New Books in World Affairs

In 1957 Ghana achieved its independence from Great Britain under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. In Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2017), Jeffrey Ahlman uses a wide range of archival and print sources to examine the first decade of Ghanaian self-rule and challenges the teleological assumptions that have dominated historical understandings of African decolonization. The author starts by explaining the roots of Nkrumah’s anti-colonial agenda, which became the guiding principle for the Convention People’s Party (CPP) political program. The book also describes the means by which said program was implemented, how it evolved in response to national and international conditions, and how it was experienced by some of the people who lived through it. 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/world-affairs

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistence and continuities of Black radicalism from the end of the Second World War through the period of McCarthyism in the United States. Departing from an insistence on colonialism as the primary historical driver of the twentieth century, the book moves from the Popular Front politics of the interwar years to the beginning of the 1960s. Considering of “long civil rights movement” in relationship to the history of forms of colonialism and imperialism that were global in scope, the chapters of the book travel from key sites and events in the U.S. across the Atlantic to the U.K. and Europe, and further afield to spaces and conversations between activists in Asia and Africa. Reframing the history of Cold-War U.S. politics in relationship to broader histories of decolonization, The Anti-Colonial Front challenges analyses that over-emphasize national and generational differences in the social justice struggles and movements of the period, as well as those narratives that would have us believe that McCarthyism was wholly successful in suppressing radical political thought and activisms in the 1950s. Indeed, the book makes a contribution to our understanding of the origins of the revolutionary ideas and events of the 1960s. Drawing on a range of archival materials, the book examines the work of organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture. It also explores the lives and political work of individuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O’Dell and C. L. R. James. Engaging literary works, press and periodical literature across a political spectrum, the book interrogates the boundaries and histories of left and liberal politics in the period. The Anticolonial Front will be of tremendous interests to historians of American political culture, Black radicalisms, and the complex global past of anticolonialism and decolonization in the Cold-War era. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib‘s A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the urban history of Beirut precisely because it exceeds the disciplinary boundaries of urban history: A Taste for Home tells the story of late Ottoman Beirut through the middle class and their sense of self. Abou-Hodeib uses domesticity as a category of analysis to look at how the middle class functioned and what it aspired to be in the midst of the late Ottoman period. However, the book also succeeds wildly because it treats a local context within the global setting, taking seriously the intersecting themes of global capitalism and consumer culture, themes of domesticity and taste. Over the course of the book, leisure and urban development are also shown to be key elements in the development of the middle class, defining the city for generations to come. A Taste for Home will be critical for conversations for many years to come on class, the economy, the city, and the home in the study of the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period. In his book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016), Matthew Karp examines how American slaveholders and their allies steered American diplomacy so as to preserve and expand slavery as an institution. Adam McNeil is an incoming PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. He completed his M.A. in History at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts and B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) in Tallahassee, Florida. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Western concept of democracy has a lineage dating back to the classical world. Paul Cartledge’s book Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016) details its origins in ancient Greece and its evolution of it as a theory over the course of the 2,500 years since then. As he explains, what people think of as “classical Greek” democracy was primarily the Athenian concept of it, which was one of several versions that emerged during the Hellenic era. Though typically viewed as at its peak during the days of the Athenian empire, Cartledge sees the “golden age” of democracy as taking place in the 4th century BCE rather than in the preceding one, a shift which attests to the endurance of democracy as a governing system. It was during Roman times when the practice of democracy declined, to the point where it was often seen as a failed or impractical system during the Middle Ages. It was not until the 17th century when democracy staged a comeback in the West, with its advocates in the 18th and 19th centuries championing it as the best possible form of government – a status it continues to hold in the West even with the strains it faces today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Benjamin Bryce, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, has written a history of belonging within a culturally plural Argentina. To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society (Stanford University Press, 2018) describes a period from the 1880s to the 1930s, when a massive wave of immigration transformed Argentine society and the country’s cultural landscape. By 1914, almost half the residents of Buenos Aires were foreign nationals. About 100,000 of the country’s newcomers in those decades were Germans, who arrived from Austria-Hungary, the Russian and German Empires, and Switzerland. Alongside the leaders of many other immigrant enclaves in Buenos Aires, Germans, too, created ethnic spaces by building institutions, from orphanages to hospitals to schools. They became loyal Argentine citizens even as they maintained a connection to German culture. The book’s guiding argument is that while immigrants often talked about the past – where they or their predecessors had come from, for example – their activity to maintain cultural identity was very much a future-oriented project. Benjamin Bryce’s book fits into the burgeoning field of migration history – an important and timely topic, one generating tremendous political energy today around the world. In this podcast, the author and I discuss cultural pluralism, the amazing flexibility of ethnicity, and the aesthetics of ethnic cemeteries, among other topics. Monica Black is Lindsay Young Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating insight into fundamental issues shaping the contemporary Middle East, including efforts to turn Arab societies into twenty first-century knowledge-based economies and  the role of the religion and its relationship to science. Assistant Professor Jörg Matthias Determann takes the reader on a highly readable and well-documented tour of the struggle of Arab scientists to contribute to the development on space studies and how scientific research contributes to reform and change in the Arab world. It is a process that often meant that scientists were forced to pursue their studies and explorations outside of the region and in doing so contributed to concepts of cosmopolitanism in the region. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I. In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind’s vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted–and often permanently altered–global politics, race relations and family structures, while spurring innovation in medicine, religion and the arts. It was partly responsible, Spinney argues, for pushing India to independence, South Africa to apartheid and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It also created the true “lost generation.” Drawing on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology and economics, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (PublicAffairs, 2017) masterfully recounts the little-known catastrophe that forever changed humanity. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

As any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplomatic historians. And yet, for all of the scholarly attention it has received, there are understudied facets of this complicated, multilateral conflict, particularly in its early years, before American ground troops entered the country in large numbers. Jessica Elkind’s Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University of Kentucky Press, 2016) does precisely this by examining U.S. development programs that tried to foster a viable South Vietnamese state in the 1950s and early 1960s. The outcomes of those disparate programs ultimately deepened a U.S. commitment to the Republic of South Vietnam and helped set the United States on the road to war. Dr. Elkind’s research was conducted using U.S. government sources, private collections from Michigan State University, and South Vietnamese government sources held in Ho Chi Minh City. Michigan State University was an important actor in this narrative because it was responsible for establishing and running certain programs. In each of the book’s five chapters, she examines a different aid program, ranging from the resettlement programs created for refugees fleeing the newly-created North Vietnam, to agricultural aid and development, to police training. What emerges from these various perspectives is a view of widely-ranging intentions and goals that often differed starkly. Not only did the U.S. government and South Vietnamese government disagree on what would constitute effective aid and development, the public-private partnership that existed between the U.S. government and Michigan State University also frayed as the individual aid workers began to lose faith in their mission. As the United States and the international community confronts global problems about development and nation-building, Aid Under Fire suggests lessons that policymakers and the public should heed. Development cannot succeed without taking into account the wishes of the people who are receiving aid, and simply transplanting western modalities cannot work without taking into account the conditions on the ground. As Elkind demonstrates, overconfidence in nation-building can have dire consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria after World War I. When Austria was the first interwar country in Europe to suffer a hyperinflation the League of Nations stepped in to offer financial support and advice. But a total collapse of the financial system in 1931 couldn’t be avoided. Nathan Marcus offers a new perspective on the already well researched subject and an individual approach not only with regards to content but also on a methodological level by interlacing multiple perspectives and sources (such as journals and caricatures, literature, anecdotes etc.) with each other to create a wider understanding for the events. Nathan Marcus is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs