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A lessoned learned from THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST: CHARLES SUMNER AND THE FIGHT FOR A MORE PERFECT UNION, by Stephen Puleo

  Answering political disagreements with political violence poisons the entire system.             We live in a time when political violence is greatly feared across the country, and we especially feel it weigh down upon us with a presidential election imminent. From one side’s candidate getting shot at, to another side remembering the trauma of the January 6 th Riot, the national mood right now is sour and fearful, with many people believing a victory by the other side will result in permanent national degradation. It is a climate very similar to the 1850’s, when the growing power of the free North over national politics terrified and enraged the slaveholding South, and eventually the nation tore itself apart and embraced a bloody Civil War. One of the defining acts of that era was The Caning of Charles Sumner, an event that author Stephen Puleo wisely makes as the centerpiece of his excellent new book The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union .
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A lesson learned from THE LOVES OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, by Edward O'Keefe

The world lost much by ignoring half its population for millennium.           I no longer teach much ancient and medieval history, but I remember one recurring theme from my old college classes was the frustration of my female students over how silenced women’s voices were in earlier eras of human history. To some extent this was my own failing at that time (there have long been many great studies looking to discover more about the roles of women in ancient societies), but there was also a major structural weakness directly based on the source materials. Namely, many pre-industrial “might makes right” societies gave very few women the ability to even learn how to read and write, much less truly express themselves and become major voices within the patriarchal leadership. Thus, the entire early field of “History” (maybe one day we’ll rename it something like “Ourstory?”) as we know of it, in the sense that historians would research earlier sources and try to reach conclusions about the
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A lesson learned from A REVOLUTIONARY FRIENDSHIP: WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, AND THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, by Francis Cogliano

  Some friendships are not meant to survive politics.   In our intensely divided modern world, it is a common assumption that an ideal America once existed where intense political divisions did not drive us apart to the extent they do today. On some level, this myth has always been just that, a romanticization of the past. It is true that ordinary Americans could more readily ignore politics during the (relatively) more peaceful days of the 1980’s and 1990’s, but that did not mean that intense divisions did not bubble just under the surface. As ancient political philosophers pointed out, politics by their very definition are a struggle over who gets what and how, and those types of disputes tend to inevitably have periods when they are ugly and explosive. No American generation learned this lesson harder than the Founding Fathers, who had assumed they were building a better and more peaceful nation away from Great Britain, only to realize they had radically different visions as to what
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A lesson learned from A KINGDOM STRANGE: THE BRIEF AND TRAGIC HISTORY OF THE LOST COLONY OF ROANOKE, by James Horn

  Be careful who you rely on. One of the great things about my summer break is it gives me the time and opportunity to expand my reading into areas that I normally would not have time to get into. As my summer break began, my school librarian asked me to peruse th rough a stack of older books that they were planning to donate, and I stumbled on a 2010 work on one of American History’s most famous legends. People who watch the channel that calls itself “History,” will know all the legends that surround the fate of the Lost Colony of Roanoke—from Indian slaughters, to tsunamis, to alien abduction and all that nonsense. That made James Horn’s A Kingdom Strange a fascinating read about the history surrounding the English settlement of Roanoke , the reasons why the colony failed, and the speculation about its u ltimate fate . Ultimately, the Roanoke story is less one of paranormal catastrophes, and more one of the dangers of leaving important and complicated tasks in the ha
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A lesson learned from THE GENERAL VS. THE PRESIDENT, by H.W. Brands

  Hold off on your judgments until you know all the evidence. One of the most confusing and forgotten wars in American History was the Korean War (of which both of my own grandparents were veterans) , and I’ve often speculated with my students that a big reason for this was because it was completely overshadowed by the even-bigger-and-uglier Vietnam War a decade later. In the early 1950’s, the fate of Korea was one of the defining questions of American politics, and the debate was symbolized in the battle between President Harry Trum an and General Douglas M acArthur, which veteran author H.W. Brands delves into detail in his new book The General vs. The President . These essays are not reviews, but I didn’t find this one of Brands’ more fascinating books, partly because I’ve never been all that into the early Cold War era (lodged as it is right in between World War II and the chaos of the 1960’s). That said, there is a vital historical lesson at the heart of this book
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