NBN Book of the Day

A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and the arguments and conflicts between social classes. Numbers were collected in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this 'data revolution'. They became a regular aspect of governmental procedure thereafter, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera; Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics - statistics as we use them today - became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians emphasised the unity of mankind, some later practitioners, following Francis Galton, studied variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, and different Victorian statisticians, Victorians and Numbers traces the impact of numbers on the era and the intriguing relationship of Victorian statistics with 'Big Data' in our own age.Lawrence Goldman was born in London and educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he taught British and American History for three decades in Oxford, where he was a fellow of St. Peter's College, and Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004-2014. Latterly he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His publications include books on Victorian social science and the history of workers' education, and a biography of the historian and political thinker R. H. Tawney. He is now Emeritus Fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

At a moment when the world has tipped over into irreversible violence and corruption, a divinity contacts a righteous man. The man is directed to build a giant ship and bring aboard animals, who will spend an indefinite amount of time living, sleeping, and eating alongside Noah and his family. The rain begins to fall, and these survivors take refuge on the ark. After forty days, the survivors disembark and then have to figure out how to create a new settlement as the waters recede. This cryptic, elliptical ancient story has inspired theological commentary, architecture, and children’s toys, giving us an abundance of metaphors and narratives to understand our past, present, and future climate crises. Our continuing attempts to critically examine the ark narrative and its long afterlife in our imagination is the subject of Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates’s new book Noah’s Arkive, just published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2023.Jeffrey Cohen is Dean of Humanities at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Jeffrey’s previous books include Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: Of Difficult Middles (Palgrave, 2006); and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (University of Minnesota, 1999). Julian Yates is H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English and Material Culture at the University of Delaware. Julian’s previous books include Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (2017); and Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2002), both from the University of Minnesota Press.More about the book:In Noah's Arkive (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. They trace how the elements of the flood narrative were elaborated in medieval and early modern art, text, and music, and now shape writing and thinking during the current age of anthropogenic climate change. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, the chapters draw on a range of sources, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s tale of Deucalion and Pyrrah, to speculative fiction, climate fiction, and stories and art dealing with environmental catastrophe. Noah’s Arkive uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative written from the perspective of Noah’s wife and family, the animals on the ark, and those excluded and left behind to die. This book of recovered stories speaks eloquently to the ethical and political burdens of living through the Anthropocene.Following a climate change narrative across the millennia, Noah’s Arkive surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. It is an intriguing meditation on how the story of the ark can frame how we think about environmental catastrophe and refuge, conservation and exclusion, offering hope for a better future by heeding what we know from the past.John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (Basic Books, 2023) argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice.Cara Fitzpatrick uncovers the long journey of school choice, a story full of fascinating people and strange political alliances. She shows how school choice evolved from a segregationist tool in the South in the 1950s, to a policy embraced by advocates for educational equity in the North, to a conservative strategy for securing government funds for private schools in the twenty-first century. As a result, education is poised to become a private commodity rather than a universal good.The Death of Public School presents the compelling history of the fiercest battle in the history of American education--one that already has changed the future of public schooling.Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Two blockbuster cases came down in June of 2022. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen substantially expanded Second Amendment rights and limited the power of states to regulate concealed carry of firearms. Bruen affected thousands of Americans who have had their laws overturned and radically changed the method by which federal judges evaluate firearms law. Two remarkable scholars of the Second Amendment and firearms law explain how law makers, law enforcers, and federal courts have responded. They discuss differences among the conservative justices that produced this fragile holding, the growing dependence on history but disdain for historians, how the Bruen approach hurts laws involving domestic violence or controlled substances, the problem of overreading historical silences, and the ways violence may be addressed through community violence intervention, free markets, etc. – in ways SCOTUS cannot control.Jacob Charles is an Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine Caruso School of Law – a constitutional law scholar focusing on the Second Amendment and firearms law. Before joining the faculty Pepperdine, he served as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University School of Law. He has a terrific new piece coming out in the Duke Law Journal called “The Dead Hand of a Silent Past: Bruen, Gun Rights, and the Shackles of History.” Jake combines ambitious academic scholarship in law journals with public facing work for outlets such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Hill, Bloomberg Law, and other outlets. Besides being a great friend to this podcast, he has been quoted in the New York Times, CNN, and NPR.Dru Stevenson is the Wayne Fischer Research Professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. Professor Stevenson joined the faculty in 2003 after a law career that included practicing as a Legal Aid lawyer in Connecticut and serving as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Connecticut. His publications cover topics ranging from criminal law to civil procedure, with an emphasis on the intersection of law with economics and linguistic theory. His articles have been cited in leading academic journals and treatises, by federal and state appellate courts, and in recent briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Stevenson’s current research focus is firearm law and policy. His “Revisiting the Original Congressional Debates About the Second Amendment” provides a missing analyses of the debates, situating each statement in Congress within the context of the speaker’s background and political stances on issues overlapping with the right to keep and bear arms.Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point.As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically relevant. The result is a sprawling yet arbitrary and inadequate mess. It has left 30 million Americans without formal insurance. Many of the rest live in constant danger of losing their coverage if they lose their job, give birth, get older, get healthier, get richer, or move.It's time to tear it all down and rebuild, sensibly and deliberately. Marshaling original research, striking insights from American history, and comparative analysis of what works and what doesn’t from systems around the world, Einav and Finkelstein argue for automatic, basic, and free universal coverage for everyone, along with the option to buy additional, supplemental coverage. Their wholly original argument and comprehensive blueprint for an American universal health insurance system will surprise and provoke.We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care (Penguin, 2023) is an erudite yet lively and accessible prescription we cannot afford to ignore.John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down--and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America.Peter Moore's Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream (1740–1776) (FSG, 2023) tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in US history: the "American dream." Centered on the friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the British publisher William Strahan, and featuring figures including the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. Everyone, it seemed, had "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution.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/book-of-the-day

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Join Mark J. Sedgwick and Owen Bennett-Jones as they discuss the resurgence of Traditionalism, its influence on political leaders like Trump and Putin, and the intersection of traditionalist beliefs with modern ideologies like Hinduism and Sufism. Explore the roles of key figures like Gennon and Evola in shaping traditionalist philosophy, and how traditionalism impacts art, democracy, and individual identity. Discover the relationships between traditionalist thinkers and influential politicians, and delve into King Charles' embrace of spiritual traditionalism in the modern world.

Today I talked to Don J. Wyatt about his book Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022).In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly all humans were potential chattel, that once they had become owned beings, they could then be either sold or inherited. Yet, despite being representative of perhaps the most universalizable human practice of that age, slavery in medieval East Asia was also endowed with its own distinctive traits and traditions. Our awareness of these features of distinction contributes immeasurably to a more nuanced understanding of slavery as the ubiquitous and openly practiced institution that it once was and the now illicit and surreptitious one that it intractably remains.Don J. Wyatt (Ph.D. Harvard University) is the John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont, USA, where he has taught history and philosophy since 1986. He specializes in the intellectual history of China, with research interests most currently focused on the intersections between identity and violence and the nexuses between ethnicity and slavery. Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, incoming visiting fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Diversity in higher education is under attack as the Supreme Court limits the use of race-conscious admissions practices at American colleges and universities. In On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies (NYU Press, 2023), Lauren S. Foley sheds light on our current crisis, exploring the past, present, and future of this contentious policy. From Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-twentieth century to the current Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Foley explores how organizations have resisted and complied with public policies regarding race. She examines how admissions officers, who have played an important role in the long fight to protect racial diversity in higher education, work around the law to maintain diversity after affirmative action is banned. Foley takes us behind the curtain of student admissions, shedding light on how multiple universities, including the University of Michigan, have creatively responded to affirmative action bans. On the Basis of Race traces the history of a controversial idea and policy, and provides insight into its uncertain future.Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day