Episodios

  • Jacob Lee, "Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi" (Harvard UP, 2019)

    Jacob Lee, "Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi" (Harvard UP, 2019)
    Jul 16 2024
    America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Coursing through a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi(Harvard University Press, 2019), Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley. Lee, an Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans. Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
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    1 h y 34 m
  • Jonathan Marc Gribetz, "Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Jonathan Marc Gribetz, "Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Jul 15 2024
    How the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center informed the PLO's relationship to Zionism and Israel In September 1982, the Israeli military invaded West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Meanwhile, Israeli forces also raided the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and trucked its complete library to Israel. Palestinian activists and supporters protested loudly to international organizations and the Western press, claiming that the assault on the Center proved that the Israelis sought to destroy not merely Palestinian militants but Palestinian culture as well. The protests succeeded: in November 1983, Israel returned the library as part of a prisoner exchange. What was in that library? Much of the expansive collection the PLO amassed consisted of books about Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. In Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton UP, 2024), Jonathan Marc Gribetz tells the story of the PLO Research Center from its establishment in 1965 until its ultimate expulsion from Lebanon in 1983. Gribetz explores why the PLO invested in research about the Jews, what its researchers learned about Judaism and Zionism, and how the knowledge they acquired informed the PLO's relationship to Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
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    28 m
  • Alfred Peredo Flores, "Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962" (Cornell UP, 2023)

    Alfred Peredo Flores, "Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962" (Cornell UP, 2023)
    Jul 14 2024
    In Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Alfred Peredo Flores argues that the US occupation of the island of Guåhan (Guam), one of the most heavily militarised islands in the western Pacific Ocean, was enabled by a process of settler militarism. During World War II and the Cold War, Guåhan was a launching site for both covert and open US military operations in the region, a strategically significant role that turned Guåhan into a crucible of US overseas empire. In 1962, the US Navy lost the authority to regulate all travel to and from the island, and a tourist economy eventually emerged that changed the relationship between the Indigenous CHamoru population and the US military, further complicating the process of settler colonialism on the island. The US military occupation of Guåhan was based on a co-constitutive process that included CHamoru land dispossession, discursive justifications for the remaking of the island, the racialization of civilian military labour, and the military's policing of interracial intimacies. Within a narrative that emphasises CHamoru resilience, resistance, and survival, Dr. Flores uses a working class labour analysis to examine how the militarization of Guåhan was enacted by a minority settler population to contribute to the US government's hegemonic presence in Oceania. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
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    50 m
  • Mark L. Haas, "Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally" (Cornell UP, 2022)

    Mark L. Haas, "Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally" (Cornell UP, 2022)
    Jul 13 2024
    Alliances among ideological enemies confronting a common foe, or "frenemy" alliances, are unlike coalitions among ideologically-similar states facing comparable threats. Members of frenemy alliances are perpetually torn by two powerful opposing forces. Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022) shows that shared material threats push these states together while ideological differences pull them apart. Each of these competing forces has dominated the other at critical times. This difference has resulted in stable alliances among ideological enemies in some cases but the delay, dissolution, or failure of these alliances in others. This book examines how states' susceptibility to major domestic ideological changes and the nature of the ideological differences among countries provide the key to alliance formation or failure. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of critical historical and contemporary cases, from the failure of British and French leaders to ally with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in the 1930s to the likely evolution of the United States' alliance system against a rising China in the early 21st century. In Frenemies, author Mark Haas develops a groundbreaking argument that explains the origins and durability of alliances among ideological enemies and offers policy-guiding perspectives on a subject at the core of international relations. Our guests today is Mark Haas, Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
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    47 m
  • Huan Jin, "The Collapse of Heaven: The Taiping Civil War and Chinese Literature and Culture, 1850-1880" (Harvard UP, 2024)

