Lessons From History Biographies

  Be careful who you rely on. One of the great things about my summer break is it gives me the time and opportunity to expand my reading into areas that I normally would not have time to get into. As my summer break began, my school librarian asked me to peruse th rough a stack of older books that they were planning to donate, and I stumbled on a 2010 work on one of American History’s most famous legends. People who watch the channel that calls itself “History,” will know all the legends that surround the fate of the Lost Colony of Roanoke—from Indian slaughters, to tsunamis, to alien abduction and all that nonsense. That made James Horn’s A Kingdom Strange a fascinating read about the history surrounding the English settlement of Roanoke , the reasons why the colony failed, and the speculation about its u ltimate fate . Ultimately, the Roanoke story is less one of paranormal catastrophes, and more one of the dangers of leaving important and complicated tasks in th...

  Hold off on your judgments until you know all the evidence. One of the most confusing and forgotten wars in American History was the Korean War (of which both of my own grandparents were veterans) , and I’ve often speculated with my students that a big reason for this was because it was completely overshadowed by the even-bigger-and-uglier Vietnam War a decade later. In the early 1950’s, the fate of Korea was one of the defining questions of American politics, and the debate was symbolized in the battle between President Harry Trum an and General Douglas M acArthur, which veteran author H.W. Brands delves into detail in his new book The General vs. The President . These essays are not reviews, but I didn’t find this one of Brands’ more fascinating books, partly because I’ve never been all that into the early Cold War era (lodged as it is right in between World War II and the chaos of the 1960’s). That said, there is a vital historical lesson at the heart of this b...

Acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them.   When I embarked on this project of taking major historical lessons away from all the history books I read, I knew that they vary wildly in terms of depth, quality, and overall readability. Mark Updegrove’s Incomparable Grace , his new book on JFK’s presidency, is very much a book I would recommend to casual history readers, and not so much one for historians looking for an in-depth study. It’s a short, highly readable, and not particularly deep book, and as one who has read dozens of books about JFK and RFK I often found its lack of depth somewhat disappointing . That said, one lesson Updegrove does a tremendous job of presenting is the primary reason so many historians look back on JFK as a tragically lost great presidency, and that is that JFK was a man who very much knew when he had fallen short and needed to do better. His presidency stands in marked contrast to more modern presidencies, of presidents full of bluster w...