All this passivity makes the Crusades seem very strange indeed. If Christ's message was one of peace, what in the world were Christians doing taking up arms in the his name? In his excellent Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books, 2011), Jay Rubenstein explains that the reason they did so had everything to do with the conviction that the world was going to presently end. The Crusaders fervently believed that the closing chapter in temporal history upon them and that they had a role in bringing it to the right conclusion. They didn't know exactly what that role was, but there were good hints in ancient scripture and contemporary signs. Everyone agreed that, whatever part the Crusaders were to play, it involved liberating Jerusalem from the infidels. So off they went. Since they were on a holy mission--in fact the last holy mission before Christ's return--the ordinary rules did not apply. The Crusaders forced Jews to convert or else die (many were murdered). They killed Muslims indescriminately. They made sport of desecrating the bodies of their victims. They even roasted some on spits and ate them. That's right: they roasted and ate them. It was like something out of the Book of Revelations. Which made sense, because the Crusaders believed they were in the Book of Revelations.

I grew up with Aunt Jemima and loved her syrup dearly, so I knew this. But I did not know that a similar tradition of racist commercial icons existed in Imperial Germany. I do now, thanks to David Ciarlo's insightful Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard UP, 2011). The Germans had been using images such as the "tobacco moor" to stamp their exotic trade goods since the eighteenth century. But it was only in the 1890s that they began to use the "moor" in mass advertising per se. It was only then, too, that they began to carve out an empire full of "moors" in southwest Africa. David skillfully connects the two phenomenon, showing that the latter tangibly altered the character of the former. The image of Africans in ads went from one that emphasized the exotic to one that stressed the exotic under German domination. Depictions that were almost entirely fanciful became much more concrete. Africans came to represent racial Untermenchen in the service of their German overlords. It was an appealing picture, and one the Germans would--unfortunately--not soon forget.

The trouble is that's not what happened at all. In fact, there was no ODESSA. In 1947, someone tricked Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal into believing "ODESSA" existed (he was quite willing to be tricked). Then Fredrick Forsyth amplified the myth in his book "The ODESSA File" (1972). Then Hollywood gave the story the full Hollywood treatment in movie "The ODESSA File" (1974). Hollywood tricked me into believing it existed (I was quite willing to be tricked).

If you want to know the truth about how the Nazis got away, read Gerald Steinacher[sic] remarkably thorough Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011). He shows that there was a sort of conspiracy to get the Nazis out, it just wasn't very conspiratorial. Even before the war the Nazis (and the SS particularly) were thinking about how to get away from the crumbling Reich. They talked to one an other, made contacts abroad, and traded tips. After some experimenting with various routes, they determined one was far and away most effective: through Austria, into Italy, and then overseas. They had a lot of help. Some of it was for hire, for example in South Tyrolia where a kind of Nazi-smuggling industry arose. Some was gratis, for example that offered by a German bishop in Rome. Add some bungling by the International Red Cross, some skullduggery by the OSS, some complicity by foreign powers (e.g., Argentina) seeking German "experts," and--just like that--the "Ratlines" were clear and known to anyone paying attention. Steinacher shows that no ODESSA-like organization was necessary for the Nazis to escape. All they had to do was follow the well-trodden, clearly marked path that lead away from justice in Europe and into safety abroad. That's more disturbing than ODESSA.

In her enlightening Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford UP, 2011), Kariann Akemi Yokota tells us how early "Americans" dealt with the problem of "American" identity. They were nothing if not conflicted: they recognized that British culture was much more sophisticated than their own, but they also sought to find virtue in American rudeness. One of the most interesting things about Kariann's book is how she uses a variety of unusual sources to study this cultural anxiety--porcelain, maps, paintings, furniture, architecture, cloth, clothes, and other artifacts of "material culture." Her analysis made me look at the "material culture" in my own house differently ("What in the world does a Dustbuster say about being an Amerian?"). Kariann's book will make you think differently about how Americans became Americans.

All this passivity makes the Crusades seem very strange indeed. If Christ's message was one of peace, what in the world were Christians doing taking up arms in the his name? In his excellent Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books, 2011), Jay Rubenstein explains that the reason they did so had everything to do with the conviction that the world was going to presently end. The Crusaders fervently believed that the closing chapter in temporal history upon them and that they had a role in bringing it to the right conclusion. They didn't know exactly what that role was, but there were good hints in ancient scripture and contemporary signs. Everyone agreed that, whatever part the Crusaders were to play, it involved liberating Jerusalem from the infidels. So off they went. Since they were on a holy mission--in fact the last holy mission before Christ's return--the ordinary rules did not apply. The Crusaders forced Jews to convert or else die (many were murdered). They killed Muslims indescriminately. They made sport of desecrating the bodies of their victims. They even roasted some on spits and ate them. That's right: they roasted and ate them. It was like something out of the Book of Revelations. Which made sense, because the Crusaders believed they were in the Book of Revelations.

I grew up with Aunt Jemima and loved her syrup dearly, so I knew this. But I did not know that a similar tradition of racist commercial icons existed in Imperial Germany. I do now, thanks to David Ciarlo's insightful Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard UP, 2011). The Germans had been using images such as the "tobacco moor" to stamp their exotic trade goods since the eighteenth century. But it was only in the 1890s that they began to use the "moor" in mass advertising per se. It was only then, too, that they began to carve out an empire full of "moors" in southwest Africa. David skillfully connects the two phenomenon, showing that the latter tangibly altered the character of the former. The image of Africans in ads went from one that emphasized the exotic to one that stressed the exotic under German domination. Depictions that were almost entirely fanciful became much more concrete. Africans came to represent racial Untermenchen in the service of their German overlords. It was an appealing picture, and one the Germans would--unfortunately--not soon forget.

The trouble is that's not what happened at all. In fact, there was no ODESSA. In 1947, someone tricked Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal into believing "ODESSA" existed (he was quite willing to be tricked). Then Fredrick Forsyth amplified the myth in his book "The ODESSA File" (1972). Then Hollywood gave the story the full Hollywood treatment in movie "The ODESSA File" (1974). Hollywood tricked me into believing it existed (I was quite willing to be tricked).

If you want to know the truth about how the Nazis got away, read Gerald Steinacher[sic] remarkably thorough Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011). He shows that there was a sort of conspiracy to get the Nazis out, it just wasn't very conspiratorial. Even before the war the Nazis (and the SS particularly) were thinking about how to get away from the crumbling Reich. They talked to one an other, made contacts abroad, and traded tips. After some experimenting with various routes, they determined one was far and away most effective: through Austria, into Italy, and then overseas. They had a lot of help. Some of it was for hire, for example in South Tyrolia where a kind of Nazi-smuggling industry arose. Some was gratis, for example that offered by a German bishop in Rome. Add some bungling by the International Red Cross, some skullduggery by the OSS, some complicity by foreign powers (e.g., Argentina) seeking German "experts," and--just like that--the "Ratlines" were clear and known to anyone paying attention. Steinacher shows that no ODESSA-like organization was necessary for the Nazis to escape. All they had to do was follow the well-trodden, clearly marked path that lead away from justice in Europe and into safety abroad. That's more disturbing than ODESSA.

In her enlightening Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford UP, 2011), Kariann Akemi Yokota tells us how early "Americans" dealt with the problem of "American" identity. They were nothing if not conflicted: they recognized that British culture was much more sophisticated than their own, but they also sought to find virtue in American rudeness. One of the most interesting things about Kariann's book is how she uses a variety of unusual sources to study this cultural anxiety--porcelain, maps, paintings, furniture, architecture, cloth, clothes, and other artifacts of "material culture." Her analysis made me look at the "material culture" in my own house differently ("What in the world does a Dustbuster say about being an Amerian?"). Kariann's book will make you think differently about how Americans became Americans.

But if Colin Woodward is right there are in fact nations in America [sic], or rather North America. In his terrific new book American Nations: A History of Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Viking, 2011) he identifies a bunch of them: First Nation, Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, El Norte, the Far West, New France, and the Left Coast. Colin deftly traces the historical origins of each of these cultural regions and then explains how their particular character affected--and continues to affect--North American history. What this amounts to is a new and refreshing way to look at the North American past and present.

And not only that. It turns out I'm a Midlander and my wife is a Yankee. That actually explains a lot...

As David Potter points out in his survey of Greek and Roman games, The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium(Oxford University Press, 2011), there have been only two periods in human history when spectator sports have had a prominent place in society and culture: our own modern age, and the ancient and classical eras in the Mediterranean. The parallels between ancient and modern games are numerous. The athletes of millennia ago, whether Olympic competitors or Roman chariot racers, were celebrities of their day, lauded by the earliest sports columnists (Greek lyric poets) and fan bloggers (Roman graffiti scribblers). They were also well rewarded. Olympic victors were the objects of bidding wars among competing Greek cities, similar to today’s free agency and transfer windows, while the richest athlete of any age remains the Roman charioteer Diolces, whose wealth was surpassed only by the emperor’s.

There is also plenty that is surprising in Potter’s book—and hopefully our interview. The Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Latin and Greek at the University of Michigan, David has spent his career writing and teaching about the classical age. And as a former college wrestler and member of the university’s athletics advisory board, he has an inside knowledge of contemporary sports. He tells us of the links between ancient and modern athletics, the strange and gory details of past competitions, and the accuracy of films like Gladiator. Along the way, we learn about figures like Diocles, the six-time Olympic champion wrestler Milo of Croton, and the poet who was the Grantland Rice of ancient Greece. If you are a fan of the Olympics, or of Gladiator and Spartacus, you’ll enjoy this tour of the ancient world.

Having read Rosamund Bartlett's excellent Tolstoy: A Russia Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), I'm left wondering if Tolstoy ever came to this realization. Throughout his life, he searched for his true self. His launching pad was not a liberal arts education, but rather an aristocratic background, a flock of tutors, and a remarkable talent. The first taught Tolstoy that he could do anything he wanted (which was largely true as it concerned the serfs that Tolstoy's family owned); the second gave him the cultural tools he needed to conduct his search; and the third gave him the ability to rise above all the other Russian aristocrats who were trying to figure out what they should do and where Russia should go. Tolstoy tried on Russian identities the way you try on cloths at a department store. He was, by turns, a student, a slacker, an enfant terrible, a rake, a soldier, a pianist, a slave master, a gambler, a journalist, a teacher, a bee-keeper, a patriarch, a national poet, a peasant, a pundit, and a child-of-nature. At the end of his life he became a holy fool, or monk, or cult leader--take your pick. Some see this identity as his final destination, his moment of Buddha-like enlightenment. I don't think so. Had he lived another five years he would have become someone else. Tolstoy--perpetual adolescent.Thankfully for us, the common thread in his loosely woven life was writing. He was a always a writer, and one with preternatural descriptive and dramatic gifts.

Rosamund Bartlett is also a writer with considerable gifts, which explains why her grasp of Tolstoy is so solid and why her ability to vividly portray him so great. If you want to know Tolstoy, read Bartlett.

"It"--whatever it was--was shifting, lawless, contested, resented, profitable, and sometimes deadly. The Grenze at Burned Bridge was really a kind of anarchical region dividing people who were in no way different from one another but who were compelled to behave as if they were by two occupying powers. The degree to which they were so compelled differed and this made all the difference in the end (the end being 1990, the year of reunification). Years of Nazi propaganda had taught Germans to fear Communist Russians. So when the Soviets arrived in Sonneberg and began to rape and pillage, their fears were realized and they fled. When Soviets (with the help of East German Communists) imposed Stalinism and all that went with it, their fears were doubled and they fled. And when Soviet order reduced once prosperous Sonneberg to a mere economic shadow of Wirtschaftwunder-era Neustadt, their fears were tripled and they fled. For the Soviets and their East German toadies, this "defection" was embarrassing, so they made what was an ill-defined, porous border zone into a militarized, nearly sealed wall.

For anyone familiar with Soviet border policy in the 1930s, what they did in Germany is not surprising. What is surprising (at least to me) is the Americans' and Neustadters' response to the influx of Easterners, namely, something between ambivalence and hostility. The former wanted order on the border and the latter wanted security from the Eastern "mob." Both took active measures to keep the Ossis out, all the while issuing pronouncements about the necessity of Wiedervereinigung. The Soviets are responsible for the division of Germany, but, as Edith shows, they had help.

Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe look different for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest in explaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe–those of France and England–only began to examine the African in earnest at the same time that their plantation- and slave-based colonies in the Caribbean came on line in the seventeenth century. "Colonial expansion" and “Scientific Revolution” ran together, it seems, and it is in their confluence that we see the origins of modern color-based racial discourse.

That discourse, as Curran shows, was first worked out in what are sometimes called "Travel Accounts," books that look for all the world like ethnographies. Europeans wrote thousands of them about every corner of the globe (Full disclosure: long ago I wrote a book about early European ethnographies of Old Russia). These books, in turn, provided grist (or "data"?) for the scientific mills of "naturalists" back home. At the same time these naturalists were looking outward for the origins of human difference, other scientifically-minded types were looking inwards. They were medical doctors, and more particularly anatomists. They wondered why, in the mechanical sense, black skin was black, and so they took black skin apart looking for mechanisms. And of course these twin discourses, ethnographic and medical, were intertwined with a third--that centered on the ethics of the then booming Atlantic slave-trade. Europeans wondered what science could tell them about the rightness or wrongness of African slavery.

This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of the origins and forms of "Blackness."

Another was William Sheridan Allen's The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945 (Quadrangle Books, 1965). It explained the rise of National Socialism in a new and revealing way: from the bottom up. In Sheridan Allen's story, the local politicians, shopkeepers, and housewives of Northeim (Hanover) moved to the fore, while Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels remained in the background. Here the locals "made history," and they did so ways that we would all recognize from our own local communities.

Charles McKinney, Jr. has written a similar book, though one with a much happier ending. Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina (UPA, 2010) tells the tale of how one small city in the South negotiated the rough transition from Jim Crow to Civil Rights and beyond. In McKinney's telling, the people of Wilson (North Carolina) make history; Martin Luther King, et al. remain off stage. These common folks--both Black and White--discuss, argue, protest, sue, threaten, fight, organize, lobby, and vote their way to a "greater freedom" over the course of many decades. In the pages of McKinney's fine book, we see how Civil Rights actually happened "on the ground." I hope it becomes required reading as Sheridan Allen's book once was.

Yet as Mikaila Lemonik Arthur shows in her enlightening book Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2011), some curricular changes have occurred, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. When I went to college in the 1980s, interdisciplinary minors and majors such as Women's' Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Queer Studies (the three cases Lemonik Arthur analyses) were in their infancy. Now the first is nearly ubiquitous, the second is growing rapidly, and the third is gaining steam.

How did these new "identity studies" disciplines succeed in finding a place at the already-full academic table despite the residence of many stakeholders? Lemonik Arthur's answer is complicated, but suggests that the deans are more nimble that we--or rather I--thought. Beginning in the late 1960s, they saw rising demand for courses in these emerging disciplines, some of which was signaled by waves of student activism. They responded by increasing the supply, albeit slowly. The first institutions to do so were of lessor status. Once they showed that the "identity studies" courses were viable in terms of enrollment and didn't harm (and in fact helped) recruitment and fund-raising efforts, the more prestigious schools followed. Their status rose and the money began to flow. These two developments, in turn, allowed the "identity studies" disciplines to institutionalize, that is, to secure places among (actually, between) departments and in course catalogue.

This is a fascinating study of how even authoritarian institutions (like most colleges and universities!) can sometimes prove responsive to their clients.

Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war "urban renewal," that is, the process by which the Washington, big city governments, big city banks, and big city developers came together to clear "slums" and erect modern (really "modernist") apartment blocks and complexes of apartment blocks. Think "the projects" (or, more generally, "public housing"). In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the New York City Housing Authority supervised the construction of a lot of them. Today roughly 500,000 New Yorkers live in them. And many of them, I would guess, probably wish they lived in "pre-war buildings."

Sandy Zipp does a wonderful job of telling the story of this re-making of New York in his fascinating book Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford UP, 2010). Along the way, myths are busted ("the projects" were not built for poor folks), villains are redeemed (Robert Moses wasn't really such a bad guy), and ugly buildings are explained (many serious people really thought tower blocks were beautiful). The book makes plain why large chunks of Manhattan (and many other cities) look the way they do and why they are thought of the way they are. Read it and find out.

The incredible brutality and injustice of the Gulag system is beyond dispute. Yet, as Steven Barnes points out in his new book Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton UP, 2011), the Soviet authorities used the Gulag not only to punish and kill, but also to "correct." They invested significant resources in the reeducation, rehabilitation, and redemption of prisoners, over 20% of whom were released every year. The vast majority of Gulag prisoners did not die there; they survived the experience and (for good or ill) were changed by it. And as they moved through the system in their millions, and were transformed by Gulag incarceration, Soviet society changed as well. In this fine book Barnes tells us how.

It's important to point out that this is not the first time biology has shaped geology: we have good evidence, for example, that 2.4 billion years ago cyanobacteria radically altered the Earth's atmosphere by releasing enormous quantities of free oxygen ("The Great Oxygenization Event"). This time, however, it's different. Cyanobacteria are essentially dumb machines. They could not choose whether they would oxygenate the atmosphere or not. In contrast, we are smart machines. We can choose how we want to alter the environment. Penna tells the story of how we have been altering the environment--and choosing to alter the environment--for the past 50,000 years, and with particular vigor in the past several hundred. We are now masters not only of our own fate, but the fate of the Earth and all life on it. We need to wake up to that fact, and we should thank Anthony Penna for helping to stir us from our slumbers.

I can only imagine, then, that Christopher Krebs had an absolute blast writing A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (Norton, 2011), for it is an epic tale of getting it wrong, history-wise. Beginning about half a millennium ago, people began to say all kinds of wrongheaded things about Tacitus's thin volume: that Tacitus was writing about "Germans" (he wasn't); that he knew a lot about "Germans" (he didn't); that he uniformly praised "Germans" (nope); that the traits he ascribes to "Germans" can be found among modern German-speakers (wrong again).

Were it not for the fact that these "interpretations" emboldened evil people (especially the Nazis) to do evil things (too numerous to recount), this exercise in bad history would be funny. But, as Krebs points out, it's really not very funny at all. It's a reminder that we professional historians have a duty to make sure we get what we say about the past straight, or else. Christopher Krebs is clearly fulfilling his duty in this important, readable, and very witty book. It deserves a wide audience. That means you.