Lessons From History Biographies

  Ordinary people ignore global events at their own peril.     One great advantage of having a local paperback bookstore is being able to pretty cheaply catch up on popular older books that I missed out on, and over the past few days I breezed through Erik Larson's 2015 bestseller Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania . Larson is a famous example of a "narrative historian," a term historians used to describe a writer who focuses on pleasing the masses. To that end, Larson is willing to write his books in a way that focuses on telling stories and increasing tension, and he's also willing to speculate on people's thoughts and feelings, in ways that make professional historians shudder (as obviously not all that stuff is backed up by solid evidence), but which is fun and generally inoffensive. The sinking of the famous ship Lusitania has become an historical footnote as one of the events that contributed to America joining World War I on the side of the Allie...

  Freedom is a constant struggle.     Those famous words--an iconic anthem of the Civil Rights era-- echo across Zaakir Tameez's excellent new biography of Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. It is a great new biography of the famous 19th century senator that is worth reading for anyone who loves studying the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and that is even if like me you read--and enjoyed--Stephen Puleo's The Great Abolitionist , a similar Sumner-focused work from a couple years ago. Tameez's new book does a deep dive into the life and times of Sumner, a man of great passions who was capable of alienating so many of his peers, but was also far ahead of his time in realizing the need for America to embrace being a more multiracial and multicultural nation, often at great personal cost. Sumner's battles against the bigotry of his era echo across the ages, as we hear the warnings of a man who saw great advancements in civil rights throughout his lifetime, whi...

  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...