Stanford University Press Blog

A Stalinist Textbook for the Modern College Classroom?

Introducing a New Primary Source for the Study of History from Medieval Kyiv Rus’ to the Soviet Union

DAVID BRANDENBERGER

In 2023, Vladimir Putin mandated a new patriotic history curriculum for the Russian public schools that rewrites key elements of twentieth- and twenty-first century history in order to reinforce his rule and justify the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many commentators have judged this historical revisionism to be dramatic enough to evoke associations with the rewriting of history that took place under Joseph Stalin during the 1930s. And indeed, the similarity of these curricular materials turns out to be more than just rhetorical, insofar as both instill a belief in statism and authority, as well as intense suspicion of those who would oppose Moscow, whether foreign or domestic.

Amid all this nostalgia for the Stalinist past, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Russian publishers have rereleased some of the most famous textbooks of the period to flank the new public school curriculum. Coincidentally, I’ve also just published a critical edition of perhaps the most important of those texts with Stanford University Press—Andrei Shestakov’s 1937 Short History of the USSR. Aside from drawing attention to the scholarly merits of the book, I’d like outline here several ways in which this central piece the Stalinist canon can play a constructive role in college-level classrooms today.

 

Stalin’s Usable Past: A Critical Edition of the 1937 Short History of the USSR, edited by David Brandenberger (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2024).

 

Presidential Immunity and the Supreme Court

Stanford University Press authors weigh in on Trump v. United States

Exterior of the United States Supreme Court By USCapitol, Public Domain, Via Wikimedia Commons

     

In light of the Supreme Court's recent decision on presidential immunity, we have gathered a small selection of responses from our authors. 

---

 

David M. Driesen, author of The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power »

The Specter of Dictatorship» reveals how the U.S. Supreme Court's presidentialism threatens our democracy and what to do about it.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision provides another example of how autocrats defeat checks and balances by capturing apex courts. We’ve seen the same thing act as a prelude to the loss of democracy in Hungary and many other countries.

If Trump is elected, this opinion offers him opportunities to rapidly vanquish democracy. The dissent pointed out that the Court’s rulings allow the President to order Navy Seals to assassinate a political rival or initiate a coup without fear of criminal sanction.  Steven Bannon has claimed that Trump will use the Insurrection Act to put down demonstrators if he is elected, and Trump has confirmed this, saying that he plans to establish a dictatorship for one day. This ruling frees Trump to order troops (or a paramilitary force drawn from immigration agencies if the military refuses) to fire upon demonstrators without fear of any consequences, which would go a long way toward establishing the fear necessary to sustain a dictatorship.  

            Trump has promised to follow the pattern of autocrats around the world by using investigation and prosecution of innocent political opponents to sideline them. A constitutional custom has long prohibited Presidents from making decisions about whom to investigate or prosecute. Functional democracies always obey such norms. This custom led the Department of Justice (DOJ) to resist Trump’s requests to investigate or prosecute Trump’s political opponents during his first term when there was no evidence of any crimes.

            But the immunity decision undermines the constitutional norm against presidential direction of prosecution. Justice Roberts stated that “the President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other DOJ officials.” His opinion identifies investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking as part of the executive power vested in the President, without any mention of the norm aimed at preventing its abuse.

            Trump’s Supreme Court has become an enemy of the Constitution and the rule of law. It now resembles the courts that have hastened the end of democracies in many countries after an elected autocrat has appointed many of their members.

Another Archive of Feelings

Reflections on Before Trans

RACHEL MESCH

  Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France »
 by Rachel Mesch, now available in paperback

 

I did not set out to write a history of trans identities in nineteenth-century France. In fact, at first I thought I was writing a book about marriage. I wanted to examine the intellectual partnerships between certain women writers I had studied in my earlier books and their devoted husbands. It wasn’t long before I noticed that the women in those partnerships were far more interesting than the men. As my research continued, I realized that two of those writers whom I had always treated as women identified deeply with masculinity. The plot thickened, and a different project was born: Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France », reissued by Stanford University Press in paperback this Spring.

As a cisgender heterosexual scholar, I hesitated at the outset of my research to use the term transgender to refer to my first subject, the explorer-turned writer Jane Dieulafoy. I had studied Dieulafoy in my previous book, which was about modern women who could balance femininity with feminism in French women’s magazines at the turn of the century. Dieulafoy always stood out, in a well-tailored men’s suit, as the exception who proved the rule.

As I began to write about Dieulafoy, I found that, in 2015-– light years ago in terms of the history of trans studies– readers frequently misunderstood what I meant. They kept assuming that I was analyzing someone who wore pants as an idiosyncratic feminist act. I realized that in order to write about transgender identity, I needed to name it as such. Not a simple feat, of course, because the term did not yet exist in the nineteenth century. But clearly, as my research proved, there were people in this time– and as we know now, in every century– who felt misaligned with the gender assigned to them at birth. This deeply ingrained sense of self was the reason that Dieulafoy, an otherwise deeply conservative figure, would subvert gender norms. Soon I would come to understand that the writer Rachilde was similarly misunderstood. Rachilde was often described as someone who “resisted interpretation”– so full of contradictions were their writings and persona. But once you recognized nonbinary identity as the motivating impulse of Rachilde's challenges to gender norms, everything about them seemed less contradictory. They wore pants and also did not see themself as a feminist. It suddenly made sense.

American Historical Association Conference 2024

 

In addition to our booth in the AHA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of History at SUP.

 

Announcements

Recent Award Winners

AHA Resources

 

---

Announcements

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S24XAHA through our virtual exhibit ».

 

Berkshire Conference of Women, Genders and Sexualities 2023

 

 

Announcements

Recent Award Winners

BCHW Resources

 

---

Announcements

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S23XBCHW through our virtual exhibit ».

---

Recent Award Winners

 

 

Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan 

SONIA AHSAN-TIRMIZI 

• Winner of the 2022 Fatema Mernissi Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). 
• Honorable Mention for the 2022 AMEA Bi-annual Book Award, sponsored by the Association for Middle East Anthropology (AMEA). 
• Honorable Mention for the 2022 AMEWS Book Award, sponsored by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies.

Organization of American Historians Meeting 2023

 

 

Announcements

New Digital Projects

Recent Award Winners

OAH Resources

 

---

Announcements

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S23XOAH-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

 

Shelley S. Lee wrote a special entry on our blog about Koreatown, L.A. and landmarks. Given that OAH is in Los Angeles this year, we hope this entry is of special interest.

Start reading KOREATOWN LANDMARKS OF THE PAST AND PRESENT »

 

---

New Digital Projects

America's Public Bible

America's Public Bible: A Commentary »

Lincoln A. Mullen 

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, newspapers in the United States—even newspapers which were not published by a religious denomination or organization—made frequent recourse to the Bible. Newspapers printed sermons and Sunday school lessons. They featured jokes whose punchlines required familiarity with the Bible and aired political commentary that cited the Bible on all sides of a given issue.

America's Public Bible is an interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. When the Bible was cited on one side or the other of an issue, only rarely was its meaning explicated rather than assumed. Those who cited the text most typically thought that their readers would understand its meaning precisely as they did. But the multiple and mutually exclusive ways in which newspapers used the Bible test that assumption. By identifying and studying quotations in American newspapers, the site offers a commentary on how the Bible was used in public life, uncovering trends and patterns that would be invisible to a single scholar's reading of these documents.

KOREATOWN LANDMARKS OF THE PAST AND PRESENT

Why a Oaxacan Restaurant in a Korean community makes perfect sense

SHELLEY S. LEE

View of Wilshire Blvd.,  facing westward, Koreatown, L.A.  Photo by Roxana Blacksea - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Black border added by SUP Social Media Specialist.

 

A landmark is an object or structure that serves as a point of orientation, often having historical or aesthetic interest, and evoking ideas about the places where they are located. Los Angeles—and Southern California more generally—is a land of landmarks. Those with which we may be most familiar—the Hollywood sign, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the Santa Monica Pier—evoke glamour, dreams, and sun. Such ideas and their association with particular landmarks played a powerful role in spurring settlement, promoting economic growth, and shaping a civic identity. When people see and interact with these landmarks, they also get to feel like they are touching up against the extraordinary and magical.

