The Brontës and the Fairy Tale (Ohio UP, 2024) by Dr. Jessica Campbell is the first comprehensive study devoted to the role of fairy tales and folklore in the work of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë. It intervenes in debates on genre, literary realism, the history of the fairy tale, and the position of women in the Victorian period. Building on recent scholarship emphasizing the dynamic relationship between the fairy tale and other genres in the nineteenth century, the book resituates the Brontës’ engagement with fairy tales in the context of twenty-first-century assumptions that the stories primarily evoke childhood and happy endings. Dr. Campbell argues instead that fairy tales and folklore function across the Brontës’ works as plot and character models, commentaries on gender, and signifiers of national identity.Scholars have long characterized the fairy tale as a form with tremendous power to influence cultures and individuals. The late twentieth century saw important critical work revealing the sinister aspects of that power, particularly its negative effects on female readers. But such an approach can inadvertently reduce the history of the fairy tale to a linear development from the “traditional” tale (pure, straight, patriarchal, and didactic) to the “postmodern” tale (playful, sophisticated, feminist, and radical). Dr. Campbell joins other contemporary scholars in arguing that the fairy tale has always been a remarkably elastic form, allowing writers and storytellers of all types to reshape it according to their purposes.The Brontës are most famous today for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, haunting novels that clearly repurpose fairy tales and folklore. Dr. Campbell’s book, however, reveals similar repurposing throughout the entire Brontë oeuvre. The Brontës and the Fairy Tale is recursive: in demonstrating the ubiquity and multiplicity of uses of fairy tales in the works of the Brontës, Campbell enhances not only our understanding of the Brontës’ works but also the status of fairy tales in the Victorian period. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global (Ohio UP, 2024) presents the stories of scientists at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), a biomedical center founded in 1936. The book analyzes the strategies and conditions that allowed the institute to endure and thrive through successive political and scientific regimes of the interwar period, the postwar period, the transition to independence, the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Museveni presidency. Julia Ross Cummiskey combines methods and themes from the history of medicine and public health, science and technology studies, and African studies to show that the story of the UVRI and the people who worked there transforms our understanding of the nature of local and international expertise and the evolution of global health research over the course of the twentieth century. Global health is one of the chief areas in which African and foreign institutions interact today. Billions of dollars are invested in global health projects on the continent, many involving strategically selected “local partners.” In the discourse of these projects, local and global are often framed as complementary but distinct categories of people, institutions, traditions, and practices. But the history of biomedical research at the UVRI shows that these distinctions are unstable and mutable and that people and institutions have mobilized both categories to attract funding, professional prestige, and research opportunities. The book complicates the local/global binary that is implicit (and sometimes explicit) in many studies of colonial, international, and global health and medical research, especially in Africa. Moreover, it challenges assumptions about global health as an enterprise dominated by researchers based in the Global North and recenters the history of biomedicine in Africa. Julia Ross Cummiskey is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the history of global health research, policy, and practice in Africa. Dr. Cummiskey interrogates the history of “global health”—what it is, how it came to be, its limitations, and its potential. She pursues projects that she believes will shed light on the broader history of East Africa and its connections to other parts of the world as well as projects that offer opportunities to inform the practice of global health research and interventions. Dr. Cummiskey’s current project explores the changing ideas about health communication in modern East Africa, from top-down organized campaigns to commercial product promotion and informal channels for spreading information and misinformation. Tentatively titled Selling Health, this book will explore the different forms of communication that have been used to shape the Africans’ behaviors and consumption of products intended to (or purporting to) improve health in the 20th and 21st centuries. You can learn more about her work here. Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City (Ohio UP, 2025) is an urban history that connects town and country. Devin Smart examines how labor migrants who left subsistence food systems in Kenya’s rural communities acquired their daily meals when they arrived in the Indian Ocean city of Mombasa, a place where cash mediated access to daily necessities. In their rural homes, people grew their own food and created mealtimes and cuisines that fit into the environments and workday routines of their agrarian societies. However, in the city, migrants earned cash that they converted into food through commercial exchange, developing foodways within the spatial dynamics of urban capitalism. Thus, Smart considers how working-class formation and urbanization, central themes of modern world history, changed East Africa’s food systems. Smart explores how these processes transformed domestic labor within migrant households, as demographic change and daily life in a capitalist city shaped the gendered dynamics of food provisioning and cooking. He also examines how urban capitalism in Mombasa, as elsewhere in the world, drove the expansion of eateries for working-class consumers. It focuses especially on street-food vendors who kept their overhead and prices low by operating on sidewalks, in alleyways, and along other open spaces in makeshift structures, where they fried, boiled, and grilled the meals that sustained working-class people in Kenya’s port city. The history of street food also provides insights on the political economy of colonial and decolonizing African cities. Despite the services and income provided by street food, Mombasa officials also regularly pursued “modernization” campaigns to remove such informal businesses from the city’s landscape, fining and arresting vendors and demolishing their structures. Preparing the Modern Meal reveals the contradictions of such urban political economies from the colonial period to the more recent neoliberal era. Devin Smart is an assistant professor of history at West Virginia University, where he teaches courses in African, European, and global history. His most recent articles have appeared in the Journal of African History and International Labor and Working-Class History, and his current research projects examine Kenya’s commercial fisheries as well as the energy transition that occurred in twentieth-century East Africa. He has two additional book projects underway, both of which address the relationship between environmental and economic change. Working the Water: Fishing and Extractivism in Twentieth-Century Kenya examines commercial fisheries as a particular kind of extractive industry, considering how these aquatic economies changed the region's lake, river, and marine environments. Dr. Smart's third book project, A Refined World: Energy Transitions in Modern East Africa, explores how different forms of energy, such as wood, coal, and petroleum, shaped daily life, the region's environments, and the political economy of colonialism and decolonization. Dr. Smart has also published articles on the history of tourism and economic development in Kenya in the African Studies Review, and on the politics of racial conflict in late-colonial Mombasa in the Journal of Eastern African Studies. You can learn more about Dr. Smart’s work here Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land. This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs overseas catalyzed the arrival of highly educated, middle-class Asians in the U.S. before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Drawing on archival documents, GIS data, and oral interviews, Quraishi investigates how Indian and Pakistani immigrants forged an “interethnic” identity in Houston and located themselves—both socially and geographically—in the midst of a booming yet segregated Sunbelt city. She conceptualizes their mobility as “brown flight,” a process that simultaneously strengthened ethnic bonds even as it reinforced racial and class barriers. By exploring the links between international and local scales, Redefining the Immigrant South will interest scholars from many fields, including Asian American history; histories of the U.S. South, immigration, and U.S. foreign relations; and sub/urban studies. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700 – 1850 (Ohio UP, 2024) examines historical change across a broad region of western Africa—from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Freetown, Sierra Leone—through the development of textile commerce, consumption, and dress. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths constituted major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks that were both regional and global. While much of the historiography of commerce in Africa in the eighteenth century has focused on the Atlantic slave trade and its impact, this study follows the global cloth trade to account for the broad extent and multiple modes of western Africa’s engagement with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Jody Benjamin analyzes a range of archival, visual, oral, and material sources drawn from three continents to illuminate entanglements between local textile industries and global commerce and between the politics of Islamic reform and encroaching European colonial power. The study highlights the roles of a diverse range of historical actors mentioned only glancingly in core-periphery or Atlantic-centered framings: women indigo dyers, maroon cotton farmers, petty traveling merchants, caravan guides, and African Diaspora settlers. It argues that their combined choices within a set of ecological, political, and economic constraints structured networks connecting the Atlantic and Indian Ocean perimeters. Jody Benjamin is a social and cultural historian of western Africa with expertise in the period between 1650 and 1850. His research is informed by a methodological concern to center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the limitations of the colonial archive. In broad terms, Prof. Benjamin’s scholarship interrogates the multiple connections between west African, African diaspora and global histories through the lens of material culture, technology, labor, gender and race to reshape how historians think about western Africa’s role in the history of global capitalism and its connections to contemporary questions of global inequality. Dr. Benjamin’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the University of California Regents, University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI), the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. From 2022-2023, he was the Principal Investigator for a Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Unarchiving Blackness,” exploring archival practices in African and African Diaspora Studies. Prior to Howard University, Dr. Benjamin taught at the University of California, Riverside. You can learn more about his work here. Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Ohio UP, 2017), Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s. Murillo brings sales clerks, market women, and everyday consumers in Ghana to the center of a story that is all too often told in sweeping metanarratives about what happens when African businesses are incorporated into global markets. By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race. Bianca Murillo is a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She is a historian of modern Africa, with research and teaching interests in global economies, decolonization, and race and gender studies. While her work focuses on twentieth-century Ghana, her research on international business and capitalism is comparative and transnational. Dr. Murillo has published articles in the journals Gender & History, Enterprise & Society, and Africa. Her current book project, Financing Africa’s Future, is a history of debt, foreign investment, and fraud in Ghana’s post-independence era. Recent writings featuring this research appear in Africa is a Country and History Workshop. Murillo's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute of Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), Fulbright-Hays Program, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program (U.S. Department of Education). She is an elected board member of the Business History Conference (Association) and has served as an elected committee member and committee chair for the American Historical Association. You can learn more about her work here Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. 150,000,000 million lifetime downloads. Advertise on the New Books Network. Watch our promotional video. Learn how to make the most of our library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this region and determined who would control it. The Ohio Valley possesses some of the most resource-rich terrain in the world. Its settlement by humans was thus consequential not only for shaping the geographic and cultural landscape of the region but also for forming the United States and the future of world history. Settling Ohio begins with an overview of the first people who inhabited the region, who built civilizations that moved massive amounts of earth and left an archaeological record that drew the interest of subsequent settlers and continues to intrigue scholars. It highlights how, in the eighteenth century, Native Americans who migrated from the East and North interacted with Europeans to develop impressive trading networks and how they navigated complicated wars and sought to preserve national identities in the face of violent attempts to remove them from their lands.  Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond (Ohio UP, 2023) situates the traditional story of Ohio settlement, including the Northwest Ordinance, the dealings of the Ohio Company of Associates, and early road building, into a far richer story of contested spaces, competing visions of nationhood, and complicated relations with Indian peoples. By so doing, the contributors provide valuable new insights into how chaotic and contingent early national politics and frontier development truly were. Chapters highlighting the role of apple-growing culture, education, African American settlers, and the diverse migration flows into Ohio from the East and Europe further demonstrate the complex multiethnic composition of Ohio’s early settlements and the tensions that resulted. A final theme of this volume is the desirability of working to recover the often-forgotten history of non-White peoples displaced by the processes of settler colonialism that has been, until recently, undervalued in the scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire. Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio received her BA in history at the University of Puerto Rico and her PhD in Central/East European history from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her dissertation, “The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and Biopolitics in the Prussian-Polish Provinces, 1840-1914,” was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Award in Polish Studies by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) in 2010. Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is the winner of the 2020 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies and honorable mention for the 2020 Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880-1983 (Ohio UP, 2008) examines the interactions between psychiatrists, patients and their families, and the national state in modern Argentina. This book offers a fresh interpretation of the Argentine state's relationship to modernity and social change during the twentieth century, while also examining the often contentious place of psychiatry in modern Argentina. Drawing on a number of previously untapped archival sources, author Jonathan Ablard uses the experience of psychiatric patients as a case study of how the Argentine state developed and functioned over the last century and of how Argentines interacted with it. Ablard argues that the capacity of the state to provide social services and professional opportunities and to control the populace was often constrained to an extent not previously recognized in scholarly literature. These limitations, including a shortage of hospitals, insufficient budgets, and political and economic instability, shaped the experiences of patients, their families, and doctors and also influenced medical and lay ideas about the nature and significance of mental illness. Furthermore, these experiences, and the institutional framework in which they were imbedded, had a profound impact on how Argentine psychiatrists discussed not only mental illness but also a host of related themes including immigration, poverty, and the role of the state in mitigating social problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. A Language for the World: The Standardization of Swahili (Ohio UP, 2022) pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard--a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes--negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories. Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili's standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa. The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918-1996 (Ohio University Press, 2023), historian Anna Müller has produced a beautifully written book that is part biography, part family ethnography, part critical meditation on the challenges and contradictions of historical sourcework. Honest and illuminating reflections on the process of crafting an intimate portrait from a scholarly perspective are interwoven with an illuminating case study of migration, motherhood, identity, and incarceration in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Tonia Lechtman was a Jew, a loving mother and wife, a Polish patriot, a committed communist, and a Holocaust survivor. Throughout her life these identities brought her to multiple countries—Poland, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel—during some of the most pivotal and cataclysmic decades of the twentieth century. In most of those places, she lived on the margins of society while working to promote communism and trying to create a safe space for her small children. One woman’s national, political, ethnic, social, and personal identities impart an extraordinary perspective on the histories of Europe, Polish Jews, communism, activism, and survival during the twentieth century. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2022) is an innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little attention to the role that cargoes have played in connecting the disparate parts of this vast oceanic world.  Drawing from the work of anthropologists, geographers, and historians, Cargoes in Motion tells the story of how material objects have informed and continue to shape processes of exchange across the Indian Ocean. By following selected cargoes through both space and time, this book makes an important and innovative contribution to Indian Ocean studies. The multidisciplinary approach deepens our understanding of the nature and dynamics of the Indian Ocean world by showing how transoceanic connectivity has been driven not only by economic, social, cultural, and political factors but also by the materiality of the objects themselves. Essays by: Edward A. Alpers, Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Eva-Maria Knoll, Karl-Heinz Kohl, Lisa Jenny Krieg, Pedro Machado, Rupert Neuhöfer, Mareike Pampus, Hannah Pilgrim, Burkhard Schnepel, Hanne Schönig, Tansen Sen, Steven Serels, Julia Verne, and Kunbing Xiao. Burkhard Schnepel is a professor of social anthropology at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. From 2013 to 2020, he was head of the Connectivity in Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean fellows group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. He is the author of The King’s Three Bodies: Essays on Kingship and Ritual and a coeditor of Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World.  Julia Verne is a professor of cultural geography at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, where she leads a research group on mobility, materiality, and maritimity, with a focus on the western Indian Ocean. Her publications include Living Translocality: Space, Culture, and Economy in Contemporary Swahili Trade and several articles discussing the Indian Ocean as a relational space. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the middle of the twentieth century, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela organized a group of revolutionary freedom fighters to openly denounce the racist apartheid regime. Mandela and MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) embarked on a dangerous, but revolutionary campaign of sabotage that fueled the burgeoning global anti-apartheid struggle.  In Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022) Paul Landau explores the pivotal years that led up to the Rivonia trial in which Mandela was given a life sentence in prison while many of his comrades were either killed, imprisoned or exiled. Landau does this by exploring Mandela’s leadership role in MK as well as by highlighting the motives and actions of the people around him. Landau complicates the whitewashed “grandpa” figure so many of us have come to know Mandela to be. He gives us a detailed glimpse into the mind of the revolutionary and oftentimes violent Nelson Mandela that we so anxiously want to know. Robrecus Toles is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at The University of Mississippi. His research focuses on The Council of Federated Organizations and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi between the years 1961-1965. He lives in Mississippi with his wife and three kids. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio UP, 2022) in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. From his study of animals with unequal political, economic, social, and intellectual capabilities, Aderinto establishes that the core dichotomies of human colonial subjecthood—indispensable yet disposable, good and bad, violent but peaceful, saintly and lawless—were also embedded in the identities of Nigeria’s animal inhabitants. If class, religion, ethnicity, location, and attitude toward imperialism determined the pattern of relations between human Nigerians and the colonial government, then species, habitat, material value, threat, and biological and psychological characteristics (among other traits) shaped imperial perspectives on animal Nigerians. Conceptually sophisticated and intellectually engaging, Aderinto’s thesis challenges readers to rethink what constitutes history and to recognize that human agency and narrative are not the only makers of the past. Saheed Aderinto is a professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at Florida International University. He is the author of Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order and When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958. Sara Katz is a Postdoctoral Associate in the History Department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509-1670 (Ohio UP, 2019), Jared Staller tells the history of how the myth of cannibalism in West Central Africa developed between 1509 and 1670 in the context of mis-understandings between European and Africans. Many of these misunderstandings were in fact intentional, given that the myth of cannibalism proved very useful to Portuguese slavers seeking to bypass the restrictions imposed by the Papacy as to who could be justifiably enslaved. On the African side, rulers of the Kongo kingdom used the discourse of cannibals to secure Portuguese support at a time of political upheaval. The increasing chaos and violence that resulted from the slow decline of existing political structures such as the Kongo, coupled with a protracted drought, contributed to the formation of new political formations that relied heavily on violence and terror and who found the myth of cannibalism useful in their attempts to compete and survive in a dangerous and insecure world. Back in Europe, stories about African cannibals were also used as a means to reflect on the religious conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era, allowing the myth to be passed on and survive into the modern world. Staller tells this compelling story by re-reading the most important European sources where African cannibals are mentioned as well as the few African sources that exist for this period. By carefully cross-referencing these sources and building on the knowledge that historians of Africa have been able to secure from oral and ethnographic sources, Staller is able to revisit old debates in African historiography and demonstrate that European sources, when carefully read, can illuminate our understanding of African perspectives. The book includes a detailed explanation of the methodology used, suggested readings for every chapter and brief excerpts from the sources, all of which make this book a robust contribution to the history and historiography of Africa and the Atlantic world. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the fall of 2020, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal decreed that the country’s near-total ban on abortion was too liberal; henceforth, pregnancies could be terminated only in cases of rape, incest, or imminent threat to the mother’s life. The court’s decision triggered a nationwide Women’s Strike, whose social mobilization galvanized reproductive rights advocacy across Europe. In the wake of the Polish mass protests, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a crucial moment to re-visit anthropologist Joanna Mishtal’s ground-breaking book The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland (Ohio University Press, 2015). Mishtal recast the decades since communism’s collapse as a time of joint Church-State war on reproductive rights, as well as feminism, which was painted as either a communist legacy or a foreign import. The Politics of Morality examines the contradiction between an emerging democracy on the one hand, and a declining tolerance for women’s rights and political and religious pluralism on the other. Surveillance, control, and abuse of power are persistent themes in this revealing ethnography, which has had an enormous scholarly impact in the study of gender and religion & politics in Eastern Europe, but carries powerful lessons far beyond its immediate field. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Fine Boys: A Novel (Ohio University Press, 2021), Ewaen is a Nigerian teenager, bored at home in Warri and eager to flee from his parents’ unhappy marriage and incessant quarreling. When Ewaen is admitted to the University of Benin, he makes new friends who, like him, are excited about their newfound independence. They hang out in parking lots, trading gibes in pidgin and English and discovering the pleasures that freedom affords them. But when university strikes begin and ruthlessly violent confraternities unleash mayhem on their campus, Ewaen and his new friends must learn to adapt—or risk becoming the confras' next unwilling recruits. In his trademark witty, colloquial style, critically acclaimed author Eghosa Imasuen presents everyday Nigerian life against the backdrop of the pro-democracy riots of the 1980s and 1990s, the lost hopes of June 12 (Nigeria’s Democracy Day), and the terror of the Abacha years. Fine Boys is a chronicle of time, not just in Nigeria, but also for its budding post-Biafran generation. Eghosa Imasuen is the cofounder of Narrative Landscape Press, a publishing company based in Lagos. He studied medicine at the University of Benin and lives in Lagos with his wife and twin sons. Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thousands of stories are given voice by Marissa Mika in Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda (Ohio UP, 2021), a fearless, warm, and humane history of the Uganda Cancer Institute’s first half century. Mika treads carefully but surely through the fields of colonial and post-colonial medical research and politics while never losing sight of the individuals who worked, planned, improvised, suffered, survived and died at the UCI. The book is a fascinating contrast to the global north history of pediatric oncology as told, for example, by former National Cancer Institute director Vincent DeVita Jr. in The Death of Cancer. As Mika makes abundantly clear, there is no such wild optimism surrounding cancer in Uganda. There is, though, resourcefulness, commitment, and an ability to adapt to extraordinary circumstances on a daily basis. This richly researched book undoubtedly has significant academic merit in fields including, but not limited to, the history of medicine. It should appeal equally to global health activists who want to understand better the challenges and incremental accomplishments of work on the ground. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age (Ohio University Press, 2019), Ndubueze L. Mbah argues that the Bight of Biafra region’s Atlanticization—or the interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade, colonialism, and Christianization—between 1750 and 1920 transformed gender into the primary mode of social differentiation in the region. He incorporates over 250 oral narratives of men and women across a range of social roles and professions with material culture practices, performance traditions, slave ship data, colonial records, and more to reveal how Africans channeled the socioeconomic forces of the Atlantic world through their local ideologies and practices. The gendered struggles over the means of social reproduction conditioned the Bight of Biafra region’s participation in Atlantic systems of production and exchange, and defined the demography of the region’s forced diaspora. By looking at male and female constructions of masculinity and sexuality as major indexes of social change, Emergent Masculinities transforms our understanding of the role of gender in precolonial Africa and fills a major gap in our knowledge of a broader set of theoretical and comparative issues linked to the slave trade and the African diaspora. Ndubueze L. Mbah is an Associate Professor of African History at SUNY-Buffalo. Thomas Zuber is a PhD Candidate in History at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The construction of collective identity among the Muridiyya abroad is a communal but contested endeavor. Differing conceptions of what should be the mission of Muridiyya institutions in the diaspora reveal disciples’ conflicting politics and challenge the notion of the order’s homogeneity. While some insist on the universal dimension of Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke’s calling and emphasize dawa (proselytizing), others prioritize preserving Muridiyya identity abroad by consolidating the linkages with the leadership in Senegal. Diasporic reimaginings of the Muridiyya abroad, in turn, inspire cultural reconfigurations at home. Drawing from a wide array of oral and archival sources in multiple languages collected in five countries, The Muridiyya on the Move: Islam, Migration, and Place Making (Ohio UP, 2021) reconstructs over half a century of the order’s history, focusing on mobility and cultural transformations in urban settings. In this groundbreaking work, Babou highlights the importance of the dahira (urban prayer circle) as he charts the continuities and ruptures between Muridiyya migrations. Throughout, he delineates the economic, socio-political, and other forces that powered these population movements, including colonial rule, the economic crises of the postcolonial era, and natural disasters. Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices