Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
It says something about your line of work when murdering thousands and thousands of innocent people only gets you graded as "imperfect". I get chewed out worse than that if I use too many carrier bags.
ParkCungHee
Deity
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I got rated a "C" on my work, because I didn't catch quite the right number of commas used in a movie that will only be watched ironically.
Bulldog Bats
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Johnson did more for civil rights than any other politician of his time. The fact that a senator from a former Confederate state took the lead on that issue (regardless of his incentive) is amazing.
I assume you mean Vietnam. In that case, you have to broad-brush Eisenhower, Kennedy, not to mention France. He did not get us into the war - he inherited the problem. I have spoken to many people from that era who believe that the reason he did not run again is that he did not see any way he could get the US out.
I am not saying he was our best leader. But people forget he took over the country after the Kennedy assassination, and continued to push civil rights. It isn't his predecessor or successor who did so. Vietnam was a massive @#$%%!-up, but it was there before and after him. The more you read, the more you appreciate.
I assume you mean Vietnam. In that case, you have to broad-brush Eisenhower, Kennedy, not to mention France. He did not get us into the war - he inherited the problem. I have spoken to many people from that era who believe that the reason he did not run again is that he did not see any way he could get the US out.
I am not saying he was our best leader. But people forget he took over the country after the Kennedy assassination, and continued to push civil rights. It isn't his predecessor or successor who did so. Vietnam was a massive @#$%%!-up, but it was there before and after him. The more you read, the more you appreciate.
Perfection
The Great Head.
What are some good historical books for a general reader? I'm not looking for any particular history but I don't want to read some dry book that is only of interest to hardcore history nerds.
Johnson had this incredible ability to lean on people to get stuff done, and he could tailor the pressure just right to get away with it every time. Even his pants salesman got the Johnson treatment.
If I were a writer and wanted to have some fun, I'd release a special April Fools' edition of a history book and intentionally label all the wrong places on the map. So the text would refer to Springfield, Massachusetts, but the map has Springfield, Illinois labeled. The text would refer to Washington (the city), but only Washington (the state) would be labeled.
It'd be the ultimate troll map.
A bit, maybe. But Johnson's stock has risen and fallen with how the public balances Vietnam against the Great Society programs.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Those people are still dead, though. It's not obvious to me how even the most admirable domestic policy can negate that fact.
But, this is a books thread, so I shouldn't take my moralising any further...
Bulldog Bats
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TF - No one likes war, but wars do happen, and sometimes are necessary (no other way to stop Hitler than beating him in WWII) and people die in them. My suggestion, in you are interested in a great read, and in learning how lawmaking works in the US, is to pick up the book.
Ajidica
High Quality Person
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Not really sure what period you are looking at, but for more modern stuff I can highly recommend Robert Service's Comrades: A History of World Communism. As long as you can ignore his occasional slide into Cold Warrior Nonsense his analysis holds up well enough to serve as a basic introduction to the history and evolution of Communism-in-practice from Marx to the Zapatistas.
While less historical and more autobiographical (along with being slightly more readable), I would also recommend the book I recommend to Phrossack earlier Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo Dallaire or The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk about the modern Middle East where he draws upon his knowledge of the region after reporting there for 30 years. Although some of Fisk's history is a bit trash (such as the Overthrow of Mossadeq), whenever he is writing about an event he was present at (such as the Iran-Iraq War) he is probably one of the best writer's I've read. He gives an excellent sense of place and narrative.
Plus the guy has interviewed Bin Laden three times and offers a fascinating insight into how his mind, and the mind of Islamic militants, works.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I dunno, from what I've heard, the Cold Warrior approach is built pretty deeply into the whole structure of the text, rather than just turning up as occasional tangents. I won't pretend I'm in a position to judge without reading it, but as a general comment I'd say that we have to be pretty careful as non-specialist readers about assuming that we have the ability to sift out the author's ideological leanings and leave ourselves with the bare-facts.
Also, didn't we once have the barebones of some sort of "CFC WH Reading List", that had a few good not-overly-nerdy suggestions? Although the only thing I can remember being on it is was Charles Mann's 1491
(As you can see, I have made no suggestions of my own, because I am a hateful ogre, and also because most of the books I read sit in that awful no-man's land between accessible and respectable, commonly known as the "undergraduate reading list".)
Ajidica
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I didn't really feel like it was that integral to the text, and looking back I still feel as though his analysis has held up decent well. His criticisms of the USSR and most Communism movements are a bit on the harsh side, generally viewing the imposition of revolutionary terror and dictatorship as endemic to the type of Communist ideology advocated rather than as independent historical factors. Which, to be fair, isn't an entirely indefensible position.
IIRC he does some soapboxing about how if liberal governments don't address the very real issues of poverty and desperation we could see (an obviously VERY BAD) a Bolshevik/Maoist style revolution, but this occurs at the end of the book where most authors get a bit soap-boxy. Also, he points out some the substantial improvements that socialist/communist parties in India have brought around so he isn't a mouth-frothing red-hater. He is no friend of the Bolsheviks and Maoists, but few in the West are.
Anyhow, we are getting a bit off topic.
It does get awfully chilly on the marge of Lake LeBarge.
Bulldog Bats
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Another topic I have started reading is alternative history (what would be the result if Hitler won WWII/ What if Lincoln or Kennedy had not been shot/ what if Jesus had not been killed). Any good recommendations on that?
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I forgot the name but there was one based on if Germany invaded America in like 1903 that I quite enjoyed. Apparently this was actually a possibility.
Phrossack
Armored Fish and Armored Men
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I doubt it was a possibility. Germany didn't have the navy or the manpower to threaten America, and the rest of Europe wouldn't exactly have just sat by and watched as Germany impaled itself.
Anyway, how good is Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier? I understand Dachs read it, and maybe someone else.
Broadly speaking, yes: Fatherland is the best of a bad bunch. Alternate history is generally not well served; there are authors who ignore the "history" part and focus on writing good novels (e.g. Harris, with Fatherland, or Nabokov, with Ada, or Ardor, or Mark Twain, with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) and there are authors who ignore the "good novels" part and most of the "history" part (e.g. Harry Turtledove, or S.M. Stirling) and there are authors who do an okay but not spectacular job at both the genre fiction and the history (e.g. Eric Flint, although the extent to which his stuff is "alternate history" in the traditional sense is dubious).
Sometimes - rarely - historians also write alternate history. Most of the time, it doesn't go very well. The What If? books are full of articles about, well, what-ifs, but most of them aren't very well thought through, or they serve chiefly to emphasize how much the author knows about his/her chosen time period in reality and not fiction. Historians often bring up the extremely valid point that this is all fiction, and that there is no way to say with great accuracy what would have happened if any given thing in history was changed, but that is beside the point. We know it's fiction, but there is a difference between fiction that is well-informed and fiction that's just ridiculous. It's the difference between Nazi Europe in 1955 and Nazis on Mars in 1955. Plausibility, in my opinion, adds a great deal to alternate historical fiction.
This is a particularly obnoxious stance of historians in general to take given the modern historical emphasis on contingency. You'll find that most academics will take pains to point out that history did not have to happen a certain way, but will be very dismissive of pointing out how history might potentially have happened otherwise. Admittedly, the second of those things isn't really an academic subject, but you'd think people would be more willing to spitball some ideas with the caveat that none of them would definitely have happened. But whatever. The closest anybody's come to doing anything like that in a major work of history is Niall Ferguson, who in The Pity of War argued that a Europe without WWI would have not only been spared countless deaths, but might have developed a European Union several decades early. Ferguson was lambasted for this, partially on the legitimate criticism that his projection was absurd, and partially on the less legitimate criticism that any projection had no place in a work of history.
There are plenty of places on the Internet where you can find alternate history in other, non-novel forms, such as the alternatehistory.com forums where users post timelines after various writing styles. As with anything, 90% of these (or more) are dreck. I myself have tried my hand at writing such alternate history; my best finished product is linked in my signature (although I would like to point out that it's currently undergoing a major revision). I think it's pretty okay and has a reasonably good handle on the history for something I wrote a couple of years ago.
No, it wasn't.
Germany lacked long-range vessels sufficient to challenge the US Navy in its home waters, and lacked the troop transport capacity to even get enough troops to occupy any appreciable amount of American territory. It would take a very long time - several years at least - to rectify these conditions.
Now, there was a semi-legit war scare in 1902-03, over the Anglo-German reaction to the activities of the Venezuelan dictator Cipriano Castro. Germany and the US could very well have gone to war, although I think it wasn't that likely. But if a state of war had existed, the Germans could not project enough power into the western Atlantic to seriously consider invading America.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
You're making a lot of assumptions about the scope of this invasion.
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