Lessons From History Biographies

  America has struggled to define who was included in "freedom" from the beginning.     One of the lessons I emphasize to my American History students is that there are two questions that have defined the course of our country; just what exactly the word "freedom" means and who it's supposed to apply to, and just who is included in the definition of an "American citizen." The great American Revolution scholar Joseph Ellis tackles those questions head-on in his latest book The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding , as he studies just how much the Founding Fathers struggled to apply the principles of American freedom to the new nation's oppressed minorities and Native American nations, and all the ways their generation came up short on these principles. Ellis makes the intriguing-if-debatable argument that the Founders did the best they could at establishing the groundwork for future emancipation, and that the mass displaceme...

  Be humble at our place in the universe—and also, space is cool! J             Every now and then, I like switching up my readings by throwing in the occasional science book, and I recently landed on the famous scientist Neil Tyson’s latest work To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery (which he wrote in collaboration with Lindsey Walker), which is a fun and reader-friendly journey through our current knowledge of the universe, complete with fascinating astronomical images. There’s no long write-up needed for this book, I would recommend it to just about anyone who has even a passing interest in astronomy (fun fact—I ALMOST majored in that in college, but in the end decided I was too dumb to do all the math involved with it, haha)! It’s a quick and fascinating read where Tyson and Walker take us on a journey through the universe, talking about the history of scientific astronomical discoveries, and some of the most...

  Science must be believed over the promise of progress and profits.           I have no doubt that our current era of technological advancement is very much based on the concept of “can we?,” not “should we?”. Our world is rushing head-long into embracing the concepts that AI and digitizing our existence can be nothing but positive developments that bring great progress for humanity, and the faster we can pull these changes off the better off we’ll be. Suffice to say, I have found the world’s enthusiasm for these ideas to be bizarre and a massive risk, and I have become an old man yelling at the clouds demanding that we slow down and think about what we are doing as a species. Outdated I may be, yet I found Daniel Stone’s excellent new book American Poison to be a gripping and fascinating read, as Stone recounts the story of how the world embraced the revolutionary technology of leaded gasoline, and did so while ignoring the warnings ...

  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. ...