Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

English author A. S Byatt talks to an audience about her novel 'Possession'. First broadcast in March 2004

(Photo: A S Byatt. Credit:BBC)

Understanding and Teaching Native American History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), co-edited by Kristofer Ray and Brady DeSanti, is a timely and urgently needed remedy to a long-standing gap in history instruction. While the past three decades have seen burgeoning scholarship in Indigenous studies, comparatively little of that has trickled into classrooms. This volume is designed to help teachers effectively integrate Indigenous history and culture into their lessons, providing richly researched content and resources across the chronological and geographical landscape of what is now known as North America. 

Despite the availability of new scholarship, many teachers struggle with contextualizing Indigenous history and experience. Native peoples frequently find themselves relegated to historical descriptions, merely a foil to the European settlers who are the protagonists in the dominant North American narrative. This collection offers a way forward, an alternative framing of the story that highlights the ongoing integral role of Native peoples via broad coverage in a variety of topics including the historical, political, and cultural. With its scope and clarity of vision, suggestions for navigating sensitive topics, and a multitude of innovative approaches authored by contributors from multidisciplinary backgrounds, Understanding and Teaching Native American History will also find use in methods and other graduate courses. Nearly a decade in the conception and making, this is a groundbreaking source for both beginning and veteran instructors.

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Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies in North America and Australasia, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. David Myer Temin's book Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought (U Chicago Press, 2023) examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through national independence, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign states and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as care for the earth. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key indigenous thinkers. He shows how these insights broaden the political and intellectual horizons open to us today with respect to climate justice.

Lachlan McNamee is a Lecturer of Politics at Monash University. His area of expertise is the comparative politics of settler colonialism, empire, and political violence with a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific.

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An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana (UP of Colorado, 2023) explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States.

Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants performed before decorated altars, and statements from participants. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the role of sacred paper figures that are produced by the thousands for each pilgrimage. The work contains drawings of these cuttings of spirit entities along with hundreds of color photographs illustrating how they are used throughout the pilgrimages. The analysis reveals the monist philosophy that underlies Nahua religious practice in which altars, dancing, chanting, and the paper figures themselves provide direct access to the sacred.

In the context of their pilgrimage traditions, the ritual practices of Nahua religion show one way that people interact effectively with the forces responsible for not only their own prosperity but also the very survival of humanity. A magnum opus with respect to Nahua religion and religious practice, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain is a significant contribution to several fields, including but not limited to Indigenous literatures of Mesoamerica, Nahuatl studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and religious studies.

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This week, Felix Salmon, Emily Peck, and Elizabeth Spiers are joined by Rob Copeland of The New York Times to discuss his new book The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend, which examines the vast difference between Ray Dalio’s public persona and Bridgewater’s private reality. Then, Felix, Emily and Elizabeth cover the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike, and WeWork’s bankruptcy. 

In the Plus segment: More with Rob Copeland!

Podcast production by Jessamine Molli.

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From the moment it was released in 1995, The Rules was controversial.. Some people loved it—and swore that the dating manual’s throwback advice helped them land a husband. Others thought it was retrograde hogwash that flew in the face of decades of feminist progress. The resulting brouhaha turned the book into a cultural phenomenon. In this episode, Slate’s Heather Schwedel explores where The Rules came from, how it became so popular, and why its list of 35 commandments continue to be so sticky—whether we like it or not. 

Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin and Katie Shepherd. This episode was edited by Willa Paskin. Derek John is executive producer. Joel Meyer is senior editor/producer. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director.

We’d like to to thank Benjamin Frisch, Rachel O'Neill, Penny Love, Heather Fain, Elif Batuman, Laura Banks, Marlene Velasquez-Sedito, Leigh Anderson, Caroline Smith. We also want to mention two sources that were really helpful: Labour of Love by Moira Weigel, a paper called Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts by Patricia McDaniel

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To celebrate their third wedding anniversary, Anjali and Rahul are each selecting a surprise activity to do together. This happy couple loves spontaneity, so they’re concerned about someday growing bored in their relationship. They’re also feeling pressure to mark the traditional milestones of marriage, including having kids. On this episode of How To!, authors Caryl and Jay Casbon join us to share the wisdom they gained from interviewing other married couples for their book Side by Side. The Casbons draw upon their own 22-year marriage to urge Anjali and Rahul to face conflict with openness and focus on individual “inner work”—in order to grow together. 

Learn more about Caryl and Jay Casbon here. If you liked this episode, check out an episode that Anjali loved: How To Decide Whether to Have a Baby with Wild author Cheryl Strayed. 

Do you have a problem that needs solving? Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.

How To’s executive producer is Derek John. Joel Meyer is our senior editor/producer. The show is produced by Rosemary Belson, with Kevin Bendis and Jabari Butler. 

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The story of the British Empire is a familiar one: Britain came, it saw, it conquered, forging a glorious world empire upon which the sun never set. In fact, far from being the tale of a single nation imposing its will upon the world, the expanding British Empire frequently found itself frustrated by the power and tenacious resistance of the Indigenous and non-European people it encountered. From gruelling wars in Ireland to the failure to curtail North African Corsair states, all the way to the collapse of commercial operations in East Asia, British attempts to create an imperial enterprise often ended in disaster and even defeat. 

In The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire (Ebury Press, 2023), David Veevers looks beyond the myths of triumph and into the realities of British misadventures in the early days of Empire, meeting the extraordinary Indigenous and non-European people across the world who were the real forces to be reckoned with. From the Indian Emperors who contained the nefarious ambitions of the East India Company, to the West African Kings who resisted British demands and set the terms of the trade in enslaved people, to the Paramount Chiefs in America who fought to expunge English colonists from their homelands, this book retells the history of early Empire from the all too familiar story of conquest to one of empowering defiance and resistance.

David Veevers is Lecturer in Early Modern History at University of Bangor. He read History at the University of Kent, where he also completed his MA and earned his PhD in 2015. His thesis was a study of the English East India Company in South Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring in particular the way in which informal social networks shaped the formation of an early modern colonial state. He stayed at Kent to take up the position of Postdoctoral Associate before moving to Queen Mary, University of London, to undertake a 4-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the School of History in 2018. He joined the School of History, Law, and Social Sciences at the University of Bangor in 2022, where he teaches courses on seventeenth century England, early modern Asia, and global history more widely. Veevers is the author of numerous articles and his The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600 - 1750, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. With William A. Pettigrew he edited The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, 1550 – 1750 (Brill, 2018, Open Access). The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire came out in May 2023 with Penguin/Ebury.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Xiaolu Guo talks about her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. The book was her first written in English and made prestigious fiction shortlists on publication in 2007.

Twenty-three year old Zhuang – or Z as she’s called in England because no-one can pronounce her name – arrives to spend a year learning English. The loneliness and strangeness of the city are overwhelming, but as she struggles through the challenges of nouns and verbs and the oddities of English speech, she meets and falls in love with an older English man. When he invites her to ‘be my guest’ she brings round her suitcase and moves into his house.

Written in broken English that subtly improves throughout the novel, with perfectly funny insights into English cultural quirks and her own Chinese background, this is a romantic comedy about two people who neither speak one another’s language nor understand one another’s culture.

(Photo: Xiaolu Guo. Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images)

**THIS EPISODE CONTAINS REPEATED PROFANITY, AND MAY NOT BE APPROPRIATE FOR ALL LISTENERS.**

 

Leslie Jones got her big break, joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, at the age of 47. She says that the long wait for stardom meant that she knew her worth and how to stand up for herself, even when the stakes were high. On today’s episode of A Word, Jason Johnson is joined by Leslie Jones to discuss her new book, “Leslie Fucking Jones: A Memoir.” 

Guest: Comedian Leslie Jones

Podcast production by Ahyiana Angel

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