In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology, and other human-directed perspectives as these are constrained by evolution. In The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2017), Owen Flanagan sets out to clarify the landscape of moral possibility for actual human beings. He defends a perspective on human morality that he describes as an “oughtology” based in naturalism, gleaned from comparing Western, Chinese, and Indian moral traditions. Flanagan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, considers how diverse moral traditions converge on some features basic to moral psychology, such as compassion, yet differ in other ways, such as whether anger is a justified and beneficial moral emotion or whether it should be extirpated. He also examines different views of the self, including the Buddhist view in which there is no self.

How did African-American slaves react to slavery? What factors, particularly religion, might shape those reactions, even making them violent? Patrick Breen, in his carefully researched and cogently written The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2015) sheds light on these questions through a meticulous study of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. With its careful attention to the historiography of the rebellion, its consideration of the veracity of “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (the primary source that serves as the center of studies on the rising), and its treatment of how churches reacted to the rising, this work is not only of interest to scholars, but could easily be adopted into a college-level survey of American history or a course introducing the historian’s craft.

Today I talked to Vicky Neale about her new book Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book details one of the most exciting developments to happen in the last few years in mathematics, a new approach to the Twin Primes Conjecture. The story involves mathematicians from five different centuries and probably every continent except Antarctica. Vicky does a great job of telling not only what the problem is and how work on it has proceeded, but also how mathematical research has evolved given the resources available in the twenty first century. If you like numbers, you’ll love this book—and if you don’t like numbers, maybe this book can help you appreciate them.

The idea of being a “political prisoner” may seem timeless. If someone was imprisoned for his or her political beliefs, then that person is in some sense a “political prisoner.” Think of the Tower of London and its various occupants. But, as Padraic Kenney points out in his fascinating new book Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2017), the modern reality of what we might call “political prisoner-ship” is very different and very modern. He shows that you really couldn’t have modern political prisoners until you had all kinds of other modern institutions, most importantly, the modern state-run prison, the modern mass press, and more generally, modern political movements (think parties, nationalist movements, revolutionary causes). These things came together to produce a kind of incarceration that was essentially a political statement made by the prisoners to whomever might listen. Kenney does a wonderful job of explaining how this form of extreme form of political protest evolved in the 19th and early 20th century. He gives lots of fascinating examples from all over the globe: Russia, Poland, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, among others. And, yes, the United States right now. What are, he asks, the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay but political prisoners? Listen in.

Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents readers with the connected histories of military cadres and intellectuals in Peru and Spain c. 1770-1830. The book advances the argument that a Crown-sponsored change in the idea of “merit” in the Spanish Empire made possible the rise to power of new military cadres and the renewal of the Hispanic republic of letters. Ricketts argues that these changes had important consequences as these two cohorts of individuals battled over who had the merits to rule the Empire during the captivity of Spanish king Ferdinand VII under Napoleon, and after independence in Peru. Such shift in the conception of merit accounted for the rise of men like Agustin Gamarra and Andres de Santa Cruz, two of the most prominent leaders of independent Peru, to high military rank in the Spanish imperial armies first, and in the revolutionary ones later. The quest for an intellectual renewal in Spain and Spanish America also led to a reinvigoration of a Spanish Atlantic republic of letters. There too new men rose to prominence based on their literary and intellectual achievements. Part of these Spanish Atlantic intellectuals would battle with the men of the military concerning whom had the most “merits” to govern in Spain and Spanish America. Ricketts’ book stimulates the reader to ask questions regarding the origins of “meritocratic” thinking in Spain and Latin America, as well as how coherent military bodies came into public life. Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at acasobe1@jhu.edu.

Rapidly changing politics. Debates over the meaning of immigration. Widespread violence against minority groups. An economy undergoing a radical shift in form. The thirty years after the end of the Civil War have much in common with the United States in the second decade of the twenty first century, argues Stanford historian Richard White in The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford University Press, 2017). In this ninth volume of the long-running Oxford History of the United States series, White tells the story of a period in American history too long thought of as historical “flyover country.” Rather than merely an era of institutional failures and mediocre presidents, the Reconstruction Era and Gilded Age are critical to understanding the politics and society of the modern United States (though there were still plenty of failures and uninspiring politicians along the way). Americans often used the image of the home, ubiquitous though often hiding in plain sight, to argue about free labor, racial equality, and environmental crises. In The Republic for Which it Stands, White makes a strong case for a wholesale reevaluation of the long period after the Civil War as more than just decades of missed opportunity; Americans spent those years fundamentally reshaping the republic itself. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perpetrators were the same, and that they were all driven by the same bass motivations. Largely a synthesis of material previously only available in German, Lewy presents a typology of perpetrator types and dispels the idea that it was impossible for killers to walk away. He also presents arguably the most accessible analysis of the post-war justice available in English. Undoubtedly a must-read for anyone wishing to understand how and why people participate in acts of mass violence. Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University. His dissertation, Political Civil Servants and the German Administration under Nazism, explores the dynamics of Civil Service behaviour under National Socialism, asking why senior administrators assisted the regime in pursuit of its ideological goals. He has forthcoming publications with the Journal of Contemporary History and the Routledge Studies in Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. He can be contacted at obyrne.darren@gmail.com or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of this discontent? Nuclear power. Not weapons. Electricity. How did anti-nuclear protest become a debate about the future of society? What united farmers, housewives, hippies, and anarchists against the state? Find out in our conversation with Andrew S. Tompkins about his new book Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2016). By weaving government documents and police records with activist newspapers and oral history interviews, Andrew explains how a transnational network of activists emerged around the issue of nuclear power despite social divides and diverse interests inside the movement. Andrew S. Tompkins is a historian specializing in modern Europe. He is a lecturer at University of Sheffield, a former Humbolt Fellow, and current research associate of the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.

In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.  

Drawing on materials from archives in eight southern US states, Melissa Milewski’s Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how African Americans utilized courts for disputes over property, personal injury, and workplace compensation, among other fields. She argues for a reexamination of African American agency through the use of the courts. In a fascinating juxtaposition, Milewski‘s work also addresses the white lawyers, juries, judges and, of course, often plaintiffs or defendants within these cases, some of whom operated out of concern, some through paternalism, and some, either overtly or not, in order to maintain white supremacy.