New Books in Intellectual History

Uncovering a radical tradition at the heart of public history within the United States, Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism (Amherst College Press, 2021) redefines our sense of the past and future of public historical practice. Its editor, Denise D. Meringolo proposes an alternative and more radical understanding of public history’s beginnings that has been marginalized in prior studies of the past of the historian profession. Reflecting on this radical past, Radical Roots’ contributors discuss the history, ethics, and power of public history, theorizing a model of public history that is future focused, committed to advancing social justice, and deeply committed to creating a more inclusive public record.Sections on museum practices, oral history, grassroots preservation, and community-based learning offer an array of local case studies and examples, from the early-twentieth-century to the present day. Throughout, the contributors to Radical Roots reflect on their experiences in public history with candor, self-reflection, and humility. This contemporary and engaging volume provides critical lessons to all those interested in mobilizing public history towards social justice and equality.This book is available open access here. Denise D. Meringolo is the Vice-President/President-Elect of the National Council on Public History and a scholar-practitioner in the field of public history working at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (published in 2012) won the 2013 National Council on Public History prize for the best book in the field.Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

When King Arthur was conveyed to Avalon they were there. When Odin summoned warriors to Valhalla they were there. When Apollo was worshipped on Greek mountains they were there. When Brendan came to the Island of Women they were there.They are the Nine Maidens – from the mothers of the Norse God Heimdall, Morgan and her sisters on Avalon, to the nine sisters at the heart of the found myth of the Gikuyu of Kenya or witches battling with the Irish St Patrick, these women stand out in history and mythology.Triggered by a local story still told in his native Dundee, Stuart McHardy has traced what seems to be memories of groups of nine women across much of Europe and as far as Siberia, Korea, India and Africa. As explored in his book The Nine Maidens: Priestesses of the Ancient World (Luath Press, 2023), McHardy shows that whether as Pictish saints, muses, valkyries, druidesses or witches, the tales of these groups of nine women transcend a vast range of cultural and linguistic boundaries.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

For decades, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) was perhaps the most influential multi-issue organization in American liberalism. The first book-length study of the ADA since 1986, Scott Kamen’s From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) details how the ADA and its key figures, including the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, exerted their influence on critical debates in post-war liberal politics, helping to define the very essence of liberalism. Taking the ADA’s story into the 1970s and 1980s, Kamen also illustrates how the ADA profoundly shaped the New Politics movement, which upended Democratic Party politics with its challenge to the Vietnam War, demands for redistributive economic policies, and development of a far-reaching politics of race, gender, and sexuality.By bringing the ADA and its influential public intellectuals into the story of the New Politics movement, Scott Kamen reveals how American liberalism shifted away from the working-class concerns of the New Deal era and began to cater to the interests of a new, suburban professional class. By the 1980s, many Democratic politicians, activists, and voters had embraced a neoliberal ideology that coupled socially liberal attitudes with market-based solutions, eschewing an older progressive politics steeped in labor issues. In so doing, Kamen historicizes several of the most contentious issues in contemporary Democratic politics—from neo-liberalism to identity politics—powerfully revealing how the ADA shaped some of the most critical debates in American politics today.Scott Kamen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, Valencia Campus. He has published in the Michigan Historical Review, Peace & Change, The Sixties and the Southern Historian and received his PhD from Trinity College Dublin in 2016.Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. @ThomasOCryer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Excavating and interpreting Paul’s thought, belief, ideas, and mission from his authentic letters and those otherwise attributed to him remains an ongoing effort in scholarship, with several competing perspectives vying for prominence. Matthew Thiessen advances an important reading of Paul within first-century Judaism, which he conceives not as a monolith of theological positions but rather as a spectrum of ideas that comfortably included Paul’s new belief in Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and Paul’s own call as appointed envoy to deliver that good news to non-Jewish Gentiles. On this episode, Matthew joined the New Books Network to discuss the recent publication of A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (Baker Academic, 2023), a concise and accessible introductory study of this Diasporic Jew that yet embraces the “weird” in Paul’s thinking, including his advance of pneumatic “gene therapy” rather than “cosmetic surgery” for non-Jews who wished to partake in God’s promises to Abraham. According to Thiessen, Paul must be understood first in his own historical context, complete with the philosophical and scientific presuppositions common to the first century CE, before being imported into our theological present—a method that has potential to overcome the devastating effects of centuries of Christian supersessionism but also compels us to tackle the uncomfortable apocalyptic origins of the earliest Jesus movement.Matthew Thiessen (Ph.D., Duke University, 2010) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on the rise of Christianity, particularly as it relates to early Judaism, and especially on contextualizing Paul’s letters within first-century Judaism. Atop numerous journal articles and chapter-length contributions, he has authored several books to that effect, including Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jesus and the Forces of Death (Baker Academic, 2020), and Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was awarded the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise.Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What is fascism? Is it revolutionary? Or is it reactionary? Can it be both?Fascism is notoriously hard to define. How do we make sense of an ideology that appeals to streetfighters and intellectuals alike? That calls for a return to tradition while maintaining a fascination with technology? And that preaches violence in the name of an ordered society?In Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2014), Kevin Passmore brilliantly unravels the paradoxes of one of the most important phenomena in the modern world--tracing its origins in the intellectual, political, and social crises of the late nineteenth century, the rise of fascism following World War I -including fascist regimes in Italy and Germany -and the fortunes of 'failed' fascist movements in Eastern Europe, Spain, and the Americas. He also considers fascism in culture, the new interest in transnational research, and the progress of the far right since 2002.Dr. Kevin Passmore is a Reader in History at Cardiff University. His The Right in the Third Republic was published by OUP in November 2012. He has continued to publish widely on fascism since publication of the VSI in 2002, but has also written on the history of the social sciences and historical writing.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

In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke UP, 2023), Grant Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend beyond art to encompass the nature of political transformation and forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of “Man,” upon which the aesthetic itself often depends.Kaveh Rafie is a PhD candidate specializing in modern and contemporary art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation charts the course of modern art in the late Pahlavi Iran (1941-1979) and explores the extent to which the 1953 coup marks the recuperation of modern art as a viable blueprint for cultural globalization in Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic.In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

Late Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford University Press, 2023) is Chris Fraser's topically organized study of the Warring States period of Chinese philosophy, the third century BCE. In addition to well-known texts like the Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Mencius, Fraser's book introduces readers to Lu's Annals, the Guanzi, the Hanfeizi, the Shangjun Shu, and excerpts from the Mawangdui silk manuscripts. Beginning with a chapter on "The Way," or the dao, Late Classical Chinese Thought explores topics in metaphysics, metaethics, ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of language and logic. By focusing on topics rather than texts, the book aims to show how philosophical discourse happened in the philosophically productive period of the third century.Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In the wake of the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas in October, 2023 I spoke with Shaul Magid, author of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021). A visiting professor of modern Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School, Magid also is rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in Sea View, N.Y. Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League in the late 1960s, was assassinated in New York in 1990 yet, as Magid told me, and as his perceptive book demonstrates, his legacy lives on. Kahane was an exponent of a “militant post-Zionist apocalytpticism,” in Magid’s term, and he lived by an ethos of revenge—in Hebrew, Nekama. Nowadays, a kind of neo-Kahanism serves as an agitating ideology for a faction of Israelis who revere Kahane and keep his memory and uncompromising pronouncements alive. And as Magid explains, the neo-Kahane vision presents a stark challenge to a liberal, democratic Zionism that Kahane himself detested.Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Uncivil liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji's Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Vikram Visana studies how ideas of liberty from the colonised South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political theory of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book offers an original global history of this process by focussing on Naoroji's preoccupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality.Dr. Visana shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism's incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority's economic decline. He responded by innovating his own liberalism, characterised by labour rights, economic republicanism and social interdependence maintained by freely contracting workers. Significantly, the author draws attention to how Naoroji seeded 'Western' thinkers with his ideas as well as influencing numerous ideologies in colonial and post-colonial India. In doing so, the book offers a compelling argument which reframes Indian 'nationalists' as global thinkers.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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