Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

The Great West. Middle America. Flyover Country. The expanse of plains, lakes, forests, and farms, between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains has carried many names. Beginning in the twentieth century, Americans began calling it The Heartland, a term that Dr. Kristin L. Hoganson argues carried a specific meaning that has changed across time. In The Heartland: An American History (Penguin, 2019), Hoganson tracks the global history of Champaign, Illinois – a small place with a large history, and, as a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Hoganson’s home for nearly two decades. The Heartland makes a strong case for the Midwest not as a provincial, isolated, region but rather as a place defined by global connections, diasporas, and a wide array of cultures. The book covers a lot of ground, from Kickapoo history to the story of high-bred cattle to a foray into the history of long-distance ballooning. Throughout, Hoganson maintains that just as scholars study the West and the South, the Heartland is deserving of its own status as part of the American regional canon, not because it looks inward, but because of its long history of affecting historical change and being affected by global events.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. Winner of the 2019 National Council on Public History Book Award, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture(University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers Colwell's personal account of the process of repatriation, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct. These specific stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.

Things, like people, have biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to acknowledge that fact—and heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Highly acclaimed British author Tessa Hadley talks to Harriett Gilbert about her award-winning novel - The Past.

Recorded at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival in the elegant surroundings of The Mathematical Institute, part of the university. Tessa skilfully evokes a brewing storm of lust and envy, the indelible connections of memory and affection, the fierce, nostalgic beauty of the natural world, and the shifting currents of history running beneath the surface of these seemingly steady lives.

Over three long, hot summer weeks, four siblings and their children assemble at their country house for a family reunion, where simmering tensions and secrets come to a head.

First broadcast on the BBC World Service in April 2019.

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Diverse in their languages and customs, the Native American peoples of the Great Lakes region—the Miamis, Ho-Chunks, Potawatomis, Ojibwas, and many others—shared a tumultuous history. In the colonial era their rich homeland became a target of imperial ambition and an invasion zone for European diseases, technologies, beliefs, and colonists. Yet in the face of these challenges, their nations’ strong bonds of trade, intermarriage, and association grew and extended throughout their watery domain, and strategic relationships and choices allowed them to survive in an era of war, epidemic, and invasion. In Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870 (Ohio University Press, 2018), David A. Nichols, Professor of History at Indiana State University, offers a fresh and boundary-crossing history of the Lakes peoples over nearly three centuries of rapid change, from pre-Columbian times through the era of Andrew Jackson’s Removal program. As the people themselves persisted, so did their customs, religions, and control over their destinies, even in the Removal era. In Nichols’s hands, Native, French, American, and English sources combine to tell this important story in a way as imaginative as it is bold. Accessible and creative, Peoples of the Inland Sea is destined to become a classroom staple and a classic in Native American history.

Ryan Tripp teaches history in California.

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Richard Oakes was a natural born leader whom people followed seemingly on instinct. Thus when he dove into the icy San Francisco Bay in the fall of 1969 on his way to Alcatraz Island, he knew others would have his back. Kent Blansett tells Richard Oakes’ story in wonderful detail in A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and Red Power (Yale University Press, 2018). Blansett, an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, argues that by understanding Oakes’ life and his movement across the United States in the 1960s, we can better understand the origins of the Red Power movement. Prior to landing in San Francisco, Richard Oakes lived in the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, a borderland region between Canada and the United States. From there he worked with other Mohawks in the ironwork trade, constructing the New York City skyline, and became a legendary figure in the Indian Cities of Brooklyn and Seattle. Although both his time on Alcatraz and his life ended in tragedy, Oakes’ legacy is lasting and undeniable, as Native people staged fish-ins and occupations across North America based on his inspiring leadership. As Oakes himself put it, “Alcatraz was not an island, but an idea.”

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its power. Dr. Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) corrects this by explicitly focusing on the country’s territories and territories overseas possessions.

Dr. Immerwahr begins at the country’s founding as apprehension over aggressive westward settlement gave way to enthusiastic land grabs by pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Propelled by an astonishingly high birth rate and immigration, Euroamericans displaced indigenous peoples. In addition to this more familiar narrative, other factors drove territorial expansion. A desperate need for fertilizers led to the annexation of nearly one hundred “guano islands” in the Pacific and Caribbean, followed by the annexation of even more territory following the Spanish-American War in 1898. These new territories, including Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and others enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the United States: they did not enjoy constitutional protections but nevertheless had a close relationship with what they called the mainland. While the United States backed away from traditional colonialism after 1945, what emerged instead was a “pointillist empire” that depended on bases and new uses of older territory to function.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

 

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This month a special edition of BBC World Book Club coming from Nairobi in Kenya. Lawrence Pollard talks to celebrated Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in the company of an enthusiastic audience of readers and students who have gathered in the bustling bookshop of Nairobi University where Ngugi was once a director. We’re discussing Ngũgĩ's landmark novel A Grain of Wheat, set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain. In it the tangled narratives of a group of Kenyan villagers interweave to tell an epic story of love tested, friendships betrayed and myths forged, confirming Ngũgĩ's status as a giant of African writing.

One of the enduring questions in American historiography is: just where exactly is the West? In The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019), Dr. Janne Lahti argues compellingly that the West is a place on the globe, very much interconnected with worldwide currents of history. Lahti, an Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Helsinki, provides an extensive synthetic work which draws a wide body of the latest literature on the American West to illustrate how scholars are approaching the region’s history in ways that transcend national boundaries. By focusing on movement, migration, disease, violence, and concepts of race and domesticity, Lahti argues that the American West has much in common with other settler colonial zones such as South Africa and Australia. Culturally, the West has maintained global fascination for over a century as well, a fact that drew Dr. Lahti to the scholarly study of the region in the first place. The American West and the World is a prime example of how the global turn in history can uncover new angles on old stories and older regions.

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This month we’re talking to bestselling British writer JoJo Moyes about her wildly popular novel Me Before You. Lou is a small town girl in need of a job. Will is a successful high-powered city trader who becomes wheelchair bound following an accident and decides he doesn’t want to go on living.

And then Lou is hired for six months to be his new caretaker. Worlds apart and trapped together by circumstance, the two get off to a rocky start. But Lou is determined to prove that life is worth living and as they embark on a series of adventures together, each finds their world changing in ways neither of them could have imagined.

(Image: Jojo Moyes. Photo credit: Stine Heilmann.)