A thing I enjoy about this job is being encouraged to read books that unexpectedly turn out to be profoundly relevant to my own interests. Jeanne Fahnestock‘s new book, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford University Press, 2011), turns out to be just such a volume. I read it with a constant sense of surprise that this long and distinguished tradition provides insights on many objects of current linguistic enquiry (and indeed a sense of embarrassment that I didn’t already know that). But there is plenty in this book for readers who don’t share my eccentric obsessions. On the one hand, there’s a careful and very readable account of the numerous techniques identified by rhetoricians, from amphiboly to antimetabole. On the other, there’s vivid exemplification of the rhetorical effects that can be achieved, with examples from influential literary, political and scientific texts. The reader is left in no doubt that rhetoric is alive, well, and perhaps more powerful than ever. In this interview, we talk about the status of rhetoric as an object of study, and its recent renaissance. We discuss the usefulness of the exhaustive distinctions identified by rhetoricians of the past, and their relevance to users and analysts of language today. And we consider the ultimate goal of persuasive language use, the attainment of the (rhetorical) sublime.

It’s standard in philosophy of mind to distinguish between two basic kinds of mental phenomena: intentional states, which are about or represent other items or themselves, such as beliefs about your mother’s new hairdo, and phenomenal states, such as feelings of pain or visual experiences of seeing red. It’s also hotly debated how to explain how both kinds of mental phenomena are part of a purely physical world. The dominant approach in recent decades is to explain the phenomenal in terms of the intentional and the intentional in terms of the physical causal – that is, to explain conscious experience in terms of intentionality and to explain intentionality in terms of causal relations between thinkers and what they are thinking about. In his new book, The Sources of Intentionality (Oxford University Press), Uriah Kriegel, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, argues for a reversal of this order of explanation. On his view, conscious experience is basic to the explanation of all mental phenomena. In this erudite, stylish and provocative volume, Kriegel weighs the relative virtues of higher-order tracking and adverbial theories of experiential intentionality, and defends an interpretivist account of non-experiential intentionality.

Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), though, goes beyond trade- there was also lots of curiosity, in Britain and abroad, about the strange new peoples and products beginning to move more freely across the world than ever before. It is this aspect of British-Muslim interaction – (or more accurately interactions; the Islamic world was vast and encompassed a dizzying diversity of peoples and cultures) that Matar and MacLean emphasise- the wondering, bemused, gleeful, fascinated, at times despairing accounts of travellers, diplomats, traders -and pirates and their captives- as they sought to convey their impressions of the new worlds they encountered. Nor did everyone think the same; not every factor in Surat went fantee, and not every potentate and cleric disapproved of tobacco and coffee, which North Africans and Britons were wont to accuse each other of having introduced to their lands- and some people tried both lifestyles before settling on one- or neither. It was this celebration of the exotic that made the trading ports and cities of early modern Britain and the Islamic powers such fascinating places to be in- and MacLean and Matar’s book evokes perfectly the heady atmosphere of the contemporary world.

Popular culture is replete with warnings about the dangers of technology. One finds in recent films, literature, and music cautions about the myriad ways in which technology threatens our very humanity; most frequently, the lesson is that the attempt to harness technology for the betterment of the world always backfires. It’s no wonder, then, that when it comes to biomedical technologies that promise to enhance human physical and cognitive capacities, many people tend to express deep unease or opposition. But once one recognizes that technological enhancement, including biomedical enhancement, is ubiquitous throughout human history (from the technologies involved with cooking and storing food, to medicine and therapy, to even literacy itself), one wonders whether the common concerns are warranted. In Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves (Oxford University Press, 2011), Allen Buchanan surveys the contemporary enhancement debate, offers a diagnosis of what drives some of the views that he finds untenable, and proposes a nuanced view that fully recognizes the moral risks inherent in the enhancement enterprise.

When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). There was “The Boys from Brazil” (“The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, 90s, 2000!”). And there was “The ODESSA File” (“Germany believes she doesn’t need us now…but one day she’ll know that she does!”). “The ODESSA File” was my favorite because it explained what really happened, how the evil Nazis formed a super-secret group (Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angeheorigen) to get themselves out of Germany so they could one day return to power. The trouble is that’s not what happened at all. In fact, there was no ODESSA. In 1947, someone tricked Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal into believing “ODESSA” existed (he was quite willing to be tricked). Then Fredrick Forsyth amplified the myth in his book “The ODESSA File” (1972). Then Hollywood gave the story the full Hollywood treatment in movie “The ODESSA File” (1974). Hollywood tricked me into believing it existed (I was quite willing to be tricked). If you want to know the truth about how the Nazis got away, read Gerald Steinacher remarkably thorough Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011). He shows that there was a sort of conspiracy to get the Nazis out, it just wasn’t very conspiratorial. Even before the war the Nazis (and the SS particularly) were thinking about how to get away from the crumbling Reich. They talked to one an other, made contacts abroad, and traded tips. After some experimenting with various routes, they determined one was far and away most effective: through Austria, into Italy, and then overseas. They had a lot of help. Some of it was for hire, for example in South Tyrol where a kind of Nazi-smuggling industry arose. Some was gratis, for example that offered by a German bishop in Rome. Add some bungling by the International Red Cross, some skullduggery by the OSS, some complicity by foreign powers (e.g., Argentina) seeking German “experts,” and–just like that–the “Ratlines” were clear and known to anyone paying attention. Steinacher shows that no ODESSA-like organization was necessary for the Nazis to escape. All they had to do was follow the well-trodden, clearly marked path that lead away from justice in Europe and into safety abroad. That’s more disturbing than ODESSA.  

The founding fathers–and mothers, sons and daughters–were British. Sort of. It’s true that they were subjects of the British crown, and that they looked, talked, acted and had the tastes of folks in London. But they were always different. Though they carried with them a sort of “British cultural package,” what they changed that cultural package, sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally. To draw an evolutionary analogy, they “speciated,” that is, evolved into something new. But just what it was they did not know, not before the Revolution and for a long time after it. In her enlightening Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford UP, 2011), Kariann Akemi Yokota tells us how early “Americans” dealt with the problem of “American” identity. They were nothing if not conflicted: they recognized that British culture was much more sophisticated than their own, but they also sought to find virtue in American rudeness. One of the most interesting things about Kariann’s book is how she uses a variety of unusual sources to study this cultural anxiety–porcelain, maps, paintings, furniture, architecture, cloth, clothes, and other artifacts of “material culture.” Her analysis made me look at the “material culture” in my own house differently (“What in the world does a Dustbuster say about being an American?”). Kariann’s book will make you think differently about how Americans became Americans.

When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most important economic and political developments in the Old Regime’s last quarter century. As Finance Minister he oversaw the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. As a diplomat, he was Russia’s chief negotiator of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty that ended his country’s disastrous war with Japan. As Prime Minister, Witte authored the October Manifesto which crowned a series of sweeping reforms of Russia’s political system with a parliament, the State Duma. But as Frank Wcislo emphasizes in his biography, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Witte was also a great storyteller, as exemplified in his memoirs The Notes of Count Witte. Wcislo shows in this fascinating book how Witte’s stories reveal the times of the man as a man of the times. Witte was an archetypical New Russian torn by his affinity for the conservatism of the Russian elite and his recognition that those very values were fetters on his nation’s modernization. At the same time Witte’s stories reveal a man prone to masculine hero worship, gossip, vindictiveness, and embellishment of his own role in Russia’s high politics.

In a liberal democratic society, individuals share political power as equals. Consequently, liberal democratic governments must recognize each citizen as a political equal. This requires, in part, that liberal democratic governments must seek to govern on the basis of reasons that all citizens could endorse. However, the freedoms secured by liberal democratic institutions give rise to a plurality of religious and moral doctrines, and thus a morally and religiously diverse citizenry. Liberal democratic states, then, must try to govern on the basis of noncontroversial principles, and must avoid governing on the basis of contentions moral and religious ideas. Religious principles are notoriously controversial among liberal democratic citizens; consequently, it is widely thought that a liberal democratic government must not employ controversial religious reasons when deciding policy. Hence the familiar commitment to the separation of church and state, and the corresponding idea that government must be neutral when it comes to the Big Questions of human life. Yet the idea that politics and religion should be kept separate seems to be a controversial moral idea in its own right. For many religious believers, faith informs every aspect of their lives, including the political and social aspects. Hence the claim that their religious commitments are inappropriate sources of guidance in political matters strikes many religious citizens as deeply objectionable, perhaps even a violation of their right to free religious exercise. A central challenge for liberal democratic political theory, then, is to justify the separation of church and state (or religion and politics) to religious citizens in a way that does not rely upon controversial moral ideas. In Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Audi proposes a novel and forceful account of the proper role of religious conviction in democratic politics. This account provides the basis for an attractive conception of the separation of church and state, and a compelling vision of civic virtue.

‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal rulers unconcerned with the dynamics of the global economy? Philip Stern‘s book, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) explores just this: the changing boundaries and demarcations between corporate bodies and sovereign states, and the ‘rightful’ spheres of action of each. This is not to suggest that the English East India Company was a sort of half-way house, or that it occupied a zone of hybridity; it was merely that, in those days (as is perhaps increasingly the case again),  the ‘business of government’ was often assumed by ‘corporations and non-state actors’; and they went about their job just as well as any political government with sovereign powers. So it was that the East India Company’s factors, based in coastal entrepots, built forts, codified law, brought in settlers, collected taxes, waged war, and generally laid down a framework for the governance of the environs they operated in- and carried on trade. The Company-State couldn’t carry on for ever though; as Stern points out, it eventually became a casualty of the ‘evolving definitions’ of what constituted an economic body and what constituted a political body, and eventually ceded all political space to the British Crown, even as its economic avatar just celebrated a quatercentenary of existence.

Great Britain and Russia faced off across the Pamirs for much of the nineteenth century; their rivalries and animosities often obscuring underlying commonalities; these were, after all, colonial Empires governing ‘alien’ peoples, and faced much the same problems insofar as maintaining their rule was concerned. Alexander Morrison‘s Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910: A Comparison with British India (Oxford University Press, 2008) does exactly that; traces the issues faced by the Russian administration in the region around Samarkand and the British administration in the Punjab, issues ranging from judicial systems and grassroots administration to dam building and educating the colonized local populace. This is a book that is at once fluent and erudite; its the great strengths are a very detailed bibliography, and an extensive use of Russian archival sources, as well as local sources in Persian; too often has the story of Russia in Central Asia been recounted to an Anglophone audience from the works and thoughts of British colonial administrators. This is also a work that analyses macro, holistic administrative structures and does not rely on the retelling of anecdotes involving flamboyant frontier officials; a recounting that delves behind the sabre-rattling of the Great Game suffices in itself to make this book a must-read.

The human capacity for language is always cited as the or one of the cognitive capacities we have that separates us from non-human animals. And linguistics, at its most basic level, is the study of language as such – in the primary and usual case, how we manage the pairing of sounds with meanings to make such a thing as speech even possible. The standard view in linguistics today, introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, is that language is a biologically based cognitive capacity that develops in specific ways in all humans given the appropriate (usually acoustic) inputs. The end result is someone who speaks a natural language – such as English –and has reliable intuitions about what can and cannot correctly be said in that natural language. Peter Ludlow, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University, examines a variety of controversial themes related to this model in his new book, The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2011). What is the nature of this universal capacity for language, and how is it related to the natural languages that we come to speak? What sort of evidence can intuitions about what we can and can’t say provide about the underlying rules for generating meaningful sounds, especially when we have no conscious access to them? Does it make sense to think that this grammar provides normative guidance for our linguistic behavior when we don’t know what it is? Ludlow suggests provocative answers to these questions and more in this ground-breaking book.

Europe may currently be in crisis and riven with divisions, but at least it’s a Europe of independent states. It was not always so. The Soviets dominated Eastern Europe for nearly half a century following the defeat of the Nazis. And for most of that time it seemed Soviet domination would never end. Then, unexpectedly, the Berlin Wall was no more. Eastern European states that had limited experience with democracy and open society began feeling their way forward and aspiring to become full fledged members of Europe. Many now are. Gale Stokes first wrote about how this monumental transformation happened in the first edition of The Walls Came Tumbling Down in 1993. He has now updated that story (The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2011) to provide thorough and readable accounts of the brutal collapse of Yugoslavia and the coming of age of the former Soviet satellites and their accession to the European Union. By its nature, it is a complex story with many different perspectives, and Stokes tells it in a fashion that novices to the region can understand, but with insights that experts in the field will find stimulating.

There is a lot of ritual involved in Buddhist practice. As more and more North Americans are discovering Buddhism, they are engaging in more and more Buddhist ritual, despite a general aversion many North Americans have to ritualized behavior. Dr. Patricia Campbell‘s new book, Knowing Body, Moving Mind: Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers (Oxford University Press, 2011), presents an ethnographic survey of two Toronto-based meditation centers and explores the ways in which Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers engage in Buddhist ritual. Obviously, ritual theory plays an important role in her book as a methodology for analyzing these Buddhist communities; but Dr. Campbell also takes note of the process of embodied learning and how engaging in ritualized behavior affectively changes practitioners. How we come to learn about Buddhism happens not only through the cognitive acquisition of knowledge, but through the process of ritualized practiced. The book is a great contribution to the growing field of Buddhist studies in North America. A thorough ethnographic study of so-called convert communities combined with an astute analysis of Buddhist ritual makes Dr. Campbell’s book a valuable addition to the field.

The Victor’s Crown brings to vivid life the signal role of sport in the classical world. Ranging over a dozen centuries–from Archaic Greece through to the late Roman and early Byzantine empires–David Potter’s lively narrative shows how sport, to the ancients, was not just a dim reflection of religion and politics but a potent social force in its own right. The passion for sport among the participants and fans of antiquity has been matched in history only by our own time. Potter first charts the origins of competitive athletics in Greece during the eighth century BC and the emergence of the Olympics as a preeminent cultural event. He focuses especially on the experiences of spectators and athletes, especially in violent sports such as boxing and wrestling, and describes the physiology of conditioning, training techniques, and sport’s role in education. Throughout, we meet the great athletes of the past and learn what made them great. The rise of the Roman Empire transformed the sporting world by popularizing new entertainments, particularly gladiatorial combat, a specialized form of chariot racing, and beast hunts. Here, too, Potter examines sport from the perspectives of both athlete and spectator, as he vividly describes competitions held in such famous arenas as the Roman Coliseum and the Circus Maximus. The Roman government promoted and organized sport as a central feature of the Empire, making it a sort of common cultural currency to the diverse inhabitants of its vast territory.

