History Books!

ParkCungHee said:

Also, for practical effect, the war outside of Poland started in the spring of 1940.

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Gary Childress said:

A neighbor has put Will Durant's 11 Volume Story of Civilization up for sale on our neighborhood website. This sort of prompted me to think about reading something on history as my history is rusty from High School. Does anyone have any recommendations on a good history book or volume of books that comprehensively covers World history both relatively objectively and accurately? I was reading of Durant's set that there are some errors in it.

Thanks.

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In the opening chapter of his latest book, the military historian Andrew J. Bacevich blames Jimmy Carter, a president commonly viewed as more meek than martial, for unwittingly spawning 35 years of American military intervention in the Midlle East. Bacevich argues that three mistakes by Carter set precedents that led to decades of squandered American lives and treasure.

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Citing numerous examples, he convincingly argues that destructive myths about the efficacy of American military power blind policy makers, generals and voters.

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Agent327 said:

Something to prick up your ears:

He nevertheless shunned the Negro press, shutting it out of the White House press corps until the last 12 years of his office.

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Lexicus said:

Recently finished Mary Beard's SPQR which was pretty good. Now reading the rather dated Army of the Caesars by Michael Grant, which is pretty good so far.

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THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU
And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
By Joshua Hammer
278 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.

In the summer of 1826, a Scotsman named Alexander Gordon Laing became the first European to set foot in Timbuktu, a city that would become synonymous with mysterious remoteness. The inhabitants of Timbuktu would have been amused by the British imperialist assumption that their city had been “discovered.” By the time Laing reached the place, it had been a thriving international center for centuries, the economic and intellectual heart of the sub-Saharan world, where travelers, traders and thinkers, Africans, Berbers, Arabs, Tuaregs and others gathered to trade gold, salt, slaves, spices, ivory — and knowledge.

While Europe was still groping its way through the dark ages, Timbuktu was a beacon of intellectual enlightenment, and probably the most bibliophilic city on earth. Scientists, engineers, poets and philosophers flocked there to exchange and debate ideas and commit these to paper in hundreds of thousands of manuscripts written in Arabic and various African languages. The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper once remarked: “There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.” Timbuktu’s staggering manuscript hoard is the most vivid proof of how wrong he was.

That ancient literary heritage, and the threat it faces from radical Islam, is the subject of Joshua Hammer’s book “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu,” part history, part scholarly adventure story and part journalistic survey of the volatile religious politics of the Maghreb region. The title is quite irritating; the rest of it is very good.

(...)Hammer writes with verve and expertise, but there are two problems with the thriller tone that underpins his story. The first is the question of just how “bad-ass” Haidara really was. While his teams were removing manuscripts, he had evacuated himself to Bamako, offering coordination and encouragement from a distance. This is a perfectly acceptable decision for a middle-aged scholar with two wives and lots of children, but it doesn’t quite make him Indiana Jones.

The level of threat posed to the manuscripts is also debatable. Like most terrorists, the forces of AQIM were on the whole very stupid. The Islamists’ control of Timbuktu focused on wrecking the ancient Sufi shrines, mounting public amputations and boasting on Twitter; the finer points of the city’s cultural heritage didn’t seem to interest them, and as Hammer acknowledges, the manuscript collections were “mostly ignored” until the final stages of the occupation.

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BIND US APART
How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
By Nicholas Guyatt
Illustrated. 403 pp. Basic Books. $29.99.

Half a century ago, inspired by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, historians embarked on an effort to identify the origins of racial segregation. C. Vann Woodward insisted that rather than existing from time immemorial, as the ruling’s opponents claimed, segregation emerged in the 1890s. Others located its genesis in Reconstruction or the pre-Civil War North.

Eventually, the debate faded. Now, Nicholas Guyatt offers a new interpretation. Segregation and its ideological justification “separate but equal,” he argues, originated in the early Republic in the efforts of “enlightened Americans” to uplift and protect Indians and African-Americans. After trying and abandoning other policies, these reformers and policy makers concluded that only separation from whites — removal of Indians to the trans-Mississippi West and blacks to Africa — would enable these groups to enjoy their natural rights and achieve economic and cultural advancement. Thus, almost from the outset, the idea of separating the races was built into the DNA of the United States.

Guyatt, who teaches at the University of Cambridge, is the author of a well-regarded book on the history of the idea (still very much alive today) that God has chosen this country for a special mission. In “Bind Us Apart” he addresses another theme central to our national identity: Who is an American? To find an answer he offers a detailed account of early national policies toward Indians and blacks.

By the somewhat anachronistic label “liberal” — usually applied, when referring to the 19th century, to believers in limited government, free trade and individual liberty — Guyatt means adherents of Enlightenment values, including the repudiation of prejudice against others. These people realized that the presence of subordinate racial populations could not be reconciled with the affirmation that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. They assumed that what appeared to be black and Indian inferiority resulted from oppressive circumstances, not innate incapacity. With proper education and training, these groups could become equal members of American society.

This belief led to a “civilizing agenda” whereby the federal government encouraged Native Americans to form compact communities where they would take up settled farming and abandon communal land holding for the benefits of private ownership. The ultimate aim was that whites and Indians would “become one people,” in the words of Thomas Jefferson.

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WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN
In the Service of My Country, a Life
By James Lee McDonough
Illustrated. 816 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $39.95.

Historians cannot get enough of William Tecumseh Sherman, and no wonder. As multiple biographies have noted over the last 30 years, he is a particularly modern figure — high-strung, quotable, irritable, irreligious, prone to bouts of anxiety and depression. One earlier Sherman biographer, the British military writer Basil Liddell Hart, called him “the first modern general.”

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Of course, his 1864 movement across central Georgia also is remembered by his name — Sherman’s march. Yet this most famous of his actions is probably his least understood, or perhaps most misrepresented. He did not conduct “total war.” Nor did he use violence indiscriminately. To the contrary, his march across Georgia and then into South Carolina was a targeted use of violence against wealthy Confederate die-hards in the rural South who had been largely untouched by the war. It was to these plantation owners that Sherman intended to bring “the hard hand of war,” and he did so with audacity and courage.

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Grant and Lincoln were nervous about it. Gen. George McClellan, running for president against Lincoln, believed “Sherman will come to grief.”

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The campaign from Atlanta to the Atlantic actually involved very few battles or casualties. In fact, of about 60,000 troops, only 103 were killed in combat. Yet the campaign had a devastating effect on the South’s determination to continue fighting.

If only our generals today were as astute.

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Lexicus said:

Blew through Plutarch's Lives which I haven't read since the second year of college. Quite interesting to see how it conflicts with other narratives I've read of the same people and period.

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Flying Pig said:

A lot of Shakespeare is based on Plutarch, so I'm told. It's always interesting, I think, to compare the lists that those (more or less) at the time put together of the 'great men' of their era against those we have today, and the reasons for which they were held as great. I've not read much of Plutarch, but I've read Suetonius, and most of his praise and blame goes on whether an emperor was personally upright or decadent. You might fairly say that he trims the personal stories to fit the image he's trying to get across, but it's certainly a bit of a shift compared with how you'd assess (for example) Prime Ministers or Presidents today. If Plutarch were writing for the Times, Cameron's political obituary would be dominated by the infamous pig.

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Agent327 said:

William Tecumseh Sherman, the general inventor of modern scorched Earth strategy... or not?

So what's the argument?

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Dachs said:

Since this is the "History Books" thread...if you haven't done so yet, check out Arnaldo Momigliano's The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. He addressed this point in considerable detail, IIRC.

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Serutan said:

The argument could made be that it was really invented by Grant in his roundabout
march on Vicksburg, albeit on a much smaller scale . It should be noted that the most vocal opponent of that plan was one William T. Sherman.

Grant did have initial misgivings about the March to the Sea, but he came round to
the idea and wound up persuading Lincoln to let it happen.

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Dachs said:

Sheridan, who was US military observer during the War of 1870, was surprised that the Germans generally refrained from attacking nonmilitary production, and primarily conducted raids against military targets when raids were conducted at all.

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