Lessons From History Biographies

There's never an "ideal" time to confront injustice--you just need to do it.      Lately I've been on a roll reading great books, but Paul Kix's new book recounting Martin Luther King's most famous protest campaign is a real page-turner, and one that feels deeply relevant in an era where people feel injustice happening on a global scale. As a man who has an interracial family, Kix tells a deeply personal story of how MLK, whose Civil Rights Movement had faltered and struggled for years to make major progress, finally awoke the conscious of America (and its ruling brothers JFK and RFK) with his Birmingham Campaign of 1963. Many of the Civil Rights Movement's most iconic moments came in the wake of Birmingham, and what was ironic about its success was that everyone told MLK it was an "ill-timed" protest--that he was better off waiting and hoping for more gradual progress.     MLK took on great personal risk when he and his fellow civil rights leade...

  Success means nothing if it’s not built to last.             It was a bit of a surreal and fascinating experience reading Colette Shade’s wonderful new book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything , as it was the first book that attempts to tell a history of the decade when I became an adult (time never stops marching on and will eventually consume us all). Shade tells the story of the famous “Aughts” through a deeply personal lens, combining her own experiences living through that decade with a deeper analysis of the trends of American culture, many of which were shaped by larger global changes that ordinary Americans were completely unaware of.             Shade’s book seems partly inspired by the wave of 2000’s nostalgia that has arrived on cue in this decade, which she compellingly argues is not so much nostalgia for “things were so much better back then!” (I was the...

  Science is always changing—roll with it and be open-minded!             This will be a shorter blog, as dinosaurs are of course not “history”—they didn’t write down much for us to study, haha! I almost exclusively read history books, but every now and then I buy science books, to keep up with some of the discoveries I’ve missed out on since college. Also, this is a lesson from reading a dinosaur book that I think everyone can get behind—dinosaurs are, have been, and will ALWAYS be cool!!             One of the intriguing aspects of reading new dinosaur books is how much we are constantly learning and changing our views of these extinct giants. When my parents were growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, scientists generally saw dinosaurs as extinct reptiles, with giant bodies and necks that towered dozens of feet straight up into the sky. They were seen as typical slow-m...

  Dictatorial governments are inherently destructive, and ultimately ineffective.             “As awful as that dictator was, he did get stuff done!” That is a myth that has been used throughout modern times to try to justify the very existence of global autocracies, and one has that sadly grown in stature in recent decades as nations around the world have embraced more authoritarian political movements. After all, democracies and societies devoted to individual freedoms are inherently messy and complicated, and people often grow frustrated with just how slow and unwieldy they can be in responding to crisis. However, the myth that dictatorships are more efficient is largely a product of propaganda, and instead history has shown that these societies contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. Whether it takes months, years, or decades, a government that is run by goons and sycophants who are mostly devoted to tryin...

  Your personal demons and disappointments do not need to define you. Many stories have been told of how important the process of going through failure can be for learning lessons and setting people on a more successful life path. I thought about my own story as I read John Reeves’ latest biography of Ulysses Grant Soldier of Destiny , which focuses on the years from Grant’s embarrassing tenure as a California soldier in the 1850’s, to his ultimate triumphs in the American Civil War. For seven years, my goal in life was to become a full-time History instructor at the community college level, and I kept telling myself that if I stuck to it and kept working hard, I would eventually achieve my dream (all evidence that those jobs are virtually impossible for Social Science instructors to find at community colleges notwithstanding). One day, I was called into an interview for a school I had long worked at, and I drove away from it convinced I had gotten the job and had to start planni...

  Reason and science are vital to humanity’s advancement in politics and society. One of the common questions I get from students whenever we’re learning about the American Revolution is who my favorite Founding Father is. It’s a difficult question to answer that’s fraught with perils, as all the Founding Fathers had major blind spots and failures by modern moral standards, and some of their flaws were truly unforgivable (with all the modern debates over what is and isn’t “woke education,” try to explain with a straight face to a young person of color that they’re supposed to worship Thomas Jefferson as a hero). However, one choice I’ve found myself leaning toward a lot in recent years is Benjamin Franklin, a man who was in some ways very much of his times, and yet was also quite self-aware of that fact and constantly strove to learn and be better. While so many Founders come off today as old, dead, unknowable figures, Franklin’s bright and bouncy personality still shines through t...