New Books in Biography

On March 4, 1953, Soviet citizens woke up to an unthinkable announcement: Joseph Stalin, the country’s all-powerful leader, had died of a stroke. In The Last Days of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2016), Joshua Rubenstein recounts the events surrounding the dictator’s death and the sociopolitical vacuum it opened up at home and abroad. After Stalin did not emerge from his room on the morning of March 1, a maid who was sent into his room found him lying in his own urine; doctors’ efforts to save him, including the application of leeches, proved hopeless. The following weeks brought mass grief and halting attempts at reform, including a mass amnesty of Gulag prisoners. Rubenstein argues that the months following Stalin’s death were a missed opportunity for a de-escalation of the Cold War. While Pravda published Eisenhower’s famous chance for peace speech and Soviet officials expressed willingness to negotiate, the State Department under John Foster Dulles viewed Soviet concessions as a moral challenge to resist rather than an opportunity to explore. While Khrushchev went on to denounce Stalin’s cult and relax political controls, a chance for the peaceful reunification of Germany and relaxation of tensions across Europe was lost. Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

With the end of the Civil War, George Crook’s decision to continue serving in the United States Army meant reverting to a lower rank and assuming a command in the Pacific Northwest. Yet, as Paul Magid details in the second volume of his biography of Crook, The Gray Fox: George Crook and the Indian Wars (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), he would soon emerge as one of the most prominent figures in the army’s ongoing operations against Native Americans in the territories. In describing Crook’s campaign against the Paiutes in the Great Basin, Magid details the relentless attritional warfare that was a hallmark of his strategy against the tribes he fought. Results in the Northwest led to his transfer to Arizona, where his success against the Apache and Yavapai earned him a promotion to the rank of brigadier general. With his selection as the head of the Department of the Platte in 1875, Crook found himself coping with the deteriorating situation in the Dakota Territory created by the surge of prospectors and settlers, and with the outbreak of the war against the Sioux, the general took to the field in a series of grueling campaigns. Though suffering a setback at the battle of Rosebud, Crook’s subsequent victory at Slim Buttes led to the subjugation of the Sioux and the surrender of Crazy Horse, which cemented Crook’s reputation as the army’s leading expert in Indian warfare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

You may know Toni Morrison’s famed novel Beloved, but do you know much about the true story of the woman depicted in that story? You will know about the real story and more, by reading her biography called Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (Ohio University Press, 2016) authored by Howard University Professor of History and Department Chair Nikki Taylor. Driven Toward Madness tells the story of how fugitive slave Margaret Garner and her family escaped to free Ohio in late January 1856, only to be captured in a cabin outside of Cincinnati. What happened as the Garner family were being apprehended is the climax of the story; Taylor shows what drove Margaret’s attempt to kill all four of her children, while only successfully doing so by way of decapitating her two year-old daughter Mary. Based in history, Taylor uses various theoretical frameworks like trauma studies, pain studies, black feminist theory, and literary criticism to broaden our understandings of the why surrounding Margaret Garner’s murder of her child. Taylor broadens popular understandings of black womanhood, resistance, and what are acceptable forms of gendered violence. In doing so, Taylor displays the ways antagonistic groups like abolitionists and pro-slavery activists both used Garner’s story for their own causes without necessarily recognizing Garner’s agency and humanity. Ultimately, Taylor expresses how far a person could go to protect their child from bondage, even if that meant taking their life so they reached freedom elsewhere. Author Nikki M. Taylor is Professor of History and History Department Chair at Howard University. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century African American History. Her sub-specialties are in Urban, African American Women, and Intellectual History. Adam McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution (Encounter Books, 2017), written by legal scholar Stephen F. Williams, uses a biographic account of the life and career of Vasily Maklakov to explore issues of legality and rule of law in Tsarist Russia from 1905, following the promulgation of the October Manifesto, which established a legislative body for the first time since the 1600s, till the Bolshevik Revolution. Maklakov, a moderate Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) reformer and practicing defense attorney (most famous for his defense of the Jewish Menahem Beilis, sometimes considered the Russian Dreyfus), was a delegate to the Second, Third and Fourth Dumas who advocated for political compromise, the establishment of rule of law and gradual constitutional reform. He advocated for a wide range of amendments to the Tsarist legal code, especially in the realms of religious freedom, national minorities, judicial independence, citizens judicial remedies, and peasant rights. As such Maklakov’s policies presented vivid contrast to the political tactics of the better-known Russian Left (the Narodniks, SRs, and Social Democrats) who refused to work with the autocracy and actively engaged in terrorism, at one point killing over 300 government employees a month in 1906, and advocating for the over through of the Tsarist regime. While Maklakov and other liberal reformist Russians ultimately failed in staving off revolution, in part due to the unwillingness of their own party to compromise with the Tsarist regime and accept anything other than a fully constitutional monarchy, Maklakov’s story serves as an example for movements seeking to liberalize authoritarian countries today—both as a warning and a guide. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book,Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Laura E. Smith, Assistant Professor of Art History at Michigan State University, unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the Kiowa community, also capturing successive years of powwows and pageants at various fairs, expositions, and other events. Though Poolaw earned some income as a professional photographer, he farmed, raised livestock, and took other jobs to help fund his passion for documenting his community. Smith examines the cultural and artistic significance of Poolaw’s life in professional photography from 1925 to 1945 in light of European and modernist discourses on photography, portraiture, the function of art, Native American identity, and American Indian religious and political activism. Rather than through the lens of Native people’s inevitable extinction or within a discourse of artistic modernism, Smith evaluates Poolaw’s photography within art history and Native American history, simultaneously questioning the category of fine artist in relation to the creative lives of Native peoples. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Though not a figure in the public imagination today, William Fox is a man whose legacy is visible in the numerous media enterprises that bear his name. Vanda Krefft‘s biography The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (Harper, 2017) leads readers through the remarkable arc of Fox’s life, one that took him from the slums of New York City to the glittering lights of Hollywood. The immigrant son of Hungarian Jews, Fox got his start in the entertainment industry in 1904 as an exhibitor. Enjoying success but chafing under the restrictive terms of film distributors, in 1915 he expanded into production, creating the Fox Film Corporation. As Krefft explains, Fox favored a director-centric approach to film making, working with such legendary figures as John Ford and F. W. Murnau to produce some of the greatest films of the silent era. By the late 1920s he had built a vast entertainment empire, only to lose first his fortune and then his company in the economic collapse at the end of the decade, which left him to watch as others turned his studio into 20th Century Fox, one of the big six studios in Hollywood today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In November 1944 Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States, despite suffering from heart disease and other medical issues that contributed to his death six months later. In His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt (Vintage Books, 2016), Joseph Lelyveld examines the final months of Roosevelt’s life, detailing both his maladies and his accomplishments. This was a momentous period for Roosevelt, as he participated in two summits and several other meetings with his allies to dictate the course of the war and the peace that would follow. Yet while noting both Roosevelt’s deteriorating health and the stress the grueling itinerary imposed on him physically (which was not helped by the travel accommodations of the time), Lelyveld views the claims afterward that his medical problems inhibited his contribution as more often the product of retrospective accounts than reliable contemporary assessments. It was Roosevelt’s desire to finish the task of shaping the postwar peace that led him to run for a final term, even though many of his closest aides believed that the president was unlikely to finish it if he won. This made Roosevelt’s health the great unspoken issue of the election, one that determined the selection of Harry Truman as his running mate and defined how the president conducted his last campaign for office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about a largely enigmatic life, Red Ink author Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of a singular Native American figure in Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). This “cultural biography” provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America’s early nationhood. William Apess’s life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Methodist spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native American presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its Indian question in favor of extinction. This new biography will sit alongside Apess’s own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Anthony Chaney teaches history and writing at the University of North Texas at Dallas. His book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) offers an examination of the intellectual life and ideas of Gregory Bateson that came to fruition in the midst of the social upheaval of the 1960s. Bateson trained in the natural sciences and anthropology, moved to the field of psychiatry and conceptualized the double bind theory of schizophrenia. Leading a research group of scientists and captivated by the possibilities the double bind theory offered in understanding the anxiety of the age, he sought to connect it with other intellectual currents such cybernetics, game theory, evolutionary and communication theory. Working across disciplines, he addressed the modern problem of the distinctions between fact/value, reason/emotion, nature/culture, producing an inescapable double bind for society. Plunging into the paradox of the human condition, he challenged the instrumental view of solving social problems, breaking new ground against binary thinking and in addressing the ecological crisis as a system in runaway. Without appealing to metaphysics, he articulated a holistic theory of mind as a new foundation for thinking about humanity and its relationship to the natural world. Chaney has provided a rich exploration of a fascinating thinker who set the foundations for the information age. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Not very many intellectuals really change their minds about anything. They have a big idea, often become well known because of it. Then their big idea becomes an integral part of their identity and they just never let it go. Evidence that doesn’t “fit” is either ignored or contorted in such a way as to make it “fit.” Too bad, that. But, as you’ll read in Adi Gordon‘s terrific book Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn (Brandeis University Press, 2017), not Hans Kohn. He had a several big ideas, most notably one about nationalism. But he never stopped evolving it to, well, reality. Kohn lived in several different worlds—a Habsburg one, a Zionist one, an American one—and in each of them he witnessed how nationalism played out in different ways. Kohn adapted as he moved from one world to another, and so did his thought. Very good, that. Listen in to our fascinating conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography