History Study Group (HSG)

  • BLOG
  • SUGGESTED READING

The Cotton Kingdom by Frederick Law Ohmstead

3/7/2023

0 Comments

 
March 16, 2023
Led by Linda Freedman


This book is an important resource as of one of the few journalistic observations of slavery conducted and written before the Civil War. While descriptions of slavery in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" swept the nation, it described life on one slave farm. These writings were an effort to provide a broader observation of numerous farms in several Southern states.

Readers find interviews and descriptions of farms, slaves, slave owners, and farmers using labor methods other than slavery in Southern states. These bring forth many compelling details of 1850s Southern farm lives, without knowledge of the impending war and its outcome that slavery would be abolished. While the descriptions are provided with journalistic integrity, the results helped enrage readers against slavery. While there are slaves expressing varying degrees of satisfaction and misery, and there were slave owners who cared more about their slaves than others (most often in the smaller farms), the brutalities reported about cruel masters and overseers shocked sensibilities. Even Olmsted broke observation neutrality in reporting a debate with a slave owner who noted the law then permitted him to beat both his wife and his slave, so he sees no difference, to which Olmsted felt compelled to reply that the law will act to protect the abused wife but no Southern laws then acted to protect the abused slaves.

Olmsted delivered a mathematically descriptive analysis that slavery was not economically efficient. Paying slave labor low incomes for life produced workers little motivated to work hard. Using violence as a motivation only produced workers who worked at levels just enough to avoid punishment. Slaves farms were further inefficient as owners provided housing and care to slaves for life meant that only a portion of the slave population was economically productive. One farm, rather than risk their life investment in slaves, hired Irish itinerant workers for dangerous work, The author provided examples and data showing that farms that had higher paid non-slave workers were far more productive and more profitable. In addition, the existence of a large number of low income employees was a damper on the Southern economy as they had little purchasing power to purchase goods.

The book editor Arthur Schlesinger notes Olmsted hoped the Southern states would recognize the inefficiency of their slave system and end it on their own accord. He observes some abolitionists denounced these writings for not taking a moral stance against slavery. These were meant as depictions as to what was observed without commentary. They remain as a great collection of slave life descriptions published before the Civil War


Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2015This is a profound book. It's shocking in its content. It's not any intellectual arguments that make the book great. Just the descriptions of what Olmstead finds day in and day out on his travels is enough. The moment Olmstead crosses into Virginia the roads stop, there are no towns, no infrastructure, and the whole countryside seems primitive. There is no incentive in the South to build civic institutions, even roads. As Olmstead travels deeper into the South, into the new South, the frontier of Mississippi and so on, conditions get worse and worse. To me the description of the poverty of the South alone was an indictment of the plantation system and the independent poor farmers who lived there as well. The book is a bit heavy plodding (for me anyway), but Olmstead can show a sense of humor, and I remember in particular his description of a day in Virginia when he is prancing in delight on a beautiful morning on a fine filly and he gives a blow by blow of his trying to find a plantation house when there are no directions, no roads, but it's the description of the day that was delightful and telling. This type of original source is essential reading to understand what history books will never be able to tell you… what it was really like.

Frederick Law Olmstead travelled extensively throughout the south during the antebellum period, as reflected in this book. He considered the effects of slavery on both blacks and whites and found it to have pernicious effects on both. Although written prior to the Civil War, the book (actually a series of extensive selections from the three original volumes based on his newspaper articles written during his travels)provides a rather indepth and refreshing look at well-known history and looks at the diverse roles played by blacks, white southerners, (and northerners!) in slavery. He also examines their views on the slave issue itself: some nascent Southern abolitionists and colonialists, as well as advocates of slavery, appeared rather intelligent and some otherwise. Many considered slavery an insoluble problem and others defended it as a necessary evil which benefitted blacks and whites alike(!). After completing his tour (including a rather interesting situation in which a black slave seriously injures a biracial runaway, has him clapped in irons and sent to jail - much to the amusement of some white southerners - & an enlightening discussion, especially in light of Talty's research showing persons of pure white descent, including adult foreigners and children who were originally indentured were kidnapped or illegally sold into slavery, of how demeanor would be an adequate determinant of whether or not a "white" slave was really free or not), he provides a critical analysis of slavery and its effects on the south.

====================================================
Critical review--


If you admire Olmstead, this is worth the effort to read his actual impressions of the south. Most of his biographies touch on this, but few explain the importance of this experience in his later life.

​
0 Comments

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff

2/11/2023

0 Comments

 
February 16, 2023
Discussion led by Kate Kidd
He's more than just a beer! Stacy Schiff resurrects the actual Samuel Adams from the scrap heap by writing a biography that will surprise most people because they don't even know "Sam Adams" beer is actually based on a real life person.

Schiff focuses on Adams' life leading up to the American Revolution. What I appreciated most about Schiff's book is her willingness to clearly point out the good and the bad throughout the book. Samuel Adams was not a selfless hero who flew above the fray. He was the fray. He caused the fray. He then reported on the fray and told everyone it was someone else's fault the fray even happened. Adams was a hero and a villain depending on which side you chose. Schiff never denies either side of him and it makes for a great read because you feel like you are reading an impartial documentary as opposed to a fawning treatment.

There is plenty to cover here. The revolutionary fathers did not always get along and for good reason. The egos were big and the stakes kept getting bigger. Schiff's book keeps laser focused on Adams and keeps the scope intimate. A great read and a must for any Revolutionary War nerd.

================================================
The Rabble-Rouser "Who Wired a Continent for Rebellion".


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/books/review/the-revolutionary-samuel-adams-stacy-schiff.html

================================================
The Boston Tea Party Was More Than That. It Was a Riot.


In July 1776, George Washington ordered the brand-new Declaration of Independence read aloud to a jubilant New York City crowd. A small group opted to continue their celebration into the evening. Led by an artillery officer, the revelers toppled the colossal, gilded statue of King George III at Bowling Green.
Like so many Confederate monuments today, the statue had been something of a late arrival. Commissioned to reinforce colonial loyalty in the wake of the unpopular Stamp Act, it had landed in New York in 1770. Now, six years later, it was decapitated. King George sustained a shot to the face. Much of the statue’s lead was turned into musket balls — 42,088 of them, to be exact. Imperial authority could truly be said to have been subverted: The king’s troops should, as one New Yorker put it, expect to meet with “melted Majesty.”
In the history books we tend to sidestep the statue-toppling, as we generally sanitize the violence that preceded the Declaration. Even before de Tocqueville, it had been preferable to subscribe to his account of the Revolution, a contest that “contracted no alliance with the turbulent passions of anarchy” and that proceeded “by a love of order and law.”
De Tocqueville gave Boston a pass. Well before the 1760s, imperial officials were run out of town. Effigies hung from trees and fueled bonfires. Townspeople broke windows and hurled stones. They tarred and feathered. They smeared the homes of their enemies in dung. In 1765, amid the Stamp Act protests, a “lawless rabble” dismantled most of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s Georgian mansion in a matter of hours. The cupola alone resisted them. With axes, they labored over it until dawn. Hutchinson’s papers and valuables, bedding and tableware afterward littered the streets. The house was a mere shell. Not a book remained. “Such ruins were never seen in America,” wailed the lieutenant governor, who appeared the next day in borrowed clothes. Crowds turned up for weeks to gawk at the wreckage.
Called to account for the vandalism, patriot leaders like Samuel Adams denounced the destruction, as General Washington would denounce the attack on the king’s statue. On the one hand, a people’s rights were under siege. Looking ahead to future generations, Adams labored to define what John Lewis would two centuries later term “good trouble.” If the Bostonians remained silent, Adams warned, they assented to their losses. On the other hand, he urged discipline. “No mobs, no confusions, no tumult” became the slogan. It was important to protest without mangling the law.
Adams also downgraded much of the violence. Those were not well-directed mobs, he argued, but mischievous adolescents. When an official’s orchard was plundered and his garden flattened, the act was written off as “a frolic of a few boys to eat some cherries.”
The idea was to minimize the terror while invigorating the resistance, a balancing act made more difficult when Britain — having heard accounts of the lawless dystopia that was Boston — dispatched troops to the restive town. To many that seemed an overreaction if not an instigation. In February 1766, when the House of Commons grilled Benjamin Franklin about the wisdom of dispatching a military force to obstreperous Boston, he predicted: “They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”
Indeed the introduction of soldiers did nothing to preserve the peace. An agitated, exacerbated people who felt their rights trampled and their voices unheard suddenly found themselves occupied, challenged by intruders at every turn. Was it really necessary for a sentinel to demand that all persons out walking after dark identify themselves? They were not, after all, under military rule. And did the people not have just as much right to be out at night, armed, as the soldiers?
One side felt it was enforcing order. The other believed that any disorder had been misrepresented, so as to further undermine their rights. The administration had invented and exaggerated the unrest “to stifle the complaints of this loyal and suffering people.” It churned trifling disturbances into “riots, outrages, robberies.” Every action yielded an opposite reaction. Each ratcheted up the tension. As John Adams observed, troops occasioned two mobs for every one they prevented. The intimidating uniforms hardly helped.
Editors’ PicksThe Quest to Find Rectangles in a Square
Soul Told Black Musicians’ Stories. Its Archives Are Going Digital.
