Episodes

  • W. Paul Reeve, et al., "This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    W. Paul Reeve, et al., "This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Nov 26 2024
    On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slavery in their new Zion confronted them on the day they first arrived. Five years later, after Utah had become an American territory, its legislature was prodded to take up the question then roiling the nation: would they be slave or free? George D. Watt, the official reporter for the 1852 legislative session, reported debates and speeches in Pitman shorthand. They remained in their original format, virtually untouched, for more than one hundred and fifty years, until LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed them. In this eye-opening volume This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (Oxford University Press, 2024), Carruth, Dr. Christopher Rich, and Dr. W. Paul Reeve draw extensively on these new sources to chronicle the session, during which the legislature passed two important statutes: one that legally transformed African American slaves into "servants" but did not pass the condition of servitude on to their children and another that authorized twenty-year indentures for enslaved Native Americans. This Abominable Slavery places these debates within the context of the nation's growing sectional divide and contextualizes the meaning of these laws in the lives of Black enslaved people and Native American indentured servants. In doing so, it sheds new light on race, religion, slavery, and unfree labor in the antebellum period. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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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    57 mins
  • Joan L. Bryant, "Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-century America" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Joan L. Bryant, "Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-century America" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Nov 21 2024
    Activists in the earliest Black antebellum reform endeavors contested and deprecated the concept of race. Attacks on the logic and ethics of dividing, grouping, and ranking humans into races became commonplace facets of activism in anti-colonization and emigration campaigns, suffrage and civil rights initiatives, moral reform projects, abolitionist struggles, independent church development, and confrontations with scientific thought on human origins. Denunciations persisted even as later generations of reformers felt compelled by theories of progress and American custom to promote race as a basis of a Black collective consciousness. Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-century America (Oxford UP, 2024) traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it. Reluctant Race Men was recently shortlisted for the 2024 Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.
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    37 mins
  • Dennis Romano, "Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Dennis Romano, "Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Nov 20 2024
    No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, "another world." During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival. When the city fell on hard times following the collapse of the Republic in 1797, a darker vision of Venice as a place of decay, disease, and death took hold. Today tourists from around the globe flock to the world heritage site as rising sea levels threaten its very foundations. Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City (Oxford UP, 2023) reveals the adaptations to its geographic setting that have been a constant feature of living on water from Venice's origins to the present. It examines the lives of the women and men, noble and common, rich and poor, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, who built not only the city but also its vast empire that stretched from Northern Italy to the eastern Mediterranean. It details the urban transformations that Venice underwent in response to environmental vulnerability, industrialization, and mass tourism. Alongside the city's commercial prominence has been its dramatically changing political role, including its power as a city-state, regional stronghold, and overseas empire, as well as its impact on the development of fascism. Throughout, Dennis Romano highlights the city's cultural achievements in architecture, painting, and music, particularly opera. This richly illustrated volume offers a stunning portrait of this most singular of cities.
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Domingo Morel, "Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Domingo Morel, "Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Nov 19 2024
    Over the past fifty years, debates concerning race and college admissions have focused primarily on the policy of affirmative action at elite institutions of higher education. But a less well-known approach to affirmative action also emerged in the 1960s in response to urban unrest and Black and Latino political mobilization. The programs that emerged in response to community demands offered a more radical view of college access: admitting and supporting students who do not meet regular admissions requirements and come from families who are unable to afford college tuition, fees, and other expenses. While conventional views of affirmative action policies focus on the "identification" of high-achieving students of color to attend elite institutions of higher education, these programs represent a community-centered approach to affirmative action. This approach is based on a logic of developing scholars who can be supported at their local public institutions of higher education. In Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education (Oxford UP, 2023), Domingo Morel explores the history and political factors that led to the creation of college access programs for students of color in the 1960s. Through a case study of an existing community-centered affirmative action program, Talent Development, Morel shows how protest, including violent protest, has been instrumental in the maintenance of college access programs. He also reveals that in response to the college expansion efforts of the 1960s, hidden forms of restriction emerged that have significantly impacted students of color. Developing Scholars argues that the origin, history, and purpose of these programs reveal gaps in our understanding of college access expansion in the US that challenge conventional wisdom of American politics.
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    50 mins
  • Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Nov 19 2024
    In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"—primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus—with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"—the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter. The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Masha Kirasirova explores how the concept of "the East" was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Dr. Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualised and carried out by students, comrades, and activists—Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and agency to shape Soviet ideology, inform concrete decisions, and allocate resources. Contextualising these Eastern mediators within a global frame, this book historicizes the circulation of peoples and ideas between the socialist and decolonizing world and reinscribes Soviet history into postcolonial studies and global history. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Carrie J. Preston, "Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Carrie J. Preston, "Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Nov 19 2024
    In this incisive critique of the ways performances of allyship can further entrench white privilege, author Carrie J. Preston analyses her own complicit participation and that of other audience members and theater professionals, deftly examining the prevailing framework through which white liberals participate in antiracist theater and institutional “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice (Oxford UP, 2024) addresses immersive, documentary, site-specific, experimental, street, and popular theatre in chapters on Jean Genet’s The Blacks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field, and Claudia Rankine’s The White Card. Far from abandoning the work to dismantle institutionalized racism, Preston seeks to reveal the contradictions and complicities at the heart of allyship as a crucial step toward full and radical participation in antiracist efforts. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Carrie J. Preston about the intersections of theater, racial justice, and social activism, the concept of “complicit participation,” and allyship. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.
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    53 mins
  • Laura F. Edwards, "Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (Oxford UP, 2022)

    Laura F. Edwards, "Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (Oxford UP, 2022)
    Nov 18 2024
    What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American society? In the hands of eminent historian Laura F. Edwards, these textiles tell a revealing story of ordinary people and how they made use of their material goods' economic and legal value in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Dr. Laura F. Edwards uncovers practices, commonly known then, but now long forgotten, which made textiles—clothing, cloth, bedding, and accessories, such as shoes and hats—a unique form of property that people without rights could own and exchange. The value of textiles depended on law, and it was law that turned these goods into a secure form of property for marginalized people, who not only used these textiles as currency, credit, and capital, but also as entree into the new republic's economy and governing institutions. Dr. Edwards grounds the laws relating to textiles in engaging stories from the lives of everyday Americans. Wives wove linen and kept the proceeds, enslaved people traded coats and shoes, and poor people invested in fabrics, which they carefully preserved in trunks. Dr. Edwards shows that these stories are about far more than cloth and clothing; they reshape our understanding of law and the economy in America. Based on painstaking archival research from fifteen states, Only the Clothes on Her Back reconstructs this hidden history of power, tracing it from the governing order of the early republic in which textiles' legal principles flourished to the textiles' legal downfall in the mid-nineteenth century when they were crowded out by the rising power of rights. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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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    55 mins
  • Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, "In Search of Jonathan: Jonathan Between the Bible and Modern Fiction" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, "In Search of Jonathan: Jonathan Between the Bible and Modern Fiction" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Nov 17 2024
    In both modern fiction and the biblical texts of 1 Samuel 13-2 Samuel 1, the character of Jonathan serves as a key literary and theological figure. Throughout In Search of Jonathan: Jonathan Between the Bible and Modern Fiction (Oxford UP, 2023), Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer interprets Jonathan's portrayal in traditional biblical literature and modern fiction. Each chapter provides first an analysis of Jonathan's characterization in 1-2 Samuel, followed by an examination of the depictions of Jonathan in modern fiction. Together, biblical and modern literature demonstrate how fictional retellings deepen and challenge the ways that scholars interpret Jonathan's character. Throughout the volume, Tiemeyer offers an interpretation of Jonathan as a plausible and psychologically consistent character while grappling with questions posed by his actions in the text. Tiemeyer asks, what kind of man is Jonathan who shows initiative and daring leadership ability, but who is also willing to lay down his crown before the usurper David's feet in humble submission? What kind of son is Jonathan who rebels against his father and takes David's part in the conflict between him and Saul, yet remains loyal to Saul until the bitter end on Mount Gilboa? To answer these questions, Tiemeyer considers depictions of Jonathan in modern fiction. Modern approaches, as Tiemeyer discusses, illuminate dormant yet integral aspects of the biblical texts. These modern retellings highlight, transform, and subvert the biblical portrayal of Jonathan. Posing these questions to the reader and other biblical scholars, Tiemeyer challenges the ways that scholars perceive Jonathan and his portrayals across biblical and modern literature.
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    1 hr and 5 mins