Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended. Was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”? 

That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose previous work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title, Lincoln's Peace, in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States’s interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.

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In this sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is just the latest step in the long evolution of good and evil and everything in between.

What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose -- and why we need them.

We humans were born to cooperate, but everywhere we find ourselves in conflict. The way we live together has changed fundamentally in recent decades: global mobility, demographic upheaval, migration movements, and digital networking, have all called the moral foundations of human communities into question. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share. If we understand the origin of our morality, we can understand its future too.

With philosophical expertise and empirical data, Sauer explains how processes of biological, cultural, social, and historical evolution shaped the moral grammar that defines our present. Seven chapters recount the crucial moral upheavals of human history showing how the emergence of humankind five million years ago, the rise of first civilizations 5,000 years ago, and the dynamics of moral progress in the last fifty years are interrelated. This genealogical perspective allows us, on the one hand, to see the contradictions and potential conflicts of our moral identities; on the other, it makes clear that we share fundamental values that apply to all human beings at all times. Sauer's elegant prose, translated into English by Jo Heinrich, brings the history of humanity to vivid new life.

Hanno Sauer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He teaches ethics, metaethics and political philosophy.

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. Twitter.

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Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, focusing on continuities and disruptions within communities and practices of design. Designing Modern Japan explores design in the unfolding contexts of modernization, empire and war, defeat and reconstruction, postwar economic acceleration, and beyond. Throughout, Teasley is sensitive to issues of gender and class within the communities of design she studies. The book combines the history of design with social, economic, and geopolitical history, placing design and its material objects carefully in the larger currents of modern and contemporary Japan. Designing Modern Japan is a history of both the people who shaped Japanese design and the designs that were integral to life in modern Japan.

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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Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a thoroughly researched assessment of how China’s economic success continues to be shaped by the communist ideology of Chairman Mao

It was long assumed that as China embraced open markets and private enterprise, its state-controlled economy would fall by the wayside, that free markets would inevitably lead to a more liberal society. Instead, China’s growth over the past four decades has positioned state capitalism as a durable foil to the orthodoxy of free markets, to the confusion of many in the West.

Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao argue that China’s economic success is based on—not in spite of—the continuing influence of Communist leader Mao Zedong. They illustrate how Mao’s ideological principles, mass campaigns, and socialist institutions have enduringly influenced Chinese entrepreneurs’ business strategies and the management of their ventures. Grounded in case studies and quantitative analyses, this book shows that while private enterprise is the engine of China’s growth, Chinese companies see no contradictions between commercial drive and a dedication to Maoist ideology.

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.

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A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensions--sparking both controversy and discovery.

The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. If you ever took a physics course, the word "vector" might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, a turbine, or a projectile. You might also remember that a vector is a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. In fact, vectors are examples of tensors, which can represent even more data. It sounds simple enough--and yet, as award-winning science writer Robyn Arianrhod shows in this riveting story, the idea of a single symbol expressing more than one thing at once was millennia in the making. And without that idea, we wouldn't have such a deep understanding of our world.

Vector and tensor calculus offers an elegant language for expressing the way things behave in space and time, and Arianrhod shows how this enabled physicists and mathematicians to think in a brand-new way. These include James Clerk Maxwell when he ushered in the wireless electromagnetic age; Einstein when he predicted the curving of space-time and the existence of gravitational waves; Paul Dirac, when he created quantum field theory; and Emmy Noether, when she connected mathematical symmetry and the conservation of energy. For it turned out that it's not just physical quantities and dimensions that vectors and tensors can represent, but other dimensions and other kinds of information, too. This is why physicists and mathematicians can speak of four-dimensional space-time and other higher-dimensional "spaces," and why you're likely relying on vectors or tensors whenever you use digital applications such as search engines, GPS, or your mobile phone.

In exploring the evolution of vectors and tensors--and introducing the fascinating people who gave them to us--Arianrhod takes readers on an extraordinary, five-thousand-year journey through the human imagination. She shows the genius required to reimagine the world--and how a clever mathematical construct can dramatically change discovery's direction.

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