The University of Chicago Press Podcast

We often think of South Africa or America when we hear the word ‘segregation.’ Or — a popular view — that social groups have always chosen to live apart.But as Carl H. Nightingale shows in his new book, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the racial phenomenon is both modern and international. To be sure, laws and informal practices separating individuals by membership in a caste can be found everywhere in the ancient and medieval world. Those with or seeking wealth and power have always sought to preserve or increase their position by disuniting people on the grounds of social category. Yet the idea of “race” and the enduring belief that human beings can be distinguished in such terms has its origins in the rise of European colonialism, starting with British rule in Madras (Chennai) and the East India Company’s decision to split Calcutta (Kolkata) into “White Town” and “Black Town.” The word ‘segregation’ itself comes from techniques used in Hong Kong and Bombay (Mumbai) in the 1890’s, part of a viral “mania” that, Nightingale explains, pivoted around the challenges of mass urbanization and sent the institution north, south, east, and west — even to Latin American cities like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, where the distinction between ‘white’ and ‘black’ was murky at best.This globalization depended heavily on imperialist governments, and often just as importantly relied on multinational corporations (real estate especially) and intellectual networks, which provided in the first case institutional precedent and protocol and in the second rationalization and legitimacy for the pseudo-scientific notion of ‘race.’ Yet, as this ambitious work demonstrates, segregation appeared under every form of government, with and without the help of capitalism. The line betweende facto and de jure was often hard to tell or irrelevant. (One might note here, for example, that, contrary to popular belief, most businesses in the Old South were not forced by law to put up those ‘Whites Only’ signs.)Indeed, there is more than a bit of paradox and irony in this tragic story. And while the late 1900’s saw the rise of powerful movements opposed to segregation, the world’s population is now majority-urban for the first time, and still lives with these awful legacies. Attempts to rollback segregation will have to grapple with this complex and global history. Thankfully, Nightingale has given us a very useful starting point. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conventional thinking tells us that private school education is better than public schooling in the US. Why else would parents pay the hefty price tag often associate with private education, especially at very elite schools? But, Dr. Christopher Lubienski and Dr. Sarah Lubienski question this assumption in their new book, entitled The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this publication, the authors use two large-scale datasets on mathematics outcomes to isolate the effects of schooling on children and they find that public schools actually score better than their private school counterparts in this measure when the proper variables are held constant. To explain their findings, Lubienski and Lubienski argue that public school usually have better certified teachers and more often teach with more modern pedagogical methods. While the book does not contend that all public schools are great, the authors would like their findings that show traditional public schools do in fact show positive outcomes to be considered alongside a policy discourse that is increasingly dominated by calls of privatization and autonomy–such as vouchers and charter schools. Dr. Christopher Lubienski joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can follow him and the host of this podcast on Twitter at @CLub_edu and @PoliticsAndEd, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our everyday lives are saturated with maps. We use maps on our smart phones to help us navigate from place to place. Maps in the newspaper and online show us the spread of disease, the state of the planet, and the conflicts among nations.Susan Schulten‘s Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines how the very idea of a map radically changed it the nineteenth century. Author Susan Schulten shows the pivotal role maps played in nineteenth-century American life, from helping Americans forge a national identity and better understand their past to showing the pervasiveness of slavery in different parts of the South and the prospect for emancipation. Those with a keen interest in cartography–or even a passing interest–will find her book and this interview fascinating.Professor Schulten has also created an excellent companion site for the book, www.mappingthenation.com. There you will find hi-resolution digital copies of the maps she examines in the book and that we discuss in our interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of “objectivity,” and the concept of the public sphere. Don’t miss the beautiful color plates nestled in the midst of the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine code and screen interface. Using a methodology called “media archaeology” that is informed by the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Kittler, Heidegger, Stiegler, and others, Chromatic Algorithms traces a transformation of color from optics to algorithms. The chapters trace a history of synthetic color in Western aesthetics and philosophy, the rise of Day-Glo, the aesthetics of color in video art from the 1960s and 1970s, the technology of color TVs, the connection between color and notions of transcendence and utopia, “democratic color” and Salvador Dalí’s urinated-upon pen, the early history of art/engineering at Bell Labs, the technology of digital infrared visualization, the aesthetics of “Photoshop cinema,” bioart and its glow-in-the-dark bunnies, and the work of some amazing artists including Lillian Schwartz, Jeremy Blake, and many many others. It is a gorgeous and fascinating study of color, technology, visualization, the digital, and beyond.As you work through the book, I highly recommend searching the Web for some of the amazing work described in its chapters. I’m based in Canada and so some of the following links may not work for you: in that case, just try searching on your own for the title:The rock opera Battle for Milkquarious! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDMhwq3pcAJeremy Blake, Winchester Redux http://vimeo.com/16485005Zbigniew RybczyÅ„ski, Tango http://vimeo.com/9033947Paper Rad: http://www.paperrad.org/This site has some clips from Lillian Schwartz’z Proxima Centauri: http://lillian.com/kinetic/You can browse video clips from WGBH’s New Television Workshop here: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philosophy does not have to be stuck in the clouds. It can have relevance in everyday life, for everyday people, and Scott Samuelson attempts to do just that in his book, entitled The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Samuelson weaves in a personal narrative from his experience teaching at Kirkwood Community College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa and a deep historical exploration of philosophy. His students provide interesting and everyday lessons that the author forges into the foundation for complex philosophical issues. The book is organized into four sections that each focus on a single question, yet vast question: What is Philosophy? What is Happiness? Is Knowledge of God Possible? and What is the Nature of Good and Evil?. From Socrates, to Pascal, from the Stoics to Epicureans, Samuelson allows for an easier understanding of advanced philosophical discourse, and without watering down the complexity. He joins New Books in Education for the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism.John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Trapped in America’s Safety Net sheds light on the reality of means-tested programs in the United States. Following an accident that left her sister-in-law paralyzed, Campbell sees the vast array of federal and California state assistance programs up close. The book highlights the peculiar aspects of these programs, including the burden of asset tests that compel disabled Americans – and others receiving benefits – to liquidate assets and prevents them from saving for the future. The book is at once deeply personal, but also a great overview of how social policy actually works and often fails. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beth Linker is the author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (University of Chicago Press, 2011). As she reveals, the story of individual rehabilitation from war-related injury was intertwined with other political concerns at multiple levels. These century-old accounts matter greatly, as the First World War was that point where modern rehabilitative medicine and social policy was born, with many of the attitudes and aspects of this early response lingering to the present day. Beth’s book is an insightful consideration of the conflicted responses Americans presented to the unanticipated challenges of post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation for the nation’s thousands of veterans, standing in no small way as a cautionary tale as America winds down from its latest conflicts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-European or Anglo-centric models of the history of colonial medicine, Osborne’s book focuses on the centrality, transformations, and ultimate demise of naval medicine in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Motivating the central arguments and narrative of the book is a concern with place, places, and emplacement, and Osborne explores maritime medical practices and the ecology of disease in French provincial port cities, on ships, in prisons, in hospitals and schools, and beyond. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France pays special attention to how the study and conception of race, and its connection with health and disease, was formed and reformed in these settings. Readers with a special interest in the relationship between medicine and the military will find much to enjoy here, as will those who come to the book wanting to know more about the maritime history of diseases like Yellow Fever, lead poisoning, and Malaria. There’s also some wonderful storytelling here, including a fascinating account of a book-bomber in Chapter 4. It is a beautifully written account, and it should be required reading for those interested in the history of medicine and healing, of France, of the colonial medical past, and of place and locality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices