New Books in British Studies

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/british-studies

How does music help us to understand the contemporary city? In It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City (Manchester UP, 2019), Caspar Melville, co-chair of the Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies at SOAS, University of London, explores three music scenes to tell the story of modern London. In doing so it rethinks the story of crucial cultural moments, such as the birth of acid house, and brings new depth and detail to research on cities and music. The book draws on extensive empirical material, foregrounding analysis of space, race, and music to deliver both a comprehensive history as well as a significant contribution to urban studies. The book is essential reading for music and social science scholars, as well as for anyone interested in London and its culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Robert Elmer, who is a communications specialist at Seattle Pacific University, a prolific writer of historical fiction, and the author of over fifty published titles, has published a ground-breaking anthology of prayers that he has collected from English and American puritans. The value of Piercing Heaven: Prayers of the Puritans (Lexham Press, 2020) is that it provides access into a world of religious practice that is otherwise lost – many puritans refusing on principle to put their prayers to paper. Trawling through published sermons and other sources, Elmer discovered prayers reflecting a huge range of contexts, situations, and geographical and denominational background. Piercing heaven: Prayers of the puritans organises these prayers in thematic sections. Tune in to find out why these prayers are so surprising – and what they tell us about the interior life of the hotter sort of English and American protestants.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Paying special attention to sociocultural threads form the period 1945-1980, Susan Newcombe's new book Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis (Equinox, 2019) charts the trajectory of how yoga in became mainstream in Britain to the point of being taught to thousands of middle-class women in adult education classes. Drawing on archival evidence and interviews, the book shows the diverse figures and movements responsible for the popularization of yoga in Britain.Suzanne Newcombe is a Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University and a Research Fellow at Inform, a charity based at the London School of Economics. She researches yoga and ayurveda from a sociological and social historical perspective.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The British romantic poet William Wordsworth is best known for his moving evocations of nature, his celebration of childhood, and his quest to find a shared humanity in his poetry. He’s also widely considered the first modern poet because he turns his experiences, memories, and the workings of his mind (earlier "spots of time") into the main subject of his accessible poetry. That hadn’t happened before, and all of us, who today are either committed to rational thought, sober analysis and reflection or are deep in our feelings, are ultimately Wordsworthians.But what Wordsworth may really be about, I discussed with the brilliant poet and critic Maureen McLane, is whether with knowledge truly comes wisdom, and whether we trade in the ecstasies of youthful exuberance and immediate experience for a more measured but diminished way of living life. Is there really "abundant recompense," as Wordsworth wrote, in recalling earlier "fits of passion" that roiled our lives? Are "our minds [...] nourished and invisibly repaired" when we look back upon earlier experiences of joy and suffering? "What I'm looking for is a golden bowl, carefully repaired," writes McLane in one of her poems in This Blue - but can we trust that things will be repaired after having been lost to the passage of time? (Incidentally, I talked with Jessica Benjamin in another podcast about the human capacity for "repair," and whether we can trust that things can be restored once broken).This question is also at the heart of the Enlightenment itself: whether knowledge frees us from superstition but at the cost of sacrificing the immediacy of experience. Can we turn fights, arguments and turmoil into something larger by placing them into a wider context: do we have the "power to make/our noisy years seem moments in the being/of the eternal Silence"? Or are some things broken by humans never fully recovered, and we are left with grief, and loss, and silence, but nothing eternal?It's an urgent question for our age, when reason, argument and truth themselves seem so easily upstaged by spectacle and the fire and fury of immediate action.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Why has the recent crisis of capitalism benefitted the nationalist right rather than the left? Is there a tension between socio-economic realities and the politico-cultural views of leftists?In his new book A Left for Itself:Left-Wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism (Zero Books, 2019), David Swift argues that the left is dominated by what he terms hobbyists and performative radicals. An overwhelmingly white, middle class, elite educated left is, according to Swift, searching for a past-time rather than fighting for basic needs.Building on earlier work on the left during WWI, Swift combines a deep knowledge of the political science and history literature with archival work and contemporary interviews with activists and those who reflect on their work. He finds activists on the left to be in search of an identity: a past-time that will enhance their image. The book looks at ethnic identity politics, immigration, the debate over Israel and Palestine, the trans movement, cultural elitism, and feminism. Swift uses these case studies to demonstrate how leftist activists often mistake online posturing for policy, undercut committed activists, and alienate centrists who might facilitate a broader left coalition.The podcast includes wide-ranging discussion of UK and US politics – including some thoughts on how COVID-19 might shape the future narratives of leftist politicians and activists.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Today we are joined by David Block, author of Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Block is a baseball historian whose research has focused on the origins of the game. Pastime Lost was a finalist for the 2020 Seymour Medal, awarded by the Society for American Baseball Research to the best book of baseball history or biography published the preceding year. His previous book, Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, won the 2006 Seymour Medal as well as the 2006 North American Society for Sport History book award. It is considered the definitive study of baseball's origins.In Pastime Lost, Block painstakingly recovers the origins of baseball games through a close reading of a wide variety of 18th-century sources including newspaper clippings, novels, and diaries. He also does a statistical analysis of those sources. He discovers that English baseball was a popular folk sport for more than two hundred years, predominantly in the home counties, but also being played as widely as Scotland and Wales. The game enjoyed widespread acceptance among men and women, elites such as Frederick, the Prince of Wales, and ordinary people, especially in the countryside. By the middle of the 19th century, English baseball faded under increased challenges from other ball games including rounders, bat and ball, and cricket. By the first half of the twentieth century, English baseball largely vanished and is now almost completely forgotten. Nevertheless, it is the likely parent of many popular ball games today – even as Block argues, American baseball.Block’s Pastime Lost, which mixed rich historical investigation with Bill Bryson-esque rollicks across the English countryside, will appeal to readers interested in the long history of bat and ball games.Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency, and Everyday Life, examines physical culture in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

