Twentieth Century History Archives - Page 2 of 3

US Survey Course: The World Wars

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Andrew Villalon offers the stories of some World War I veterans, including Frank Buckles, the last American who served in the war.

Jacqueline Jones shares a personal story of a World War II love story, and a poem.

During World War II the United States shipped an enormous amount of aid to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program, discussed on NEP by Charters Wynn. And here is a video to accompany the piece.

Bruce Hunt discusses the decisions and discussions that led the US to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, signaling the end of WWII.

And, Charlotte Canning traces the diplomatic role played by US theatre during the first half of the twentieth century.

Recommended Books:

Jermaine Thibodeaux recommends two books on black servicemen in World War I:

Adriane Lentz-Smith’s Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009)
Chad L. Williams’s Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Turning to WWII and the Pacific, Michael Stoff recommends a readable tale of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, a Japanese prisoner of war: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

Emilio Zamora talks about his study, “Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas; Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II” (Texas A&M University Press, 2009)

Lior Sternfeld reviews The Wilsonian Moment, by Erez Manela (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Yana Skorobogatov recommends The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War, by Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko (Yale University Press, 2008)

Michelle Reeves suggests Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism, by Thomas W. Devine (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), and Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945-1965, by Ilya Gaiduk (Stanford University Press, 2013).

And finally, check out these recommended books on WWI, including José A. Ramírez’s To the Line of Fire, Mexican Texans and World War I (2009) and these on WWII, including David Kennedy, The American People in World War II (Oxford University Press, 2003).

From 15 Minute History:

America’s Entry in to World War I

World War I ended the long-standing American policy of neutrality in foreign wars, a policy seen as dating back to the time of George Washington. What forces conspired to bring the United States into World War I, and what was the reaction at home and abroad?

Historian Jeremi Suri walks us through the events and processes that brought the United States into The Great War.

The U.S. and Decolonization after World War II

Following World War II, a large part of the world was in the hands of European powers, established as colonies in the previous centuries. As one of the nations that came out on top of the geo-political situation, the United States was looked to with hope by aspiring nationalist movements, but also seen as a potential source by European allies in the war as a potential supporter of the move to restore the tarnished empires to their former glory. What’s a newly emerged world power to do?

Guest R. Joseph Parrott takes a look at the indecisive position the United States took on decolonization after helping liberate Europe from the threat of enslavement to fascism.

Eugenics

Early in the twentieth century, governments all over the world thought they had found a rational, efficient, and scientific solution to the related problems of poverty, crime, and hereditary illness. Scientists hoped they might be able to help societies control the social problems that arose from these phenomena. All over the world, the science-turned-social-policy known as eugenics became a base-line around which social services and welfare legislation were organized.

Philippa Levine, co-editor of a newly published book on the history of eugenics, explains the appeal and wide-reaching effects of the eugenics movement, which at its best inspired access to pre-natal care, access to clean water, and the eradication of harmful diseases, but at its worst led to compulsory sterilization laws, and the horrific experiments of the Nazi death camps.

To learn more on Eugenics in the USA, and beyond, check out Philippa Levine’s article ‘Eugenics Around the World’ on NEP.

Teaching the World Wars:

Joan Neuberger discusses the Harry Ransom Center’s The World at War, 1914-1918 exhibition, and talks to the curators of the exhibition.

Sarah Steinbock-Pratt discusses UT’s Normandy Scholar Program on World War II and recommends some great WWII films.

You may also like Joan Neuberger’s exploration of World War II images on Wikimedia Commons: Part One and Part Two.

US Survey Course: Reconstruction

Reconstruction on 15 Minute History

After the chaos of the American Civil War, Congress and lawmakers had to figure out how to put the Union back together again–no easy feat, considering that issues of political debate were settled on the battlefield, but not in the courtroom nor in the arena of public opinion. How did the defeated South and often vindictive North manage to resolve their differences over issues so controversial that they had torn the Union apart?

Historian H.W. Brands from UT’s Department of History reflects on this issues and how he has dealt with them in his thirty years of experience in teaching about Reconstruction: “It’s one of the hardest parts of American history to teach, in part because I think it’s the hardest to just understand.”

Three cases studies from Reconstruction-era America:

Kali Nicole Gross discusses power, sex, gender and race in late nineteenth-century Philadelphia in her book: Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso

Henry Wiencek looks back to the Oil boomtowns of the early twentieth century, and offers some historical perspectives on the current oil boom.

Karl Hagstrom Miller talks to us about Segregating Southern Pop Music on NEP and on 15 minute history, and then shares a list of recommended books on Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music.

Texas History:

Bruce Hunt highlights three technological innovations in late nineteenth-century Austin:

And finally, Nicholas Roland discusses Reconstruction in Austin: The Unknown Soldiers.

US Survey Course: The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History

Erika Bsumek discusses Navajo Artisans at the Trading Post, a late nineteenth-century Navajo rug held in the Art and Art History Library Collection at the University of Texas, and recommends more books on Navajo Arts and the History of the U.S. West

Book Recommendations:

Nathan E. McCormack recommends Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin, 2008).

And here is another from Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, (University of California Press, 2003), suggested by Henry Wiencek.

Continuing with an environmental approach to history, Hannah Ballard recommends The Republic of Nature, by Mark Fiege (University of Washington Press, 2012)

Hannah Ballard reviews 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End, by Scott W. Berg (Vintage, 2012).

Nakia Parker recommends Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

Jacqueline Jones suggests Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams.

James Jenkins reviews The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, by Alan Taylor (Vintage, 2010)

And finally, Erika Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark A. Lawrence highlight their broad environmental history Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History, (Oxford University Press, 2013), and five great books on the Environment on History & History in the Environment.

Erika Bsumek and Kyle Shelton show the importance of studying history and discuss their innovative course bringing the Humanities and STEM together, ‘Building America: Engineering Society and Culture, 1868-1980’.

From 15 Minute History: The Social Legacy of Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson’s presidency marked the introduction of a real maverick to the White House: a frontiersman from Tennessee, not part of the Washington elite, who brought the ideas of the people to the national government — or, at least that’s what his supporters claimed. But Jackson’s lasting political legacy instead comes from expanding the vote to all white males (not just landholder), and the tragic effects of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Guest Michelle Daneri from UT’s Department of History helps us sort through the political forces that brought Jackson to office, and the long lasting impact of his presidency.

Texas:

Nakia Parker explores an exhibit on the First Texans.

Neel Baumgartner discusses the history of Big Bend National Park.

And finally, Nathan Jennings highlights three fascinating sources held in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin:

Watching Soccer for the Very First Time in the American West

By Mark Sheaves

In the summer of 2014, when the World Cup was played in Brazil, around 3.2 billion (not million!) people watched at least one game of football, or as we like to call it here in the US, soccer. That’s nearly half the world’s population. The final between Germany and Argentina played at the Maracana, the so-called “Cathedral of Football,” drew an audience of about one billion people, probably representing the largest simultaneous experience in the history of humanity. That’s nearly ten times the viewers of this year’s Superbowl. And viewing numbers are just one way of judging the global reach of a sport played in parks, streets, and beaches almost everywhere in the world. Today, it is hard to imagine meeting someone anywhere in the world who has not watched or played the global game. With the European Championships kicking off in France this June, I was wondering: What would the sport look like to someone who had never seen it played?

I found an answer while conducting research on an entirely different topic. Trawling the digitalized local newspapers from early twentieth-century Kansas, I stumbled on an article titled “A Sunday with the Scotch at Maple Hill” published in The Topeka Daily State Journal on November 16, 1912. Reading the headline I hoped that the article might be about a rowdy party involving kilts, whisky, and bagpipes. But instead it was an account by an unnamed Topeka-based journalist describing his first ever soccer game.

In the Kansas countryside, a short drive west of Topeka, two teams lined up on a patchy field of grass in late-fall sunshine. Wheat swayed in the background, cattle wondered freely, and “the fruit trees and cabbage plants and fat pasture land mocked the poor, lean newspaper men from the city.” On one side stood the Topeka team composed of descendants of “the English shires and the Scotch Glens.” Their opponents were a Maple Hill team of “eleven husky Highlanders” who worked on the farms in rural Kansas. Bigger and stronger than their urban counterparts, the Maple Hill players are described as built like bears, with jaws made of cement, and faces weather-worn by the Scotch glens and the Kansas sun. This was a game between slender, quick urbanites and a team of strong, rugged farm workers. Skill and speed took on physical power that day, which is still a recognizable dynamic in the soccer world.

And then the game kicked off and the newspapermen watched on, trying to make sense of a game with “no hidden details or smothered intricacies.” Without a sporting lexicon to draw from, the journalist relied on animal metaphors and contemporary references to describe what he saw. Some of these create wonderful images of a game played between a zoo of hybrid animals. A Maple Hill player has “a face like a hawk, hair grey as a badger and standing up like a shock. He was a bearcat to follow the ball.” At another moment, the author explains that the Topeka goalkeeper “had more troubles in the game than a bear in a bee yard.” But he reserves his best descriptions for the Maple Hill defense:

“The three Maple Hill Scots guarded the goal like a bulldog watching a baby buggy. Jackson stood like a tree. Reid had the displacement of a battleship. Warren covered the ground like a crop of wheat.”

Living now in an era where sports commentators usually draw on a set of clichés, it is refreshing to read this journalist describe the game in such original language.

At some points the game is almost entirely unrecognizable to a current soccer fan. A section titled “Kicking a ‘Human’ Goal” describes the brutal events that led to Maple Hill’s fourth goal. Moments after the Topeka goalkeeper successfully caught the ball, five of the Maple Hill “clan” bundle him to the floor and then kick the ball and man through the posts. Amazingly, the goal stood while the fans on the sidelines “swore joyously in the Gaelic tongue”. The Topeka goalkeeper “got up with the worst grouch this side of the Balkan war zone.” A picture depicts this moment, which was one of the highlights for the journalist. Such play now would probably result in a lengthy ban for the offending players, but the game played that day at Maple Hill appears to have been largely lawless.

Back in 1912, the violent nature of this game should not come as a massive surprise. During the nineteenth century, Americans played a diverse range of sports involving kicking, running, and outright fighting. These games derived from ill-defined versions of rugby, football, and the medieval game of mob football, the latter being a ferocious chaotic event pitting neighboring European communities against each other as they fought to drag an inflated pigs bladder to a designated point. And of course, it was from this mosaic of sporting activities that some kind of standardized rules for American football came into being in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the game at Maple Hill was primarily about kicking a leather ball, and no animal innards were involved, the violence of Highlanders certainly echoes elements drawn from other sports including the recently developed American football.

This one-off game also sheds light on a largely forgotten history of soccer in the US. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, businesses, churches, schools, and ethnic community organizations established teams, leagues and associations in the hope that soccer would become the nation’s favored sport. While mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans is thought to be the first home of soccer in America, the game really took off in the northeast under the stewardship of the American Football Association, founded in 1884. By the second decade of the twentieth-century when the Maple Hill game took place, soccer matches drew large crowds in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and increasingly in cities further west such as St. Louis. The game at Maple Hill is part of this westward expansion of soccer. It was just one example of a series of matches organized by Tom Powell, a Topeka businessman, who devoted his energy to bringing the game to the Kansas area in the 1910s. However, as with most other parts of the country, these soccer initiatives declined with the increasing popularity and professionalization of American football and baseball. Yet, these early twentieth century games point to a richer history of soccer in the US than is usually recognized.

A mob football match played at London’s Crowe Street in 1721. Via Wikipedia.

Oh, and the score between Maple Hill and Topeka? The reporter does not give it. Maple Hill certainly won, and scored at least four goals. No mention is made of a Topeka goal. This was a friendly match, in the sense that the score mattered only for pride, and for the journalist the final result mattered less than the enjoyment he derived from watching his first ever game. Perhaps this emphasis on play and community rather than results is one we might hope to return in the face of the ever-increasing monetization and business oriented approach of the sport.

All Images and quotes are from: The Topeka state journal. (Topeka, Kan.), 16 Nov. 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

American Zionism and Soviet Jews

By Michael Dorman

During the early 1960s American Jews began realizing the severity of the anti-Semitic policies under which the 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union were living. This sparked an organized effort across American Jewish communities to raise awareness about the human rights violations being faced by Soviet Jews. Throughout the decade the White House frequently received letters from Jewish organizations and leaders requesting that the President use his influence to persuade the Soviets to rethink their anti-Semitic policies. Jewish organizations also wrote directly to the Soviet government pleading for it to ease its discriminatory policies targeted at Jewish culture and religious practices. Letters sent to the Kremlin were often asking the Soviet government to merely follow its own laws, citing cultural freedom as a right that was granted to all Soviet citizens in the 1917 Declaration of Rights. Another common request sent to the Soviet government was that Soviet Jews, who had been separated from family members as a result of the Holocaust, be allowed to reunite. Many organizations, especially those with an underlying Zionist agenda, used such arguments with the Soviets (and the White House) in hopes that it would provide a convincing pretense for a mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

In response to Zionist efforts to use the discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to increase the population of Israel, Jewish anti-Zionists leaders began writing to the White House expressing their concerns. During his time in office, President Johnson, a strong and vocal supporter of Jewish causes, received numerous letters from anti-Zionist rabbis and Jewish organizations asking him to take their views and solutions into consideration. These letters were primarily aimed at explaining to the Johnson administration that Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, thus supporting a Zionist approach in the Soviet Union should not be thought of as supporting a Jewish approach. These letters often point out that the vast majority of the American Jewish community at that time was either not supportive of the Zionist movement or outright anti-Zionist.

Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Via Wikipedia.

One letter in particular, sent to President Johnson by The American Council For Judaism, an organization of Anti-Zionist, reform rabbis, was quite explicit in expressing opposition to Zionism. In this letter the Council attempts to draw the White House’s attention to the fact that Zionism is not the humanitarian rescuing of the Jews, nor should it be viewed as a movement that is particularly inline with the tenets of Judaism as a religion. The letter explains to the president that, from the Council’s perspective, the aim of Zionism is not to create a Jewish state, but a Zionist state, emphasizing ethnicity over religion.

The letter goes on to point out that Zionists have worked hard to make it so that criticism of Israel (especially by non-Jews) has become synonymous with criticism of Jews as a whole, and sometimes unjustly labeled anti-Semitism. According to the Council this is an intentional way to not only deflect criticisms of Zionist ideologies, but also to make criticism of the State of Israel and its legitimacy completely off limits. As a result of this, many American Jews and non-Jews shied away from speaking out against the Johnson administrations’ whole hearted support of Zionism and the solutions it offered in efforts to ease the plight of Soviet Jews.

As the decade progressed, Jewish special interest groups would continue to work with the White House in the battle to end the state imposed hardships on Soviet Jewry. Ultimately the Israeli voice would prevail, and during the 1970’s a noticeable trickle of Soviets emigrants to Israel would begin. This is perhaps to be expected, as every Prime Minister Israel has ever had was either born in the Russian Empire or born to parents born in the Russian Empire, thus the connection to the region’s Jewish population runs deep among Israel’s elites. Over the next several decades more than a million Jews would leave the USSR (and the post-Soviet territories) to settle in Israel.

The documents cited in the essay are held in the LBJ Library and Museum, “White House Central File; RM (Religious Matters) Box #7. They include a letter from the American Council For Judaism to Jack Valentini on December 18,1963, a letter from the American Council For Judaism to President Johnson on January 25, 1967, a letter from the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to Bill Moyers on December 8, 1966, a letter from Richard Korn (president of the American Council For Judaism) to President Johnson on June 16,1966, and a letter from the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum and Rabbi S. A. Berkowits to President Johnson on September 23,1966.

Remembering Chernobyl

By Michael Dorman

In the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl reactor number four experienced a series of explosions that resulted in the world’s most devastating nuclear disaster to date. The local population did not believe that a nuclear accident could happen in the Soviet Union, so no one living or working in the affected areas had been properly prepared or trained to respond to a nuclear accident. Soviet authorities at all levels of government were largely uninformed as to the procedures and precautionary measures that should have taken place. Local officials in Kiev waited a full 40 hours to receive orders from their superiors in Moscow. It took another two days for them to publicly acknowledge that the accident had occurred. On the Saturday morning following the explosion children went to school, men went fishing in the reactor’s cooling ponds, and, with the exception of those called to help at the reactor, the daily lives of those in the contaminated areas continued as usual. The reactions of party members and plant workers in the hours and days following the accident were characterized by fear, confusion, and an overall lack of understanding of the severity of the accident. Outside of the circles of upper level Soviet officials, no one would know that Belarus had received an amount of radioactive fallout equivalent to 350 nuclear bombs until 1989.

Map of Soviet Union - Administrative Divisions, 1989. Via Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries.

Map of Soviet Union Administrative Divisions, 1989. Belarus is colored green in the top left corner. Via Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries.

The Chernobyl nuclear energy facility in Ukraine was located just 16 km from the Belarusian border. As a result the radioactive rain (or “back rain”) that followed in the wake of the accident dispersed 70% of the total fallout on Belarus. This left 23% of the republic’s territory contaminated with cesium-137 and 80% contaminated by radioactive iodine. It is thought that many of the thyroid diseases that occurred immediately following the accident were caused by iodine 131, as the effects of the other forms of radiation that fell on Belarus would have taken much longer to manifest.

Since the catastrophe, 2.3 million Belarusians, including 700,000 children, have been affected by Chernobyl. In Gomel, Belarus’s second largest city, congenital deformities have increased 250 percent and birth defects have increased by 200 percent. The incidents of thyroid cancer in the Gomel region are 10,000 times higher than prior to the accident. With 2.1 million people currently living on contaminated land (just over one fifth of the population), it has been in the governments interest to downplay the effects of Chernobyl whenever possible. According to the NGO “Hope To Children In Trouble,” since the accident the deaths of 160 children in Belarus have been “black listed” in order to hide their causes of death and to deflate statistics regarding the birth defects and congenital diseases in republic. In Voices From Chernobyl, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich includes an interview from the mother of (at the time) “the only child in Belarus to have survived being born with such complex pathologies.” The mother describes the body of her newborn daughter as being without an anus, vagina, and left kidney. This family was from a village that had initially been marked for evacuation but due to lack of government funds was left in place. Additionally, many birth defects that are life threatening in Belarus would require mere outpatient operations in most western countries. Cleft pallets, tonsillectomies, minor heart defects, and the likes can be fatal in Belarus due to the lack of advancements in the Belarusian medical system. Thus the seriousness of Chernobyl-related birth defects are greatly heightened due to the poor state of Belarusian health care.

In the latter days of the Soviet Union Belarus already had over 100 non-government organizations (NGOs) working within the republic to aid in the Chernobyl clean up and minimize the impact of the fallout on the children born in the contaminated areas. The idea of large scale problems being solved by non-government organizations rather than government agencies was a foreign concept in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. This skepticism of NGOs has largely carried over into independent Belarus. The tendency among government officials has been to treat NGOs with suspicion while looking to Moscow to provide funding (even after 1991), as accepting help from western organizations contradicts decades of deeply engrained Soviet values. Since the mid 1990’s, many of the NGOs operating in the Republic of Belarus have either left or found themselves operating under hostile regulatory conditions. Currently in Belarus, 114 NGOs continue to operate; however, their projects must stay apolitical in nature, avoiding the temptation to encourage a more democratic civil society in the republic. Additionally, while many of these NGOs have spent millions of U.S. dollars renovating and building facilities to provide various forms of care for those affected by Chernobyl, their stories are completely absent from Belarusian media.

Nearly 25 years after the collapse of communism, the debate over the scope of the devastation Chernobyl caused in Belarus continues, with many western organizations such as the United Nations and World Health Organization dismissing the effects of the accident and attributing the rise of all health problems, with the exception of those related to thyroid diseases, to “radiophobia.” Since the accident, Chernobyl’s visibility in Belarusian media has steadily declined, finally reaching its present state of virtual nonexistence. As Olga Kuchinskaya points out in The Politics of Invisibility, “those who should worry most, or at least more, often appear to be the least concerned; the experience of living with increased radiation danger does not necessarily bring out more anxiety.” This observation not only disputes the idea that radiophobia is a legitimate issue in Belarus, but most importantly points to the fact that the dangers of radiation and the gravity of Chernobyl’s effects have been extirpated from the national consciousness of Belarusians.

Sources and Further Reading

Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl. Cambridge, Massachusettes: MIT, 2014. Print.

Cliodhna Russell, “Column: How My Trip to a Children’s Mental Asylum in Belarus Made Me Proud to Be Irish.” TheJournalie. N.p., n.d. Web. Nov. 30, 2015.

Vladimir Tsalko, “Mineral Resources.” Brill’s New Pauly (n.d.): n. pag. Web. Dec. 5, 2015.

David R. Marples, Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Print.

David R. Marples, “Chapter 8.” The Long Road to Recovery: Community Responses to Industrial Disaster. Tokyo: United Nations UP, 1996. 183-230. Print.

Chernobyl Heart: The Dark Side of Nuclear Power. Dir. Maryann DeLeo. 2003. Youtube.

“STRANGLING THE NGO COMMUNITY.” Human Rights Watch. N.p., 1997. Web. Dec. 6, 2015.

Valentina Pokhomova, “Belarusian Victims of Chernobyl – Hope to Children in Trouble.” Belarusian Victims of Chernobyl – Hope to Children in Trouble. N.p., 2015. Web. Dec. 6, 2015.

“Belarusian Civic Organizations Database – En.ngo.by.” Belarusian Civic Organizations Database – En.ngo.by. N.p., n.d. Web. Dec. 7, 2015.

“Map of Chernobyl Fallout.” Http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/, n.d. Web. Dec. 4, 2015.

Killing a King, by Dan Ephron (2015)

By Emily Whalen

Yigal Amir has never denied assassinating Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Days after he publicly shot Rabin at close range after a peace rally, the young extremist calmly recreated the event for police officers at the crime scene in Tel-Aviv. When police interrogating him informed Amir that Rabin had died from his wounds, Amir was “ecstatic,” asking for liquor to toast his accomplishment. Yet, to this day, conspiracy theories about Rabin’s death abound, with many on the Israeli extreme right suggesting that Shin Bet (or Shabak, the Israeli intelligence agency) orchestrated the killing to drum up sympathy for the Palestinian peace process. With an eye to understanding this surreal state of affairs, Dan Ephron interweaves two narratives: the story of Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts toward building a sustainable peace with the Palestinians and the story of Yigal Amir, whose interpretation of Jewish law and radical conservatism led him to plan and carry out the killing of a prime minister.

After Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed the first Oslo Accords in 1993, the divisions already splintering Israeli society cleaved even deeper, pitting liberal, secular Israelis against a conservative, religious right. By 1994, when Rabin and Arafat signed the Cairo Agreement, those divisions had widened into chasms. The Cairo Agreement initiated the second step in the Oslo Process, limited Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories. Withdrawal further fueled the already blazing anti-Rabin rhetoric in Israel. Ephron writes in lucid detail about anti-Rabin protesters “burning pictures of the prime minister, chanting ‘Death to Rabin’…’Rabin the Nazi’ and ‘In blood and fire, we’re drive Rabin out.’” The right wing of the Israeli political class, Ephron insinuates, took advantage of the charged rhetorical atmosphere to score electoral points. As one particular protest roiled in the streets of Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud leaders silently watched from a hotel balcony—perhaps not actively complicit, but lending an air of legitimacy to violent, angry rhetoric.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, shaking hands with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, with U.S. President Bill Clinton in the center at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, Sept. 13, 1993. (Vince Musi / The White House)

Yigal Amir, a charismatic young activist from a Yemeni Jewish family, believed the Cairo Agreement amounted to treason. His roots in the extreme religious right and connections to the settler community had already placed Amir on Shabak watch lists by 1995, though the agency never scrutinized him individually. Shabak, designed to respond to threats from Palestinian terrorist groups, shifted clumsily to meet the rising menace of Jewish extremism in the years between Oslo I and Rabin’s assassination. Ephron’s book provides sensitive insights into the inner workings of the agency, exploring how bureaucratic inertia supported a series of questionable policy choices. For example, in the aftermath of the assassination, it came to light that a well-known right wing agitator close to Amir, Avishai Raviv, had in fact been an undercover Shabak agent. Questions regarding Raviv’s foreknowledge—and possible encouragement—of the assassination plot, plagued the agency for years (Raviv successfully defended himself against legal charges in 2000 for failing to prevent the assassination – he claimed that he had been operating under Shabak orders and that events spun out of control).

Binyamin Netanyahu speaks at the infamous “Rabin the Traitor” rally in Jerusalem, October 1995

Controversially, Amir justified his desire to assassinate Rabin within the parameters of Jewish law. Ephron explains din rodef, the law of the pursuer, a Talmudic principle permitting extrajudicial killing under extremely specific circumstances. Under din rodef, a Jew may kill a rodef—that is, someone who pursues another with an intent to kill—if absolutely no other means will stop the would-be murderer. Amir openly argued that Rabin’s concessions to Arafat and the Palestinians led to Jewish deaths, thus making Rabin a rodef. Most rabbis agree that din rodef doesn’t apply to public figures, but in Ephron’s interviews, Amir’s brother Hagai suggested the assassin “received at least an implicit confirmation [from right-wing rabbis] that din rodef applied to Rabin.” Confusion over din rodef, Ephron claims, and the rampant conspiracy theories surrounding Rabin’s death have allowed the religious extreme right in recent years to both justify Amir’s act and absolve the assassin of blame.

The latter part of the book develops a third narrative: Ephron’s own efforts to debunk conspiracy theories about Rabin’s murder. Ephron’s certainty about Amir’s sole responsibility wavers in the final chapters as the author attempts to identify a mysterious hole in the shirt Rabin wore the day of the assassination. The hole, troublingly, does not align with bullet wounds described in Rabin’s autopsy—not even Dalia Rabin, the prime minister’s daughter, can say with certainty if Amir was the only shooter. Ephron’s willingness to entertain all possibilities makes for a gripping conclusion.

Since the Rabin assassination, Israeli social and political culture has undergone a fundamental transformation—and a profound polarization. Violent rhetoric, it appears, does have consequences. After Amir murdered Rabin, the seemingly inexorable—although shaky—Palestinian peace process ceased, ushering in the Benjamin Netanyahu era of extreme-right politics. Killing A King offers a provocative perspective on how quickly the world around us can become unrecognizable. Dalia Rabin admits that now, “I don’t feel I’m a part of what most people in this country are willing to do.” Even the recent past, Ephron suggests, is another country.

You may also like Itay Eisinger’s NEP article published on the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

By Christopher Babits

In this history of popular religion and spirituality, Matthew Hedstrom argues that books and book culture were integral for the rise of liberal religion in the twentieth century. After World War I, a modernizing book business and an emerging religious liberalism expanded the spiritual horizons of many middle-class Americans. The new spiritual forms of twentieth-century liberalism incorporated psychology, mysticism, and (to a lesser extent) positive thinking in their works. Hedstrom, like sociologist Christian Smith, believes that liberal religion achieved a stunning cultural victory after World War II.

Two key developments led to the rise of liberal religion: the embrace of the marketplace and the creation of middlebrow reading culture. In the 1920s, liberal Protestants turned to the marketplace, but on their own terms. They wanted people to read right. Middlebrow reading required that one read earnestly, intensely, and with purpose. Many liberal Protestants thought that this manner of reading would improve people. Middlebrow reading norms also required individual autonomy and expertise. Religious and cultural leaders carefully shepherded readers by offering comfortable — but limited — freedom to act as guided consumers. In other words, religious leaders still hoped to shape the purchases that laymen and laywomen made and the book industry complied.

The First World War destroyed the faith Americans had in simple notions of progress. In response to this crisis, liberal Protestant leaders, executives of the American publishing industry, and other cultural figures collaborated on a series of new initiatives to promote the buying and reading of religious books. These initiatives included the Religious Book Week, the Religious Book Club, and the Religious Books Round Table of the American Library Association. Major publishing houses, like Harper’s and Macmillan, established religious departments for the first time.

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925. Via Library of Congress.

In the interwar years, religious reading became a national concern as the United States faced the threat of fascism. Religious groups like the Council on Books in Wartime and the Religious Book Week campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) promoted reading. Hedstrom shows the widespread appeal of the Council’s slogan, “Books as Weapons in the War of Ideas.” The Second World War, for these groups, was not only an ideological battle, it was also a spiritual struggle for the soul.

US Government Poster from 1942. Via Library of Congress.

Harry Emerson Fosdick. Via Wikipedia.

After the war, Americans continued to turn to books for spiritual guidance. And the increasing belief that the United States was a Judeo-Christian nation formed the foundation of what Hedstrom calls “spiritual cosmopolitanism.” Letters to Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two of the most popular post-World War II authors of liberal religion, display Americans’ newfound eagerness to read religious and spiritual works from authors of other faiths. These letters also provide keen insight into who was reading spiritual books and why and how they were reading them. Many Americans were religious, even if they were not attending church on Sundays. Readers of middlebrow religious culture were trying to grapple with religious questions about the Second World War, morality, and spirituality. Fosdick and Liebman helped them find answers.

The Rise of Liberal Religion is revisionist history in the best possible sense. By emphasizing “lived religion,” or the spaces where religion is practiced and faith is formed, Hedstrom shows that the numerical decline of mainline Protestant churches and churchgoers matters less than previous historians insisted. In addition, Hedstrom challenges the master narrative that conservative Christianity dominated the post-World War II religious landscape. Despite this, readers might find a few shortcomings. First, Hedstrom makes too many sweeping declarations about liberal religion after the 1950s. For example, he points to Americans’ incorporation of yoga as a form of spiritual cosmopolitanism, but it is not clear that liberal religion in the U.S. made a conscious effort to incorporate yoga into its practice. More important, Hedstrom provides little evidence about the lived religious experiences of women, African Americans, and Native Americans. He asserts that middlebrow reading provided women agency, but the evidence from women themselves is somewhat thin. By emphasizing the vitality of liberal religious experience, Hedstrom has set a new agenda for the cultural history of U.S. religion, but that cultural history will have to incorporate more of the population of the faithful for it to have a real impact.

Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013)

You may also like these reviews by Christopher Babits:

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

And Robert Abzug’s discussion of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism

By Cali Slair

While totalitarianism did not first emerge in the twentieth century, the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933-1945) and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin (1924-1953) were distinct. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, seeks to explain why European populations were amenable to totalitarianism in the twentieth century and to identify what factors distinguish modern totalitarian regimes. Arendt was born into a German-Jewish family in Hanover, Germany in 1906 and in 1933, fearing Nazi persecution, she left Germany. The Origins of Totalitarianism is Arendt’s attempt to better understand the tragic events of her time.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt explores the histories of anti-semitism and imperialism and their influence on the development of modern totalitarian regimes. Arendt argues that anti-semitism, race-thinking, and the age of new imperialism from 1884-1914 laid the foundation for totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Arendt traces how racism and anti-semitism were used as instruments of imperialism and nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe. Arendt shows that imperialism and its notion of unlimited expansion promoted annexation regardless of how incompatible a country may have been. Nationalism developed along with imperialism, and foreign peoples who did not fit in with the nation were oppressed. Modern totalitarian regimes, aware of the efficacy of these instruments, used them in pursuit of their singular goals.

Arendt argues that the origins of totalitarianism in the twentieth century have been too simplistically attributed to nationalism, and totalitarianism has been too easily defined as a government characterized by authoritative single-party rule. Arendt also argues that scholars and leaders have mistakenly equated nationalism and imperialism. Arendt rejects the notion that a dictatorship is necessarily totalitarian. Dictatorships can be totalitarian, but they are not inherently totalitarian. Totalitarian governments are characterized by their replacement of all prior traditions and political institutions with new ones that serve the specific and singular goal of the totalitarian state. Totalitarian governments strive for global rule and are distinguished by their successful organization of the masses. In fact, Arendt argues that totalitarianism is significantly less likely to originate in locations with small populations.

Arendt also argues that modern totalitarian regimes are defined by their use of terror. Totalitarian terror is used indiscriminately; it is directed at enemies of the regime and obedient followers without distinction. Arendt argues that, for modern totalitarian regimes, terror is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. Arendt states that modern totalitarian regimes used alleged laws of history and nature that noted for example, the inevitability of war between chosen and lesser races, to justify terror. Arendt also argues that the bourgeoisie’s rise in power eroded the political realm as a space for freedom and deliberative consensus and contributed to the amenability of populations to totalitarianism.

According to Arendt, the appeal of totalitarian ideologies is their ability to present a clear idea that promises protection from insecurity and danger. After World War I and the Great Depression, societies were more receptive to these ideas. These ideas are fictional and the success of totalitarianism hinges on the regime’s ability to effectively obscure the distinctions between reality and fiction. One way this is accomplished is through propaganda.

Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is an influential work that takes on the difficult task of trying to understand the devastating rise of Nazi Germany and Soviet Stalinism.

You may also like these articles in our Social Theory series:

Abikal Borah on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe

Joshua Kopin discusses Walter Benjamin on Violence

Ben Weiss explain’s Slavoj Žižek’s theory of Violence

Jing Zhai on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Charles Stewart talks about Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

Katherine Maddox on Ranajit Guha’s ideas about hegemony

50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective

By Nancy Bui

Most Americans, including policy makers, and Vietnam Veterans have expressed their lack of knowledge of Vietnam’s history and culture before US’s involvement in Vietnam to fight a war over ideology. The War cost over 58,000 American lives and claimed the lives of over a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers, over a million of North Vietnamese troops and an estimated 7 million civilians from both North and South Vietnam.

The war was over, but the misunderstandings continued. What can we learn from this war? Perhaps, we may want to look at the war from the Vietnamese perspective. After all, we carry the largest cost of the war and suffered unspeakable atrocities long before and long after America’s involvement. The outcome of the War has affected us tremendously and the ongoing process of healing will take us generations.

On May 8, 1965, 3,500 U.S Marines landed in Da Nang, a beach town North of South Vietnam. It marked the year America officially got involved in The Vietnam War by sending ground troops. However, for the Vietnamese, the war had started many years before. After World War II, Ho Chi Minh, an expat who was away from Vietnam for over 30 years, introduced communism into Vietnam. The Vietnamese have had a history of fighting for our sovereignty long before communism arrived. Our people fought the French for our independence from 1885, and we quickly had to fight another war against communists at the same time. In 1954, the Geneva Accords was signed to divide Vietnam into two parts at the 17th parallel. The North belonged to the communist party, and the South belonged to the free Vietnamese.

On May 19, 1959, Ho Chi Minh’s 69th birthday, with help from Russia and China, North Vietnam officially kicked off the invasion of South Vietnam. The South fought back in a Guerrilla War which lasted from 1959-1963. America wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and sent troops to Vietnam. President Ngo Dinh Diem on the other hand, only wanted economic aid, weapons, and training, because he believed that any foreign troops on Vietnamese soil would sooner or later offend the Vietnamese people, as fighting for their sovereignty from foreign invaders was their way of life. The conflict ended in his assassination on Nov. 2, 1963.

After sending troops to Vietnam, the conflict extended into a Total War. The battlefields became bloodier and bloodier. Over half a million U.S troops were in South Vietnam by 1968. Vietnam lost the media war, as public opinion and support for the War rapidly declined, triggering a decade of antiwar demonstrations. America started pulling troops out of Vietnam. By the end of 1972, all combat troops were completely withdrawn. In early 1973, Congress passed the resolution to prohibit any funding of The Indochina War. The US was quick to get involved in the war, but was even quicker to retreat from it.

The South Vietnamese Army fought for over two years without any outside assistance. On the other hand, Russia and China more than doubled their aids to North Vietnam. The South fought to their last bullet and finally surrendered on April 30, 1975. The following two slides offer further information what happened after the war.