New Books In World Affairs

“We live in the age of globalization, with the interconnection of markets, technology, and cultures making the world a smaller place.” Sure.Tell that to the guys on my local sports radio show. For them, the world is bounded by the Big Ten and the North Division of the National Football Conference, the groupings to which our state’s college and pro football teams belong. Other teams? Other games? Conferences in other parts of the country? Those barely rate a mention.And different sports, in other parts of the world? They don’t even exist. Tune to your local sports radio station or open the sports page and you’ll find the same, whether you’re in America or Europe: the average fan remains intensely regional–maybe even tribal–in his sports interests. But as Andrei Markovits argues, globalization is creeping into sports. At the University of Michigan, where Andy is an Arthur Thurnau Professor and Karl Deutsch Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, European students follow their countrymen in the N

There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion. But there are few images from the modern history of sports that have transcended the games, photos that have inspired and provoked those with little interest in athletics. Perhaps the only image to have had such a far-reaching effect is that of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. But some would object–and many did in 1968–that what Smith and Carlos did on the medal stand after the 200-meter finals was not a sports moment. It was a political moment, a protest, and therefore it was outside the boundary of athletics. Smith and Carlos had violated a fundamental principle of sport by mixing it with politics. But those who made that criticism in 1968 likely did not denounce George Foreman ten days later, when he waved the American flag in the ring after winning

It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks. You can find this thesis in numerous monographs, textbooks, and in the popular press. It’s one of those things “everybody knows.” But according to Robert Thurston’s provocative new book Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Ashgate, 2011) the standard ‘social control’ line is inadequate. It cannot explain when lynching started or when it ended; why lynching occurred in some places often and others never; and why the period in question witnessed a considerable amount of intra-racial lynching. The ‘social control’ thesis fails because it tries to put a square peg (the evidence) in a round hole (the concept of systematic oppression through terror). Thurston shows that lynching, though hardly accidental, was simply too occasional and too random to b

One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time–plate tectonics, the orientation of the Earth’s axis relative to the sun, volcanic activity–were distinct from the forces that drove human time–evolution, technological change, population growth. To be sure, they interacted. But the causal arrow always went from geologic change to human change. As Anthony Penna rightly points out in The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), the causal arrow now goes in both directions. Not only do we adapt to the environment, but the environment is adapting to us, and mightily. We are ushering in a new geological period sometimes called the Anthropocene–the era defined by human activity. It’s important to point out that this is not the first time biology has shaped geology: we have good evidence, for example, that 2.4 billion years ago cyanobacte

One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities, the rise of high culture, the industrial revolution–can, so most Western social scientists claim, be associated with some condition that compelled otherwise conservative humans to act in new ways. This premise is of course most closely linked to Marx, but it is found throughout post-Marxist big picture scholarship (including my own humble contribution to that literature). Ricardo Duchesne argues in his new The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Brill, 2011) that we have it all wrong. History, he claims, is driven by creative people and their ideas, not by the conditions they find themselves in. If you see a bit of Hegel and Nietzsche here, you are not wrong: Duchesne embraces them both (and throws in a considerable amount of Weber to boot). But he goes much further. He try

When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single, coherent theory of remarkable explanitory power. Alas, grand theoretical books like Spirit of the Laws are out of fashion today, not only because the human sciences are gripped by particularism (“more and more about less and less), but also because we don’t train students to think like Montesqueiu any more. In his excellent The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), Francis Fukuyama bucks the trend. Of course, he’s done it before with elegant and persuasive books about the fall of communism, state-building, trust, and biotechnology among other big topics. Here he takes on the emergence of modern political institutions, or rather three modern political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and accountable government. He begi

International theorists like to game out every possible scenario. What would happen if you applied their methodology to dealing with the fictional public policy challenge of a zombie infestation? In Dan Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton UP, 2011), he looks at each of the major international relations schools–realism, liberalism, neoconservatism, etc.–to determine how they would react to a zombie attack. In the book, Drezner combines a strong understanding of international-relations theory with a comprehensive knowledge of the zombies. He also uses charts, cartoons, and humor to make his points. In the podcast, I ask Drezner to apply his approach to the question of how President Obama would cope with a zombie attack. We discuss all of these things, and have our share of laughs, along the way. Read all about it, and more, in Drezner’s humorous new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi

People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the case that somebody else’s ancestors once lived on “this land,” and somebody else’s before that. From the very earliest moments of human history, people have been taking each other’s territory. This seemingly endless cycle is the subject of David Day’s excellent new book Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford UP, 2008). Day points out that the process of “supplanting” has a kind of deep structure, no matter when or where it occurs. Claims are made, territories are mapped, colonists settled, soil is tilled, natives are moved about or exterminated, and comforting stories are told, often about how “our ancestors have always lived here.” It’s a rather sad spectacle, though we should thank David for holding this mirror up to us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by b

Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and one of the most common ways we cooperate is through trade. Some form of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” lies at the heart of almost every human relationship. We are built for reciprocation, and we do it remarkably well. But, as Joyce Appleby shows in her provocative, readable, and thoroughly entertaining The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Norton, 2010), the natural impulse for reciprocal back-scratching did not capitalism make. A set of very unusual historical forces did. These historical forces were not everywhere and always. On the contrary, they came together in one place at one time: Northwestern Europe in what we might call the “long modern period,” roughly the 15th though 18th c

My son Isaiah likes to play the “why” game. Isaiah: “Why is my ice cream gone?” Me: “Because you ate it.” Isaiah: “Why did I eat it?” Me: “Because you need food.” Isaiah: “Why do I need food?” And so on. Isaiah naturally wants to know why things are the way they are. We all do. Most of us, however, are taught that seeking these ultimate answers is quixotic. We say either that there are no ultimate answers or that you’d have to know too many to answer them. In this conception, there either is no story of everything or, if there is, no one can tell it. Thankfully, Fred Spier disagrees. His path-breaking Big History and the Future of Humanity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) succeeds in sketching the story of everything from the origins of the universe to the reason my son’s ice cream is gone. In around two-hundred lucidly written pages he takes us from the Big Bang, to the separation of matter and energy, to the rise of elementary particles, to the formation of galaxies, solar systems, stars, and planets, to the creati

Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact–and it is a fact–that we see remarkable diversity in the historical record. The past, we say, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But there are also political reasons to hold to the idea that we have no essence, that everything is “socially constructed.” Where, for example, would modern liberalism be without this concept? If our natures are fixed in some way, then what should we do to improve our lot? Given the strength and utility of the “blank slate” doctrine, anyone hoping to question it successfully must possess considerable political savvy and, more importantly, an overwhelming mass of evidence. When the first modern challenge was issued–by the Sociobiologists of the 1970s–they had the latter (I would say), but not the forme

Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any really scientific theory of history to be possible. Human history, they said, was chaos. The problem is that human history isn’t chaos at all. The “hard” human sciences–evolutionary biology and anthropology in particular–have shown that human nature is quite predictable, cultural variability is strictly constrained, and ongoing patterns of social development have ancient roots. Historians can ignore these facts all they like, but that doesn’t make them any the less true. It does, however, impoverish their discipline by ceding the search for a satisfying theory of history to scientists. Neither Paul Bingham nor Joanne Souza are historians. The former is a molecular biologist and the latter an evolutionary psychologist. But they have formulated an elegant theory of human history in Death From a Distance and the Birth

Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standards) moved to nearly every habitable place on the globe. We are their descendants. The Africans never stopped migrating, but they began to do so with particular vigor beginning about 1400 AD. Patrick Manning tells the story of their movements in his remarkable new book The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (Columbia UP, 2010). The tale Pat tells might well be divided into three phases: before slavery, during slavery, and after slavery. The middle period usually gets the most attention, but happily Pat well covers the “before” and “after” phases as well. This is an excellent corrective to the standard story because it shows us that for most of modern history African migrants were not really victims, but agents. Prior to the emergence of the international slave trade, they travelled and migrated to North Afric

Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. The first is this: chimps are not programmed, so to say, to commit mass slaughter, while humans are so programmed. The second is this: chimps do not make their own history and therefore cannot make the conditions conducive to genocide, while humans do, can, and repeatedly have. In the former case, human genocidal behavior is part of our evolved “nature”; in the latter case, it is a historical artifact. After reading Ben Kiernan’s sobering (Yale UP, 2007) I’ve come to believe that it is a bit of both. Much of what we know about the evolution of human psychology and the history of human genocide suggest that we have an ingrained, genetically-encoded, largely unalterable drive to want to kill one another in large numbers. That drive, however, seems to be triggered by particular historical circumstances, these being lar

I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you are likely to end as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (I didn’t, but that’s another story). “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Don’t historians get bored with their little time and place?” “Yes,” I replied. “Don’t they exhaust the topic and begin to work in circles?” “Yes, quite often” I replied. “Don’t they want to compare what they’ve learned about time/place X with time/place Y in order to better understand both X and Y?” “Probably,” I replied. “Then why,” she asked, “do historians continue to work the way they do?” It’s a good question, and one that deserves to be answered. On the one hand, ‘more and more about less and less’ has certainly enabled us–that is, the historical profession–to uncover a lot of the past that might have been forgotten. But, on the other hand, we’ve gone so far ‘inside baseball’ that

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part. Our guest today–sponsored by the National History Center–is not among them. Julian Zelizer has used his historical research and writing to inform the public and public debate in a great variety of fora: magazines, newspapers, online outlets, radio, TV–and now New Books in History. Today we’ll be talking about his efforts to bring the historian’s voice to the public and his most recent book Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From WWII to the War on Terrorism (Basic Books, 2010) (which itself is a contribution to that effort). The book proves that in the U.S. politics does not “stop at the water’s edge”–not now, not ever. From the very beginning of the Republic, American foreign policy has been informed by a subtle mix of electoral politics, ideology, and institutional infighti

Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name (Free Press, 2009). As Toby points out, medieval Europeans thought the earth had three parts–Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem at the dead center and water all around. (And no, they didn’t think the earth was flat…). But in 1507 a peculiar item appeared–the Waldseemuller map— that outlined a fourth part of the world called “America,” with the Atlantic Ocean on the one side and an unnamed ocean on the other. Here’s the really curious thing though: at that time no European had ever seen what we now call the “Pacific Ocean.” Balboa was the first to see it, and he didn’t do so until 1513. So where did Waldseemuller and his colleagues get the idea that there was a continent between Europe and Asia and tha

This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is offering in conjunction with the National History Center. The NHC and Oxford University Press have initiated a book series called “Reinterpreting History.”The volumes in the series aim to convey to readers how and why historians revise and reinterpret their understanding of the past, and they do so by focusing on a particular historical topic, event, or idea that has long gained the attention of historians. The first contribution to the “Reinterpreting History” series is Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2008). Today we’ll be talking to the editors of the volume, Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. You may think that historians normally study states or nations, like France and China. But they also study areas of international or imperial interaction. The most famous example of this sort of “international” history is Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949

In 1983, when I was in college, I participated in something called a “Die-In.” A group of us set up crosses on the commons and threw ourselves on the ground as if we were dead. The idea, such as it was, was to suggest that nuclear weapons were bad and should be done away with. Quite honestly, I didn’t really think it would work (to put it mildly). But as Larry Wittner shows in his compelling Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford, 2009), I was wrong, or at least partially wrong. Larry demonstrates that the nuclear disarmament movement had an impact on government policy. Politicians, not just here in the US but also in unlikely places like the USSR, actually listened to the protesters. But they sensed that a lot of people–like Einstein and me–were very uncomfortable with mutually assured destruction and wanted something done about it. Ronald Reagan listened. And so did Mikhail Gorbachev. After reading Larry’s book, I’m thinking I may organize another “Die-In.”

It’s the classic historical question: Why did the Roman Empire fall? There are doubtless lots of reasons. One historian has noted 210 of them. No wonder Gibbon said that we should stop “inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed,” but rather “be surprised that it lasted so long.” Indeed. But 210 reasons do not amount to a satisfying explanation. Historical events are complex, but historical writing must be parsimonious if it is to achieve its primary aim, that is, to make the past clear to us. Happily, Adrian Goldsworthy‘s How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (Yale UP, 2009) does a marvelous job of boiling it all down. He proposes that structural explanations–governmental inefficiency, economic decline, imperial overstretch and the 207 others–are fine, but they really won’t do the job in this case. The late Roman Empire was ill, but it was hardly on its death bed in the third and fourth centuries. Moreover, even at its weakest moments, the Empire was hugely more powerful than any of its competitors. In orde