Darrow

HL Mencken respected Clarence Darrow for his work in the Scopes Trial.  Today's pervasive media atmosphere does not see to foster iconoclasts.  Look at Gloria Allred, the Chicago lawyer who has taken criticism for hyping one of Herman Cain's accusers.  In light of what we've remembered about Darrow, she looks pale.  There was a broader spectrum of active political involvement 100 years ago, despite what Tea Partiers want us to think.  The Twitter post by @farnamstreet says Walter Lippmann said, "Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."

Here is the link to Amazon for the new Clarence Darrow biography I noticed.

Here is a link to a blog by the author Andrew Kersten at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay.  His official web site has not been updated lately.  The NY Times reviewed the book favorably. 

Here is another recent biography of Darrow.  Here is another recent book on Darrow.  Here a link to a collection of Darrow's writings.  Pulitzer-winner Ed Larson is the editor.  Larson came to Darrow through Darrow's work on the Scopes trial. 

John Brown

Today's historical lens makes John Brown a terrorist.  He did plenty of violent things.  Here is the Wikileaks entry for him.  As an abolitionist, John Brown may be forgiven today in a way that he was not in 1859.

Tony Horwitz is the author of a new book about John Brown, a man who was committed to violence as necessary to end the sin of slavery.  We are familiar with people who feel that way about sin.

Here is the link to the Times Book Review for this book:

MIDNIGHT RISING

John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

By Tony Horwitz.Illustrated. 365 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $29

This is a recurring theme and topic that relates to today as much as America's past.  In 2009, I noted the book JOHN BROWN'S WAR AGAINST SLAVERY, by Robert E. McGlone.

Prohibition

Prevailing political trends suggest that small-town white Protestants feel besieged.  It appears that has been true for quite a while.  Here  is a link to a new New York Times story about how the tax system favors those who don't live in New York City or Palo Alto.  From the article:
"The debate over regional differences is nothing new, Dr. Thorndike said. When the modern tax code went into effect in 1913, “it was viewed as a way to tax those rich Northerners, and to be fair, that’s what it was,” he said."

It's clear that the political system favors those of us citizens who live in the central part of the country.  My conservative friend who talks with me about such things has an attitude that published accounts victimize conservatives.  Sarah Palin and Rick Perry carry that chip on their shoulders, too.  Why those fortunate, rich, white people should think of themselves as victims continues to puzzle me, but that's an honestly held point of view, regardless of the irony.  It comes out in the integration cases and other public points of conflict when those fortunate, rich, white people think somebody is getting away with something, and so we shouldn't help our neighbors in an organized way. Think of the Bush Administration in New Orleans after Katrina.  Think of the current Congress talking about Amtrak.  Think of Florida governor Scott turning down the money for the high speed rail line.

When PBS showed Ken Burns' excellent program on Prohibition recently, the historical link to small-town, white America came to my attention.  Of course, it's true.  I know that from my own upbringing, but I hadn't really previously articulated in that way.  Now, we have a book that elucidates the idea.

The author is Daniel Okrent, who has an interesting Wikipedia entry.   I hadn't realized that Okrent invented fantasy or "rotisserie" baseball.   Apparently he and Ken Burns both are interested in baseball and the Prohibition era. 

Here is a review of a book about the Prohibition amendment to the US Constitution that reviewer David Oshinsky describes as "remarkably original."  Here is the book:

LAST CALL

The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

By Daniel Okrent. Illustrated. 468 pp. Scribner. $30

CIA Whistleblower Story

Here's the book: "Long Strange Journey" by Patrick G. Eddington and the author's website.
Here's a link to the Secrecy News report about the book. 

The World War II that the US ignored

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder, a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow.  And The Show Went On, by Alan Riding, about how the Nazis occupied Paris and gained cooperation from French cultural figures. Germany 1945, From War to Peace, by Richard Bessel.  These books appear to intend to show the ambiguity of the stories that the winners tell. 

The Cold War became the dominant US preoccupation, but millions of people were affected by other considerations.  These books help us remember those millions.

Nuremberg Legacy: How the Nazi War Crimes Trials Changed the Course of History, by Norbert Ehrenfreund, successfully weaves personal anecdote, historical record and legal analysis into his account of the trials and their legacy, according to a 2008 review in the New York Law Journal.

Collectively, these books remind us that if you kill one person you're a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands, you're a general, and if you kill millions you're a patriarch, so long as you stay in power.

Al Capone

Recently, I finished the Kindle version of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster, by Jonathan Eig.  Here's the link to the web page.  Like so many books, the book is longer than the really meaty material.  The author obviously found some interesting material in the records, and the author works hard to show how there's a secret plot.  But modern Americans know that when government fixates on a target----like terrorists today---the government has lots of weapons at its disposal that may bypass the normal limits that the government usually observes.

The author was able to show how what we think of as modern political attitudes such as "law and order" and anti-immigrant prejudice have roots that run way back in American politics.  

Oh, and it portrays Elliot Ness in a whole new way.  Myth-making about law enforcement has a long history.

Driving a VW suggests you're smart, he says

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist at University of New Mexico. Click here for biography. David Brooks' column today was inspired by Geoffrey Miller's book called Spent: Sex Evolution and Consumer Behavior. Apparently Brooks thinks the ideas in Spent are too biological and not focused enough on "nurture." Miller's book was ranked #1,750 on Amazon, well behind Michael Jackson.

This is the sort of topic that Brooks should have well-developed ideas about, because of Brooks' book called Bobos in Paradise.

I don't understand how people can be so passionate about whether it's nature or nurture that dominates. I don't really understand how anyone knows or why we think that people generally are more governed by nature or by nurture. Maybe you could tell for some individuals, but I think we're a long way off when it comes to deciding whether humans generally are dominated by nature or nurture or whether a majority of humans are dominated by one or the other. The limits of human understanding matter.

Human motivation and cause and effect are huge mysteries, insofar as I can tell.

I F Stone

The new biography of IF Stone is gathering comment: On Slate for example: http://www.slate.com/id/2220782/
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3815
The Village Voice reviewed it.

Although he's long dead, he has his own web site.

"Guttenplan’s admiring but not uncritical biography has been nearly 20 years in the making." The NYTimes reviewed it here.

Here's another review of Guttenplan's book.

American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone by D.D. Guttenplan, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 570 pages, $35.00; the new biography is (the graphics are copied straight from Amazon):

American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone

Author is D. D. Guttenplan.



Here's a reference to the Myra McPherson biography of IF Stone:

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev Yale University Press, 650 pages, $35.00

Some say IF Stone spied for the Soviets. I don't know what he knew that the Russians could not have figured out for themselves. Here's a wikipedia entry regarding the Venona project. There obviously were some spies. It is not obvious that Stone was among them.

Rebirth of Nation

Jackson Lears wrote Rebirth of a Nation to show why our guns culture leads to debacles and failures like Iraq. Here's the review from the Times last Sunday. (http://history.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=187&Itemid=140)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/books/review/Gage-t.html?scp=1&sq=Jackson%20Lears&st=cse

The Influence of Communists

I note two books. SPIES: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassilev. ALGER HISS AND THE BATTLE FOR HISTORY, by Susan Jacoby.

Here's a link to Jacoby's page: http://www.susanjacoby.com/

"Much of the enduring passion surrounding the Hiss case can be traced to the split in the thirties between pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet American leftists, and an astonishing number on both sides (indeed, nearly everyone capable of beginning a sentence with a capital letter and ending it with a period) have left exhaustive and sometimes exhausting memoirs repudiating or justifying their youthful selves. The sheer volume and intensity of these memoirs, many of which touch on the Hiss case in one way or another, have certainly had the effect of exaggerating the influence of communism on American cultural life — and that is true whether one is talking about the actual importance of communism in the thirties, the retrospective importance attached to communism during the anti-Red crusades of the late forties and fifties, or the more distant, though not necessarily more dispassionate, historical evaluations offered today." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/books/chapter-alger-hiss-battle-for-history.html
http://www.amazon.com/Alger-Battle-History-Icons-America/dp/0300121334

Haynes has been studying this period and has found remarkable information in Soviet archives. Here's a link to follow: http://books.google.com/books?id=qCAVQ_cdomcC&dq=John+Earl+Haynes+Spies&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=RVMtsvKJEP&sig=79NvWD7bz6S84SWVKAG-rfKcO10&hl=en&ei=fkMfSr74EpSDlAfItJHHBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

http://www.amazon.com/Spies-Rise-Fall-KGB-America/dp/0300123906

Today, Haynes' book is #836, which is pretty successful, considering that the Jacoby book is #172,701.

Colfax Massacre

The book is THE DAY FREEDOM DIED: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. Author is Charles Lane. Publisher is Henry Holt and Co.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for the Colfax massacre:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colfax_Massacre

The book is available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Freedom-Died-Massacre-Reconstruction/dp/0805083421

The book is now out in paperback:
http://us.macmillan.com/thedayfreedomdied

Here's a link to a review in the New York Times last year:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Boyle-t.html?pagewanted=print

Here's a review from New Orleans
http://blog.nola.com/susanlarson/2008/03/colfax_massacre.html

Spying on the Bomb

Spying on the Bomb - American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea, by Jeffrey T. Richelson.

The New York Times reviewer said "Richelson writes with admirable clarity."

"His rich material points to issues tht cry out for further analysis," David Holloway wrote in the Times.

The Modern World

Joseph J. Ellis reviewed The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 in the NY Times. Author Jay Winick has "an uncanny knack for syntheizing the work of others," Ellis wrote. Ellis's fundamental comment on the book is that personalities of political leaders receive too much credit and the underlying forces receive too little emphasis. It sounds like a well done and well conceived book.

Rick Atkinson

Rick Atkinson is working on a trilogy of WW2 books. The Time reviewer referred to "genuinely new materials and perspectives." That's referring to The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, by Rick Atkinson.


Here is an Atkinson bibliography: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Atkinson

• (1989) The Long Gray Line. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-48008-6.
• (1993) Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-60290-4.
• (2002) An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6288-2.
• (2004) In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-7561-5.
• (2007) The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6289-0.

The Army at Dawn won a Pulitzer Prize. http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2003/history/works/

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" -- Richard Brookhiser in the NY Times says that this book is really about both Thomas Paine and Burke's Reflection on the Revolution in France. That's the classic conversation between Whigs and Tories, between "two masters of polemic." One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/09/arts/idbriefs10A.php?WT.mc_id=rssarts

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-Paine-Th.html

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?ean=9780743256025&z=y

Gordon S. Wood writes reviews in The new York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/authors/53

Infamous Scribblers is an entertaining account of where we came from: http://www.declaration.net/news.asp?docID=5607&y=2007


A WRITER'S "concerns are with all mankind," wrote Thomas Paine in 1777, "and though he cannot command their obedience, he can assign them their duty." "Poor Paine [is] not the most prudent man in the world," wrote an American a few years later. These books support both judgments.

Tom Paine, by John Keane (Little, Brown, 644 pp., $27.95): John Keane's biography is hard going, thanks to its clumsy and cacophonous prose. To take one instance out of hundreds, Keane writes, of the style of Rights of Man, that "its author presented himself as a burping, farting rebel" -- and he means it as a compliment: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n9_v47/ai_16920443


http://www.umnexus.org/context.php?Article=107:
Thomas Paine, the great writer of inspiring (some said inflammatory) texts that sparked the Revolution, clearly felt that church and state should be separate, according to author Harvey J. Kaye in his book, “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America.” Kaye writes:

“Paine’s appreciation of America’s religious diversity and the need to divorce church from state, along with his skillful articulation of Bible story, American history and providential intent, also appealed to many of Virginia’s smallholders, the great majority of whom were Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, who strongly resented the power and authority of the colony’s Anglican establishment” (page 55).

So from their earliest times Methodists and America share a reciprocal, informal influence – among other things, an independent spirit and an affinity for Trinitarian order (witness our common identity of legislative, executive and judicial branches in our respective governments).

Hubris, deception, and death - David Halberstam

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, By David Halberstam

On September 26, 2007, it's #25 on the Amazon best seller list.

Here's a comment by Glenn Greenwald on Salon about Halberstam's findings:
http://nx5.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/24/halberstam_patriotism/index.html

Amazon quotes Publishers Weekly this way:

At the heart of David Halberstam's massive and powerful new history of the Korean War is a bloody, losing battle fought in November 1950 in the snow-covered mountains of North Korea by outnumbered American GIs and Marines against the Chinese Communist Army.Halberstam's villain is not North Korea's Kim Il Sung or China's Chairman Mao or even the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin, who pulled the strings. It's the legendary general Douglas MacArthur, the aging, arrogant, politically ambitious architect of what the author calls the single greatest American military miscalculation of the war, MacArthur's decision to go all the way to the Yalu [River] because he was sure the Chinese would not come in.Much of the story is familiar. What distinguishes this version by Halberstam (who died this year in a California auto crash) is his reportorial skill, honed in Vietnam in Pulitzer-winning dispatches to the New York Times. His pounding narrative, in which GIs and generals describe their coldest winter, whisks the reader along, even though we know the ending.Most Korean War scholars agree that MacArthur's sprint to the border of great China with a Siberian winter coming on resulted in a lethal nightmare. Though focused on that mountain battle, Halberstam's book covers the entire war, from the sudden dawn attack by Kim Il Sung's Soviet-backed North Koreans against the U.S.-trained South, on June 25, 1950, to its uneasy truce in 1953. It was a smallish war but a big Cold War story: Harry Truman, Stalin and Mao, Joe McCarthy and Eisenhower, George C. Marshall and Omar Bradley, among others, stride through it. A few quibbles: there were no B-17 bombers destroyed on Wake Island the day after Pearl Harbor, as Halberstam asserts, and Halberstam gives his minor characters too much attention.At first MacArthur did well, toughing out those early months when the first GIs sent in from cushy billets in occupied Japan were overwhelmed by Kim's rugged little peasant army. MacArthur's greatest gamble led to a marvelous turning point: the invasion at Inchon in September, when he outflanked the stunned Reds. After Inchon, the general headed north and his luck ran out. His sycophants, intelligence chief Willoughby and field commander Ned Almond, refused to believe battlefield evidence indicating the Chinese Communists had quietly infiltrated North Korea and were lying in wait. The Marines fought their way out as other units disintegrated. In the end, far too late, Truman sacked MacArthur. Alive with the voices of the men who fought, Halberstam's telling is a virtuoso work of history.

http://www.amazon.com/Coldest-Winter-America-Korean-War/dp/1401300529/ref=pd_sim_b_3/103-9830571-0401420

Here's a link to David Halberstam's thoughtful words on uses and misuses of history:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/08/halberstam200708?currentPage=2.

Halberstam reports that MacArthur did not spend the night in Korea after reviewing the troops; in fact, he did not spend the night there during the entire time he commanded. That's hubris.

The Arms Race

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, By Richard Rhodes

Here's what it says at Amazon:
"Rhodes reveals the early influence of neoconservatives and right-wing figures such as Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz. We see how Perle in particular sabotaged the Reykjavik meeting by convincing Reagan that mutual nuclear disarmament meant giving up his cherished dream of strategic defense (the Star Wars system). Rhodes’s detailed exploration of these and other events constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375414134/ref=pe_pe_5050_6735740_pe_snp_134

How Slavery Shaped the US Constitution

Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits and the Struggle for the Constitution, by Lawrence Goldstone, Walker & Company.

The Constitution was the result of the work of "highly pragmatic men who were pursuing limited and self-interested goals." Too bad we lack such men in high places now.

The author respond to a book review on Mary L. Dudziak's Legal History Blog:
http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/lawrence-goldstone-responds-to-gordon.html

It's possible that interpreting the Constitution based on original intent just isn't possible because the compromisers that got the Constitution written and adopted did not all mean the same thing.

Here's the link to the transcript of Goldstone's appearance on the NPR Tavis Smiley show:
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200611/20061116_goldstone.html

Pirates & America's beginnings

The Pirates Lafitte: The treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf, by William C. Davis, Harcourt


The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World by Frank Lambert, Hill & Wang


White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves, by Giles Milton, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Navasky

A Matter of Opinion, by Victor Navasky, Farrar, Straus & Giroux