Lessons From History Biographies

  Small good deeds don't matter as much if the entire system is unjust.     Sometimes when I'm blogging about the historical lessons of History books, the author themselves do me a favor by spelling out their lesson in the book's opening and closing segments, as Melvin Ely does in his new book A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South . This will be a shorter blog than usual as Ely's book does not follow the traditional format of an historical narrative; rather, it is a series of chapters analyzing the courtroom proceedings of Edward County in Virginia during the peak years of slavery (1830-1860). As such, it's a book that will be less appealing to those seeking the standard format, but actually quite gripping to people who love following courtroom drama and testimony. I actually found the book to be a fascinating deep dive into a topic of which I knew little about prior to reading Ely's book (the inner workings of courtroom life in the old...

  Oppressed people finding common ground is crucial for organizing mass movements.     One thing I love doing any time I see new History books that catch my eye is to try and fill some of my historical "blind spots"; as hard as I try to know everything for the sake of my students, there are huge gaps in my knowledge of many key people and events, and to that end I greatly enjoyed learning more about Elizabeth Cady Stanton from Ellen Dubois' new biography of the famous suffragette. While I know very well the broad history of the Women's Suffrage Movement and its leaders (and I've read some excellent Alice Paul books in recent years), I knew shockingly little details of the lives of the most famous 19th century feminist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Dubois brings Elizabeth (as she calls her throughout the book) back to life in vibrant and vivid detail, and in the process she relays the cautionary lesson that it is still incredibly difficult fo...

Sometimes the people you should follow are the quiet competent ones, rather than the loud and boisterous ones.     With the latest book I finished, I noticed that a lot of my recent entries have concerned the Civil War era and Russian history. which is merely an accident of which new History books I've gravitated to in my bookstores; the next titles in my queue concern radically different topics, so we'll get some variety back into this blog! That said, I greatly enjoyed Tim McGrath's Three Roads to Gettysburg as summer reading, as he does well at relaying military history while also not losing sight of the larger implications of the war (though most have gotten better in recent generations, Civil War historians were long notorious for knowing every minutia of every battle, while not wanting to talk at all about what the Northern and Southern soldiers were actually fighting for, ahem ahem...). In connecting the lives and stories of Abraham Lincoln, George Meade, and Robert ...

Accepting immorality and corruption at the highest levels eventually damages the whole society.     Antony Beevor's study of the infamous Russian monk Grigory Rasputin is a fascinating page-turner, one that is aided by Beevor's general expertise with Russian history (I cannot recall reading his previous books, but nearly all of them center on Russia). Of all the sordid tales of the Russian Revolution and the atrocities connected with it, few have intrigued the public more than the centuries-old Romanov Dynasty being partially brought down by its decision to put so much power in the hands of a semi-illiterate peasant monk with a shady reputation, partly because of all the myths and legends that have been spread of his supposed powers and resiliency. Beevor has some fun deflating those myths, but he also does not miss the deeper story of the Russian Empire's fall, a cautionary tale that we would all do well to study and remember today. As Beevor notes, it was not so much Rasp...

  Never be too certain your side is the right one.     I have read so many Lincoln-themed books now--with more waiting on my shelf!--that every time I read one I wonder if I will be able to find a new lesson to take away from it. Needless to say, I am not quite familiar with the details of his life and the major events surrounding it, and few Lincoln books these days really offer radical new discoveries. Nonetheless, he's a much more pleasant historical figure to spend time with than some of the others I have recently (I seriously never need to read a Hitler book again). Every Lincoln book tends to have a different area of focus, and Meacham (an excellent and acclaimed historian) intriguingly focuses on Lincoln's religious journey of discovery. To what extent Lincoln was seriously religious is debated to this day; he started his life as something of a skeptic, and while religious iconography seeped into all his later speeches, historians still debate how much of a "conver...

  Be careful who you hitch your wagon to. Writing this blog out on my phone because my laptop alas won’t work properly in this hotel room I’m currently in, so apologies to my readers if this format is funkier than normal! Stacy Schiff is a prolific historical writer (some of her more recent excellent works being studies of the Salem Witch Trials and Samuel Adams), but 2010’s Cleopatra: A Life  might be her most iconic book, having stayed on bestseller lists for years after its release. I only recently managed to catch up with it, courtesy of my local used paperback book store; I had avoided it for so long because I’ve never been all that interested in the subject matter, and it was only after loving some of Schiff’s other work that I decided to give this one a try. I was quite glad I did, because Cleopatra is a fascinating portrait of a woman desperately trying to maintain an empire on its last legs, and inadvertently dooming it in the process. Cleopatra’s story is an historic...