The Harvard Brief

In A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard University Press 2013) Dr. Raul Coronado provides an intellectual history of the Spanish America’s decentered from the dominant narrative of Enlightenment, revolution, and independence stemming from Protestant Europe and British America. Examining pamphlets, broadsheets, manuscripts, and newspapers, Coronado situates the emergence of Spanish American revolutionary thought at the moment of rupture, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed King Fernando VII in 1808. It was at this moment, Coronado argues, when subjects of the Spanish Crown were thrust into the modern era with the task of envisioning and producing an alternative to the ancien regime. With an engaging and sweeping narrative that transports readers across time and space, Coronado explores the central actors and ideas that intersected in and developed out of the Spanish American borderlands to lead independence movements throughout Latin America during the first half of the 19th century. Rooted in the region that would become modern-day Texas, A World Not to Come explores the formation of community and identity, as well as the transmission of ideas, among Texas Mexicans during the eras of Mexican independence and U.S. westward expansion. In the process, Coronado provides a different history of modernity (“alternative west”) that is truly transnational in scope and content.David-James Gonzales (DJ) has a PhD in History from the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the intersection of Latina/o civic engagement and politics on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century.

What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural displays and amusements, an emergent urban modernity including a host of negotiations between social classes, public and private, men and women, citizens and the state. And if I had to name one historical figure to stand for the transformation of the nineteenth-century capital? Haussmann. Hands down.Alexia Yates‘s book, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital (Harvard UP, 2015), opened my eyes to a whole other world of everyday urbanism and historical actors in the city during the first decades of the Third Republic. Acknowledging the undeniable impact of Haussmann and Haussmannization on the city that Paris became under and after the Second Empire, Selling Paris considers the activities, interests, and effects of a host of other figures who shaped the city’s property relations and commercial culture from the early years of the Third Republic to the First World War. In the books chapters, readers will find a social history of the business of French building during this period, from planning and production to use. Focused on the architects, private developers, municipal authorities, speculators, real estate agents, notaries, property owners, and tenants whose interactions and negotiations influenced the form, representation, and experience of Parisian real estate in purposeful ways, the book makes significant contributions to our understanding of the history of the capital and capitalism in France.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, 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/.

Amar Akbar Anthony is a film like no other. When you see it you cannot forget it. Filled with music, comedy, drama, and love it captures audiences in multiple ways. But what can we learn from a deeper look at this classic of Hindi cinema? William Elison, Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, Christian Lee Novetzke, Professor at the University of Washington, and Andy Rotman, Professor at Smith College offer a layered analysis of the 1977 blockbuster in Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2016). The authors examine the film through each of the narratives three brothers, as well as their mother. All four perspectives offer a new vision of modern India. Through their investigation they explore questions of religion and secularism, Indian nationalism, cinematic genres and Bollywood, politics, urban architectural space, and gender. They also examine the film as a powerful allegory of the nation, where differing religious identities, specifically Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, can produce a generative social harmony. Overall, the authors provide a rich portrait of this amazing film and a useful model for the interdisciplinary analysis of cinema.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

In the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. At first glance, these two events might appear to have little to do with one another. But in his new book, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017), Neil Maher examines the often contentious relationship between the NASA-led space program and the social movements of the era.Maher shows that civil rights activists questioned why the U.S. federal government spent billions on space exploration while many African Americans suffered in poverty and lived in dilapidated housing in the nation’s cities. He explains why New Left activists and environmentalists opposed NASA’s emphasis on big technology and the agency’s involvement with the military in Vietnam. And he describes how hippies with the counterculture rejected NASA’s techno-optimism and moved to communes to practice simpler living using smaller, appropriate technology.Neil Maher is associate professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of a previous book, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Rise of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press).Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and how to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books.

In the capital of the African nation of Angola today stands a statue to Njinga, the 17th century queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms. Its presence is a testament to her skills as a diplomat, warrior, and leader of her people, all of which she demonstrated over the course of a reign described by Linda Heywood in Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard University Press, 2017). The daughter of the Ndongo king Mbande a Ngola, Njinga grew up in a west central Africa that was facing growing encroachment by Portugal, who were major customers in the regions slave trade. Seeking to extend their control, the Portuguese challenged Njinga’s succession to the throne in 1624, prompting a war that lasted for three decades. To persevere, Njinga had to navigate the complex politics of the region, gaining control of the Matamba kingdom and pursuing ties with both the Vatican and the Dutch to provide a counterweight to the Portuguese. The treaty signed with Portugal in 1656 was a testament to her success, allowing her to focus on establishing a legacy of an independent kingdom that she could pass on to her sister after her death.

