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Long Hard Road-A Q&A with Charles Murray

Long Hard Road-A Q&A with Charles Murray

September 15th, 2022

 

Purdue University Press spoke with author Charles J. Murray about his new book, Long Hard Road: The Lithium-Ion Battery and the Electric Car.

Q: Could you give a brief description of your book?

The first half of the book takes the reader through the piece-by-piece invention of the lithium-ion battery. Lithium-ion had many inventors around the world, but mostly in the US, UK, France, and Japan. The inventors in those countries are profiled, and the book details their contributions between 1972 and 1991. The second half of the book is about the electric car, and the auto industry’s adoption of lithium-ion. It describes all the different chemistries that automotive engineers tried before they settled on lithium-ion. The consistent thread to this story is the battery. There is no single main character in this book; the lithium-ion battery is really the star.

Q: What is the goal of your book? What motivated you to write it?

I wanted to write this because I thought the electric car and the lithium-ion battery were misunderstood. In popular culture, the electric car is a new idea. But in truth the manufacturable electric car is 138 years old. And the rechargeable lithium battery is 50 years old this year. This isn’t a story about a new idea. It’s a story about an old, failed idea that was successfully brought back to life.

Q: What are a few things that are being studied for the first time in this book?

The biggest thing is the contribution by Japanese companies. If not for two companies, Asahi Chemical and Sony Corporation, we might not have a lithium-ion battery today. During the 1970s and ‘80s, critical concepts were invented and patented in the US and UK. And then they were ignored. Scientists in the UK were shocked when Sony came along and wanted to license a British patent for lithium-ion that had been gathering dust for eight years. The Japanese companies used that patented technology, then added their own inventions, and created a commercial product. This turns out to have been a critical moment in technological history.

The other unknown story was the creation of the first pre-production battery in Boston. It turns out that Asahi Chemical had a working prototype battery in its lab, but its scientists didn’t know how to build a commercial cell, like the kind you might buy at a grocery store. And they didn’t want to ask for help in Japan because they feared their idea would be stolen. So in 1986 they flew out to Boston with three jars of slurry and asked a company there to turn their slurry into 200 working cells. The whole affair was so secret that even some of the scientists who worked on it in Boston were unaware that they had participated in the creation of the first lithium-ion production batteries. The owner of the company in Boston never divulged the secret until recently, and the story hasn’t been told until now.

Q: Is there anything that shocked or surprised you while working on this project?

I never knew that Thomas Edison and Henry Ford partnered on an electric car in 1913. Ford seldom gets credit for his efforts in this area. It’s often assumed that he disliked electric cars. But he wanted to build and sell electric cars; he even planned to have his son, Edsel Ford, serve as head of manufacturing. But the partnership flopped when Edison’s nickel-iron battery performed poorly in Michigan’s cold winter climate.

The other thing that surprised me was the role of a company called AC Propulsion in the development of Tesla’s first electric car, the Roadster. AC Propulsion created the powertrain that served as the model for the Roadster, which came out in 2009. The Roadster’s powertrain was very similar to AC Propulsion’s, but was redesigned so it could be manufactured in large volumes. Obviously, Tesla deserves enormous credit for what it did. But the initial spark of genius really came from AC Propulsion.

You can get 30% off Long Hard Road: The Lithium-Ion Battery and the Electric Car and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering from our website and using the code PURDUE30 at checkout.


Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver: A Q & A with author Robert Hershberger

June 9th, 2022

We talked to Robert Hershberger, the author of Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver about his experiences as a caregiver to a loved one with Alzheimer’s and the process of writing their story to inform others.

 

Q: Will you please give us a brief description of your book?

A: The book (diary) provides an up close and personal view of Deanna (Dee) Hershberger’s four-and-a-half year journey through Alzheimer’s disease, from its first manifestations to her death.

Q: What is the goal of your book?

A: The goal is to make others aware of and better prepared to deal with what might happen to them or a loved one if either one should contract the disease.

 

Q: What motivated you to write the book?

A: I began to keep a record of changes in Dee’s disease to answer questions from medical personnel about the course of the disease. When changes began to occur rather rapidly I began to record them on the computer several times a week. As the disease progressed I recorded the happenings of each day late in the evening after Dee fell asleep. It became a kind of diary recorded on my laptop computer. It also allowed me to unload the emotional toll of the day so I could get some sleep…an important unplanned benefit of keeping the diary.

A year or two after Dee passed I reviewed the diary entries and realized things had happened to us that other’s could profit from should they ever find themselves in a similar situation. That is what really motivated me to make the diary into a book.

 

 

Q: What surprised you most about what you and Dee experienced?

A: There were so many surprises this is a hard question to answer. I guess the most surprising was how unprepared I was to deal with the situation. We thought we were “bullet proof” and would go on living until someday in the far future we would die. It certainly never occurred to me that Dee would contract such a horrible disease and die while still relatively young. She had always been a model of health in every way.

 

Q: What advice do you have for someone at the beginning of their journey with Alzheimer’s or Alzheimer’s caregiving?

A: Currently there is nothing much the person with Alzheimer’s can do once they know they have it. The disease has already progressed to the point where nothing will change its inevitable course toward death. On the other hand, the primary caregiver (usually the husband, the wife, or one of the children) will suddenly be thrust into the role without any preparation. In this case I recommend reading the Diary…for a possible “worst case” scenario, The 36 Hour Day for practical caregiving advice, Still Alice (or the movie) for what might happen early on, and, perhaps, In Love for an alternative that may work for some people. It is urgent that the caregiver read these and other books right away because it won’t be long before they will not have time or energy to do so. Also get your financial affairs in order very early on when your loved one can still agree to needed changes.

 

You can get 30% off Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering from our website and using the code PURDUE30 at checkout.


The Sky Above-A Q&A with astronaut John Casper

April 12th, 2022

In this interview, we talk with author, Purdue alumnus, and astronaut Colonel John H. Casper, (USAF, Ret.) about his forthcoming autobiography, The Sky Above: An Astronaut’s Memoir of Adventure, Persistence, and Faith.


Q: Could you give a brief description of your book?

The Sky Above tells how persistence and determination led me to fly in space, after serving the nation as a combat fighter pilot and test pilot. Despite life-threatening experiences and failures, my spiritual faith was pivotal in overcoming life’s challenges.

Throughout flying stories told in “pilot lingo,”  I invite the reader to ride alongside me in the cockpit, feeling the fear of enemy antiaircraft fire and the squeeze of high g-forces during combat maneuvering in jet fighters. I describe exhilarating Space Shuttle launches, the magical experience of weightlessness, and the magnificent beauty of Earth from hundreds of miles above.

 

Q: What is the goal of your book? What motivated you to write it?

The goal of my book is to tell readers my life story, which is a true adventure of overcoming adversity through dedication, perseverance, passion, and endur­ing faith to make a lifelong dream and vision a reality. I hope those trying to reach their dreams, whatever they are, will find inspiration; those unsure or challenged in their faith, encouragement.

 

Q: Military Service is a tradition in your family. You describe a “service before self” family mentality toward your dad’s service as a pilot. Was this mentality impacted by your family’s faith? Conversely, do you think this mentality affected the way you view(ed) and practice(ed) your faith?

Yes, I believe there is a link between my faith and military service, because both ask a person to “serve” something greater than oneself. Christian faith asks you to love God with all your mind, body, and spirit, and to love your neighbor—those around you—as you love yourself. Those in military or government service are serving our country by defending and upholding our foundational values and traditions. Both faith and the military emphasize the idea of serving others, rather than self-centeredness.

While growing up, I watched my grandparents and parents help others as an extension of their faith, and I witnessed their service to our country in both peace and wartime. They didn’t brag about it; they were merely helping those in need or helping our country defeat those who would destroy our way of life. I’m grateful for the strong example they set for me.

 

 

 Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring astronauts?

My advice to anyone with a dream or vision is to work hard and not be discouraged if you don’t succeed the first time. For most of us, following our passion or dream takes determined, persistent effort over a period of time to reach the goal.

Those who want to be astronauts will need to study hard and perform well in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. NASA also selects a small number of medical doctors in each incoming group. It’s best that you study subjects and work in career areas that interest you or that you have a passion for. Then, if you don’t become an astronaut, you’ll be working in a career field you enjoy.

 

Q: Do you have any thoughts on what the future of NASA and American space missions might look like? What would you most like to see explored? What challenges do you think NASA and aspiring astronauts will face along the way?

Future missions to the International Space Station, or ISS, will continue as humankind learns how to live and work­­ in space. ISS is a microgravity laboratory with a multi-nation crew (­15 nations cooperate) orbiting Earth at 250 miles altitude. The space vehicle weighs nearly one million pounds, has been continuously crewed since 2000, and has conducted over 3000 experiments and technology demonstrations. Because ISS is also valuable as a primary testbed for future deep-space exploration to the Moon and Mars, NASA plans to operate it at least until 2031.

Artemis is NASA’s Moon landing program to learn how to live on other worlds. This time, the goal is to stay by establishing a true outpost on the lunar surface. The first Artemis mission will fly no earlier than June 2022, using the new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft. The mission will be un-crewed to test the rocket and crew vehicle on a 3-week voyage beyond the Moon and back to Earth. Artemis 2 is planned about a year later with a crew of four NASA astronauts on a similar 21-day mission to check out the human support systems in deep space. A lunar-orbiting habitat called Gateway is being built to sustain our ability to explore the lunar surface.

The next step is Mars: NASA’s goal is to land humans on Mars before the end of this century. The commercial company SpaceX also plans to fly humans to Mars. A human mission to Mars is hard because Mars is much, much farther away than the Moon—Mars is 35 to 250 million miles distant from Earth, depending on the two planets’ orbital positions. At their closest point, a trip to Mars takes about nine months with current rocket technology. A round trip could theoretically be completed in 21 months, with three months on the surface to wait for favorable alignment of Earth and Mars orbits before returning.

Future astronauts will face challenges similar to the ones they face today on the International Space Station—reduced or zero gravity, confinement in a relatively small space, isolation and separation from family and friends on Earth, and risk of damage to their spacecraft from micrometeorites. Radiation is the number one threat for deep space missions: ISS is in a low Earth orbit and shielded from most solar radiation by the higher Van Allen belts. However, crews on Moon or Mars missions will be outside that protection and exposed to greater solar radiation and occasional solar flares. Deep space crewed vehicles will require additional radiation shielding to keep the crew healthy.

 

Q: Is there anything that shocked or surprised you while working on this project?

I was surprised by the amount of time and effort it took me to research, write, and edit even my own memoir, where I knew the storyline! I had written many technical papers before, but crafting a story that interests and inspires readers is another level of creativity and complexity. Someone advised me that producing the first draft was about 50% of the writing process and I found that to be true—editing, condensing, choosing which stories to tell and which to delete, all took enormous amounts of additional time. Choosing a publisher and negotiating a contract required a completely different expertise and I had to learn that skill.

 

Q: Any comments for the future readers of your book?

If you like to read adventure stories, especially true ones, where the character overcomes odds to reach a goal, you will enjoy this book. If you would like to know more about flying airplanes and flying in space, this book is for you. If you’re looking for a story about spiritual faith helping someone overcome obstacles in life, my story might interest and inspire you.


Thank you to Col. Casper for answering our questions!

You can get 30% off The Sky Above and other Purdue University Press books by ordering from our website and using the discount code PURDUE30.

 

 


Finding Order in Diversity: A Q&A with Scott Berg

March 17th, 2022

We talked to Scott Berg, the author of Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848, about the aspects of the Habsburg Empire studied for the first time in this book and their possible relevance to readers today.

Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 covers the tumultuous period in the Habsburg Empire from Joseph II’s failed reforms through the Revolutions of 1848, documenting the ongoing struggle between religious activism and civil peace. Though civil peace and religious toleration eventually became the norm, this book documents the decades of heavy-handed state efforts to get there.


Q: Could you give a brief description of your book?

My book looks at policies of religious toleration in what has typically been seen as a pretty conservative period in Habsburg history: the French Revolution to the aftermath of the1848 Revolutions. The Habsburg Empire developed a well-deserved reputation for toleration and multiculturalism at the end of the nineteenth century, which I argue originated in these policies of religious toleration that developed in this conservative era. Implementing toleration also involved restraining some activities of the Catholic Church, which the Habsburgs kept, politically, at arm’s length for the only time in its history.

I also wanted to stress the imprint of the Enlightenment on Habsburg institutions, even conservative ones. The Habsburg Empire offers a good case study for this project because of the presence of significant numbers of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Eastern Christians, and Orthodox Christians across present-day Austria, Hungary, northern Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, southern Poland, western Ukraine, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and northern Italy.

 

Q: What is the goal of your book? What motivated you to write it?

The goal of the book is to illustrate how the state navigated the rocky waters of religious tensions in a period in which the majority of people still fiercely adhered to the tenets of their particular confession. Basically, how did the state make sure people, with ancient feuds, get along? In addition, this book offers a nuanced analysis of the Habsburg state’s relation to the Catholic Church, which was quite distant, especially compared to other European governments and their relationship with the institution of the majority confession in these states.

I did not have an “aha” moment when coming across this topic.  I have always liked religious history and grew up in a period when historians were moving away from national frameworks, which drew me to this topic. In addition, as a student, I found Joseph’s reforms in the 1780s fascinating and was never satisfied with the simple answer that they just disappeared when he died and rigid conservatives took over.  I originally wanted to look at religious policy, in general, in this time period but found that topic way too broad and found myself looking, increasingly, at toleration and attempts to regulate peaceful co-existence, which was a nagging question for me. Finally, the increasing acknowledgment diversity in our own society pushed me to this topic of how diverse societies manage to get along.

 

Q: What are a few things that are being studied for the first time in this book?

As I stated above, I was never satisfied with the answer that Joseph’s reforms sort of just ended when he died.  Now, when you dig into the literature, particularly the literature in German, works do acknowledge the continuing influence of Joseph’s reforms, particularly in the bureaucracy. However, while that theme does recur in this book, it really is not the point of it. This book looks at Habsburg toleration from an objective point of view and analyzes how Habsburg institutions approached conversions, mixed marriages, and religious polemics, which were explosive issues at the time.  The few that have looked at these issues in any detail have done so through a nationalist or ideological lens, often without the benefit of archival documents.

 

Q: Is there anything about this book you think readers would find particularly relevant to their own experiences in today’s world?

Many people today interact with various forms of media designed to keep them perpetually enraged, often using misinformation, and which politicize even the most mundane events, which few people argue is good for institutions.  The Habsburgs sort of foresaw this problem of controversial topics being available for open discussion because it would lead to mobs and instability. They also addressed the problem of how to depoliticize difference, not exploit it, and did so through the police.  When censorship collapsed in 1848 and, later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, differences, including mundane everyday ones, became politicized as irreconcilable ethnic or religious ones, which ultimately weakened faith in institutions.  One could argue a vaguely similar trend, with many important differences of course, is happening today.

We also see the legacy of Habsburg toleration and promotion of the Enlightenment on the successor states of this empire. One could point, for example, to one of the most dangerous hotspots in the world since 2014:  the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.  Ukrainian nationalism, as with other nationalisms, came about in the nineteenth century and emerged in the Habsburg Empire, in part to combat Polish domination of Galicia, which is in present-day southern Poland and western Ukraine.

However, these origins are contested, often in religious terms, most notably by Vladimir Putin, and while this book does not provide a detailed analysis of the origins of Ukrainian nationalism, it does describe how the Habsburgs protected the largely Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and promoted Ukrainian language (called Ruthenian) and education for the priesthood, in contrast to Russification polices in Tsarist Russia.  As a result, it helped create a Ukrainian identity and helps explain the pro-western stance of the country, particularly in western Ukraine.

 

Q: Your book makes the observation that the famed Habsburg toleration took root through deeply conservative policies. Can you tell us about that dichotomy?

It is sort of counterintuitive to associate efforts to promote toleration and co-existence with conservativism, but in the period after the French Revolution, conservatives feared popular politics, and even Liberals only wanted to expand political representation to elites without an aristocratic background. However, that didn’t stop rulers in other countries from appealing to the majority religion in the states they ruled in order to garner popular support for their regime.  The Habsburg regime, however, feared popular support, even if in their favor, because of the unpredictability of it.  In addition, appealing to the majority religion for public support would imply that political power rested with the people.

However, although the Habsburgs were the face of the post-French Revolutionary conservatism, the Enlightenment had made deep inroads into the ruling class and the bureaucracy, which also explains why the government promoted vague notions of morality rather than confessional dogma.  In short, one can point to the desire for order, which would not be well served by stirring up the general population with religious polemics, and to Enlightenment values that the ruling class held, which also militated against promoting political Catholicism.

 

Q: What are some of the factors that motivated the Habsburgs to institutionalize toleration and reject confessionalism?

Embracing Catholic confessionalism, which would have rallied the 2/3 of the population that was Catholic, would have implied that obtaining popular support mattered.  Officials did not, of course, explicitly spell it out in these terms, but you can read between the lines.  Few officials had an appetite for a culture war, even when it would benefit Catholicism, and the desire to avoid discussion of controversial topics trumped other concerns.  In documents, officials stressed avoiding uproar on controversial topics, such as mixed marriages and conversions, and often preferred not addressing topics for fear that a ruling on a certain matter would spark discussion on it.  While one can read these actions as sweeping problems under the rug, one can also appreciate the desire to avoid exploiting divisions among diverse populations, which was done in the 20th century, with tragic consequences.

I have focused on the cynical explanations for the Habsburgs institutionalizing toleration and rejecting confessionalism, but we also cannot ignore how deep the Enlightenment had penetrated Habsburg society and institutions.  While present-day expectations for religious freedom were not present in the Habsburg Empire (as they were not in most places around the world at the time), freedom of conscience and the rule of law were considered core rights of living in the Habsburg Empire, and the Counter-Reformation, which had only ended in 1780, was considered a shameful event in Habsburg history.

 

Q: Can you tell us a little about the interesting tension between the Habsburgs’ political and state policies and their continued familial dedication to Catholicism?

I state at the beginning of the book that Emperor Francis II/I and top officials were good Catholics and that nothing indicates otherwise.  However, they had been educated in the Enlightenment, which did not deny the core tenets of their religion but which also stressed toleration and disavowed fanaticism.  Instead, officials stressed the vague concept of morality and good behavior, which aligned with the Enlightenment and middle-class values of the nineteenth century. Francis Joseph adhered to more traditional forms of Catholicism, thanks to the influence of his mother, but he was not willing to break with the precedent of toleration that had been set in the pre-1848 period.

 

Q: Is there anything that shocked or surprised you while working on this project?

I was surprised at the popularity of religion, which has been studied in German literature, in the nineteenth century. Issues, such as mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants, really did arouse popular outrage.  Even Liberals, who are typically associated with anticlericalism, actually sympathized with the Church, which it viewed as oppressed under the heavy hand of the state.  I was also surprised at the extent Habsburgs officials went to in order to regulate religious practices, particularly of the Catholic Church.  For example, obtaining a religious blessing for interconfessional mixed marriages today is arguably harder today than in the Habsburg Empire in this period because of the heavy hand of the state in regulating religious affairs.


You can get 30% off Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering from our website and using the discount code PURDUE30 at checkout.

 


Balkan Legacies: A Q&A with Balázs Apor and John Paul Newman

June 7th, 2021

We talked to Balázs Apor and John Paul Newman, the editors of Balkan Legacies: The Long Shadow of Conflict and Ideological Experiment in Southeastern Europe.

Balkan Legacies is a study of the aftermath of war and state socialism in the contemporary Balkans. The authors look at the inescapable inheritances of the recent past and those that the present has to deal with.


Q: What was your main motivation for starting this project as editors?

Balázs Apor: The book was the product of a conference in Dublin that addressed the broad themes of memory and identity in Central and Eastern Europe. The conference had several excellent papers that focused on Southeastern Europe and reflected on very similar themes: the legacies of war and communism in the region. It seemed to us like an obvious decision to bring those papers together in a volume in which these issues are analyzed more systematically. We also wanted to offer a comprehensive coverage of the region, so we invited additional experts to contribute. We felt that academic publications on historical legacies in the Balkans either focus on the legacy of wars or the legacy of the communist dictatorship, but they rarely address the two jointly. The primary motivation behind the volume is to offer a joint discussion of the two formative legacies of the 20th Century in the Balkans and explore how they interact with each other.

John Paul Newman: It is exactly as Balazs says – we had organized this large conference in Dublin, and in the aftermath sat down together in a pub and discussed what impressed us about the many papers that we had heard. It was clear that there was some excellent work by established and early career scholars on the many aftermaths of conflict and socialism in the region. It was also clear to us that there existed a kind of Gordian memory knot: that people had certain ideas and attitudes about war, and the Second World War especially, and that people also had a set of ideas and attitudes about socialism – that these attitudes were often entangled, conflicting, and that if we addressed these together we might learn something about the contemporary history of the region. That is what we have set out to do in the book.

 

Q: This volume is titled Balkan Legacies, and you make effort in the introduction of the book to talk about the concept of “legacy” and why you’re exploring it, could you explain that some here?

Apor: The concept of “legacy” is an elusive one. It is used very often in academic discussions, but its meaning is often left vague. There are very few attempts to define what “historical legacy” actually means and how can scholars study them. Our goal with the book was to tap into the literature on historical legacies and offer a contribution to academic debates on the term. In our interpretation, legacies denote structures, ideas, trends, themes, and so on, that revive or endure after radical breaks in history. We also argue for the importance of studying different legacies jointly in order to be able to appreciate the myriad of ways in which they interact with each other. The recent history of Southeastern Europe – or the Balkans – is probably the best case to illustrate this point. The legacies of wars and dictatorships (communist or otherwise) fundamentally shaped social and political developments in the Balkans in the past century and they continue to exert an influence on contemporary societies.

Newman: I suppose we liked the way the idea of ‘legacies’ suggested deeper historical and institutional inheritances. Deeper, that is, than the usual ideas about the past that are articulated in the public sphere in Southeastern Europe. Here, war and socialism are of course extremely important topics, hot button issues in politics, culture, the media, as many of our contributors point out. But often what is said in public is at odds with the historical reality: present-day politicians, for example, are quick to disavow the socialist period in toto, to claim that the period was a parenthetical departure from the true course of the nation, or to claim that if there are still vestiges, this has to do with an ‘unfinished revolution’ that they and they alone can bring to completion. This is a far too common and far too superficial way of interpreting the past, and part of the choice behind the legacies concept was to show another way of thinking about these important issues.

 

BALKAN LEGACIES is available June 15, 2021.

 

Q: You also mention the effects of both long-lasting legacies (institutions, policies, behaviors, and attitudes) and short-term events (revolutions, wars, and violent coups d’état) on societies and legacies. What makes this volume’s take on this somewhat novel?

Apor: In the literature on historical legacies there is a tendency to focus on structures, institutions and long-term developments or phenomena. We argue that short-term events, including revolutions and wars may produce equally significant and enduring legacies. The book contains a healthy balance of case studies focusing on the legacies of short-terms events (wars) and chapters discussing the legacies of enduring structures (dictatorships). The collection of essays should provide the reader with an insight into how different types of legacies function and how they interact with each other.

Newman: Braudel and the doyens of the Annales School would be turning in their grave! But it is true: so many studies of Southeastern Europe have thought in terms of long-term economic, social, and cultural development, and related many of these to the legacies of the Ottoman empire. Of course the Ottoman empire is central to the history of the region, just as it is central to Europe more generally (and to North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia). But we also wanted to show that the complex legacies of more recent conflict and political projects were also central to the way Southeast European societies have taken shape in the 21st century. One of our points of departure was Tony Judt’s opus of European history since the end of the Second World War ‘Postwar’, in which he argues that the shadow of that conflict remained over Europe throughout the Cold War and beyond. We wanted to try to push that premise further in Southeastern Europe, asking that, if this was true, how would it manifest in a region that experienced civil conflict, invasion, occupation, revolution, in the course of these years.

 

Q: How is this volume organized and what are some of the specific subjects covered?

Apor: The volume consists of five thematic parts. The first part contains chapters reflecting on the legacies of wars with an emphasis on the legacy of World War II in Croatian nation-building, the use of the hajduk tradition in Serbian politics at the time of the Yugoslav succession wars, and the Civil War in Greece. The second and third parts of the book collect chapters addressing the legacies of communism. Part 2 focuses primarily on the political sphere in Romania, Albania and Bulgaria whereas the emphasis in Part 3 is on everyday practices and objects (holidays, song contests and Tito memorabilia) that often evoke nostalgic sentiments in present-day societies. Part 4 highlights the role of non-communist legacies in the Balkans with case studies reflecting on monarchical legacies in Bulgaria, the antiquisation campaign in Macedonia, and the importance of (purged) books in attempts to create a usable past in Croatia. The last part of the book focuses on the legacies of war and communism in minority groups, such as diaspora and ethnic minority communities, and disabled people.

Newman: I remember that this was one of the hardest parts of editing this book. We had such an amazing range of scholars, approaching our central questions from such a range of disciplines, and with such a range of topics, too. It was on us as editors to craft this into a thematically coherent book. I hope we have achieved this!

 

Q: What do you want someone reading of to leave with a better understanding of, or, what is the main goal of this project?

Apor: The main goal of this project is to highlight the complexity of historical legacies in the Balkans. Legacies may be short-term or longer-term, they may be invisible and un-reflected and they often interact with each other in a multiplicity of ways.

Newman: Obviously I hope the reader will understand that war and socialism have left important and enduring legacies on the region! But I hope they will understand that this has not happened monolithically, that societies are experiencing these legacies in very different ways, depending on a range of intersectional variables, geography, age, gender, race, religion, and so on. I hope too that, if they didn’t know this plain fact before, they will understand something of the social and cultural vibrancy of the region. Perhaps the reader will be introduced to the ideas and the work of scholars they had not known about before.


Thank you to Balázs Apor and John Paul Newman! If you would like to know more about this book you can order your own copy or request it from your local library.

You can get 30% off this title and any other order by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.


Eleanor Roosevelt, The Jewish Plight, and the Founding of Israel: Q&A with John F. Sears

May 13th, 2021

We talked to John F. Sears, the author of Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Jewish Plight, and the Founding of Israel, about his motivations for writing the book, some of the new subjects the books covers, and some other aspects of Eleanor Roosevelts legacy.

Refuge Must Be Given details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States.


Q: What brought this part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacy to your attention, and what motivated you to write a book on it?

John F. Sears: When I was associate editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, I helped edit ER’s correspondence from the period 1945 through 1948. In letters she exchanged with President Harry Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall in 1948 about the Truman administration’s position on the future of Palestine, I was struck by how passionately she advocated on behalf of the plan adopted by the UN to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. ER strongly objected to the Truman administration’s plan in March to pursue the establishment of a UN trusteeship for Palestine when the British mandate came to an end in May rather than push immediately for the implementation of the partition plan. I wanted to know the origins of her commitment to partition and of her devotion to Israel once it was established.

 

Q: Though Eleanor Roosevelt is perhaps the most studied and popular first lady in American history, this part of her legacy has received little attention. Why do you think that is?

