Lessons From History Biographies

Sometimes, to defeat a greater enemy, you have to compromise with people you might detest.     That historical lesson is a common takeaway from the Allied victory in World War II, and it was absolutely true as the Americans, British, and Soviets all had to tolerate some fairly awful behavior from their allies in order to defeat the evil of Nazi Germany. In his relatively brief, page-turning study of the Allies, Giles Milton in The Stalin Affair focuses on studying the alliance through the eyes of the American diplomat W. Averell Harriman and his entourage. Needing to work with unsavory characters is a tried-and-true lesson of many historical movements, but it was especially true when trying to destroy the monstrosity of fascism. Milton's book claims to tell the story of how FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin set aside differences and old animosities to work together to win the war, but he overwhelmingly focuses on the unique characters of Churchill and Stalin, two uniqu...

  Great leaders must always be willing to learn new things.     This blog post will be a relatively short one, as William Fowler's George Washington and the Creation of the American Republic is a relatively short book, clocking in at under 200 pages when sources and notes are not taken into account. Although easy to read, Fowler's book is a deep-dive on a very specific period of Washington's life (the six years between him leading America to victory during the American Revolution, and subsequently assuming the first presidency of its new Constitution), and to that end it is certainly of much more interest to Washington scholars and professional historians. That said, one element I did find fascinating in Fowler's book in terms of historical lessons was Washington's private interests during this quiet era, and how his curiosity about the world around him continued to aid his evolution as one of the great leaders of his era.     From a modern perspective, one of t...

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...