasive influence of one key scientific concept: the possibly that the universe might hold within it unseen, higher dimensions. Over the course of his study, White analyses how a host of diverse individuals and groups – from scientists and mathematicians to writers, artists and even televangelists – have appropriated the notion of higher dimensions in order to explore, rationalise and explain supernatural phenomena. White maintains that rather than undermining religious beliefs, new scientific ideas, particularly those derived from physics, provided the faithful with a new framework for conceptualising the divine. Undertaking a comprehensive survey of various scientific, spiritual and literary discourses on higher dimensions, White moves from nineteenth-century treatises by Edwin Abbott and C. Howard Hinton to late twentieth-century science-fiction texts like A Wrinkle in Time and The Twilight Zone. In doing so, White shows how rather than opposing intellectual factions, science and spirituality have long been intertwined, with the scientific often providing individuals with new and engaging ways to imagine religious spaces and concepts.

Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture. She blogs about literature and popular culture HERE and can also be found on Twitter.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India (Harvard University Press, 2018), Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey discuss the genealogy of garbage and how it grew in quantity and changed in consistency in liberalising India. The book also provides us with an exhaustive birds eye view of the technological, socio-political and administrative challenges faced by those who work for a cleaner India.

Ian Cook is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University, Budapest and also the host of Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Cultures.

Juli Perczel is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Manchester.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done there. In his new book,  The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Waitman Beorn gives us a detailed overview of the Holocaust precisely here, in what he well called “the Epicenter of the Final Solution.” Waitman does an excellent job of describing Eastern European Jewry, the crooked path the Nazis took in deciding to attempt to obliterate it, the various ways in which they put that horrible decision into practice, and the ways the Jews resisted.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Steven Lubar’s latest book Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven gets to the heart of what makes museums so interesting to both appreciate and critique. For him, the complex nature of the museum lies in the balancing act a curator and other museum staff must strike in both displaying a collection and making it open, accessible and useful while resisting the temptation to encourage or even force a certain way of looking or behaving among visitors.

Structured along the four chapters collect, preserve, display and use, Steve tells the history of museums, from cabinets of curiosities and the Victorian model all the way to the contemporary in an easily accessible and very engaging way. In the last part of his book, the coda, he reveals how working with contemporary artist Mark Dion allowed him and his students from the Jenks Society for Lost Museums to think about museums in new ways, making them social and useful spaces that combine an object-centered and people-centered approach.

Ricarda Brosch is a curatorial trainee at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via [email protected].

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America.  Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Harvard University Press, 2017) shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building.

As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United States’ “national family.” White households who adopted Indians—especially slaveholding Southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jackson—saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges U.S. attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and racial hierarchy.

U.S. whites were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of U.S. governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. In The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America. The Chinese Must Go begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. Across decades of felling trees and laying tracks in the American West, Chinese workers faced escalating racial conflict and unrest. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 and made its first attempt to bar immigrants based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment in federal border control failed to slow Chinese migration, vigilantes attempted to take the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, U.S. policymakers redoubled their efforts to keep the Chinese out, overhauling U.S. immigration law and transforming diplomatic relations with China. By locating the origins of the modern American alien in this violent era, Lew-Williams recasts the significance of Chinese exclusion in U.S. history. As The Chinese Must Go makes clear, anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today’s immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the “heathen Chinaman.”

Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press), out in paperback May 2018).

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jon D. Michaels, a professor of law at UCLA Law School, has written an argument in favor of the administrative state and against recent efforts to shift government functions to private contractors. In Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic (Harvard University Press, 2017), Professor Michaels contends that the administrative state of the New Deal and post-World War II periods was a state that rightly fulfilled state functions by having an administrative entity and its dedicated employees carry out regulatory functions, rule-making, and adjudication.  Professor Michaels rejects the claim that bureaucrats are a threat to the proper functioning of government; and instead argues that they are experts that serve as a counterweight to politically motivated appointed agency heads.  He sees in the modern administrative state a recreation of the separation of powers (legislative, executive, and judicial) that harkens back to the Founders’ concerns about consolidated power and tyranny. Professor Michaels sees the efforts to private state functions as endangering our democratic system of government by placing private actors in too powerful positions, wherein state functions are subordinated to the concerns of private actors, all to the detriment of the public.  Professor Michaels addresses the politically contentious issues of the efficiency of public employees, private interests capturing public functions, and whether the modern regulatory state is constitutional.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period. In his book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016), Matthew Karp examines how American slaveholders and their allies steered American diplomacy so as to preserve and expand slavery as an institution.

Adam McNeil is an incoming PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. He completed his M.A. in History at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts and B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) in Tallahassee, Florida. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.