Columbia University Press

“I realize now, that in comparison to [Dag Hammarskjöld], I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.”—John F. Kennedy

We conclude our week-long feature on Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa, by Susan Williams with an excerpt from her moving epilogue. Williams focuses not on the mystery surrounding his death but rather his important legacy.

On 14 March 1962, six months after Hammarskjöld’s death, President John F. Kennedy invited Sture Linnér [a Hammarskjöld aide], who had by now left the Congo and was at UN headquarters in New York, to the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. He told Linnér that he wanted to apologize for the pressure that had been put on Dag to implement US policy in the Congo—a pressure which Dag had refused to heed. The Secretary-General’s strategy had been straightforward: ‘I do not intend to give way to any pressure, be it from the East or the West; we shall sink or swim.’ Equally clear were his instructions to Linnér: ‘Continue to follow the line you find to be in accordance with the UN Charter.’

Kennedy explained to Linnér the reasons for US opposition to Dag’s policy in the Congo. For his own political survival, said the President, he had felt obliged to heed the deep aversion towards Communism and left-wing views, which even after McCarthy’s heyday played an important role in American politics. He then said that because it was now too late to offer an apology to Hammarskjöld, he wished to do so to Linnér. ‘I realise now,’ said Kennedy, that in comparison to [Dag], I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.’

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A few weeks ago, the BBC reported on the continuing controversy concerning Dag Hammarskjold’s death in 1961 when his plane crashed in Zambia. His death, of course, is also the subject of Susan Williams’s new book, Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa .

Williams’s book and the BBC report describes some of the evidence that have surfaced in recent years that have cast doubt around the official explanation of how Hammarskjold’s plane crashed. Raising doubts is the way the crash scene was handled, a mysterious hole in Hammarskjold’s head that had been airbrushed from official photographs, and another plane which was spotted around Hammarskjold’s DC-6.

Who would want Hammarskjold dead?

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Upon publication of Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa, the Hurst Blog, published an essay by Adrian Begg, who was then a 20-year-old officer in the Northern Rhodesia Police when Dag Hammarskojld’s plane crashed in 1961. In this essay, he describes that fateful day and the mystery that surrounds the crash. We thank Hurst and Mr. Begg for allowing us to reprint the article on our blog. To view Begg’s photographs from the site, please visit the Hurst Blog.

It began as a normal, quiet Sunday shift at Ndola’s central police station, where I had been stationed as a young assistant inspector since completing my training six months earlier – but it soon became obvious there was something big on the go. Officers were being called in from home, and in the early afternoon I was sent with a squad of other officers to secure Ndola Airport and put it in security lockdown in readiness for VIP arrivals. The word quickly spread among us that Dag Hammarskjöld was expected.

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While serving as United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) representative to Zambia from 1998-2005, Margaret O’Callaghan spoke at a memorial service upon the anniversary of UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold’s death. In an article originally published by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and reprinted on the Hurst Blog, O’Callaghan writes about how she might have felt at the memorial had she read Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa, by Susan Williams, at that time.

In Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, Susan Williams re-examines the plane crash that took Hammarskjold’s life as he traveled to the Congo, a hot spot during the Cold War. O’Callaghan writes:

Williams is not just raking over old ashes but shining a bright light into the dark recesses of government archives and other sources, and revealing new information which clearly indicates that the crash was no accident. She produces evidence which shows that a number of governments, themselves member organisations of the fledgling UN, along with powerful business interests, played crucial roles in the event. This is perhaps why the book is causing such a stir – despite the half century which has passed.

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This week our featured book is Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa, by Susan Williams

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a free copy of the book to one lucky winner.

To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!

Praise for Who Killed Hammarskjold?:

“This is an extraordinary story, narrated with clarity and devastating effect. Susan Williams is to be congratulated for shining a light onto a very strange and disturbing incident. The result is a gripping and astonishing read.” — Alexander McCall Smith, novelist, author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series

In the following passage from The Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva explores the iconography and symbolism of beheadings during the French Revolution:

More Roman, Marat takes great pleasure in what he believes to be the “serene joy” of the people contemplating “the head of the tyrant [that] had just fallen under the sword of the law” and salutes “a religious holiday.” In effect, we are witnessing a “syncope of the sacred,” which only suspends one religion with the ambition of immediately founding another.But this new religiosity is lacking in imagination and rudimentary in symbolism: the passage to the act itself takes the place of culture and justice.

The jubilation of the masses before this spectacle has been compared to prehistoric skull rituals and the totemic meal. This comparison does not flatter modernity, to say the least. The gritty rhetoric, the repression or denial of death often takes the mediocre, infantile aspect of the bawdy story. A few engravings tragically emphasize the “caustic forms” of this Dantean era. Less numerous, it seems, than the royalist images, most of the figurations are republican caricatures representing the head of Louis XVI. The most widespread and widely imitated engraving in France and abroad is signed with two pseudonyms, “Fious,” for the draftsman, and “Sarcifu,” for the engraver. Redundant imagery characterizes these productions, which are limited to representing three essential subjects: the severed head is displayed on the Place de la Révolution, like a Medusa head, as some present-day historians note; the portrait of the guillotine victim is engraved without any narrative context, for the voyeuristic pleasure of “sacred” vengeance; the king is accompanied on his descent into Hell.

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“My hope with this book is, first, to resituate Stein where I think she belongs—in the latter camp of reactionary modernism. It simplifies her work and falsifies her life to misread both in the service of our own progressive agendas. The dilemmas of her life, and the realities of her actions and convictions, require careful and objective understanding.”—Barbara Will

Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma continues to garner attention. This week the book was featured in Rorotoko and in an article in The Chronicle Review (unfortunately, a subscription is required to view the entire article).

In her essay for Rorotoko, Barbara Will describes her book’s focus on the relationship between Gertrude Stein and the French intellectual Bernard Fay. As she explains, Unlikely Collaboration tells the story of Stein and Fay’s involvement and support of the Vichy government — Stein as writer of propaganda for Petain’s regime and Fay as an official in the secret police. Despite their shared affinity for the Vichy government, the two had very different fates after the war as Stein’s wartime writings were suppressed and she was hailed by the American press as being a survivor while Fay was sentenced to life in prison.

Barbara Will’s investigation into how a Jewish-American writer and a French aesthete were drawn to a fascist government is complemented by her exploration of larger questions about what drew many modernists to reactionary politics. Will writes:

What was it that drew these thinkers toward such regimes? My book sees Stein and Faÿ as case studies of this larger phenomenon, arguing that there is no necessary correspondence between avant-garde or radical thought and progressive politics. Indeed, in uncertain times, the avant-garde can sometimes take on rear-guard or reactionary positions. Being attentive to the particular reactionary agendas of Stein and Faÿ—including their idealization of the eighteenth-century and their sense of Pétain as a revolutionary war hero—allows us a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the broader points of convergence between modernism and fascism or authoritarianism.

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Subhas Chandra Bose, one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century was an Indian nationalist allied himself with the Nazis during World War II in the hopes of toppling British rule in India. Bose is considered on par with Gandhi as one of the key figures of India’s struggle against the British. He is also the subject of Romain Hayes’s new book Subhas Chandra Bose In Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence, and Propaganda 1941-43.

On the website of Random House India, the book’s Indian publisher, Romain Hayes discusses his interest in Bose and his decision to write the book. Hayes first learned of Bose while reading Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet and was struck how Bose’s path challenged the view of Indian passive resistance to British rule.

Hayes describes his rationale for writing Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany:

I eventually concluded that Bose was a subject deserving of more research particularly in regard to his interactions with the Germans during the Second World War. The questions that intrigued me were centred around the nature of these interactions. Were they sincere or purely opportunistic? Were the two sides able to achieve their aims? Were the Nazis forced to compromise their racial ideology or was this merely political posturing? What of the moral implications of such an alliance? It cannot be denied that it was one of the more controversial associations of the Second World War.

What had a greater impact on business, the Iron Age or the invention of coinage? What might these developments tell us about more recent historical changes such as globalization or the computer revolution? These are the issues that Keith Roberts, author of The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets, explores in a recent op-ed in Forbes.

Roberts argues that an understanding of Ancient History gives us a better understanding of the impact of change over time and its effect of business and economies. While the political importance of the Iron Age cannot be denied, Roberts suggests that its impact on business, despite its ability to create wealth, was limited.

Roberts compares this with the invention of coinage in Ancient Greece during the late seventh century. Roberts writes:

As sales for money replaced barter, economic exchange became faster and more frequent. Monetary prices improved information about values and supply and demand, reducing risks for traders and vendors. Their wares then became more available, stimulating consumer demand. An entrepreneurial market economy became a defining feature of Greek urban life. Later, the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Romans brought market economies to towns and cities throughout the western world.

The difference between the impact on business of the Iron Age and of coinage cautions us to ignore the “shock and awe” of change as a general proposition and focus on the practical details of exactly how a change works in reality.

Having recently published biographies of New York City mayors—America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York and Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City—we’ve been following Mayor Bloomberg’s recent battles with snow storms. While the post-Christmas blizzard won the first round, Bloomberg was clearly ready for the most recent snow fall, undoubtedly recognizing that providing plowed streets and other basic services are key to a mayor’s success.

One only has to look at the experience of John Lindsay whose mayoralty almost came undone by a blizzard in 1969 (see above picture of a lonely Lindsay surveying the storm). In America’s Mayor, Jeff Greenfield, CBS News senior political correspondent and a former speechwriter for Lindsay, describes how the snowstorm hurt an already weakened Lindsay:

Even the gods—and a sclerotic bureaucracy—conspired against him: a freak snowstorm in early 1969 that dumped nearly two feet of snow on eastern Queens had paralyzed much of that borough for days, offering a Currier & Ives portrait of a Manhattan-centric mayor indifferent to the plight of middle-class homeowner.

Sound familiar?

In other New York City Mayor news, New York Magazine recently gathered a group that included scholars, political consultants, and Al Sharpton to weigh in on what makes a good mayor of New York City and who might have been the best.

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James Rodger Fleming, author of Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, was recently interviewed by both ABC Radio’s Late Night Live as well as New Books in History. In both interviews, Fleming talks about the frequently misguided efforts throughout history to affect the weather.

Marshall Poe from “New Books in History” writes about the book:

In Fleming’s excellent telling, the story is entertaining though a bit sad. It’s sadder still that the weather-controlling con is still being run by seemingly well-intentioned people who claim they can “fix” global warming by means of some outsized, outrageous, and out-of-this-world engineering scheme. Fleming, who both knows the science and has looked at the history, is more than dubious. The only way we can “fix” the sky is to leave it alone and hope for the best.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has also posted a video of Fleming’s recent talk on geoengineering. Fleming critiques recent proposals aimed at “fixing the sky” to help reduce global warming. While such proposals differ from the military uses of geoengineering considered during the Cold War and the Vietnam War, the implications are still troubling.

From the AAAS site:

Fleming said today’s proponents of geoengineering for climate control need to look beyond the technical details of proposals. He argues, as he put it in his book, for “the relevance of history, the foolishness of quick fixes, and the need to follow a ‘middle course’ of expedited moderation in aerial matters, seeking neither to control the sky nor to diminish the importance of the environmental problems we face.”

More on the book: Read the introduction.

Every year the librarians at the New-York Historical Society Library field thousands of questions from patrons. In When Did the Statue of Liberty Turn Green? 102 of the most compelling questions are collected and answered. These questions illuminate New York’s  history and the various facets of the city from its politics and sports to its oddities and extraordinary residents. Take the quiz below and find out how well you know the history of New York City.

Click here for the answers.

1. What famous statesman founded the New York Post?
a. George Washington
b. Alexander Hamilton
c. Rudolph Giuliani
d. Andrew Carnegie

2. Where did the name “Manhattan” come from?
a. Native Americans
b. Henry Hudson
c. Dutch West India Company
d. Queen Isabella of Spain

3. What was the “Massacre Opera House”?
a. a theater
b. a play
c. a famous opera singer’s residence
d. a haunted house

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The following is a post by Steven Bryan, author of The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire. Read Bryan’s earlier post, How Unusual Is China’s Currency Policy?

On its surface, one the oddest responses to the current economic crisis has been the reemergence of the argument that austerity is a good idea in a depression. The idea that, in effect, making a downturn worse is the way to recovery is superficially so nonsensical as to be incomprehensible.

But, in the current crisis, as in the interwar depression, calls for austerity have reflected mixed motives. In Germany to date austerity has been more rhetorical than actual and offset by a social safety net, export and manufacturing bases and a currency made to support them all. In Spain and Ireland it has been a response to perceived, if politically questionable, concerns about bond rates and ratings. This does not mean austerity is a smart policy; it just means it is not incomprehensible. In Greece austerity has been the result of IMF and EU demands to protect banks outside of Greece rather than a path freely chosen by Greeks themselves. In the UK, if anything, austerity has been less a response to the current economic crisis than the preference of a new government to re-shape the role of the state for philosophical reasons and to favor its electoral base – in other words, an excuse to do what it would like to do anyway.

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Jonathan Soffer, author of the forthcoming Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City will be on what promises to be an excellent panel at this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 12.

Soffer’s panel, “Change Gonna Come: The Fluid Life of New York City,” will be from 1-2 and be held at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Here’s a description of the panel:

Change is Gonna Come: The Fluid Life of New York City

In a city like New York, change is constant. Yet coupled with that change comes numerous and often times competing interests. Sharon Zukin (Naked City), Roberta Brandes Gratz (The Battle for Gotham) and Martin Lemelman (Two Cents Plain) consider the perpetual ebb and flow of The Big Apple and how it affects us all. Moderated by Phillip Lopate (Waterfront).

The Brooklyn Book Festival is one of, if not the best literary event in New York City, gathering some of the best writers from the New York City area and the world.

In Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète Paula Amad examines one of the most extraordinary collections of film and photography.

Tucked away in a garden on the edge of Paris is a multimedia archive like no other: Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (1908-1931). Kahn’s vast photo-cinematographic experiment preserved world memory through the privileged lens of everyday life, and Counter-Archive situates this project in its biographic, intellectual, and cinematic contexts.

At the heart of the book is an insightful meditation upon the transformed concept of the archive in the age of cinema. While Amad’s work offers the first comprehensive study of Kahn’s films, the photographs from the collection, documenting life in the early twentieth century are also extraordinary.

Recently the Web site City Noise posted photographs from the collection. Some examples are below and click here for more.

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While its hard to imagine otherwise, Italians have not always embraced the tomato as part of their national cuisine. In a late summer love letter to the tomato the New York Post describes the history of the tomato in Italy as told by David Gentilcore in the book Pomodoro!

Here the Post details the turning point when the tomato went from a strange and horrible killer to a kitchen staple:

While Italian cuisine we think of today would be impossible to imagine without its tomatoes, the historical process of turning the maligned vegetable into a favored edible was slow. Gentilcore discovers that attitudes toward the tomato finally began to change by the mid-17th century when medical books were allowing that the acidity of the tomato could actually help digestion, and recipes from the New World for chopped tomatoes with fresh chiles were making their way to Italy. Italian food writers started paying more attention to flavors and using tomatoes in their cooking.

Elsewhere, the blog The Crispy Cook has a roundtable discussion of Pomodoro! going. They’ve even got recipes!

“Do not let the peasant know how good cheese is with pears.”– an Italian proverb

In Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb Massimo Montanari explores the background of this common Italian proverb still in use today. Along the way we discover why the diets of medieval monks were so influential in their time; who was allowed to eat pears, and who wasn’t; how cheese and pears came to be eaten together; when “rustic food” became fashionable; how your temperament of hot, cold, wet, or dry determined your meal choices; and when we first became connoisseurs of “good taste.”

The following is a quiz based on the history in Montanari’s book (Click here for the answers):

1. Until the seventeenth century, doctors believed that everything was reduced to the four elements of the universe–hot, cold, moist, and dry–and that medical ailments were cured by eating foods to counteract your out-of-balance elements. Who codified this system?
a. Dr. Spock
b. Hippocrates
c. Galen
d. Julius Caesar

2. In the middle ages certain foods were believed to dispose the stomach to receive the foods that came afterwards—hence aperitif from aprire, “to open” or to conclude a meal with foods noted for their sealing qualities to aid in digestion. Which of these foods was almost always served at the end of a meal to seal the stomach and prevent indigestion?
a. cherries
b. bread
c. chocolate
d. cheese

3. People were obsessed with social class in medieval culture and food was a primary way of distinguishing oneself. Cheese was to be eaten as a main dish only by the peasantry because, coming from beasts of the land, it was considered a low-status food. Pears, on the other hand, grow on trees. Following this logic, who was allowed to eat pears?
a. nobility
b. the king and queen
c. pilots
d. birds

4. Monks, and religious orders in general, were neither of the peasantry nor of the nobility. As a sort of mediating space between the two, foods forbidden to one class or the other could meet and intermingle in religious settings. As the Catholic Church became stricter about the renunciation of meat on holy days and Lent, what food came to replace meat in the monastic diet and then spread into other classes from there?
a. Fish
b. Eggs
c. Cheese
d. All of the above

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Every so often we like to feature blogs by Columbia University Press authors. Today we shine a spotlight on Kings of War whose contributors include three Columbia/Hurst authors: Robert Dover, co-editor of Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence Needs the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence; Patrick Porter, author of Military Orientalism:Eastern War Through Western Eyes; and John Mackinlay, author of The Insurgent Archipelago.

These authors and are all members of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. As you might have surmised the focus of the blog is on strategy, the military, war, and security. Recent posts have discussed the controversy surrounding and resignation of Stanley McChrystal, Wikileaks, the attack on the Gaza flotilla, and changes in the academic discipline of International Relations.

Here is a description of Kings of War from the site, detailing the scope of the blog:

Kings of War is about strategy, widely defined.

We assign each of our posts to one (or more) of seven “columns” – the tabs at the top of the page. Alanbrooke is about British national security and defense. Clausewitz deals with strategic theory. Galula explores counterinsurgency. Grant, like the U.S. general and president, is concerned with American grand strategy. Mao covers insurgency and terrorism. Thucydides is history. Turing, as in Alan Turing, reviews cyberwar and the virtual dimension of conflict.

In her book Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London, Lisa Keller examines among other issues the critical development of sanctioned free speech, controlled public assembly, and new urban regulations in London and New York. Here are her reflections on the newest addition to one of London’s most prominent and historic public spaces: Trafalgar Square.

There was hardly a gasp from the small crowd on May 24 when they unveiled the latest work of art on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square. There should have been, though, for several reasons. The work was a miniature version of Lord Nelson’s ship, The Victory, which won the famous 1805 battle for which the square was named. The Battle of Trafalgar is widely celebrated as one of Britain’s greatest naval victories, certainly the most important of the Napoleonic Wars. This little wonder (1:30 scale) sits in a glass bottle (the packaging said made in Italy). It is the first work of art in the square by a black British artist, Yinka Shonibare, MBE. And it is the first work of art specifically referencing the square’s history.

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Reaching a range of viewers and listeners, Sam Roberts, editor of America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York, has been talking about the just-published book and the accompanying exhibit which opened at the Museum of the City of New York.

America’s Mayor has also been featured on Politico and James Sanders’s essay from the book, Adventure Playground: John V. Lindsay and the Transformation of Modern New York, was excerpted on The Design Group Observer site.

To listen to Sam Roberts and Tom Casciato, the director of the documentary Fun City Revisited: The Lindsay Years, which just aired on WNET on Leonard Lopate:

And here are Roberts and Casciato on Good Day New York: