Lessons From History Biographies

Every great artist needs both the freedom to follow their visions, and the pressure to eventually complete them.     Of all the fields of History I have studied in my decades of loving the topic, my knowledge of Art History has always been sadly limited. Partly this is my own lack of artistic vision; from my earliest academic days, my strength has always been in reading and writing, and not so much in any sort of visual talent or appreciation of what one looked like. To that end, I was well aware that the Renaissance artists were great men who made timeless artistic masterpieces, yet I knew very little about their lives or the details of what their art meant to them. Having discovered Miles Unger's 2014 study of Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces , I have a new appreciation for what the man accomplished, as well as an understanding of the complexities of dealing with tortured artists, many of whom have ambitions they could never accomplish without outside deadlines and d...

  Being a great president requires one to grow when faced with crisis.     There is no shortage of biographies of the famous 20th century president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (aka FDR), and a few of them I have already enjoyed in my personal book collection. However, it was only courtesy of my local used bookstore that I finally caught up with Jean Smith's 2007 massive biographical study of him, and I am quite glad I took the time to do so. Smith paints a compelling portrait of a man who went through great physical suffering, and came out the other end of it a more empathetic and determined leader, one uniquely suited to leading the United States through the great crisis years of the 1930's and 1940's.     FDR's general life details are well known, and Smith recounts them in an in-depth and compelling fashion. Born a child of great wealth and privilege (his parents being deeply embedded in the fashionable wealthy society of Gilded Age America), FDR saw his elderl...

  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...