New Books In History

The vast majority of historians write history. Perhaps that’s good, as one should stick to what one knows. But there are historians who braves the waters of social and political criticism. One thinks of Arthur Schelsinger Jr., Richard Hofstadter, Christopher Lasch, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and more recently Tony Judt, Sean Wilentz and Victor Davis Hanson. Today I had the good fortune to speak with a historian who is virtually sure to enter the top rank of historian-public intellectuals, John H. Summers.  Indeed, he already has. He’s published numerous probing essays on academic life, anarchism, the Left, sex scandals, anti-Americanism, the fate of newspapers, and, of course, many of the great American public intellectuals (he’s at work on a biography of C. Wright Mills). Summers does what all critics worth their salt do: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Just read his remarkably insightful  “All the Priviledged Must Have Prizes” about his experience teaching at Harvard. (Also, read the comments attending article, where current Harvard students unwittingly prove Summers’ main points). We must be grateful, then, that the folks at the Davis Group Press have elected to publish a collection of Summers’ finely crafted essays in Every Fury on Earth (2008). The book is challenging, thought-provoking, and courageous. John H. Summers does not blink. You will agree with some of the things he says, and you will disagree with others. That, of course, is the fun of it.

BTW: If you have a relative or friend who is an academic, this book would make a perfect holiday gift. If you are an academic, indulge yourself and buy it.

 

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Tags: 19th Century, 20th Century, Academia, C. Wright Mills, Cultural Criticism, Higher Education, Ideology, Intellectuals, Liberalism, Radicalism, Sociology // Add Comment »

There was a time when “history” was the history of powerful people. Shakespeare captures this notion of history in the prologue to Henry V:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Then and for centuries afterward, princes were deemed the proper focus of the historical investigations. The history of history from about 1950 to the present has largely been one of “democratizing” that view of the past. Princes are still given their due, but now a host of previously invisible people are as well. In the hands of social historians, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, male and female, European and non-European have all been given a written history.

Our guest today, Vicki Ruiz, is one of the pioneers in this effort. Her path-breaking From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford UP, 1998; Tenth Anniversary Edition, 2008) shed light on the lives of one of these invisible groups for the first time. Through interviews and extensive documentary investigation, Vicki does a masterful job reconstructing the experiences of immigrant women who have gone by many names–Mexicanas, Tejanas, Chicanas, Hispanas among them. She describes in vivid detail how they negotiated the life passages of school, marriage, motherhood, and work while trying to balance the forces of assimilation and tradition. Though the book is about Mexican women, the theme resonates with the American immigrant experience more generally. Their story is our story. Read From Out of the Shadows and find out how.

 

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Tags: 20th Century, Family Life, Feminism, Frontiers, Gender, Marriage, Mexico, Migration, National Identity, Women // Add Comment »

If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial relationship with “nature.” They fought the wild tooth and nail in a never-ending effort to bring it under human control. It never really occurred to them that this effort at pacification–and the wanton destruction it brought–was wrong. On the contrary, it was man’s right. As the Hebrew Bible says, God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Nature was ours, to do with as we pleased.

John Muir was among the first people to take a different and more “modern” view. He, like others of the Romantic movement, felt that nature and divinity were intertwined. We should no more destroy a wilderness than we should take the Lord’s name in vain, for both the one and the other were sacred. In his remarkable A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford UP, 2008), Donald Worster tells us how Muir came by these rather odd sentiments and how he put them into practice. You know about Muir’s work: the Sierra Club, Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Park, Muir Woods National Monument. Now read Worster’s wonderful biography and learn about the man himself.

 

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Tags: 19th Century, 20th Century, American Civil War, American West, California, Christianity, Conservation, Environmentalism, Frontiers, National Parks, Romanticism, Theodore Roosevelt // Add Comment »

If you ask me, the “white wedding” is the oddest thing. I’m a modern guy and my wife is a modern woman. We’re feminists. We have an equal partnership. But when it came to getting married we both agreed that I would play the role of Prince Charming and she would be the virginal maiden. A black tux for me. A white dress for her. I do believe there was even some “giving away” of the bride. I was glad to be the “recipient,” if that’s what you’d call it. The wedding was terrific, but I had to ask: What in the world were we doing playing lords and ladies? Well I finally got my answer by reading Katherine Jellison’s terrific It’s Our Day: America’s Love Affair with the White Wedding (University of Kansas Press, 2008). Katherine shows how incredibly resilient the white wedding was and is. In the post-war years, American women increasingly went to college, joined the paid workforce, and entered the halls of power. They rejected the gendered stereotypes that once held them in check. Except, it seems, on their wedding days. “Seems” is the operative word here, because as Katherine demonstrates the meaning of the white wedding changed even while the form remained roughly the same. How did it change? I encourage you to read the book and find out (preferably before you get married, so you won’t be confused like I was).

 

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Tags: 20th Century, Family Life, Feminism, Gender, Liberalism, Marriage, Weddings, Women // Add Comment »

While researching his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gotham:  A History of New York City to 1898 (with Mike Wallace; Oxford UP 1999), Edwin Burrows uncovered the story of thousands of American soldiers who had been held prisoner by the British during the Revolutionary War in and around New York. Now he’s back to tell the tale in a full-length book: Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War (Basic Books, 2008). Burrows explains that the British faced a dilemma when deciding what to do with the Americans. On the one hand, if they granted them the status of prisoners of war, that would to some degree legitimate the American cause. Only the soldiers of legal combatants could be POWs, and in the eyes of the British the Americans weren’t legal combatants but rather rebels. On the other hand, if the British classified them as rebels, then they would be placing the Americans–as English subjects–under the protection of English law. That would mean the Americans could not be held without formal charges being brought and trials undertaken. The British weren’t ready to do that. So they opted to suspend habeas corpus and leave the Americans to rot in fetid jails and horrific prison ships. American protests went unanswered, American prisoners died like flies, and when it was all over almost no one bothered to remember. Except Ted Burrows. We should thank him for reviving a story that is all too relevant today as Americans deal with their own dilemmas regarding “enemy combatants.”

 

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Tags: American Revolution, Colonialism, Congress, New York, POWs, Radicalism, Republicanism, War // Add Comment »

Did you ever wonder how we got from a moment in which almost everything on film could be censored (the Progressive Era) to the moment in which nothing on film could be censored (today)? From the Nickelodeon to Deep Throat? The answer is provided by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski in their wonderful new book The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (University of Kansas Press, 2008). You’ve probably never heard of “The Miracle” or the case it launched in 1949. It’s a short film by Roberto Rossellini about a deranged women who, having slept with a man she believes is St. Joseph, gives birth to a child in a deserted mountain church. Fellini has a bit part (as “Joseph”). Critics generally liked it; Catholics in New York generally didn’t. The Church mounted a campaign against the film and the authorities relented: “The Miracle” was banned on the grounds that it was  “sacrilegious.” In 1949, those were fine grounds. Not for long. The film’s distributor–the fiesty Joseph Burstyn–fought for the right to exhibit it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1952. And he won. Between 1952 and 1965, the states got out of the film-censorship business and we entered a new era of free-speech absolutism when it comes to film. One wonders if that’s a good thing.

 

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Tags: 20th Century, Censorship, Constitutional Law, Film, Intellectuals, Law, Liberalism, Media, Progressive Era, Supreme Court // Add Comment »

The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this in terms of things like gold, oil, or rubber. But people can be “extracted” as well. The French empire of the later nineteenth century offers a case in point. Having  found themselves in a very nasty war with the Germans, the French decided that it might be useful to enlist their African and Southeast Asian colonials in the fighting. As Richard Fogarty demonstrates in his excellent new book  Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 ( The Johns Hopkins University Press,  2008), this effort to draft the colonials led to no end of paradoxes. France was the home of Republicanism, and Republicans are supposed to be keen on  liberté, égalité, fraternité. But the colonials weren’t at liberty–they were subjects. Neither were they equal–they enjoyed few of the rights of the native French. And of course they weren’t  brothers–rather they were “children” of France.  Yet the French felt free to ask their colonial underlings to undertake the highest act of civic sacrifice, namely, to fight and die for la Patrie. Would this sacrifice earn them liberté, égalité, fraternité? No. In fact, it didn’t earn them much but a hellish trip to what looked like the end of the world. For, as Fogarty shows, French racism trumped French Republicanism throughout the war (and after, one might add). The colonial soldiers were segregated, stereotyped, and often used as cannon fodder. Some French felt bad about this. But most didn’t. After all, the colonials needed to be “civilized” in order to enjoy the fruits of Republicanism, and presumably the French believed that asking them to die for their would-be motherland would help accomplish this feat. All it probably did was engender bitterness, as the French were to discover some decades later when their empire slipped away.