When landmarks become popular attractions, they seem to belong to everyone, but they also tell the stories and convey the aspirations of particular interests. While it may not be obvious or plain to the casual observer, they are borne out of power—who holds it; who seeks it; who claims the authority to define the meaning of a place.

The landscape of notable landmarks in Los Angeles goes well beyond the most recognizable and commonly cited points named above. Los Angeles is, after all, a city of tremendous diversity and a complex history. It is a city where people have seized power, vied for it, and sought to shape it. And if we dig into the history of Koreatown, a wealth of otherwise unappreciated landmarks emerge, revealing even more complex and fascinating histories.

American Historical Association Conference 2023

 

In addition to our booth in the AHA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of History at SUP.

 

Announcements

New Digital Projects

Recent Award Winners

AHA Resources

 

---

Announcements

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S22XAHA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

 

American Historical Association Conference 2022

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the AHA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of History at SUP.

 

Announcements

2022 History Catalog

Recent Award Winners

AHA Resources

 

---

Announcements

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S22XAHA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

 

What Would Jefferson Snap?

A Call on Gen Z to Rewrite the Constitution

BEAU BRESLIN

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1901. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.  Additional text added by the SUP Social Media Specialist.

 

Thomas Jefferson would have loved TikTok. He would have been a fierce champion of a generation of Americans – labelled Gen Z or iGen – that grew up with cell phones in their hands, a strong penchant for escapism, and an outsized regard for social media influencers.

You see, for Jefferson, it was all about thwarting tyranny. The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence herald his conviction: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another,” he wrote, “it is the right of the people to alter or abolish [the existing government], and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” His loathing of King George III on full display.

But those same sentiments and that same loathing, Jefferson would argue, should now be directed squarely at him. And at Madison. And Hamilton. At Adams and, yes, even George Washington. America’s most eloquent eighteenth-century wordsmith knew that tyranny was not the sole estate of a mad king. Despotism can also come in the form of one generation holding unconstrained political authority over another. “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living, the dead have neither rights nor powers over it,” he famously wrote to James Madison, by which he meant that one generation has no more right to regulate the lives and liberty of another than does a foreign power have the right to oppress its colonial subjects. Today’s Americans, he would say, should shed the chains that unjustly bind them to the founding generation.

Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Conference 2021

 

 

 

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the SHAFR exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of History and Foreign Relations at SUP.

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

Recent Award Winners 

SHAFR Resources

 

---

New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History and Foreign Relations titles with discount code S21CSHAF-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

 

 

 

Margo Irvin, SUP's History Acquisitions Editor, says hello to SHAFR and explains her areas of interest.

American Historical Association Conference 2021

 

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the AHA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of History at SUP.

 

Events

New Books and New SUP Authors

2021 History Catalog

Recent Award Winners

New in Stanford Digital Projects

AHA Resources

 

---

Events

January 11th, 12 PM (ET)

Prose and the Prosaic: Historians Writing about Historical Experiences, Including Their Own »

Panelists: Fabio Lanza (Chair), Xenia Cherkaev, Susan Crane, Ananya Chakravarti

"How do historians craft historical narratives that adequately witness the experience of historical research? How much “sausage making” does the reader of a historical narrative deserve – or desire? Today’s historians have a rich variety of options for writing histories that may reach an audience beyond academia and sharing with readers the choices they made in the production of their narratives. This panel will address recent innovations in historical writing through the work of researchers who risk their authorial presence in text: their hesitations and perceived strictures as well as successfully negotiated strategies for overcoming them. Panelists include an anthropologist working on Soviet-era historical thought; a historian of early modern India; and a historian of historical consciousness with a background in modern Europe. Panelists will present papers followed by audience Q&A. This session will not be recorded."

Inequality and Poverty in China’s West

C. Patterson Giersch introduces his new book Corporate Conquests

C. PATTERSON GIERSCH

President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People 2016 by 美国之音. From Voice of America Chinese. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

It’s 2020, and Xi Jinping's promise to eradicate rural poverty comes due this year. By most accounts, China has achieved extraordinary success in poverty reduction over the last few decades, but it seems unlikely Xi, no matter what he claims, will fulfill his promise, even despite a frantic sprint to the finish.

One reason that Xi will fail is the difficulty in eradicating poverty among western ethnic minority communities. Despite efforts to implement economic development specially tailored to each region, the Communist Party acknowledges that many “ethnic minority regions are still lagging behind on the path to moderate prosperity.”[1] As of 2016, up to 48 percent of those who lived in poverty were in these regions, where, according to Arthur Holcombe, “top-down…policies to reduce poverty have been least effective.”[2] Throughout China, poverty alleviation has been hampered by inequality and an inability to promote inclusive growth,[3] but these problems are particularly acute in minority communities.

Why has inequality and poverty proven difficult to address in China’s vast and ethnically diverse West? The simplest answers point to geography, not ethnicity: Chinese citizens in rural, inland provinces tend to be poor no matter what their ethnicity.[4]

However, a more accurate answer lies in the intertwined histories, stretching over the past century, of Chinese economic development, nation-building, and ethnicity. If one understands these intertwined histories, then it becomes clear why the Chinese state’s extraordinary efforts since 2000 to ‘Develop the West’ have largely failed to be equitable or to inspire widespread loyalty to Beijing. Instead of equity and inclusiveness, researchers find increasing ‘marginalization’ among ethnic minorities, leading some influential Chinese academics to conclude that long-standing policies to promote political autonomy and social equality for minorities have failed.[5] At the highest levels of government, moreover, that conclusion is shared and has led to Xi Jinping’s brutish policies of subjugation through the internment of Uyghurs and others.[6]

A Look at SUP's SHAFR Virtual Exhibit

SUP is excited to present new titles in the history of American foreign relations and the US in the world. While we wish we could meet with you face-to-face in New Orleans, Acquisitions Editor Margo Irvin is taking pitches from authors working on topics within international Cold War history; American empire and the history of science, technology, and medicine; and projects situated in the Pacific world, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. 

In lieu of our booth exhibit, please enjoy this Virtual Book Exhibit and receive a 30% discount and free shipping to the US and Canada on the books listed below using the discount code S20XSHAFR-FM. Offer ends 7/31/2020.

 

Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy »

ROBERT VITALIS

A bracing corrective to the myths that have shaped economic, military, and diplomatic policy, dispelling our oil-soaked fantasies of dependence.

There is a conventional wisdom about oil—that the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is what guarantees access to this strategic resource; that the "special" relationship with Saudi Arabia is necessary to stabilize an otherwise volatile market; and that these assumptions in turn provide Washington enormous leverage over Europe and Asia. Except, the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Robert Vitalis debunks the myths to reveal "oilcraft," a line of magical thinking closer to witchcraft than statecraft. Oil is a commodity like any other: bought, sold, and subject to market forces. Thus, the first goal of this book is to expose the suspect fears of oil scarcity and conflict. The second goal is to investigate the significant geopolitical impact of these false beliefs.

 

Learning the Lessons of Modern War »

EDITED BY THOMAS G. MAHNKEN

Learning the Lessons of Modern War uses the study of the recent past to illuminate the future. More specifically, it examines the lessons of recent wars as a way of understanding continuity and change in the character and conduct of war.

The volume brings together contributions from a group of well-known scholars and practitioners from across the world to examine the conduct of recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, South America, and Asia. The book's first section consists of chapters that explore the value of a contemporary approach to history and reflect on the value of learning lessons from the past. Its second section focuses on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chapters on Iraq discuss the lessons of the Iraq War, the British perspective on the conflict, and the war as seen through the lens of Saddam Hussein's military. Chapters on Afghanistan discuss counterinsurgency operations during the war, Britain's experience in Afghanistan, raising and training Afghan forces, and U.S. interagency performance. The book's third section examines the lessons of wars involving Russia, Israel, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Georgia, and Colombia. It concludes by exploring overarching themes associated with the conduct of recent wars.

 

Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis »

TOSHIHIRO HIGUCHI

Political Fallout is the story of one of the first human-driven, truly global environmental crises—radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War—and the international response. Beginning in 1945, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, scattering a massive amount of radioactivity across the globe. The scale of contamination was so vast, and radioactive decay so slow, that the cumulative effect on humans and the environment is still difficult to fully comprehend.

The international debate over nuclear fallout turned global radioactive contamination into an environmental issue, eventually leading the nuclear superpowers to sign the landmark Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963. Bringing together environmental history and Cold War history, Toshihiro Higuchi argues that the PTBT, originally proposed as an arms control measure, transformed into a dual-purpose initiative to check the nuclear arms race and radioactive pollution simultaneously. Political Fallout addresses the implications of science and policymaking in the Anthropocene—an era in which humans are confronting environmental changes of their own making.

Behind the Scenes of Gender Stories

A Q&A with Rachel Mesch

RACHEL MESCH

Card depicting Jane Dieulafoy. Public domain.

 

Last month, Stanford University Press hosted an online discussion between Rachel Mesch, author of the recently released Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France », and renowned queer theorist Jack Halberstam. The book follows the lives of Jane Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Marc de Montifaud, three gender non-conforming writers who explored their sense of self through a variety of late nineteenth-century discourses. Because attendees of the talk posed far more questions than could be answered in a short amount of time, we invited Rachel to continue the conversation here.

 

Could you share more of your book’s genesis story? How did you become interested in the topic and in these three figures in particular?

I became interested in the writer Jane Dieulafoy while I was researching my previous book on French women’s magazines in the Belle Epoque, where Dieulafoy stood out in tailored men’s suits alongside her similarly appareled husband, Marcel. I first tried to understand her in the context of my work on fin-de-siècle feminisms, but I quickly realized that what was at stake for Dieulafoy was something different. Two of her novels—Frère Pélage and Volontaire—told of young women who disguised themselves as men and achieved fame and glory, which then allowed them to continue to live as their masculine identities. These narratives mapped right onto Dieulafoy’s own life: she began wearing pants during the Franco-Prussian War and then resumed the practice while on an archaeological mission to the Middle East. I realized that she was working out her own self-understanding through the stories she told— an imaginative process that I recognized from contemporary trans memoirs. This led me to the idea of the “gender story,” which I argue was what constituted gender identity before modern discourses had been developed. I then started to think about other writers I had encountered who were preoccupied with gender and expressed themselves in ways that didn’t fit neatly into nineteenth-century categories.

 

How were these three figures’ behavior and gender expression seen at the time by their peers and society? Were these individual stories or did Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud have a sense of community or collectivity?

Although they lived in the same place and time, life was different for each of my three subjects. They knew of each other, but they frequented slightly different academic and literary spheres. While they were sometimes mentioned together in newspaper articles about women wearing pants, they weren’t the subject of any kind of collective outcry, in part because there wasn’t an obvious way to group them together beyond the pants-wearing. In the book, I follow their individual lives and the starkly different ways that they each made sense of themselves in relationship to the world around them, showing that not only has gender variance existed for a very long time, but that it has existed in uniquely personal ways. 

Dieulafoy was a celebrity because of her successful Orientalist exploits (there is a Dieulafoy room in the Antiquities Wing of the Louvre) and was part of a conservative upper-class milieu. She actually modeled herself on a certain conservative male imperialist culture. She truly avoided controversy, perhaps because everything else about her upheld social structures. Rachilde was seen as a rebel outlaw, and while she first found this reputation painful, she eventually embraced the persona—as well as a loveless marriage— because it allowed her the freedom to behave as she pleased. Montifaud struggled mightily against public perceptions through her many battles with the legal system. She was sentenced repeatedly to prison for her erotic writing and was continually enraged that she was expected to serve time at the women’s prison, where they sent prostitutes, rather than the all-male prison for censored writers and artists. But at the end of the day, she really just wanted to be left alone in the library. She hadn’t been seeking fame in the first place. My point is that these three formulated very distinct gender stories, despite all having lived at the same time, and likely at least brushing past each other at some point on the streets of Paris.