History Book Reviews Reviewed, July/August 2010 edition

Chris Beneke

What follows is the first installment of a semi-regular update on historical reviews in the London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other places that we bothered to look.

Jeffrey Rosen, “Why Brandeis Matters: The Constitution and the Crash” (TNR, July 22) Review of Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (Pantheon)

Writing admiringly of both book and subject, Rosen says that Urofsky’s “definitive,” “masterful” biography of the great supreme court justice is timely given Elena Kagan’s nomination to Brandeis’s Supreme Court seat and the rediscovery by progressives of “the virtues of judicial restraint.” Rosen is confident that Brandeis “would have predicted the crash of 2008.” (The bearish justice would have no doubt still preferred bonds, as he did in the 1920s, rather than credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities.) Rosen details Brandeis’s long-standing critique of concentrated financial power (“the curse of bigness”), his commitment to judicial restraint on most matters but “judicial vigilance” on the especially urgent matter of civil liberties, and his support for Zionism as both a complement to nationalism and a source of intra-national cultural vitality. The 2008 financial crisis figures centrally in this piece and Rosen builds on a distinction of Paul Krugman’s, positing the existence of two historically-informed schools of thought on financial reform: “the Jeffersonian-Brandeisians, who want to break up the big banks and prevent them from engaging in risky behavior, and the Hamiltonian neo-New Dealers, who prefer top-down government regulation.” Rosen suggests that the Jeffersonian-Brandeisians (like Paul Volcker) have gotten it right, but the Hamiltonian-New Dealers (like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner) have gotten the votes. Urofsky’s biography is itself quite big. Given its hefty 955 page count, you might want to read Rosen’s longish review before taking the plunge. Or maybe even wait for Rosen’s own forthcoming book on Brandeis.

Anthony Grafton, “A Jewel of a Thousand Facets” (NYRB, June 24) Review of Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Belknap/Harvard); and, Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, eds., Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Getty Research Institute)

The two books reviewed here might be a good complement to Stephen Prothero’s hot-selling God is Not One (not mentioned by Grafton). Prothero’s conclusion that the world’s religion’s do not much converge is today’s contrarian position. That wasn’t the case in Bernard and Picart’s time. Grafton observes that the emphasis on the similarity of the world’s faiths was a subversive stance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Also subversive in that period: dense, weighty compilations of global knowledge like Religious Ceremonies of the World, and chatty, “ironic” footnote commentary on “orthodox inanities.” By detailing (in both print and image) the nuances of religions across the globe and by comparing the common forces underlying their different practices, Bernard and Picart injected sociological and anthropological substance into enlightened appeals for toleration. Though wondering what contemporary readers thought of Bernard and Picart’s Religious Ceremonies, Grafton is impressed by the collaborative, interdisciplinary effort that went into this two-volume project. He concludes that the authors “have done justice to a great work of eighteenth-century humanistic learning. And they have shown us some of the directions in which humanistic scholarship should move in generations to come: not only away from older narratives of intellectual change, but toward new models in which books and digital media, grand accounts and detailed inquiries shed light on one another.”

Bee Wilson, “Stuck with Your Own Face” (LRB, July 8) Review of Geoffrey Jones, Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry (Oxford)

Beauty trends may rise and fall, but the beauty industry only rises. In 1916, roughly “four fifths of Americans used neither toothpaste nor shampoo, never mind mosturiser or deodorant, lipstick or hair gel.” Today, “[c]onsumers around the world spend ‘$330 billion a year on fragrances, cosmetics and toiletries’.” Scent was the first sense to be addressed by the broadly conceived category of beauty products. Salvaging the body from early modern street odors was not an easy job. Perfume helped. By the mid-nineteenth century, this early beauty product was sold in mass, factory-produced quantities, along with “‘the first factory-made, non-toxic mascara’.” Over time, manufacturers moved away from beauty products that poisoned their users and toward products adapted to the visual revelations of electric light. They also went global with products, such as skin-lightening creams, that changed or reinforced prevailing conceptions of race and personal attractiveness. The greatest of the beauty industry’s innovations, according to Wilson, may have been lipstick. It’s legitimation “over just a few decades [in the twentieth century] must have brought about one of the biggest changes to the appearance of the Western female body in history.” Wilson is generally pleased with the data that Jones offers. She is less impressed with his grasp of the “artifice” that has gone into the sale of these high-margin products with often questionable claims to effectiveness.

Dispatches from the Historical Society, Day 2: Christian Identities in Modern Germany

Randall J. Stephens

This Friday session, which I chaired, took place after lunch, when bellies were full and eyes were heavy. Attendees trickled in until we had a good number. The presenters engaged us on historical-theological change and continuity in Modern Germany.

Ryan Glomsrud (Harvard University) asked: How do we summarize and describe the context of theologians and philosophers? What counts as appropriate contextualization for a theologian a cultural critic, or a moral philosopher, like Karl Barth? How do we concretize some of these ideas with social and theological context?

In Glomsrud's view, Pietism is the forgotten religious context for 19th century religion and Weimar Germany. Glomsrud challenges the abstract categories--imminent, gnostic, transcendent--used to describe theologians and public intellectuals.

Pietists organized themselves around projects--youth conferences and the like. Barth launched his career in this world. Journals attached to the Pietist 19th century movement served as the bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Glomsrud finds a continuity in this model from one century to the next. And he asks historians to think about how this continuity might reshape what we think of the tumultuous changes of the 20th century.

Late 19th-century ecumenism certainly drew on new sentiments in Europe. Thomas Albert Howard (Gordon College) focused on the return of religious history in the ecumenical and confessional age. His paper “Christian Unity in a Secular and Confessional Age: Ignaz von Döllinger, Vatican I, and the Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875,” answered questions about why these conferences took place, what occured at them, and what they tell us about the era. The theological consensus fell apart, commented Howard, when Catholics questioned the participation of Anglicans. The center could not hold.

So what does this tell us about the era? Howard noted the severe limits of thinking of the 19th century as a second confessional age. But also it was no secular age either. Ecumenism was limited for a variety of reasons. Still, the legacy of the Bonn conferences lived on into the 20th century.

Nicholas Brooks (University of Virginia) began with a quote, "Paul has become fashionable again." Perhaps that is in response to the postsecular age or to his reimagining/reevaluation by Gary Wills and others.

Brooks's paper “Interpreting St. Paul for the New Germany: Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth, 1920-22,” considered the views of Barth and Heidegger on Paul. Those views, said Brooks, revealed a very specific pattern in 20th century thought and marked a break with the previous century. Where Glomsrud saw continuity, Brooks saw discontinuity. In Brooks's words: "Barth's and Heidegger's readings of Paul might be situated in the history of Paul-interpretation, and how in invoking Paul's writings, Barth and Heidegger in similar ways signaled their divergence from the intellectual and cultural heritage of the nineteenth century while providing footing for the beginning of a new era in Weimar and European culture more broadly."

Heidegger viewed Paul as an existential type that took on greater relevance in the 20th century. Paul's religion was not the religion of Jesus, thought Heidegger.

The Paul the Heidegger and Barth offered was different from the liberal version, argued Brooks. Paul's religion does not look to a unified whole, Heidegger thought. Real religion presents the world in a kind of radical chaos. It is mutable. Barth and Heidegger launched very different projects using Paul. Heidegger takes a very serious vision of finitude. Barth conceives of God as wholly other and takes on a "post-metaphysical" outlook. The work of both Barth and Heidegger on Paul had special resonance for Westerners in mid-century.

Tal Howard used Freud's term "the return of the repressed" to speak about the trouble in intellectual history with regard to religion. Each of the panelists was thinking through how theologians, divines, and philosophers reenvisioned faith or belief in a supposedly increasingly secular era. Religion has returned, though, and religious studies and religious history is strong. (See the theme for the 2011 AHA!) And these papers were great examples of the strength of the field.

Posted Soon: Videos from two other sessions. The Internet connection here is as slow as Christmas.

Göbekli Tepe, the Origins of Religion, and Early Societies

Randall Stephens

An amazing archeological find is changing what we think of ancient societies and human development. Göbekli Tepe is the first human site of worship--at 11,500 years old--a startling neolithic temple. The site, not attached to a village or settlement, also challenges what archeologists and anthropologists make of the roots of religious belief. Did civilization produce religion? Did religion produce civilization?

Newsweek's Patrick Symmes reports on the find and its chief archeologist, Klaus Schmidt. (Patrick Symmes, "History in the Remaking: A Temple Complex in Turkey that Predates Even the Pyramids is Rewriting the Story of Human Evolution," Newsweek, February 19, 2010.) "The site isn't just old," writes Symmes:

it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

See also:
Andrew Curry, "Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?" Smithsonian Magazine, November 2008.

Gobekli Tepe was first examined—and dismissed—by University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery.

Sandra Scham , The World's First Temple," Archeology (November/December 2008).

Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists believed that societies in the early Neolithic were organized into small bands of hunter-gatherers and that the first complex religious practices were developed by groups that had already mastered agriculture.

