Cole Porter loved Paris in the fall (true, he loved it in the winter, spring, and summer too); I always think of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast when the weather turns autumnal: "the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside..." What is it about Paris and the fall that seem so perfect together?
I'd like to be holed up in a café (not that one, which was "sad and evilly run," but the "good café" that Hemingway knew "on the Place St.-Michel"), with a glass of white wine and a copy of John Baldwin's Paris 1200, an exquisite guide to the Paris of eight centuries ago. Using only contemporary sources, the voices of the city come alive to tell the story of what everyday life was like for the students, scholars, clerics, merchants, rulers and common people of 13th-Century Paris.
Can ordinary citizens really bring change to international politics? We may think this question applies only to current times when we talk of Gov 2.0 and governments outsourcing ideas from citizens on Twitter. As the nuclear disarmament campaign shows, grassroots movements have had an impact in previous decades as well.
Wittner's book includes many interesting quotations from world leaders that evidence just how excited international leaders initially were about the advent of the Bomb. Winston Churchill loved the bomb and saw it as a way to win wars and maintain international influence. Eisenhower viewed the bomb as a positive addition to the U.S. arsenal, saying "My administration looks on nuclear weapons as no different than a bullet." The general consensus among leaders was that bigger and better weapons lead to better defense and therefore a safer environment.
As Wittner goes on to explain, the public saw nuclear weapons in a different light. From the early 1970's to its height in the early 1980s, an anti-nuclear movement had people all over the world protesting the Bomb. As Marshall Poe himself reminisces, he never thought that his small protests really had a big impact. However, Wittner explains that the growing anti-nuclear campaign had a huge influence on world leaders' decisions, from small protests to gatherings of almost 1 million people. At the beginning of Ronald Reagan's term as president, he made clear that nuclear weapons were a positive addition to U.S. defense. But as time went on and as the disarmament campaign grew, the nation watched Reagan make a complete turn around. He began to consider the call for disarmament. Even leaders of other countries began to change the way they viewed nuclear weapons. After 1985, Nikolai Gorbachev said "new thinking" was needed. Gorbachev and Reagan met many times and were able to come to agreements for lessening the nuclear arsenals in their countries.
As leaders began to heed the requests of the public, people of the anti-nuclear movement became comfortable and complacent. The movement has since died down. Toward the late 1990's, the anti-nuclear movement became less prolific. As a result, nuclear weapons began to increase again. In 1996, a Republican Senate rejected a nuclear test ban treaty, and later, during George W. Bush administration, the President began to pursue the creation of new nuclear weapons. Free from the pressure of the nuclear disarmament campaign, the government is at liberty to pursue nuclear weapons -- but, as Wittner explains, the movement is reviving.
Wittner's book goes into a brief history of the advent of bomb and a more detailed history of the movement against it. Though the movement has had its ups and downs, Wittner is confident that it is resurging and as history shows, ordinary people can make a big difference.
In a recent post in The China Beat, Jeffrey Wasserstrom commends Bergere on the first English language book of this topic.
Shanghai, China's Gateway to Modernity is the fist comprehensive history of Shanghai in any Western language. Bergere’s tale takes readers back to when Shanghai first opened up to the world as a trading hub. She narrates the city’s beginnings as a treaty port in the mid 1800’s, the capitalist boom after the 1911 revolution, the fifteen years of economic decline after Japanese invasion in 1937, and the city’s years under communism. Her account shows that Shanghai is in a sort of evolutionary process that was set into motion a century and a half ago.
Eclipsed for three decades by socialism, Bergere’s account vividly shows how Shanghai is once again a symbol of China’s quest for modernity. Her book describes the city’s long and fascinating cultural history.
Look out for reviews and more news related to this book as we moved closer to publication.
Krepon’s own book Better Safe than Sorry places contemporary anxieties about nuclear proliferation in historical context. Krepon moves back in time providing context for today’s nuclear fears by examining past periods of nuclear danger. From the first and second nuclear ages, to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, all the way to the discovery of Sadam Hussein’s nuclear weapon program, Krepon provides a comprehensive historical story of “the bomb.”
Using his knowledge and expertise on the subject, Krepon compiled in Foreign Policy a list of the top literature surrounding nuclear weapons; from The Acheson-Lilienthal Report (1946) to The Master of the Game, Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace (1988). Though Krepon admits some of the literature is a little dated, it nevertheless contributes to the ever-evolving discussion surrounding nuclear proliferation – perhaps aiding in and leading to his own contribution to the field.
Gordon Barrass, author of the recently published book The Great Cold War, wrote an intriguing article in the The Guardian entitled Inside the Minds of Foes. Gordon draws on his knowledge of the Cold War while assessing the current situation in foreign affairs that President Obama now faces.
Barrass addressed the fact that Obama will have to reshape US foreign policy; and he cannot do so without good intelligence. Looking back upon the lessons of the Cold War, it is crucial that a leader can get into the mind of his adversary. An excerpt from the book, which Barrass also includes in his article, tells us: "One of the things that kept the cold war scary," secretary of defense Robert Gates recalled in 2006, "was the lack of understanding on each side of the mentality of the other."
The challenges that Obama’s administration faces now are, of course, fundamentally different then those of the Cold War; but Barrass informs us that “getting inside the mind” of the enemy should remain an important concern and guiding principle in foreign relations.
When seeking efforts to deter a nuclear Iran, or even in worrying about the possibility of terrorists acquiring nuclear or biological weapons within the next 5 years, the US must know more about the fears of their enemies and work toward a better intelligence system with new technologies. Barrass believes that the history of the Cold war reveals just how important intelligence is.
“There is another lesson the US will ignore at its peril - the need to grasp an adversary's culture. After Khrushchev shattered American self-confidence by putting Sputnik into space, Congress swiftly approved the National Defense Education Act. Soon many young Americans were studying Soviet affairs. They learned to look at what was really happening, rather than accept preconceived notions, especially the one about the Soviets being unfathomable. Now there is an equally urgent need for young Americans to comprehend the intricacies of more difficult languages and complex cultures.”
Using the insights from his work as a British diplomat during the Cold War, Barrass skillfully lays out what he thinks will be essential intelligence policy not just for the government, but for the people as well.
Nuclear proliferation is an ever present security concern. In a recent book by Michael Krepon, Better Safe Than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb, Krepon examines the ironies of living in a world with nuclear weapons. He divides history into two nuclear periods: the past up until 1991, and everything thereafter. Krepon’s ideas have been recently featured in The Economist and also in an op-ed on proliferation vs. abolition that Krepon wrote for UPI.
Krepon argues that while our current nuclear situation in no way compares to that of past years from WWII through the Cold War, the bomb is still a huge concern.
“I begin this book with a snapshot of where we are and then move back in time to snapshots of previous periods of presumed maximum nuclear danger. The purpose of these vignettes is to place contemporary anxieties into histori-cal context.”
A large part of the book is dedicated to addressing the irony that, though we remain in fear of the bomb’s use, countries have, and continue to build up their nuclear arsenals. A recent New York Times report addresses the fact that even defense strategies in the United States are becoming outpaced by the build-up of nuclear weapons in Iran and Pakistan.
Krepon argues: “I also believe that a sense of irony helps when working on nuclear problems. Good intentions can produce terrible results, and good outcomes can some¬times result from nefarious plans.”
As the article in the Economist explains, Krepon uses five principles from the cold war that can still apply in circumstances today: deterrence; conventional military strength; containment; diplomatic engagement; and a readiness on both sides to engage in arms control. As the struggle between abolition and proliferation occurs in this nuclear age –something that Krepon addresses in his own article – the greatest challenge to stability will depend on the 5 principles he lays out, especially in Pakistan and Iran where nuclear weapons are becoming a more legitimate concern.
Though it concerns very real dangers, Krepon’s book is not meant to scare the reader. As he puts it: “The United States has been through far worse periods of nuclear peril, and we have found safe passage. We can get through this mess as well. This is a hopeful book.”
Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is a groundbreaking volume that not only presents these artists’ important contributions to and influences on American art and culture, but also details the political and social conditions that have delayed the recognition of these achievements. It spans the period from the Gold Rush to the late 1960s, when a heightened civil rights and cultural consciousness began to emerge along with the emergence of Asian American Studies as a subject of academic study.
The volume is connected with a current exhibition at the de Young Museum, Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970, which continues through Jan. 18, 2009 in San Francisco. The art showcased in the volume and the exhibit presents familiar places, people and experiences in unfamiliar ways, allowing us to see America with “new eyes.” Chiura Obata’s Setting Sun: Sacramento Valley and Chang Dai-chien’s vision of Yosemite, Autumn Mountains in Twilight, offer fresh perspectives on the American landscape.
On seeing the exhibit, I was particularly struck by--Yun Gee'sWhere is My Mother, an early, poignant work where the artist expresses his sorrow at leaving his mother behind in China in color prisms of yellow, ochre, and green. An Untitled (Winter Internment Scene), by George Matsusaburo Hibi, painted in 1943 when the artist was confined with thousands of other Japanese Americans at the internment camp in Topaz, Utah. This stark and spare painting is at once gripping with isolated and dark figures moving through thick snow past gray barracks. The cascading destruction depicted in Eitaro Ishigaki's Disaster by Atomic Bomb is striking. And, the Bauhaus inspired modernism of Ruth Asawa's hanging wire sculptures disassembles any stereoptypical ideas one might have about the "asianness" of American art.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the volume's editors, Mark Johnson remarks, "I think the range and sophistication of expression and the complexity of references are going to take you aback," this show "expands our understanding of American cultural history. It isn't often that one gets to be a part of rewriting such an important chapter in our national cultural heritage."
The Stanford Asian American Art project, whose work resulted in this volume, found "over 1,000 professional artists working in California alone," said Gordon Chang (in an interview with the Stanford Report), adding that these were not Sunday afternoon artists but "professionals, who lived by their art." Over the years these artists' names disappeared from art history, said Chang (watch a video clip of the interview), leaving the project's researchers to "excavate knowledge, because the knowledge wasn't there." It was "an undercover, hidden history—a history hidden before my eyes. Most names were "erased," he said, as people who live on the margins of society often are. Hence, the researchers combed old newspapers, art school rosters and museum catalogs from a bygone era. They hunted down families and looked for artwork in "attics, basements, garages."
The volume covers several
of the most important centers of Asian American creative activity—from
New York to the West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los
Angeles, and exhumes the careers of more than two hundred artists—most
of whom are seen here for the first time in many decades, some in more
than a century. Profiled artists include painters, sculptors,
printmakers, photographers, textile artists, and ceramicists who were
active for a decade or more in the United States.
Also see a longer video of a panel discussion at the exhibit's opening at the de Young.
Proctor and Schiebinger's collection of essays looks at the study of ignorance in order to ask, "Why don't we know what we know?" and to show that ignorance can be a result of cultural and political struggles, rather than simply being an absence of knowledge.
McLemee argues that ignorance — and the awareness of one's own ignorance — is the foundation for attaining wisdom, that both knowledge and wisdom are interconnected and are "both socially produced and socially productive."
McLemee says that ignorance, "...serves to foster a wide range of social and cognitive goods," and says that the Agnotology essay by Michael J. Smithson, "Social Theories of Ignorance" addresses those benefits:
"A zone of carefully cultivated ignorance is involved in privacy and politeness, for example. It is also intrinsic to specialization. 'The stereotypical explanation for specialization,' writes Smithson, 'is that it arises when there is too much for any one person to learn anything.” But another way of looking at it is to regard specialization as a means whereby 'the risk of being ignorant about crucial matters is spread by diversifying ignorance.'"
Early
last week Mike Allen of Politico.com broke the news of Scott McClellan’s
forthcoming book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and
Washington’s Culture of Deception. In it, McClellan confesses to have
knowingly kept the public in the dark on many important issues. Public
ignorance of government affairs is not a new development, but the kinds of
egregious abuses of information-withholding McClellan claims in his book
warrant another look at how ignorance is created and promulgated. What don't we
know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive and allows it to be
used as a political instrument?
These
questions are addressed in Agnotology (May 2008), an introduction to the
study of how ignorance is produced and maintained. Through a collection of
essays, Proctor and Schiebinger present a new and much-needed perspective for
scholars across all research fields (most of whom have spent their careers
learning what is already known). They also provide a theoretical framework for
non-academics who can recognize ignorance as more than a void.
The
essays assembled in Agnotology strive to prove just that – that
ignorance is often much more than a void of knowledge; it is the outcome of
cultural and political struggles. Arguing that ignorance has a history and a
political geography all its own, the authors outline why there are more than a
handful of things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our
product" is the tobacco industry slogan).
The
authors acknowledge that the causes of ignorance are multiple and diverse;
ignorance can be “brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction,
secrecy, or suppression.” But to facilitate discussion, Proctor and Schiebinger
divide ignorance into three broad categories: ignorance as native state,
ignorance as lost realm, and ignorance as a deliberately engineered and
strategic ploy. By defining and discussing the different qualities of each
category, the authors demonstrate that ignorance can be the result of pure
innocence, pure deceit, and everything in between.
Why do
so few people know that the biggest building in the world is a facility built
to produce explosive uranium-235 near a nondescript town in southern Ohio? Why
did epidemiologists miss the high levels of vitamin deficiency diseases among
early-twentieth-century African Americans? How did the first probes into the
effects of alcohol on fetuses become “scientifically uninteresting”? Proctor
and Schiebinger give such questions serious reflection and provide examples
from many subject areas: from global climate change to military secrecy; from
the female orgasm to Native American paleontology.
According
to Proctor, Schiebinger, and the collection of essays in Agnotology,
there is a lot to know about what we don’t know. Ignorance may seem like
nothing but it is, in fact, a myriad of things: “It’s no excuse, it’s what
can’t hurt you, it’s bliss.”
In a recent review of books on race in The Nation, Thomas Sugrue wonders “How do we make sense out of a country where racial inequality is deeply entrenched but where racism is seldom overt? How can we square evidence of racial progress with the grim reality of persistent racialized poverty, unemployment, health and wealth gaps and educational disparities?”
Sugrue goes on to remark that, “While racial optimists emphasize the extraordinary progress blacks have made in the United States over the last half-century. Racial pessimists, by contrast, argue that racism is pervasive but well hidden. Peel away whites' colorblind rhetoric and beneath it you will find deep-rooted, perhaps subconscious, evidence of racial hatred.”
Stephen Steinberg author of, Race Relations (a book discussed in this review), would definitely qualify as a pessimist on this issue. Steinberg’s pessimism is based not only on the experiences of African-Americans in America today but also on how mainstream sociologists have theorized about concept of race, “reducing racism to the level of attitudes.” The preferred language of mainstream sociology when talking about race, “race relations” obfuscates the true nature and sources of racism. Steinberg writes: “A popular adage holds: ‘Don’t piss on me and call it rain.’ Applied to the sociologist, it might read: ‘Don’t deprive me of my rights, my livelihood, and my dignity and call it ‘race relations.’”
The book shows how sociologists, perhaps against their intentions, have advanced “a white sociology,” reflecting white interests and perspectives. This explains why they utterly failed to anticipate the black insurgency that culminated in a triumphant civil rights movement and why they fail to see the separate and unequal status of blacks today. In Steinberg's view, this is because sociology since its inception has been more preoccupied with pacification than with racial justice.
Steinberg is critical of both writers on the political right when they trample on the rights of minorities, including the right to preserve their native languages and cultures, and of writers on the political left who engage in wishful thinking about the viability of the multicultural project or who go the other way and are impatient to get "beyond race" and "beyond ethnicity.” According to Sugrue, “Steinberg is relentlessly polemical, often witty and sometimes brilliant in his debunking of the conventional wisdom. Like all iconoclasts, he overstates his case. But for all of his rhetorical excess, his argument that the mainstream of twentieth-century social science downplayed racial oppression and exploitation for individualistic understandings of race relations is powerful and convincing, and it needs to be heard as he shouts it from the rooftops.”
Sugrue concludes that “Steinberg's larger argument--that racial inequality is ultimately a matter of oppression and exploitation, not personal prejudice and bigotry--stands. The story of inequality is one of the maldistribution of power and resources. Racial inequality has persisted in American life not just because whites harbor bad thoughts about blacks but because the advantages that redound to whites through racial segregation, especially in housing and education, have yet to be dismantled.”
