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Episodes
Miriam Dobson, “Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin” (Cornell UP, 2009)
March 15, 2011 20:37 - 53 minutesExaminations of the Soviet gulag are a cottage industry in Russian studies. Since 1991, a torrent of books have been published examining the gulag’s construction, management, memory, and legacy. Few scholars, however, have investigated how Soviet citizens reacted to the return of over four million prisoners from labor camps and colonies between 1953 and 1958. How were they received? How did they reintegrate themselves into Soviet society? How did the specter of the “gulag returnee” impact pol...
David Day, “Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others” (Oxford UP, 2008)
March 15, 2011 18:43 - 59 minutesPeople will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the case that somebody else’s ancestors once lived on “this land,” and somebody else’s before that. From the very earliest moments of human history, people have been taking each other’s territory. This seemingly endless cycle is the subject of David Day’s excellent new book Conquest: How Societies Overwhe...
W. Taylor Fain, “American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2008)
March 14, 2011 16:08 - 1 hourIf you ask most Americans when the U.S. became heavily involved in the Persian Gulf, they might cite the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1981 or, more probably, the First Gulf War of 1990. Of course the roots of American entanglement in the region run much deeper, as W. Taylor Fain shows in his excellent new book American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). Beginning in the 18th century, the British began to do in the Gulf what the British did in th...
Mark Bradley, “Vietnam at War” (Oxford UP, 2009)
March 14, 2011 14:45 - 1 hourMy uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or “Thuds.” He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called “Thud Ridge.” He’d come home on leave and tell us that it was okay “over there” and not to worry. I didn’t because I was sure “we” would win and my uncle would come home a hero. Of course, neither of these things happened (though my uncle did come home). Since then, I’ve read many books about the war In an effort to try to figure out “what happened,” which is to say why...
Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young, “Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars” (Oxford UP, 2008)
March 14, 2011 14:44 - 1 hourWhat to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war? Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York...
Hans Kundnani, “Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust” (Columbia UP, 2010)
March 13, 2011 22:07 - 52 minutesIt’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just people you don’t like very much. Not so in post-War West Germany. There, too, it was common to call people “fascists. But in the Federal Republic they may well have been fascists, that is, Nazis. Despite the efforts of the most thorough-going de-Nazifiers, post-war West German government, business and...
Charles Lane, “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction” (Henry Holt, 2008)
March 11, 2011 18:32 - 1 hourWhy did Reconstruction fail? Why didn’t the post-war Federal government protect the civil rights of the newly freed slaves? And why did it take Washington almost a century to intercede on the behalf of beleaguered, oppressed African Americans in the South? In a terrific new book, Charles Lane explains why. The Day Freedom Died. The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (Henry Holt, 2008) tells the tale of a little-known though remarkably important incident: t...
Gabrielle Hamilton, “Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef” (Random House, 2011)
March 11, 2011 15:23 - 1 hourGabrielle Hamilton has a hard time admitting she wrote a memoir. “It’s like admitting you wrote a power love ballad,” she told me. But her new book, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Random House, 2011), has been garnering strong reviews, a blurb from Anthony Bourdain calling it “Simply the best memoir by a chef ever,” and debut sales that landed it at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Just as Gabrielle did not set out to open a groundbreaking rest...
Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2010)
March 10, 2011 20:04 - 1 hourFor us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word “nation,” this idea of “culture” or “a culture” is not very old. According to the OED, the modern meaning gained currency in English only in the nineteenth century. In a way, that’s not surprising: the nineteenth century was the era of high-nationalism and, as we’ve said, every “nation” had to have ...
Benjamin Binstock, “Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice” (Routledge, 2009)
March 09, 2011 19:09 - 1 hourBen Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. It does what all good history books should do–tell you something you thought you knew but in fact don’t–but it does it ON EVERY PAGE. I thought Vermeer was X; now I know he was Y. I thought Vermeer was influenced by X; now I understand he was influenced by Y; I thought Vermeer painted X; now I realize he painted Y. I could go on and on...
Lesley Hazleton, “After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split” (Doubleday, 2009)
March 07, 2011 20:28 - 1 hourSometimes a shallow explanation, the kind you read in newspapers and hear on television, is enough. “The home team was beaten at the buzzer” is probably all you need to know. Sometimes, however, it’s not. The intermittent conflict between the Shias and Sunnis in Iraq (and elsewhere) provides a good example. It is just not sufficient to say, as the major news outlets often do, that the Shias are fighting the Sunnis in Iraq because the Shias were oppressed by the Sunnis under Saddam Hussein, a ...
Louis Hyman, “Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink” (Princeton UP, 2011)
March 04, 2011 22:58 - 51 minutesI remember clearly the day I was offered my first credit card. It was in Berkeley, CA in 1985. I was walking on Sproul Plaza and I saw a booth manned by two students. They were giving out all kinds of swag, so I walked over to see what was to be had. T-shirts, I think. I asked them if I could get a credit card, sure that the answer had to be “no.” But the answer was an enthusiastic “yes.” I asked them if they understood that: a) I had no income beyond a tiny graduate student stipend; b) that ...
Noah Feldman, “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices” (Twelve, 2010)
March 03, 2011 19:07 - 1 hourFranklin D. Roosevelt promised the country “bold, persistent experimentation” to address the Great Depression – but for quite a while his ideas were a little too bold for the justices of the Supreme Court, who struck down many New Deal laws as unconstitutional. FDR had his day: over the years he replaced many of those justices with his own men, New Dealers who then, as judges, worked boldly with the Constitution. Irascible, ingenious, and remarkably uncooperative, the four justices in Noah Fe...
Claudia Verhoeven, “The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Cornell UP, 2009)
March 03, 2011 15:52 - 56 minutesScan the historical literature of the Russian revolutionary movement and you’ll find that Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov occupies no more than a footnote. After all, Karakozov was no great theorist. He led no political organization. He hardly fit the image of the iron willed, revolutionary aesthetic who preached the maxim ‘The ends justifies the means.’No, to his contemporaries, Karakozov was a nobody, an odd and sickly school dropout who, like so many of his ilk, dabbled in student radical...
Gregory J. W. Urwin, “Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity” (Naval Institute Press, 2010)
March 03, 2011 15:07 - 1 hourGregory J. W. Urwin’s Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity (Naval Institute Press, 2010) tells the story of the Americans captured on Wake Island in December 1945. The Wake Island garrison’s defeat of the initial Japanese landing attempt was one of the few bright spots for Americans in the opening weeks of the Second World War and earned the praise of President Roosevelt. The surrender of the small Marine garrison and the civilian contractors working on the atoll on Decem...
Hendrika Freud, “Electra vs Oedipus: The Drama of the Mother-Daughter Relationship” (Routledge, 2010)
February 27, 2011 20:13 - 57 minutesWho doesn’t want to know what women want, right? Well, in this interview with Hendrika Freud, we begin to get the idea that women often prefer not to know. As I sit in my private practice, many of my female patients put on a good smoke and mirror show, cloaking desires behind reaction formations, saying they are not angry when indeed they are, and feeling guilty when they venture to articulate what they prefer in bed, for breakfast, or as payment for services rendered. Indeed, when a woman sa...
J. Arch Getty, “Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s Iron Fist” (Yale UP, 2008)
February 23, 2011 16:42 - 46 minutesWhen you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so.But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosecuted Stalin reign of terror? We’ve learned a lot about Ezhov’s involvement in the Terror since the opening of Soviet archives in 1991. We know about his fanaticism, how he manufactured confessions, was present at his victims’ torture, and even kept the bullets that killed his victims, wrapped and labeled them, and tucked them in his desk. Less ...
J. E. Lendon, “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins” (Basic, 2010)
February 18, 2011 22:10 - 1 hourReading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yardon which we had recess. We called it a “playground.” But we did not play on it. We did battle. We did not fight for treats or for love or for sport. These things were trivial to us. No, we fought for honor. One achieved honor not by getting good grades, or by having the best lunch, or by making the...
Virginia Scharff, “The Women Jefferson Loved” (HarperCollins, 2010)
February 11, 2011 19:42 - 1 hourMost Americans could tell you who George Washington’s wife was. (Martha, right?) Most Americans probably couldn’t tell you who Thomas Jefferson’s wife was. (It was also Martha, but a different one of course). They might be able to tell you, however, who Thomas Jefferson’s alleged concubine was, as she has been in the news a lot lately. (His slave, Sally Hemings). But actually there were a lot of women in Jefferson’s life–or should we say a lot of women had Jefferson in their lives. Virginia ...
Joyce Appleby, “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism” (Norton, 2010)
February 04, 2011 18:34 - 59 minutesToday everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and one of the most common ways we cooperate is through trade. Some form of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” lies at the heart of almost every human relationship. We are built for reciproca...
Catherine Epstein, “Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland” (Oxford UP, 2010)
January 27, 2011 16:31 - 1 hourThe term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford UP, 2010). Greiser was a totalitarian if ever there we...
Joyce Salisbury, “The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages” (Routledge, 2011)
January 21, 2011 18:20 - 1 hourI have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and love them. When they die, I’ll be really sad. After having read Joyce Salisbury’s eye-opening The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2011), I know now how weird all that is. People in the Middle Ages did not, so far as we know, love their animals. As Joyce points out, they used them, ate them, and even had sex with them. But they do not seem to have lo...
Nell Irvin Painter, “The History of White People” (Norton, 2010)
January 14, 2011 20:06 - 1 hourWe in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call “race.” But, as Nell Irvin Painter shows in her fascinating new book The History of White People (Norton, 2010), it wasn’t always so. The Greeks didn’t do it, at least very seriously. The Romans didn’t do it, at least very often. And the folks of the Middle Ages didn’t do it, at least with much gusto. In fact, the people who invented the modern concept of “race” and the classification of people by skin...
Ian Sample, “Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science” (Basic Books, 2010)
January 14, 2011 19:08 - 1 hourYou’ve probably read about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It’s the largest (17 miles around!), most expensive (9 billion dollars!) scientific instrument in history. What’s it do? It accelerates beams of tiny particles (protons) to nearly the speed of light and then smashes them into one another. That’s cool, you say, but why? Well, the simple answer is this: it was built to test the validity of the way most physicists understand the origins and essence of everything, that is, the “standard ...
Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010)
December 17, 2010 19:09 - 1 hourWhat should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and ...
David Shearer, “Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953” (Yale UP, 2010)
December 10, 2010 18:55 - 1 hourThe question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens during the Great Purges is one of the most important of modern history, primarily because it shapes what we are likely to think about communism. There are two schools of thought. On the one hand, there are those who feel Stalin launched the Great Purges because “social cleansing” was (and is) intrinsic to communist ideology and practice. On this gloss, communism itself is responsible for S...
Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
December 03, 2010 20:39 - 1 hourHere’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler than any other figure in modern history. Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin and a few others might give him a run for his money, but I’d bet on Hitler. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him. The fact ...
Deborah Kaple, “Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir” (Oxford UP, 2010)
November 24, 2010 18:17 - 1 hourHere’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of humanity. For instance, it is at least imaginable that one day everyone will believe that zoos were [NB] profoundly immoral. The future will condemn us for imprisoning animals. The future will ask “How could they have done such a barbaric thing?” And the future, more than likely, will answer “Because they were evil.” When looking into humanity’s sord...
Kyra Hicks, “This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces” (Black Threads Press, 2009)
November 19, 2010 17:59 - 1 hourI’ll tell you something I’ve never really understood: the difference between “art” and “craft.” Yes, I get the sociological difference (“art” is made in New York and Paris; “craft” is made in Omaha and Wichita), but what about the substantive difference? One common way to differentiate the two is to say “art” is not functional and “craft” is functional. You can’t sit on a painting but you can sit on a chair. If that’s the difference, then the “Museum of Modern Art” in New York should be calle...
Joe Maiolo, “Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941” (Basic Books, 2010)
November 12, 2010 17:24 - 1 hourIn Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but please read the book and judge for yourself) two remarkably insightful theses. The military industrial complex was born three decades before Eisenhower put a name on it. The first is that the primary result of the disaster that was World War I was not the even great catastrophe that was World War II, but rather a new kind of state and one that is st...
David Farber, “The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism” (Princeton UP, 2010)
November 05, 2010 16:52 - 1 hourI think that many smart people, particularly on the Left, make a really ill-considered assumption, to wit, that “Republican” means “Conservative.” I don’t mean lower case “c” conservative, as in wanting to maintain the status quo. Nearly all (there are important exceptions) twentieth-century Republicans were conservatives in that generic sense. Rather, I mean capital “c” conservative, that is, pro-religion, traditional family centered, militarily hawkish, arch-patriotic, Constitution protecti...
Abbott Gleason, “A Liberal Education” (TidePool Press, 2010)
October 28, 2010 18:34 - 1 hourI fear that most people think that “history” is “the past” and that the one and the other live in books. But it just ain’t so. History is a story we tell about the past, or rather some small portion of it. The past itself is gone and cannot, outside science fiction, be revisited. And the histories in books are neither dead nor alive. They are zombies, endlessly repeating themselves, never having a new thought, never responding to anything you say. (Plato, by the way, is good on this subject.)...
James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010)
October 20, 2010 16:37 - 1 hourIn the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers (over 10,000 of them) and proceeded to make war on the heavens. The idea was to “seed” clouds with silver iodide before they got to Beijing and rained on the Chinese parade. Or may...
Aram Goudsouzian, “King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution” (University of California, 2010)
October 12, 2010 18:01 - 1 hourI imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I had to guard Antoine Carr in high school. I “held” Carr to 32 points. But no dunks! Russell’s opponents in college and the NBA rarely fared any better. Sports talk is full of hyperbole, but in Russell’s case most of it is true. In his time, he was far and away the best player to ever step on the court and, for most of his career, he completely owned every court he stepped on. He was so dominant that they changed the rules ...
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Russian Orientalism” (Yale UP, 2010)
October 08, 2010 19:06 - 1 hourThere’s a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar.” I’ve scratched a Russian (I won’t say anything more about that) and I can tell you that the saying is false: all I found was more Russian. It’s true, however, that Russians have always known a lot about Tatars because they’ve lived cheek-by-jowl with them for many centuries. Before the beginning of European contact with Russia in the sixteenth century, Russians didn’t really think the Tatars were ter...
Fred Spier, “Big History and the Future of Humanity” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
October 01, 2010 16:54 - 1 hourMy son Isaiah likes to play the “why” game. Isaiah: “Why is my ice cream gone?” Me: “Because you ate it.” Isaiah: “Why did I eat it?” Me: “Because you need food.” Isaiah: “Why do I need food?” And so on. Isaiah naturally wants to know why things are the way they are. We all do. Most of us, however, are taught that seeking these ultimate answers is quixotic. We say either that there are no ultimate answers or that you’d have to know too many to answer them. In this conception, there either is ...
Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides” (Princeton UP, 2010)
September 24, 2010 17:18 - 1 hourAbsolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of “dekulakization,” his pitiless deportation of “unreliable” ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to “cleanse” the Communist Party of supposed “enemies of the people”–all of these actions resulted in mass death. In total, Stalin is responsible for the murder of roughly 10 million Soviet citizens. Again, this is well established. Wh...
Thomas Kessner, “The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation” (Oxford UP, 2010)
September 15, 2010 17:11 - 1 hourTry to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part of our daily experience. Just look up and you’ll probably see one, or at least its vapor trails. Go to your local airport and you can fly in one pretty inexpensively. Heck, if you like, you can learn to pilot one yourself at any one of hundreds of flying schools. There is just nothing unusual or even very exciting about airships. It wasn’t always so. In the first quarter of the 20th century, airplanes were...
Kip Kosek, “Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy” (Columbia UP, 2010)
September 10, 2010 17:27 - 1 hourThere’s a quip that goes “Christianity is probably a great religion. Someone should really try it.” The implication, of course, is that most people who call themselves Christians aren’t very Christian at all. And, in truth, it’s hard to be a good Christian, what with all that loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, and helping the poor. It’s particularly hard to pull off in the modern world. But some have tried, at least in part. Foremost among them are the Christian pacifists. They are...
Elaine Tyler May, “America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation” (Basic Books, 2010)
September 04, 2010 19:19 - 57 minutesDon’t you find it a bit curious that there are literally thousands of pills that we in the developed world take on a daily basis, but only one of them is called “the Pill?” Actually, you probably don’t find it curious, because you know that the pill has had a massive impact on modern life. And why wouldn’t it? Thanks to the Pill, women alone–without the (unreliable) “cooperation” of their sexual partners–could control their own fertility. For the first time in human history. The first time. T...
Valerie Hebert, “Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg” (University Press of Kansas, 2010)
August 27, 2010 16:49 - 1 hourClausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, he might well have said war (or at least that war) was the “continuation of politics by any means.” Hitler was terribly specific about this. The Slavs, he said, were Untermenschen (subhumans). The Communists were Judeo-bolschewisten (Jewish Bolsheviks). Soviet soldiers were keine Kameraden (not comrades-in-...
Amanda Podany, “Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East” (Oxford UP, 2010)
August 19, 2010 18:28 - 1 hourI have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but in some ways telling. Many historians and history readers genuinely have a bias against the older periods, and particularly against the history of the pre-Hellenic Ancient World (roughly 10,000 BCE to 500 BCE). That’s really too bad for a whole host of reasons. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just list...
Jeffrey H. Jackson, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010)
August 13, 2010 17:07 - 1 hourIn the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern society, and particularly life in concentrated urban-industrial areas like Paris, left people without the sense of belonging that characterized “traditional” life. Durkheim was not alone in thinking that there was something fundamentally sick-making about modernity. Marx called the modern malady “alienation” (Entfremdung), Weber called it “disenchantment...
Gary Bruce, “The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi” (Oxford UP, 2010)
July 29, 2010 17:11 - 1 hourI have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally told the Stasi–the East German secret service–to watch them (which they did). After the fall of the Wall, the Stasi files were opened and my friend requested to see her dossier. I have to say, it was disappointing. For some reason (perhaps having to do with John le Carre), I thought the Stasi was a ru...
Todd Moye, “Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II” (Oxford UP, 2010)
July 23, 2010 17:26 - 1 hourIn the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known to history as the “Tuskegee Airmen.” In light of the honorable service record of countless African Americans, allowing blacks to become fighter and bomber pilots might not seem very “experimental” to you, but you have to put yourself in the mindset of the era in question to understand how “experimental” it was. Jim-Crow segregation was nearly univers...
Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization” (Oxford UP, 2006)
July 15, 2010 14:33 - 53 minutesHistorians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact–and it is a fact–that we see remarkable diversity in the historical record. The past, we say, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But there are also political reasons to hold to the idea that we have no essence, t...
John Steinberg, “All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
July 09, 2010 17:24 - 1 hourThe Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; no World War II, no Cold War). It’s little wonder, then, that historians have expended oceans of effort and ink trying to explain why and how it happened. The answer is complex, but it boils down to this: Nicholas II’s armies had a rough time of it in World War I, his regime lost credibility, the hungry cities revolted, and the Bolsheviks usurpe...
Michael Kranish, “Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
July 01, 2010 16:59 - 58 minutesThe past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybody and his brother is going to start digging into your past to see what kind of “dirt” they can find. It’s true now, and it was true when Thomas Jefferson was running for president in the late eighteenth century. Jefferson had had an eventful, largely public life, so there was a lot of “material” to be mined by his foes. Most of the accusations “di...
Jerry Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews” (Princeton UP, 2010)
June 25, 2010 17:51 - 1 hourI confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010). Capitalism is a touchy subject; Jews are a touchy subject. But capitalism and the Jews, that’s a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t suggest you try this, but just imagine what would happen if you started a water-cooler chat with “Hey, what do you think of capitalism and the Jews?” Not pretty. So, being a bit curious, I wanted to know who would write a book with said title and what they could possi...
Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010)
June 17, 2010 19:08 - 1 hourIf you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment,...