New Books In Biography

In 1933, the Chicago Symphony performed the Symphony in E Minor by Florence B. Price. It was the first time a major American orchestra played a composition by an African American woman. Despite her success, Price sank into obscurity after her death in 1953. Dr. Rae Linda Brown spent much of her career researching and writing about Price’s life and music, as well as advocating for African American representation in academia and in the concert hall. Three years after her death, University of Illinois Press published the manuscript she left largely complete at her passing: Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Two guests join this podcast to talk about the biography—Dr. Carlene Brown, Rae Linda’s sister, and Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, who edited the book and prepared it for publication. Heart of a Woman places Price’s life and music within the context of genteel middle-class African American culture and the active black classical music scene in Chicago in the 19

Over the course of three decades of public service, Herbert Lehman dedicated himself tirelessly to advances the causes in which he believed. In Herbert H. Lehman: A Political Biography (SUNY Press, 2017), Duane Tananbaum describes his livelong public activism and the role Lehman’s relationships with key individuals played in shaping his political career. Tananbaum identifies the first of these as relationships as the lifelong friendship Lehman established with the social reformer Lilian Wald, with whom Lehman worked in a settlement house on New York’s Lower East Side. It was Lehman’s partnership with Al Smith, however that led to a career in elected office, as Smith was key in convincing Lehman to run for the lieutenant governorship of New York in 1928. As lieutenant governor, Lehman labored closely with Franklin Roosevelt throughout the latter man’s tenure as governor. When Roosevelt became president Lehman succeeded him as governor, and for the rest of the decade worked with his predecessor to implement the

In 1918 Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Jones received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, becoming its first female African American graduate (though she was not allowed to "walk" at graduation, nor is she pictured in the 1918 CU yearbook). In Remembering Lucile: A Virginia Family's Rise from Slavery and a Legacy Forged a Mile High (University Press of Colorado), author Polly McLean depicts the rise of the African American middle class through the historical journey of Lucile and her family from slavery in northern Virginia to life in the American West, using their personal story as a lens through which to examine the greater experience of middle-class Blacks in the early twentieth century. The first-born daughter of emancipated slaves, Lucile refused to be defined by the racist and sexist climate of her times, settling on a career path in teaching that required great courage in the face of pernicious Jim Crow laws. Embracing her sister’s dream for higher education and W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideology

In 1912, at age 24, Georgia O’Keeffe boarded a train in Virginia and headed west, to the prairies of the Texas Panhandle, to take a position as art teacher for the newly organized Amarillo Public Schools. Subsequently she would join the faculty at what was then West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University). Already a thoroughly independent-minded woman, she maintained an active correspondence with her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and other friends back east during the years she lived in Texas. In Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters (Texas A&M UP, 2020), Amy Von Lintel brings to readers the collected O’Keeffe correspondence and added commentary and analysis, shining fresh light on a period of the artist’s life she characterizes as “some of the least appreciated in the vast O’Keeffe scholarship,” but also as “a time when she discovered her own voice as a young, successful, and independent woman . . . a dedicated faculty member at a brand-new college . . . a vibrant socia

From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting: The Labor Plays of Manny Fried (SIU Press 2020) collects three plays by Manny Fried alongside a thorough explanation of his work and life by theatre scholar Barry Witham. Witham traces Fried’s long career as a labor organizer and Communist Party militant, as well as the obsessive lengths the FBI went to in order to suppress his activism. Fried is unique among American playwrights in his intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the labor movement, and this knowledge is fully evident in the plays. Issues of red-baiting, deindustrialization, and religious bigotry take center stage in his work, which carries the radical tradition of Clifford Odets and the Federal Theatre Project into the long decline of labor beginning in the 1960s and continuing to this day. From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of theatre and the labor movement. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA p

Nozomi Naoi’s Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020) is the first book-length English-language study of one of Japan’s iconic twentieth-century artists, Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934). While he is most famous for portraits of beautiful women and stylish graphic design―which remain enormously popular and ubiquitous in today’s Japan―Yumeji’s output was not only prolific but also diverse. He began as an illustrator for socialist magazines, was a key figure in the revival and reinvention of the woodblock print as a modern medium, and produced astute and evocative portrayals of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated the Tokyo area. He was also a mentor to young artists and writers, and as Naoi shows, Yumeji created not just a recognizable style and brand, but also an alternative space of artistic production in the early twentieth century. Naoi situates Yumeji’s career within the evolving social, artistic, and technological contexts of his time,

In this episode, I look at Eisler’s last days in England, where he found that the Oxford readership he had been promised before being sent to Dachau was taken by someone else, a paper shortage had put a stop to academic publishing, and that foreign Jews without visas were being imprisoned in a British internment camp on the Isle of Man. I also talk with astrology scholar Dr. Nicholas Campion about Eisler’s scathing criticisms of newspaper astrological columns and unpack Eisler’s final scholarly works on folklore, philology, and ethics. This episode officially concludes the story of Robert Eisler, but there will be a tenth and final episode in the near future that reflects on this project and academic podcasting as a whole after I have had time to hear some feedback. On that note, now that you have heard the story, I would love to hear what you think about it! Guests: Steven Beller (independent scholar), Nicholas Campion (Principal Lecturer in History at Bath Spa University and Director of the Sophia Centre fo

Russell J. A. Kilbourn’s The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style (Wallflower Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive study published in the English-speaking world on one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first centry European film, Italian 2014 Academy Award recipient Paolo Sorrentino. Kilbourn’s book offers close readings of Sorrentino’s cinema in eight dense and elegantly written chapters and one coda: from the filmmaker’s first feature One Man Up, to The Consequences of Love, The Family Friend, Il Divo, This Must Be the Place, The Great Beauty, Youth, and the TV series The Young Pope, produced by HBO. The coda discusses the biopic on Silvio Berlusconi Loro (Them), which came out in 2018. While contextualizing Sorrentino within the legacy of Italian cinema tradition, Kilbourn establishes meaningful connections with international filmmakers (from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to Mary’s Harron’s American Psycho, among many others), literary texts (such as Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), an

Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March of 1938, Robert Eisler wrote to Oxford asking about being appointed to the Wilde Readership in Comparative and Natural Religion, thereby gaining a way out of Nazi-controlled Europe. On the day after Hitler held a rally at the Heldenplatz in Vienna attended by 200,000 Austrian supporters, a letter came expressing regret that Oxford was unable to offer any assistance. Desperate to find an escape, Eisler wrote to friends all over Europe and America, asking for help. Finally, Gilbert Murray, Eisler’s old friend from his days with the League of Nations, stepped in and secured him the Oxford readership, which he was to have taken in October and held for three years. But on May 20th, Eisler was arrested and spent the next fifteen months in Dachau and Buchenwald, where he would see the things that inspired him to write Man into Wolf. I talk about the events of 1938 with Steven Beller and we also examine the case of a high-ranking S.S. officer who was expell

Among the tens of thousands of Americans who volunteered their services during the Civil War was Mary Walker, a daring young woman who was one of the handful of female doctors in the nation at that time. Yet despite the often desperate need for medical professionals she spent much of the war struggling to earn the respect she felt she deserved. In Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights (Lyons Press, 2020), Theresa Kaminski describes this struggle and how it reflected her lifelong struggle to have the world accept her on her own terms. The daughter of free-thinking farmers, the young Mary enjoyed a level of education unusual for her era. Even before the war began she defined her identity with their radical choices in clothing and her decision to divorce her philandering husband. When the war began Dr. Walker sought a commission as a doctor, only to face opposition from every authority figure she met. Over time, however, her persistent efforts gra

In Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which is shaped and conditioned by the already post-postmodern condition. This perspective opens up the exploration of modernist projects and allows a discussion that goes beyond a specific time-period and invites us to locate the conversation about Kraus, as well as about the modernist discourse, in the context of the present moment. In his book, Linden outlines the most salient features of Kraus’s writing and establishes an ethic and aesthetic matrix to explore the variations and renditions that the modernist projects may promote and welcome. The book specifies Kraus’s aesthetic engagement with satire, as well as with the exploration of the language limitations (if any) and with intellectual conversations, which serve as responses to political and historical events. The latter makes Linden’s project particularly relevant

Robert Whitehead of London, a self-described “Business Man” who was “no Churchman and not a Jesus worshipper, much as I admire him,” wrote to Robert Eisler on New Year’s Eve of 1929, asking “if it is a frequent occurrence that men see The Christ; and are there occasions known when the visions are free from religiosity and at the same time full of life and power?” These questions came in light of Whitehead’s dramatic experience when he had seen a blazing vision of Christ in his home. In letters between the two men over the next few years, Eisler gave a startling psychoanalytic interpretation of the dream, which he eventually published. In this episode, I talk about Eisler’s only known attempt to psychoanalyze anyone else with psychoanalyst and religion scholar Marsha Hewitt. Guest: Marsha Hewitt (Trinity College, University of Toronto) Voice of Robert Eisler: Logan Crum Additional voices: Logan Marshall Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra. Funding provided by the O

James West speaks with Jerry Gershenhorn, Julius L. Chambers Professor of History at North Carolina Central University, about Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), ahead of the book's paperback release. Gershenhorn's award-winning study recovers the life and activism of Louis Austin and the influence of his newspaper, the Carolina Times, the preeminent Black newspaper in the state. Spanning much of the twentieth century, this absorbing account explores the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a fresh vantage point, shedding new light on the role of the Black press in the twentieth century. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020)   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium me

Nasser Rahmaninejad’s A Man of the Theatre: Survival as an Artist in Iran (New Village Press) provides a fascinating glimpse into the political and artistic life of Iran. This memoir discusses the difficulties of creating progressive theatre under the murderous and repressive regime of the Shah (supported by the United States), the “prison commune” created by an ad hoc body of Marxist and Islamist political prisoners, the exhilaration of the Shah’s ouster in 1979, and the tragic defeat of the Left by the new religious Right after the revolution. Throughout the book, Rahmaninejad’s storytelling voice is clear: impassioned, ironic, learned, elegant, and subtle. This is a story of resistance under conditions of intense repression, and of the power of art to change society. Nasser Rahmaninejad started his theater career in 1959 in Iran. In response to the authoritarian cultural policies and censorship of the Shah’s regime, he founded the independent MEHR theatre group in 1966, which later became the Iran Theatre

Warning: Economics. In this episode, we begin with Eisler’s testimony before the skeptical Senators of the Committee on Banking and Currency in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 1934, in which he proposed that the nation adopt a dual currency system to control inflation and end the Great Depression. I (a non-economist) talk about what this means with noted economist Miles Kimball, who has recently brought renewed attention to Eisler’s plan in his own work. We also learn about Eisler’s theory of who actually wrote what we call the Gospel of John, talk with Steven Wasserstrom about Eisler’s brief involvement with Carl Jung and the Eranos Conference, and interpret a “dream poem” that Eisler recorded at his mother’s house in 1936. Guests: Guests: Miles Kimball (The University of Colorado-Boulder), Steven Wasserstrom (Reed College). Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb Crawford Additional voices: Brian Evans Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra. Funding provided by the Ohio Univ

Though not as well known today as many of his contemporaries, few American mob bosses were as feared as Albert Anastasia. As head of “Murder Inc.”, Anastasia presided over the contract killing of hundreds of people, some of whom he murdered with his own hands. In Lord High Executioner: The Legendary Mafia Boss Albert Anastasia (Citadel, 2020), Frank DiMatteo and Michael Benson draw upon DiMatteo’s firsthand experiences with several of Anastasia’s contemporaries to recount the tale of Anastasia’s bloody career. Born Umberto Anastasio, the young Anastasia went AWOL from the Italian Navy in order to start his life in America. During the 1920s Anastasia rose rapidly in the ranks of the New York mob in the thanks to his organizing abilities and his willingness to do dangerous work. When “Lucky” Luciano organized the five families in 1931, Anastasia became the underboss of Vincent Mangano and was placed in charge of their enforcement arm. Over the next quarter of a century Anastasia ruled through intimidation and b

In the middle of the twentieth century, a newspaper photographer who went by the name of Weegee took memorable pictures of New York City’s street life that appeared everywhere from tabloid newspapers to seminars on the history of photography. Christopher Bonanos’ book Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous (Henry Holt and Company, 2018), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, tells the story of his life from his childhood as an immigrant street kid on the Lower East Side to his years photographing murder scenes to his experiments with caricatures of celebrities. As Bonanos observes, Weegee “very early on grasped that the distinction between high culture and low culture was growing blurry.” Out of that insight he made a career and a body of work that tell us a lot about New York City, its journalism, and photography. Robert W. Snyder, professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers-University-Newark and Manhattan Borough Historian, is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heig

Youthful arrogance. Hipster alienation. A lot of reading. A lot of drinking. Struggles to adjust to a land radically different from the one that one has left in youth. Intense wrestling with nearly every major intellectual trend of the last few decades (from hardcore Marxism to intersectionality) to a searing admission of one’s own seeming worthlessness, and, finally, redemption in the Catholic faith via fateful encounters in London and New York with the aesthetic and spiritual power of the Catholic Mass. That is the outline of the story told by the noted journalist and public intellectual, Sohrab Ahmari in his 2019 memoir, From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (Ignatius Press). You don’t have to be a Catholic to be moved by this book. The unrest in our streets and even politically-motivated violence by young people who find the very notions of Western Civilization and American ideals and institutions irredeemably oppressive and ripe for toppling render this book invaluable for wannabe-revolut

In this episode, we focus on one of Eisler’s most controversial works, a reconstruction of the 1st-century Roman Jewish historian Josephus’ account of the events surrounding the death of Jesus and the ministry of John the Baptist, including a new physical description of Jesus that apparently prompted the Christ to appear to followers in America to prove he did not look like Eisler said he did. Also, Eisler gets into a bitter back-and-forth with Solomon Zeitlin in the pages of the Jewish Quarterly Review and one Christian scholar dedicates an entire book to discrediting the methods of Eisler and other “learned Jews." Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb Crawford Additional voices: Brian Evans Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra. Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program. Special thanks to the Warburg Institute. Bibliography and Further Reading --Eisler, Robert. The Messiah Jesus and

Jennifer J. Davis speaks with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, about The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan UP, 2020), Jeffers’s latest collection of poems centered on the remarkable life of America’s first poet of African descent, Phillis Wheatley Peters. The Society of Early Americanists recently selected The Age of Phillis as the subject for their Common Reading Initiative for 2021. Prof. Jeffers has published four additional volumes of poetry including The Glory Gets and The Gospel of Barbecue, and alongside fiction and critical essays. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma. In The Age of Phillis, Jeffers draws on fifteen years of research in archives and locations across America, Europe and Africa to envision the world of Phillis Wheatley Peters : from the daily rhythms of her childhood in Senegambia, the trauma of her capture and transatlantic transport, to the icy port of Boston where she was enslaved and educated. In our conversation, Jeffers speaks to the origins of this pro