New Books in Early Modern History

Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members.This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor.An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible.Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is natural history a genre of political thought? What do we miss about the substance of political ideas when we ignore the study of nature?Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (University of Florida Press, 2021) demonstrates how the natural historical writings of chroniclers, explorers, and missionaries “helped to lay out a distinct set of empirical foundations for modern political thought.” Dr. Mauro José Caraccioli connects scientific, historical, religious, and political ideals to show how Spanish natural history of the so-called “New World” was deeply political.Political theorists focus on empire, racial hierarchy, conquest, and colonization but Caraccioli cautions not to ignore the “interplay between empire, faith, and the experiences of New World environments” that shaped Imperial Spain’s early efforts to shape culture and politics. That natural history context is essential to fully understand the context of early modern political thought. Caraccioli uses natural history texts written by early Spanish missionaries to create the “first work of political theory that accounts for New World exploration and evangelization as a dual science of domination.” The intersecting analysis of the ecological, political, religious, and historical makes this book an important one for the 21st century.Dr. Mauro José Caraccioli is an assistant professor of political science and core faculty in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech.Amber Gonzalez assisted with this podcast.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Ottoman Empire has been many things throughout its long history. One of the greatest and gravest threats to Christian Europe. A source of inspiration for Renaissance and Reformation thinkers. An exoticized realm of sultans, slaves and harems. An equal and key partner in the European system of international relations. And, near its end, “the sick man of Europe”.The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Basic Books, 2021) by Professor Marc David Baer charts the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, not just dealing with its sultans and military expansion, but also a wide range of topics like the roles played by women and minorities in Ottoman society.In this interview, Marc and I talk about the Ottoman empire’s rise and “fall”—a term that may actually mischaracterize how the Ottoman Empire transformed after its heights under Selim and Suleiman. We also talk about its legacy, both for Europe and the wider world.Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of five books, including Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford University Press: 2011), which won the Albert Hourani Prize, and Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (Indiana Univeristy Press: 2020), which won the Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Ottomans. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the old cliché goes, “there must have been something in the water.” A new book by historian Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge UP, 2021), courses a thread through the various disorders that riddled the Atlantic World in the late-eighteenth century. Alpaugh searches for and brings to light commonalities that spread through regions circling the North Atlantic. From the Caribbean islands to Ireland; France, colonial America, and the United Kingdom, “Liberty” and “Freedom” conjoined a patchwork of disparate people who gave rise to social movements roughly at the same moment in history.Alpaugh’s archival research is astounding and unearthed new ways of looking at eighteenth-century revolutions beginning with the United State and ending with Haiti. In Friends of Freedom, Alpaugh reconfigures Boston’s “Sons of Liberty” as a social leviathan that swept the eastern seaboard of North America thereby becoming emulated by similar clubs of men and women in Britain, France, and Ireland – i.e., “friends of freedom.” What Alpaugh proves, without a doubt, were the incredible transatlantic networks by which social movement spread, movements that inspired powerful forces on both sides of the Atlantic. The rise of abolitionism, for example, connected moral philosophers, clerics, and thinkers throughout this large ocean basin as the Enlightened values of liberty and freedom became haltingly extended to all ranks of Atlantic society.Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rita Koganzon’s new book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought (Oxford UP, 2021), examines the structure and function of the family within early modern political thought while also teasing out the way that early childhood education may often be at odds with the claims to freedom within liberal states. Koganzon’s book traces the problem of authority in early modern thought in regard to how children need to be managed by those who are responsible for them—and how they are to be taught to be citizens, to be free, to have liberty, and to understand sovereignty. All of these teachings are complicated by the need to impose an authority of knowledge and expertise in the course of a child’s education. When these forms of authority are contextualized within liberal states, the tension is obvious between the idea of individual liberty and freedom, as pursued by adults in society, and the need to educate through this position of the authority of knowledge.Koganzon’s work traces the approach and theorizing about the family and education through the work of Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. But the book starts with Hannah Arendt’s insight about education being an “inherently authoritarian undertaking” and that this is the conundrum for contemporary liberal thinkers. The first sections of the book examine the rise of sovereignty theory, especially in the work of Bodin and Hobbes. This work also brings up the logic of congruence, that the sovereign and the patriarch should be mirrors of each other in terms of their rule within their distinct realms. The thrust of the book, though, is in the exploration of the work by Locke and Rousseau, and their critiques of the sovereignty theory put forward by those who preceded them. Koganzon examines how both Locke’s work and Rousseau’s work also push against the logic of congruence in terms of the form of education. Liberal States, Authoritarian Families delves into the problem, particularly for Locke and Rousseau, of the tyranny of public opinion (the problem of peer pressure is real!), and how anti-authoritarian liberalism, particularly in the contemporary period, has done away with many of the components of authoritarianism within education that helped to limit this tyranny. This is a very clear and lively discussion and will be of interest to a wide range of readers and scholars.