Nicholas Birch, "7,000 Years Older than Stonehenge: The Site that Stunned Archaeologists," The Guardian, April 23, 2008.

Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

End-of-Year History On-Line Roundup

Randall Stephens

Trapped in the Midwest because of a snowstorm, I've been catching up on some on-line reading. Choice items I've come across:

"Digitizing Monk," Here and Now, WBUR, December 24, 2009
BOSTON–Father Columba Stewart has made it his mission to digitize precious manuscripts found in some of the most threatened communities around the world, including Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel, Iraq, and Ethiopia. The project has discovered and preserved chronicles of how the early Christians living in the Middle East perceived the arrival of the Crusaders, as well as the oldest known Ethiopian-language copy of every book in the Bible. >>>

"Digital Scripture," NGM Blog, December 8, 2009
A fourth-century Bible that includes the earliest known complete copy of the New Testament now has a 21st-century address: codexsinaiticus.org. For much of its existence, the sacred text—handwritten on parchment in ancient Greek—resided at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, from which it takes its name. As with many old manuscripts, it was eventually split up, and some of it was lost. Only 823 of an estimated 1,487 pages survive. >>>

"Google & the Future of Books: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, January 14, 2010,
By Paul N. Courant, Laine Farley, Paula Kaufman, John Leslie King, Theodore Koditschek, Anthony Lewis et al.
To the Editors: In his recent article criticizing the Google settlement ["Google and the New Digital Future," NYR, December 17, 2009], Robert Darnton fails to acknowledge the significant role that libraries have had in the creation of Google Book Search as well as the concrete steps they are taking to address the sorts of concerns he raises. >>>

"800 years on the Cam: Low living and high thinking at Cambridge University, from Henry III to Peter Mandelson," by Peter Linehan, Times Literary Supplement, December 16, 2009
This year the University of Cambridge celebrated its 800th birthday, an anniversary no less secure than any other of thirteenth-century origin, with an “anniversary portrait”, a handsome volume illustrated with the reminiscences of recent and not so recent alumni. >>>

"'War Is Over! If You Want It': John and Yoko, 40 Years Later," The Nation Blog, Jon Wiener, December 27, 2009
"War Is Over! If you want it" – a full page ad in the Sunday New York Times Dec. 27 must have puzzled many readers. The ad marked an anniversary: it was 40 years ago today that John Lennon and Yoko Ono launched their "War Is Over!" campaign, with billboards in New York, London, Hollywood, Toronto, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Athens and Tokyo proclaiming the message in giant black letters on a white field – and in much smaller type at the bottom, "Happy Christmas, John and Yoko." The message was repeated on posters, leaflets, and newspaper ads. >>>

Historical Society's 2010 Conference & Religious History

Randall Stephens

[Crossposted at Religion in American History]

The Historical Society's 2010 conference will deal with the future of the field of history. Titled "Historical Inquiry in the New Century" (June 3-5, 2010, hosted by Eric Arnesen at George Washington University, Washington, DC) the meeting hopes to attract scholars interested in the shape of the historical enterprise.

Animating questions include:

• What are the current historiographical debates?
• Where do particular fields currently stand?
• What's changed for the good—or the worse—in specific areas?
• What have been the clearest criticisms of the profession?
• What are the truly "big questions" historians face, and are we adequately grappling with them?
• What, in fact, are our aims/goals for the history that we write? What are the audiences for the history we write? Who's reading us?
• What impact, if any, do we have on larger, non-scholarly debates and understandings?
• How important is good writing to the field of history?
  

I hope that we can have several panels on religious history in general and American religious history in particular. Questions similar to those above might be worth considering. In addition, though, participants might look at how the field of religious history has broadened out over the decades from institutional and denominational history to something much larger. In recent years the number of historians who study religion has grown rapidly. Will that help reshape the field of history? Are the arguments about the neglect of religious history—made by George Marsden, John McGreevy, and Jon Butler—still applicable? Other questions to consider: What topics are younger historians studying, and why? What role does theory play in the writing of religious history? Has the job market or the publishing industry begun to reflect the growth in religious history?

A couple of years back James O’Toole wrote an essay in Historically Speaking on “Religious History in the Post-Ahlstrom Era.” His closing paragraph deserves further reflection:

The post-Ahlstrom era is now thirty years old, and no one can predict how long it might last. Historians will have to take account of new forms of religious diversity, particularly outside the West, both on their own terms and for the impact they have on more established groups. Levels of religious practice remain very high in America in comparison to other parts of the West, and history can help us understand this phenomenon. The future of the discipline is unknown, but it is clear that there is much work to do.

