The Harvard Brief

The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard UP, 2020) recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis.In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver's seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a "ghost state" set adrift by the fall of the empire. D'Annunzio's ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire.Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below.

Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012). We talk about bad writing, but a lot more about how to make it good. There's even a dog.Interviewer : "What is it that keeps most students and then, too, many early-career academics away from making the effort to write well?"Helen Sword : "Writing is seen as this utilitarian thing. You've got to learn it. It's got lots of rules. If you get things wrong, somebody's going to put red ink on there or red tracked changes or whatever. There's a lot of emotional baggage tied up with the hard work of writing well, and yet when I interviewed successful academic writers, what I heard over and over again, was about the pleasures that they take in the hard work of the craft. And that's where, for me, I link the pleasures of writing well back to stylish academic writing, to the craft of writing well. Those two things have got to go hand in hand to be a long-term sustainable kind of enterprise."

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the book we are here to talk about today, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, a 2019 Harvard University Press release. In this book, Professor Strocchia continues the work of her career: recentering the discourse to include the formative contributions of women in the Italian Renaissance. Through a discussion of Medici women, convent pharmacists, and hospital nurses, Strocchia adeptly argues that women played a leading role in the development of Renaissance medicine.Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective.

R. H. Helmholz's book Natural Law in Court (Harvard UP, 2015) serves as a guide to the uses of natural law in the past. It shows how lawyers, judges and jurists used natural law to reason and argue about all areas of the law, be they procedural or substantive. Far from being a polemic, this book delves into the legal record of multiple countries to compare, contrast and shed light on the role natural law played in actual legal disputes. Due to the renewed interest in natural law today, this book serves as an important counter-point to legal thinkers who too often rely on purely philosophical or theoretical notions of natural law in their arguments to show how natural law was (and potential can be) deployed to make effective legal arguments in actual legal proceedings.

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock. Though their unions were not legally recognized, slaves commonly married, fully aware that their marital bonds would be sustained or nullified according to the whims of white masters.Bound In Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard UP, 2017) is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Uncovering the experiences of African American spouses in plantation records, legal and court documents, and pension files, Tera W. Hunter reveals the myriad ways couples adopted, adapted, revised, and rejected white Christian ideas of marriage. Setting their own standards for conjugal relationships, enslaved husbands and wives were creative and, of necessity, practical in starting and supporting families under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.After emancipation, white racism continued to menace black marriages. Laws passed during Reconstruction, ostensibly to secure the civil rights of newly freed African American citizens, were often coercive and repressive. Informal antebellum traditions of marriage were criminalized, and the new legal regime became a convenient tool for plantation owners to discipline agricultural workers. Recognition of the right of African Americans to enter into wedlock on terms equal to whites would remain a struggle into the Jim Crow era, and its legacy would resonate well into the twentieth century.Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. A specialist in 19th and 20th century African American history, her research focuses on gender, race, labor, and Southern histories.Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick studying eighteenth and nineteenth century African American women’s history, slavery and emancipation in colonial America and the Atlantic world, and the history of slavery and capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte! 

In 1985, Greg Mack, a DJ working for Los Angeles radio station KDAY, played a song that sounded like nothing else on West Coast airwaves: Toddy Tee’s “The Batteram,” a hip hop track that reflected the experiences of a young man growing up in 1980s Compton. The song tells about the Los Angeles Police Department’s battering ram truck, an emblem of the city under Police Chief Daryl Gates, and which terrorized largely African American neighborhoods across Los Angeles under his watch. In To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Harvard UP, 2020), historian at San Francisco State University Felicia Angeja Viator describes how rap leapt across the continent from its New York roots in the mid-1980s and took hold in Los Angeles. Often gaining popularity by word of mouth and mobile DJ parties, local groups like NWA pioneered a new, harder-edged, style of hip hop music that reflected their experiences as youth growing up in Gates era LA. Viator explains how the rapid rise of West Coast rap became engulfed in the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s and shaped perceptions of the 1992 LA uprising. When gangsta rap hit the American mainstream in the early 90s, the artform changed the face of popular music and American culture forever.For a playlist of songs featured in To Live and Defy in LA, see the following link.Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming.

In Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020), Sianne Ngai continues her theoretical work of demystifying the vernacular aesthetic categories encountered in late capitalist daily life. In this witty and penetrating book-length treatment of the affective experience of the “gimmick,” Ngai draws upon formalist literary criticism, post-Kantian aesthetic philosophy, and Marxist political economy in order to illuminate the historical production of this attractive yet unsettling cultural form. From The Magic Mountain to It Follows, smiley faces to subprime mortgages, Ngai’s image of the surprisingly ubiquitous gimmick emerges from a careful evaluation of the capitalist subject’s fundamental discomfort surrounding the coupling of value to labor-time.Michael Eby is a writer and researcher on contemporary art and digital culture. He lives in New York and tweets @michaeleby2020.

The Protestant Reformation looms large in our cultural imagination. In the standard telling, it’s the moment the world went modern. Casting off the shackles and superstitions of medieval Catholicism, reformers translated the Bible into the vernacular and democratized religion. In this story, it’s no wonder that Protestantism should give birth to liberalism.But this story is wrong, or so argues James Simpson in Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019). In Simpson’s account, liberalism did not flow neatly from Protestant triumph. Liberalism and Protestantism are indeed intertwined, but in a much more violent, anguished way than we’re familiar with. The logic of revolution meant that Protestants increasingly turned against themselves and their own traditions. It was from the embers of this self-destructive conflagration that liberalism actually took shape. Vaulting lyrically from Shakespeare to Milton, from hypocrisy to magic, biblical literalism, and liberty, Simpson challenges the stories we tell ourselves. The result is a much more dynamic narrative of a world, like our own, in a state of flux.

In her book, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2020), Mira L. Siegelberg traces the history of the concept of statelessness in the years following the First and Second World Wars. At its core, this thoughtful monograph is an intellectual history of an idea that jurists in the United States and Europe struggled to agree upon after the fall of traditional imperial ways of structuring belonging. Siegelberg’s book examines how debates regarding statelessness redefined many of the core concepts that structured modern politics, such as sovereignty, citizenship, and the broad spectrum of terms in English, French, and German that described the state of not having a national affiliation. The book’s methodologically pluralist approach also brings many other aspects of the problem of statelessness into focus, such its implications on the global humanitarian crisis that followed these two conflicts, its resonance in particular ethnic communities, and the way it redefined many ideas about citizenship. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of empire and law, international history, the history of migration, and a range of other topics in global history.Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

Intrinsic to the practice of empire is the creation of boundaries. We tend to think of such boundaries as borders, physical lines of demarcation past which the empire’s sovereignty has no purchase. But, in fact, the picture is much fuzzier than that. A foundational task of empire is to define, to categorize, and in so doing, to make peoples and places knowable; only once something is known can it be controlled. For this reason, the peoples that stalk the edges of empire have been a constant source of anxiety. These peoples, defying the state’s power of comprehension and inhabiting the very limits of its reach, are the empire’s frontier.In Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Harvard University Press, 2020), Dr. Benjamin D. Hopkins makes the case that such peoples and the practices used to control them constitute “frontier governmentality.” In Hopkins’ formulation, the frontier is not a place, but rather a practice. Frontiers are an ideational space in which empires define liminal peoples and deploy a unique set of tactics to manage them. They recruit imaginative “customs” and “traditions” to institute the illusion of self-rule. They deny them access to state courts without surrendering legal claims to them. And they render them economically dependent while withholding access to the state’s economy. Ranging from India’s Northwest Frontier to the TransJordan, South Africa, Apache reservations and beyond, Ruling the Savage Periphery documents in clear and convincing prose the startling breadth of frontier governmentality, and its tragic legacy still with us today.