What Is a Pickleball Dress?The Bostonians roundly abused the soldiers. One was informed the crowd intended to tar and feather him. They would afterward affix his head to the highest post in town. Others were pelted with stones and dirt and pieces of brick, dragged by the hair, punched in the face, struck with bludgeons. Or so they reported. The insults flew in both directions. “They returned,” according to a former judge, “compliments for compliments, and every blow was answered by a bruise.” Townspeople were abused and assaulted, women harassed. Bloodshed ensued, as might be expected between an armed force and a people who felt they had nothing to lose other than their self-esteem, their freedom and their future.
Already the British knew the drill: A bonfire would flare; a whistle would sound. And out of nowhere 400 or 500 youngsters would materialize. On the night of March 5, 1770, they pelted soldiers with ice and oyster shells, bricks and broken glass bottles. No one thought to dance naked in the street — it was winter, in Boston — but they could hardly have been more provocative. “Damn you, fire, fire if you dare,” they taunted. “Damn them, where are they, knock them down,” a soldier was heard to swear.
Ultimately someone pulled a trigger. Five townspeople lay dead. Blood stained the street. A Black American was the first victim. For the most part the soldiers would be acquitted of wrongdoing. They had acted in self-defense. More important, the scuffle turned not into the Boston Riot or the Boston Uprising, but the Boston Massacre.
Several years later, after long December days of town meetings, after endless speeches and equally protracted negotiations, over a thousand colonists headed, early on a damp evening, to Griffin’s Wharf. Three hundred and forty-two troublesome chests of East India tea sat aboard the ships on which they had sailed from England. Hatches were opened, holds entered, chests hoisted on deck. In a few hours, every leaf of tea steeped in Boston Harbor. By 9 p.m. the town was still. Boston had not known a quieter night for some time.
No one was hurt. No gun was fired. No property other than the tea was damaged. The perpetrators cleaned up after themselves. In the aftermath, the surgical strike was referred to plainly as “the destruction of the tea.” To the indignant Massachusetts governor, it constituted nothing less than a “high handed riot.”
He had a point: There is a difference between burning a draft card or toppling a statue and tossing someone else’s goods overboard. This was an assault on property rather than on a symbol. Expertly choreographed, it qualified as a blatant act of vandalism. It was difficult to dress up, though John Adams would privately declare the dumping of the tea the grandest event since the dispute with Britain had begun. He thought it sublime.
To the occupiers it proved to be a particular mortification. The king demanded an immediate prosecution. It did not seem too much to ask: After all, thousands had watched the tea rain into the water, even if only several dozen men had actually boarded the ships. No one, however, seemed to have seen a thing. In all of Boston only one witness could be found — and he refused to testify unless transported out of the colony.
The patriots swabbed the decks afterward and history reciprocated, turning a riot into a tea party. The tidying is necessary to the exercise. The acts of defiance are meant to shine as sterling symbols of patriotism. Over time they take refuge under their principles: We prefer to remember not that we were making a mess but that we were making a point. In a protest movement, we like to be able to distinguish the villains. Or as Samuel Adams put it after what he was never to know as the Boston Tea Party: “Our enemies must acknowledge that these people have acted upon pure and upright principle.”
It seems wiser all around to focus on ends rather than means, to defer to heroes rather than to the indecorous details. For years Boston hesitated to erect a monument to the rabble-rousers of 1770. We do not care for the revolutionary spirit to survive the revolution. The revolution, however, goes nowhere without it.
Toppling a two-ton King George could not have been easy. As an Iranian monument-wrecker told a modern journalist, the job required experience. It was not for amateurs. It blistered the hands. You had to know where to hook your grapple, which way to pull. But to be clear: “It wasn’t work. It was duty.”
Sometimes the more targeted gestures speak every bit as loudly. On the night of Oct. 5, 1768, a week after British troops marched, muskets loaded, into Boston, a vandal took a knife to the portrait of the royal governor that hung at Harvard. He excised a neat, heart-shaped piece of canvas from the chest. And he left a note. His was, he explained, an act of mercy. This way the governor would find it easier to look back upon his loathsome administration. Which seems precisely where we are today.
Stacy Schiff is the author of, among other books, “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.”(A great read)




0 Comments

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Sracy Schiff

1/15/2023

0 Comments

 
Discussion led by Lucy Kennedy
January 19, 2023
ONE OF WALL STREET JOURNAL'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF 
LOS ANGELES TIMES TOP 5 NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF 
THE NEW YORK TIMES MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
And named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by 
The New Yorker, TIME, Oprah Daily, USA Today, New York Magazine, Air Mail, Boston Globe, and more!

"A glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important.” —Ron Chernow
 
"A beautifully crafted, invaluable biography…Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future, underscoring the lessons of Adams while reclaiming our nation’s self-evident truths at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten them." —Oprah Daily

A revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father—the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.


Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.
 
Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd and eloquent man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool available to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason.

In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.

​+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/books/review/the-revolutionary-samuel-adams-stacy-schiff.html

https://stacyschiff.com/the-revolutionary-samuel-adams.html

0 Comments

River of the Gods: Genius, Couirage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard

10/2/2022

0 Comments

 

October 20, 2022

Read by Ben Liptzen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy—from the New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was  a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe – and extend their colonial empires.
 
Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton’s opposite in temperament and beliefs.
 
From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke’s great envy. The day before they were to publicly debate,Speke shot himself.
 
Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan’s army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.
 
In
River of the Gods Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The first law of travelers’ tales is simply put: the worse, the better. No reader wants to hear of well-made plans or sunsets that paint the sky in glorious reds and purples. Give us a ship trapped in the ice or desperate wanderers sitting down to a meal of frozen boot. Better yet, give us two Victorian rivals in East Africa, supposed colleagues who were consumed with hate for each other, weak from fever, half-starved and half-blind but nonetheless obsessed with solving a mystery that had mocked the world for 2,000 years.

“River of the Gods” is a lean, fast-paced account of the almost absurdly dangerous quest by those two friends turned enemies, Richard Burton and John Speke, to solve the geographic riddle of their era. The two men had set out, in 1857, to find the source of the Nile. Candice Millard, formerly a National Geographic writer and editor and the author of a gripping book about Teddy Roosevelt’s adventures in South America, has here plunged into another tale of exploration at the edge of disaster.
The search for the Nile’s headwaters was not simply a chase for fame and glory, though it was that. Filling in that tantalizing blank on the map would represent a genuine contribution to knowledge as well. It would not come easy.
Burton, six years older than Speke and more experienced, was the expedition leader. Speke was second in command. They should have worked well together. Speke was a skilled surveyor and geographer, Burton an astonishingly gifted linguist. Both were fearless and ambitious, but they had little else in common.
Burton was a scholar and an adventurer — the first Englishman to travel to the forbidden city of Mecca (disguised as a Muslim), a linguist who spoke 25 languages, and a translator who would one day bring the Kama Sutra and “Arabian Nights” to a vast audience of titillated, scandalized Victorians. Speke was a more conventional character, a soldier from an aristocratic family, a big-game hunter and, in one acquaintance’s admiring description, “a fine, manly, unaffected specimen of an Englishman.”
They quickly became fierce enemies. Yoked together in pursuit of the same goal, they devoted vast stores of energy to denouncing each other, as if “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” had been rewritten to feature a pair of mismatched Victorian explorers.
Almost from the start, Burton and Speke found themselves tormented by a host of mysterious pains and illnesses. Three months into their journey they came to a 7,000-foot-tall mountain range. “Trembling with ague, with swimming heads, ears deafened by weakness, and limbs that would hardly support us,” Burton wrote, “we contemplated with a dogged despair the apparently perpendicular path.”

Speke needed the support of three men just to keep on his feet. Then his fever boiled over and he began raving in delirium. Porters took away his weapons, for everyone’s safety. The expedition’s supply of food, which was meant to last a year, had nearly run out. There were no villages nearby to trade with and scarcely any game to hunt. Desperate for protein, the travelers took to eating ants.
This is not new ground — the most recent writer to have come this way is Tim Jeal, author of the thorough and engaging “Explorers of the Nile” — but Candice Millard has earned her legions of admirers. She is a graceful writer and a careful researcher, and she knows how to navigate a tangled tale.
Curiously, Millard provides few of the natural history vignettes that were highlights of “The River of Doubt,” her Teddy Roosevelt book. There are hardly any mentions of elephants, except as their tusks figured in the ivory trade, and only the briefest mention of lions. Leopards and giraffes and wildebeests turn up in only a single paragraph.
Millard sticks close to Burton and Speke, even dashing past such important and colorful figures as David Livingstone and Henry Stanley (of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame). But she takes pains to put her story in context. Unlike Scott and Amundsen, say, whose race to the South Pole played out on an empty continent, Burton and Speke set out into territory that, Millard notes with characteristic liveliness, “had in fact been occupied continuously by human beings for hundreds of thousands of years longer than London or Paris.”
But the Nile had never yielded its secrets, though traders had long recounted stories of towering mountains and giant lakes that might have given rise to a mighty river. The problem for locals and traders alike was scale — knowing a great deal about one region or stretch of river was far different from knowing the full course of the longest river in the world. Just how all those lakes and rivers connected, across vast watersheds, no one knew. Explorers since Roman days had tried to follow the Nile upstream to its headwaters. They had all failed. The new strategy was to make an end run instead, by marching inland from the coast.
Burton and Speke and other explorers wound their way like armies on the move, in caravans of 100 or 200 men. Most of the paths they followed had been laid down over the course of centuries by African and Arab traders in ivory and enslaved people. Even in the 1850s those trade caravans continued to thrive. Throughout East Africa, Millard writes, “the shackling and selling of human beings was still a common and daily occurrence.”
Porters staggered along with tusks that weighed up to 100 pounds, cut from slaughtered elephants. Victims of smallpox lay dead along the trail. Hordes of unfortunate souls who had been captured in raids or purchased like animals trudged their weary way along, destined for slave markets.

One of the heroes of Millard’s story had once marched in one of those slavers’ caravans, in ropes and chains. Sidi Mubarak Bombay would play an indispensable role as a guide to Burton and Speke — he was, Burton said, “the gem of the party” — and he had endured a lifetime of hardships that surpassed anything that befell his employers.
Bombay was born in a village near the present-day border of Tanzania and Mozambique. Kidnapped by raiders, he was dragged hundreds of miles to the coast and then flung into a crammed boat for the 200-mile crossing to Zanzibar. Those who died at sea were tossed overboard. Bombay survived. In Zanzibar’s notorious slave market, he was exchanged for a few lengths of cloth and shipped to India, where he lived in slavery for 20 years.
Bombay was freed on his master’s death and made his way back to Africa. By the end of his life, Millard writes, the man who had been stripped of his name and family had become “not only one of the most accomplished guides in the history of African exploration but likely the most widely traveled man in Africa.”
History buffs know the names of Burton and Speke and their fellow explorers. Millard reminds us of the role of men like Bombay, who guided them, and the anonymous porters and laborers, who marched alongside them or struggled to carry their frail, feverish bodies in hammocks, mile after endless mile over hills and across rivers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/river-of-the-gods-book-review-in-search-of-the-source-of-the-nile-11651849253




0 Comments

Indian World of George Washington by Colin Calloway

7/28/2022

1 Comment

 

August 18, 2022

Red by John Dickson

As the author highlights, biographies of George Washington do not effectively cover his interfaces with the American Indians. In fact, George Washington spent a lot of time interfacing with the Indians, in war and in peace through negotiations on peace treaties. This book covers all of it in a lot of detail. What comes through is that although George Washington tried to treat the Indian fairly, in fact the his ultimate goal was to take their land and turn them into farmers. Of course, this did not work, resulting in wars and movement of the Indians from their lands to the west of the Mississippi. Why? Settlers and land grabbers would move into the Indians land. This would cause conflict resulting in deaths on both sides, resulting in war with the US Government resulting in taking the Indians land. And, the cycle would continue. It is a sad part of history. And, this book lays it out from 1753, when Washington first interfaced with the Indians in war until his death in 1799. My only criticism of this book is that can get a little dense at times, and difficult to read. I found myself reading it and falling asleep. But, I finished it and it is worth the read. Telling this history is important to understanding our country.

Professor Calloway’s book is exceptionally well researched and a corrective to the long ingrained and overly sympathetic image of George Washington most Americans have held since childhood. Calloway convincingly confirms that Washington’s early military exploits were debacles, and that he was a land speculator with few compunctions over prevailing treatment of the various Native Americans who had long claimed dominion over such territory. The book however would have benefited from a more rigorous editing, as Calloway’s full, and near full, page paragraphs suggest a prolixity in need of curbing. Calloway repeatedly recounts certain themes in the book, such as (I) Washington’s dual postures of promising peace with the Indians while at the same time threatening extirpation of the Indians if peaceful methods failed, and (I) the ambivalent attitude Washington held toward Native Americans, i.e., that he like many of the English and Colonists didn’t trust them and thought little of their honesty and trustworthiness. Not that this was a hindrance to the colonists and the British in their recruitment of friendly or neutral tribes to assist in ousting the French from lands claimed by the British colonists, and of course the Native Americans.
1 Comment

Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration by Ronnie Greene

6/13/2022

0 Comments

 
June 16, 2022
Read by Ronnie Greene
The Heart of Atlanta Supreme Court decision stands among the court's most significant civil rights rulings.

In Atlanta, Georgia, two arch segregationists vowed to flout the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the sweeping slate of civil rights reforms just signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Pickrick restaurant was run by Lester Maddox, soon to be governor of Georgia. The other, the Heart of Atlanta motel, was operated by lawyer Moreton Rolleston Jr.

After the law was signed, a group of ministry students showed up for a plate of skillet-fried chicken at Maddox's diner. At the Heart of Atlanta, the ministers reserved rooms and walked to the front desk.

Lester Maddox greeted them with a pistol, axe handles, and a mob of White supporters. Moreton Rolleston refused to accept the Black patrons. These confrontations became the centerpiece of the nation's first two legal challenges to the Civil Rights Act.

