Lessons From History Biographies

Sometimes there are no easy lessons to take away—because patriotism and moral reckonings can be complicated things.   As I finished Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s masterful Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus , I realized I had a problem in titling this blo g post; I realized I had A LOT to say about the life of Oppenheimer, yet there wasn’t necessarily one easy lesson to take away from it (I really should think of such difficulties before taking on these projec ts)! I certainly could not say anything more eloquently than the talented filmmaker Christopher Nolan, who made the biography the outline of his 2023 film Oppenheimer . However, there was a line in the book itself that hit me hard, given my profession and how much of my life I spend thinking on historical topics. As Oppenheimer went through a brutal inquiry from a McCarthy- esque government panel that eventually declared him a national security risk and invoked his clearance, various allies of his recommended he si

Change your mind if you’re wrong, and push back against your community if you know they are wrong.   One of the first major Civil War epics I ever watched was Ronald Maxwell’s 1993 glorified Civil War battle recreation Gettysburg . At the time, I thought it was one of the greatest war movies I ever saw, even if I was weirded out at all the longing, epic-music-background shots of the Confederate battle flag , and the suggestions that the Confederates were tragic, sympathetic characters. Suffice to say, in 2024 Gettysburg comes off as an embarrassing Confederate apologia, a warm-up to Maxwell’s disastrous 2003 sequel Gods and Generals where he openly proclaimed himself a believer in the Lost Cause [the long-lasting myth that the South had been largely right in the Civil War, which now for well over a century has had a disastrously corrosive effect on how Americans view their own history].   However, as bad as Gettysburg is today, one of its most interesting and compelling characters