Current Reading: January 2023

Happy New Year!
I've started off with regional history books from the library. These books were published by Arcadia Publishing/History Press.

Finished:
Hidden History of Civil War Williamsburg by Carson O. Hudson, Jr.
This book focuses on the Civil War years in Williamsburg, VA.

Yorktown, Virginia: A Brief History by Wilford Kale
The 1781 surrender of General Cornwallis was just one chapter in this town's history!

Next: A Culinary History of West Virginia by Shannon Colaianni Tinnell
Food history of the Mountain State with recipes included.

Finished Subchaser by Edward P. Stafford, the personal memoirs of a Subchaser skipper during training and then in the Mediterranean in World War II. Better than many of this ilk as Stafford keeps his musings to a minimum. I learned a lot from it.

Wrapped up Inventor of the Future, a critical biography of Buckminster Fuller that left me impressed that there was some actual substance there; I was never really a fan of the man. Was there too much personal myth-making for anyone's good; yes. Was that necessary if Fuller was going to keep some control over his destiny, and not be reduced to some organizational asset; also probably yes.

>1 princessgarnet: are you planning on attempting any of the recipes?

Completed Guns of the Special Forces 2001 – 2015 by Leigh Neville. In spite of its title, this isn't a macho stories book or an encyclopedia but rather a well written narrative discussing the weapons used by western special forces. The book is broken down in chapters about each class of weapon. Included are histories of the weapon class prior to the time period of the title, discussions of procurement, tactics and techniques. There are also sections on each of the individual major weapons as well as a look at future trends. The book is well illustrated with many color photographs.

Although I had first gotten the hardcover version, I found that the Kindle version was (and currently is) on sale. The color photos in the Kindle version can be seen quite well on something like a cell phone, tablet or computer, supporting a very significant amount of zooming.

Finished The Country House Library, which looks like a coffee table book but reads like an academic-grade treatise on the evolution of libraries and book collecting in the British Isles. I have to respect the scholarship but it might have been a little more about the topic than I wanted to know; more the sort of book you dip into than read cover to cover.

Finished another couple of books.

First up, a short Electric Interurbans and the American People (Railroads Past and Present) by H. Roger Grant. I've read several books about the interurbans, but this one is touted as a social history. Unfortunately it suffered from a lack of readability. For instance, the author would make the point that interurbans appealed to farmers and then present several pages with examples. Then the same thing but only with commuters. Since he eschewed any discussions of financial, technical or any other aspect other than social, the book was rather dull. If you know very little about the interurbans you might get more out of it.

And then a much longer The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes: The Ancient World Economy and the Empires of Parthia, Central Asia and Han China by Raoul McLaughlin. Unfortunately, this one suffered from the opposite issue, way too much information on too many subjects. After many pages on how the Romans used silk, the author then spent quite a lot of pages on how the Chinese made silk, including aspects of the workforce, economics, turning fibers into cloth, storing the cloth, etc. And we're not even getting started. Then it was off on how the Chinese made steel, how the Romans used that steel, and we still haven't even started to talk about how the silk routes got established. That part was very, very long as it had to establish the history of Chinese expansion towards the West, political practicalities with their neighbors, so on and so forth. This isn't a bad book, not at all, but at my age I get rather worn down by long, drawn out discussions. Others may actually enjoy it.

>7 jztemple: I know the feeling...I sometimes have to remind myself it's been a long time since I've been in grad school and can throw a given book at the wall.

Finished The Emperor Maurice and his Historian yesterday. It was less about the emperor and the historian (Theophylact Simocatta) as people than I expected going in, and more on Maurice's wars on the Danubian and Persian frontiers, as well as on the sources, style, and position at the end of the tradition of classicizing histories of Theophylact's History. The military chapters appealed to me, the literary-critical ones rather less.

>7 jztemple:

Haven't read the Silk Road one, but I read McLaughlin's The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean som years ago, and had somewhat mixed feelings about it. In particular, it was badly let down by the editor.

I finished my scanning of Louisiana State Guide which is part of the American Guide Series. The dust jacket (a stylized pelagin) is sort of neat.

Remember that when you read some of the chapters such as Racial Elements, Folkways, Social Life and Social Welfare, etc, the book was put together in 1940 and 1941. At the time it was written it was considered the current information.

Knocked off Fatal Colours, which while nominally is an account of the battle of Towton, is really more a short history of the Wars of the Roses, with the famous battle being the climax of the narrative.

Finished Infantry Small Arms of the 21st Century: Guns of the World's Armies by Leigh Neville, a sequel of sorts to the book I mentioned above. Again, excellent research and presentation, very informative.

Finished Against the Grain. This is an exercise, by a well-known social historian, to personally assimilate the new insights that archaeology is providing into how previous assessments of social evolution and state building really do not stand up to sustained examination. I found it quite good, and it's a little more digestible than the over-stuffed sandwich that is The Dawn of Everything.

I've just finished Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson. Larson has delivered a stirring and extremely readable biography of an extremely important and inspirational--though I expect not well enough known at this point--figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. Fannie Lou Hamer was the children of tenant farmers, and became one herself, in Jim Crow Mississippi. With very little education but with a burning drive to learn and an iron-willed dignity that would not allow her to sit still for the horrific realities of 1950s and 60s Mississippi, Hamer gradually became involved in the grass roots efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to help rural Blacks attain voting rights in the face of furious, violent and often deadly resistance by segregationist whites. The book begins with the story of Hamer's childhood and family life, of necessity intertwined with an in-depth description of the depravities and horror of Jim Crow oppression, which was brutal and ubiquitous. When, as an adult, Hamer went into town to attempt to register to vote, she came home to find that her white landlord was promising to evict Hamer, along with her husband and children, unless she promised to go back to town the next day to rescind her registration. Hamer replied, "I registered to vote for me, not for you," and her landlord followed up on his threat. Later, in a Winona, Mississippi, jail cell, Hamer and four of her companions received vicious beatings, and Hamer was raped, for the crime of trying to integrate a bus stop diner. The beating left Hamer's health compromised for the rest of her life. But Hamer, due to her articulate, passionate speeches, her inspirational singing and her drive and inclusiveness, nevertheless became a powerful figure in the movement, to the extent that she was the keynote speaker before the Democratic National Committee when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a Black party organized to fight the seating of the fiercely segregationist Mississippi Democratic contingent at the Democratic Presidential Convention in Atlantic City in 1964.

I finished Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson. Acheson was a high-ranking U.S. diplomat throughout the WW2 war years and into the years immediately afterwards. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations and International Conferences from December 1944 through August 1945, then Under Secretary of State until June 1947 and finally returned to government service to become Secretary of State in the Truman administration from 1949 through 1953. Acheson was Secretary of State between George Marshall and John Foster Dulles.

This book contains a series of reminiscences/portraits of the diplomats and politicians he worked with (or, in some cases, against) and/or under during his time in the diplomatic corps. The book opens with chapters about Ernest Bevin and Robert Shuman, Acheson's opposite numbers for England and France, respectively, during the years at the end of, and immediately after, the war, when the large Western democracies were figuring out how they wanted to administer Western Europe and how to negotiate with Soviet Russia and create a united front against what they saw as Soviet plans for further expansion. There is a chapter, also, on Acheson's dealing with several Russian diplomats and their negotiating tactics. The chapters cover negotiations around the establishment of the United Nations, the administration of the post-war occupation of Germany and the establishment of the western alliance that became NATO. Of particular interest to me were the deliberations that led to the decision to bring West Germany into the alliance (i.e., to rearm them, a development that was viewed with some alarm, as I've learned from other reading, in many parts of Europe). While there was serious reluctance to take this step in some quarters, in the end the West Germans were seen by the U.S. and the Western European powers as a pivotal member of any alliance that would be able to stand up to Stalin and his successors.

Other politicians Acheson profiles here include Winston Churchill, Arthur Vandeberg (a Republican leader in the Senate whom Acheson describes as a tough opponent of the policies of the Truman administration who could nevertheless come around to support individual initiatives if he saw that the administration was, in fact, on the right track), George Marshall and Conrad Adenauer.

Wrapped up Turtles as Hopeful Monsters, which is more about the nature of scientific authority, rather than turtles, and needed to be organized accordingly. I'm left with the impression that the author is a sufficiently eminent man in his field that he didn't get the tough-minded editing this book required.

Finished Shooting Lincoln: Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century by Nicholas J. C. Pistor. Interesting and reasonably well written, although the author does tend towards stylish phrasing.

Done with Escape from Earth, which deals with the early days of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab, and some of its more "colorful" participants. While occultist Jack Powers, and Qian Xuesen, the eventual founder of the PRC's rocketry program are part of this story, the real focus is on Frank Malina, and the question of whether he really could have been involved in Soviet espionage (not likely, but hard to prove one way or the other at this point). What was probably the most jaw-dropping moment for me in the book was learning that Malina and Powers were the founders of the Aerojet Corporation!

I finished American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hoshschild. This is an excellent but horrifying (again!) history about an extremely violent and repressive, but mostly (as per the title) forgotten 4-year period in American history, from 1917, when the U.S. entered WW I, to 1920. Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913 as a liberal reformer, and many like-minded politicians and other figures joined his administration to help with the project of making life better for laborers and helping to reduce the large wealth gap that had formed between the working class and the owners of industry. (Sound familiar?) In many important ways, however, Wilson was no bargain. Although he'd served as governor of New Jersey, Wilson was a Georgia native and a firm proponent of Jim Crow. For example, he went about resegregating the areas of the federal government that had made progress in that area. At first he was opposed to U.S. involvement in WW I, running for reelection under the slogan, "He kept us out of war." But as the war progressed, and the allies became hard pressed, they turned to the U.S. for armaments and other supplies, going into huge debt to the U.S government and munitions companies, among others, to the extent that an Allied defeat in the war would have occasioned massive defaults and extensive losses to U.S. creditors. Well, that couldn't be allowed. That's not the only cause that Hochschild provides for the U.S. entry into the war, but it is an extremely significant one, and something I'd never realized.

Once the U.S. was involved, Wilson's Attorney General and other high-ranking figures went to town, using the war effort as an excuse for furious and violent repression. The so-called Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime punishable by long prison terms to criticize the war effort or the government, or to complain about war profiteering. A nationwide civilian vigilante organization called the American Protective League was organized and given carte blanche for violent and even often deadly activities. People got lynched for refusing to buy War Bonds. Massive, coordinated, roundups of draft-aged men took place, and woe betide anyone who couldn't show a draft card. This was all a cover for nativist, rightwing politicians who wanted to hound immigrants, the labor movement, conscientious objectors, socialists, Jews, Catholics and, it goes without saying, Blacks.

Finished up 1968: Radical Protests and its Enemies, which turned out to be a pretty good survey of the year that seemed to promise genuine revolution, but which now looks more like a bump on the way to our current state of politics, which is clearly in its dotage; the Reagan-Thatcher ideology that was a response to 1968 having been running on fumes forever.

I finished Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography by William E. Gienapp. This is a very enjoyable, well written and relatively brief (200 pages) biography of Abraham Lincoln. The title infers that the book describes only Lincoln's term as president, but in fact it is neatly divided, pretty much in half. The first 100 pages provide a description of Lincoln's childhood and then his career in law and politics leading up to his Civil War administration, from his farm-bound childhood through his early adulthood working any odd job to keep afloat, to his apprenticeship in the legal field, his coming into his own as a lawyer and his career in Illinois state politics. It was interesting to learn that the upshot of the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates was that Lincoln lost the subsequent election to Douglas. This was all great, as far as I was concerned, because while I had read several accounts of Lincoln's presidency and handling of the war, my knowledge of Lincoln's pre-White House life was essentially made up of legend and shadow.

The second half of the book covers Lincoln's presidency and the war years. I already mostly knew the details of the progression of the war and Lincoln's struggles to get the commanders of the Army of the Potomac (from McClellan onward) to go on the offensive against the Confederate armies in the east, but Gienapp also did a fine job of filling in the political details of Lincoln's presidency, as he strove just as hard to hold together the coalition of extreme and moderate Republicans and Democrats.