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Díaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order.In The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts (Yale UP, 2020), Sylvia Sellers-García reveals how this bizarre and macabre event spurred an increased attention to crime that resulted in more forceful policing and reflected important policy decisions not only in Guatemala but across Latin America. This fascinating book is both an engaging criminal case study and a broader consideration of the forces shaping Guatemala City at the brink of the modern era.Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (NYU Press, 2021) tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith aliveMany scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its early period it was very much on the brink of failure. In 1576, Indigenous Mexican communities suffered a catastrophic epidemic that took almost two million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of Christianity in the Americas.The Church of the Dead offers a counter-history of American Christian origins. It centers the power of Indigenous Mexicans, showing how their Catholic faith remained intact even in the face of the faltering religious fervor of Spanish missionaries. While the Europeans grappled with their failure to stem the tide of death, succumbing to despair, Indigenous survivors worked to reconstruct the church. They reasserted ancestral territories as sovereign, with Indigenous Catholic states rivaling the jurisdiction of the diocese and the power of friars and bishops.Christianity in the Americas today is thus not the creation of missionaries, but rather of Indigenous Catholic survivors of the colonial mortandad, the founding condition of American Christianity. Weaving together archival study, visual culture, church history, theology, and the history of medicine, Jennifer Scheper Hughes provides us with a fascinating reexamination of North American religious history that is at once groundbreaking and lyrical.Brady McCartney is a Ph.D. student and scholar of religion, Indigenous studies, and environmental history at the University of Florida.Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erin Jessee of the University of Glasgow, with her Rwandan co-author Jerome Irankunda, and illustrator Christian Mugarura, and translator Sylvere Mwizerwa have published a graphic novel titled Nyiragitwa (Mudacumura Publishing House, 2021). It tells the story of Nyiragitwa, a Rwandan woman who is thought to have lived in the 17th century. The first in a series of graphic novels about Rwandans living in the pre-colonial era, Nyiragitwa provides insight into how Rwandan women might have lived and contributed to their communities in the past. The story is based on the oral histories of Jan Vansina, of the University of Wisconsin, in the 1950s and 1960s. Nyiragitwa’s life history was shared with Vansina by a Rwandan elder named Ndamyumugabe. Erin and I had a wide-ranging conversation about publishing for Rwandans, the absence of women in Rwanda’s pre-colonial history and the value of collaborative work.Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton UP, 2021), Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish. For more than two centuries, his youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery. Hamilton himself wanted it that way, and most biographers have simply assumed he had a Christian boyhood. With a detective’s persistence and a historian’s rigor, Porwancher upends that assumption and revolutionizes our understanding of an American icon.This radical reassessment of Hamilton’s religious upbringing gives us a fresh perspective on both his adult years and the country he helped forge. Although he didn’t identify as a Jew in America, Hamilton cultivated a relationship with the Jewish community that made him unique among the founders. As a lawyer, he advocated for Jewish citizens in court. As a financial visionary, he invigorated sectors of the economy that gave Jews their greatest opportunities. As an alumnus of Columbia, he made his alma mater more welcoming to Jewish people. And his efforts are all the more striking given the pernicious antisemitism of the era. In a new nation torn between democratic promises and discriminatory practices, Hamilton fought for a republic in which Jew and Gentile would stand as equals.By setting Hamilton in the context of his Jewish world for the first time, this fascinating book challenges us to rethink the life and legend of America's most enigmatic founder.Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales (John Murray, 2022), Nick Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Baba Yaga'. From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children's literature, they include a German apothecary's daughter, a Syrian youth running away from a career in the souk and a Russian dissident embroiled in a plot to kill the tsar. Following these and other unlikely protagonists, the book travels from the steaming cities of Italy and the Levant, under the dark branches of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy fells of Lapland.“This is how the history of fairy tales operates: stories splintering along zigzagging pathways, carrying long-sounding echoes that turn down narrative alleyways suggested elsewhere or replicate each other with astonishing exactitude.”In the process, Jubber discovers fresh perspectives on some of our most frequently told stories. Filled with adventure, tragedy and real-world magic, this bewitching book uncovers the stranger lives behind the strangest of tales.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, focusing on qualitative analyses of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. However, she is also a life-long lover of fairy tales & fantasy; her father continues to be surprised that her PhD did not once mention dragons, elves, or castles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices