The United States has long been associated with a very harsh criminal justice system with, in some cases, people serving long sentence for minor crimes. But attempts to reform the system have proven very difficult. In her new book Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration (Stanford UP, 2023), Colleen P. Eren explains why. Listen to her in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.
Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.
The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But history tells us, in fact, that they are woven into the fabric of American democracy.
Cultural historian Dr. Colin Dickey has built a career studying how our most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream, why, and what they tell us about ourselves. In Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shape American Democracy (Viking, 2023), Dickey charts the history of America through its paranoias and fears of secret societies, while seeking to explain why so many people—including some of the most powerful people in the country—continue to subscribe to these conspiracy theories. Paradoxically, he finds, belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial can be more soothing than what we fear the most: the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling of fortunes in America, and the messiness of democracy. Only in seeing the cycle of this history, Dickey says, can we break it.
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.
"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place.
Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War(Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.
Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies.
Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.
In 1798, young French general Napoleon Bonaparte entered Egypt with a veteran army and a specialist group of savants—scientists, engineers, and artists—his aim being not just conquest, but the rediscovery of the lost Nile kingdom. A year later, in the ruins of an old fort in the small port of Rosetta, the savants made a startling discovery: a large, flat stone, inscribed in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and ancient hieroglyphics. This was the Rosetta Stone, key to the two-thousand-year mystery of hieroglyphs, and to Egypt itself. Two years later, French forces retreated before the English and Ottoman armies, but would not give up the stone. Caught between the opposing generals at the siege of Alexandria, British special agents went in to find the Rosetta Stone, rescue the French savants, and secure a fragile peace treaty.
Jonathan Downs' book Discovery at Rosetta: Revealing Ancient Egypt (American University in Cairo Press, 2020) uses French, Egyptian, and English eyewitness accounts to tell the complete story of the discovery, decipherment, and capture of the Rosetta Stone, investigating the rivalries and politics of the time, and the fate of the stone today.
Madhumanti Datta completed her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California, USA. Her primary research area is the syntax of human languages, focussing on what possible and impossible structures in human language tell us about how linguistic structures are built, how meaning is represented and about the knowledge of grammar that speakers of a language intuitively possess. She is interested in issues surrounding language, both from the social and cultural perspective as well as from the biological perspective of language as a window into human cognition.
The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation (Random House, 2023), acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders.
William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed west, became governor of the vast Indiana Territory, and sought statehood by attracting settlers and imposing one-sided treaties.
Tecumseh, by all accounts one of the nineteenth century's greatest leaders, belonged to an honored line of Shawnee warriors and chiefs. His father, killed while fighting the Virginians flooding into Kentucky, extracted a promise from his sons to "never give in" to the land-hungry Americans. An eloquent speaker, Tecumseh traveled from Minnesota to Florida and west to the Great Plains convincing far-flung tribes to join a great confederacy and face down their common enemy. Eager to stop U.S. expansion, the British backed Tecumseh's confederacy in a series of battles during the forgotten western front of the War of 1812 that would determine control over the North American continent.
Tecumseh's brave stand was likely the last chance to protect Indigenous people from U.S. expansion--and prevent the upstart United States from becoming a world power. In this fast-paced narrative--with its sharply drawn characters, high-stakes diplomacy, and bloody battles--Peter Stark brings this pivotal moment to life.
Margaret Hillenbrand’s On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China(Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China’s exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China’s economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers’ experience of civic suspension and their class others’ fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.
Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture’s capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff’s edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest.
Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.
Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative.
In Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale UP, 2023), Dubcovsky reconstructs the lives of Native women—Timucua, Apalachee, Chacato, and Guale—to show how they made claims to protect their livelihoods, bodies, and families. Through the stories of the Native cacica who demanded her authority be recognized; the elite Spanish woman who turned her dowry and household into a source of independent power; the Floridiana who slapped a leading Native man in the town square; and the Black woman who ran a successful business at the heart of a Spanish town, Dubcovsky reveals the formidable women who claimed and used their power, shaping the history of the early South.
Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.
Uganda, August 1972. President Idi Amin makes a shocking pronouncement – the country’s South Asian population is being expelled. They have ninety days to leave. After packing scant possessions and countless memories, 50,000 Ugandan Asians vied for limited space in countries including Canada, India and the United Kingdom. More than 28,000 expellees from Britain’s former colony arrived in the UK and began building new lives – but their incredible stories have, until now, remained largely hidden.
Fifty years on from the exodus, The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus (Coronet, 2023) by Lucy Fulford draws on first-hand interviews and testimonies, including from the author’s family, to illuminate a time of painful alienation and incredible courage. As an entire people stepped into the unknown, a global diaspora was born, and the fate of the United Kingdom changed forever.
Journeying across continents and decades, this staggering work of reportage illuminates an essential, and under-explored, chapter in post-colonial history, challenging politically expedient narratives to uncover the true fate of minorities at the end of empire.
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.
Today’s book is Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s First Capital (Georgetown UP, 2023), by Dr. Elizabeth Rule, which is the first and fullest account of the suppressed history and continuing presence of Native Americans in Washington, DC. Washington, DC, is Indian land, but Indigenous peoples are often left out of the national narrative of the United States and erased in the capital city. To redress this myth of invisibility, Indigenous DC shines a light upon the oft-overlooked contributions of tribal leaders and politicians, artists and activists to the rich history of the District of Columbia, and their imprint—at times memorialized in physical representations, and at other times living on only through oral history—upon this place. Inspired by Dr. Elizabeth Rule’s award-winning public history mobile app and decolonial mapping project Guide to Indigenous DC, this book brings together the original inhabitants who call the District their traditional territory, the diverse Indigenous diaspora who has made community here, and the land itself in a narrative arc that makes clear that all land is Native land. The acknowledgment that DC is an Indigenous space inserts the Indigenous perspective into the national narrative and opens the door for future possibilities of Indigenous empowerment and sovereignty. This important book is a valuable and informational resource on both Washington, DC, regional history and Native American history.
Our guest is: Dr. Elizabeth Rule, who is Assistant Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. She is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. Her research on Indigenous issues has been featured in the Washington Post, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, The Atlantic, Newsy, and NPR. She has published scholarly articles in the American Quarterly and in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal; and is the author of Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s Capital (Georgetown University Press). Beyond the classroom, Dr. Rule continues her work as an educator by presenting her research and delivering invited talks on Native American issues. Dr. Rule has held posts as Director of the Center for Indigenous Politics and Policy and Faculty in Residence at George Washington University, Director of the Native American Political Leadership Program and the INSPIRE PreCollege Program, MIT Indigenous Communities Fellow, Postdoctoral Fellow at American University, and Ford Foundation Fellow. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies from Brown University, and her B.A. from Yale University.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer and show-host of the Academic Life podcasts. She holds a Ph.D. in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey--and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.
In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions fostered tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members--mostly men--and their families and neighbors. They conveyed fundamental worldviews, making blue-collar unionists into loyal Democrats who saw the party as on the side of the working man. Today, unions play a much less significant role in American life. In industrial and formerly industrial Rust Belt towns, Republican-leaning groups and outlooks have burgeoned among the kinds of voters who once would have been part of union communities.
InRust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party (Columbia UP, 2023), Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol provide timely insight into the relationship between the decline of unions and the shift of working-class voters away from Democrats. Drawing on interviews, union newsletters, and ethnographic analysis, they pinpoint the significance of eroding local community ties and identities. Using western Pennsylvania as a case study, Newman and Skocpol argue that union members' loyalty to Democratic candidates was as much a product of the group identity that unions fostered as it was a response to the Democratic Party's economic policies. As the social world around organized labor dissipated, conservative institutions like gun clubs, megachurches, and other Republican-leaning groups took its place. Rust Belt Union Blues sheds new light on why so many union members have dramatically changed their party politics. It makes a compelling case that Democrats are unlikely to rebuild credibility in places like western Pennsylvania unless they find new ways to weave themselves into the daily lives of workers and their families.
Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.