Please contact me, or the Historical Society, if you are interested in giving a paper, attending, offering insights, or putting together a session. Proposals (abstract and CV) should be sent to jslucas [at] bu.edu by January 31, 2010. Panel proposals are encouraged.

Which History?

Randall J. Stephens

Patricia Cohen reports on the steady drop in college courses offered on diplomatic, economic, and intellectual history in "Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?" NYT, June 10, 2009. "To the pessimists evidence that the field of diplomatic history is on the decline is everywhere," writes Cohen. "Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce, while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings."

Cohen's comments are sparked by a roundtable on the topic at the upcoming meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, June 25th - June 27th at the Fairview Park Marriott in Falls Church, Virginia. That session is titled "What’s in a Name?: Diplomatic History and the Future of the Field" and includes the following participants: Thomas Zeiler, University of Colorado at Boulder; Matthew Connelly, Columbia University; Christopher Endy, California State University, Los Angeles; Barbara Keys, University of Melbourne; Robert J. McMahon, Ohio State University; Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of Kentucky; Emily Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine.

According to Cohen the percentage of history departments with faculty who specialize in intellectual, diplomatic, or economic history has declined sharply since the 1970s. By contrast greater numbers of faculty work in gender, women's, or cultural history. There's also been a slight increase in the number of faculty specializing in military history, oddly enough. (The latter bit contradicts what John Miller wrote in his 2006 National Review essay, "Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retied.")

There are many reasons why some areas of history lose lines and why others gain them. Cohen cites David Kaiser, history professor at the Naval War College: “The boomer generation made a decision in the 1960s that history was starting over. It was an overreaction to a terrible mistake that was the Vietnam War.” To what extent has post-1960s identity politics shaped the profession?

As I read on I wondered what other fields could be added to those that Cohen mentions. I'm no longer certain that religious history would qualify as "neglected" or "underrepresented.” There is much interest in religious history. (See this interesting thread at Religion in American History on a recent conference on religious history/American religion.) Though it’s debatable whether or not that interest has bubbled up into curriculum and/or publications. I conducted a little informal, crude, utterly unscientific study of my own a couple years back. I went through journals like American Quarterly and the Journal of American History for the years 1997-2007. These rarely include religious history topics. (The American Historical Review was a little better.) Only 5% of the articles in the American Quarterly, the premier publication for American studies, covered religion. Only 4.3% of the essays in the Journal of American History dealt with religion over the same period. Thumb through most professional history conference programs and find much the same. (See John Butler's now-classic 2004 essay in the JAH: "Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History.")

What else? Would political history count as underrepresented? What about the history of science? This could probably be extended to include periods that receive less attention, too. I’m looking at you, Early Bronze Age.

Adam’s Ancestors

An Excerpt of Donald Yerxa's Interview with David Livingstone from Historically Speaking (June 2009)

David N. Livingstone is a professor of geography and intellectual history at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Arts. One of the most talented and perceptive scholars currently working on the history of science and religion, Livingstone is especially interested in exploring the spatial as well as the temporal contexts within which ideas are produced and consumed. Among his many books are Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and most recently Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Historically Speaking senior editor Donald A. Yerxa caught up with Livingstone on March 3, 2009, to discuss his latest book as well as his approach to intellectual history.

Donald A. Yerxa: Your most recent book, Adam’s Ancestors, is a history of pre-Adamite thinking. What is pre-Adamism?

David N. Livingstone: Pre-Adamism is actually a notoriously simple idea, though its consequences are multifaceted. It’s the idea that the Adam of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament is not the first human being. In some incarnations Adam is simply the father of the Jewish people, whereas in other versions Adam is viewed as the father of Caucasian people. But the material point of pre-Adamism, at least in its early days, is that there were, and perhaps indeed continue to exist, peoples who are descended from a pre-Adamic or at least non-Adamic source. This would mean that there were at least two (and arguably more than two) creations of the human species. In pre-Adamism lie the origins of what anthropologists used to call polygenesis. And, indeed, that has been and continues to be something of an issue right up to contemporary paleoanthropology. Should we look at all humans as derived from a single source, let’s say, a “mitochondrial Eve”? Or did the human species emerge in many different places? So the debate in that sense, without the biblical significance of Adam, continues to be important in thinking about human origins more generally.

Yerxa: How significant was pre-Adamism in Western intellectual history prior to Darwin?

