Lessons From History Biographies

  America has struggled to define who was included in "freedom" from the beginning.     One of the lessons I emphasize to my American History students is that there are two questions that have defined the course of our country; just what exactly the word "freedom" means and who it's supposed to apply to, and just who is included in the definition of an "American citizen." The great American Revolution scholar Joseph Ellis tackles those questions head-on in his latest book The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding , as he studies just how much the Founding Fathers struggled to apply the principles of American freedom to the new nation's oppressed minorities and Native American nations, and all the ways their generation came up short on these principles. Ellis makes the intriguing-if-debatable argument that the Founders did the best they could at establishing the groundwork for future emancipation, and that the mass displaceme...

  Be humble at our place in the universe—and also, space is cool! J             Every now and then, I like switching up my readings by throwing in the occasional science book, and I recently landed on the famous scientist Neil Tyson’s latest work To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery (which he wrote in collaboration with Lindsey Walker), which is a fun and reader-friendly journey through our current knowledge of the universe, complete with fascinating astronomical images. There’s no long write-up needed for this book, I would recommend it to just about anyone who has even a passing interest in astronomy (fun fact—I ALMOST majored in that in college, but in the end decided I was too dumb to do all the math involved with it, haha)! It’s a quick and fascinating read where Tyson and Walker take us on a journey through the universe, talking about the history of scientific astronomical discoveries, and some of the most...