Marshall Poe interviewed Colin Gordon, author of Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City, for the New Books in History blog. An audio file of this extensive interview is available for download at newbooksinhistory.com.
Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography
Anita Shapira
Translated by Evelyn Abel
392 pages | 6 x 9 | 29 illus.
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4028-3 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series
A bestseller in Israel, Yigal Allon, Native Son is the only biography of the charismatic leader. Born in 1918 into the fabric of Arab-Jewish frontier life at the foot of Mt. Tabor, Allon rose to become commander of the Palmah, one of the founding figures of the state of Israel and an architect of its politics. The book focuses on Allon's life up to 1950, his clash with founding father David Ben-Gurion, the end of his military career, and the watershed in culture and character between the Jewish Yishuv and Israeli statehood.
The story of Allon's life frames the history of Israel, its relationship with its Arab neighbors, its culture and spirit. This biography touches on matters--Israel's borders, refugees, military might--that remain very much alive today.
Steve Goddard selected Doug Rossinow's Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America for today's History Wire Book Alert, calling the history "an effective way to introduce today's progressives to their historical predecessors and suggests the pitfalls of losing sight of the forest for the trees."
Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City
Colin Gordon
304 pages | 7 x 10 | 78 color illus.
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4070-2 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series
Mapping Decline, illustrated with more than 75 full-color maps, traces the ways private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, federal housing policies, and urban renewal encouraged "white flight" and urban decline in St. Louis, Missouri.
Read more . . .
Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.
Welcome to the new age of preventive war, in which states and their leaders will no longer be content to wait for signs of imminent attack in order to strike first, and will choose instead to eradicate even potential threats long before they can fully ripen into major terrorist attacks or mature into working weapons of mass destruction.
The quote above is from Thomas M. Nichol's new History News Network essay, "The Coming Age of Preventative War". In this piece, Nichols, Professor of Strategy and Forrest Sherman Chair of Public Diplomacy at the United States Naval War College and author of Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War, outlines the concepts that will shape future geopolitical violence and calls for truly international governance over the use of preventive force.
". . .[Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan] is an important addition to the literature on New York and the social world of leisure and entertainment that emerged between the wars," writes David S. Churchill in a recent H-Urban H-Net review of Burton W. Peretti's history of New York City night life and politics.
Read the entire review at www.h-net.org.
In a post titled "Du Bois in the Lone Star State 2.0", The Bald Blogger has made a recent lecture by Edward J. Blum, author of W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet, available on line. In this talk, "The Noose and the Cross: Race, Religion, and the Redemption of Violence in the Works of W. E. B. Du Bois," (a 53.5 MB mp3) Blum discusses the image of the Black Jesus that developed in the United States in response to racial oppression.
Human Rights in the Arab World: Independent Voices
Edited by Anthony Chase and Amr Hamzawy
336 pages | 6 x 9
Paper 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2032-2 | $24.95 | £16.50
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series
This is the first book in English that draws together the work of intellectuals at the forefront of research on the Arab region's key human rights issues. Its empirical and theoretical focus is on the historical and contemporary place of human rights in Arab politics and the obstacles to advancing rights in the region.
Read more . . .
Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.
This week, Time magazine became the latest major publication to review Marc Sageman's new study of Islamist terrorism, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century.
Time's Aryn Baker writes, "...Leaderless Jihad discredits conventional wisdom about terrorists by eschewing anecdotes and conjecture in favor of hard data and statistics."
The complete review is available in the March 31 issue of Time and at www.time.com.
As Sen. Barack Obama deals with the fallout of controversial remarks by his pastor, a noted historian explains how the Rev. Jeremiah Wright came to say what he did.
That historian is Edward J. Blum, author of W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet. Here's an excerpt from the interview:
NEWSWEEK: You've said that African-American church leaders have taken America's Christian values and turned them against the nation's practitioners of racial discrimination, violence and imperialism for hundreds of years. When and how did this tradition begin?
Edward J. Blum: It began even before the United States became the United States, during the slave trade. Throughout slavery, African-Americans used the Bible to challenge their enslavement. Olaudah Equiano, a slave who was later freed, wrote a narrative juxtaposing the Christianity of the slaveholders vs. his own Christianity. Frederick Douglass said he hated the Christianity of whites but loved the Christianity of Christ. As Africans became Americans and embraced Christianity, they continued to turn the teachings of Jesus against whites.
