William Smith Map of England and Wales - History Study Group (HSG)

HSG Blog

7/7/2020

July 7, 2020

Topic originated by Alan Rubin

We have discussed about 180 topics of interest since the History Study Group was formed about 15 years ago.

The HSG blog was introduced about 5 years ago primarily to introduce each topic and as a means to archive all the discussions.

This has allowed all members timely information about each book as well as links to additional reference material.

Also, it was hoped that members would use the HSG blog for comments both before and after each monthly topic. Although this has not yet been the case, the necessity of our meeting only online for the foreseeable future may prove to be a reason for change.

I receive many emails with recommendations for topics and many interesting suggestions. Often, I am asked to pass information along to the membership.

I consider the HSG to be a member driven organization in which I function as a catalyst. So, I will again recommend that we use the HSG blog as our primary means of communication. Any member can access the site at www.historystudygroup.com.

It is not password protected since comments from non-members with expertise on a topic are welcome. This policy will continue so long a there is not any abuse.

Although email comments would be welcome, it would be preferable if members began using this blog.

Just click on the link at the right under "Categories" and type in your comments.

There is a comments link at the bottom of each post.

On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker by A'Lelia Bundles

6/30/2020

November 19, 2020

Discussion led by Ellen Croibier

Soon to be a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, On Her Own Ground is the first full-scale biography of “one of the great success stories of American history” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Madam C.J. Walker—the legendary African American entrepreneur and philanthropist—by her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles.

The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Breedlove—who would become known as Madam C. J. Walker—was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then—with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women—everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: building a storied beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women, and devoting her life to philanthropy and social activism. Along the way, she formed friendships with great early-twentieth-century political figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-684-82582-3

The President Is Dead!: The Extraordinary Stories of Presidential Deaths, Final Days, Burials, and Beyond by Louis L. Picone

6/29/2020

December 17, 2020

Discussion led by Bob Rosen

A fun, anecdote-filled, encyclopedic look at the circumstances surrounding the deaths of every president and a few “almost presidents,” such as Jefferson Davis.

Packed with fun facts and presidential trivia, The President Is Dead! tells you everything you could possibly want to know about how our presidents, from George Washington to Gerald Ford (who was the most recent president to die), met their ends, the circumstances of their deaths, the pomp of their funerals, and their public afterlives, including stories of attempted grave robbings, reinterments, vandalism, conspiracy theories surrounding their deaths, and much more.

The President Is Dead! is filled with never-before-told stories, including a suggestion by one prominent physician to resurrect George Washington from death by transfusing his body with lamb’s blood. You may have heard of a plot to rob Abraham Lincoln’s body from its grave site, but did you know that there was also attempts to steal Benjamin Harrison's and Andrew Jackson’s remains? The book also includes “Critical Death Information,” which prefaces each chapter, and a complete visitor’s guide to each grave site and death-related historical landmark. An “Almost Presidents” section includes chapters on John Hanson (first president under the Articles of Confederation), Sam Houston (former president of the Republic of Texas), David Rice Atchison (president for a day), and Jefferson Davis. Exhaustively researched, The President Is Dead! is richly layered with colorful facts and entertaining stories about how the presidents have passed.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

The Kerner Report

6/10/2020

August 20, 2020

Discussion led by Lucy Kennedy

Pent-up frustrations boiled over in many poor African-American neighborhoods during the mid- to late-1960s, setting off riots that rampaged out of control from block to block. Burning, battering and ransacking property, raging crowds created chaos in which some neighborhood residents and law enforcement operatives endured shockingly random injuries or deaths. Many Americans blamed the riots on outside agitators or young black men, who represented the largest and most visible group of rioters. But, in March 1968, the Kerner Commission turned those assumptions upside-down, declaring white racism—not black anger—turned the key that unlocked urban American turmoil.