Livingstone: There are a couple of things to be said about this. Another historian who worked on this subject some years ago, Richard Popkin, made the arresting suggestion that pre-Adamic theory was much more destabilizing to European intellectuals in the 17th century than the Copernican revolution or indeed the mechanical universe of the Newtonians. Popkin reasoned that pre-Adamism challenged human beings’ sense of their own identity, of who they really were. For a very long time, going back to the church fathers, to Augustine, and indeed to much earlier times, descent from Adam came to be a definition of what it was to be human. So I’m inclined to agree with Popkin because while you can scarcely find an advocate for the idea after 1655 when it first began to achieve wider publicity, you find many, many refutations. Although pre-Adamism seems initially to have had few converts, a lot of people felt the need to refute it.

Yerxa: Throughout your book it is clear that this notion is quite versatile and can be adapted to a number of arguments. Could you speak to that?

Livingstone: Pre-Adamism can be used for many contradictory purposes and is hugely adaptable in different environments. Let me just pick out three or four of these. Initially, when it was first put forward in the 1650s by Isaac La Peyrère, it was rapidly castigated as a heresy. Emissaries from the Vatican picked up La Peyrère when he was traveling in what is now Belgium and took him off to Rome, where he was forced to recant before the pope. Clever devil that La Peyrère was, however, the recantation never really admitted he was wrong. Pre-Adamism was considered heretical because it plainly challenged a literal reading of the Genesis narrative. One has to rethink a sequence of other related theological precepts if one accepts the notion that there were pre-Adamites. For example, did they also fall from grace? How representative is Adam of the human race? How does original sin come into the world? How is it transmitted?

Pre-Adamism has been quite versatile, however. In the 19th century—and indeed on into the 20th century—the idea was promulgated by those who were much more conservative in their theological outlook. It was adopted in a new guise by conservative believers who wanted to hold onto the historic significance of Adam while at the same time take some notion of human evolution seriously. So pre-Adamism, once deemed a massive heresy, was later taken up by conservative, orthodox believers.

Let me provide another instance of its adaptability. In the 1650s La Peyrère thought that Adam was the father of the Jewish race, but he was convinced that we all, whether Jews or not, participate to some degree in the benefits of the Jewish religious tradition and divine action in the world through the children of Israel. So in that sense, pre-Adamism is inclusive, humanitarian, and sweeps all of humanity—whether Jewish, Adamic or non-Jewish, non-Adamic—into a human family that benefits in Israel’s redemption. But later, pre-Adamism was used for the grossest forms of racism by depicting certain racial groups as non-Adamic and thus inferior and perhaps even subhuman. So pre-Adamism has been used for both humanitarian and racist purposes. . . .

Yerxa: You were trained as a geographer, and yet much of your recent writing has been in the area of intellectual history and the history of science. Is this an unusual intellectual trajectory? Or is this question premised on a false assumption about what it is that geographers do?

Livingstone: Being trained in geography in my generation encompassed aspects of physical science as well as the humanities and social sciences. Geography integrates nature and culture, or environment and society. Since its institutionalization in the 19th century, geography has always had considerable interest in the history of exploration. If you go back to early examination papers at the University of Oxford, you will find papers dealing with the history of what was then called, in those colonially unconscious days, the Age of Discovery or the Age of Exploration. So there was always interest in the history of growing geographical knowledge about the globe. . . .

Religious Responses to Epidemic Disease

Randall Stephens

According to the New York Times: "Health officials continue to report mild cases of swine flu throughout the United States and worldwide. The number of deaths in Mexico that officials suspect to have been caused by the flu is 159." The NYT also features a map that tracks cases by region. Schools and private companies have laid out plans of action. Churches and mosques are urging the faithful to reconsider "several traditional observances," according to the Raleigh News & Observer. "At St. Mel Parish in Fair Oaks, Calif., congregants will be asked not to shake hands during the exchange of peace or hold hands when the community recites the Lord's Prayer. The church will not offer the Communion cup during Mass."

For some historical perspective on this coverage--and perhaps to counter the shrieking, doomsday coverage of swine flu--I post here a link to a forum we ran in Historically Speaking several months ago. In the intro to “Religious Responses to Epidemic Disease: A Roundtable,” Donald Yerxa writes:

Thanks to the seminal work of William McNeill and Alfred Crosby, historians pay much more attention to the impact disease has had in history. Historians, however, have been slower to consider the nature and variety of religious responses to epidemic disease. To help readers think about this relatively neglected topic, we invited Andrew Cunningham to comment in general terms about religion and widespread disease in the West. We also asked David Arnold and Howard Phillips to explore two specific cases outside of Europe—one from India, the other from South Africa. Then we commissioned Duane Osheim to use these essays to comment on the overall topic of religion and epidemic disease in history.