Lessons From History Biographies

  Historical injustices never make sense until you consider the full picture.     Allowing the institution of slavery to persist decades after most of the rest of the modern world has long been acknowledged as America's original sin (along with the dispossession of Native American societies), and yet our society continues to struggle with and debate the legacy of the continuing impacts of slavery on our nation's politics and culture. As Scott Spillman explains in his excellent new book Making Sense of Slavery: America's Long Reckoning from the Founding Era to Today , such confusion over the topic is nothing new in American society, and indeed goes back to the earliest efforts to understand the institution of slavery even as it was still being practiced. Making Sense of Slavery is very much an historiography book (a term that explains the study of how the field of History is written over time), yet is surprisingly readable and accessible to anyone with a passing interest i...

Petty grudges and personal feuds can destroy promising futures.     Once in a blue moon I manage to get over to our neighborhood used bookstore and find older gems that I missed along the way (an experience I highly recommend for book lovers everywhere). On a recent journey there I stumbled on Thomas Fleming's 1999 book Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America , a topic I knew embarrassingly little about given the public adoration of the Hamilton play! I actually had encountered Fleming himself several years back through his fascinating book The Illusion of Victory , a revisionist take on World War I that essentially argued America's entire participation in that war had been a disastrous mistake, a topic that is still very much open to debate amongst historians. Reading Duel , I gained fascinating insight on the most famous murder of the Revolutionary war generation, and in particular on just how pointless and destructive personal grudges can be in the l...

  Without clear-headed and moral leadership, the loudest and most emotional voices win.           Robert Merry’s Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 is an excellent new study on the political chaos of the 1850’s, that fascinating and crucial decade where the original American nation collapsed into regional conflict, and set up a civil war that built a new American nation on its ashes. Merry focuses his study on the leaders of Massachusetts and South Carolina, the two states which were famously at the leading edges of abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric, respectively. One clear lesson which becomes obvious from Merry’s work is that a clear factor in the disintegration of the antebellum political order, was the complete lack of competent national leadership, as a series of ineffectual presidents in the 1850’s completely failed to unify the country behind any kind of clear nationa...

  Change and evolution are vital for the long-term survival of a state.     While my primary interest and specialty has always been American History, it has always been a fun hobby to read up on ancient civilizations, particularly Egypt and Rome. People have spent centuries trying to study the lessons of the Roman Empire, and unsurprisingly that has meant centuries of different interpretations and arguments over how Rome became such a successful and long-lasting civilization, and that includes arguments as to when exactly Rome "rose" and "fell." In his new book The Romans: A 2,000 Year History , author Edward Watts takes the controversial stance that "Rome" as a unique civilization actually lasted all the way through the first sack of the city of Constantinople in 1205 (other historians call the Constantinople-led Roman outbranch "Byzantium" and argue it's its own unique civilization, I don't know nearly enough about that debate to render...

  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...