Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

George Perkins Marsh Prize winning environmental historian and geographer Joseph E. Taylor III's new book, Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast (Oregon State University Press, 2019), takes an innovative approach to the history of fisheries and work in the Pacific Northwest. Focusing on the Nestucca river valley, Taylor shows how nature, culture, markets, and technology affected the "callings," or identities, of residents from pre-colonial times to the very recent past.

The first chapter gives readers a sense of the Nestucca Native Americans who developed ceremonies that centered on the region's abundant diadromous salmon populations. After this chapter, the book leaps to the second half of the nineteenth century when settler-colonists exterminated and removed Indians and began farming. Taylor shifts attention away from itinerate wage workers as the primary source of labor in the Pacific Northwest and centers his analysis instead on the families who took to the ocean as one of a number of economic survival strategies. After 1927, fishing in Nestucca slowly transformed from a subsistence activity to a form of recreation for tourists. The tourist were incursions in Nestucca but also a source of revenue for locals.

Using oral histories as evidence, Taylor spends a lot of time describing the minutia of fishing work; its physicality, technological stagnation, and its dangers. These details expose workers' connections to the landscape, connections which shaped their identities. The short book is a vital addition to environmental studies because of the way that Taylor seamlessly integrates environmental history into the history of one community. His method shows how and why environmental factors should be a part of all historical narratives.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment.

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French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani joins Harriett Gilbert in the Radio Theatre at the BBC and readers from around the world to talk about her novel Lullaby, the devastating story of a nanny, Louise, who kills two children in her care.

The book – an international bestseller – opens with this horrific crime then travels back in time to discover why an apparently perfect nanny turned into a cold blooded murderer. Through the lives of Louise and her employers, Slimani explores Paris’s economy and society, depicting a city where poverty and wealth live side by side and people know little about one another. The third programme in World Book Club’s year celebrating international women’s writing, this novel raises urgent questions about women’s lives and maternal instincts, and what is expected of them.

(Photo: Leïla Slimani. Photo credit: Catherine Hélie/Editions Gallimard.)

There is far more to a map than meets the eye. Such is the case in historian Alex Hidalgo’s Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019), which focuses on the complex lives of dozens of Oaxacan maps created by Indigenous mapmakers. Tracing the legal, social, cultural, and political history of these maps, Hidalgo sheds new light on the purpose, production, and preservation of maps as well as the lives of Indigenous peoples and Spaniards alike involved in their production. The result is a vivid re-orientation of Oaxacan history that speaks to the historical power of collaboration, adaptation, and cartography.

Trail of Footprints provides a deep dive into the production and use of maps, focusing specifically on the roles of patrons, painters, and notaries as well as the complex material dimension of mapmaking. Hidalgo lends equal attention to both the broader historical context of mapmaking and the smallest details of each cartographic creation, emphasizing how maps both recorded and created spatial relationships. In tracing the long lives of these maps, Hidalgo demonstrates, among other important interventions, the potency of Indigenous skills, ideas, and ways of knowing in creating and charting Oaxacan history.

 Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.

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Pilar M. Herr’s new book Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) places the independent Mapuche people and pro-Spanish Pincheira bandits at the heart of Chile’s nineteenth century. During the 1820s, while criollo elites struggled openly between themselves to form a stable, constitutional central government and define the meaning of citizenship, they agreed that the southern third of Chile formed an integral part of their newly-imagined nation.

This claim, Herr argues, erased the Mapuche people, who had defended their lands (known to the Spanish as Araucanía) for centuries from the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonial regime. To demonstrate how Mapuche leaders and bandits challenged Chile’s political and territorial claims, and threatened the viability of the young republic, Contested Nation looks at the smoldering war to the death (Guerra a muerte) between Chile and remaining pro-Spanish royalists that spilled over into Araucanía and across the Andes. This focus reveals how Mapuche and Chilean leaders drew on pre-Columbian negotiation rituals, known as parlamentos, alliance-making, and force to resolve the conflict. Herr’s study concludes that Chile’s exclusion of the Mapuche from its evolving definition of “citizen,” and it’s interest in dispossessing the Mapuche of their land to root out bandits and armed opponents, fundamentally altered the meaning of parlamentos and the viability of Mapuche autonomy.

