Lessons From History Biographies

  Many people’s entire perception of American History needs to be radically reconsidered.             In the America of 2025, history wars have taken an unusual position front and center in the world of American politics, partly because our current administration has sold a specific view of American history—the story of a great nation, founded by good moral Christian pioneers, who conquered and civilized a continent and in the modern world are in a never-ending battle with modern forces to protect proper American values. How that view pertains to eras such as the American Civil War are another matter altogether, but specifically for the purposes of this reading it has put the Trump administration in an interesting position given its historical view of the American Indian nations, such as when they argued that the soldiers who participated in the Wounded Knee “battle” (often considered more of a massacre) were heroes deserving...

  We ignore the power of viruses and bacteria at our own peril.     In our modern world, we have largely been shielded from the effects of deadly plagues, especially if you live in a relatively modern and developed nation. Of course, we all just lived through the trauma of COVID, a disease that killed less than 1% of the American population yet still caused years worth of massive disruption to people's lives, not to mention the overall global economy. Nonetheless, the western world today is a much more healthy and calm place than it was even a century ago, and that has caused modern generations to assume that vanquishing plagues is as simple of a process as following certain social media trends and advice without having to go through the discomfort and annoyance of modern vaccinations. As Jonathan Kennedy subtly notes in his study Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues , we take that laissez faire stance at our own great peril. As his book makes clear, the ...

  Much is lost when we don't allow people to reach their full potential.     This write-up will be much shorter than my usual ones, not because Jean Wiesen and Rita Daniels' Harriet Tubman: Military Scout and Tenacious Visionary is a bad book, but it is a very short and light one. Indeed, it was actually a nice contrast to my prior book, the long and intense  Lower Than the Angels , as I always have so much going on in the early fall that short and sweet was nothing to complain about! Neither Wiesen or Daniels are professional historians, and the book feels much more aimed at general audiences, and indeed would be a good place to start on Tubman for my high school students. Nonetheless, I did appreciate the book's efforts to tie Tubman in with the larger story of the Ghana culture that her family had been ripped away from generations prior, as it tells the larger crime of how much the world might have lost by supporting and abiding by the slave trade for centuries. ...

  Human beings have never had one set "morality" when it comes to complicated matters of sex.      In our fractured political world of 2025, one of the most intense debates that has consumed American culture is that relating to sex and gender, and what exactly are the "proper" roles that people should be following. This is a part of a larger trend of conservative movements who have argued for decades that there is a set of "traditional family values" that America has moved away from, and that is the source of much of our national decline over the past few decades. As one who was largely raised outside of church culture, that made Diarmaid MacCulloch's new Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity  a fascinating read into a history of Christian attitudes toward those topics. It's a dense book that jumps around a lot (MacCulloch tries to include Christian-based cultures from all over the world), and that makes it hard for me to recomme...

  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...