 

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Tags: 20th Century, Colonialism, France, Ideology, Imperialism, National Identity, Nationalism, Race, Republicanism, War, World War I // Add Comment »

As some of you may be aware, there’s a big election coming up. Yes, it’s time to pick a new auditor for Iowa City, Iowa, my hometown. It’s a hotly contested race between a jerk with a drinking problem and a twenty-four-year-old who ran a cake business into the ground. The pundits are having a field day.

And then there’s the presidential race between McCain and Obama. That’s been in the news as well round these parts. It sort of reminds one of the race-that-almost-was between Richard Milhouse Nixon and RFK in 1968. Nixon wanted to give us “peace with honor” and RFK wanted us “out now.” With this parallel in mind we are happy to have Ray E. Boomhower on the show today. We’ll be talking about his fascinating book  Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary (Indiana UP, 2008). It’s a very enlightening bit of scholarship. I was under the impression that RFK was somehow destined to run against Johnson in ‘68. Not so! He came in only after Eugene McCarthy showed LBJ’s vulnerability to a strong anti-war message. RFK saw his chance, and took it. I was also under the impression that RFK would have doubtless won the Democratic nomination had he not been assassinated. Again, not so! McCarthy gave RFK a run for his money, and a very strong Humphrey was waiting in the wings. As Ray shows, RFK ran well in Indiana (and gave a speech on the day Martin Luther King was killed for which he is justly famous), but faltered elsewhere.

Would RFK, had he been nominated, defeated Nixon? Nothing is sure in politics, as we in the United States are about to find out on November 4. Happy Election Day!

 

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Tags: 1968 Democratic Convention, 20th Century, Democratic Party, Elections, Eugene McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, Indiana, Lyndon Johnson, Politics, Richard Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy // Add Comment »

If you ask most Americans when the U.S. became heavily involved in the Persian Gulf, they might cite the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1981 or, more probably, the First Gulf War of 1990. Of course the roots of American entanglement in the region run much deeper, as W. Taylor Fain shows in his excellent new book American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). Beginning in the 18th century, the British began to do in the Gulf what the British did in those days: build their empire. British dominance in the region lasted as long as Britain did as a Great Power, that is, until about 1945. At that point, a power vacuum of sorts developed. What is perhaps most interesting about Fain’s book is that the U.S.–which had had strong commercial ties to several Gulf states for decades–was not terribly eager to get politically involved. Britain had significant military assets in the region; the U.S. did not. Britain needed the oil; the U.S. at that time did not. Britain wanted to blunt the forces of Arab nationalism; the U.S. had a rather more favorable attitude toward “self-determination.” The Brits did their best to play up the “special relationship,” but it just wasn’t “special” enough to get the U.S. involved in what seemed to be a plainly imperial endeavor. Americans just aren’t very good at imperialism–they have no stomach for it.  In the end, it wasn’t the British who convinced the U.S. to take a strong hand in Gulf affairs, but the Soviets, or rather the fear of the Soviets. The strange cocktail of pan-Arab nationalism and international socialism convinced American policymakers that vital U.S. interests were being threatened in some very out-of-the-way places. Thus the U.S. developed new “special relationships” in the region, notably with Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran–an odd group if ever there were one! So “special” were these ties that they eventually drew the U.S. into war and, recently, occupation. The British empire, so it is said, was built in a “fit of absent mindedness.” The American empire in the Gulf was built against better judgment.

 

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Tags: 20th Century, British Empire, Cold War, Colonialism, Communism, Imperialism, Nationalism, Oil, Persian Gulf, Soviet Union // Add Comment »

There are some topics that  historians know not to touch. They are just too hot (or too cold). The assassination of JFK is one of them. Most scholars would say either: (a) the topic has been done to death so nothing new can be said or (b) it’s been so thoroughly co-opted by nutty theorists that no sane discussion is possible. Thank goodness David Kaiser believes neither of these things, for if he did we would never have his thought-provoking  The Road to Dallas. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Harvard UP, 2008).  Taking a professional historian’s skills to documents old and new, Kaiser provides what is doubtless the best argument available that the assassination was in fact a conspiracy, though not the one you may know from a certain movie by Oliver Stone. He weighs each piece of evidence and builds his case point by point. Conclusions are never forced but follow naturally from the record. Not everyone will agree with Kaiser’s position, but it must be taken seriously by anyone interested in the topic. Kaiser has thrown down the gauntlet to those who believe Oswald acted alone. Now it is for other historians to take it up.

PS: Read David’s blog “History Unfolding.”

 

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Tags: 20th Century, Assassination, CIA, Castro, Cold War, Communism, JFK, Mafia, Soviet Union // Add Comment »