Lessons From History Biographies

  Tolerating hatred and violence against anyone degrades your entire society.     The JFK era has long been an historical era that has fascinated me, partly because my grandparents were all loyal Kennedy people, and also because I truly believe that with all of JFK's deep flaws, that he was the last thing we had to anything resembling tremendous presidential leadership (it was a sad realization I recently had that for most of my lifetime, the best of American society has not actually lead us, a symbol of just how broken how country has become). The 1960's were an era of great tumult in general, and the fact that so few of that era's great leaders actually survived it undoubtedly played a major role in the overall decline of our national leadership in the coming decades. Peniel Joseph's excellent new book Freedom Season examines in detail the crucial year of 1963, which was a year of wrenching change for the nation that was filled both with some of our most inspiring his...

  All of human society is poorer with how little regard women have been given over the ages.           Every now and then I break my standard of reading History books and try to catch up on what’s happening in the world of science. It’s become a depressing exercise recently as I live in a country that has now publicly disowned science, and one thought that occurred to me as I read it was that I might have to start relying on other countries’ scientific studies to actually keep up with developments. For now, it was a fascinating and informative exercise to read Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution , which uses evidence from the fossil and genetic record to speculate how females drove some of the most important developments in all of human history (and prehistory). Bohannon uses those examples to offer a larger commentary of the failings of modern human societies to properly support human and...

  Know what you’re good at, and quit while you’re ahead.   Fewer figures in all human history are more pivotal than Christopher Columbus ( he’s often listed as one of the 10 most influential people who’s ever lived), and few have been as polarizing. When I was in elementary school, Columbus was still taught to us as a daring hero (All millennials join in: “IN 1492, COLUMBUS SAILED THE OCEAN BLUE )!” Many modern progressives are more inclined to see Columbus as a monstrous figure, the beginning of a long process of destroying America’s indigenous populations and creating colonial empires in their wake; to this day, Americans debate intensely just how he should be remembered (most prominently in continued debates about how exactly we celebrate “Columbus Day ).” The American obsession with debating Columbus has always been odd—the man himself not only never landed in what we know of as the United States today, but likely never even knew of its existence—but it has alway...

  The true story is often a lot more complex—and fascinating—than the Hollywood version.   Like many an historian, I have long had my issues with Mel Gibson’s 1995 historical epic film Braveheart , not the least of which it beat out the exc ellent Apollo 13 movie for best picture, in the first Oscars ceremony I remotely followed and watched. Gibson has long since revealed himself as an awful person with a warped worldview, one that is often evident in Braveheart itself (as movie writer Nathan Rabin hilariously put it a decade ago, Gibson pines for a simple world where all heroes are wise grizzled vets, strapping young warrior s, and fair innocent dames, and all villains are murderous psychopaths and lisping gays). Beyond any personal criticism of him and the movie, it also quickly became infamous for being one of the least historically accurate movies of all time, as Gibson presented the young noble knight Wallace as a wild poor Scottish peasant, covered in blue war paint (1...