sociology – Recall This Book

146* Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)

Peter Brown‘s fascinating Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD chronicles the changing conceptions of wealth and treasure in late antiquity and the first centuries of Christianity. For our 2020 series in the rise of money (we also spoke to Thomas Piketty and Christine Desan) Brown related the emergence, in the 3rd and 4th century AD, of striking new ideas about charity and how to include the poor inside a religious community.

Brown explains how the very categories of “the wealthy” and “the poor” had to be invented in late Antiquity. Hence the importance of civic euergetism in the Greek and Roman worldview–i.e. benefaction and charity strictly confined to the good of the city.

142* Greg Childs on seditious conspiracy (EF, JP)

What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP.

138c. What Just Happened? David Cunningham (Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie)

Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years.David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, U.S.A. and There’s something happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence His ongoing research includes the recent wave of conflicts around Confederate monuments and other sites of contested memory.

David’s vision of what has changed in 2024 relates to an extended analogy to the election of 1972, when the avowedly racist George (“Segregation….forever“) Wallace almost rode right-wing fury to victory.

138b. What Just Happened? Vincent Brown (Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock)

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture.

122 The Culture Trap, with sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)

In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of race, ethnicity, and education, and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores “ethnic expectations” for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as “high-achieving,” in London, they have been conversely thought to be “chronically underachieving.” Yet in each case the main cause — of high achievement in New York and low achievement in London — is said to be cultural. We discuss the concept of ethnic expectations and the ways it can have negative effects even when the expectations themselves are positive, the dense intertwining of race, class, nation, colonial status, and gender, and the travels of the concept of culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.