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now the “border,” for in order for borders to be borders, they have to be seen as such. Sheffer shows that for quite a number of years after 1945, the Germans in Neustadt and Sonneberg–closely situated towns in, respectively, the American and Soviet zones of occupation–didn’t really know whether the border was a border and, if so, what kind of border it was or should be. “It”–whatever it was–was shifting, lawless, contested, resented, profitable, and sometimes deadly. The Grenze at Burned Bridge was really a kind of anarchical region dividing people who were in no way different from one another but who were compelled to behave as if they were by two occupying powers. The degree to which they were so compelled differed and this made all the difference in the end (the end being 1990, the year of reunification). Years of Nazi propaganda had taught Germans to fear Communist Russians. So when the Soviets arrived in Sonneberg and began to rape and pillage, their fears were realized and they fled. When Soviets (with the help of East German Communists) imposed Stalinism and all that went with it, their fears were doubled and they fled. And when Soviet order reduced once prosperous Sonneberg to a mere economic shadow of Wirtschaftwunder-era Neustadt, their fears were tripled and they fled. For the Soviets and their East German toadies, this “defection” was embarrassing, so they made what was an ill-defined, porous border zone into a militarized, nearly sealed wall. For anyone familiar with Soviet border policy in the 1930s, what they did in Germany is not surprising. What is surprising (at least to me) is the Americans’ and Neustadters’ response to the influx of Easterners, namely, something between ambivalence and hostility. The former wanted order on the border and the latter wanted security from the Eastern “mob.” Both took active measures to keep the Ossis out, all the while issuing pronouncements about the necessity of Wiedervereinigung. The Soviets are responsible for the division of Germany, but, as Edith shows, they had help.

Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow and St. Petersberg go about making the bewildering array of peoples and ethnicities into subjects subject of a Russian empire? Vera Tolz’s Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford University Press, 2011) examines ‘Orientalism’ as it evolved in the Russian metropole, developed by scholars and pedagogues from every corner of the far flung Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These turn-of-the-century Russian Orientologists (note, not ‘Orientalists’) saw themselves as ‘Empire-savers;’ promoting ethnic nationalism, they felt, would only strengthen ultimate allegiance to the Russian Empire. The result of their efforts was an emphatic celebration of the ‘non-European’ cultures that made up much of Central Asia and the Caucasus, whose peoples were encouraged to consolidate their ethnic and cultural identities even as they were supposed to be part of a larger Russian entity- a policy that persisted through the many changes of power at the metropole. And even as the Russian state continued to be shaped and influenced by peoples and cultures away from from its political centre, the Orientologists who did so much to integrate this diversity of Russians were themselves influenced by, and counted among their ranks of, people from all over Russia. Orientology in Russia was then a rejection of the East -West dichotomy, a view that early on anticipated and matched many of the cannons of modern postcolonial scholarship.

A book called Southeast Asia in World History (Oxford University Press, 2009) might seem on the face of it to be out of place on a blog about South Asia. But as Craig Lockard so convincingly demonstrates, this region was shaped by, and in turn gave much to, the rest of the world. Its links with South Asia, with the ancient empires of India, go back to antiquity; and Indian traders in turn were responsible for ferrying many Southeast Asian spices to the rest of the world; curiosity eventually drew the Arabs and then the Portuguese, to the region, thus bringing the world to a place that already boasted of Indic, Sinitic and Pacific peoples and cultures. The nation states of modern Southeast Asia, both mainland and maritime, have continued this proud tradition of welcoming people from across the world; not always without conflict, but this is part of a larger process of acceptance and assimilation that translates into being able to partake of foods from across the world on the streets of Penang and Singapore and Jakarta; of a small city state becoming a global hub insofar as connections, virtual and real, are concerned, and of politicians coming from ‘minority’ ethnic groups and nobody batting an eyelid. Craig’s book shows us how this is the result not of some artificially engineered process, but of an autochthonous tradition of pluralism that has endured over the centuries.

Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet(Oxford University Press, 2008). Common in Tibetan Buddhism is the story of the delok, a person who has died, traveled to the afterlife, and returned to the land of living with some message or moral to share. Delok come from all walks of life–laypersons, lamas, and monks–all figure in these stories. And what they share is a detailed and personal account of their deaths, their journeys to various Buddhist hells and suffering beings they encounter there, and a meeting with the Lord of Death, Yama, who judges their karmic action. Invariably, Yama tells the delok that she or he should return to the living and be a more compassionate, generous, and devoted Buddhist. These morality tales tell us much about religious belief and practice in pre-modern Tibet. But Prof. Cuevas’ important work also has much to say about the limitations of the term “popular” itself. By cutting across both monastic and lay communities, this literature reveals much about common Buddhist understandings of the cosmos both inside and outside the monastery walls.

If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war “urban renewal,” that is, the process by which the Washington, big city governments, big city banks, and big city developers came together to clear “slums” and erect modern (really “modernist”) apartment blocks and complexes of apartment blocks. Think “the projects” (or, more generally, “public housing“). In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the New York City Housing Authority supervised the construction of a lot of them. Today roughly 500,000 New Yorkers live in them. And many of them, I would guess, probably wish they lived in “pre-war buildings.” Sandy Zipp does a wonderful job of telling the story of this re-making of New York in his fascinating book Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford UP, 2010). Along the way, myths are busted (“the projects” were not built for poor folks), villains are redeemed (Robert Moses wasn’t really such a bad guy), and ugly buildings are explained (many serious people really thought tower blocks were beautiful). The book makes plain why large chunks of Manhattan (and many other cities) look the way they do and why they are thought of the way they are. Read it and find out.

Today’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or not, of artworks have historically been tied to the notion of beauty, there are plenty of works of art and genres of art that succeed aesthetically only when they cause non-pleasurable responses. Horror films and tragedies are typical examples. These kinds of art are philosophically puzzling. How is it that things that we know are not real can cause emotional responses as if they were real? Why do we experience the adrenalin rush and the racing pulse of fear when we know very well that Hannibal Lector is just a character on the screen? How can an aversive experience be aesthetically valuable? How can something that repels be aesthetically attractive? These paradoxes of fiction and aversion arise in spades when it comes to the emotion of disgust. In this podcast, we talk with Carolyn Korsmeyer, professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, about her new book is Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2011). Professor Korsmeyer discusses the nature of disgust as an emotion, the aesthetic allure of the disgusting, and the kind of aesthetic experience that we get in disgusting art. Do we really feel disgust when we confront this art, or must our disgust be denatured in some way before we can regard the object aesthetically? How can the disgusting also be attractive? What does disgust add to aesthetic experience that other emotional responses don’t? Korsmeyer claims that disgust is more varied than we tend to think, that it has certain features that overcome the problem of fiction and aversion, and that successful works of art that aim to evoke disgust elicit a special kind of aesthetic response, the sublate.

In his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of reading in the United States. Where some would argue that there are too few people doing the wrong kind of reading, Jacobs argues the contrary. He believes that literature is flourishing, pointing to the existence of enormous booksellers like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, as well as the influence of Oprah’s Book Club as evidence. In our interview, we talked about why our reading muscles have weakened over time, the importance of reading at whim, and the wondrous reading silence of children immersed in books.  Read all about it, and more, in Jacob’s thought-provoking new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already.

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come.

Many entries in our lexicon have an interesting history, but it’s very seldom the case that the currency of a phrase has global repercussions. In his book The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2011), Adam Hodges makes a compelling case that the expression “War on Terror” became part of a political narrative that was sufficiently powerful to gain public support for at least two major wars. Hodges traces the characterisation of America’s “War on Terror” from George Bush’s first speeches after 9/11 all the way to the end his Presidency. He explores how the narrative grew to encompass Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and how systematically it was presented to the public. He considers how the pre-eminence of this narrative marginalised alternative world-views and shaped political debate, as well as influencing the public’s perception of reality. At the same time, his book is a theoretically sophisticated work of applied discourse analysis and a compelling exploration of the role of language in domestic politics and international relations. In this interview, Hodges discusses the trajectory of the narrative, its reception among the public and the political classes, and the potential role of discourse analysts in contributing to a better public understanding of political actions.

For many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origination) as something fearful to be escaped. Many scholars, especially recently, have told this story of the transition from pre-modern to modern Buddhism, but often with no other purpose than to dismiss modern Buddhism as inauthentic, a departure from the “real” Buddhism of ritual chanting and sacred relics. David McMahan‘s book The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008) tells the story of Buddhist modernism in a balanced way, one that acknowledges its novelty yet remains sympathetic to its concerns and interests. McMahan, who is a professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College, theorizes not only Buddhism but also modernity. Using Charles Taylor’s account of modern life, he explores the forces that changed Buddhism in recent centuries. McMahan discusses typically cited factors (e.g., the emphasis on meditation, the belief in science), but also seldom mentioned (though important) elements of Buddhist modernism like affirmations of nature, interdependence, and everyday life.

I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone said, were bent on ruling the world. Detente had been a ploy to lull us to sleep. In Afghanistan, the Communists had renewed their campaign. We had to do something. So we didn’t go to “their” Olympics. Oddly, that brave gesture failed to bring them around to our way of thinking. There are two really wonderful things about Sir Rodric Braithwaite‘s new book Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (Oxford UP, 2011). First, Sir Rodric shows in excruciating detail just how wrong we got it. The tiny cabal of Soviet leaders who sent the Red Army into Afghanistan weren’t imperialists pursuing some grand strategy to conquer the globe. They were scared, sometimes confused old men in a situation that was made impossible by conflicting, contradictory aims. They wanted to protect the USSR’s southern boarder; they wanted to keep the US out of the region; they wanted to stop the local Communist Party from turning Afghanistan into another Cambodia; they wanted to protect their personal friends and allies, people they knew, trusted, and liked; and, almost more than anything else, they wanted to give the Afghanis peace, stability, and prosperity so they just wouldn’t have to think about Afghanistan ever again. That’s right, the men in the Kremlin were not evil; they wanted to do good, if only for their own sake. The trouble was–and this brings us to the second wonderful aspect of Sir Rodric’s book–they couldn’t accomplish all these things. They knew this: the horrible example of America’s effort to “help” Vietnam was right before their eyes. But they were frightened, prone to catastrophic thinking, and didn’t want to appear weak. So they had to do something. They couldn’t very well refuse to go to their own Olympics. So, by steps, they invested Afghanistan. First there were advisors. Then there were troops to protect the advisors. Then there was political unrest, calls for help, and the dispatch of larger army units to “restore order.” Order was not restored, so the generals (though not all of them) reasonably asked for more troops. And so it went until the Soviets conquered Afghanistan but did not hold it; ruled it but did not govern it; won every battle in it but lost the war against it. If this sounds familiar to Americans, it should.    

The Greco-Roman world was the prism through which the British viewed their imperial efforts, and Mark Bradley’s compendium Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010) explores the various ways in which this reception of the classics occurred. From museums, to oratorical texts, to theories of race, the classical world was a reference point for the imperial British. Bradley’s book looks at how the British thought about the classical world at a time when they were confronted by their own role as empire builders. There was the desire to reinforce, to justify their claims to being the greatest imperial power after Rome. There was doubt; the need to reconcile the colonized to their rule even as they learnt how ancient Britons had resisted Roman rule. There was a certain humbled pride that they had managed to supplant the Romans insofar as claims to being the ‘greatest imperial power’ were concerned. There was also puzzlement; the jewel in the crown, India, was nothing like any Roman province or territory-how did this place them in relation to the Romans, who after all went about subjugating ‘barbarians’ as opposed a people with a highly sophisticated civilization of their own? These are some of the issues that concerned the Britons of the Empire, and that this book analyses with great sensitivity.

Copyright is one of those topics over which even two saints disagreed. The legend has it that Saint Columba and Saint Finnian engaged in an argument as Columba had secretly, and without the latter’s permission, copied a Latin Psalter owned by Finnian. When Finnian found out about it, he requested the copy, but Columbia refused to give it back. Dermott, the King of Ireland, decreed “to every cow belong its calf, so to every book belong its copy.” In 1925 the former Assistant Register of Copyrights in the United States, Richard De Wolf, pointed out that “the progress of copyright law does not take place by revolutions, but by successive stages. It resembles the growth of a city, in which, as time goes on, some parts are torn down and others are devoted to new uses..” However, this process has been historically riddled with controversy and disagreement, and not only among saints. Authorship rights and other questions related to the intellectual property became issues of major importance with the advent of the industrial revolution, in particular, with the advancement of printing technologies. Even figures like Charles Dickens were concerned with the free circulation of British books abroad. English statutes to protect intellectual property were adopted as early as in 1624. As the international legal mechanisms protecting intellectual property have solidified, the critique, mainly emanating from the global south, about its monopolizing and exclusionary nature has intensified as well. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains provisions regarding the protection of private property as well as intellectual property. In particular, Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that “everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” But is it proper to think of the world of ideas and knowledge, the world, which as Rajshree Chandra argues, is inexhaustible and socially distributed, in the same way as we think of the world of tangibles such as clothes, cars, or houses? And what are the main problems associated with relying on normative justifications for private property while we consider moral underpinnings of property rights over knowledge? And if indeed the moral groundings of the right to intellectual property are the same as those of the right to the ownership of property, what conclusions should be made from the distributional consequences of the transnational enforcement of these rights? Chandra takes up all these questions and more in her fine new book Knowledge as Property, Issues in the Moral Grounding of Intellectual Property Rights (Oxford University Press, 2010).

In our attempts to know and understand the world around us, we inevitably rely on others to provide us with reliable testimony about facts and states of affairs to which we do not have access. What is the nature of this reliance? Do testifiers simply provide us with especially compelling evidence? Should we regard the testimony of others as only so much more local data in our cognitive environment? Or is there a deeper sense in which much of our knowledge depends on others? In his new book, Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2010), Sanford Goldberg argues for the striking thesis that in cases of testimonial knowledge, part of our justification in believing another’s testimony resides in the mind/brain of the testifier. This thesis runs counter to what Goldberg regards as a widespread and insufficiently examined premise at the heart of most views in contemporary epistemology, namely, individualism, which is the view that a believer’s justification never extends outside of the believer’s mind/brain. Goldberg argues that, over a significant range of cases, a believer’s justification depends upon irreducibly social factors, and thus that an individual’s justification sometimes resides in part in the cognitive processes of others.

What was the scholastic metaphysical tradition of the later Middle Ages, and why did it come “crashing down as quickly and completely” as it did towards the end of the 17th Century? Why was the year 1347 a “milestone in the history of philosophy”? And why didn’t philosophy itself collapse right along with the scholastic framework? In Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder) provides a monumental yet highly readable synthesis of four hundred years of philosophical thought about the nature of ordinary objects, such as cats or dogs or stones. After examining hundreds of original texts (many only available in the original Latin) Pasnau focuses on metaphysical debates involving the central scholastic concept of substance, understood as a composite of matter and form. He discusses the crushing effect of the Inquisition on innovative metaphysical thought in this period, emphasizes the continuity of scholastic views even among critics of scholasticism, and considers why the dominant metaphysics that succeeded the scholastic framework, which he calls corpuscularianism, was not inevitable. Indeed, as he points out, the new metaphysics brought with it a host of new difficulties that are by now familiar, such as the mind-body problem, the nature of identity over time, and the distinction between appearance and reality.

How can those in African, Africana, and African American Studies strengthen their disciplinary ties? What do these connections have to do with Kwasi Konadu‘s recent study The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford 2010)? How can the scholarship produced in African, Africana, and African American Studies serve the interests of people of African descent across the globe? Indeed, how can the history of the Akan people help us to better understand slavery and the history of the Americas? What does it mean for a scholar who is the descendant of Ghanaians, born in Jamaica and reared in America to make his life work about African history? And how does that scholar feel about his personal role in the legacy of the Diaspora, about a being a Black father in the U.S.? Kwasi Konadu speaks about all of this and more in his New Books in African American Studies interview. Konadu’s intellectual commitment to uncovering and explaining the Akan people, their language, culture, and performative practices is inspiring. In fact, he seeks to encourage his colleagues in Africana Studies–broadly construed to include African American and African studies–“to get the story straight,” that is, to cultivate a rich appreciation for the narrative histories of the peoples of the African Diasporas (plural) and to explore what those narrative histories mean for our teaching and even our lives. I am persuaded by Konadu and personally plan to take up his call in my own teaching and research. I ask myself, “How could I not after talking to him, especially since he gives suggestions that are easy to implement?” I bet that after listening to him that you too will become a believer. Enjoy the interview, and let us know what you think!

What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that rested “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.” The charismatic leader is not like us. In fact, he is not like anyone. He is sui generis, a mysterious force of nature, a sort of political demiurge. According to Jonathan Steinberg, Weber may well have had Otto von Bismarck in mind when he defined charismatic authority. In his wonderful Bismarck: A Life (Oxford UP, 2011), Steinberg argues that Bismarck’s successes (and some of his failures) can be largely attributed to the awesome force of his personality. Not “social structures.” Not “historical patterns.” Not “underlying forces.” But charisma pure and simple. Time and again Steinberg finds those around Bismarck attesting to the fact that he just wasn’t like everyone else. He was smarter, wittier, stronger, more willful, more cunning, more temperamental, and in most ways larger than life. And this was the nearly uniform (though not always positive) assessment of the some of the most impressive figures of his day. It’s a compelling case. And it provokes a question about German political culture, for Bismarck was not the first or the last “genius” to rule some or all of the Reich. Fredrick the Great preceded him, and Hitler followed. What are we to make of that? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: “We lost the war because we, individually and therefore communally, were ill.” And it explains victory: “We won the war because we, individually and there communally, were healthy.” And it suggests a program for political progress: get healthy and stay that way. It’s an old idea. We find it among the Greeks, the Romans, and throughout the various 19th- and early 20th-century programs for “national renewal” that swept Europe and Asia. In his excellent book Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (Oxford UP, 2010), Erik Jensen explores how Germans of the Weimar era were seduced by this “self-wellness = national-wellness” logic. They’d lost a war, and they couldn’t understand why. They knew that German culture wasn’t the problem. They believed–and with some good reason–that it was the most advanced in the world. So perhaps, they thought, the problem was some failure in themselves. They had grown weak and ill. Yes, that was it. So something had to be done about it. As Jensen shows, it was. And here’s the really interesting part, at least by my lights: it wasn’t done by the state. The Weimar government itself, though hardly disinterested, did not lead the campaign to make the German body well. Rather, “ordinary Germans” did. They began to play and follow sports, and to form countless clubs that played and followed sports. Sports became, well, “progressive” among the “right thinking people.” Rich and poor. Men and women. Everyone played. For Germany.

On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and South Ossetia were located not on the southeastern seaboard of the United States, but in a mountainous region south of Russia called the Caucasus. The war was short, a mere four days, but during that time it became an campaign issue between Barack Obama and John McCain, a moment made memorable when McCain declared “We are all Georgians now.” For the Cold Warriors of yesteryear the world was remade familiar: Russia was enemy no. 1 again, Mikheil Saakashvili’s was a victim of Russian imperialism, and the Cold War was back as if it had never left. Those familiar with the South Caucasus know that the region is allergic to Cold War binaries. Its ethnic, linguistic, and religious complexity defy even the best social scientific models. Persistent conflicts mark the region. Azerbaijan and Armenia are at odds over Nagorno-Karabakh. Georgia has had to contend with separatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both Russian protectorates. Of course, we can’t forget that the region also hosts two important energy pipelines–the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline–making the South Caucasus a geopolitical focus of the United States, the EU, and Russia. The 2008 South Ossetian War might have brought the region to the attention of many, but its origins have deep roots in the intricacies of the region’s history. Luckily, to make sense of the South Caucasus’ complicated past and volatile present, we have Thomas de Waal‘s The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford UP, 2010). De Waal clearly and succinctly outlines the morass that is the South Caucasus by laying out the histories, relations, and issues that drive present day Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and their place in the world. Whether as a refresher or an initiation, The Caucasus: An Introduction is an important primer.

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t even that, because the people who lived in what we now call “Europe” didn’t think of themselves as “Europeans” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but no matter…). There were, however, other Ages of Exploration. Giancarlo Casale‘s wonderful book is about one of them, one you haven’t heard of. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford UP, 2010) and is about–you guessed it–the Ottoman Age of Exploration. Like their “European” counterparts, the Ottoman explorers were pursuing two interests: spices and salvation. The former were found (largely) in Southern Asia and the latter was of course in Mecca. To ensure access to both, the Ottomans built–nearly from scratch–an large, ocean-going navy and set out to dominate the Indian Ocean. And they almost did it, though they faced fierce competition from the Portuguese, Safavids, and Mughals. Read all about it in Casale’s terrific book. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the case that somebody else’s ancestors once lived on “this land,” and somebody else’s before that. From the very earliest moments of human history, people have been taking each other’s territory. This seemingly endless cycle is the subject of David Day’s excellent new book Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford UP, 2008). Day points out that the process of “supplanting” has a kind of deep structure, no matter when or where it occurs. Claims are made, territories are mapped, colonists settled, soil is tilled, natives are moved about or exterminated, and comforting stories are told, often about how “our ancestors have always lived here.” It’s a rather sad spectacle, though we should thank David for holding this mirror up to us.

My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or “Thuds.” He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called “Thud Ridge.” He’d come home on leave and tell us that it was okay “over there” and not to worry. I didn’t because I was sure “we” would win and my uncle would come home a hero. Of course, neither of these things happened (though my uncle did come home). Since then, I’ve read many books about the war In an effort to try to figure out “what happened,” which is to say why it all went so horribly wrong. But I’d never read one quite like Mark P. Bradley’s Vietnam at War (Oxford University Press, 2009). Mark succeeds in doing something very unusual–and perhaps unique–in the American literature on the Vietnam conflict: he shows us the war from the Vietnamese point of view, and more particularly the North Vietnamese point of view. He’s mined Vietnamese archives, literature, and popular culture to see the war through Vietnamese eyes, and he’s done a marvelous job of it. My uncle’s war was very different from the one Mark presents. He fought the “Vietnam War”; they fought the “French War” and the “American War.” He saw it from a cockpit; they lived it on the ground, under the bombs. He was in their country; they were in their own country. He was sure he would leave; they were sure they would stay, and grasp victory once the invaders were gone. Now that I think about it, there is something strangely familiar about this story.

What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war? Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The book is part of the National History Center‘s Reinterpreting History series. The pieces in it are wide-ranging: some see the war from the heights of international diplomacy, others from the hamlets of the Mekong Delta. They introduce new themes, for example, the role of American racial stereotypes in the conflict. More than anything else, however, they are nuanced. Their authors provide no simple answers because there are none. You will not find easy explanations, good guys and bad guys, or ideological drum-beating in these pages. What you will find is a sensitive effort to understand an event of mind-boggling, irreducible complexity. There’s a lesson here: we may think we know what we are doing on far-away shores, but we are fooling ourselves. Reminds one a bit of Tolstoy’s thoughts on the philosophy of history at the end of War and Peace. Still worth a read, as is this book.

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford UP, 2010). Greiser was a totalitarian if ever there were one. He believed in the Nazi cause with his heart and soul. He wanted to create a new Germany, and indeed a new Europe dominated by Germans. As the Gauleiter of Wartheland (an area of Western Poland annexed to the Reich), he was given the opportunity to help realize the Nazi nightmare in the conquered Eastern territories. But, as Epstein shows, he was often hindered both by his own personality and the chaos that characterized Nazi occupation of the East. Grieser emerges from Epstein’s book as someone who wanted to be a “model Nazi,” but couldn’t really manage it because he was a crooked timber working in a crooked system. His personal life was an embarrassing tangle of marriages, affairs, and break-ups that at points threatened his career. His professional life was marked by ambition, ego-mania, and fawning, none of which endeared him to most of his colleagues and superiors. And his murderous attempts to “work toward the Fuhrer” in the Wartheland–by displacing Poles, murdering Jews and other “undesirables,” and populating the East with Germans–were stymied by the cross-cutting jurisdictions, conflicting agendas, and professional jealousies that were one of the hallmarks of Nazi rule. Grieser did his best (or his worst, depending on how you look at it) to Germanize the Wartheland. He improvised, maneuvered, and “worked the system” such as it was in pursuit of the Nazi totalitarian project. Thankfully, he failed, demonstrating again that totalitarian dreams, though they can be horribly distructive, are a far reach from totalitarian realities.

Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler than any other figure in modern history. Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin and a few others might give him a run for his money, but I’d bet on Hitler. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him. Surely Thomas Weber knew this when he began to work on Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford UP, 2010). After all, a new book on Hitler’s wartime experience had come out in 2005. What more is there to say? It turns out that there is quite a lot if you know where to look. And Weber does. He uses an interesting approach to uncover novel information about Hitler. Weber acknowledges that the documentary record relating directly to Hitler’s personal wartime experience is thin (a few letters, some military reports) and, when it is thicker, biased (more than a few axe-grinding memoirs from a much later time). These documents, all of which have been pored over by historians, will not shed any new light on Hitler. So Weber turns to a much larger and more trustworthy body of sources: that produced by the officers and soldiers in Hitler’s unit, the List Regiment. Though these papers usually do not mention Hitler by name, they enable Weber to reconstruct what he must have experienced, to see what was typical and what was not in Hitler’s service record, and, on the basis of this information, judge the veracity of claims made by Hitler, Nazi propagandists, and historians about the impact of World War I on the the Nazi dictator. The result is a serious revision. Hitler (et al.) said that World War one “made” him the person he became. Weber shows in detail that this claim is false. Fundamental elements of Hitler’s worldview either pre-date the war (his German nationalism) or seem to post-date it (his radical anti-semitism). In fact, the war did two things for Hitler: it gave him credibility he could use as he entered politics and it convinced him that he was an expert in military affairs. He ran for office as a humble Gefreiter (private), a holder of the Iron Cross First Class; and he ran the war as a dilettantish know-it-all, often with disastrous consequences. The only revelation Hitler had in the trenches was a common one, namely, that war is a very nasty business. That he went on to start another, even bloodier one has less to do with his experience of World War One than the ideas he brought to the conflict and absorbed after it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Here’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of humanity. For instance, it is at least imaginable that one day everyone will believe that zoos were [NB] profoundly immoral. The future will condemn us for imprisoning animals. The future will ask “How could they have done such a barbaric thing?” And the future, more than likely, will answer “Because they were evil.” When looking into humanity’s sordid past, we often say this sort of thing. Why did American slaveholders trade in human flesh? Because they were evil. Why did the Nazis persecute the Jews? Because they were evil. Why did the Khmer Rough murder countless innocent Cambodians? Because they were evil. In 1940, Mochulsky was tapped by the NKVD (it ran the GULAG system) to build railroads north of the Arctic Circle. He thereby came to control the lives of a great number of what were essentially slave-laborers. He, of course, did not see them as such. “Because they were evil,” however, is not an explanation; it’s an ethical judgment. It might make you feel morally superior; and indeed you might well be morally superior. But it will not help you comprehend anything. For if you really want to understand why seemingly ordinary people did what you feel are truly awful things, you have to listen to them explain why. In Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir (Oxford UP, 2010), Deborah Kaple gives us just this opportunity. She presents us with Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky–ordinary fellow, Communist Party member, and GULAG officer from 1940 to 1946. Born in Belorussia after the Revolution, Mochulsky was raised on Bolshevik ideas. Not surprisingly, he believed in the project; he wanted to help create a bright future for humankind. So he trained as an engineer, because building socialism was all about building in those days. In 1940, Mochulsky was tapped by the NKVD (it ran the GULAG system) to build railroads north of the Arctic Circle. He thereby came to control the lives of a great number of what were essentially slave-laborers. He, of course, did not see them as such. To him, they were “enemies of the people” and had received their just (if somewhat harsh) reward. Under his direction, many of them suffered and died. This bothered him a bit, but not enough to question “the system.” He thought it was basically sound, though perhaps in need of better implementation. And that is the way he saw his role: he was improving “the system” without ever asking whether “the system” itself was bankrupt. Of course, looking back on what he did (he wrote the memoir in the 1990s), he has regrets. But he had none at the time. Mochulsky believed in what he was doing, just the way you believe that it’s fine to imprison animals. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Try to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part of our daily experience. Just look up and you’ll probably see one, or at least its vapor trails. Go to your local airport and you can fly in one pretty inexpensively. Heck, if you like, you can learn to pilot one yourself at any one of hundreds of flying schools. There is just nothing unusual or even very exciting about airships. It wasn’t always so. In the first quarter of the 20th century, airplanes were new. People had long dreamed of flight (see “Icarus and Daedalus”) and by the 19th century they’d done a little of it in balloons. But most folks could hardly conceive of a man (or woman) taking to the air like a bird. But men (and soon women) did just that. To many contemporary observers, flying in winged airships was nothing short of a miracle. Surely, pundits claimed, conquest of the air would usher in a new modern age. It did, but not in all the ways expected. As Thomas Kessner shows in his wonderfully told The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation (Oxford University Press, 2010), the experience of Charles Lindbergh is a case in point. To be sure, Lindbergh was an extraordinary pilot–skilled, meticulous, and remarkably brave. That, however, did not set him apart from the hundreds of other fly boys of the age. What did set him apart was: 1) luck (many of his contemporaries died in crashes, and he nearly did on many occasions); 2) a single insight, doggedly pursued (that a plane with one engine, one pilot, and an 2,385 pounds of fuel could make it from New York to Paris); and 3) the fact that after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic he became the most famous person in the world. Tom pays due attention to all three of these characteristics, but I found the last of them–Lindbergh’s incredible celebrity and its impact on him and the world–the most interesting. It’s arguable that Lindbergh was the first “superstar.” Though he had indeed done something extraordinary, he was the creation of a finely tuned, corporate-backed publicity campaign and a frenzied, tireless, and completely meritorious press corps. The people around Lindbergh understood that if they handled his “image” correctly they all could make a fortune. And so they took this gangly, taciturn, strangely aloof son of the prairie and made him the symbol of all that was good (and marketable) in the newly christened air age. The problem was that, eventually, Lindbergh refused to play along. He was who he was, and who he was was a loner. Celebrity wore on him. Now when most people get tired of attention, they go home. But after the Paris flight Lindbergh had no home. His entire life was public. So he did what so many frustrated celebrities with considerable resources (think Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, J. D. Salinger) after him have done: he became a crank. He tried to find a way to live for ever, dabbled in ‘scientific racism,’ and eventually got mixed up with the Nazis. Lindbergh, the arch-individualist, got tired of having people tell him who he was; he wanted to be his own man. And, in the end, he was, for good and ill. The lesson? If you are in the business of making and selling role models, it’s probably not a good idea to pick a 27-year old who has focused his life on some narrow pursuit to the exclusion of all others, even if he’s really good at it. You just don’t know what they’re going to “be” when they grow up. (For more, see “Michael Jackson,” “Lindsey Lohan,” “LeBron James,” etc., etc.) Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on

