Archives de catégorie : History

BEKLAUTE FRAUEN de Leonie Schöler

How women made history – and men took the credit.

BEKLAUTE FRAUEN
(Stolen Fame: Philosophers, Scholars, Pioneers: History’s Invisible Heroines)
by Leonie Schöler
Penguin, February 2024

Muse, secretary, wife: these are some of the labels used to describe the women whose influence on history has been erased. Their achievements have brought honour and fame to the men close to them – such as Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Albert Einstein, who couldn’t have done what they did without their female friends, daughters or lovers – but they themselves remain largely unknown. The list includes scientists like Rosalind Franklin and Lise Meitner, who, unlike their male colleagues, were never celebrated for their discoveries; and authors and artists like Marie Hirsch, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Hedwig Thun, who hid behind male pseudonyms all their lives in order to be taken seriously. In « Stolen Fame », Schöler tells their stories, introducing us to the women who changed human history and showing that there are still issues around participation and visibility. Behind every successful man is a system that empowers him – and that system stands in every woman’s way.

For fans of Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, Unlearn Patriarchy by Lisa Jaspers et al., The Patriarchy of Thing » by Rebekka Endler and Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.

Leonie Schöler is a historian, journalist and presenter. Her articles have been published in taz and Zeit Online, and she also works as an editor and online filmmaker (« Jäger und Sammler », « Y-Kollektiv » and « Auf Klo ») for various broadcasters. Her documentary exposing fraud and money laundering at Germany’s largest meat processing company came out in 2021, and she is the author and director of a 2022 online series about the infamous Wannsee Conference (both shown by ZDF). She produces popular history content for TikTok and Instagram and talks to her more than 170k followers about politics past and present. In 2022, she became presenter of ZDF’s Heureka programme (shown on YouTube).

TRANS TIME TRAVEL de Thomas Page McBee

Thomas Page McBee defines the concept of “trans time,” and how the trans experience can be a torch into the future for all of us.

TRANS TIME TRAVEL
A Mind-Bending Journey Across Continents, Centuries, and Dimensions
by Thomas Page McBee
Scribner, TBD
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

© A Klass Thomas Page McBee is at 42, he writes, one of the oldest trans people he knows, an “elder,”—and he’s also 12, “a man without a boyhood, alive at the end of the world.” Time is linear, but it’s also cyclical. This moment, with its fever-pitch of anti-trans rhetoric, a broken political system, not to mention climate change, can feel like the end of the world—as have other moments in our history. And yet, as Thomas writes, “the future is already here.” The seeds of what is to come already exist. We need to be asking different and better questions.

This books takes us through time and space and through the ideas that Thomas finds himself obsessed with: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; queer history of the American West; the story of Brandon Teena, subject of the film “Boys Don’t Cry” and the first trans person Thomas ever heard of; how the media, the medical system, the prison system, the archives have all told trans stories.

Thomas Page McBee’s TV and screenwriting career has been enormously successful, with several collaborations with Elliott Page and others, including for an adaptation on Amateur that HBO has momentum behind. He’s been praised by some of the most iconic writers of our generation, from Roxane Gay to Maggie Nelson. His work as a journalist is highly sought after, from the current piece on Mary Shelley he’s writing for Travel and Leisure to a T Magazine feature commissioned by Hanya Yanagihara.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE de Jason Bell

The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the first enemy of the Nazis.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE
The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code
by Jason Bell
Pegasus Books, May 2024
(via Vertical Ink)

The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the first enemy of the Nazis In public life, Dr. Winthrop Picard Bell was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. As MI6 Secret Agent A12, he evaded gunfire and shook pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy in electrifying 1919 Berlin. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for WWII, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6, and to prime ministers. But a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress his alerts. Nevertheless, his intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways only now revealed. Bell became a spy once again in the face of WWII. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler’s deadliest secret code: the Holocaust. At that time the Führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell’s shocking warning? Fighting an epic intelligence war from Ukraine, Russia, and Poland to France, Germany, Canada and Washington, D.C., A12 was the real-life 007, waging a single-handed fight against madmen bent on destroying the world. Without Bell’s astounding courage, the Nazis might just have won the war.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE, informed by recently declassified documents, is the first book to illuminate the astounding exploits of Winthrop Bell, Agent A12.

Jason Bell, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He has served as Fulbright Professor in Germany (at Göttingen, Winthrop Bell’s alma mater), and has taught at universities in Belgium, the United States, and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Pickard Bell’s classified espionage papers.

INFERNAL MACHINE de Steven Johnson

Combining science, forgotten periods of history, and philosophy, Johnson documents the rise of dynamite-driven political terrorism, the emergence of modern forensic sciences, and the formation of the modern detective in the twentieth century.

INFERNAL MACHINE
A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective
by Steven Johnson
Crown, May 2024

When Arthur Woods took command of the NYPD in April of 1914, the institution was still largely corrupt and low-tech. Determined to change that, he couldn’t have anticipated the maelstrom of violence that would test his science-based approach to policing. Within weeks of his tenure, New York City was engulfed in a period of relentless bombings, many of them perpetrated by the anarchists movement led by the radicals Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.

Steven Johnson’s engrossing account of the struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance goes back to Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, to the development of forensic science in France, and to the assassination of Czar Alexander II. As the forces of anarchy and policing clash in New York City, we meet Inspector Joseph Faurot, a science-first detective who works closely with Woods in reforming the police force; Hans Schmidt, the psychotic killer priest whose capture turns Faurot into a household name; and Amadeo Polignani, the young Italian undercover detective who infiltrates the notorious Bresci Circle.

Steven Johnson is the author of seven books including the bestseller Ghost Map. His writings have influenced everything from the way political campaigns use the Internet, to cutting-edge ideas in urban planning, to the battle against 21st-century terrorism.

FEARLESS d’Ann Hagedorn

In the vein of Hidden Figures, FEARLESS is fascinating and moving look at a “hidden history” of women at the forefront of a movement of great and lasting impact.

FEARLESS
The Hidden Story of The Women Who Powered America’s Anti-Slavery Movement
by Ann Hagedorn
Simon & Schuster, 2025
(via The Martell Agency)

From the author of Edgar Award finalist Sleeper Agent comes FEARLESS: The Hidden Story of The Women Who Powered America’s Anti-Slavery Movement, which recounts the heretofore unchronicled lives of seven activist women – Black and white, urban and rural, rich and poor and middle class — who formed the backbone of the Abolitionist movement in the decades leading up to the Civil War, networking and organizing across the country, forming anti-slavery societies, newspapers, conventions and lecture circuits, raising funds that were critical to the cause and daring to stand up for their beliefs amidst widespread condemnation.

Ann Hagedorn, an award-winning author and journalist, has been a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and has written for other publications including The Washington Post. She has taught writing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of Sleeper Agent (2022); The Invisible Soldiers (Simon & Schuster); Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (Simon & Schuster); Beyond the River: A True Story of the Underground Railroad (Simon & Schuster); Ransom: The Untold Story of Global Kidnapping (Holt) and Wild Ride: The Rise and Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc. America’s Premier Racing Dynasty (Holt).