    Huan Jin, "The Collapse of Heaven: The Taiping Civil War and Chinese Literature and Culture, 1850-1880" (Harvard UP, 2024)
    Jul 13 2024
    The Collapse of Heaven: The Taiping Civil War and Chinese Literature and Culture, 1850-1880 (Harvard UP, 2024) investigates a long-neglected century in Chinese literature through the lens of the Taiping War (1851–1864), one of the most devastating civil wars in human history. With the war as the pivot, Huan Jin examines the manifold literary and cultural transformations that occurred from the 1850s to the 1880s. The book analyzes a wide range of writings—proselytizing pamphlets, diaries, poetry, a full-length novel, drama, and short stories—with a particular emphasis on the materiality of these texts as well as their production and dissemination. Tracing allusions to political turbulences across many genres, Jin discusses how late imperial Chinese literary and cultural paradigms began to unravel under conditions of extreme violence and tracks the unexpected reinventions of literary conventions that marked the beginning of Chinese literary modernity. In addition to making a significant contribution to Chinese studies, this book offers an important comparative perspective on the global nineteenth century and engages with broad scholarly discussions on religion, violence, narrative, history, gender, theater, and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
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    1 h y 9 m
  • Karine Varley, "Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Karine Varley, "Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
    Jul 9 2024
    Karine Varley's book Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023) advances a significant new interpretation of French collaboration during the Second World War. Arguing that the path to collaboration involved not merely Nazi Germany but Fascist Italy, it suggests that the Vichy French government was caught in a double bind. On the one hand, many of the threats to France's territory, colonial empire and power came from Rome as well as Berlin. On the other, Vichy was caught between the irreconcilable yet inescapable positions of the two Axis governments. Unable to resolve the conflict, Vichy sought to play the two Axis powers against each other. By exploring French dealings with Italy at diplomatic, military and local levels in France and its colonial empire, Double Bind reveals the multi-dimensional and multi-directional nature of Vichy's policy. It therefore challenges many enduring conceptions of collaboration with reference to Franco-German relations and offers a fresh perspective on debates about Vichy France and collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
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    1 h y 19 m
  • Laura Robson, "Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work" (Verso, 2023)

    Laura Robson, "Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work" (Verso, 2023)
    Jul 9 2024
    When Americans and other citizens of advanced capitalist countries think of humanitarianism, they think of charitable efforts to help people displaced by war, disaster, and oppression find new homes where they can live complete lives. However, as the historian Laura Robson argues in her book Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (Verso, 2023), the history of the international refugee regime is much less noble than the self-representation of humanitarian organizations (and the global powers that fund them) would suggest. Robson shows how imperial powers, nation-states, global corporations, and intergovernmental organizations have sought to remake refugees into disposable migrant laborers whose exploitation would advance various imperial and state-building projects. Laura Robson is a Professor of History at Yale University. Her recent books include States of Separation: Transfer, partition, and the making of the modern Middle East (2017) and The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
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    51 m
  • Rachel Williams, "Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront" (Kent State UP, 2024)

    Rachel Williams, "Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront" (Kent State UP, 2024)
    Jun 30 2024
    Examining how a civilian organization used the Civil War to advance their religious mission. Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront (Kent State UP, 2024) discusses the work of the United States Christian Commission (USCC), a civilian relief agency established by northern evangelical Protestants to minister to Union troops during the American Civil War. USCC workers saw in the Civil War not only a wrathful judgment from God for the sins of the nation but an unparalleled opportunity to save the souls of US citizens and perfect the nation. Thus, the workers set about proselytizing and distributing material aid to Union soldiers with undaunted and righteous zeal. Whether handing out religious literature, leading prayer meetings, preaching sermons, mending uniforms, drawing up tailored diets for sick men, or bearing witness to deathbed scenes, USCC workers improvised and enacted a holistic lived theology that emphasized the link between the body and soul. Making extensive use of previously neglected archival material—most notably the reports, diaries, and correspondence of the volunteer delegates who performed this ministry on the battlefront—Rachel Williams explores the proselytizing methods employed by the USCC, the problems encountered in their application, and the ideological and theological underpinnings of their work. Tabernacles in the Wilderness offers fascinating new insights into the role of civilians within army camps, the bureaucratization and professionalization of philanthropy during the Civil War and in the United States more broadly, and the emotional landscape and material culture of faith and worship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
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    42 m