Lessons From History Biographies

  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...