The Kerner Report is a powerful window into the roots of racism and inequality in the United States. Hailed by Martin Luther King Jr. as a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life," this historic study was produced by a presidential commission established by Lyndon Johnson, chaired by former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, and provides a riveting account of the riots that shook 1960s America. The commission pointed to the polarization of American society, white racism, economic in-opportunity, and other factors, arguing that only "a compassionate, massive, and sustained" effort could reverse the troubling reality of a racially divided, separate, and unequal society. Conservatives criticized the report as a justification of lawless violence while leftist radicals complained that Kerner didn’t go far enough. But for most Americans, this report was an eye-opening account of what was wrong in race relations.
Drawing together decades of scholarship showing the widespread and ingrained nature of racism, The Kerner Report provided an important set of arguments about what the nation needs to do to achieve racial justice, one that is familiar in today’s climate. Presented here with an introduction by historian Julian Zelizer, The Kerner Report deserves renewed attention in America’s continuing struggle to achieve true parity in race relations, income, employment, education, and other critical areas.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/1968-kerner-commission-got-it-right-nobody-listened-180968318/

https://timeline.com/kerner-report-race-america-b99e3eac0cac

Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood by Kai T. Erikson

6/4/2020

October 15, 2020

Discussion led by Alan Rubin

On February 26, 1972, 132-million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.

Making extensive use of the words of the people themselves, Erikson details the conflicting tensions of mountain life in general—the tensions between individualism and dependency, self-assertion and resignation, self-centeredness and group orientation—and examines the loss of connection, disorientation, declining morality, rise in crime, rise in out-migration, etc., that resulted from the sudden loss of neighborhood.

https://www.supersummary.com/everything-in-its-path/summary/

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/20/archives/everything-in-its-path-more-was-broken-than-a-dam-everything.html

Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

5/25/2020

September 17, 2020

Discussion led by Alan Metzger

Americans constantly make moral judgments about presidents and foreign policy. Unfortunately, many of these assessments are poorly thought through. A president is either praised for the moral clarity of his statements or judged solely on the results of their actions.

In Do Morals Matter?, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., one of the world's leading scholars of international relations, provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in US foreign policy during the American era after 1945. Nye works through each presidency from FDR to Trump and scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions of their intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which ones do not. Regardless of a president's policy preference, Nye shows that each one was not fully constrained by the structure of the system and actually had choices. He further notes the important ethical consequences of non-actions, such as Truman's willingness to accept stalemate in Korea rather than use nuclear weapons.

Since we so often apply moral reasoning to foreign policy, Nye suggests how to do it better. Most importantly, presidents need to factor in both the political context and the availability of resources when deciding how to implement an ethical policy-especially in a future international system that presents not only great power competition from China and Russia, but a host of transnational threats: the illegal drug trade, infectious diseases, terrorism, cybercrime, and climate change.

https://time.com/5771368/morals-american-foreign-policy/

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M.Barry

5/25/2020

June 18, 2020

Discussion led by Ben Liptzin

Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart."

At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.

Author's website. Contains many good links.
.http://www.johnmbarry.com/

March 7, 2020 NY Times book review.
http://www.johnmbarry.com/

Madame Fourcade's Secret War The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler" by Lynn Olsen

5/25/2020

Discussion led by Stacy Wallach

July 16, 2020

In 1941 a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, became the leader of a vast intelligence organization—the only woman to serve as a chef de résistance during the war. Strong-willed, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country’s conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. Her group’s name was Alliance, but the Gestapo dubbed it Noah’s Ark because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases. The name Marie-Madeleine chose for herself was Hedgehog: a tough little animal, un-threatening in appearance, that, as a colleague of hers put it, “even a lion would hesitate to bite.”

No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence—including providing American and British military commanders with a 55-foot-long map of the beaches and roads on which the Allies would land on D-Day—as Alliance. The Gestapo pursued them relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents, including Fourcade’s own lover and many of her key spies. Although Fourcade, the mother of two young children, moved her headquarters every few weeks, constantly changing her hair color, clothing, and identity, she was captured twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape—once by slipping naked through the bars of her jail cell—and continued to hold her network together even as it repeatedly threatened to crumble around her.

Now, in this dramatic account of the war that split France in two and forced its people to live side by side with their hated German occupiers, Lynne Olson tells the fascinating story of a woman who stood up for her nation, her fellow citizens, and herself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/books/review/lynne-olson-madame-fourcades-secret-war.html

https://www.historynet.com/madame-fourcade-was-one-of-world-war-iis-most-daring-female-spies.htm

Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense: The Courtroom Battle to Save His Legacy by Dan Abrams

3/7/2020

April 16, 2020

Discussion by Judith Lamet

A President on Trial. A Reputation at Stake.

ABC News legal correspondent and host of LIVE PD Dan Abrams reveals the story of Teddy Roosevelt’s last stand—an epic courtroom battle against corruption—in this thrilling follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Lincoln’s Last Trial.

“No more dramatic courtroom scene has ever been enacted,” reported the Syracuse Herald on May 22, 1915 as it covered “the greatest libel suit in history,” a battle fought between former President Theodore Roosevelt and the leader of the Republican party.

On May 22, 1915, after a five-week trial, in the William Barnes vs. Theodore Roosevelt libel suit, the jury’s verdict was in favor of the President. Barnes, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee had sued Roosevelt for $50,000 for an alleged libelous statement “a political boss of the most obnoxious type.” The trial did not begin well for the President, he was frustrated by the proceedings and on the witness stand, he spoke after his attorney’s objections and judge’s use of gavel. While the book is about the other end of Roosevelt’s life. This case threatened the president to humiliate and humble him. He still had big plans to make another run for the president. He was forced to defend his reputation and honor under questioning by the plaintiff’s attorneys. The stakes were high, and this courtroom drama brought the president up close and unscripted to the American public. This was the trial of the century in 1915, and it inspired many modern-day counselors looking for name and fame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=j4Nk7ikQ3_E

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/22/725026140/theodore-roosevelt-for-the-defense-makes-a-libel-case-into-gripping-reading

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone

12/19/2019

January 16, 2020

Discussion led by Joel Wolk

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NPR Best Book of 2017
“Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie.” — The New York Times
Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.
In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth’s story, incredibly, has never been told.
In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.
Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson’s bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32025298-the-woman-who-smashed-codes

https://www.bookculture.com/blog/2017/11/12/saras-review-woman-who-smashed-codes-jason-fagone
Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie. In “The Woman Who Smashed Codes,” Jason Fagone recounts the stranger-than-fiction story of how the 23-year-old Smith was hired in 1916, along with other scholars, by an eccentric tycoon who wanted to find secret messages in the work of Shakespeare. Those messages didn’t exist, but within a year Smith was recruited into a wartime code-breaking project. (“American history is very strange,” Fagone told me.) Smith met and married the cryptologist William Friedman; helped break up smuggling rings during Prohibition; and spent World War II successfully decoding messages sent between Nazi spies, ruining the Germans’ operations in South America, among other triumphs. Below, Fagone talks about the long odds he faced in filling in the gaps in his subject’s life, the role sexism played in her career and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
After the Edward Snowden story broke in 2013, I started reading about the history of the N.S.A. Like a lot of Americans, I didn’t know a lot about it. While I was doing that, I stumbled across a web page about Elizebeth Smith Friedman at the library where she donated her personal papers — the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Va. It was really just a bare description of her life. She was a poet who taught herself to break codes; she caught gangsters during Prohibition; and, oh yeah, she was married to a godfather of the N.S.A. And I thought, that’s unusual: Married codebreakers. I saw there was an old biography of William from the ’70s, but no books about Elizebeth.
She left 22 boxes of her files. It’s a wonderful archive. You can read her letters from a hundred years ago, her college diary, her original poems, her original code work, letters that she wrote to her kids in code. She and William taught their daughter how to use cipher, and she would write them cipher letters from summer camp.
When I finished going through the boxes, I realized there was this gap where World War II is supposed to be. And it kind of screamed out, because she had documented the rest of her life so meticulously. I was pretty sure the records existed somewhere, but I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find them. I talked to a historian who had worked on William, and she told me, “Sometimes it’s not that the N.S.A. is evil and trying to keep this stuff from you; sometimes it’s just that they don’t know where it is.” The National Archives is like the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” You can spend months looking for something in there.