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

The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal by William J. Burns

12/14/2019

May 21, 2020

Read by John Dickson

Throughout the “The Back Channel” Author William J. Burns gives the reader an incredible front row seat to the last thirty plus years of American diplomacy (or sometimes the lack of diplomacy!) Through the author’s respectful and thought-provoking critique of the past 5 presidential administrations we are able to see where our foreign policy has served us well and where it has failed. The author does an amazing job of sifting through his years of service focusing on critical events and policies that give context to not only where we have been and where we are, but even more importantly what the future could be! While politically there were policies I opposed, I closed the book with an incredible respect and appreciation for the hard work, intelligence, and agility that goes into achieving a coherent and credible foreign policy. I couldn’t help but think how lucky our country had been to have the service of William Burns. And despite the incredibly challenging times before us, after reading “The Back Channel”, I am left with the belief that there will be others following William Burns that are ready to dedicate themselves to developing and implementing a coherent foreign policy/diplomacy that recognizes our values, respects the values of others and can still give hope to the world. And even more importantly upon finishing the book, I am left knowing that while changes may be necessary to reflect the dynamics of a new world, it is critical that the work of diplomacy not only continue but be made a priority for our country! I was honored to receive a free advanced copy of this book from NetGalley and the Publisher, Random House in exchange for an honest review.

https://www.amazon.com/Back-Channel-American-Diplomacy-Renewal/dp/0525508864#customerReviews

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9ILXTbVO7Q

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-cautious-diplomat-who-couldnt-stop-us-mistakes/2019/03/14/d69fd026-4297-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82_story.html

The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss

11/25/2019

February 20, 2020

Read by Barbara Viniar

Nashville, August 1920
Thirty-five states have approved the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote; one last state–Tennessee–is needed for women’s voting rights to be the law of the land. The suffragists face vicious opposition from politicians, clergy, corporations, and racists who don’t want black women voting. And then there are the “Antis”–women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the nation’s moral collapse. And in one hot summer, they all converge for a confrontation, replete with booze and blackmail, betrayal and courage. Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, The Woman’s Hour is the gripping story of how America’s women won their own freedom, and the opening campaign in the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/books/review/womans-hour-elaine-weiss.html

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168384

The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss

11/25/2019

February 20, 2020

Read by Barbara Viniar

Nashville, August 1920: Thirty-five states have approved the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote; one last state--Tennessee--is needed for women's voting rights to be the law of the land. The suffragists face vicious opposition from politicians, clergy, corporations, and racists who don't want black women voting. And then there are the "Antis"--women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the nation's moral collapse. And in one hot summer, they all converge for a confrontation, replete with booze and blackmail, betrayal and courage. Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, The Woman's Hour is the gripping story of how America's women won their own freedom, and the opening campaign in the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/the-imperfect-unfinished-work-of-womens-suffrage

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/books/review/womans-hour-elaine-weiss.html

Energy: A Human History

11/22/2019

March 19, 2020

Read by Alan Metzger

Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time - wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond.
People have lived and died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself.
Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
In Energy, Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each breakthrough in energy production, from animal and water power to the steam engine, from internal combustion to the electric motor. He addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He also addresses the specter of global warming and a population hurtling toward 10 billion by 2100.
Human beings have confronted the problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further challenges, and through such transformations we arrived at where we are today. In Rhodes' singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TagDqxdyA9A

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/books/review/energy-richard-rhodes.html

http://chesterenergyandpolicy.com/2018/10/10/energy-a-human-history/

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America: Margaret O'Mara:

9/23/2019

December 21, 2019

Discussion led by Lucy Kennedy

Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects.

Deploying a wonderfully rich and diverse cast of protagonists, from the justly famous to the unjustly obscure, across four generations of explosive growth in the Valley, from the forties to the present, O'Mara has wrestled one of the most fateful developments in modern American history into magnificent narrative form. She is on the ground with all of the key tech companies, chronicling the evolution in their offerings through each successive era, and she has a profound fingertip feel for the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural narrative about tech as it has evolved over the years. Perhaps most impressive, O'Mara has penetrated the inner kingdom of tech venture capital firms, the insular and still remarkably old-boy world that became the cockpit of American capitalism and the crucible for bringing technological innovation to market, or not.

The transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American economy and the nexus of so many of our hopes and dreams--and, increasingly, our nightmares--can be understood, in Margaret O'Mara's masterful hands, as the story of one California valley. As her majestic history makes clear, its fate is the fate of us all.

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Silicon-Valley-Remaking-America/dp/0399562184

https://www.paloaltojcc.org/Events/the-code-silicon-valley-and-the-remaking-of-america
https://www.amazon.com/Code-Silicon-Valley-Remaking-America/dp/0399562184

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman

7/30/2019

November 21, 2019

Discussion led by Stan Applebaum

The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.”

These are the years when the Black Death struck in the great plague of 1348-50, killing more than a third of the entire population between India and Iceland, and returned four times during the rest of the century... when freebooting companies of brigands terrorized Europe with impunity... when a "hundred years' war" seemed to have no beginning and no end, and, defying the belligerents' own efforts to end it, acquired a life of its own, "an epic of brutality and bravery checkered by disgrace"... when chivalry, the ideal that had formed and nurtured the nobility, was crumbling under the impact of new weapons, new tactics, and knightly follies...

An excellent commentary on Barbara Tuchman as an historian.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/a-distant-mirror-by-barbara-w-tuchman/

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War bySonia Pernell

7/22/2019

October 17, 2019

Discussion led by Alan Rubin

“Excellent…This book is as riveting as any thriller, and as hard to put down.” -- The New York Times Book Review

"A compelling biography of a masterful spy, and a reminder of what can be done with a few brave people -- and a little resistance." - NPR

The never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II, from the author of Clementine

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her."

The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and--despite her prosthetic leg--helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.

Virginia established vast spy networks throughout France, called weapons and explosives down from the skies, and became a linchpin for the Resistance. Even as her face covered wanted posters and a bounty was placed on her head, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate. She finally escaped through a death-defying hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown. But she plunged back in, adamant that she had more lives to save, and led a victorious guerrilla campaign, liberating swathes of France from the Nazis after D-Day.

Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall--an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance, and personal triumph over shocking adversity. A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war.

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/711356336/a-woman-of-no-importance-finally-gets-her-due

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-woman-of-no-importance-the-untold-story-of-wwii-s-most-dangerous-spy-virginia-hall-1.3858641

https://variety.com/2017/film/news/daisy-ridley-a-woman-of-no-importance-paramount-1201968755/

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

5/24/2019

September 19, 2019

Led by George Stassi

We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited?

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-empire-daniel-immerwahr.html

Video:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-empire-daniel-immerwahr.html

Winston Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts

5/22/2019

July 18, 2019

Discussion led by Stacy Wallach

“Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill . . . A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain’s savior.” --Wall Street Journal

In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman and leader can finally be fully seen and understood--by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Storm of War.

In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman and leader can finally be fully seen and understood--by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Storm of War.

Video:
https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=tightropetb&p=winston+churchill+walking+with+destiny&type=Y137_F13_163989_050719

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/books/review/andrew-roberts-churchill-winston-biography.html

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/29/churchill-walking-with-destiny-andrew-roberts-review

Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution by Simon Schama

5/16/2019

June 20, 2019

Discussion led by Kate Kidd

Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves -- Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom -- escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5361103

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Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgvbtJOCiWc