In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Serious and casual scholars and readers interested in the Pacific War would do well to commit reading Marc Gallicchio’s and Waldo Heinrich’s massive study of the conflict’s last two years, Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2017).  The two authors, both masters in the field, take on the monumental task of offering a civil-military synthesis of the war against Japan that covers both the home front and the campaigns in exacting detail.  Along the way, they introduce readers to a wide range of new and interesting interpretations that both validate and challenge long-held presumptions that have dominated the American historiography since the 1950s.  In our conversation, Marc Gallicchio offers several insights into the book, particularly with regard to civil-military relations in time of global total war, the US Army’s role in clearing the Philippines, the problems with the FDR and Truman Administration’s unconditional surrender policy, and the decision to use the atomic bomb.  At the same time, Marc shares several interesting insights and anecdotes about the war from the perspective of average Americans – including his co-author’s experiences and observations as a veteran of the 86th Infantry Division – that make this authoritative book so accessible and relevant for the contemporary reader.

There has been a recent trend in books that explore one year in detail: 1914, 1927, and 1968 have all received this treatment. E. Douglas Bomberger’s new book Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture from Oxford University Press (2018) is new twist on this phenomenon. Rather than primarily trace historical events while touching on cultural matters as many of these books do, Bomberger follows the events in jazz and classical music during this crucial year while framing them within America’s entry into World War One.Written for the general public as well as a scholarly audience, each chapter puts the events of one month in conversation with each other, allowing readers to grasp the busy cultural landscape in the period. Bomberger focuses on eight key figures. Classical musicians Fritz Kreisler, Karl Muck, Walter Damrosch, Olga Samaroff, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink contended with the fallout from mounting anti-German feeling within the United States in different ways as audiences turned against the German music which was the core of their repertory, and viewed German musicians with suspicion. Only Olga Samaroff was born in the US. The others were German-speaking, and some were not U.S. citizens. Through canny marketing and patriotic concerts, Ernestine Schumann-Heink maintained her singing career even though she had sons fighting on both sides of the conflict, while conductor Karl Muck ended up in an internment camp.Meanwhile popular musicians Freddie Keppard, Dominc LaRocca, and James Reese Europe worked to establish their careers and popularize the fledging musical style of jazz. James Reese Europe spent most of the year staffing and then training the band for the Fifteenth Regiment (Colored) of the New York National Guard, an all-black unit that went on to distinguish itself in battle, but not before encountering racism at home. Bomberger also explains the legal and recording challenges jazz musicians faced in 1917. Over the course of the book, Bomberger skillfully makes the case that 1917 saw crucial developments in American music that changed the cultural landscape in the United States forever.E. Douglas Bomberger is Professor of Musicology at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. A prolific author, Bomberger has published six books and over one hundred articles on subjects ranging from the medieval origins of keyboard instruments to mid-twentieth century American music. His primary research areas are in the piano literature, nineteenth-century American music, and transatlantic musical connections. He received the Elizabethtown College 2018–2019 Ranck Prize for Research Excellence.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits representations, or internal states that carry information about the world and that are used by the system to guide its behavior. Naturalistic theories of representation provide explanations of what information, or content, these internal states carry, and how they come to have the contents that they do. In Representation in Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2018), Nicholas Shea approaches the problem from the perspective of the role that the contents of subpersonal states play in explanations of a system’s behavior. Shea, who is professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London, offers a theory that integrates two main components – task functions and exploitable relations – into a pluralist view called Varitel Semantics. He presents and defends his account and considers how it fares in relation to competitor theories.

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything, however, and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit. Ever since, with the rise of science and decline of religious belief, there has been growing interest––and growing doubt––about whether human life really does have meaning. If it does, where might we find it?Historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse investigates this question in his new book A Meaning to Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) asking whether we can find a new meaning to life within Darwinian views of human nature. Rather than promoting a bleak nihilism, many Darwinians think we can convert Darwin into a form of secular humanism. Ruse explains, in a tradition going back to the time of Darwin himself, positive meaning is found in continuing and supporting the upwards path of life provided by the process of evolution itself. However, this is a false turn, he argues, because there is no real progress in the evolutionary process. Rather, meaning in the Darwinian age can be found if we turn to a kind of Darwinian existentialism, seeing our evolved human nature as the source of all meaning, both in the intellectual and social worlds. Ruse argues that it is only by accepting our true nature, evolved over millennia, that humankind can truly find what is meaningful.Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, The Darwinian Revolution, and On Purpose.

Neoliberal policies have been a primary feature of American political economy for decades. In Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Matt Guardino focuses on the power of corporate news media in shaping how the public understands the key policy debates during this period. Based on a range of evidence from the Reagan Revolution into the Trump administration, he explains how profit pressures in the media have narrowed and trivialized news coverage and influenced public attitudes in the process.Guardino is associate professor of political science at Providence College.

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war.The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will.

John Dryden is often regarded as one of the most conservative writers in later seventeenth-century England, a time-serving “trimmer” who abandoned his early commitments to the English Republic to become the poet laureate and historiographer royal of Charles II’s new regime. But, as this important new book demonstrates, Dryden never entirely left behind the ideas – and worries – about inspiration that shaped his early political and creative experiences. John West, who is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Warwick, has written a brilliant new book, Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion and Politics in Restoration England (Oxford University Press, 2018), which opens up the sustained ambiguities of his subject’s interest in inspiration. With an agenda that promises to re-shape the literary history of the later seventeenth century, Dryden and enthusiasm is a defining study of a complex and contradictory literary figure.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

We’re all familiar with the ways in which speech can cause harm. For example, speech can incite wrongful acts. And I suppose we’re also familiar with contexts in which a person who occupies a position of authority can harm others simply by speaking – as when a boss announced and thereby institutes a discriminatory office policy. In such cases, the announcement is itself a harm in addition to the harm of the instituted policy – the boss’s announcement constitutes a harm and does not only cause harm. Once we’ve see the ways in which authoritative speech can constitute harm, we might look for mechanisms other than speaker authority by means of which speech can be constitutively harmful.In her new book, Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm (Oxford University Press, 2019), Mary Kate McGowan identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech can be harm. On her analysis, one needn’t be positioned in an authoritative role to speak in ways that constitute harm. Rather, everyday communicative acts can constitute – and not simply cause – harm.Mary Kate is the Margaret Capp Distinguished Alumna Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works primarily in metaphysics, philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of law.

One of the first and most famous of Christian martyrs was Perpetua, who died in Carthage in the early 3rd century CE. Though there is no record of her life beyond the details contained in a single text, in her book Perpetua: Athlete of God(Oxford University Press, 2018), Barbara K. Gold analyzes the account of her sacrifice and draws upon the dual contexts of the Christian and Roman worlds of that time to provide a framework for understanding her. Central to this effort is the "Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis," one of the earliest Christian texts and one which presents an incomplete and often confusing picture of Perpetua as a woman. As Gold explains, the gendering of her depiction reveals much about the complexities of her portrayal in the work, which posed a number of challenges for subsequent generations of male authors and Christian leaders in terms of the example she set with the martyrdom described within it.

Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights(Oxford University Press, 2019) by Zachary Kramer (Oxford University Press, 2019) sets forth an imaginative critique of the way that civil rights law currently fulfills its mission. Using stories that lucidly illustrate the gap between the aspiration of civil rights law and the lived reality, Professor Kramer proposes a new approach. Drawing on existing protections for disability and for religious practice, Professor Kramer outlines the way that a right to personality, combined with an accommodation-focused inquiry, could update and refresh our approach to civil rights.Zachary Kramer is Associate Dean of Faculty, Professor of Law, and Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.Künga Tenje is an independent librarian in Virginia.