Almost daily in popular media the Muslim World is pinpointed as a homogeneous entity that stands separate and parallel to the similarly imagined West. But even scratching the surface of the idea of a Muslim World reveals the geographic, social, linguistic, and religious diversity of Muslims throughout the world. So what work is performed through the employment and use of this phrase? And in what context did the idea of the Muslim World emerge?Cemil Aydin, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tackles these questions in his wonderful new book The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017). It in he weaves distant and interconnecting social, intellectual, and political histories of modern Muslims societies with clarity and detail. Altogether, he reveals the complex story of how the concept is constructed as a device intended to point to a geopolitical, religious, and civilizational unity among Muslims. The term is defined and employed by Muslim and non-Muslim actors alike across imperial and national contexts over the past nearly 150 years. In our conversation we discussed the justifications for imperial conflicts, the effects of Christian nationalistic liberation and the colonization of Muslims, orientalism, social Darwinism, the racialization of Muslims, the global role of the Ottomans, European and Russian imperialism, Muslim modernists thinkers, the effects of the World Wars, and the changing political landscape of the late 20th century.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

Susanna L. Blumenthal is a professor of law and associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Her book, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) won the 2017 Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Blumenthal offers a historical examination of the jurisprudence of insanity, legal capacity, and accountability from post-revolutionary America through the nineteenth century. Americans struggling to set the boundaries of ordered liberty turned to Common Sense philosophy that held to divinely given rational faculties of intellect, volition, and moral sense. Republican citizenship assumed that a reasonable man, as a legal person, would act accordingly. The market economy of self-made men, the new field of medical psychology, will and contract challenges over wealth and property, tort law and increased liability claims exposed the inadequacy of social and political norms in defining human fallibility, and the limits of responsibility. Litigants, lawyers, judges, and medical experts struggled to find a reliable way to settle issues of mental competency and define the bounds of freedom. The incapacity of married women, children, and slaves provided a means of comparison for the male citizen involving metaphysical, political, social, and economic ideas wrapped up in the concept of self-government. Blumenthal has produced a remarkable piece of intellectual and legal history situated in the rapidly changing market environment of a young republic.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Modernization dominates development’s historiography. Historians characterize moments in development’s history–from the Tennessee Valley Authority to US-led “nation-building”in the Third World–as high-modernist attempts to industrialize, urbanize, bureaucratize, and centralize. Indeed, modernization and development have almost come to be synonymous in our historical imaginations. Daniel Immerwahr’s Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press, 2015) shows that this is not the whole story.Immerwahr, an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University, writes communitarianism back into the history of development. He traces a troubling history of how social scientists, policymakers, and civil servants were enamored of ideas of community development and how they tested these ideas in Indian villages, counterinsurgency campaigns in Southeast Asia, and the US war on poverty. Daniel makes important arguments about the mid-century ambivalence towards modernity, the global dimensions of domestic policy formation and the problematic appeal of community. Taking this story to the present, Daniel shows the limits of contemporary localist approaches to global inequality and makes his own profound and persuasive policy prescriptions. This fascinating book should be of interest to intellectual historians, diplomatic historians, historians of the global south, as well as development workers and anyone else engaged in debates about global poverty.

Laura Madokoro’s new book is a timely and important study of movement across national borders, migrants, and the refugee label in the global Cold War. Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2016) offers critical historical insight into the problem of defining refugee and the significance...

On today’s program we will be speaking with David W. Stowe about his recent book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Song of Exile weaves together the 2,500-year history of one of the most famous psalms in the Hebrew Bible; it examines the entire psalm, including the more obscure last stanza; and it draws on historical and interview research with musicians who have used Psalm 137 in their music.David W. Stowe earned his PhD from Yale University in 1993. He is currently interim chair of the English Department at Michigan State University. During the 2012-13 academic year, Stowe held a research fellowship in Music, Worship, and the Arts at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, where he researched and wrote an initial draft of this book, Song of Exile, which presents the cultural history of Psalm 137. Among his other books, he wrote No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (UNC Press 2011). He also wrote How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard UP, 2004), which won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu.