Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

The story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present. 

Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications, he tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline. 

Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade (MIT Press, 2022) highlights the differences between British and North American arcades, especially in terms of the complex relationship between gambling and amusements. He also underlines Britain’s role in introducing coin-operated technologies into Europe, as well as the industry’s close links to America and, especially, Japan. He shows how the British arcade is a product of centuries of public play, gambling, entrepreneurship, and mechanization. Examining the arcade’s history through technological, social, cultural, biographic, and legislative perspectives, he describes a pendulum shift between control and liberalization, as well as the continued efforts of concerned moralists to limit and regulate public play. 

Finally, he recounts the impact on the industry of legislative challenges that included vicious taxation, questions of whether copyright law applied to video-game code, and the peculiar moment when every arcade game in Britain was considered a cinema.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Counterinsurgency, the violent suppression of armed insurrection, is among the dominant kinds of war in contemporary world politics. Often linked to protecting populations and reconstructing legitimate political orders, it has appeared in other times and places in very different forms – and has taken on a range of politics in doing so. How did it arrive at its present form, and what generated these others, along the way? 

Spanning several centuries and four detailed case studies, The Counterinsurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History (Cambridge UP, 2022) unpacks and explores this intellectual history through counterinsurgency manuals. These military theoretical and instructional texts, and the practitioners who produced them, made counterinsurgency possible in practice. By interrogating these processes, this book explains how counter-insurrectionary war eventually took on its late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms. It shows how and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures.

Yi Ning Chang is a PhD student in political theory at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She works on the history of contemporary political thought, postcolonial theory, and the global histories of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism in Southeast Asia. Yi Ning can be reached at yiningchang@g.harvard.edu.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government viewed education as one sure way of civilizing “others” under its sway—among them American Indians and, after 1898, Filipinos. Teaching Empire: Native Americans, Filipinos, and Us Imperial Education 1879-1918 (UP of Kansas, 2019) considers how teachers took up this task, first at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, opened in 1879, and then in a school system set up amid an ongoing rebellion launched by Filipinos. Drawing upon the records of fifty-five teachers at Carlisle and thirty-three sent to the Philippines—including five who worked in both locations—the book reveals the challenges of translating imperial policy into practice, even for those most dedicated to the imperial mission.

These educators, who worked on behalf of the US government, sought to meet the expectations of bureaucrats and supervisors while contending with leadership crises on the ground. In their stories, Elisabeth Eittreim finds the problems common to all classrooms—how to manage students and convey knowledge—complicated by their unique circumstances, particularly the military conflict in the Philippines. Eittreim’s research shows the dilemma presented by these schools’ imperial goal: “pouring in” knowledge that purposefully dismissed and undermined the values, desires, and protests of those being taught. To varying degrees these stories demonstrate both the complexity and fragility of implementing US imperial education and the importance of teachers’ own perspectives. Entangled in US ambitions, racist norms, and gendered assumptions, teachers nonetheless exhibited significant agency, wielding their authority with students and the institutions they worked for and negotiating their roles as powerful purveyors of cultural knowledge, often reinforcing but rarely challenging the then-dominant understanding of “civilization.”

Examining these teachers’ attitudes and performances, close-up and in-depth over the years of Carlisle’s operation, Eittreim’s comparative study offers rare insight into the personal, institutional, and cultural implications of education deployed in the service of US expansion—with consequences that reach well beyond the imperial classrooms of the time.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

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Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford UP, 2021) offers an important new theory of rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. While the Bible is filled with stories of rape, scholarly approaches to sexual violence in the scriptures remain exhausted, dated, and in some cases even un-feminist, lagging far behind contemporary discourse about sexual violence and rape culture. Graybill responds to this disconnect by engaging contemporary conversations about rape culture, sexual violence, and #MeToo, arguing that rape and sexual violence - both in the Bible and in contemporary culture - are frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky, and that we need to take these features seriously. 

Texts after Terror offers a new framework informed by contemporary conversations about sexual violence, writings by victims and survivors, and feminist, queer, and affect theory. In addition, Graybill offers significant new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 34), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1-2), and the unnamed woman known as the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). Texts after Terror urges feminist biblical scholars and readers of all sorts to take seriously sexual violence and rape, while also holding space for new ways of reading these texts that go beyond terror, considering what might come after.

Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee.

Rachel Adelman is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible in the rabbinic program at Hebrew College in Boston.

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From Gail Borden’s meat biscuit to John Harvey Kellogg’s peptogenic foods for race betterment and Fleishmann’s yeast as both technology of empire and imperfect tool of the global struggle with malnutrition, Lisa Haushofer’s Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition (University of California Press, 2022) brings together case studies of American and British foods developed and marketed in the century 1840-1940 as modern, scientific miracles of nutritional efficiency―of “doing more.” 

Wonder Foods deepens our understanding of the dramatic transformations of science, commerce, and their relationship during that century; the effects that those changes had on how food was conceptualized and consumed; and the ways in which these foods were entangled with destructive forces including imperialism and eugenics, racism and sexism. 

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Mark Parrino has been involved with the delivery of health care and treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) since 1974. As the president of the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, Inc. (AATOD), he works with treatment providers across the country to develop and improve treatment protocols.

In December 2022, AATOD worked with the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD) to initiate a first-of-its-kind census of all patients currently receiving treatment from government-certified opioid treatment programs (OTPs). Their findings, based on responses from over 1,500 OTPs nationwide, show the breadth and distribution of addiction treatment in America, and are the product of almost fifty years of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in the United States.

I spoke with Mark about his census results, as well as the history of MAT, and specifically methadone, treatment in America. You can see the full report here.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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In India after the 1857 Revolt: Decolonising the Mind (Routledge, 2022), M. Christhu Doss brings together some of the most cutting-edge thoughts by challenging the cultural project of colonialism and critically examining the multi-dimensional aspects of decolonization during and after the 1857 revolt. He demonstrates that the deep-rooted popular discontent among the Indian masses, followed by the revolt, generated a distinctive form of decolonization movement—redemptive nationalism that challenged both the supremacy of the British Raj and the cultural imperatives of the controversial proselytizing missionary agencies. Doss argues that the quests for decolonization (of mind) that got triggered by the revolt were further intensified by the Indocentric national education; the historic Chicago discourse of Swami Vivekananda; the nonviolent anti-colonial struggles of Mahatma Gandhi; the seditious political activism displayed by the Western Gandhian missionary satyagrahis; and the de-Westernization endeavours of the sandwiched Indian Christian nationalists.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.

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One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik.

In Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (Columbia UP, 2022), Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.

Articles referenced in the show:

• Winston James, “Letters from London in Black and Red: Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and the Negro World,” History Workshop Journal, Issue 85 (Spring 2018), pp. 281-293.
• Winston James, "To the East Turn: The Russian Revolution and the Black Radical Imagination in the United States, 1917–1924," The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 3, September 2021, Pages 1001–1045.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

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The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states' insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement's ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement.

Kate Masur's magisterial history, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton, 2021) delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Until Justice Be Done was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in history and winner of the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize in US law and society, broadly defined.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. The Slaves of the Churches: A History (Oxford UP, 2020), the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem.

Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others' behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities' duty to preserve the Church's patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.

Mary Sommar has taught ancient and medieval history for the past twenty years, most of them at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She also spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Stephan Kuttner Institute for Medieval Canon Law in Munich, Germany and a year as a Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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