Historical Book Recomendation Thread

[Esperr]

If you don't understand the difference between the Depression and a recession, then yes. And I'm sure those not counted as unemployed during the 1930s would find much comfort in your words...

And the people in 2008 would find comfort in yours? Your not even trying to make an argument. Your just saying "no your wrong".

 

[Agent327]

Indeed. If those categories you mentioned - that were not counted - would be added to the 25-30 % unemployment rates already measured, we'd have even higher unemployment rates. This is just one of the reasons why the Depression - which lasted all through the 1930s - is not referred to as 'a recession'. Unemployment rates during the recent recession (there have been several between 1930 and now) went up above 10 %. That's serious, but it in no way compares to the 1930s.

 

[Agent327]

US foreign policy: what is it all about?

THE TRAGEDY OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest
By Walter A. McDougall

Walter A. McDougall, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania who has taken on some of the broadest themes in American society and won a Pulitzer for his brilliant history of the American space program, warns in “The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy” that once in office American presidents are often “susceptible to a utopian temptation.” They adopt a language that he describes as “American civil religion,” wrapping adventurism in a gauzy, semireligious haze. Democracy becomes an export.

In the 19th century, as he describes the history, this was mostly limited to the American continent. But when Manifest Destiny was fulfilled, global destiny beckoned. So from Theodore Roosevelt’s empire-building to Kennedy’s “pay any price” and Reagan’s shining-city-on-a-hill, America kept recommitting itself to remaking the world.

This is not a new theme. Walter Russell Mead’s “Special Providence,” published just after the 9/11 attacks, made a convincing case about how different imaginings of American exceptionalism were used to justify adventures abroad, for good and ill.

Civil religion? Interesting.

McDougall is at his most convincing describing how American civil religion episodically drove the country’s thinking, from the early days of the Republic to Truman. He’s at his least persuasive explaining more recent times, and it can be argued that he fundamentally misses how a cold-eyed view of America’s national interests became the defining element of Obama’s foreign policy. For if we were truly following the command to stand with liberty, we would have 100,000 troops in Syria.

Also:

The nuclear arms race, begun by Truman and accelerated by Eisenhower and Kennedy, came less out of religious fervor than out of a conviction that national survival depended on having the biggest arsenal. The “domino theory” that justified the failed intervention in Vietnam was also about the perception of American vital interests. The same was true for the 2003 invasion of Iraq: It was first and foremost a campaign to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. Only when it turned out there were no such weapons did liberating the oppressed Iraqis become Bush’s primary objective.

Hm. But Bush knew from the start there were no weapons of mass destruction: that was the stick to hit the dog with. Not to mention that the invasion plan for Iraq was hatched right after 9/11, to which Saddam Hussein was in no way linked.

The main point, however, stands: interventionism hasn't always been in the US national interest - whether you attribute such interventionism to civil religion or not.

From here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/b...nl=bookreview&nlid=61820453&ref=headline&_r=0

So what about China?

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
America and China, 1776 to the Present
By John Pomfret

This weighty history by a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, while not offering itself as a vade mecum for dealing with the slow-gathering storm, provides an exhaustive collection of names, dates and historical markers to show just how we reached this place, the jumping-off point for the coming decades of what men of menace like to term “interesting times.”

The underlying thesis of Pomfret’s account is quite simple: that the United States and China are locked “in an entangling embrace that neither can quit” and that this mutual dependence is “vital to the fate of the world.”

Well, possibly. So what about this Yellow Peril?

Almost all territory once held by foreigners is now back in the fold: after Ports Arthur and Edward, after Manchuria, after Shandong and Hainan, after Hong Kong and Macau, all that remains outside is the great island of Taiwan. And so far as the Pacific more generally is concerned, the South China Sea is now close to being under Chinese control. The three so-called “island chains” that serve to protect China’s eastern shores, which extend, in some interpretations, as far out as Hawaii, will soon be dominated by an ever-enlarging Chinese Navy, shortly to be bigger and more powerful than anything the United States may be able to muster or afford.

Ah, no. The US military budget is (cuts notwithstanding) still larger than the next 5 powers combined. And, one might note, the next president is not planning on having that changed.

But at least we have a book which is an exhaustive collection of names, dates and historical markers,

Review in full here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/b...1230&nl=bookreview&nlid=61820453&ref=headline

 

[Flying Pig]

Interesting that they imply that Taiwan is 'held by foreigners'

 

[JohannaK]

"Shortly to be bigger and more powerful than anything the United States may be able to muster or afford."

Is this the same China that has no blue-water navy to speak of? And the same US who is building the Gerald Ford-class of aircraft carriers?

 

[Agent327]

Well, the reviewer seems to have a bit of a narrative of his own. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly well-informed narrative.

Interesting that they imply that Taiwan is 'held by foreigners'

Well, no matter how you wish to look at it, it is. The current Taiwan government (i.e. the Nationalists) aren't indigenous to Taiwan at all. It is a bit of a conundrum then that China considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory - but then they have similar ideas about (North-) Korea. One should never underestimate the element of tradition in foreign policy.

 

[Agent327]

And now the curious case of Edward Snowden. Is he a spy?

HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft
By Edward Jay Epstein

People who reveal secrets are either heroes or betrayers, depending on what the secrets are and on the inclinations of the audience for them. In the case of Edward Snowden, who took and then released a great deal of internal data from the National Security Agency in 2013, his admirers have campaigned for a last-minute pardon by President Obama, but Donald Trump has mused that execution might be more appropriate. Journalism based on Snowden’s revelations won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2014, and the Oscar for best documentary in 2015; on the other hand, many American government officials think Snowden, who lives in Russia, should be brought home and prosecuted for revealing classified information.

Hm. So who is this Snowden character?

Snowden, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and their immediate circle of allies come from a radically libertarian hacker culture that, most of the time, doesn’t believe there should be an N.S.A. at all, whether or not it remains within the confines of its legal charter. Epstein, conversely, is a strong supporter of the agency’s official mission of “communication intercepts,” which he sees as an essential element in the United States’ ability to participate in “the game of nations.” To him one of the lessons of the Snowden case is that the agency’s reliance on private contractors like Snowden instead of career employees has made it dangerously vulnerable to security breaches.

Ah yes, put national security in the hands of private individuals. That's not asking for problems at all:

It’s an irony of the years since the Reagan revolution that one political strain in the United States, suspicion of big government, has led to spending and staffing limits that have pushed the N.S.A. into the low-security private marketplace to perform its ever-expanding mission. (The contractor that employed Snowden had been acquired by a private equity firm that was pressuring it to cut costs, and elaborate background checks are expensive.)

But is he a spy? Epstein suggests he is (his stay at Hongkong, and subsequent stay at Moscow), but presents no proof. Which is a bit disappointing, as Epstein made this suggestion in an article in 2014 already.

 

[Ferocitus]

I'm recommending a book and an article in Harper's Magazine.
Jeff Sharlet,
"Jesus Killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military"
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/jesus-killed-mohammed/

The book by the same author is:
"The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power"

If you want to know Mike Pence's provenance, and some of the things
he and his colleagues are aiming for, then those two should scare the
bejesus and bemohammed out of you.

 

[JohannaK]

Not even halfway through the article I'm scared to hell and back.

 

[Ferocitus]

Not even halfway through the article I'm scared to hell and back.

I thought that the article title was also the title of a book.
When I was in a bookshop in Melbourne, the woman at
the counter saw me looking around and called out if she could help.
From the back of the shop, I shouted out, "I'm looking for a book called
Jesus Killed Mohammed. Do you have it?"

No hilarity ensued.

 

[Agent327]

How odd. An (uncritical) look at Israel's arms industry:

THE WEAPON WIZARDS
How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower
By Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot

Seventy years ago, the state of Israel was still just a gleam in Zionists’ eyes, and the future state’s military was hardly more than a ragtag group of irregulars, forced to manufacture bullets in a secret facility built underneath a kibbutz. Today, Israel’s military is widely viewed as one of the most effective in the world. Once compelled to arm itself with surplus equipment purchased from more powerful states (and sometimes obtained by stealth), Israel is now one of the world’s six largest arms exporters, earning billions each year through the sale of military equipment to buyers from China and India to Colombia and Russia.

Now, Katz and Bohbot are journalists, not historians. So their explanation for this phenomenon doesn't go much further than listing a number of clichés. Which may be perfectly true, but:

What “The Weapon Wizards” doesn’t offer is any meditation on the political context or implications of Israel’s rise to military superpower status. Katz and Bohbot are cheerleaders, not critics, and there’s little room for introspection in this breathless tale of triumph over adversity. Left largely unmentioned, for instance, is the role of the United States. American security guarantees over the last few decades have kept Israel’s neighbors relatively docile, if not precisely friendly, and nearly a quarter of Israel’s annual defense budget is effectively paid for by the United States. Israel receives more American military aid than every other country in the world combined. A more complete answer to “How did Israel do it?” might be: pluck, brains and billions of dollars of American aid each year.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Anyone got sth to recommend on the crusades? I am foremost Interested in the political, economic and social Background. Not the waring itself.

 

[Ajidica]

Anyone got sth to recommend on the crusades? I am foremost Interested in the political, economic and social Background. Not the waring itself.

If you are looking for a doorstop, Christopher Tyerman's God's War is good.
Thomas Asbridge The First Crusade: A New History is pretty good easy read but as the title suggests, only covers the first crusade. He did a book on the whole crusades but I never read it.

 

[Arakhor]

There's Mary Beard's A History of Ancient Rome.

 

[sophie]

I can't recommend a specific book, but some general guidelines for buying history books¹:

1) Newer is generally better; be wary with books written pre-1980s.
2) Stick to well-regarded University Presses: Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Chicago, University of California
3) Check the author's background. Being a professor is not a guarantee of good history, nor is not being a professor an indication of a bad one, but works put out by tenured professors at prestigious universities tend to be of higher quality.

¹Buying books for general knowledge on a topic. This obviously doesn't apply to historiographical research.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Some Second World War-iness, for those who never get tired of that:

Neal Bascomb; The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler's Atomic Bomb; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; May 2016

I think it's been concluded since the war that Nazi German wasn't really that close to developing an atomic bomb, nevermind deploying one. Still, the British didn't know that at the time, and in 1942 you didn't need to be a hysteric to be concerned that Liverpool, Newcastle, or Portsmouth could be the site of the world's first atomic bomb detonation. The American facilities at Los Alamos, NM and Oak Ridge, TN hadn't even opened yet, and the Germans were ramping up production of deuterium in Norway. You can imagine how that looked from London.

James Hornfischer; Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal; Bantam; March 2012

If a US Marine ever gives one of his Navy brothers or sisters a ribbing for staying safely on their boats, the sailor's best retort may be, "Ironbottom Sound, dude. Ironbottom Sound." For every jarhead who died on Guadalcanal, 3 sailors were killed in The Slot. Some of the night battles were fought at such close ranges the American and Japanese destroyers were in danger of ramming each other. A Navy veteran described one engagement as being "like a bar fight after somebody shot the lights out", and the commander of one group simply ordered half his ships to fire to port and the other half to fire to starboard. Some time after the war, the Japanese told their American counterparts that their battlecruisers were carrying high-explosive rounds for their 14"/356mm guns, to be used against the Marines on the island after they had defeated the Allied surface fleet.

 

[Mouthwash]

Newer is generally better; be wary with books written pre-1980s.

So there's been a revolution in historiography since then? I don't know what to make of this.

 

[sophie]

Yeah, the linguistic turn - essentially the introduction of postmodern thought to historical research and analysis. It's not to say that pre-1980s history is trash, it's just the turn was so transformative to the research of so many historical periods and kinds of history that you're shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring post-turn research.

 

[Camikaze]

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a book on the Russian Civil War? I gather The Russian Civil War by Evan Mawdsley is the go-to.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

If you are looking for a doorstop, Christopher Tyerman's God's War is good.
Thomas Asbridge The First Crusade: A New History is pretty good easy read but as the title suggests, only covers the first crusade. He did a book on the whole crusades but I never read it.

Cool thanks