New Books In History

Americans don’t like “big government” right? Not exactly. In the Early Republic (1789 to the 1820s) folks were quite keen on building up the (you guessed it) republic. As in res publica, the “things held in common.” The “founding fathers”–all “Classical Republicans”–designed a form of government that, though “checked and balanced,” gave the federal government significant powers. And throughout the 19th-century Americans asked the federal government to use those powers to do all kinds of things, many of them profoundly self-interested. But as Brian Balogh points out in his thought-provoking new book A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in 19th-Century America they–that is, the American people–preferred that the federal government render aid in a certain way, namely, unobtrusively. Americans wanted the fed to help, but they didn’t want to see any feds. This created a system of “associative” government: the fed collected money (or incurred debt) and then distributed it to cities, counties, and states to get what it–and they–wanted done. But the fed didn’t give the money to local governments alone; they also, even in the 19th century, gave it in the forms of subsidies, tax credits, loans and so on to private individuals and entities. It hardly needs to be said that the impact of this traditional American way of “doing” central power can be seen today. From block grants to states for welfare programs, to for-profit military contractors in Iraq, to “public” health care administered by the private insurance industry–it’s all part of “associative” government. So do Americans hate “big government”? Only “big government” they can see.

Brian and two of his colleagues have a radio history show that you should listen to. You can find it here.

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Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, American Civil War, American Exceptionalism, American Midwest, American Revolution, American West, Atlantic World, British Empire, Congress, Constitutional Law, Democratic Party, Elections, Enlightenment, Foriegn Policy, Founding Fathers, Individualism, Liberalism, National Identity, Renaissance, Republican Party, Republicanism // 1 Comment »

For us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word “nation,” this idea of “culture” or “a culture” is not very old. According to the OED, the modern meaning gained currency in English only in the nineteenth century. In a way, that’s not surprising: the nineteenth century was the era of high-nationalism and, as we’ve said, every “nation” had to have an essence that distinguished it from all others. That essence came to be called “culture.” This nation-culture equivalency, however, presented some nationalists with a problem, particularly if their “nation” had what looked to be several cultures. Jews are the archetypal example. They were spread all over the place, spoke many languages, and practiced many customs.  There was nothing to unite them except Judaism–itself hardly unified. If you believed in a Jewish nation, then you had to believe that there could be a “Jewish culture.” But what would it be? In his fascinating new book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2010), Kenneth Moss explores the ways in which Eastern European Jewish culture-builders attempted to answer this question in the Russian Revolutionary era. As Ken points out, there was no simple answer. Rather, there were a lot of competing answers (Yiddishist, Hebraist, Socialist, etc.). But there was also a lot of deep, deep thought about what it meant to build and have a culture. These thinkers knew what we have forgotten, namely, that all cultures are made. They knew this because they were making one. Whether we admit it or not, we are too…

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Tags: 19th Century, 20th Century, Anti-Semitism, Ashkenazi Jews, Bolsheviks, Culture, Emancipation, Hebrew, Ideology, Intellectuals, Jews, Marxism, National Identity, Nationalism, Poland, Popular Culture, Revolution, Russia, Russian Empire, Socialism, Soviet Union, Ukraine, World War I, Yiddish, Zionism // Add Comment »

One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made American government democratic. Neocon theorists, who have been wrong about most things, believe the opposite: that democratic governments can make cultures democratic. Under this theory, we should be able to impose liberal democracy on, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, and thereby make their cultures liberal democratic.

The culture-government question is also central to modern German historiography. It usually takes this form: did German culture produce the Nazis or did Nazis produce German (or rather “Nazi”) culture. In his eye-opening book Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard, 2009), Alan Steinweis succeeds in shedding new light on this subject by carefully studying an old topic–the Nazi pogrom against the Jews in 1938, aka, “Kristallnacht.” He shows that it is difficult to argue that the Nazis alone prosecuted the attack. It would be much more reasonable to say that they “provoked” it or, even better, “unleashed” it. Steinweis points out that what might be called “spontaneous” (or at least not party-directed) assaults on Jews had been occurring with some frequency over the years preceding the Kristallnacht. The Nazis my have facilitated these spasms, but they did not create the paranoia that drove them–that, it seems, was a element of German culture. Importantly, the Nazi leaders–and above all Hitler and Goebbels–knew that all they needed to do was give the word and the anti-Semetic pressure building up within the German public would be released. In November 1936, Herschel Grynspan’s assassination of a low-level German diplomat gave them the pretext they needed to give that word. They did, and the floodgates of Judophobia opened.

The Nazis didn’t create violent German anti-Semitism; they reflected it and took advantage of it. As H.L. Menchen might have said, the Germans got the government they wanted and deserved to get it good and hard.

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Tags: 20th Century, Anti-Semitism, Ashkenazi Jews, Assassination, Atrocities, Crimes against Humanity, Ethnic Cleansing, Fascism, Genocide, Germany, Hitler, Jews, Nazis, Propaganda, World War II // 1 Comment »

I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you are likely to end as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (I didn’t, but that’s another story). “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Don’t historians get bored with their little time and place?” “Yes,” I replied. “Don’t they exhaust the topic and begin to work in circles?” “Yes, quite often” I replied. “Don’t they want to compare what they’ve learned about time/place X with time/place Y in order to better understand both X and Y?” “Probably,” I replied. “Then why,” she asked, “do historians continue to work the way they do?” It’s a good question, and one that deserves to be answered. On the one hand, ‘more and more about less and less’ has certainly enabled us–that is, the historical profession–to uncover a lot of the past that might have been forgotten. But, on the other hand, we’ve gone so far ‘inside baseball’ that we can’t and don’t talk to one another, let alone talk to colleagues in other disciplines or the public at large. There are exceptions, but they only improve the rule.

In their very readable new book Natural Experiments of History (Harvard, 2010), Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson point out that this way of going about history is a lost opportunity. If historians would pull up for a moment and look around, they would discover a world “natural experiments” that could both shed light on their particular time/place and speak to larger patterns in world history. More specifically, “natural experiments”–what historians usually call the “comparative method”–would permit them to speak about the general causes of the specific events they study. To my mind, that is a laudable goal and one that we should pursue. Knowledge, as we know, is difference. If all you know is the Russia in the 1600s, then you won’t really know Russia in the 1600s. We should do what we tell our undergraduates to do: compare and contrast.

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Tags: Anthropology, Comparative History, Frontiers, Historians, Historical Laws, Historiography, Islands, Natural Experiments, Sociology, Theory, World History // 2 Comments »

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part. Our guest today–sponsored by the National History Center–is not among them. Julian Zelizer has used his historical research and writing to inform the public and public debate in a great variety of fora: magazines, newspapers, online outlets, radio, TV–and now New Books in History. Today we’ll be talking about his efforts to bring the historian’s voice to the public and his most recent book Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From WWII to the War on Terrorism (Basic Books, 2010) (which itself is a contribution to that effort). The book proves that in the U.S. politics does not “stop at the water’s edge”–not now, not ever. From the very beginning of the Republic, American foreign policy has been informed by a subtle mix of electoral politics, ideology, and institutional infighting. Julian’s book focuses on the most recent episode in this long story–the period from the Second World War to the present. He shows that politics plain and simple had a powerful effect on the major foreign policy decisions of the era: Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Reagan’s volte-face on disarmament, the First Gulf War, and the Second. It is, Julian says, in the nature of our political culture to cross swords and break lances over issues of foreign policy. Never truer words…

We discuss the History News Network and the History News Service. Their webpages can be found here and here.

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Tags: 20th Century, Bill Clinton, Cold War, Communism, Congress, Democratic Party, Dwight Eisenhower, Elections, FDR, Foriegn Policy, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Harry Truman, Henry Kissinger, Iraq War, JFK, Jimmy Carter, Korean War, Lyndon Johnson, Military Industrial Complex, National Security, Politics, Public Intellectuals, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Russia, Soviet Union, U.S. Presidency, Vietnam War, War, War on Terror, World War I, World War II // Add Comment »

Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester’s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name (Free Press, 2009). As Toby points out, medieval Europeans thought the earth had three parts–Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem at the dead center and water all around. (And no, they didn’t think the earth was flat…). But in 1507 a peculiar item appeared–the Waldseemüller map– that outlined a fourth part of the world called “America,” with the Atlantic Ocean on the one side and an unnamed ocean on the other. Here’s the really curious thing though: at that time no European had ever seen what we now call the “Pacific Ocean.” Balboa was the first to see it, and he didn’t do so until 1513. So where did Waldseemüller and his colleagues get the idea that there was a continent between Europe and Asia and that an undiscovered ocean separated Asia from it? Was it just a good (educated) guess, or did the mapmakers have information that has not come down to us? You want the answer? We’ll you can listen to the interview and then go buy the book. All will be reveled!

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Tags: 14th Century, 15th Century, 16th Century, Atlantic World, Cartography, Catholicism, China, Christendom, Columbus, Early Modern Europe, Empires, Exploration, Explorers, Globalization, Humanism, Imperialism, Marco Polo, Middle Ages, Mongols, Northwest Passage, Religion, Travel, Travel Literature // 3 Comments »

Why did communism collapse so rapidly in Eastern Europe in 1989? The answer commonly given at the time was that something called “civil society,” having grown mighty in the 1980s, overthrew it. I’ve always been more than a little uncomfortable with both the idea of “civil society” and this explanation. The former is very difficult to define. Is “civil society” the same as “the opposition?” Is it something like the “public sphere” (another slippery though very popular notion)? Or is it just a trendy synonym for “the people,” as in “of the people, by the people, for the people?” The explanation is theoretically (and politically) comforting, but it doesn’t make much sense empirically. With the exception of Poland, most Eastern European states had minuscule “civil societies” under almost any reasonable definition. And even in Poland, “civil society” did not bring Solidarity to power–bungling Communists did. In Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (The Modern Library, 2009), Stephen Kotkin (with a contribution by Jan Gross) confirms all my suspicions. The Communist Parties of Eastern Europe ruled their territories more or less completely; there was no significant organized opposition in any of them, again, with the exception of Poland. Therefore when we look for reasons for their sudden rupture, we should look at their own doings, since they were in effect the masters of their own fate. Had they succeeded in building wealthy, democratic communist societies–that was, after all, their ostensible aim–they would probably still be in power today. But they failed utterly. Once they came to realize this, they lost faith in their own project and more or less gave it up, though not exactly willingly. Kotkin tells the tale of how they did so in spirited, direct prose. The book a joy to read, the more so because it is brief and often funny. If you are interested in contemporary affairs, you would do well to read it; if you teach contemporary history, you would do well to assign it to your students.

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Tags: 20th Century, Berlin Wall, Capitalism, Cold War, Communism, Decline, East Germany, Empires, Erich Honecker, Frankfurt School, Ideology, Marxism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nuclear Disarmament, Poland, Ronald Reagan, Socialism, Solidarity Movement, Soviet Union // 1 Comment »

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads “Unions: the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend.” Indeed they did. Organized labor has had a rocky history in the U.S. It’s been hounded for leaning left, associating with mobsters, and being corrupt. But truth be told unions have made an enormous contribution to American prosperity. This is especially true of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, as Harvey Schwartz explains his new book Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU (University of Washington, 2009). While other unions were mired in all of the above-mentioned controversies, the ILWU managed to remain pretty clean. When hounded by the government, it did what all good unions should do–it closed ranks. When its members faced dislocation due to technological advance (for example during the “container revolution”), it adjusted, survived, and continued to serve the interests of its members, their industry, and the nation in general. It’s a real treat to read these working men and women tell their own stories and that of the cause to which they contributed. If you like the work of Studs Turkel, you’ll like this book. I do and I did.

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Tags: 19th Century, 20th Century, California, Capitalism, Civil Rights Movement, Cold War, Communism, Organized Labor, Radicalism, Ships, Socialism, Trade, Unions, Working Class // Add Comment »

I’ll be honest: I have a Ph.D. in early modern European history from a big university you’ve probably heard of and I couldn’t name a single female writer of the Renaissance before I read Sarah Ross’s new book The Birth of Feminism. Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Harvard University Press, 2009). Does that make me a bad person? No, other things make me a bad person. But it does makes me and my entire field ignorant, for as Sarah points out there were quite a number of female intellectuals in the Renaissance. They were, so to say, waiting for us to pay them the attention they deserve. Sarah does a nice job of unearthing them, telling us how they came to be intellectuals, and giving us a good idea of what they  wrote about and why. That’s quite an achievement in itself, but there is more. Sarah also makes a  bold claim, one that I’m sure will have the field of Renaissance studies atwitter (no, not twitter as in “tweets”). She argues that these women intellectuals were sort of proto-feminists, not in the Gloria Steinem sense, but an important sense nonetheless. They proposed that, via humanist education, women could have as much  “virtue” (NB: from the Latin word for “man,” vir) as men. And they not only argued this was the case, they demonstrated it by means of their writing. This act, Sarah convincingly proposes, was a crucial early step in the movement toward the idea that women were, well, equal to men. And, I should add, she offers lots of other meaty stuff for those interested in the history of gender, the history of the family, intellectual history, and the Renaissance generally. Read the book and then you, too, will be relieved of the embarrassment of not being to name a single female Renaissance writer.

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Tags: 15th Century, 16th Century, 17th Century, Academia, Enlightenment, Family Life, Feminism, Gender, Higher Education, Humanism, Intellectuals, Literature, Republic of Letters, Salons, Women // 1 Comment »

Ben Binstock’s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.  It does what all good history books should do–tell you something you thought you knew but in fact don’t–but it does it ON EVERY PAGE. I thought Vermeer was X; now I know he was Y. I thought Vermeer was influenced by X; now I understand he was influenced by Y; I thought Vermeer painted X; now I realize he painted Y. I could go on and on, revaluation after revaluation. The biggest news–or rather the bit that will get the most press–is that a handful of “Vermeers” were in fact painted by his daughter, Maria. Vermeer’s Family Secrets is remarkably well researched and convincingly argued. It’s also lavishly illustrated. So are a lot of art history books. But this one is also intelligently illustrated: the way the pictures are arrayed serves the book’s many arguments. They are not simply eye-candy; they are also brain-candy. And the books is written in a clever, engaging, dry style. The short “Acknowledgments and Preface” are worth the price of admission. A word about that price. I confess I get all the books I do on this show free, thanks to the publishers. So I don’t know how much they cost. I thought this one, judging by the production value, was going to run somewhere around $100. That’s steep. But my friends, I’m delighted to tell you that you can buy this book for the low, low price of $32.85 from Amazon. It would make a great holiday gift. Since I have a copy on hand, I think I’ll give it to my brother-in-law (don’t tell him…).

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Tags: 17th Century, Art History, Dutch Republic, Early Modern Europe, Family Life, Genius, Painting, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Women // Add Comment »