On May 15, 2020, Instructional Associate Professor Robert Fleegler published the piece below in the “Made by History” section of the Washington Post.
“If President Trump loses in 2020, it won’t be because of Joe Biden”
By Robert Fleegler
May 15, 2020
April Holm, associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi and the author of A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era, is in the Washington Post. Click here to read the article!
The Black Christ of Esquipulas: Religion and Identity in Guatemala
University of Nebraska Press, 2016
On the eastern border of Guatemala and Honduras, pilgrims and travelers flock to the Black Christ of Esquipulas, a large statue carved from wood depicting Christ on the cross. The Catholic shrine, built in the late sixteenth century, has become the focal point of admiration and adoration from New Mexico to Panama. Beyond being a site of popular devotion, however, the Black Christ of Esquipulas was also the scene of important debates about citizenship and identity in the Guatemalan nation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In The Black Christ of Esquipulas, Douglass Sullivan-González, professor of history and dean of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, explores the multifaceted appeal of this famous shrine, its mysterious changes in color over the centuries, and its deeper significance in the spiritual and political lives of Guatemalans. Reconstructed from letters buried within the restricted Catholic Church archive in Guatemala City, the debates surrounding the shrine reflect the shifting categories of race and ethnicity throughout the course of the country’s political trajectory. This “biography” of the Black Christ of Esquipulas serves as an alternative history of Guatemala and sheds light on some of the most salient themes in Guatemala’s social and political history: state formation, interethnic dynamics, and church-state tensions. Sullivan-González’s study provides a holistic understanding of the relevance of faith and ritual to the social and political history of this influential region.
By Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward
Between 1550 and 1750 London became the greate
st city in Europe and one of the most vibrant economic and cultural centres in the world. This book is a history of London during this crucial period of its rise to world-wide prominence, during which it dominated the economic, political, social and cultural life of the British Isles, as never before nor since. London incorporates the best recent work in urban history, contemporary accounts from Londoners and tourists, and fictional works featuring the city in order to trace London’s rise and explore its role as a harbinger of modernity, while examining how its citizens coped with those achievements. London covers the full range of life in London, from the splendid galleries of Whitehall to the damp and sooty alleyways of the East End. Readers will brave the dangers of plague and fire, witness the spectacles of the Lord Mayor’s Pageant and the hangings at Tyburn, and take refreshment in the city’s pleasure-gardens, coffee-houses and taverns.
Reviews:
“As an account of how and why London is London, however, this is the best book to come along in a generation.” -British Heritage Magazine
“Bucholz and Ward explore the rise of Europe’s preeminent entrepôt and metropolis in this engaging account of London and its people. Their superlative integration of the worlds of high culture and popular experience will enrich the study of English literature, society, and politics from the Reformation through the Enlightenment.” – Gary De Krey, Professor of British and European History, St. Olaf College
“There is a big story here – how, between 1550 and 1750, London became a great world capital – but there are also a thousand small and even more wonderful stories about the men and women who walked the city’s streets. Their experiences, their hopes, and their disappointments come vividly to life in this compulsively readable account.” – Lena Cowen Orlin, author of Locating Privacy in Tudor London
“This book is a must for anyone interested in London. It covers the period when London rose from being a quite important Northern European trading center to become the greatest international port in the world at the hub of not just the emerging British Empire but European and North American trade. The internationally connected city, at the center of trade, determined the character of the city it has become today, including the weight of its international finance and trade sectors, its globally diverse population and the worldwide influences on its heritage and contemporary culture.” – Ken Livingstone, first mayor of London
“A compass to navigate in the dark, an A to Z of London’s past, from beggars to kings, from Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson; Bucholz and Ward have created a compelling picture of the Great Wen in all its premodern glory.” – Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Eighteenth-Century History, University of Hertfordshire, Co-Director of Old Bailey Online
by Sheila Skemp
On January 29, 1774, Benjamin Franklin was called to appear before the Privy Council—a select group of the King’s advisors—in an octagonal-shaped room in Whitehall Palace known as the Cockpit. Spurred by jeers and applause from the audience in the Cockpit, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn unleashed a withering tirade against Franklin. Though Franklin entered the room as a dutiful servant of the British crown, he left as a budding American Revolutionary. In The Making of a Patriot, renowned Franklin historian Sheila Skemp presents a insightful, lively narrative that goes beyond the traditional Franklin biography—and behind the common myths —to demonstrate how Franklin’s ultimate decision to support the colonists was by no means a foregone conclusion. In fact, up until the Cockpit ordeal, he was steadfastly committed to achieving “an accommodation of our differences.” The Making of a Patriot also sheds light on the conspiratorial framework within which actors on both sides of the Atlantic moved toward revolution and it highlights how this event ultimately pitted Franklin against his son, suggesting that the Revolution was, in no small part, also a civil war.
Edited by Vivian Ibrahim and Margit Wunsch
This ground-breaking and innovative book examines the influence of charisma on power, authority and nationalism. The authors both apply and challenge Max Weber’s concept of ‘charisma’ and integrate it into a broader discussion of other theoretical models.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, leading international scholars draw on a diverse range of cases to analyse charisma in benign and malignant leaderships, as well as the relationship between the cult of the leader, the adulation of the masses and the extension of individual authority beyond sheer power. They discuss idiosyncratic authority and oratory, and they address how political, social and regional variations help explain concepts and policies which helped forge and reformulate nations, national identities and movements. The chapters on particular charismatic leaders cover Abraham Lincoln, Kemal Atatürk, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Gamal Nasser, Jörg Haider and Nelson Mandela.
REVIEWS
“This rich collection of essays, by leading academics from across the world, examines in critical depth Max Weber’s concept of charismatic leadership in the context of nations. Is charismatic leadership a result of how followers construct the idea of their leader or is it the intrinsic quality of charisma itself? The authors explore the personalities and purposes of leading figures across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and question whether Weber’s concept needs revision, extension or rejection if applied globally.
Here is a collection of essays on the important theme of leadership, nations and charisma, which will be read with immense benefit by those interested in politics, sociology and history.”
– Lord Meghnad Desai, Emeritus Professor at London School of Economics (LSE)
“Margit Wunsch and Vivian Ibrahim have performed a stunning feat. Like an expose of a magician’s tricks, this book opens our eyes by dissecting the charisma of nationalist leaders to reveal its profane sources. Rigorous examinations of psychological phenomena in history and politics are rare, but this book delivers magnificently. The editors explore whether charisma is primarily about psychology, or is produced by social roles and political coercion. They ask if charisma is a cause or merely an effect of success. Authors consider whether charisma can survive in a pluralistic democratic context. They distinguish between situations where cunning leaders project charisma onto the masses and instances when the people bestow it upon their anointed leader. They go on to show how charisma can inhere in entire nations and institutions, not merely in individuals. They ask whether it can change history, and if so, whether it is always a malign force or can it serve democracy well, as Max Weber hoped. Might charisma survive death and be successfully institutionalised? What is the connection between charismatic individuals and heroes, icons or exemplars of national character? Does charisma exhibit a different quality in ‘disenchanted’ mass modernity? In non-western societies? Might Jesus, Muhammad, Joan of Arc and other historical figures exert charisma from beyond the grave, and how do latter-day charismatics appropriate their mantle? Is charisma inherent in charismatic figures or is it ‘made’ by image management, spin, dress and staging? This book offers a sustained analysis of these questions and much more. John Breuilly’s introduction weaves an impressive theoretical account through the embarrassment of riches provided by the book’s star-studded cast. From Hitler and Mussolini to Mandela and Gandhi, FDR and Lincoln to Haider, Napoleon to the Virgin Mary, this book will forever change the way we look at nationalist charisma.”
– Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
Looking at a series of Swiss political debates, this book offers a case study of a revolutionary transformation to a rights-based society and political culture. Based on a tradition of political innovation and experimentation, Swiss citizens recalibrated their understanding of liberty and republicanism from 1750 to 1848. The resulting hybrid political culture centered around republican ideas, changing understandings of liberty and self-rule. Drawing from the public political debates in three characteristic cantons, A Laboratory of Liberty places the Swiss transformation into aEuropean context. Current trends in Revolutionary studies focus on the revolution in its global context and this book demonstrates that the Swiss case enhances our understanding of the debates over the nature of liberty in the transatlantic world during the Age of Revolution.
Marc H. Lerner, Ph.D. (2003) in History, Columbia University, has been Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi since 2005. His research interests are focused on revolutionary Europe in comparative perspective, republicanism, democracy and the transition to political modernity.
By Mohammed Bashir Salau
The literature on Atlantic slavery is rich with accounts of plantation complexes in the Americas, but to date none have been produced for West Africa. In this valuable study, The West African Slave Plantation: A Case Study, Mohammed Bashir Salau helps to address this lacunae by looking at the plantation operations at Fanisau in Hausaland, and in the process provides an innovative look at one piece of the historically significant Sokoto Caliphate. The case study calls into question the assumption that servile institutions in West Africa were “serf villages” and not “slave plantations,” and argues that manumission was less common, at least in the Caliphate, than generally believed. Also, it provides evidence on the key role of the emir of Kano (Abbas) and various merchants in the transition to groundnut cultivation and the significant use of slave labor by large estate holders in the early twentieth century.
REVIEWS
“Salau’s study of a plantation complex in the Sokoto caliphate fills an important gap in the global studies of slavery and plantation systems. It is an exciting exploration into a system of agricultural production, the plantation, that has not been given sufficient consideration in African history; nor have we had sufficient African case studies to allow useful comparative studies with New World plantations. It uses a rich trove of oral histories, collected from among people who were either themselves slaves or who supervised slaves, to document the ways that African plantations were managed and slaves controlled and resisted. This is a richly textured study that is a major contribution to our understanding of plantations as economic and social systems and the agency of slaves who, in this case, were drawn into the cash crop economy of a West African colony.”
— Carolyn Brown, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
“This book is an important contribution to knowledge. By and large, Africanists do not have the data to write the kind of study which is available for village and plantation studies in the West Indies or the United States. Salau has, however, an exceptional source consisting of a large fund of oral interviews and a significant number of written sources. It makes it possible for him to provide a detailed account of how a rural plantation in Hausaland operated. I do not know of any other study which details the daily life of the slave economy in Africa and makes clear how the court interfaced with the rural economy. Such village studies are crucial for any kind of comparative analysis, and though there are other village studies, none give such an accurate picture of life on a slave plantation.”
—Martin Klein, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Toronto
Author Mohammed Bashir Salau is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. Salau received his Ph.D. in African Diaspora history at York University, Canada, in 2005. He is the author of articles published in Journal of African History, African Economic History and several edited volumes. He is now working on a biography that focuses on Dorugu Kwage Adam, a Hausa man in Central Sudan who was enslaved during the early years of his life in the mid-nineteenth century, and on a book tentatively entitled Plantation Slavery in the Central Sudan on comparative slavery.
