Faculty Books
American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2021.
Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European explorers with centuries of belief and thought in tow. From this foundation of expectation and experience, America and American thought grew in turn, enriched by the bounties of the Enlightenment, the philosophies of liberty and individuality, the tenets of religion, and the doctrines of republicanism and democracy. Crucial to this development were the thinkers who nurtured it, from Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois to Jane Addams, and Betty Friedan to Richard Rorty. This addition to Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether it is the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today. Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism. In engaging and accessible prose, this introduction to American thought considers how notions about freedom and belonging, the market and morality – and even truth – have commanded generations of Americans and been the cause of fierce debate.
Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Vanina Kopp (Co-editor), and Elizabeth Lapina (Co-editor). Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Brepols, 2021.
The volume contributes to reconstruction of medieval and early modern gaming culture through analysis of visual and material evidence. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, games were not an idle pastime, but were in fact important tools for exploring, transmitting, enhancing, subverting, and challenging social practices and their rules. Their study, through both visual and material sources, offers a unique insight into medieval and early modern gaming culture, shedding light not only on why, where, when, with whom and in what conditions and circumstances people played games, but also on the variety of interpretations that they had of games and play. Representations of games, and of artefacts associated with games, also often served to communicate complex ideas on topics that ranged from war to love, and from politics to theology. This volume offers a particular focus onto the type of games that required little or no physical exertion and that, consequently, all people could enjoy, regardless of age, gender, status, occupation, or religion. The representations and artefacts discussed here by contributors, who come from varied disciplines including history, literary studies, art history, and archaeology, cover a wide geographical and chronological range, from Spain to Scandinavia to the Ottoman Turkey and from the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and beyond. Far from offering the ‘last word’ on the subject, it is hoped that this volume will encourage further studies. Vanina Kopp is Privatdozentin at the University of Münster. She was research group leader on medieval games at the German Historical Institute in Paris, where she wrote her second book Sacred, Serious, Subversive (Habilitation, 2020) on literary games in monastic, courtly, and urban contexts, and she has co-edited two volumes on educational games (Jeux éducatifs et savoirs ludiques in Ludica, 2016-2018). She is also the author of one monograph (Der König und die Bücher, Thorbecke 2016) and co-author of an edited volume on archives and power (Archiv Macht Wissen, Campus 2010). Elizabeth Lapina is Associate Professor of Medieval History and Director of the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is the author of one monograph (Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade, Penn State, 2015) and is co-editor of two volumes (The Crusades and Visual Culture, Ashgate, 2015 and The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, Brill, 2017). Her articles include ”Gambling and Gaming in the Holy Land: Chess, Dice and Other Games in the Sources of the Crusades,” published in Crusades in 2013. Table of Contents List of Illustrations Introduction — VANINA KOPP AND ELIZABETH LAPINA Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games: Literary and Archaeological Evidence Combined — KATHERINE FORSYTH AND MARK A. HALL ‘Turne Over the Leef’: Games and Interpretation on Misericords — PAUL HARDWICK Gambling Miners — LENA ASRIH AND JENNIFER GARNER Chess and Cultural Crossings in Boccaccio — AKASH KUMAR Visualizing Chess and Love in Les Eschéz d’Amours — DANIEL E. O’SULLIVAN Game as a Sign of Social Status: Backgammon in the Ottoman Literature and Visual Culture — TÜLÜN DEĞIRMENCI Chess of the Gnostics: The Sufi Version of Snakes and Ladders in Turkey and India — İRVIN CEMIL SCHICK Playthings: Ivory on Ivory — ELINA GERTSMAN The Playing Eye: On the Transfer of Game-related Knowledge through Miniatures in Alfonso X’s Book of Games (1283/84) — MICHAEL A. CONRAD Children’s Toys in Italy, 1350–1550 — ANNEMARIEKE WILLEMSEN The Printed Book and the Visual Culture of Chess in the Late Middle Ages: William Caxton’s 1483 Edition of The Game and Playe of Chess — LOUISE FANG Graffiti as Gaming: Vikings at Play in the Orkney Islands — JULIE MELL Scratching the Surface: Graffiti Games in the Byzantine Empire — WALTER CRIST
The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European explorers with centuries of belief and thought in tow. From this foundation of expectation and experience, America and American thought grew in turn, enriched by the bounties of the Enlightenment, the philosophies of liberty and individuality, the tenets of religion, and the doctrines of republicanism and democracy. Crucial to this development were the thinkers who nurtured it, from Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. DuBois to Jane Addams, and Betty Friedan to Richard Rorty. The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today. Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism. In engaging and accessible prose, this introduction to American thought considers how notions about freedom and belonging, the market and morality — and even truth — have commanded generations of Americans and been the cause of fierce debate.
The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 8. The Modern World, 1815–2000
Tony Michels (Co-editor), and Mitchell B. Hart (Co-editor). The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 8. The Modern World, 1815–2000. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
The eighth and final volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the period from roughly 1815–2000. Exploring the breadth and depth of Jewish societies and their manifold engagements with aspects of the modern world, it offers overviews of modern Jewish history, as well as more focused essays on political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural developments. The first part presents a series of interlocking surveys that address the history of diverse areas of Jewish settlement. The second part is organized around the emancipation. Here, chapter themes are grouped around the challenges posed by and to this elemental feature of Jewish life in the modern period. The third part adopts a thematic approach organized around the category ‘culture’, with the goal of casting a wide net in terms of perspectives, concepts and topics. The final part then focuses on the twentieth century, offering readers a sense of the dynamic nature of Judaism and Jewish identities and affiliations.
The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources
Elizabeth Lapina (Co-editor), and Nicholas Morton (Co-editor). The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources. Brill, 2017.
The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources sets out to understand the ideology and spirituality of crusading by exploring the biblical imagery and exegetical interpretations which formed its philosophical basis. Medieval authors frequently drew upon scripture when seeking to justify, praise, or censure the deeds of crusading warriors on many frontiers. After all, as the fundamental written manifestation of God’s will for mankind, the Bible was the ultimate authority for contemporary writers when advancing their ideas and framing their world view. This volume explores a broad spectrum of biblically-derived themes surrounding crusading and, by doing so, seeks to better comprehend a thought world in which lethal violence could be deemed justifiable according to Christian theology. Contributors are: Jessalynn Bird, Adam M. Bishop, John D. Cotts, Sini Kangas, Thomas Lecaque, T. J. H. McCarthy, Nicholas Morton, Torben Kjersgaard Nielsen, Luigi Russo, Uri Shachar, Iris Shagrir, Kristin Skottki, Katherine Allen Smith, Thomas W. Smith, Carol Sweetenham, Miriam Rita Tessera, Jan Vandeburie, Julian J. T. Yolles, and Lydia Marie Walker.
Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy
Viren Murthy (Co-editor), Fabian Schäfer (Co-editor), and Maz Ward (Co-editor). Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy. Brill, 2017.
Confronting Capital and Empire inquires into the relationship between philosophy, politics and capitalism by rethinking Kyoto School philosophy in relation to history. The Kyoto School was an influential group of Japanese philosophers loosely related to Kyoto Imperial University’s philosophy department, including such diverse thinkers as Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nakai Masakazu and Tosaka Jun. Confronting Capital and Empire presents a new perspective on the Kyoto School by bringing the school into dialogue with Marx and the underlying questions of Marxist theory. The volume brings together essays that analyse Kyoto School thinkers through a Marxian and/or critical theoretical perspective, asking: in what ways did Kyoto School thinkers engage with their historical moment? What were the political possibilities immanent in their thought? And how does Kyoto School philosophy speak to the pressing historical and political questions of our own moment?
East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories
Viren Murthy (Co-editor), and Joyce C.H. Liu (Co-editor). East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
In this volume, leading scholars from around the world suggest that radical ideologies have shaped complex historical processes in East Asia by examining how intellectuals and activists interpreted, rethought and criticized Marxism in East Asia. The contributors to this volume ask how we can use Marxism to understand East Asia in a global capitalist world, and where the problems that Marxism highlighted, including imperialism, domination and inequality, are increasingly prevalent. The volume draws on various disciplines to reinterpret Marx, and shed light on the complex dynamics of global capitalism in various historical/national contexts. The distinguished contributors illuminate, rethink and make accessible highly complex Marxist concepts, such as the question of class contradiction, the temporalities of capitalism, real and formal subsumption, relative surplus value and the commodity form, the question of class and the proletariat. At a time when people around the world are struggling to cope with the crises of global capitalism, this volume on regional responses to capitalism is especially welcome. It will be of interest to students and scholars of East Asian studies, social and political theory, sociology and globalization studies.
The Worlds of American Intellectual History
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Co-editor), Joel Isaac (Co-editor), James T. Kloppenberg (Co-editor), and Michael O’Brien (Co-editor). The Worlds of American Intellectual History. Oxford Universiity Press, 2016.
The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites–from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals–in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred – some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures. The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia.
The Crusades and Visual Culture
Elizabeth Lapina (Co-editor), April Jehan Morris (Co-editor), Laura J Whatley (Co-editor), and Susanna A. Throop (Co-editor). The Crusades and Visual Culture. Ashgate, 2015.
The crusades, whether realized or merely planned, had a profound impact on medieval and early modern societies. Numerous scholars in the fields of history and literature have explored the influence of crusading ideas, values, aspirations and anxieties in both the Latin States and Europe. However, there have been few studies dedicated to investigating how the crusading movement influenced and was reflected in medieval visual cultures. Written by scholars from around the world working in the domains of art history and history, the essays in this volume examine the ways in which ideas of crusading were realized in a broad variety of media (including manuscripts, cartography, sculpture, mural paintings, and metalwork). Arguing implicitly for recognition of the conceptual frameworks of crusades that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, the volume explores the pervasive influence and diverse expression of the crusading movement from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.
Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America
April Haynes. Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Nineteenth-century America saw numerous campaigns against masturbation, which was said to cause illness, insanity, and even death. Riotous Flesh explores women’s leadership of those movements, with a specific focus on their rhetorical, social, and political effects, showing how a desire to transform the politics of sex created unexpected alliances between groups that otherwise had very different goals. As April R. Haynes shows, the crusade against female masturbation was rooted in a generally shared agreement on some major points: that girls and women were as susceptible to masturbation as boys and men; that “self-abuse” was rooted in a lack of sexual information; and that sex education could empower women and girls to master their own bodies. Yet the groups who made this education their goal ranged widely, from “ultra” utopians and nascent feminists to black abolitionists. Riotous Flesh explains how and why diverse women came together to popularize, then institutionalize, the condemnation of masturbation, well before the advent of sexology or the professionalization of medicine.
Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Co-editor), James L. Baughman (Co-editor), and James P. Danky (Co-editor). Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865. University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.
The use of print to challenge prevailing ideas and conventions has a long history in American public life. As dissenters in America sought social change, they used print to document, articulate, and disseminate their ideas to others. Protest always begins on the margins, but print is the medium that allows it to reach a larger audience. In Protest on the Page, scholars in multiple disciplines offer ten original essays that examine protest print culture in America since 1865. They explore the surprising range of dissidents who enlisted print in their causes—from vegetarians and anarchists at the advent of the twentieth century, to midcentury evangelicals and tween comic book readers, to GIs and feminists in the 1970s–’80s. Together they demonstrate that print has never been a neutral medium, but rather has been instrumental in shaping the substance of protest and its audiences.
Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100-1700
Joe Dennis. Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100-1700. Harvard University Press, 2015.
This book is the definitive study of imperial Chinese local gazetteers, one of the most important sources for premodern Chinese studies. Methodologically innovative, it represents a major contribution to the history of books, publishing, reading, and society. By examining how gazetteers were read, Joseph R. Dennis illustrates their significance in local societies and national discourses. His analysis of how gazetteers were initiated and produced reconceptualizes the geography of imperial Chinese publishing. Whereas previous studies argued that publishing, and thus cultural and intellectual power, were concentrated in the southeast, Dennis shows that publishing and book ownership were widely dispersed throughout China and books were found even in isolated locales. Adding a dynamic element to our earlier understanding of the publishing industry, Dennis tracks the movements of manuscripts to printers and print labor to production sites. By reconstructing printer business zones, he demonstrates that publishers operated across long distances in trans-regional markets. He also creates the first substantial data set on publishing costs in early modern China—a foundational breakthrough in understanding the world of Chinese books. Dennis’s work reveals areas for future research on newly-identified regional publishing centers and the economics of book production.
Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade
Elizabeth Lapina. Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade. Penn State University Press, 2015.
In Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade, Elizabeth Lapina examines a variety of these chronicles, written both by participants in the crusade and by those who stayed behind. Her goal is to understand the enterprise from the perspective of its contemporaries and near contemporaries. Lapina analyzes the diversity of ways in which the chroniclers tried to justify the First Crusade as a “holy war,” where physical violence could be not just sinless, but salvific. The book focuses on accounts of miracles reported to have happened in the course of the crusade, especially the miracle of the intervention of saints in the Battle of Antioch. Lapina shows why and how chroniclers used these miracles to provide historical precedent and to reconcile the messiness of history with the conviction that history was ordered by divine will. In doing so, she provides an important glimpse into the intellectual efforts of the chronicles and their authors, illuminating their perspectives toward the concepts of history, salvation, and the East. Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade demonstrates how these narratives sought to position the crusade as an event in the time line of sacred history. Lapina offers original insights into the effects of the crusade on the Western imaginary as well as how medieval authors thought about and represented history.
A Companion to Global Historical Thought
Viren Murthy (Co-editor), Andrew Sartori (Co-editor), and Prasenjit Duara (Co-editor). A Companion to Global Historical Thought. Wiley, 2014.
A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an in-depth overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, across the world, directly addressing the issues of historical thought in a globalized context. Provides an overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, across the world, through essays written by a team of leading international scholars Complements the Companion to Western Historical Thought, placing non-Western perspectives on historiography at the center of the discussion Explores the different historical traditions that have shaped the discipline, and the challenges posed by modernity and globalization
The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia
Viren Murthy. The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia. Brill, 2014.
Edited by: Viren Murthy, University of Wisconsin–Madison and Axel Schneider, University of Göttingen The papers collected in this volume congeal around a debate about the ways and extent of the dominance of linear time and progressive history and the concomitant delineation of the nation in Chinese and Japanese historiography. As China and Japan entered the global capitalist system of nation states, the Chinese and Japanese regimes implemented a number of reforms, which resulted in transformations that affected everyday experience. In the face of imperialism and the perceived threat of being split up, the Meiji and late Qing governments radically reoriented policies in order to become wealthy and powerful in the global arena. People not only began to experience time and space in new ways, but elites also were increasingly exposed to Western theories of history and concepts of nationhood, which became dominant. These changes contributed to the production of new types of historical consciousness and collective identity. The essays in this volume each provide a perspective on the complex ways in which imagining national and regional identity in East Asia were and continue to be enmeshed with visions of time and history. This book should be of interest to all those who are interested in nationalism, modernity in China and Japan, global capitalism and the politics of time.
Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan
Louise Young. Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan. University of California Press, 2013.
In Beyond the Metropolis, Louise Young looks at the emergence of urbanism in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute “the city” took their characteristic modern shape. In Japan, as elsewhere, cities became the staging ground for wide ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. The rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and streetcar suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both socio-spatial form and set of ideas. Young tells this story through the optic of the provincial city, examining four second-tier cities: Sapporo, Kanazawa, Niigata, and Okayama. As prefectural capitals, these cities constituted centers of their respective regions. All four grew at an enormous rate in the interwar decades, much as the metropolitan giants did. In spite of their commonalities, local conditions meant that policies of national development and the vagaries of the business cycle affected individual cities in diverse ways. As their differences reveal, there is no single master narrative of twentieth century modernization. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces, but rather co-constituted through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country and beyond.
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche’s philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.
Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History
Tony Michels. Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History. NYU Press, 2012.
Jewish Radicals explores the intertwined histories of Jews and the American Left through a rich variety of primary documents. Written in English and Yiddish, these documents reflect the entire spectrum of radical opinion, from anarchism to social democracy, Communism to socialist-Zionism. Rank-and-file activists, organizational leaders, intellectuals, and commentators, from within the Jewish community and beyond, all have their say. Their stories crisscross the Atlantic, spanning from the United States to Europe and British-ruled Palestine. The documents illuminate in fascinating detail the efforts of large numbers of Jews to refashion themselves as they confronted major problems of the twentieth century: poverty, anti-semitism, the meaning of American national identity, war, and totalitarianism. In this comprehensive sourcebook, the story of Jewish radicals over seven decades is told for the first time in their own words.
Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World
James Sweet. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Between 1730 and 1750, powerful healer and vodun priest Domingos Álvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time–from Africa to South America to Europe–addressing the profound alienation of warfare, capitalism, and the African slave trade through the language of health and healing. In Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, James H. Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which healing, religion, kinship, and political subversion were intimately connected.
The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness
Viren Murthy. The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness. Brill, 2011.
Zhang Taiyan (1868-1936) is famous for being one of the first thinkers in China to promote revolution in the early twentieth century. Scholars have addressed Zhang’s revolutionary and nationalist thought, but until this work there has not been any sustained engagement with Zhang’s Buddhist writings which aimed to understand and criticize the world from the perspective of consciousness. These philosophical works are significant because they exemplify how, as Chinese intellectuals entered the global capitalist world, they constantly tried to find resources to create an alternative. As the author argues in the conclusion, this desire to create an alternative to capitalism remained throughout twentieth century China and continues today in the works of critical intellectuals such as Wang Hui. Thus this work is important not only to understand our past, but to hope for a better future.
The African Diaspora and the Disciplines
James Sweet, and Tejumola Olaniyan (Co-editor). The African Diaspora and the Disciplines. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Focusing on the problems and conflicts of doing African diaspora research from various disciplinary perspectives, these essays situate, describe, and reflect on the current practice of diaspora scholarship. Tejumola Olaniyan, James H. Sweet, and the international group of contributors assembled here seek to enlarge understanding of how the diaspora is conceived and explore possibilities for the future of its study. With the aim of initiating interdisciplinary dialogue on the practice of African diaspora studies, they emphasize learning from new perspectives that take advantage of intersections between disciplines. Ultimately, they advocate a fuller sense of what it means to study the African diaspora in a truly global way.
Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573-1912
Sarah Thal. Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573-1912. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
When people create new societies, economies, and nations—both now and in the past—they create gods, rituals, and miracles to support them. Even what seem to be some of the most timeless and sacred sites in the world have been shaped, reshaped, and reinterpreted by countless people to produce oases of peace and nature today. Using miracle tales, votive plaques, diaries, and newspapers, Sarah Thal traces such changes at one of the most popular Japanese pilgrimage sites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the shrine of Konpira on the island of Shikoku. This rich and fascinating history explores how people from all walks of life gave shape to the gods, shrines, and rituals so often attributed to ancient, indigenous Japan. Thal shows how worshippers and priests, rulers and entrepreneurs, repeatedly rebuilt and reinterpreted Konpira to reflect their needs and aspirations in a changing world—and how, in doing so, they helped shape the structures of the modern state, economy, and society in turn. Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods will be welcomed by all scholars of Japanese history and by students of religion interested in the construction of modernity.
A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York
Tony Michels. A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Harvard University Press, 2005.
In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers’ education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.
Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770
James Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came–Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others–Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time. Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism. Sweet’s analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil’s slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.
Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism
Louise Young. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. University of California Press, 1998.
United Government and Russian Foreign Policy, 1900-1914
David McDonald. United Government and Russian Foreign Policy, 1900-1914. Harvard University Press, 1992.
In 1904 a small, distant war brought Russia to the brink of internal collapse – and yet within ten years the country embroiled itself in an incomparably larger conflict close to home. How the war with Japan and its aftermath actually steered Russia toward such an unlikely, fateful decision is the subject of David McDonald’s book, an analysis of Russian foreign policy on the eve of World War I. The revolutions that followed the Russo-Japanese War confirmed Russian statesmen in their belief that complications abroad threatened the domestic order. McDonald shows how this perceived connection prompted the institutional measures intended to minimize the risks of foreign entanglements, principally the reform of the Council of Ministers as a “United Government” that would share the emperor’s role in forming foreign policy. These measures, as McDonald demonstrates, had a decisive effect on Russia’s restrained response to trouble in the Balkans, and consequently, on the course of world history. McDonald’s analysis integrates the history of Russian foreign policy at this critical juncture with accounts of the “crisis of autocracy” that marked the early 20th century. Depicting Nicholas II’s struggle with his ministers over the direction of foreign policy, the book offers insight into the evaluation of the bureaucratic state and its relation to domestic society in late imperial Russia.