New Books in Biography

As historical topics, political revolutions come in and out of fashion. At the moment the American Revolution as an ideological struggle engages the public, but historians are less sure. Books that used to have the Revolution at their centre now approach it from the edges and peripheries, integrating the experiences of people and communities excluded by studies of ideological origins.In the United Kingdom, still mired in BREXIT, the civil war past inflects present politics even if the conflict itself has been nudged off the school curriculum. In the 1990s, historians of England re-fought the civil wars in battles of footnotes. It took entire books to summarise the scholarship on events that were sometimes civil wars, at others revolutions, here wars of religion, there the wars of the three kingdoms.Michael Braddick is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield, and is a leading voice in the study of England’s revolutionary past. In The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), he takes a fresh look at the turmoil that gripped England for three decades in the middle of the seventeenth century. His focus is one man’s path through these years, a path that was one of stark public suffering, personal conviction, principled argument, and an unwavering dedication to the idea that common liberties were the highest political goods.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Today we are joined by Dr. Mitchell Nathanson, author of the book Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Nathanson, a professor of law at the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports at Villanova University, examines the life of Jim Bouton, a journeyman pitcher whose 1970 book, “Ball Four,” was a lightning rod for controversy and became one of the best sports books of all time. Nathanson examines the dynamics behind the crafting and publishing of “Ball Four,” Bouton’s diary of the 1969 major league baseball season. He examines the contributions of Leonard Shecter, the former New York Post sportswriter who helped shape Bouton’s narrative. More importantly, Nathanson presents a more well-rounded portrait of Bouton, a free-thinking man who marched to his own beat and was not afraid to buck the establishment. Bouton’s youth, his early successes with the New York Yankees and fall from grace are chronicled. Well-researched with interviews from key figures in his lifetime, “Bouton” provides context and reveals the man behind a work that was vilified fifty years ago as a “kiss-and-tell” book but is now lauded as a sports classic. Nathanson brings fresh perspective and delivers an unvarnished, critical view of Bouton.Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In light of the profound physical and mental traumas of colonization endured by North Africans, historians of recent decades have primarily concentrated their studies of North Africa on colonial violence, domination, and shock. The choice is an understandable one. But in his new monograph, A Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2020), M’hamed Oualdi asks how a history of the modern Maghreb might look if we did not perceive it solely through the prism of European colonization, and argues that widening our gaze might force us to redefine our understanding of colonialism — and its limits.As a sequel of sorts to his first book, Oualdi explores the life and afterlife of one figure, the manumitted slave and Tunisian dignitary Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah, as an aperture through which to understand the financial, intellectual, and kinship networks that mingled with processes of colonialism and Ottoman governance in unexpected ways to produce the modern Maghreb.A master class in how historians might untangle the relationship between the personal and the political, A Slave between Empires centers Husayn — and North Africa — at the crossroads of competing ambitions, imperial and intimate. Engaging with sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and European languages, and corralling French, Tunisian, and Anglophone historiographies into one conversation, Oualdi’s newest book is not to be missed.M'hamed Oualdi is full professor at Sciences Po in Paris.Nancy Ko is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she examines the relationship between Jewish difference and (concepts of) philanthropy and property in the late- and post-Ottoman and Qajar Middle East. She can be reached at [nancy.ko@columbia.edu]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a stern moralist yet possessed of deep, and at times dark, passions? And why did scores of thousands of Jews, many of them from traditional, observant backgrounds, embrace Herzl as their leader?In his new book Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale UP, 2020), historian Derek Penslar shows that Herzl’s path to Zionism had as much to do with personal crises as it did with antisemitism. Once Herzl devoted himself to Zionism, Penslar shows, he distinguished himself as a consummate leader—possessed of indefatigable energy, organizational ability, and electrifying charisma. Herzl became a screen onto which Jews of his era could project their deepest needs and longings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina.Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Brandon K. Winford's John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director.Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.Today I talked to Brandon K. WinfordDr. Brandon K. Winford is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee. He is a historian of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century United States and African American history with areas of specialization in civil rights and black business history.Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in colonial and revolutionary-era Black women’s history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

