Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998)

An old-fashioned account of the history of the United States that doesn't cover up America's bad aspects, but it generally treats America as a progressively better nation (for bad or good). It is a sort of 1940s progressive liberal/Whig history of the US. It does lean towards Democrats beginning in the 20th century and needs many more maps, but it is still good.

That is, up until the modern update courtesy of Jeffrey Morris, which might be described as: Democrats good, Republicans bad. show more Nowhere is this most apparent when he talks about Reagan, who comes across as a genial cipher (the "amiable dunce" myth). And Morris just makes stupid, ahistorical comments, case in point, p. 624: "The President's overarching goal in the area of domestic policy was to reduce the role of the federal government, a policy traditionally associated with the party of Jefferson, not that of Lincoln." REALLY? Maybe the analogy holds true for Jefferson and Lincoln themselves, but not their parties, at least not since the 1890s. Has Morris ever heard of, I don't know, Republicans like Harding and Coolidge who pruned government? or government growers like Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, who created bloated bureaucracies? What party did the last three belong to? Hint, they ain't Republicans. Absolutely and utterly biased against conservatives. show less

A decent short narrative history of the United States, running from 'the planting of the colonies' to World War II.

It has a few flaws, although its not terrible overall. Its main problems are that the prose is sometimes tinted with a bit of romaticism-- it would have been better if the authors had written slightley more seriously, and not tried to give it the air of an amusing school textbook-- and that the text is sometimes a bit cluttered by relatively unimportant facts-- it may be a show more short narrative, but it isn't tight....

And of course, it's also pretty old-fashioned, for better or worse. On the whole, not terrible, but certainly not great.

(7/10) show less

In this short "study", Commager tackles his own subject. Without actually citing any other teaching disciplines, only his own, he declares that "History, it seems, is more self-conscious than other disciplines" and the historian "more introspective". To his credit, his compass of his own discipline and its leading scholars is nonpareil. I am just sort of disappointed that he cites none outside his siloh of information--other than two ancient theologians (Plutarch and St. Augustine).

This work show more focuses on How historians can question themselves and "get on with the job of study and teaching and writing". He does not linger on the unanswerable -- "we cannot answer ultimate questions". He does formulate approaches to questions about the uses of history and what it is as a subject.

"Rightly studied," answers to elementary questions about the nature and uses of history, can "illuminate our understanding and broaden our sympathies".

This book is a collection of five short essays:
Ch. 1 The Nature of History.
Ch. 2 The Varieties of History
Ch. 3 The Study of History
Ch. 4. Some Problems of History.
Ch. 5 History as Law and as Philosophy.

In his Chapter 4 are four subheadings in which Commager wrestles with:
--Limitations on the Historian
--The Trouble with Facts
--Interpretation--and Bias
--Judgment in History.

To pull out a few highlights --not summarizing -- from this important section:

--Limitations on the Historian
Quoting Veronica Wedgewood: The historian "ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance."

--The Trouble with Facts.
"First, a paradox. There are too few facts, and there are too many."
--Interpretation--and Bias
"There is one bias, one prejudice, one obsession, so pervasive and so powerful that it deserves special consideration: nationalism." This is a disease, really, of the eye.
--Judgment in History.
The idea of a moral function was well-stated by Lord Acton in 1895--he exhorted students of history "never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standards of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong." [63] show less

This is the type of history I really enjoy. We are seeing the events through the eyes of the people involved and not through the gloss of future historians. When a historians writes of events they know for the most part what happened but because the people whose writings are collected in this book don’t know what is going to happen I feel that we get a truer sense of what happened and what they actually thought at the time.