UMass Press Podcast

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about a largely enigmatic life, Red Ink author Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of a singular Native American figure in Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).

This “cultural biography” provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America’s early nationhood. William Apess’s life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Methodist spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native American presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its Indian question in favor of extinction. This new biography will sit alongside Apess’s own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

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Kent State University is associated indelibly with the events of May 4, 1970, when soldiers of the Ohio National Guard shot over a dozen students, killing four of them. In Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), Thomas M. Grace, a historian who was one of the survivors of that day, sets it within the context of an emergent culture of political activism on the camps. That culture had its origins in the broader changes taking place in American society in the late 1950s, with a small but committed group of students at the rapidly expanding university protesting for civil rights for African Americans. Most of these students came from working-class backgrounds and inherited the New Deal Democratic politics of their parents, and often found themselves at odds with the more conservative town and a campus administration reluctant to court controversy. Lyndon Johnson’s decision to commit American troops to the defense of South Vietnam soon brought about a shift in the priorities of these protestors, as antiwar marches soon replaced civil rights activism as their focus. These protests evolved as the war dragged on, with Richard Nixon’s announcement on April 30, 1970 of the invasion of Cambodia sparking demonstrations that led to the destruction of the campus’s ROTC building and the dispatch of the Guard by the states governor in response. As Grace reveals, the strained emotions and frayed nerves of the participants led to a tragedy that shocked a nation and transformed permanently the lives of everyone involved.

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From the “Ballad of the Green Berets” to “Bad Moon Rising,” the music of the Vietnam War is woven through every vets memories. Vietnam vet Doug Bradley and his fellow University of Wisconsin professor Craig Werner first intended to whittle down a list of the top 20 songs of the war, and soon realized that was an impossible errand. No Vietnam veteran is alike, and hundreds of songs held meaning for those who fought there. It was a varied soundtrack of patriotism and protests, hard rock and soul music, love songs, Dear John songs and more.

Bradley and Werner’s book We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) blends musical and personal histories, explaining the backgrounds of specific songs and artists as well as what they meant to the Vietnam soldiers. In a conversation with Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, they discuss everything from the generational differences between Vietnam soldiers and their World War II-veteran fathers to the importance of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” written a full decade after the war ended. Hanoi Hannah, Good Morning Vietnam DJ Adrian Cronauer, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nancy Sinatra, Country Joe McDonald and his famous F cheer all played a role in the wars musical history. Take a musical trip through this sometimes personal and often poetic book. Country Joe himself said of it, We all love popular music and we all love soldiers. All we have left is memories. Maybe there is something to learn from this book, from their experiences, from the music. God, I hope so.

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After World War II, the newly formed United Nations and what might be called a global community of nations that included the United States, worked to create a more extensive code of international law. The urge stemmed from the events of World War II, including the atrocities of the war that resulted in war crimes trials and tribunals afterward. The new effort included a move to implement new enforcement mechanisms and insure that the agreed upon international standards were upheld and violators punished. During this same period, the United States military significantly expanded its global presence. Throughout the Cold War and after, U.S. troops were stationed at bases in more countries than ever before, which each required Status of Forces Agreements laying out, among other things, jurisdiction over U.S. troops. This increased global presence also meant more American soldiers, and in some cases civilians accompanying the military for various reasons, were in the position to violate these international standards. Yet, despite a prominent role in spreading universal standards of international law, U.S. policymakers strongly resisted any compromise to U.S sovereignty in upholding these laws.

Patrick Hagopian, senior lecturer in History and American Studies at Lancaster University, has a new book, American Immunity: War Crime and the Limits of International Law (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) that looks at the relationship between the United States and war crimes jurisdictional questions. He discusses how not only did U.S. policymakers refuse to allow Americans to be prosecuted by international tribunals, but also U.S. courts failed to uphold international standards of justice. Policymakers felt that territorial and practical limitations placed acts committed abroad beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts, while the Supreme Court decided veterans and civilians could not be court-martialed. This left a jurisdictional gap that existed for much of the postwar period. Though the My Lai massacre brought the gap into particular focus, Congress still failed to close it. This new book explains jurisdictional issues and the failure of American policymakers to adequately remedy. In this episode, we discuss the legal problem, the book’s insights as to their cause, and some of the (often failed) attempts to close the gap.

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Guy Chet, Associate Professor of early American and military history at the University of North Texas, in his book The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) makes a well-crafted argument for the persistence of Atlantic piracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the age of Blackbeard and Captain Kid. He asserts that piracy was not abruptly stamped out by the royal navy but remained normal rather than exceptional for a long time past the 1730s.

The end of piracy is described in the traditional historical narrative as a speedy decline due to the central state’s extension of its authority into the Atlantic frontier and its monopolization of violence. Chet, following methodology established by legal and borderland historians, critiques this assessment pointing out that frontier conditions are sustainable for long periods of time. He fleshes out through each section of his work why the monopoly on violence pronounced in statutory law was not accepted as legitimate or seen in reality in peripheral communities. Despite the central state’s use of army, navy, courts and gallows to extend authority to the frontier, Atlantic piracy waned only slowly in the face of these delegitimizing efforts.

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From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornographic nature. Colette Colligan‘s new book, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) explores the rich and fascinating history of these “Paris editions” across seven decades of literary publishing in France, in English. Troubling too-simplistic notions of British prudishness versus French sexual liberalism and “high” versus “low” literatures, Colligan’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Paris’s expatriate past, a past that remains part of the city’s mythology to this day.

The book includes discussion of the cultural, legal, and commercial sides of this story, as well as closer textual analyses of some key examples of “degraded” and high modernist literature. In its chapters, readers will be introduced to characters and works that may not be so well known, including the British expatriate publisher Charles Carrington (whose publishing credits include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1908). In addition to illuminating the lives of lesser known figures and texts, A Publisher’s Paradise also situates the history of “dirty books” published in the French capital to literary legends Sylvia Beach (the owner of the Parisian landmark English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Co. and publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922) and Vladimir Nabokov (whose novel Lolita was first published by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris in 1955). The book will be a rewarding read to anyone interested in the histories of publishing, pornography, and/or Parisian cultural life.

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Dan Kennedy envisioned a massive book project, a big-picture investigation into current issues facing journalism and media. Instead he found everything he needed in New Haven, Conn., inside the small but productive office of the New Haven Independent.

In The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), Kennedy, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, researches models of journalism that engage public conversation while producing indispensable local news coverage. Although Kennedy’s work includes insight into numerous organizations, the book focuses primarily on the Independent, a non-profit institution in the historical town of New Haven that includes the New Haven Register, a publication that dates back more than two centuries

Through interviews and research, Kennedy shows that local journalism in the 21st Century can survive and thrive so long as those within an organization are willing to put in the work and develop an understanding of the new tenets of journalism: social engagement, deep community focus, and evolving revenue models

“What you want is sustainability,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, the New Haven Register traces its roots to Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s. I don’t think that anybody is going to achieve that kind of sustainability anymore, and I’m not even sure it’s desirable. I think we’re going to see things come and go.”

The Wired City is food for the civic minded and news junkies alike. It’s an important work that begins a sketch of what local journalism can and should be.

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Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network. Cosell was known for an inflated sense of self-importance, but in this claim he was accurate. From his interviews of Muhammad Ali on Wide World of Sports in the Sixties, through his 13-year tenure in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, Cosell came to be the most prominent personality in sports television and one of the most recognizable figures–certainly, the most recognized voice–in all of American popular culture.

Throughout his career, Cosell aspired to be more like the trusted journalist Cronkite than the entertainer Carson. And one of the main points of historian John Bloom’s biography, There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is that Cosell was an innovative, probing, and fearless reporter. Cosell defended Ali when the boxer was stripped of his heavyweight title. He spoke on behalf of Tommie Smith and John Carlos when they were sent home after their protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. And he denounced boxing and refused to work in the sport again, after announcing the horribly one-sided Holmes-Cobb championship fight in 1982.

At the same time, Cosell recognized that sports was entertainment. He played his role for laughs in the Woody Allen film Bananas and on the made-for-TV “athletic competitions” of lesser actors and actresses. But as his fame peaked, Cosell’s stated opinion of sports turned sharply and dismissively critical. The broadcaster always felt himself an outsider in the world of sports, a characteristic that Bloom attributes to Cosell’s Jewish background. And as a trained attorney, Cosell felt himself intellectually superior to the jocks and shills, as he called them. He gained wealth and fame through sports, but he came to see himself as bigger than sports. In that sense, Cosell can be seen not only as a legendary figure, but also as a tragic one.

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When I was a kid, I used to pore over an illustrated history of American sports that I had received as a birthday gift. The oversized, hardcover book featured some of the iconic images of 20th-century sports: Lou Gehrig standing humbly at home plate on his day of tribute, teammates...

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Miriam Thaggert’s study Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is an exceptional contribution to the discussion of both modernism and the the period of intense African American artistic production known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black Modernism is particularly invaluable because it explores the techniques, devices, and politics of blackness as both a cultural and literary concept, even as it examines modernism in the same way. It is a well-written and meticulously researched study.

The University of Massachusetts Press’s website explains that “Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness. The work of the writers and artists under discussion reflects the creative tension between the intangibility of some forms of black expression, such as spirituals, and the materiality of the body evoked by other representations of blackness, such as “Negro” dialect.”

I am especially enthralled with Thaggert’s deft analyses of James Weldon Johnson’s famous introductions to his volumes on African American poetry and African American spirituals. She handles the cross influences between black and white writers of the early period of the Harlem Renaissance with insight and respect. This undeniable academic study can easily be handled by educated critics, working outside of university environments. It also offers a heuristic investigation for those within the academy.

Thaggert is a careful and intelligent writer, and she brings her fresh perspective alive in our hour-long discussion. Please listen in.

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