If you haven’t been able to tell by the way I pronounce the word “about,” I should probably let you know that I’m from Canada. And I have to make a confession––growing up in Vancouver, I was fed the line that Canadian history was dull, that it lacked drama (i.e. no revolutionary war against England), and so my historical attention was always drawn to the US. It wasn’t until I was deep into college that I began to think otherwise. And, as a result, I know far too little about my country’s history.Asa McKercher’s superb new book, Canada and the World since 1867 (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019), is a strong rebuttal to the Canadian-history-is-boring thesis. Surveying the history of Canada’s relations with the rest of the world, the book tracks Canada long decolonization from Britain, its ugly campaign against First Nations communities to take territory and move settlers westward, and how it dealt with having a superpower for a neighbour. The book should not be read, however, just by Canadians or Canadian historians, however. In examining the history of a medium-sized state’s foreign policy, McKercher’s book helps us understand how the international system itself works.Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

What is the relationship between inequality and classical music? In Class, Control, and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anna Bull, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth and co-director of the 1752 Group, explores the intersections of class, race, and gender to explain the exclusive, and excluding, nature of classical music in contemporary society. The book is based on a detailed study of young people’s engagement with classical music, along with a broader understanding of music education and the sociology of culture. The book is also deeply engaged with the question of what, if anything, classical can do to transform, rather than reproduce, social inequalities. It is essential reading across both music and sociology, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary culture and social inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Of the many thousands who participated in the American and French revolutions in the late 18th century, only a handful played roles in both events. Among that select number were Thomas Jefferson and Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, two men who enjoyed a friendship that stretched across five decades.In Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations (St. Martins, 2019), Tom Chaffin describes the shared views and experiences that bonded them together. As Chaffin describes, the two men first met during the American Revolution after the young Lafayette crossed the Atlantic to participate in the fighting. Though their initial association was brief, the two men grew close during the five years Jefferson served as minister to France in the 1780s, with Jefferson providing the marquis with advice during the early stages of the French Revolution. Though Jefferson and Lafayette were soon parted by the course of events, they would be reunited one final time in 1824 when the marquis visited the former president at Monticello as part of his grand tour of the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies