☆ Bay Area profs on refining our understanding of history via literature (part 2)
Anton Refregier: Indians by the Golden Gate
Perhaps a well-told story (or mural, like SF Post Office's “Indians by the Golden Gate,” above) is the best way to learn not just history's facts—but its struggles, nuances, and questions. In this Opp Now exclusive, history profs recommend books for better knowing and navigating life's currents: spanning from CA's indigenous peoples, to colonial Indian ethics, to a Nazi German town that still “puzzles” historians.
Elena Schneider, UC Berkeley history associate professor and Sonne Chair in Latin American History: On California history, I would recommend Deborah Miranda's book “Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir” (2014). It's written by a California Indian woman and is a blend of tribal history, intimate memoir, and critique of the way we tell Native American history in this state. It's also beautifully written and hard to put down.
Sohini Majumdar, University of San Francisco history adjunct professor: The book that I would recommend political leaders to read is Aishwary Kumar's “Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
I choose this book because it offers a complex understanding of the “morals and methods of a formidable struggle for justice and its consequences for a global genealogy of democratic ethics.” By analyzing the intellectual encounter between two non-western thinkers, M. K. Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar in colonial India, the book allows us to rethink and reevaluate the ideas of equality, democracy, and justice.
By contextualizing their philosophical thoughts in both Western and Indian traditions, the book shows that an autonomous and distinctive notion of equality is at the center of political, democratic thought. This book is a story of struggle against injustice and a promise for equality that ultimately shaped “the global life of democracy.” I believe we can learn about the varied ways to improve our society and politics by reading this book.
Margaret Anderson, UC Berkeley history professor emerita: I have just finished Nancy Pelosi’s memoir, “The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House,” which I found very interesting. It doesn’t tell you what “The Art of Power” actually is, but it did, usefully, remind me of events of not so long ago, whose details I had already forgotten, such as the origins of our entry into the Iraq war (as seen from the House of Representatives); and it gave “inside” information about our government’s handling of the U.S. banking crisis of 2008 that I hadn’t known at the time.
If your readership is interested in How Democracies Can Fail—through the example of how National Socialism came to power in Germany, then the place to go is the classic study by William Sheridan Allen: “The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922–1935”—originally published in 1965.
I know no one who has ever read this fairly short book—whether undergraduate, or graduate student, or adult out in “the world”—who wasn’t enthusiastic about it. It's based on Allen's extensive reading of one town’s newspapers and its community records, as well as illuminating interviews with survivors. It reveals a town that was one of the first where the Nazi party came to power by actually winning elections—and yet most of the usual explanations for the rise of National Socialism simply don’t work here. For:
This was a town that was not hit especially hard by the Great Depression of 1930–33. (Here the author looks at savings accounts and employment figures.)
It was a town where antisemitism played little or no role (Jewish townspeople were well-integrated.) And:
It was a town where Hitler himself never even visited, much less gave a speech.
So we have a puzzle—apparently. But the book does provide answers, which are pretty convincing.
I would suggest readers stick with the original book, and then if they like it, check into the more recent edition (which is not, I think, by Allen himself, who died in 2013, but by someone else). But there the book will be competing with many excellent books on the Nazis in power, on the Shoah, and on WWII. There is nothing that can compete with “The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922–1935.”
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