New Books in History

Natalia MolinaView on Amazon"America is a nation of immigrants." Either this common refrain, or its cousin the "melting pot" metaphor is repeated daily in conversations at various levels of U.S. society. Be it in the private or public realm, these notions promote a compelling image of national inclusivity that appears not to be limited to particular notions of race, religious affiliation, gender, or national origin. Indeed, generations of American writers–like J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Israel Zangwill, Emma Lazarus, and Oscar Handlin–have embedded America's immigrant past into the collective psyche of its people and the epic telling of its history. Yet, as scholars of U.S. immigration history have asserted over the past few decades, the "nation of immigrants" narrative is blinded by both its singular focus on trans-Atlantic European migration and the presumption of immigrant assimilation and incorporation to Anglo American institutions and cultural norms. In her fascinating new study How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (University of California Press, 2014) Professor of History and Urban Studies at UC San Diego Natalia Molina advances the study of U.S. immigration history and race relations by connecting the themes of race and citizenship in the construction of American racial categories. Using archival records held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the U.S. Congress, local governments, and immigrant rights groups, Dr. Molina examines the period of Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1924-1965. Employing a relational lens to her study, Professor Molina advances the theory of racial scripts to describe how ideas about Mexicans and Mexican immigration have been fashioned out of preexisting racial projects that sought to exclude African Americans and Asian immigrants from acquiring the full benefits of American citizenship.

Tabetha EwingTabetha Ewing's Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the word on the street that everyday Parisians might have picked up, and/or spread around town in the 1740s. Focused on rumor during the War of Austrian Succession that lasted from 1740-1748, Ewing's is a book that examines a range of urban voices and opinions across a pivotal decade of the Enlightenment. Taking very seriously the landscapes of gossip and fantasy, Rumor, Diplomacy, and War is intriguing in its subject matter and its methodology. Interested in the circulation of speech and ideas, Ewing tracks a variety of bruits–open and clandestine media, royal efforts to release and police information about matters of state and military conflict, and oral and written forms of communication. All this, with the aim of exploring a distinctively early-modern brand of political participation, and an "inchoate citizenship" that existed in the decades before the French Revolution. Questions of national identity, loyalty to the regime (or not), and political expression/representation were in the air during these years of war and Enlightenment. Ewing's is a book that shows us how much historians can hear if we listen carefully.

Louis A Pérez, Jr.View on AmazonCuba is changing fast. Or is it? Our understandings of Cuban history are shaped by decades of polarized interpretations. Cubans themselves have a particularly vital relationship to their past, and have long used it to guide them in times of crisis and transformation. Louis A Pérez's book The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) traces those uses of the past, from the breakdown of a colonial regime beginning in the nineteenth century to the very recent shifts in Cuba's domestic and diplomatic politics. This beautifully written book lingers on the emotional dimensions of historical change, and leads us through those moments in Cuban history during which Cubans relied on the knowledge of their history, as transmitted through stories, memoirs, novels, and music.

Kelly J. WhitmerView on AmazonKelly J. Whitmer's new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were "enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally." As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer's account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education.

Gordon H. ChangView on Amazon"There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be." According to Gordon H. Chang's new book, the idea of "China" became "an ingredient within the developing identity of America itself." Written for a broad audience, Chang's Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation with China (Harvard University Press, 2015) traces the intertwined relationships of the US and China from their might as world powers in the eighteenth century to today. Moving roughly chronologically, Fateful Ties explores this long history from the point of Americans' eighteenth century entry into the China trade, paying attention to the contemporary "Chinomania" of Ben Franklin and other prominent Americans as well as the significance of China for America's westward expansion. The story continues with the travel of American missionaries to China and Chinese students, intellectuals, and laborers to America. Chang looks at the establishment and implications of the Open Door policy, American responses to revolution in China, and the growing interest and appreciation that prominent figures in the American art world had for China in the nineteenth century. As the story moves into the twentieth century and beyond, hot and cold wars raged as prominent US figures clashed over responses to Communist and Nationalist agendas, and the book looks at the commonalities and divergences in the approach to US-China policy of several recent US presidents and the popularity of recent notions of a "Chinese Dream" to rival the American one. Throughout the story, Chang pays special attention to the "sentimentality and emotionalism" that Americans developed toward China, and includes the stories of many fascinating individuals who helped chart the path toward today's US/China relations.

Shellen WuView on AmazonShellen Wu's new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China's Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2015) brings readers into the nineteenth century industrialization of China, when coal became the "fuel of a 'new' imperialism." Wu's book asks how China came to matter in a new modern world order of the nineteenth century that was built on a perception that coal was a measure of a country's standing in the world. In answering that question, Empires of Coal looks carefully at the importance of mining (including state management and legal regulation thereof) to the political economy of late imperial China. As geology developed into an independent discipline separate from geography, it help colonizers cement their power by aiding efforts to extract valuable mineral deposits from the colonies. Wu traces the archive produced in this context as coal became crucial not just to foreign interest in China, but also to China's interest in mineral resources, exploring a wide range of maps, translations, letters, essays, journals, textbooks, and other materials. The book also situates this story within a history of mineral sciences, scientists, and engineers in China. It will be required reading for anyone interested in the entanglement of science, technology, and modernity in global history.

Nicole StarosielskiView on AmazonNicole Starosielski's new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, 2015) looks carefully and imaginatively at the geography of undersea cable networks, paying special attention to the materiality of network infrastructure and its relationships with the histories of the Pacific. The book revises what we think we know about the infrastructure of global networks: they are not "wireless," but wired; not rhizomatic and distributed, but semicentralized; not deterritorialized, but "territorially entrenched"; not resilient, but precarious and vulnerable; and not urban, but rural and aquatic. After providing a broad overview of three major eras of cable development – the copper cables of the 1850s-1950s, the coaxial cables of the 1950s-1980s, and the fiber-optic cables of the 1990s on, in each case focusing on the importance of security, insulation, and interconnection – Starosielski analyzes how cables have become embedded into existing natural and cultural environments in a number of specific sites in Hawai'i, California, New Zealand, British Columbia, Tahiti, Guam, Fiji, Yap, and beyond. Countering the rhetorical pull of terms like "flow" that tend to provoke an approach to media that is deterritorializing and dematerializing, Starosielski instead turns readers' attention to the ecological dimension of media and the fixed, material investments grounding today's communication networks. It is a brilliant book that deserves a wide readership. Don't miss the website that is woven together with the book: www.surfacing.in.

Dan StoneView on AmazonEvery year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended.  Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today's podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts about the system of camps and ghettos that pervaded Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled.  Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women's camp of Ravensbruck and Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system.  I'll conclude the series in a few weeks with an interview with Shelly Cline about the female guards who staffed some of the camps. In this fourth episode, Dan Stone makes a convincing case that the Holocaust reverberated for years after the war came to a close. The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press,   is slender but packed with information and insights. It certainly provides a top-down discussion of the issues and challenges that accompanied the dissolution of the camp system.  He makes clear the various policies adopted by the liberating countries and how these were caught up in both domestic and international politics. But it goes beyond this to offer  a wide variety of anecdotes and perspectives of camps survivors and liberators demonstrating the long-lasting impact of their experiences.  It's a perfect example of the kind of integrated history of the Holocaust that Nik Wachsmann identified in his discussion.

Douglas BamforthView on AmazonIt's the ultimate cold case: a mountain of 10,000-year old evidence excavated and stored in hundreds of boxes that sat unopened and nearly forgotten in the basement of a museum for nearly 60-years. The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska  (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) by Douglas Bamforth is the site report of an early excavation in southwestern Nebraska, a Paleoindian camp site on Medicine Creek, now permanently submerged under the waters of Harry Strunk reservoir. An extraordinary example of dedication and professionalism in the field of archaeology, The Allen Site combines the work of eleven (11) contributors. Superbly written in clear, easy to understand language, and illustrated with photos, maps and drawings, The Allen Site documents the earliest presence of freshwater mussels in the Paleoindian diet, compelling evidence of Paleoindian children learning the craft of flintknapping, and intriguing evidence for Paleoindian fishing and netting. If you are interested in Paleoindian camp life, the archaeology beyond the massive bison bonebeds, this interview is a gem, and most definitely, you need a copy of The Allen Site in your library.

Christine DesanView on AmazonChristine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015). Per the books jacket, "Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange – a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself – along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money's design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money's creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. "Commodity money" was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half of the book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the first time with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown of commodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard – all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentives and public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money's neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money." Some of the topics we cover are: How the work's assertion that money is a mode of governance in a material world undermines claims in economics about money's neutrality. The "free minting" system and why legal enforcement was essential to it. The radical redesign of money that began in the 17th

Tom JacksonView on AmazonTom Jackson's Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration.  This book reads like an expanded chapter of James Burke's classic book Connections.  Refrigeration is not only one of the most important foundation stones of our technological society, it's also one that we take for granted.   It's hard to say which is more interesting; the realization that people were aware of a cooling method almost two millennia before the birth of Christ, the history of refrigeration from the Middle Ages to the present, or the possibilities for refrigeration technology in the world of the future.  Chilled is a fascinating look into one of the most amazing and important technologies that man has ever developed.

Laura Isabel SernaView on AmazonDuring the early decades of the 20th century the nation of Mexico entered the modern era through a series of social, political, and economic transformations spurred by the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. At the same time, American film companies increasingly sought opportunities to expand their market share by exporting films to exhibitionists in Mexico and Latin America. As government bureaucrats and progressive reformers sought to unify and rebuild the Mexican state, the cinema became a critical site through which the post-revolutionary ideals of modernization, secularism, and ethnic nationalism were promoted. In Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age (Duke University Press, 2014), Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California Laura Isabel Serna vividly describes the process of cultural exchange that played out across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during this critical period in the development of the modern Mexican state. Focusing on the "agency of Mexican audiences, distributers, cinema owners, and journalists," Professor Serna narrates the dynamic process of how American film was received, interpreted, and fashioned to meet the needs of Mexican state officials and a "transnational Mexican audience." Illuminating alternative responses to Mexicana/o "encounters with American mass culture" that did not always result in the acculturation of American values, Dr. Serna argues that movie going promoted a growing sense of Mexican national identity among the emerging diasporic community of transnational Mexican citizens in the post-revolutionary era.

Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizView on AmazonWhen Howard Zinn published A People's History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. "I used it as a text immediately," she remembers. Comrades in the movement anti-war movement, Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz shared a belief that a radically different kind of history, freed from patriotic bluster, was desperately needed. But Dunbar-Ortiz was also concerned by Zinn's narrative. While the opening chapters on the genocide of Indigenous people were "like no other general U.S. history book," Native Americans largely fell out of the story until the Red Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. "I kept saying to Howard, 'What happened to the Indians? Why did they disappear until Alcatraz in 1969?'" Dunbar-Ortiz recounts. "He would say, 'You have to write that book.'" And so last year, Dunbar-Ortiz published An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014). Covering several centuries in a brisk and moving narrative, this is a deeply unsettling tale. Dunbar-Ortiz lays bear a process of genocidal colonization and Indigenous resistance, the genesis of a American way of war born from frontier counterinsurgency and premised on annihilation, and how powerful origin myths continue to obscure the real history of this continent.

The Nation magazine turned 150 this year, a striking achievement for a publication that is firmly on the left of the political spectrum. It was founded in 1865 just months after the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. To celebrate a century and a half in print, the magazine has published a book on its history written by D. D. Guttenplan, a Nation correspondent based in London. The Nation: A Biography (The Nation Co., 2015) traces the tumultuous history of America's oldest weekly from the causes and controversies that shaped it to the rebels, mavericks and visionaries who edited and wrote for it. Along the way, The Nation has featured the work of such notable people as Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Molly Ivins, I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader, Martin Luther King Jr. and Hunter S. Thompson. In this New Books Network interview, Guttenplan talks about how The Nation veered sharply right in its early years to become the voice of the eastern establishment and then, how it gradually regained its radical roots. He says though that The Nation has always been consistent on one great theme: its opposition to the growth of American Empire from conquests in Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines in its early decades to the War in Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq in its later ones.

Let's begin with what Paul Bjerk's new book isn't: a biography or evaluation of Julius Nyerere. Instead, according to a letter that Bjerk sent me in advance of our interview, Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 (University of Rochester Press, 2015), "focuses on sovereignty and discursive agency as main interpretive lenses" of the peaceful course pursued by Nyerere and his colleagues before and after Tanzanian independence. Although Nyerere's biography is not the focus of this book (during the interview Bjerk nonetheless tantalizingly alludes to a biographical project currently in the works), Nyerere's formative exposure to British Utilitarianism, and the thought of John Stuart Mill in particular, is unquestionably fundamental to his vision of postcolonial statehood, including his unwavering belief in the one-party state. The central contention of Building a Peaceful Nation is that meaning-making is at the core of political activity, and that without understanding how meanings are produced through discourse, Tanzania's continental exceptionalism is difficult, if not impossible, to understand. The book, and the interview, explore in depth the development (and pitfalls) of a discursive strategy designed to work at both the grassroots and cosmopolitan levels,  produce a sustainable democratic system, and "minimize conflict during the transition to independence",  all within a highly complex geopolitical context.