How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians.
In When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018), Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.
Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process.
It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation(Rutgers University Press, 2020) asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action?
The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.
Sarah B. Rodriguez is a medical historian at Northwestern University in the Global Health Studies Program, the Department of Medical Education, and the Graduate Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. Her teaching and research focuses on the history of reproduction, clinical practice, and research ethics. Her publications include the book Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Practice.
Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.
At age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate activist since age 11, studied engineering and public policy to understand what physically has to happen to solve climate change, and served in the Massachusetts state legislature on a climate-focused platform.
In 2018 he canceled his campaign for re-election so he could work full-time on climate change at the national and global levels. The 100% Solution framework is a product of his political experiences, numerous meetings with technical experts and activists, and intensive research and analysis.
The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change (Melville House) is a highly visual book, with informative and whimsical illustrations drawn by Violet Kitchen, a visual artist, illustrator, and writer based in western Massachusetts. She currently splits her time between being a full-time art student and a part-time hermit, and is available for commissions and freelance work. Violet also got her start at a young age: her instructional manual Drawing Comics Is Easy, Except When It’s Hard, written and drawn at age seven, earned her the title of youngest ever Eisner Award nominee.
In this New Books Network interview, we speak about the political, industrial, and scientific changes that need to occur by 2050 to solve climate change, as well as the importance of focusing on real solutions rather than wallowing in fear.
Solomon Goldstein-Rose was elected to the Massachusetts legislature on a climate change-focused platform at age 22. He previously interned in the Obama White House and in Congress, and ran a statewide carbon pricing campaign. He lives in Amherst, MA. For more see: SolomonGR.com
Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.
Among the tens of thousands of Americans who volunteered their services during the Civil War was Mary Walker, a daring young woman who was one of the handful of female doctors in the nation at that time. Yet despite the often desperate need for medical professionals she spent much of the war struggling to earn the respect she felt she deserved. In Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights (Lyons Press, 2020), Theresa Kaminski describes this struggle and how it reflected her lifelong struggle to have the world accept her on her own terms. The daughter of free-thinking farmers, the young Mary enjoyed a level of education unusual for her era. Even before the war began she defined her identity with their radical choices in clothing and her decision to divorce her philandering husband. When the war began Dr. Walker sought a commission as a doctor, only to face opposition from every authority figure she met. Over time, however, her persistent efforts gradually won her a degree of acceptance and a role in the war. While her goal to earn a commission remained unfulfilled, at the end of the war her brave sacrifices on behalf of the Union earned for herself a Medal of Honor – one that a century and a half later remains the only Medal of Honor ever awarded to a woman.
Before Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in 1981, nine highly qualified women were on the shortlist. What do the stories of these women tell us about the judiciary? Gender? Feminism? Race?
In Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court(NYU Press, 2020), Renee Knake Jefferson (professor at the University of Houston Law Center) and Hannah Brenner Johnson (Vice Dean and a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego) demonstrate how highly (and often overly) qualified woman are shortlisted by presidents -- from Herbert Hoover to Donald Trump -- to create the appearance of diversity before a (white) man is selected to preserve the status quo. Short-listing isn’t success but symptom of a problem.
Jefferson and Johnson’s research in presidential libraries, private papers, oral histories, the Nixon tapes, and biographies reveals that presidents as early as Herbert Hoover began discussing female candidates – though presidents set aside overly qualified women for decades. The first half of this nuanced book explores the first woman considered (Florence Allen), five judges who were on the short lists of JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford, and female judges who were short-listed alongside Sandra Day O’Connor (including the first Black female judge, Amalya Lyle Kearse). The histories of each candidate map onto the waves of feminism, reflect on the role of marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, and allow the authors to identify the harms of short-listing.
The details are revealing about both past and present and the second half of the book addresses how to apply the lessons learned from these decades of paying lip-service to diversity. How can candidates transition from shortlisting to selection? Jefferson and Johnson discuss tokenism, the burdens of being a gender spokesperson, racism, ageism, and the binds of femininity and “respectability.” The authors demonstrate how the selection of women for the Supreme Court impacts other aspects of the legal system and beyond. Although the number of men and women entering law school and entry-level legal positions are equal, the rate at which men reach leadership positions is considerably faster than women. This phenomenon can be seen in many fields where there is a pursuit of professional advancement. The authors conclude with strategies such as “collaborating to compete” to reform the American legal system.
White Balance explores the connection between politics and film from the 1970s to the 1990s. Gomer illustrates the myriad of ways that Hollywood relied on and helped solidify an emerging ideology of colorblindness in the wake of the civil rights movement.
From films like Dirty Harry to Rocky, Gomer is able to show just how much politics and film are intertwined during this period and held to reinforce each other in order to gradually chip away at the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement.
Justin Gomer is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the California State University-Long Beach.
Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous detective and others hid their violence, and the arduous struggle to get Burge fired and win reparations for survivors.
He blends legal and social history with ethnography to chronicle the labyrinthine legal system that concealed this torture, and the challenges of political coalition-building across class, race, and prison walls. The result is a history of the fraying reform discourse with which we live.
Andrew S. Baer is assistant professor of history with a secondary appointment in African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Patrick Reilly studies US history, race, and civilian cooperation with police at Vanderbilt University.
In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity (Ohio State University Press, 2020), Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture, showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race, nation, and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of latinidad, or pan-Latina/o/x identity, for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream, and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players, Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture.
David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.
New research and innovations in the field of science are leading to life-changing and world-altering discoveries like never before. What does the horizon of science look like? Who are the scientists that are making it happen? And, how are we to introduce these revolutions to a society in which a segment of the population has become more and more skeptical of science? These are the questions which Marc Zimmer, professor of chemistry at Connecticut College, asks in his new book, The State of Science: What the Future Holds and the Scientists Making It Happen(Prometheus Books, 2020)
Zimmer also investigates phony science ranging from questionable "health" products to the fervent anti-vaccination movement. Zimmer introduces readers to the real people making these breakthroughs. Concluding with chapters on the rise of women in STEM fields, the importance of US immigration policies to science, and new, unorthodox ways of DIY science and crowdsource funding, The State of Science shows where science is, where it is heading, and the scientists who are at the forefront of progress
Marc Zimmer is the Jean C. Tempel ’65 Professor of Chemistry at Connecticut College and the author of Glowing Genes, the first popular science book on jellyfish and firefly proteins; IlluminatingDiseases (Oxford University Press 2015); and three books for young adults. His writing has appeared in USA Today and the Los AngelesTimes, and he has been interviewed and quoted in the Economist, Science and Nature.
Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.
In particular, she investigates how these communities are considering the question of diversity and inclusion. Using ethnographic methods – interviews, participant observation, and deep readings of texts – Dunbar-Hester shows how the problem-solving ethos of open tech does not quite meet the challenge of structural social problems.
