Category / Publications

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Undergraduate Fox Center Fellow and History Major Daniel Thomas Publishes Blog Post About Honors Thesis

Daniel Thomas, a senior history and international studies double major, recently published a blog post about his honors thesis for Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Thomas researches the history of Russian separatism in the Donbas, a region in Eastern Ukraine. He completed fieldwork for his thesis in the summer of 2019 in Kyiv, Ukraine, with support from the History Department’s George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Study Abroad. Thomas is currently an undergraduate fellow at the Fox Center and works with Dr. Matthew Payne. Read his post here: “Neighbors against Neighbors: Historical roots of the Donbas War, 1985-2014.”

 

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Crespino Writes Op-Ed for ‘The New York Times’: “The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher.”

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor of History, authored an opinion piece in The New York Times last month on the day of the democratic presidential primary debate held here in Atlanta. In the article, “The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher,” Crespino provides historical context for democratic optimism that Georgia could turn blue in the 2020 election. Crespino’s most recent book is Atticus Finch: The Biography (Basic Books, 2018). Read an excerpt of The New York Times article below along with the full piece: “The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher.”

“In many ways, American politics today resemble an earlier era in Southern history, when candidates who only a few years before their election had been dismissed as jokes or nobodies stoked reactionary impulses to win the highest office in the state. That’s what happened in Georgia in 1966 when Lester Maddox, a folksy restaurateur and longtime failed candidate, was elected governor. After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, forcing the desegregation of public accommodations in the South, Maddox leapt to public prominence by wielding an ax handle to chase away African-Americans who attempted to eat at his restaurant. He attracted the same voters that George Wallace won in neighboring Alabama — white Southerners embittered by social and political changes that they felt were being forced upon them by sanctimonious, out-of-touch elites.”

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History Dept. Event Showcasing Eckert’s New Book Draws Crowd

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Dr. Astrid M. Eckert, Associate Professor of History, published West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands with Oxford University Press in October 2019. The History Department recently sponsored a public presentation and conversation about the new monograph with Eckert and Joseph Crespino, Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor of History. Over 75 guests attended the event, which is the first of three that the Department will host this year. To learn more about Eckert’s newest work, read the recent written Q&A we published: “New Books Series: Q & A with Astrid M. Eckert about ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain.’”

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Emory News Center Features Eckert’s ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain’ in Advance of Talk with Crespino

The Emory New Center recently published a feature about Dr. Astrid M. Eckert‘s new book, West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (Oxford UP). The article presents some of Eckert’s central findings, which she will discuss in more depth with History Department Chair Joseph Crespino on Thursday, November 14. Find out more information about the event, hosted at 5pm in the Jones Room, 311 of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, here. Read the full Emory News Center article (written by April Hunt): “Iron Curtain’s consequences still evident for former West Germany.” Also learn more about the project by checking out our recent Q&A with Eckert: “New Books Series: Q & A with Astrid M. Eckert about ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain’.” 

by abritt

New Books Series: Q & A with Astrid M. Eckert about ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain’

Astrid M. Eckert, Associate Professor of History, published West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands with Oxford University Press in October 2019. Frank Biess (University of California, San Diego) offers the following review of the work: “This brilliant book is a timely reminder of how borders and walls remake the human and natural environments they seek to divide. Deeply researched and deftly written, West Germany and the Iron Curtain is a major accomplishment that is certain to have a lasting impact on the field.”

Below, Dr. Eckert offers a glimpse into the making of the monograph as a part of the History Department’s series on new faculty publications.

Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense of the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.

This book took me eleven years. Of course that does not mean that I engaged with the project every waking hour over those years. There were times of intense immersion during the summers and during occasional leave time; and then there were times when my attention was needed elsewhere and the book project moved to the back burner for a while. What I try to convey to our students is that you really need to be passionate about your dissertation and book project. Given the time such projects take, without a deep commitment and this passion, you would run out of steam. You also need to pace yourself and break down the project into manageable portions. Finally, it helps to remember that everything always takes longer than you think! The production process holds many surprises, from copyright issues for images to staff changes at the publisher’s offices.

What was the research process like?

I visited nineteen archives with records of state and non-state actors. I interviewed a number of people, mostly nature conservationists, and corresponded with a few former East German border guards. At times, I identified relevant interlocutors in the archives or in dated literature from, say, the 1970s and ’80s. In one case, I read an article from 1981 on the re-discovery of the black stork (ciconia nigra) in a certain area of Thuringia (East Germany). Although the piece was very vague on location, I figured out that it must have been close to the Iron Curtain. I contacted the author, and lo and behold, I uncovered the story of how this East German conservationist was called by GDR border guards who had observed a “strange black bird with red feet” in the border area. This might not rock everyone’s boat, but if you are trying to piece together how, exactly, the “hardware” of the Iron Curtain that was placed into the landscape affected wildlife, you live for nuggets like this. In terms of reading, I extended my reach into fields like conservation biology, ornithology, and river ecology. I also read up on nuclear technology for the chapter on a nuclear waste reprocessing and storage facility that the West Germans intended to build right on the Iron Curtain. This obviously does not turn me into a nuclear engineer, but I felt strongly that you need to know the difference between a light-water reactor and a fast breeder, otherwise you can’t explain what’s at stake.

Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?

I love them all because each offers a new perspective on a subject in Cold War German history that many people would have considered to be “settled.” The chapter on tourism to the Iron Curtain has autobiographical roots of sorts. As a high school student, I myself took our French exchange students to the border although I no longer remember why we did this or what they thought about it; presumably it was one of the few things we could do in our rural region that might impress teenagers from Paris. I also like the chapter on transboundary pollution between East and West Germany. Not only is this a staple subject in environmental history and borderland studies, it also allowed me to develop a genuinely new perspective on inter-German relations. Environmental diplomacy has thus far been overlooked in those relations. I point out that the inter-German border was the interface through which West and East Germany encountered each other’s pollution, an encounter that was becoming very asymmetrical over time: during the 1980s the GDR’s infrastructure was in full decline and its decaying industry was literally “bleeding” pollution. West German authorities monitored and engaged East German pollution. I argue that through the evidence of this pollution (the water quality of the Elbe River was so poor that a new classification category had to be invented to describe its pollution level), they were practically handed the evidence of the GDR’s dissolution on a platter but failed to get the message. Still, the negotiations with the GDR over pollution that I address in the chapter generated the knowledge about the causes of East German environmental problems. Only if we take these encounters seriously (although some of them may have looked ineffectual at the time) can we understand the rapid pace of the post-unification ecological restoration in East Germany. To be sure, much of the pollution abatement after 1990 was achieved by switching off the polluter—factories were closed, mines were shut down etc., but I still credit the environmental diplomacy of the 1980s with producing a clear understanding of the challenges and occasionally with generating accurate templates to fix them. Such insight is only possible, of course, if one does not stop analyzing data in 1990 when both countries re-unified. In fact, I found it very illuminating and satisfactory to draw the subject matter of all my chapters well into the post-unification years and at times right into the present.

How does this project align with your broad research agenda?

With its strong focus on environmental history, work on this book has acquainted me with several aspects of this field, namely the history of nature conservation, the history of pollution and environmentalism, and nuclear history. I intend to continue to work in this field with a new project that examines the ways in which one leading industrialized western economy with a high standard of living has related to global environmental resources over time. This new project will probe Germany’s reputation as a “green leader” and presumably show that the paths towards climate-conscious and sustainable practices that it took were serendipitous, contingent, and involved dead ends and unintended consequences.

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Michael Camp (PhD, 2017) Publishes ‘Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia After the 1973 Oil Embargo’

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Dr. Michael Camp, a 2017 alumnus of the history graduate program, recently published his first book, Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia After the 1973 Oil Embargo, with University of Pittsburgh Press. Camp is Assistant Professor and Political Papers Archivist at the University of West Georgia. He completed his doctoral thesis, “Greater Abundance: Energy Production, Environmental Protection, and the Politics of Deregulation in the United States after the OAPEC Embargo,” under the supervision of Jimmy Carter Professor of History and Department Chair Joseph Crespino. Read the publisher’s summary of Unnatural Resources below and find more information on the University of Pittsburgh Press website.

“Unnatural Resources explores the intersection of energy production and environmental regulation in Appalachia after the oil embargo of 1973. The years from 1969 to 1973 saw the passage of a number of laws meant to protect the environment from human destruction, and they initially enjoyed broad public popularity. However, the oil embargo, which caused lines and fistfights at gasoline stations, refocused Americans’ attention on economic issues and alerted Americans to the dangers of relying on imported oil. As a drive to increase domestic production of energy gained momentum, it soon appeared that new environmental regulations were inhibiting this initiative. A backlash against environmental regulations helped inaugurate a bipartisan era of market-based thinking in American politics and discredited the idea that the federal government had a constructive role to play in addressing energy issues. This study connects political, labor, and environmental history to contribute to a growing body of literature on the decline of the New Deal and the rise of pro-market thinking in American politics.”

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Julie Livingston (PhD, 2001) Publishes ‘Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa’

Dr. Julie Livingston, Julius Silver Professor at New York University, recently published Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa with Duke University Press. Livingston was the first student to receive the PhD in African History from Emory in 2001. In 2013, she received a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her work sits at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. Read Duke UP’s summary of Self-Devouring Growth below and see her other work on Livingston’s NYU faculty profile page.

“Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction. As Livingston notes, improved technology alone cannot stave off such destruction; what is required is a greater accounting of the web of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, plants, and minerals that growth entails.  Livingston contends that by failing to understand these relationships and the consequences of self-devouring growth, we may be unknowingly consuming our future.”

 

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‘Masquerading Politics,’ by John Thabiti Willis (PhD, 2008), Named African Studies Association Book Prize Finalist

John Thabiti Willis (PhD, 2008) published Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town with Indiana University Press in 2017. Willis’ book is a finalist for the African Studies Association Book Prize, the premier award given by the association.  The book stems from Willis’ 2008 dissertation, “Masquerading Politics: Power and Transformation in a West African Kingdom.” Professor Emeritus of History Kristin Mann was Willis’s advisor.

Willis is Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies at Carleton College.  Read the summary of Masquerading Politics from Indiana UP below.

“In West Africa, especially among Yoruba people, masquerades have the power to kill enemies, appoint kings, and grant fertility. John Thabiti Willis takes a close look at masquerade traditions in the Yoruba town of Otta, exploring transformations in performers, performances, and the institutional structures in which masquerade was used to reveal ongoing changes in notions of gender, kinship, and ethnic identity. As Willis focuses on performers and spectators, he reveals a history of masquerade that is rich and complex. His research offers a more nuanced understanding of performance practices in Africa and their role in forging alliances, consolidating state power, incorporating immigrants, executing criminals, and projecting individual and group power on both sides of the Afro-Atlantic world.”

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Marni Davis (PhD, ’06) Publishes Piece in ‘The History Teacher’

Marni Davis (PhD ’06) co-authored an article in The History Teacher on how to teach students about the importance of the footnote. In the piece, which is co-authored with Jill E. Anderson, they write: “Footnotes offer a crucial window into historians’ methods of building an argument and using evidence.” Davis is a historian of ethnicity and immigration in the United States and Associate Professor at Georgia State University. Read the full article, “Follow the Footnote.”

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Dr. Astrid M. Eckert Publishes New Book: ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain’

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Congratulations to Dr. Astrid M. Eckert on the publication of her book West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands with Oxford University Press. The book takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. It also provides the first environmental history of the Iron Curtain. Dr. Eckert is Associate Professor of History.