I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but in some ways telling. Many historians and history readers genuinely have a bias against the older periods, and particularly against the history of the pre-Hellenic Ancient World (roughly 10,000 BCE to 500 BCE). That’s really too bad for a whole host of reasons. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just list three “biggies”: 1) The Ancient World witnessed the greatest single break in the history of humankind, that is, the transition from hunter-gather to sedentary agricultural life; 2) The deepest roots of our civilizations (Western, Eastern, you name it) are mostly to be found in the Ancient World; 3) Finally, the basic institutions of what we think of as “modern” life were all hammered out for the first time in the Ancient World. Take, for example, diplomacy. As Amanda Podany shows in her engaging new book Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East (Oxford University Press, 2010), the rulers of Sumer, Akkad, Syria, Egypt and the rest developed a way of dealing with one another that will be strikingly familiar to anyone who follows modern international relations. They regularly sent envoys to one another. Those envoys were given safe passage, provided with diplomatic immunity, and treated as special guests. Royal representatives followed strict instructions from their masters. They negotiated formal treaties, which included such things as the conditions for international trade. They presented gifts from their masters to their hosts and expected gifts in return. They arranged for diplomatic marriages of the kind any student of European history would recognize. All this is nothing if not strikingly “modern.” Yet, as Amanda points out, the entire system was invented over 4,000 years ago. And, thanks to Amanda, you can read all about it. If you do, you won’t think of “that old stuff” as really that old, or at least odd. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally told the Stasi–the East German secret service–to watch them (which they did). After the fall of the Wall, the Stasi files were opened and my friend requested to see her dossier. I have to say, it was disappointing. For some reason (perhaps having to do with John le Carre), I thought the Stasi was a ruthlessly efficient, super-clandestine, surveillance-repression machine. But I couldn’t find that machine in my friend’s file. It was boring. She did this, did that, she did the other thing. Why would anyone care? Read Gary Bruce‘s wonderful The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (OUP, 2010) and you can find out why. But don’t expect it to make any sense, because the picture Gary paints is of a kind of Bizarro World. Like their handlers in the Soviet Union, the East German communist party was mindlessly paranoid. They saw–or at least claimed to see–“enemies” under every rock. This (mis)perception was the pretext for the creation of the Stasi: it would protect the revolution from said “enemies.” (It would also prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West, but that was just an added bonus.) How? First, they needed agents. These weren’t hard to get in the post-war years. There were lots of idealistic communists who were quite willing to go to work for the cause. One of the revelations of Gary’s work is that many (most?) Stasi agents believed in what they were doing. Those that didn’t recognized that the pay was good. Next, you needed your trusty agents to recruit “co-workers,” that is, informants. This was not as easy. Gary’s subjects worried a lot about meeting their recruitment quotas; really good informants were hard to find. But generally they found them (or made them up). Finally, you had to have your agents work their informants, that is, meet with them regularly and pump them for valuable information. This was the hardest job of all. Gary’s work makes clear that most Stasi agents viewed the regular meeting (again, they had quotas) as a hassle. More than that, they were generally seen as completely unproductive. We now know what the Stasi agents could doubtlessly have told us long ago: there were no “enemies.” With the singular exception of Poland, no Eastern Bloc state ever hosted anything like an organized “opposition” to communism or anything else. A lot of folks were unhappy with, for example, Party hypocrisy, the price of sausage, or the inability to travel abroad. But there was no “underground” to go into to fight for, well, whatever one might fight for. This being so, the vast majority of Stasi agents worked for decades without ever turning up anything beyond the occasional extra-marital affair–hardly the kind of thing that would endanger the “republic.” What they did accomplish, and perhaps what the Stasi itself was meant to accomplish, was to frighten the populace. You don’t need to watch everyone to give the impression that everyone is being watched and, if “seen,” being punished. In the end, the myth of the Stasi was more important for the stability of the East German regime that its practice. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known to history as the “Tuskegee Airmen.” In light of the honorable service record of countless African Americans, allowing blacks to become fighter and bomber pilots might not seem very “experimental” to you, but you have to put yourself in the mindset of the era in question to understand how “experimental” it was. Jim-Crow segregation was nearly universal, especially, though not exclusively, in the South. The armed forces were similarly segregated, with blacks serving in what might be mildly called “auxiliary roles” and whites doing all the commanding and fighting. There were few black officers (and they never supervised white troops) and no black military pilots. Most of the (nearly all white) “brass” could not conceive of integrated units and doubted the ability of African Americans to serve as line officers; most of those in the majority white voting public shared these views. When the argument to native ability failed (after all, black units had performed well in the Civil War and World War I), opponents of integration fell back on a familiar argument: if “we” allow “them” to serve with “us,” chaos will ensue and fighting effectiveness will suffer. But black leaders didn’t buy it; they wanted integration. The Roosevelt administration sat on the fence. It clearly couldn’t embark on full-scale integration (and, it must be said, FDR himself had doubts about it), but it couldn’t forgo black votes. So it compromised: blacks would get one high-profile flying unit, but integration would be deferred. And so the great experiment began. Todd Moye has mined the archives and talked to the airmen to tell the tale of how said experiment proceeded in his terrific Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (OUP, 2010). It’s a tale I found both uplifting and shocking. I’m not usually one to heap praise on people, but the pilots themselves were remarkably brave. It is hard for me to imagine what they went through to get their wings and fight for the country they loved. I found myself again and again asking “How could they do that?” Todd does a terrific job of setting the scene and helping us understand their struggle. I confess I find it just as hard to enter the mindset of those whites who stood against them. They were racists and more frighteningly racists with absolutely clean consciences. When they said that blacks didn’t have the “right stuff” to become pilots, to command troops, to serve in integrated units, they believed it. Their testimony, again very ably related by Todd, is simply difficult to read. Here too I found myself asking again and again “How could they do that?” It was a different world. Parts of it, however, are obviously still with us. What is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” but the executive branch’s attempt to find a “middle way” between integrationists and their opponents? Harry Truman, where are you now? Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact–and it is a fact–that we see remarkable diversity in the historical record. The past, we say, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But there are also political reasons to hold to the idea that we have no essence, that everything is “socially constructed.” Where, for example, would modern liberalism be without this concept? If our natures are fixed in some way, then what should we do to improve our lot? Given the strength and utility of the “blank slate” doctrine, anyone hoping to question it successfully must possess considerable political savvy and, more importantly, an overwhelming mass of evidence. When the first modern challenge was issued–by the Sociobiologists of the 1970s–they had the latter (I would say), but not the former. Happily, their successors–principally the practitioners of “evolutionary psychology”–have both (again, in my opinion). Azar Gat is a good example. In his pathbreaking War in Human Civilization (Oxford UP, 2006), he explains in politically palatable and empirically convincing terms just why, evolutionarily speaking, our evolved natures guided the way we have fought over the past 200,000 years. He rejects the notion that we have anything like a “violence instinct.” Rather, we have a kind of “violence tool,” given to us by natural selection. In certain circumstances, we are psychologically inclined to use it; in others, not. In this way we are no different than many of our fellow species, the primates in particular. Of course, unlike them, our use of collective violence has an (extra-genetic) history. Azar does a masterful job of describing and explaining how, even while our nature has remained the same, the way we fight has changed. And here the news is good: believe it or not, we–humanity as a whole–have been becoming more peaceful over the past 10,000 years, and radically more peaceful (at least in the developed world) over the past 200 years. Azar can explain this too, and does in the interview. I cannot emphasizeenough how important this book is, both as a model of what I would call “scientifically-informed” history and a sort of guide to those of us who, despite having abandoned the “blank slate,” believe that we have the capacity to create a better world. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

The past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybody and his brother is going to start digging into your past to see what kind of “dirt” they can find. It’s true now, and it was true when Thomas Jefferson was running for president in the late eighteenth century. Jefferson had had an eventful, largely public life, so there was a lot of “material” to be mined by his foes. Most of the accusations “didn’t stick,” but one that did was that he was a coward. Jefferson was the governor of Virginia during a good portion of the Revolutionary War and, as such, charged with defending the place (and the Revolution) against the British. As Michael Kranish shows in his terrific book Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War (Oxford UP, 2010), he had a rough time of it. Jefferson had no military experience, didn’t like “standing” armies, and received only tepid support from his continental allies. The British invaded, invaded, and invaded again. Jefferson fled, fled, and fled again. What was he supposed to do? His political opponents didn’t care if he had no choice but to run or not–the fact that he didn’t stand and fight was enough to prove he was a “coward.” This charge wounded Jefferson deeply and he fought it for much of his life. The episode sort of reminded me of a certain presidential candidate a few years back and (shameful, in my opinion) questions about his military service. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as far as I know). But we might call it an “Easter Rising victory” after the Irish Republican revolt of 1916. The Republicans took over several buildings in Dublin, declared an Irish republic, and then were promptly obliterated by the British Army. Their leaders were executed, their republic disbanded, and their enemies remained in control of the island. They lost. Or did they? Shortly after the disastrous uprising, the Republican cause began to gather force. Its fallen leaders became martyrs to the Irish nation, the idea of a republic grew in popularity, and once moderate Constitutional Nationalists began to fight the British. Within a short three years, the Irish republic was back; in another three years the “Irish Free State”–not exactly independent of London, but much closer than before–was established. In The Rising. Ireland: Easter, 1916 (Oxford, 2010), Fearghal McGarry does a terrific job of describing the complicated ins and outs of the Rising and its impact on Irish politics. The book really shows us the revolt “from below,” that is, from the point of view of those who fought in it. Fearghal is able to gain this perspective because of a remarkable source. In the 1940s, the Irish authorities, knowing that witnesses to the Rising were passing, had the presence of mind to conduct a large survey of participants. They collected well over 1,000 accounts, all of which became available in 2002. Fearghal mines these reports to reconstruct how the men- and women-on-the-street experienced the revolt. The results are remarkable. The Rising appears anew as an event at once tragic, terrifying, and farcical. In hindsight, we can see that the Rising changed Irish politics forever; at the time, amidst the bravery, blood, and rubble, few saw any such thing. Most were just scared. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its legacy; both are profoundly multiethnic and multiracial; both have spent much of their respective histories settling a vast “wild” frontier (though, to be fair, it was already “settled” by indigenous people); and, most importantly for our purposes, both are car-crazy, and indeed for almost the same reason. In the United States, the automobile meant modernity. It was the implement with which we, Americans of every stripe, would “tame” a continent and thereby realize our national potential. The Brazilians, according to Wolfe, feel the same way. Joel does a masterful job of explaining how the promise of this crucial technology entered the Brazilian psyche and became not only the vehicle of modernity (pardon the pun) but also the symbol of everything modern. Along the way Joel explodes one of the foundational myths of modern anti-globalism (and what used to be called “anti-imperialism”), namely, that powerful “multinational corporations” muscled their way into undeveloped countries and fostered a crippling “dependency.” Not in Brazil. The Brazilians invited Ford, GM, and VW into the country with a full understanding of what they were getting; they embraced the values these corporations fostered, all of which were seen as “modern”; and when things weren’t working out, they essentially forced them to act according to Brazilian interests. The Brazilians were, so to speak, in the driver’s seat of automobilismo; the supposedly all-powerful multinationals were along for the ride. In the end, both enjoyed the journey, despite some rough patches. I’m happy to say, however, that this book has no rough spots at all. You will drive carefree from the first to the last page. Have a good trip. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.