New Books in Intellectual History

We often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood not as a period on a timeline but as a claim to freedom from the past. By recognizing how “modernity claims” try either to erase the past or to master it for our own uses, we can appreciate what is at stake in our own invocations of “modernity."Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Senior Research Fellow, Beatrice InstituteFeatured Scholar:Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard UniversitySpecial thanks: Travis DeCook, Rokhaya Dieng, Gina Elia, Thomas A. Lewis For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, visit https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/season-ii. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

We all know many stories about how modernity came about. But what does it mean to be “modern”? This episode comes at the question through the test case of mountain climbing and rock climbing. Claims to becoming modern through climbing often point back to Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux in 1336, a climb that made him, according to many historians, “the first modern man.” But Petrarch was by no means the first person to climb Mt Ventoux, and his own account is, if anything, counter-modern. By surveying evidence of much earlier climbing in Europe and pre-contact North America, the episode argues that humans have always been climbing mountains and scaling cliffs for a wide variety of reasons. Only recently did they start to think of these achievements as making themselves “modern.” It turns out that to claim to be modern is one of the most modern things you can do. Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of PittsburghFeatured Scholars: Shannon Arnold Boomgarden, Director of Range Creek Field Station, University of UtahLarry Coats, Career-line Associate Professor of Geography, University of UtahPeter Hansen, Professor of History, Worcester Polytechnic InstituteDawn Hollis, Independent HistorianSpecial thanks to: Jake Grefenstette, John-Paul Heil, Jason König, Michael Krom, Michael PuettMedia and scholarship referenced:Hansen, Peter. The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2013.Hollis, Dawn. “Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Genealogy of an Idea.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26:4 (2019): 1038-61.For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, visit https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/season-ii. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of journalistic storytelling dating back nearly two centuries. Literary journalism arose in the decades before the U.S. Civil War alongside the era's sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, literary journalism encouraged readers to empathize with subjects by presenting more nuanced and engaging stories than typical news coverage. While women writers were central to the formation and ongoing significance of the genre, literary journalism scholarship has largely ignored their contributions. How the News Feels re-centers the work of a range of writers who were active from the 1830s until today, including Catharine Williams, Margaret Fuller, Nellie Bly, Winifred Black, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Alexis Okeowo.Offering intimate access to their subjects' thoughts, motivations, and yearnings, these journalists encouraged readers to empathize with society's outcasts, from asylum inmates and murder suspects to "fallen women" and the working poor. As this carefully researched study shows, these writers succeeded in defining and developing the genre of literary journalism, with stories that inspire action, engender empathy, and narrow the gap between writer, subject, and audience.James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

If anything, the Imperfect Buddha Podcast has been a rallying cry for the disruption of the myths that abound in the world of Buddhism and meditation. David L. McMahan professor of religion at Franklin and Marshall College, has been something of a crusader himself, writing a much needed correction to many of the myths in western adoption of Buddhism in his seminal text, The Makings of Buddhist Modernism.In our second interview with David, we discuss his newest book, Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practice in Ancient and Modern Worlds (Oxford UP, 2023) continues where Buddhist Modern left off. In this text David wakes readers up to context, and the role it has in the stories western Buddhists have constructed around meditation. As a religious studies professor and historian, David does this through reconstructing the history that has produced many of the ideas that are so prominent today regarding meditation and mindfulness. It’s a fascinating book and we go through key sections and concepts in our discussion.This book is well worth your time if you, like us, take a critical approach to practice, results, and claims.Apologies to listeners: I had a cold whilst recording this.Episode 48. IBP - David L. McMahan on Buddhism, Science, the Humanities, and ModernityMatthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale UP, 2023) revives and critiques Tate’s prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras.Barbara Savage’s skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.Omari Averette-Phillips is a History educator based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In his book Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus (Fortress Press, 2023), J. Christopher Edwards explores the early Christian teachings regarding who actually killed Jesus. Historians of early Christianity unanimously agree that Jesus was executed by Roman soldiers. This consensus extends to members of the general population who have seen a Jesus movie or an Easter play and remember Roman soldiers hammering the nails. However, for early Christians, the detail that Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers under the direction of a Roman governor threatened their desire for a stable existence in the Roman world. Beginning with the writings found in the New Testament, early Christians sought to rewrite their history and shift the blame for Jesus's crucifixion away from Pilate and his soldiers and onto Jews. During the second century, a narrative of the crucifixion with Jewish executioners predominated. During the fourth century, this narrative functioned to encourage anti-Judaism within the newly established Christian empire. Yet, in the modern world, there exists a significant degree of ignorance regarding the pervasiveness--or sometimes even the existence!--of the claim among ancient Christians that Jesus was executed by Jews.J. Christopher Edwards is professor of religious studies at St. Francis College, Brooklyn.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea?From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, Transparency: the Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023) is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Dr. Daniel Jütte argues that the experience of transparency has been inextricably linked to one element of Western architecture: the glass window.Windows are meant to be unnoticed. Yet a historical perspective reveals the role that glass has played in shaping how we see and interpret the world. A seemingly “pure” material, glass has been endowed, throughout history, with political, social, and cultural meaning, in manifold and sometimes conflicting ways. At the same time, Jütte raises questions about the future of vitreous transparency—its costs in terms of visual privacy but also its ecological price tag in an age of accelerating climate change.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Honesty is an important virtue. Parents want to develop it in their children. Close relationships depend upon it. Employers value it in their employees. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have said very little about the virtue of honesty over the past fifty years. In Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (Oxford UP, 2021), Christian B. Miller aims to draw much greater attention to this neglected virtue.The first part of the book looks at the concept of honesty. It takes up questions such as: What does honesty involve? What are the motives of an honest person? How does practical wisdom relate to honesty? Miller explores what connects the many sides of honesty, including not lying, not stealing, not breaking promises, not misleading others, and not cheating. He argues that the honest person reliably does not intentionally distort the facts as she takes them to be.Miller then examines the empirical psychology of honesty. He takes up the question of whether most people are honest, dishonest, or somewhere in between. Drawing extensively on recent studies of cheating and lying, the model Miller articulates ultimately implies that most of us have a long way to go to reach an honest character.Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue provides both a richer understanding of what our character looks like, as well as what the goal of being an honest person actually involves. Miller then leaves it up to us to decide if we want to take steps to shrink the character gap between the two.Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is currently the Director of the Honesty Project. He is the author of over 100 academic papers as well as four books, including Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Moral Psychology (2021). He is a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP),Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP),Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press)Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

How can researchers study magic without destroying its mystery? Drawing on a collaborative project between the playwright Dr. Poppy Corbett, the poet Anna Kisby Compton, and the historian Dr. William G. Pooley, Creative Histories of Witchcraft: France, 1790–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) presents thirteen tools for creative-academic research into magic.These are illustrated through case studies from France (1790–1940) and examples from creative outputs: write to discover; borrow forms; use the whole page; play with footnotes; erase the sources; write short; accumulate fragments; re-enact; improvise; use dialogue; change perspective; make methods of metaphors; use props. These tools are ways to 'untell' the dominant narratives that shape stereotypes of the 'witch' which frame belief in witchcraft as ignorant and outdated. Writing differently suggests ways to think and feel differently, to stay with the magic, rather than explaining it away. The Element includes practical creative exercises to try as well as research materials from French newspaper and trial sources from the period.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Erinnerungskämpfe: Neues deutsches Geschichtsbewusstsein (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2023) is a new, provocative volume on German memory cultures and politics edited by Jürgen Zimmerer. What can be loosely translated as Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness is a collection of chapters that lay bare a mosaic of a diverse German memory landscape as well as the major debates and turning points by which it is continuously shaped. It is subdivided in five sections together encompassing 23 chapters and covers German Empire and colonialism, National Socialism and the Second World War, the Holocaust and multidirectional memory, East/West Germany and reunification, and, finally, today's Berlin Republic. This volume gains in relevance by the day and shows how the German past(s) and the way they are debated, commemorated, and weaponized today and by whom has real-life, if not existential, consequences. It is far from an exclusively German matter. Memory Wars: New German Historical Consciousness is of interest for all those who critically engage with the instrumentalization of memory in ongoing cultural wars in other national contexts as well, such as the heated debates and rightwing attacks in the United States and elsewhere surrounding fields such as Critical Race Theory, Gender or Queer Studies that emerge out of the White Supremacist backlash and the concomitant increase in racism, trans- and homophobia.Jürgen Zimmerer is Professor of Global History and the head of the research center “Hamburg’s (post-)colonial legacy” at the University of Hamburg. He served as the founding president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars for twelve years until 2017 and was the Senior Editor of the Journal of Genocide from 2005 to 2011. His research interests include German Colonialism, Comparative Genocide studies, Colonialism and the Holocaust, and Environmental Violence and Genocide and, for the specific German context, his work has been crucial in revealing the deep connections between the Holocaust and German colonialism – up until that point two German histories of violence hegemonically thought of as ontologically different, if thought together at all. His publications include German Rule, African Subjects: State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia (2021) and From Windhoek to Auschwitz? Reflections on the Relationship between Colonialism and National Socialism forthcoming in English in 2024.Miriam Chorley-Schulz is an Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow of Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon and the co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present. She holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and is the author of Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees (Berlin: Metropol, 2016) which was awarded the “Hosenfeld/Szpilman Memorial Award.”Henriette Sölter is a communications and PR consultant with expertise on the interface of contemporary art and culture, international perennial formats, and strategic institutional positioning. She has worked with institutions such as documenta, Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), is a member of Bergen Assembly's executive board and is part of the New Patrons network for citizen-commissioned art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history