Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

During the nineteenth century, nearly ten thousand Americans traveled to Germany to study in universities renowned for their research and teaching. By the mid-twentieth century, American institutions led the world. How did America become the center of excellence in higher education? And what does that story reveal about who will lead in the twenty-first century?

In Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Emily Levine presents the first history of the ascent of American higher education seen through the lens of German-American exchange. “This book treats transatlantic culture exchange and competition as its topic, methodology, and causal historical mechanism. It uncovers the origins of the research university by pulling apart the strands of parallel, comparative, and intertwined stories that unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapters pair individuals and institutions from Germany and America to reveal side-by-side stories about how idealists made compromises to create universities they hoped would bring tangible benefits to their respective communities.”

In a series of compelling portraits of such leaders as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martha Carey Thomas, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Levine shows how academic innovators on both sides of the Atlantic competed and collaborated to shape the research university. Even as nations sought world dominance through scholarship, universities retained values apart from politics and economics. Open borders enabled Americans to unite the English college and German PhD to create the modern research university, a hybrid now replicated the world over.

Dr. Levine argues that “the university did not emerge in isolation nor was it ever a finished project. Rather, the compromises were constantly renegotiated by these innovators and other social actors amid changing contexts. As the society that the university served evolved, the university coevolved into such forms as the central state university in Berlin, the land grant in California, and the privately funded urban university in Baltimore, and each time the academic social contract was reconstituted.”

In a captivating narrative spanning one hundred years, Dr. Levine upends notions of the university as a timeless ideal, restoring the contemporary university to its rightful place in history. In so doing she reveals that innovation in the twentieth century was rooted in international cooperation—a crucial lesson that bears remembering today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

Jeremy Friedman is Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The former Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University, he is the author of Shadow Cold War: The Sino–Soviet Competition for the Third World.

Thomas Kingston is currently a Huayu Enrichment Scholar, studying Mandarin Chinese at National Cheng Kung University, as he finds himself in post MPhil and pre PhD limbo. He holds an MA in Pacific Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MPhil in Philosophy from Renmin University of China. His research interests focus on the political and intellectual histories of nationalism(s), imaginaries and colonialism in the East and Southeast Asian context.

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Nick Enfield’s book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022), argues that language is primarily for social coordination, not precisely transferring thoughts from one person to another. Drawing on empirical research, Enfield shows that human lexicons the world over are far more coarse-grained than our perceptual faculties. Yet, at the same time, languages vary in the structure and sophistication of their representations. This means that, for instance, how different languages carve up the world influences not only how their speakers talk about the world, but also how they think about it. The book explores a range of linguistic phenomena, from lexical diversity to linguistic framing to the effects of narrative. As a result of understanding how language shapes our understanding of reality, Enfield argues that we can make more informed—and more ethical—decisions about our own language use, as individuals and communities.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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Ian Tyrrell's American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea (UChicago Press, 2021) is a powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America’s exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America’s exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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In the fall of 2020, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal decreed that the country’s near-total ban on abortion was too liberal; henceforth, pregnancies could be terminated only in cases of rape, incest, or imminent threat to the mother’s life. The court’s decision triggered a nationwide Women’s Strike, whose social mobilization galvanized reproductive rights advocacy across Europe.

In the wake of the Polish mass protests, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a crucial moment to re-visit anthropologist Joanna Mishtal’s ground-breaking book The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland (Ohio University Press, 2015). Mishtal recast the decades since communism’s collapse as a time of joint Church-State war on reproductive rights, as well as feminism, which was painted as either a communist legacy or a foreign import. The Politics of Morality examines the contradiction between an emerging democracy on the one hand, and a declining tolerance for women’s rights and political and religious pluralism on the other. Surveillance, control, and abuse of power are persistent themes in this revealing ethnography, which has had an enormous scholarly impact in the study of gender and religion & politics in Eastern Europe, but carries powerful lessons far beyond its immediate field.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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We speak with Richard Detweiler about his new book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry and Accomplishment (MIT Press, 2021). This multi-year project, which entailed interviews with a national sample of over 1,000 college graduates aged 25-64, provides convincing evidence of the benefits the liberal arts in enabling individuals to lead more fulfilling lives and successful careers. He uses an innovative definition of the liberal arts which focuses on the distinctive: 1) purpose, 2) context, and 3) content of a liberal arts education, measuring the frequency and intensity of these elements across different higher education institutions. He also shares insights from his tenure as President of Hartwick College and the head of the Great Lakes College Association.

David Finegold is the president of Chatham University.

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Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020) reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century. Far from dismissing Ebony as a consumer magazine with limited political or educational importance, E. James West highlights the value editors, readers, and advertisers placed upon Ebony's role as a "history book." Benefitting from unprecedented access to new archives at Chicago State and Emory University, West also offers the first substantive biographical account of the writing and philosophy of Lerone Bennett Jr., who used his position at Ebony to emerge as one of the twentieth century's most influential popular black historians. Focusing on Lerone Bennett's role within Johnson Publishing, and assessing Ebony's broader historical coverage, this book uses the magazine as a window into the transition of black history from the margins to the center of American cultural, historical, and political representation. As an important cultural outlet with millions of readers, Ebony played a powerful role in reshaping public representations of African American history. Directed by the efforts of Bennett, the magazine produced militant depictions of black history and connected activism in the present to a longstanding history of radical black protest. However, as a black consumer magazine it also helped to legitimize and facilitate corporate mediation of black history, and to frame and limit discussions of African American history, memory, and identity.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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What is the hidden history of women in the television industry? In Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (U California Press, 2022), Annie Berke, film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and host of the Film channel of the New Books Network podcast, explores the history of women writers through key case studies, industry analysis, and readings of on-screen representations. The book is a rich and detailed analysis of the changing nature of the gendered profession of making television, thinking through the past, with lessons for the present and future of the entertainment industry. Accessible and fascinating, the book should be widely read by scholars, industry insiders, and the public too!

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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In Partition and Peace in Civil Wars: Dividing Lands and Peoples to End Ethnic Conflict (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Carter Johnson examines whether partition is an effective means to resolve ethnic and sectarian civil wars. He argues that partition is unlikely to end ongoing ethnosectarian civil wars, but it can increase the likelihood of preventing civil war recurrence, as long as the partition separates civilians and militaries.

The book presents in-depth case studies of Georgia–Abkhazia and Moldova–Transnistria, in addition to cross-national comparisons of all ethnosectarian civil wars between 1945 and 2004. This analysis demonstrates when partitioning a country can help transform an identity-based civil war into a lasting peace.

Highlighting practical and moral challenges of separating ethnosectarian groups, Dr. Carter contends that complete partitions cannot be easily implemented by the international community, and this limits their applicability. He also demonstrates that ethnosectarian civil wars are driven less by inter-group antagonisms and more by state breakdown, meaning displaced minorities can reintegrate peacefully after partition as long as a minimal level of state-building has been completed. The book ends by examining whether partition would be useful for five contemporary conflicts: Iraq, Ukraine–Donbass, Afghanistan, Sudan–South Sudan, and Serbia–Kosovo.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show in Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (U Chicago Press, 2021), this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves.

Today’s humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critical, historical perspective, Permanent Crisis can take scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities beyond the usual scolding, exhorting, and hand-wringing into clearer, more effective thinking about the fate of the humanities. Building on ideas from Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Small and Danielle Allen, Reitter and Wellmon dig into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world.

Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures at the Ohio State University. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.

Chad Wellmon is professor of German studies and history at the University of Virginia. He is the author and editor of many books, The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook and Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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