Jesse Zarley is an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where he teaches Latin American, Caribbean, and Global History. His research interests include the Mapuche, borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Río de la Plata. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.

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What did the American Civil War look like from Diné Bikéyah and Apacheria? This is just one of the many questions that drives historian Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which details the Civil War’s impact on a diversity of historical actors vying for control, opportunity, and survival in the continental southwest. As both the Union and the Confederacy vied for claim to Indigenous lands, Diné, Apache, and other Indigenous nations fought back. The narratives of Juanita, a Diné woman who resisted Union encroachments upon her community and Diné lands, and Mangas Coloradas, a Chiricahua Apache chief who sought to expand and protect Apache territories, reveal the difficult choices Indigenous peoples made in the face of competitive expansion.

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian with a background in the American Civil War, U.S. western history, and American culture. In The Three-Cornered War, Nelson combines meticulous research in military records, letters and diaries, oral histories, and photographs with novel-like prose to tell the story of the American Civil War through the experiences of nine individuals. As Nelson shows how each of these individuals shaped and were shaped by the Civil War in the continental southwest, the result is a history of the American Civil War truly continental in its scope yet deeply individual in its impact.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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Harriett Gilbert is joined by Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah for this month’s edition of World Book Club, continuing 2020’s celebration of women’s writing.

Petina will be answering questions from readers around the world about her novel The Book Of Memory. It’s narrated by Memory, an albino woman convicted of murdering her wealthy white guardian, who took her away from life in the townships when she was a child. In this testimony, written from her prison cell, Memory looks back over her life and confronts the events that led to this conviction.

(Photo: Petina Gappah. Credit: Marina Cavazza)

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with 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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In his Relation of the second voyage to Guiana, published in 1596, George Chapman put the imperial ambitions of England into a telling verse couplet. ‘Riches, and Conquest, and Renowne I sing. / Riches with honour, Conquest without bloud’. For the metropolitan gentlemen of early 17th-century London, the colonising project in Virginia was deeply bound up with the tastes and social lives of statesmen. Chapman’s reference to riches and honour signal English ambitions at the outset of a colonising project in which the interior worlds of the state were profoundly transformed.

In The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Lauren Working examines a complex trans-Atlantic process of the movement of objects, ideas, and cultural mixing. Colonialism was a civic project that might hold the keys not just to the prosperity and prestige of the kingdom, but to the refashioning of society. But beneath all this lay tensions that stemmed from the encounter with the Native peoples of Tsenacommacah, a place that was marred by violence between settlers and the Powhatan Confederacy. This book places that tension at the fore of a sparkling and detailed study of the ideology of early colonialism and its place in important circuits of ideas and power in London. Lauren Working is a Post-doctoral Researcher on the TIDE Project.

Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.

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Moments before his death at the hands of Spanish colonial officials on November 15, 1781, Aymaran leader Túpac Katari assured his apostles as well as his adversaries that he would “return as millions.” As promised, Katari’s presence in Bolivia did not end with his life. In the centuries since his historic siege of La Paz, Katari has returned often, and remains a cornerstone of the five-hundred-year-long rebellion to reclaim and restore an Indigenous world that long predated the formation of Bolivia. Such a rebellion is the topic of Benjamin Dangl’s latest book, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia (AK Press, 2019), a deep dive into the historical roots and contemporary relevancy of Indigenous-led movements in modern Bolivia.

Drawing on fifteen years of journalistic experience in Bolivia, Dangl demonstrates the ways that Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní intellectuals, activists, and communities use history as a means of resistance. Dangl shows how the Indigenous campesino union, the Andean Oral History Workshop, caciques apoderados, and other Indigenous activists seized historical knowledge and symbolism as their own, reminding the world of their role as agents of historical change. Over the last several decades, such efforts have led to monumental shifts in Bolivian politics that have permanently transformed the past, present, and future of the country.

Benjamin Dangl teaches journalism at the University of Vermont where he is Lecturer of Public Communication in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics. As a specialist of Bolivian politics, Dangl provides New Books listeners with insightful commentary on the historical context and immediate impact of the recent coup that removed Indigenous president Evo Morales from power.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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