The Harvard Brief

Raymond Jonas‘ The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire (Harvard UP, 2011) places Menelik alongside Napoleon and other greatest strategists. The Ethiopian emperor carried out a brilliant maneuver across hundreds of miles, essentially defeating his Italian adversaries without battle. That battle came was the colossal blunder of the Italians and one that cost thousands of Italian and Askari soldiers their lives. More than just the history of the campaign, The Battle of Adwa provides keen insights into Menelik’s court and elucidates Italian imperial ambitions.

To say that David Edwards‘s The Lab: Creativity and Culture (Harvard University Press, 2010) is inspiring would be a profound understatement. In a series of concise, focused chapters that range from “Dreams” to “Translational Change,” Edwards maps out a program for the artscience laboratory as a space that opens up creativity by fostering dialog across disciplines, materials, cultures, and groups of people. These ambitious ideas are illustrated by clear examples from Edwards’s own teaching and research, exploring the potential of the laboratory (broadly defined) as a creative space that maps onto the classroom, the kitchen, the gallery, the storefront, the street. The Lab is a kind of manifesto that builds on Edwards’s previous work on the innovative potential of transcending the art-science divide, and urges readers to challenge their ideas of what a laboratory is, has been, and can be. It’s a wonderful and thought-provoking book that has wide ramifications for readers interested in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), both in terms of how we conceptualize and communicate our research and how we think of the space of the classroom. I came away from our conversation wanting immediately to set up an artscience lab in Vancouver, and to head to Paris to try some whiffable chocolate.

Tim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and advanced scholars, it’s not merely a dry textbook: The...

In the celebrity firmament that circles around us, sports stars are among the brightest lights. Kobe, Tiger, Messi, Márta, Sachin, and Serena can be recognized from most points on the globe.But other stars are visible only in certain lands: Yuna Kim, Barbora Strycova, Sebastien Chabal, Andres Guardado, Israel Folau, Buster...

It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globalization, nationalism–the Soviet war in Afghanistan figures in many narratives. Indeed, the ten-year intervention was the one of hottest and bloodiest...

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or part from stock characters in American minstrel shows, largely because they suggested to white consumers a comforting though bygone hospitality. Aunt Jemima said “You might not have a loving mammy to do your home cookin’, but you can eat as if you did.”I grew up with Aunt Jemima and loved her syrup dearly, so I knew this. But I did not know that a similar tradition of racist commercial icons existed in Imperial Germany. I do now, thanks to David Ciarlo‘s insightful Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard UP, 2011). The Germans had been using images such as the “tobacco moor” to stamp their exotic trade goods since the eighteenth century. But it was only in the 1890s that they began to use the “moor” in mass advertising per se. It was only then, too, that they began to carve out an empire full of “moors” in southwest Africa. David skillfully connects the two phenomenon, showing that the latter tangibly altered the character of the former. The image of Africans in ads went from one that emphasized the exotic to one that stressed the exotic under German domination. Depictions that were almost entirely fanciful became much more concrete. Africans came to represent racial Untermenchen in the service of their German overlords. It was an appealing picture, and one the Germans would–unfortunately–not soon forget.

Peter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man who was Japan’s ambassador to the US in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Mauch traces the geopolitical developments of...

An earlier author described the British invasion of Mesopotamia in 1914 as “The Neglected War.” It no longer deserves that title thanks to the brilliant treatment of the subject by Professor Charles Townshend (University of Keele). His Desert Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia (Harvard University Press, 2011) describes in impressive detail both the political background and the military operations that made modern-day Iraq quite literally hell for the British soldiers engaged there from 1914 to 1918. A parsimonious British administration waged the campaign, seen at the time quite understandably as something of a peripheral concern, on a shoestring, and the absence of the most basic materials, especially shipping and medical supplies, was paid for by the largely Indian soldiery in blood.Using sources ranging from the highest level strategic plans and parliamentary inquiries, to the quasi-anthropological studies of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, to the memoirs and letters of the common soldier, Townshend demonstrates convincingly that British frugality combined with an ideology of rational administration created “mission creep” that drew the British further and further into a theater of war in which they were ill-equipped to fight and led them to make arrangements for the postwar Middle East that reverberate to this day.Townshend is laudably cautious in extrapolating from the experience of 1914-1918 to the present day, but an attentive reader will be in no doubt about the ways in which today’s Iraq is a product of its past.

As we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the conflict. Many books will certainly promise much, but in the end deliver little. Fortunately this is not the case with Michael Neiberg‘s latest book Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011).In this important new view of the opening months of the war, Neiberg offers a fresh look at the July Crisis, how it was perceived across Europe, and the first two months of the war. Rather than focusing on the same old voices of the European literati and political elites, Neiberg shows us how the average person considered the march to war. In the process he reveals a number of startling insights that challenge the war’s standard historical orthodoxy, revealing that many of our assumptions about the collective and individual responses to the July Crisis are based on misperception and poor assumptions. Rather than a continent primed for war through a network of military alliances, unfettered military bureaucracies, and a cultural predisposition that viewed war as the great test of nations and men, he reveals a society that genuinely believed peace was possible until the very last moment, and which only accepted war as a last alternative, and which would be defensive in nature. This insight and so many others earn Dance of the Furies the label of “revisionist history” in the best possible sense.

America, wrote the late historian and public intellectual Tony Judt, is “intensely familiar–and completely unknown.” America’s current position as the globe’s single superpower means that almost everyone, from a farmer harvesting his crops in Missouri to a street vendor in Kazakhstan, has a strong an opinion about what America is.For example, in its 2011 “World Report,” Human Rights Watch condemned the unlawful arrest of three Georgian poets who peacefully protested on George W. Bush Street in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, demanding that it be renamed in honor of Walt Whitman. “George W. Bush does not represent what America is. Walt Whitman does,” said one of the protesters, Irakli Kakabadze, after being released from detention.It’s not accidental that Aziz Rana‘s new book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2010), opens up with an epigraph from Walt Whitman’s “Facing West from California’s Shores.” According to Rana, Whitman’s verse highlights the disjuncture between essential American ideals and the politics the country often pursues today.In the book, Rana investigates this seeming disjuncture between values and actions with reference to the Janus-faced American idea of freedom and how to spread it. For Americans, Rana argues, freedom means emancipation and domination. He points out, for example, that since Wilson’s time Americans have often attempted to free a country by attacking it, and they see no contradiction in this. For Americans, the pursuit of human rights–and especially emancipation–excuses and sometimes requires domination. It’s easy to see how Rana’s point is directly relevant to the current debate on U.S. intervention in Libya.These and many other insights make Rana’s thoroughly researched and clearly written book an excellent guide for those perplexed about American ideology and its impact on the world. If you want to understand why the most powerful country in the world does what it does, I recommend you read it.