Sears: Good question. In the case of American refugee policy and the Holocaust, historians have focused extensively on FDR and the response of his administration. While they have noted (usually very briefly) that Eleanor Roosevelt advocated on behalf of refugees, she has been treated as a peripheral actor on this issue. In the case of the future of Palestine and Israel, liberals at the time were generally supportive, even enthusiastic about Israel’s founding and accomplishments. Politics have changed since the occupation of the West Bank, and many liberals today are critical of Israel. Perhaps that ER harbored stereotypes of Jews fairly late into her life, embraced Israel uncritically, and was unsympathetic to the Arab political stance on Israel are, for some people, jarring to her image as a great humanitarian. I myself found these topics challenging to deal with.

 

Decorative picture of book cover

 

Q: Eleanor Roosevelt certainly wasn’t always a champion of Judaism or Jewish people, as her views changed drastically over the course of her life. Why is understanding this evolution important in understanding her?

Sears: Eleanor Roosevelt grew up in an antisemitic society and absorbed the social antisemitism of her class. She gradually shed these attitudes as she worked closely with Jewish colleagues in addressing political and social issues. But even after she began campaigning against antisemitism, she continued to harbor stereotypes of Jews and to share the view that there was a “Jewish problem” that could be mitigated if Jews were distributed more widely geographically and among the professions. She does not appear to have completely shed this attitude until World War II or, perhaps, until the success of the Jews in establishing Israel created a different image of the Jew in American culture. But she firmly believed and repeatedly argued that everyone, whatever their religion, race, or ethnic background, was entitled to equal rights. She applied this principle to African Americans as well as to Jews.

ER was ahead of her time in many ways, including in her evolving attitude toward Jews. But it is important to understand that just as many Americans today have recently become more aware of how they continue to harbor racist stereotypes, despite their opposition to racism, ER’s rejection of antisemitism had not completely banished the old Jewish stereotypes from her consciousness. Prejudice is deeply embedded in our culture and not easily rooted out of our minds, even when we strive to do so.

 

Q: What are a few things that are being studied for the first time in this book?

Sears: Eleanor Roosevelt’s partnership with Clarence Pickett, executive director of the American Friends Service Committee, in advocating for the admission of more refugees, both Jewish and Christian, to the United States. The two of them also tried to educate the American public about the contributions refugees made to the country, and they sought to welcome refugees and care for them once they arrived in this country. As honorary chairman of the United States Committee for the Care of European Children, ER had a special concern for unaccompanied child refugees. She and Pickett also fought against antisemitism, which was rampant in the United States at the time.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts to prod Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to speed up the visa process and to facilitate the issuing of visas to applicants who were having difficulty obtaining one. Welles was widely seen as sympathetic to refugees, unlike most of his colleagues in the State Department, but he was captive to the bureaucratic system and to his own rigid personality. He failed to challenge his colleagues regarding the slowness of the visa process and insisted to ER that it was functioning well.

The evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt’s views on the future of Palestine and her ultimate commitment to the establishment of a Jewish state.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s attitude toward the Palestinian Arabs, who, she felt, had wrongly opposed the United Nations plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. ER sympathized with the Arab refugees and advocated for their care and resettlement. She regarded the Arab refusal to recognize Israel, negotiate a peace, and resettle the refugees in other Arab countries, however, as the principal cause of ongoing conflict.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s role as World Patron of Youth Aliyah, the organization that brought unaccompanied children to Palestine and later Israel and trained them to become productive citizens and nation builders. ER traveled to Israel four times and toured Youth Aliyah training centers and youth villages. She was fascinated by the various educational strategies employed by Youth Aliyah to integrate newly arrived child immigrants into a unified national culture. She also raised funds for Hadassah, Youth Aliyah’s major sponsor, and visited Hadassah medical facilities when she was in Israel.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s warm relationship with Israel and admiration for its leaders. ER regarded the energy and innovative way Israel approached its own development and the education of children as a model for other newly independent nations to emulate. “There is no country as exciting as Israel,” she said.

 

Q: In an ideal world, how would you like this book to affect ER’s legacy?

Sears: I hope readers will continue to admire Eleanor Roosevelt for the extraordinary leader she was, but gain a more complete and complex understanding of her views and achievements, including her shortcomings. Throughout her career, ER partnered with American Jews in addressing issues she cared deeply about, including refugees, religious tolerance, the civil rights of African Americans, child welfare, public health, and human rights. ER’s devotion to Israel was in many ways the culmination of that career. Yet many people, including Jews, are unaware of ER’s role during the founding of Israel and her ongoing relationship with the new nation. I hope Refuge Must Be Given will illuminate this important chapter in ER’s long and productive life.


Thank you to John! If you would like to know more about this book you can order your own copy or request it from your local library.

You can get 30% off this title and any other order by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.


Studying a Pioneer of Modern Weather Forecasting: Q&A with Jonathan E. Martin

February 22nd, 2021

We talked to Jonathan E. Martin, the author of Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science.

Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science recounts the life and scientific contributions of Reginald Sutcliffe, an understudied and underappreciated pioneer of modern weather forecasting.


Q: What motivated you to spend this amount of time documenting Reginald Sutcliffe’s life and accomplishments?

Jonathan E. Martin: When I was first hired at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994, my first assignment was teaching a senior undergraduate course in synoptic-dynamic meteorology – the study of the theory and observations of mid-latitude weather systems.  It was a dream come true since the phenomenology of these storms had fascinated me since childhood and my education and research experience to date had only heightened my enthusiasm for them as it had revealed to me their wondrous physical and dynamical nature.  As I prepared my notes for the course I was to teach that fall, it became clear that Sutcliffe had singularly elucidated the fundamental dynamics of the development of these cyclones, a process known as cyclogenesis, as well as the dynamical explanation for the coincidence of the characteristic frontal zones of such storms and the production of the clouds and precipitation associated with them.  This was the whole franchise of modern weather systems science and it had seemingly sprung from the mind of a single scientist in the late 1930s.  I was struck by the discrepancy between the importance of these contributions to modern understanding of weather systems (which informed the subsequent great advance in numerical weather prediction) and the relatively low profile of the man who had brought them forth.  Twenty years later a sabbatical afforded me the opportunity to begin examining Sutcliffe’s life in detail and perhaps remedy this unjust set of circumstances.

 

Q: When researching for this project were there any surprises that significantly altered your view on Sutcliffe or his legacy?

Martin: The core of my interest in Sutcliffe was his seeming monopoly on fundamental contributions to understanding mid-latitude weather systems juxtaposed with an incongruous obscurity as a scientist.  Nothing in the research that went into the book altered that basic view.  Nonetheless, it was surprising to discover that he was not interested in weather as a boy and, in fact, turned to the Meteorological Office upon graduating with his Ph.D. in Mathematics because there were virtually no other options at the time.  The Meteorological Office officially discouraged research and so a very talented Ph.D. in math was set to really boring tasks in the largely unscientific approach to weather forecasting then employed at the Office.  How, despite such intellectually suffocating circumstances, young Sutcliffe began to wriggle free and eventually elevate the forecasting enterprise to a hard science is an inspiring story.  Another unexpected aspect of Sutcliffe’s intellectual life was that he was a persistent skeptic of numerical weather prediction, perhaps the most unheralded scientific advance of the late 20th century.  Throughout the 1950s, when the enterprise was in its infancy, his main complaint was that it was not as good as what could be rendered by deep knowledge and expert judgement.  This was indeed the case and remained so for a good part of his professional career.  His perspective was sweeping; at the beginning of his career forecasting was a truly unscientific activity.  Then his own contributions elevated it to something much more rigorous.  It seems as though his skepticism was rooted in a frustration that too large a share of forecasting research effort in the 1950s focused on the computer, which was still quite limited.  He commented more than a couple of times later in his life that he thought the computer came too early – implying that important conceptual and theoretical work might have been displaced by an emphasis on tool development.

 

REGINALD SUTCLIFFE AND THE INVENTION OF MODERN WEATHER SYSTEMS SCIENCE is out March 15, 2021

 

Q: The availability of an accurate forecast and our ability to check it is no small feat, yet it has become so routine it is almost taken for granted. What kind of challenge does this provide in touting the accomplishments of someone like Sutcliffe?

Martin: My experience has long suggested to me that most people have some level of interest in the weather.  In fact, I’d venture to guess that meteorology, in the form of weather forecasting especially, is the physical science with which the general public makes is most frequent and familiar contact.  By extension, I imagine that a good number of us who benefit from the easy availability of accurate forecast information probably harbor a companion desire to know something more about where it comes from – to peer behind the curtain a little.  To the extent that such a desire does exist in some segment of the population, I think it provides motivation for coming to know Sutcliffe, his life and his influential accomplishments.  In fact, given the increasing profile of weather and climate issues in the public consciousness, this may the perfect time to begin telling the stories of the pioneers, like Sutcliffe, who helped fashion the modern scientific infrastructure upon which so much of our current predictive capability is built.

 

Q: In the preface of the book you mention that Sutcliffe’s life, in many ways, “was unusually illustrative of the progress often associated with the century in which it was lived”. What do you mean by this?

Martin: The pace of progress in the 75 years since the end of WWII probably exceeds that of any other period in human history regarding advances in medicine, physical science, social issues, technology, and a host of other human endeavors.  Sutcliffe was born into a world where children were still working in factories as opposed to getting a basic education, male life expectancy in Britain was 50, and a reasonably reliable weather forecast hardly existed for the next day.  By the end of his life, child labor was nearly non-existent in the West, a typical British man could expect to live until 74, and outlooks as long as 5-7 days were as routinely accurate as the 1-day forecast had been in 1905. Sutcliffe himself was an agent of substantial change despite the catastrophic interruption to his professional life imposed by the war.  Like so many of his generation, he answered the call to duty without hesitation or complaint, served admirably, and went about rebuilding the world upon returning to civilian life.  I believe that the progress that was made in so many dimensions in the post-war world was a direct result of the intestinal fortitude of men and women whose perspective on civic duty and citizenship mirrored Sutcliffe’s.


Thank you to Jonathan! If you would like to know more about this book you can order your own copy or request it from your local library.

You can get 30% off this title and any other order by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.


Veterinary Science and Infectious Plagues: A Q&A with Norman F. Cheville

February 19th, 2021

We talked to Norman F. Cheville, the author of Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health.

Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues covers a century of progress fighting infectious diseases and plagues, illuminating the important role of veterinary research and science.


Q: What was your impetus for writing this book and studying this subject?

Norman F. Cheville: A mystery existed about why America trailed Europe by a full century—from the 1760s to the 1860s—in building science-based veterinary colleges to educate for animal health care. Why? No historian had ever explained that. Turns out, veterinary colleges in Europe has been stimulated by rampant infectious disease, many of them zoonoses—diseases transmissible from animals to humans. Yet in North America, there was a century-long delay. Did it arise from public ignorance of microbes, from national energies miss-directed to war, or from the fraudulent veterinarians working in rural frontiers? There had to be a story there.

Then a celebratory editorial in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association had things backwards; an employee of the National Library of Medicine had written that medicine in North America had been the model for veterinary education. The writer had ignored not only the rich practical science culture but also the difficult but creative contributions to veterinary science in rural America and Canada. In seeking the historical facts, it appeared that much of the history of veterinary medicine has been ignored. In the beginning, I wanted to correct that and to include the important seminal contributions of pioneering scientists who I believed had been left out in the story, e.g., Heinrich Janssen Detmers and Rush Shippen Huidekoper. In progressing, a remarkable historical tableau emerged that drove the remainder of the book on how microbes, war, and public health had changed animal health care in North America.

 

Q: When you started writing this project you may not have expected it to be as topical as it now is. What are some of the most striking parallels between the plagues you talk about in the book and the pandemic we’re facing today?

Cheville: From the start, it was clear that the great plagues occurred in cycles that were driven by national economies, idiosyncrasies of political cultures, and wars. It was also soon clear that in responding to pandemics, the answers provided by science had to be translated into action – a translation that required journalists, informed politicians, and responsible pharmaceutical business; it has been the task of these groups to lead the public into acceptance of social behavior change including use of drugs and vaccines. Early successful scientists had been connected to some form of public information where the press, politicians, and heads of state drove effective actions. At the beginning of the era, the political talents of Jenner (smallpox), Pasteur (fowl cholera, anthrax, and rabies), Koch (tuberculosis), and Virchow (trichinosis) convinced the public and had been the key to their successes. In each succeeding plague cycle, some scientist or science group appeared to fulfill that mission. Virchow solved the problem of trichinosis in pigs in Germany by providing the science behind trichinosis in pork and the on-farm methods to prevent it; he had connections with the Reichstag to implement regulations and laws to mandate action. In America, unlike our early response to the COVID-19 disaster, some plagues led to effective responses. In the first decade of the 20th century food safety for humans appeared because of a scientist, a journalist, and a Congress who understood their responsibility to establish the Food and Drug Administration. For animals of that decade, scientists provided the vaccination method for the disastrous pandemic of hog cholera, the federal government, the research impetus, and the state legislatures (most of them at least) provided the funds and production facilities to stop the disease. Succeeding pandemics of influenza, poliomyelitis, and the prion diseases followed the same pattern. The importance of all this is that when journalists, legislators, or heads of state fail in this scheme, disaster ensues.

What emerged in writing this book was that distortion of veterinary science and education was occurring from two idiosyncrasies of culture – disbelief in science and distrust of government. Spreading misinformation and downright lies, people in these misinformation cults spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, astrology, and other anti-science scams. All of these scalawags were having destructive impacts on science in general and on veterinary medicine in particular. There were other bogeymen – fraudulent veterinarians, scientists that published fake data, dishonest entrepreneurs, and other latter-day snake oil salesmen. The anti-science stance of a disturbing percentage of the public arises from avoiding logic and rational analysis in solving what is basically a science problem. Underlying much of this mischief are the prejudices of the more misinformed segments of human cults of various kinds.

All of this is part of a scary anti-science and anti-government philosophy that has been growing since the 1960s and has been severely exacerbated by the internet and its lack of control.  Failure of the federal government to take command of this issue has allowed COVID-19 to spread throughout the nation before serious efforts of mitigation were finally begun. This is in striking contrast to the outbreak of smallpox in New York City at the end of World War II; then the nation was educated by the presidents, governors, mayors and public health departments; the public was responsive to the needed behaviors, and together acted immediately to prevent spread, vaccinate the population, and track spreaders. Because of our anti-science and anti-authoritarian beliefs (that are now being disguised at some loopy faux patriotism), we have become victims of pandemic viruses. It will get worse unless we correct this nonsense.

Q: As you put it, disbelief in science and distrust in government may be the two largest impediments to the advancements you outline in the book. From the 1860s to now, what do you think makes these so pervasive?

Cheville: There are several factors, the most important of which seems to be the tone set by those in charge. Presidents, state governors, and local leaders must take the steps and walk the walk of responsibility to keep the public informed and educated about the steps that must be taken: surveillance of global infections, monitoring for spread, social behavioral changes that prevent spread, and scientific research that expands production of vaccines and drugs. This often involved subtle communications and seeing that the public is informed correctly. A lethal move is the political re-direction or re-interpretation of science data. In recent times there is the need to regulate the internet, making it conform to public standards of truth – just as newspapers were forced to do in the early 20th century. Today, this is the major route for misinformation and anti-science cults to spread fake news. There is a persistent phony mentality that drives many of these cults, most based upon ignorance and expediencies of money, land, and material things that override the needs for the public good. These scams can only persist when there are deficits in public education. Any lack of a rigorous and demanding educational curriculum for teaching civics, government, science, and propaganda analysis in our primary and secondary schools provides fertile soil for cults.

 

Q: You write at the start of the preface of the book, “Animal health care in North America evolved from farriers and itinerant cow leeches to science-based veterinary medicine in one century, from 1860 to 1960.” When doing your research, what struck you most about the advancement of this era?

Cheville: It was a time when social responsibility moved to regulate the expanding economy. Reforms of the early 20th century regulated dangerous business habits that had spread not only plagues of infectious diseases but episodes of food adulteration and uncontrolled toxic disposals. These reforms gave us the safe nation in which we now live. The demands of regulated capitalism was co-incident with societal reform that promoted education and science. It was a time of public acceptance of science. There was less opportunity for those struggling with personality disorders/mental illness to seriously harm society.

 

Q: You end the book with an epilogue and changes since 1960 with emphasis on a growth in public distrust; how about the future?

Cheville: Things may seem dark at the moment, but there is hope. It takes time, but we will correct our mistakes through education and correction of misinformation, and by regulating the unrestricted falsification of public information. As to Veterinary Medicine and animal health care, these changes have been maintained. The book documents a striking and direct impact of change: the complete reversal in the acceptance of women as veterinary scientists. Not permitted to study for the profession in early times, women veterinary graduates exploded after World War II from near 0 in 1960 to nearly 90% in 2000. This remarkable change doubled the intellectual power of the profession. The change was coincident with an emerging spiritual aura of empathy and responsibility – an understanding of how animal behavior and human-animal connections change when biology goes awry. For the veterinarian, professional responsibilities expanded. One of the remarkable books of the period was James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small. It represented the era; scratch away the beautiful Yorkshire dales, the funny humanistic stories, and the cleverness of the writing, the reader is still left with a continuing theme of empathy of the human-animal bond – dealing with animal cruelty in a global production system, with the ecologic health of free-ranging terrestrial mammals in the wild, with dolphins and fish that must be saved from toxic tides in oceanic environments, and of protecting wild birds from suffering infections, starvation and lead poisoning along their intercontinental flyways. Knowledge and skill dedicated to healing animals of many species in a variety of environmental settings provided an unspoken but protective spiritual bond that leads to public trust.


Thank you to Norman! If you would like to know more about this book you can order your own copy or request it from your local library.

You can get 30% off this title and any other order by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.


Recovering the Stories of Early Women Pilots: A Q&A with Fred Erisman

December 18th, 2020

We talked to Fred Erisman, the author of In Their Own Words: Forgotten Women Pilots of Early Aviation.

In Their Own Words takes up the writings of eight women pilots as evidence of the ties between the growth of American aviation and the changing role of women.


Q: What was your main goal in undertaking this project?

Fred Erisman: I’m aiming at recovering and calling attention to some largely unknown or little-examined documents of women’s history. The eight women I discuss are known to aviation historians, but, with the exception of Earhart and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, are otherwise invisible to the larger public. The writings they left behind – Journalism, autobiography, fiction, etc. – help to expand our understanding of the women’s movement throughout its twentieth­-century history. The works give a new window through which to examine the relationship of women and aviation, how women of five decades came to grips with recurring issues of women’s rights and abilities, and how women (as opposed to men) viewed aeronautical technology and the airplane.

In the case of Louise Thaden and Ruth Nichols, their forays into fiction give readers yet another way to see and reflect on how two notable women viewed aviation, the times, and the future. One created an aeronautical dystopia and the other an American aviation utopia, yet both embraced the belief that flight was a special, even purifying, endeavor.

 

Q: Which of these aviators were new to you? Were there any stories that were particularly surprising/impressive?

Erisman: I have to point to the two Ruths – Ruth Law and Ruth Nichols. The more I learned of them the more impressed I became. Ruth Law was among the earliest of the record-setters (1916), made her living as a pilot, expressed what I have to believe was a genuine desire to join the military, and took real pride in being allowed to wear the trousered uniform of the U.S. Army. (This was 20 years before Earhart’s penchant for trousers caused twittering among the public.) Her writings make a strong case for women’s being in the military and, more generally, their calls for being treated on an equal plane with men.

Ruth Nichols impressed me with her vision of an American aeronautical paradise as reflected in her unfinished novel, Sky Girl, and with her early recognition of space as the next “aeronautical” frontier confronting women. At age 58 she presented herself to the American space program and proceeded to blow away tests judging her tolerance for g-forces, weightlessness, and sensory deprivation. She was an outspoken supporter of women in space until shortly before her death, and gives readers a new slant on what constitutes the “right stuff.”

 

 

Q: Do you think the stories of these women and have the potential to ring true even now? Any in particular that you remember?

Erisman: Unquestionably. The stories of these eight pilots are stories of hope, aspiration, challenge, and competency – issues as applicable to the women of today as they are to those of the teens, 20s, or 30s. It just happens that these women chose to face the challenge of a new technology, a profession that had become male-dominated (by default as much as by design), and a society that almost daily was having to adapt to a changing world.

These are all “airplane” stories. Change the specifics, retain the challenges, and they are as pertinent for women of the twenty-first century as they were for those of the twentieth. There is very little distance between our admiring them for all they did, and our admiration for Tammie Jo Shults and the aviation skills that help her to pilot her southwest Airlines 737 to safety after its explosive decompression. The challenges of flying remain, whether in mastering the stick-and-wire craft of early aviation or the sophisticated craft flown by today’s commercial and military pilots.

 

 

Q: Few if any of these aviators identified with the feminist/suffragist movements of their time (you mention this in the introduction of the book), but they all seemed to take their own route advocating for women’s causes, why do you think this is?

Erisman: They were stout believers in the equality and ability of women, but were realists about the mechanisms of change. They all recognized that the profession they loved was male-dominated. They also recognized that it was an individualistic one, in which women could be as effective acting singly as they might be in groups. Aviation was an area where male-female equality could easily and visibly be established; it was much easier for a capable woman aviator to show competence in the cockpit than in business or politics. They chose to stick with the world they knew and demonstrate their capabilities there. A widely expressed goal among the women pilots of the 1920s was “eliminating sex from aviation.” They wanted to be judged as pilots who were women, rather than women pilots.

They had no quarrel with the established movements. Earhart gradually gave them her endorsement, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh became an outspoken women’s advocate late in her career. They simply believed that they could do as well – or better – by going their own way.

 

Q: So it seems aviation provided a unique opportunity for the advancement of women’s causes. Do you feel that these women were able to capitalize on that?

Erisman: Here, too, the answer is “undeniably.” The very novelty of the airplane worked to put the eight in the spotlight, but none of them was shy about using her association with flight to call attention to specific accomplishments or challenges. There were proud of their achievements as women – not necessarily because they were sticking a thumb in men’s eyes, but because they were advancing the public conception and understanding of their gender’s possibilities. That their work related to the larger picture of male/female relations was a bonus.

Harriet Quimby was a journalist, Earhart was married to a publicity genius, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was married to a celebrity; all three had ready access to means of capitalizing on their deeds and emphasizing their role(s) as women. Without aviation, Katherine Stinson likely would have ended up a Mississippi piano teacher, Louise Thaden the manager of a Kansas coal­ distributing business, and Ruth Nichols a debutante fishing about for a “good marriage.” Each made much more of herself, solely and entirely through aviation.


Thank you to Fred! If you would like to know more about this book you order your own copy or request it from your local library.

You can get 30% off this title and any other order  by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.


Recovering the Stories of Early Women Pilots: A Q&A with Fred Erisman

December 18th, 2020

We talked to Fred Erisman, the author of In Their Own Words: Forgotten Women Pilots of Early Aviation.

In Their Own Words takes up the writings of eight women pilots as evidence of the ties between the growth of American aviation and the changing role of women.


Q: What was your main goal in undertaking this project?

Fred Erisman: I’m aiming at recovering and calling attention to some largely unknown or little-examined documents of women’s history. The eight women I discuss are known to aviation historians, but, with the exception of Earhart and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, are otherwise invisible to the larger public. The writings they left behind – Journalism, autobiography, fiction, etc. – help to expand our understanding of the women’s movement throughout its twentieth­-century history. The works give a new window through which to examine the relationship of women and aviation, how women of five decades came to grips with recurring issues of women’s rights and abilities, and how women (as opposed to men) viewed aeronautical technology and the airplane.

In the case of Louise Thaden and Ruth Nichols, their forays into fiction give readers yet another way to see and reflect on how two notable women viewed aviation, the times, and the future. One created an aeronautical dystopia and the other an American aviation utopia, yet both embraced the belief that flight was a special, even purifying, endeavor.

 

Q: Which of these aviators were new to you? Were there any stories that were particularly surprising/impressive?

Erisman: I have to point to the two Ruths – Ruth Law and Ruth Nichols. The more I learned of them the more impressed I became. Ruth Law was among the earliest of the record-setters (1916), made her living as a pilot, expressed what I have to believe was a genuine desire to join the military, and took real pride in being allowed to wear the trousered uniform of the U.S. Army. (This was 20 years before Earhart’s penchant for trousers caused twittering among the public.) Her writings make a strong case for women’s being in the military and, more generally, their calls for being treated on an equal plane with men.

Ruth Nichols impressed me with her vision of an American aeronautical paradise as reflected in her unfinished novel, Sky Girl, and with her early recognition of space as the next “aeronautical” frontier confronting women. At age 58 she presented herself to the American space program and proceeded to blow away tests judging her tolerance for g-forces, weightlessness, and sensory deprivation. She was an outspoken supporter of women in space until shortly before her death, and gives readers a new slant on what constitutes the “right stuff.”

 

 

Q: Do you think the stories of these women and have the potential to ring true even now? Any in particular that you remember?

Erisman: Unquestionably. The stories of these eight pilots are stories of hope, aspiration, challenge, and competency – issues as applicable to the women of today as they are to those of the teens, 20s, or 30s. It just happens that these women chose to face the challenge of a new technology, a profession that had become male-dominated (by default as much as by design), and a society that almost daily was having to adapt to a changing world.

These are all “airplane” stories. Change the specifics, retain the challenges, and they are as pertinent for women of the twenty-first century as they were for those of the twentieth. There is very little distance between our admiring them for all they did, and our admiration for Tammie Jo Shults and the aviation skills that help her to pilot her southwest Airlines 737 to safety after its explosive decompression. The challenges of flying remain, whether in mastering the stick-and-wire craft of early aviation or the sophisticated craft flown by today’s commercial and military pilots.

 

 

Q: Few if any of these aviators identified with the feminist/suffragist movements of their time (you mention this in the introduction of the book), but they all seemed to take their own route advocating for women’s causes, why do you think this is?

Erisman: They were stout believers in the equality and ability of women, but were realists about the mechanisms of change. They all recognized that the profession they loved was male-dominated. They also recognized that it was an individualistic one, in which women could be as effective acting singly as they might be in groups. Aviation was an area where male-female equality could easily and visibly be established; it was much easier for a capable woman aviator to show competence in the cockpit than in business or politics. They chose to stick with the world they knew and demonstrate their capabilities there. A widely expressed goal among the women pilots of the 1920s was “eliminating sex from aviation.” They wanted to be judged as pilots who were women, rather than women pilots.

They had no quarrel with the established movements. Earhart gradually gave them her endorsement, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh became an outspoken women’s advocate late in her career. They simply believed that they could do as well – or better – by going their own way.

 

Q: So it seems aviation provided a unique opportunity for the advancement of women’s causes. Do you feel that these women were able to capitalize on that?

Erisman: Here, too, the answer is “undeniably.” The very novelty of the airplane worked to put the eight in the spotlight, but none of them was shy about using her association with flight to call attention to specific accomplishments or challenges. There were proud of their achievements as women – not necessarily because they were sticking a thumb in men’s eyes, but because they were advancing the public conception and understanding of their gender’s possibilities. That their work related to the larger picture of male/female relations was a bonus.

Harriet Quimby was a journalist, Earhart was married to a publicity genius, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was married to a celebrity; all three had ready access to means of capitalizing on their deeds and emphasizing their role(s) as women. Without aviation, Katherine Stinson likely would have ended up a Mississippi piano teacher, Louise Thaden the manager of a Kansas coal­ distributing business, and Ruth Nichols a debutante fishing about for a “good marriage.” Each made much more of herself, solely and entirely through aviation.


Thank you to Fred! If you would like to know more about this book you order your own copy or request it from your local library.

You can get 30% off this title and any other order  by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.