"After I’d finished my rapid-fire history of self-justification he paused and then said, deadpan and rural-Australian-slow: 'Right. Ok. So how is that all working out for you?'"On Drugs (Giramondo Publishing, 2019) explores Australian philosopher Chris Fleming’s experience of addiction, which begins when he is a student at the University of Sydney and escalates into a life-threatening compulsion.In a memoir by turns insightful and outlandish, Fleming combines meticulous observation with a keen sense of the absurdity of his actions. He describes the intricacies of drug use and acquisition, the impact of drugs on the intellect and emotions, and the chaos that emerges as his tightly managed existence unravels into hospitalisations, arrests and family breakdown. His account is accompanied by searching reflections on his childhood, during which he developed acute obsessive compulsive disorder and became fixated on the rituals of martial arts, music-making and bodybuilding.In confronting the pathos and comedy of his drug use in Sydney, On Drugs also opens out into meditations on the self and its deceptions, religion, masculinity, mental illness, and the tortuous path to recovery.On Drugs is a uniquely Australian experience of a universal quest for oblivion.Dr Matthew Thompson is a literary journalism specialist recently with the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia but now based in the USA. Dr Thompson has a special focus on the conflict areas of the Sulu archipelago and Mindanao in the southern Philippines. He is the author of MAYHEM, Running With The Blood God, and My Colombian Death. For more information visit https://matthewthompsonwriting.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Protégé of Elsie Clews Parsons and Franz Boas, founder and head of Barnard College's anthropology department, and a trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (1893–1955) is one of America’s least appreciated anthropologists. Her accomplishments were obscured in her lifetime by differences in intellectual approach and envy, as well as academic politics and the gender realities of her age. Reichard's approach to Native languages put her at odds with Edward Sapir, leader of the structuralist movement in American linguistics. Similarly, Reichard’s focus on Native psychology as revealed to her by Native artists and storytellers produced a dramatically different style of ethnography from that of Margaret Mead, who relied on western psychological archetypes to “crack” alien cultural codes, often at a distance.Nancy Mattina's Uncommon Anthropologist: Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019) is the first full biography of Reichard, and examines her pathbreaking work in the ethnography of ritual and mythology; Wiyot, Coeur d’Alene, and Navajo linguistics; folk art, gender, and language; and her exceptional career of teaching, editing, publishing, and mentoring.In this episode of the podcast Nancy talk to host Alex Golub about Reichard's life, her remarkable ethnography Spider Woman, her career as a teacher (including as an instructor of Zora Neale Hurston), how academic politics can erase people from disciplinary memory, and why Reichard's 'humanitarian' values are needed now more than ever.Nancy Mattina holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and is retired faculty and founder of the Writing & Learning Commons at Prescott College, Arizona. She is a contributor to Studies in Salish Linguistics in Honor of M. Dale Kinkade.Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Despite a reign that lasted for over two decades, the Mughal emperor Jahangir has often been regarded as a weak ruler who was hobbled by his addictions and dominated in his later years by his wife Nur Jahan. As Lisa Balabanlilar reveals in The Emperor Jahangir: Power and Kingship in Mughal India (I. B. Tauris, 2020), this portrayal often exaggerates Jahangir’s defects and glosses over many important aspects of his rule. Much of this this distortion, she notes, originated with his memoir, in which Jahangir was often frank in his assessment of his own failings. This was exploited by his son and successor, Shah Jahan, who sought to justify his rebellion against his father late in Jahangir’s reign once he ascended to the throne. Balabanlilar shows how this image obscures important aspects of the workings of the Mughal emperorship during the early 17th century. These she uncovers by examining Jahangir’s court, his empire’s relations with other kingdoms, and his patronage of the arts, revealing him in the process as a more capable and consequential monarch than his traditional depiction allows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In his new book In Our Own Way In this Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture and Nation (Duke University Press, 2019), Kwasi Konadu tells the story Kofi Donko (1913-1995) and the many communities he served as a blacksmith, healer, farmer, leader and intellectual. The book starts by describing the ontological universe that gave historical and social substance to the work of Kofi Donko, and traces the ways in which this universe remained central to the wellbeing of many communities in the Gold Coast (later Ghana) as they faced ecological degradation as well as social and political dislocation. In spite of its social value, much of the knowledge and the institutions sustained and led by men like Kofi Donko were sidelined in the process of nation-building. Thus, even after independence, leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah continued to ignore the carefully researched and collected knowledge of local intellectuals. Konadu argues that this deliberate ignorance not only deprived the new nation from proven models for building and caring for community, but that the world at large has much to learn from the ideas and experiences of healers such as Kofi Donko.Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography