Lessons From History Biographies

  Humility is needed for a successful democracy.   One subject who will undoubtedly come up repeatedly over the course of my blog is Abraham Lincoln, and I already took a lesson away from him in a previous entry (when Michael Burlingame’s excellent Lincoln biography examined his fairly humble origins). I partly will always return to Lincoln because he will forever be my favorite president (and thus I tend to snap up every book about him I can find), but also because he was a unique American leader in our history who is still admired on a global scale. Author Allen Guelzo apparently shares my fascination with Lincoln and has written numerous studies about his presidency—his most recent Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment is a relatively fast-paced read (clocking in at under 200 pages), and it specifically focuses on Lincoln’s various political and economic theories that have often received less attention compared to the titanic Civ il War-relat...

Nostalgia be damned—life was MUCH harder in the past, especially for women.   Abigail Adams is perhaps the single most famous woman of the generation of America’s Founding, and as such she has long been the subject of much fascination and study amongst American historians. Interest in her especially piqued in the wake of modern feminist movements, as people gravitated toward an outspoken and clearly powerful woman in an era where such things were very often frowned upon. In John Smith’s highly readable biography of her, he demonstrates how a major reason for her success was in how perfectly she navigated what people saw as her “proper place,” while also pushing back against it at every opportunity. However, one thing that struck me reading about her life was how brutal and short life could be for pre-modern women, even for the most privileged and powerful. 18 th century people suffered from loss on a level it would be hard for us to conceive of today, and we have forgotten all th...

  Humanity never changes, only our historical circumstances do.           Sometimes the History books I read chronical fascinating historical characters and eras, and have lessons from the past that our modern society really needs to take to heart. Then there are times that I just read good, informative books that don’t really fit the format of my blog well, as it’s hard to take any such wrenching lessons away from them, and that’s the case with Edward Ayers’ American Visions . It’s a very well-written and readable book which is also very much a casual synopsis of the world of Antebellum America, and it jumps between dozens of different figures. As such, this is going to be a shorter post than my usual one, but there was one intriguing theme I stumbled on across the book—how much the debates that consumed 19 th century Americans weren’t all that different than the ones we have today, if you squint just enough.    ...

  Cling to your ideas in defiance of reality at your own peril.   Most of the time, I find great new books when browsing my local bookstores, much to the chagrin of my monthly budget. But every now and then, I randomly stumble across a gem, as was the case with Robert Service’s 2009 Trotsky biography, which I happened to find in good condition for $2 at a local garage sale . I’ve read up a lot in my life on the infamous Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and somewhat less on his ideological predecessor Vladimir Lenin, but until now I knew tragically little about the Communist Rev olution’s third-most famous member Leon Trotsky, the most prominent Soviet founder whom Stalin murdered in an effort to claim the revolution for his own. Trotsky’s an unlikable historical figure who still suffered a tragic fall in the classic Greek sense of the word, a man who so desperately wanted to believe in the revolution he led that he was blind to the real-world horrors he had unleashed on the wor...