In gripping detail built from exclusive interviews and original documents,
Heart of Atlanta reveals the saga of the case's rise to the US Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the segregationists.

Heart of Atlanta restores the legal cases and their heroes to their proper place in history.

================================================
Summary: A journalistic account of two Atlanta legal cases in response to the 1964 Civil Rights act, joined by the Supreme Court to uphold public accommodations (Title 2 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act).
I do not think I would have picked up Heart of Atlanta if my book club had not decided to go to a book talk with the author at the Atlanta History Center. But Heart of Atlanta is the type of narrow history that I think is exactly what we often miss in our too-quick presentation of the Civil Rights Era. The Civil Rights Era was so transformational because the movement was broad-based. Literally, hundreds of thousands of people participated, at least in minor roles. But even the often significant characters of the era have been forgotten. And the more minor characters were often never really known. One of the best examples of this is that frequently throughout the book, Ronnie Greene will cite a video or picture or newspaper story about these events, and the five main characters of the story were either unnamed or listed as “unknown.” In fact, the men often did not know that there was photographic or video documentation of their protests until Ronnie Greene showed it to them.
All five pastors in the subtitle were students at the Interdenominational Theological Center seminaries (ITC). Two of the five pastors are still living, Albert Sampson (involved in the earlier sit-in movement in North Carolina) and Woodrow Lewis (involved in the earlier Atlanta Student Protest movement). Unfortunately, the other three, Albert Dunn (also involved in the Freedom Rides), Charles Well, and George Willis (both having been in the military before returning to attend college and seminary), have passed away. All five continued their activism after their involvement in these cases, but like many pastors organizing in their communities, they did not obtain national recognition.
The manager and part-owner of the Heart of Atlanta Hotel, Moreton Rolleston, was a lawyer. He filed suit against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the day it went into effect. His suit was a barrage of arguments, that Congress didn’t have the right to regulate local businesses, that the 14th amendment did not prohibit individual discrimination, that the 13th amendment prohibited slavery and this regulation was a type of enslavement, that the regulation was a type of seizure and therefore a violation of his fifth amendment rights.
The five pastors attempted to eat at Lester Maddox‘s Pickrick Restaurant. Maddox took out a weekly ad in the local paper to promote the restaurant and rail against integration, and promote his brand of segregation. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a rotating group of the five pastoral students attempted to eat at the restaurant. They were turned away, at times with guns pointed at them, and threatened with a beating by the ax handles that Maddox sold to customers for the purpose. Civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley took up the case and quickly filed suit against Maddox and the restaurant. The two cases were heard by a federal court panel together and were very quickly combined into a Supreme Court Case, Heart of Atlanta Motel vs. the United States. (Baker Motley, just two years later, was the first Black woman appointed as a judge in the federal court system.)
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed on July 2, 1964. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Oct 5 and released the decision on Dec 14. The decision was unanimous with two concurring opinions, but it is a case that most do not know about. The court upheld Congress’s authority to use the Commerce Clause to regulate local businesses and dismissed the idea that the 13th or 5th amendment could be used to prevent regulation.
I appreciated the book talk and hearing the author present an overview and respond to questions. Greene is a journalist, and I think this reads like it was written by a journalist and not a lawyer or academic historian. That is not meant to be negative, but a lawyer likely would have spent more time on the legal case and less on the context of the case. And a historian likely would have written with a different tone and contextualized the story differently. This isn’t quite right, but this feels like it was written as a thriller. Greene keeps building tension and then moving back to the context before moving on with the story. It felt a lot like the biography of Robert Smalls that I recently read, which was written by Cate Lineberry, also with a journalistic background.
One of the points that I think came out in the book well was that despite the very different backgrounds of Maddox and Rolleston, they both were driven not just by personal racism but by a libertarian understanding of government that believed that the government had no right to regulate private businesses. Kevin Kruse’s main thesis of White Flight, also about Atlanta, was that the libertarian wing of the GOP was empowered by the rise of integration and attempted to create more private spaces to minimize the reach of government regulations toward integration. But that libertarian impulse was clearly already present in 1964, not just in 1984.

https://www.overdrive.com/media/7675121/heart-of-atlanta







0 Comments

Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age by Debby Applegate

4/9/2022

0 Comments

 
July 21, 2022
Led by Karen O'Connell


Pearl to Polly, shtetl child to savvy New Yorker, Brooklyn corset factory girl to Manhattan’s most notorious brothel owner: “Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate, tells a fast-paced tale of radical, willful transformation.


Pearl Adler, gifted with neither height nor looks, grew up in the Russian Pale not far from Pinsk to a peripatetic tailor who considered himself a bit of a dandy. Years later, after Pearl’s birth records were lost to fire and war, her parents would guess that she had been born in 1900, making her, in her father’s words, a child of the 20th century. With pogroms mounting, he packed her off at 13 for the golden land of the United States, accompanied by a cousin already heading there. Mid-journey, the cousin begged off, but Pearl had the wherewithal to continue on alone.

Her father had arranged for her to live with a family in Massachusetts, but once acclimatized, she made her escape to relatives in Brownsville, N.Y. Already attracted to the seediness and pleasures of Coney Island, she was easily lured by the underworld, and by 1920 was living with a showgirl as her roommate on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive (“Allrightnik’s Row” in the city’s Yiddish slang, indicating you had made it). That same year Prohibition went into effect, and the party was on.

Within a few months, Pearl, now renamed Polly by her new friends, had opened her first brothel, conveniently located across from Columbia University. Speakeasies sprouted “like mushrooms”: “Manic, uninhibited revelry echoed everywhere, from the Bronx to Greenwich Village.” Predictably, everyone was trying to get a piece of the action, including the vice squad, which ran a shakedown business that had Polly’s bank account rising and falling like out-of-control blood pressure. (Although one might say her family, who would soon be arriving in America, did much the same; they were all too happy to take her money even as they barred her from their Seder.)The more successful Polly became, the more hounded she was — by the police, by Tammany Hall, by the Broadway mob. Her brothel was distinguished by good hygiene and well-selected “girls.” (When the Depression hit, Polly was able to turn away up to 40 young women for every one she hired — an acceptance rate analogous to that of the Ivy League these days.) But as the business evolved, her brothel also offered less tangible services: It took on the appearance of a literary salon, with drink from the best bootleggers, food from her private cooks and good company from Polly. It became the after-hours place not only for gangsters, lowlifes and politicians, but also for the Algonquin Round Table and for writers at The New Yorker. (Dorothy Parker and Polly would chat while the men availed themselves of the services.) Here, an often unexplored exploitation haunts Applegate’s narrative: Polly, who has claimed the American dream and sits sipping drinks with the celebrated Parker, is also the one who procured these young, mostly working-class women.
Having famous friends also meant that Polly became the subject of gossip columns, jokes and banter, which added to her renown. But not everything was so peachy; her gangster friends were just as likely to fleece or beat her as they were to trade laughs and cook up schemes with her. Of course, misogyny was hardly the sole purview of the underworld; the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who used Polly’s services extensively, balked when an up-and-coming bandleader fell in love with her. Winchell objected that the bandleader, who could have had any woman he desired, was dating a “broken-down old whore and an ugly one at that.”

Replete with accounts of Polly’s many court battles, newspaper headlines, mobster dealings and society gossip, “Madam” is a breathless tale told through extraordinary research. Indeed, the galloping pace of Applegate’s book sometimes makes the reader want to pull out a white flag and wave in surrender — begging for her to slow down. The mob violence, political corruption, social approbation and multitude of johns that Polly confronts at her ever-changing brothel locations are both impressive and unrelenting. And while Polly seems to be in the thick of the action, those who surround her often also outshine her. In the book’s last pages, Applegate makes a forthright case for why Polly is worthy of a biography by noting this injustice: It was not Polly but “her male criminal colleagues who became 20th-century cultural icons.” “Sex workers in general … are dealers in illusion,” she writes, and Americans do not like to see the curtain pulled back to reveal the mechanisms, let alone the banality, of their dreams.

Now, Applegate suggests, with the advent of social movements around sex and power, we might finally be ready. But elsewhere, she stakes Polly’s claim for fame on her proximity to men who made history (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), wittily narrated it (Robert Benchley), created its soundtrack (Duke Ellington) or violently upended it (Dutch Schultz and Legs Diamond). Yet the takeaway for this reader at least is that Polly deserves our attention because her life shows how women who wish to transcend their status must become expert practitioners of chameleonism. That is also what makes Polly on some level a frustrating subject for a biography. As Applegate concedes, Polly “hid far more of her story than she shared, even from herself.” In other words, the very trait that made Polly Adler survive and succeed is also what makes her defiantly elusive. Applegate, armed with formidable skills, may be the biographer who can come closest to revealing her.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/madam-the-biography-of-polly-adler-icon-of-the-jazz-age_debby-applegate/28154247/#edition=58877945&idiq=51612175
0 Comments

Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosaland Rosenberg

4/4/2022

0 Comments

 
April 21, 2022
Led by Mal Wassermann
Throughout her prodigious life, activist and lawyer Pauli Murray systematically fought against all arbitrary distinctions in society, channeling the discrimination she faced to make America a more democratic country. In this definitive biography, Rosalind Rosenberg offers a poignant portrait of a figure who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements.

A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina, before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected on account of her race. Deciding to become a lawyer, she graduated first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study at Harvard University on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall challenge segregation frontally in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. When appointed by Eleanor Roosevelt to the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962, she advanced the idea of Jane Crow, arguing that the same reasons used to condemn race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination. In 1965, she became the first African American to earn a JSD from Yale Law School and the following year persuaded Betty Friedan to found an NAACP for women, which became NOW. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the argument Ginsburg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women--and potentially other minority groups--from discrimination. By that time, Murray was a tenured history professor at Brandeis, a position she left to become the first woman ordained a priest by the Episcopal Church in 1976.

Murray accomplished all this while struggling with issues of identity. She believed from childhood she was male and tried unsuccessfully to persuade doctors to give her testosterone. While she would today be identified as transgender, during her lifetime no social movement existed to support this identity. She ultimately used her private feelings of being "in-between" to publicly contend that identities are not fixed, an idea that has powered campaigns for equal rights in the United States for the past half-century.


https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/jane-crow-story-pauli-murray


The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice
by Patricia Bell Scott


0 Comments

Facing the Mountain: The True Story of Japanese Americans Heros in World War II  by Daniel James Brown

1/1/2022

0 Comments

 
May 19, 2022
Led by Kate Kidd
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2021
 
“Masterly. An epic story of four Japanese-American families and their sons who volunteered for military service and displayed uncommon heroism… Propulsive and gripping, in part because of Mr. Brown’s ability to make us care deeply about the fates of these individual soldiers...a page-turner.” – Wall Street Journal

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, a gripping World War II saga of patriotism and resistance, focusing on four Japanese American men and their families, and the contributions and sacrifices that they made for the sake of the nation.

In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawaii were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil. Woven throughout is the chronicle of Gordon Hirabayashi, one of a cadre of patriotic resisters who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights. Whether fighting on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best—striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-james-brown/facing-the-mountain/
0 Comments

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe –  by Mark Mazower

12/31/2021

1 Comment

 
Chosen as one of the top history book of the year by The Economist

From one of our leading historians, an important new history of the Greek War of Independence—the ultimate worldwide liberal cause célèbre of the age of Byron, Europe’s first nationalist uprising, and the beginning of the downward spiral of the Ottoman Empire—published two hundred years after its outbreak

As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the nation-state and democracy that were shaking up the old order. Lord Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece to fight and die—along with many more who followed events passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans.

Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a fraying and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory for a completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2021-08-24/greek-revolution-1821-and-making-modern-europe

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-greek-revolution-book-review-history-independence-ottoman-empire-hellenism-and-heroism-11639154604

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31460913-an-historical-outline-of-the-greek-revolution

1 Comment
<<Previous

    Group Leader: Alan Rubin

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    October 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    April 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    December 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2013
    July 2013

    Categories

    All
    1491: Americas Before Columbus
    1493 America After Columbus
    1919 Boston Molasses Tank Failure
    A Biography
    A Distant Mirror
    Albert Einstein
    American Creration
    A Woman Of No Importance
    Bible Myths
    Blood
    Candy Bombers
    Carnegie
    Caste
    China's Grand Strategy
    China Today
    Cia
    Citizens Of London
    Cotton Kingdom
    Cuba
    Devil In The Grove
    Do Morals Matter?
    Energy: A Human History
    Everything In Its Path
    Facing The Mountain
    Fear City
    Fields Of Blood
    Forgotten 500
    Forgotten-Trump Voters In PA
    God's Shadow
    Greek Revolution
    Heart Of Atlanta
    Henrietta Lacks
    History Shock
    Hitler
    Hitler: A Biography
    How Democracies Die
    How To Hide An Empire
    HSG Blog
    Indian World Of George Washington
    Jane Crow
    Korean War
    Madame Forcade
    Map That Changed The World
    Marshall Plan
    McNamara's Folly
    Mexican War
    Middle East
    Money Changes Everything
    One Hot Summer
    On Her Own Ground
    Polly Adler
    Powder And Residue
    Presidents Of War
    River Of The Gods
    Rough Crossings
    Samuel Adams
    Sapiens
    Second Coming Of The KKK
    Shattered Sword
    Stalin: Waiting For Hitler
    Strangers In Their Own Land
    Thank You For Being Late
    The Back Channel
    The Code
    The French Blue
    The Great Flu Influenza
    The Half Has Never Been Told
    The Howe Dynasty
    The Kerner Report
    The Lives Of The Constitution
    The Moralist
    Theodore Roosevelt For The Defense
    The President Is Dead
    There Is Nothing For You Here
    The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
    The Rothchild's
    The Sediments Of Time
    The Seventies
    The Woman Who Smashed The Codes
    The Women's Hour
    The Wright Brothers
    Walking With Destiny
    War Is A Racket
    Warriors Dont Cry
    What Has God Wrought?

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly