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

The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past by Meave Leakey and Samira

7/20/2021

August 15, 2021

Led by Stacy Wallach

"Extraordinary . . . This inspirational autobiography stands among the finest scientist memoirs."
--New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

Meave Leakey’s thrilling, high-stakes memoir—written with her daughter Samira—encapsulates her distinguished life and career on the front lines of the hunt for our human origins, a quest made all the more notable by her stature as a woman in a highly competitive, male-dominated field.

In The Sediments of Time, preeminent paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey brings us along on her remarkable journey to reveal the diversity of our early pre-human ancestors and how past climate change drove their evolution. She offers a fresh account of our past, as recent breakthroughs have allowed new analysis of her team’s fossil findings and vastly expanded our understanding of our ancestors.

Meave’s own personal story is replete with drama, from thrilling discoveries on the shores of Lake Turkana to run-ins with armed herders and every manner of wildlife, to raising her children and supporting her renowned paleoanthropologist husband Richard Leakey’s ambitions amidst social and political strife in Kenya. When Richard needs a kidney, Meave provides him with hers, and when he asks her to assume the reins of their field expeditions after he loses both legs in a plane crash, the result of likely sabotage, Meave steps in.

The Sediments of Time is the summation of a lifetime of Meave Leakey’s efforts; it is a compelling picture of our human origins and climate change, as well as a high-stakes story of ambition, struggle, and hope.

"A fascinating glimpse into our origins. Meave Leakey is a great storyteller, and she presents new information about the far off time when we emerged from our ape-like ancestors to start the long journey that has led to our becoming the dominant species on Earth. That story, woven into her own journey of research and discovery, gives us a book that is informative and captivating, one that you will not forget."
—Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute

Hitler: A Biography by Peter Longrich

7/5/2021

July 15, 2021

Read by Stan Applebaum

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0peufc4xeldp8e7/Hitler.%20PwrPnt%2014d.pdf?dl=0

From one of the most prominent biographers of the Nazi period, a new and provocative portrait of the figure behind the century's worst crimes

Acclaimed historian Peter Longerich, author of Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler now turns his attention to Adolf Hitler in this new biography. While many previous portraits have speculated about Hitler's formative years, Longerich focuses on his central role as the driving force of Nazism itself. You cannot separate the man from the monstrous movement he came to embody.

From his ascendance through the party's ranks to his final hours as Fuhrer in April 1945, Longerich shows just how ruthless Hitler was in his path to power. He emphasizes Hitler's political skills as Germany gained prominence on the world's stage. Hitler's rise to, and ultimate hold on, power was more than merely a matter of charisma; rather, it was due to his ability to control the structure he created. His was an image constructed by his regime - an essential piece self-created of propaganda. This comprehensive biography is the culmination of Longerich's life-long pursuit to understand the man behind the century's worst crimes.

Too many books are written about Hitler. Many are amateur efforts, and even those that aren’t rarely add anything new. Yet this vivid and painstakingly researched volume revises fundamentally how historians ought to view the geopolitical motivations of the Nazi leader. Simms argues that Hitler did not see the Soviet Union as the primary obstacle to his expansionist ambitions. From the start, his real enemies were the United Kingdom and the United States, the victors of World War I, the conflict that had decisively shaped his worldview. These countries were (from Hitler’s perspective) racially pure “Anglo-Saxon” superpowers that possessed significant air and naval power, lorded over colonies, and molded the “plutocratic” system of international finance. Hitler’s supposedly controversial strategic choices—such as diverting military resources to the Balkans, declaring an apparently needless war on the United States, launching a brutal attack on the Soviet Union, and even attempting to exterminate the Jews—were far more rational than most critics allow, given his often idiosyncratic assumptions. All these actions were part of a larger mobilization of resources and popular support for an inevitable war of attrition against the Anglo-Saxons. Some will dispute this thesis. Nevertheless, the book is engaging and essential reading for anyone interested in Hitler’s policy-making.

History Shock: When History Collides with Foreign Relations" by John Dickson

5/23/2021

June 17, 2021

Discussion led by John Dickson

John Dickson draws on more than a quarter century of experience as a US diplomat to paint a disturbing picture of how and why America's international relations are often derailed by a lack of historical knowledge and understanding on the part of the nation's foreign policy officials.

For over twenty-five years John Dickson served the United States as a Foreign Service officer in North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In Hist01y Shock: When History Collides with Foreign Relations Dickson offers valuable insights into the daily life of a Foreign Service officer and the work of representing the United States. Dickson organizes History Shock around a country by-country series of lively personal experience vignettes followed by compelling historical analyses of the ways in which an inadequate understanding of the host country's history, particularly its prior history with the United States, combined with incomplete knowledge of his own nation's history lead to history shock: where dramatically different inter-interpretations of history blocked diplomatic understanding and cooperation.

John Dickson offers these "stories with HISTORY SHOCK When History Collides with Foreign Relations.

JOHN DICKSON www.kansaspress.ku.edu a history" to highlight the interaction between history and foreign relations and to underscore the costs of not knowing the history of our partners and adversaries, much less our own.

In both Mexico and Canada in particular our lack of knowledge and understanding of how our long history of military interventions continues to complicate our efforts at developing mutually beneficial relationships with our two closest neighbors.

In Nigeria and South Africa, Dickson experienced firsthand how the history of racism in the United States plays out on a world stage and clouds our ability to effectively work with key African nations.

Perhaps the starkest example of history shock, of two nations with deeply conflicted views of their own histories and their shared history, is another country near at hand, Cuba. Not all of the gaps are too wide for bridge building; in Peru, Dickson provides an example of how history can be deployed to mutual advantage. The Foreign Service has long sought to improve its training, to provide some form of "playbook" or "operating manual" with systematic case studies for its officers.

In History Shock, Dickson provides not only a model for such case studies but also a unique contribution of an interpretive framework for how to remedy this deficit, including recommendations for strengthening historical literacy in the Foreign Service.

John Dickson is a retired Foreign Service officer with the US Information Agency from 1984-1999 and with the US State Department from 1999-2010. He lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

John is also one of us. He resides in the Berkshires and is an active member of the History Study Group.

This book was just released and there is not yet much review on the internet.

"Hitler, a Biography" by Peter Longerich

5/17/2021

July 15, 2021

Led by Stan Applebaum

From one of the most prominent biographers of the Nazi period, a new and provocative portrait of the figure behind the century's worst crimes

Acclaimed historian Peter Longerich, author of Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler now turns his attention to Adolf Hitler in this new biography. While many previous portraits have speculated about Hitler's formative years, Longerich focuses on his central role as the driving force of Nazism itself. You cannot separate the man from the monstrous movement he came to embody.

From his ascendance through the party's ranks to his final hours as F�hrer in April 1945, Longerich shows just how ruthless Hitler was in his path to power. He emphasizes Hitler's political skills as Germany gained prominence on the world's stage. Hitler's rise to, and ultimate hold on, power was more than merely a matter of charisma; rather, it was due to his ability to control the structure he created. His was an image constructed by his regime - an essential piece self-created of propaganda. This comprehensive biography is the culmination of Longerich's life-long pursuit to understand the man behind the century's worst crimes.

Carneigie by Peter Kruss

3/1/2021

May 20, 2021

Discussion led by Ben Lipzen

One of the major figures in American history, Andrew Carnegie was a ruthless businessman who made his fortune in the steel industry and ultimately gave most of it away. He used his wealth to ascend the world's political stage, influencing the presidencies of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. In retirement, Carnegie became an avid promoter of world peace, only to be crushed emotionally by World War I.
In this compelling biography, Peter Krass reconstructs the complicated life of this titan who came to power in America's Gilded Age. He transports the reader to Carnegie's Pittsburgh, where hundreds of smoking furnaces belched smoke into the sky and the air was filled with acrid fumes . . . and mill workers worked seven-day weeks while Carnegie spent months traveling across Europe.
Carnegie explores the contradictions in the life of the man who rose from lowly bobbin boy to build the largest and most profitable steel company in the world. Krass examines how Carnegie became one of the greatest philanthropists ever known-and earned a notorious reputation that history has yet to fully reconcile with his remarkable accomplishments.

A very even-handed, but critical review.

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1185/Carnegie.htm

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Henry Clay Frick a partner with Carnegie
https://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1000597

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Charles Schwab--known for his management skills.

https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/charles-m-schwab-137.php

God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World by Alan Mikhail

1/18/2021

April 15, 2021

Discussion led by Joel Wolk

Coming down to Mexico’s Pacific shore one summer day in 1573, a merchant named Pero Ximénez saw something remarkable — “ships,” he told Spanish colonial officials, “of Turks or Moors.” Surely there was some mistake. But just weeks later, a report came of “seven vassals of the Great Turk, all men of the sea, the spies of the princes,” walking as bold as brass around the plaza of the town of Purificación. Sent to investigate, Spain’s Crown Agent concluded that “Turks or Moors” were indeed plotting with Native Americans to overthrow Christian rule.

What sounds foolish today — Turks invading Mexico — did not seem so in 1573. When Spaniards sailed the 13,000 miles from Cadiz to Java, they found Muslims all along the way. Was it really so silly to suspect that Islam had crossed the Pacific too? Today we know that the only Muslims in the Americas were the West African slaves Spain had been importing since 1501, but the conquistadors were never quite sure. Hernan Cortés claimed to have seen over 400 mosques while making war on the Aztecs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/books/review/gods-shadow-alan-mikhail.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gods-shadow-review-sword-of-the-caliph-11599837430

https://spectator.us/book-and-art/selim-i-became-gods-shadow-alan-mikhail/

Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Johnathan Parshall, Tony Tully

11/23/2020

March 18, 2021

Discussion led by Jim Schaefer

Many consider the Battle of Midway to have turned the tide of the Pacific War. It is without question one of the most famous battles in history. Now, for the first time since Gordon W. Prange’s bestselling Miracle at Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully offer a new interpretation of this great naval engagement. Unlike previous accounts, Shattered Sword makes extensive use of Japanese primary sources. It also corrects the many errors of Mitsuo Fuchida’s Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, an uncritical reliance upon which has tainted every previous Western account. It thus forces a major, potentially controversial reevaluation of the great battle. The authors examine the battle in detail and effortlessly place it within the context of the Imperial Navy’s doctrine and technology. With a foreword by leading WWII naval historian John Lundstrom, Shattered Sword will become an indispensable part of any military buff’s library. Winner of the 2005 John Lyman Book Award for the "Best Book in U.S. Naval History" and cited by Proceedings as one of its "Notable Naval Books" for 2005.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23vL8AvqbDc

https://www.strategypage.com/bookreviews/372.asp
http://www.shatteredswordbook.com/

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

11/15/2020

February 18, 2021

Discussion led by Karen O'Donnell

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves

Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.

Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/books/review/the-half-has-never-been-told-by-edward-e-baptist.html

https://www.douglasdecelle.net/the-half-has-never-been-told-summary-and-notes/

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson

8/22/2020

January 21, 2021

Discussion led by Mal Wasserman

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/books/review-caste-isabel-wilkerson-origins-of-our-discontents.html

A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off.

I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.
I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.
Wilkerson’s book is about how brutal misconceptions about race have disfigured the American experiment. This is a topic that major historians and novelists have examined from many angles, with care, anger, deep feeling and sometimes simmering wit.

Wilkerson’s book is a work of synthesis. She borrows from all that has come before, and her book stands on many shoulders. “Caste” lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her. This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.
This is a complicated book that does a simple thing. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, avoids words like “white” and “race” and “racism” in favor of terms like “dominant caste,” “favored caste,” “upper caste” and “lower caste.”

Some will quibble with her conflation of race and caste. (Social class is a separate matter, which Wilkerson addresses only rarely.) She does not argue that the words are synonyms. She argues that they “can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” The reader does not have to follow her all the way on this point to find her book a fascinating thought experiment. She persuasively pushes the two notions together while addressing the internal wounds that, in America, have failed to clot.

A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.”

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance,” Wilkerson writes. She observes that caste “is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/isabel-wilkerson-caste-the-origins-of-our-discontents_n_5f296473c5b68fbfc88811b3

In her new book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, recalls once seeing a small, barely noticeable welt in the corner of a room in her home and deciding it was nothing. But over the years, the welt “became a wave that widened and bulged,” until the ceiling was bowed. The tiny flaw in the home’s structure could only be ignored for so long before it threatened the integrity of the whole.
America is like that old house, Wilkerson observes, and “the owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away.”
For many Americans, the country now seems to be in that catastrophic phase. The rot cannot be ignored. Tens of thousands have died from the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19; the economy has been devastated by the pandemic, and millions have lost work and face eviction due to the lack of government aid. Protesters have filled the streets of American cities, decrying police brutality against Black people, while police and federal agents respond with rubber bullets, tear gas, and beatings.
The interlocking systems that structure American life no longer seem stable ― but why?
Some may say it’s the advent of President Donald Trump, a destructive aberration from our usual political leaders. Others believe the roots lie far deeper. Wilkerson, for example, argues that a caste system “as central to [our nation’s] operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home” has both structured American society and led inexorably to its decay.
Wilkerson, the author of the acclaimed “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” traces this caste system back to the colonization of America and the creation of the American slave trade, which arose out of the demand for cheap, virtually limitless labor. Unlike white indentured servants, she writes, African slaves lacked ongoing ties to family or organized labor movements back in England, which could provide aid in eventually seeking wages and freedom. Over time, colonial law began to privilege white indentured servants, at first exempting Christians (at the time roughly synonymous with Europeans) from lifetime enslavement.
As enslaved Africans began to convert to Christianity, however, the rationale evolved and hardened into one of racial difference. America’s rigid caste system, Wilkerson argues, was developed to justify and perpetuate a brutal form of chattel slavery. “It made lords of everyone in the dominant caste,” she writes. “Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of the subordinate caste seem normal and righteous.”
After the abolition of slavery, the caste distinction remained vital to the white population who feared losing the psychological wage of a superior rank ― a fear that has remained powerful in American politics and daily life. Jim Crow enshrined caste into law, but caste, as Wilkerson describes it, is not strictly legal; it also plays out in unequal application of criminal law, or widespread perceptions of Black people as poor or uneducated that shape how they are treated by medical workers, teachers, banks, employers, and police.
This is not exactly new, of course; what “Caste” proposes is a framework for understanding it ― not as America’s odd preoccupation with race, but as just one example of a caste system much like others we are familiar with.
Wilkerson turns again and again to metaphors to pin down what caste means exactly, arguing that it’s not exactly race (though in the U.S. it is inextricable from it), nor is it class. It is, she says, “the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.” Or it is the play itself, in which “the actors wear the costumes of their predecessors and inhabit the roles assigned to them. The people in these roles are not the characters they play, but they have played the roles long enough to incorporate the roles into their very being.” Caste is “like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs.”
Wilkerson focuses most of her attention, rightly, on the tremendous suffering inflicted by caste on the lowest subordinate group in a system, and on Black Americans in particular. Using studies, historical research, and anecdotes from daily life, she argues that it is caste expectations that frequently exclude Black people from high-status jobs and that scapegoat them for crime and other social ills. These expectations inflict stress especially, she argues, on Black people who defy caste by climbing into higher social classes, which has profound health implications.

“Socioeconomic status and the presumed privilege that comes with it do not protect the health of well-to-do African-Americans,” she points out. “In fact, many suffer a health penalty for their ambitions… The stigma and stereotypes they labor under expose them to higher levels of stress-inducing discrimination in spite of, or perhaps because of, their perceived educational or material advantages.”
In the current moment, with rioters protesting police killings of Black people, and the coronavirus tearing through Black and brown communities, Wilkerson’s caste opus is often clarifying. She traces how caste relegates most lower-status people to the type of essential work that forces them to leave home, endangering their health, even as many predominantly white office workers remain safely isolated while working remotely. She examines how it undergirds every interaction between people of different castes, especially as the election of Barack Obama, and then Donald Trump, drove a resurgence of caste policing.

Everything from what to watch to cocktail party fodder you'll love.“After the 2016 election,” she writes, “the surveillance of black citizens by white strangers became so common a feature of American life that these episodes have inspired memes of their own.” White people calling the cops on Black people entering their own homes or waiting at a Starbucks, she argues, is “a distant echo of an earlier time when anyone in the dominant caste was deputized, obligated even, to apprehend any black person during the era of slavery.”
In an era of increasingly widespread anti-capitalism, it can be surprising how matter-of-fact Wilkerson is about class hierarchy. Class mostly appears in the book as either a function of caste or a foil to it: Black people are mostly confined to low-wage labor and lower social classes, while some rise to the upper classes but face frequent assumptions that they are unfit to be in upper-class spaces. To limn the precise reach of race-based caste, Wilkerson focuses on those who defy caste-assigned class, especially wealthy Black people. In several anecdotes, including some drawn from her own life, Wilkerson remarks on a Black person being treated rudely despite being expensively dressed, owning a house, or participating in a white-collar professional gathering. The episodes are revealing; they speak to the reality that class does not account for all racial disparities, and that caste functions with and through class rather than being identical to it.
This makes sense, as the project of the book is to tease out what caste is. But the question of class hierarchy lingers tantalizingly. Wilkerson often suggests that hierarchies are natural, provided that the sorting happens through personality, grit, and intelligence rather than caste. She devotes one rather eccentric chapter to the concept of “alphas,” digging into the science of wolf pack hierarchies to argue that one harm of caste is to force people from dominant castes to behave as alphas and to suppress natural alphas from lower castes into subordinate roles. In her disproportionate interest in the individual experience of upper-class people from lower castes, like herself, and her apparent acceptance of class as a reasonable hierarchy, Wilkerson neglects to explore the full implications of how the intersection of caste and class disadvantage poor Black people. As long as class hierarchies are embraced, one is left wondering how injustices like those inflicted by caste might ever be fully eradicated.
If a future utopia fails to materialize in Wilkerson’s dissection of caste, her macro-level analysis of the caste system itself is more fruitful. Her exploration of why caste provides a rickety framework for society as a whole is particularly illuminating, exposing how America’s vulnerability to the pandemic is rooted in the neglect and vilification of the lower castes. Both the Ebola and the coronavirus pandemics, she argues, exemplify the dangers of creating scapegoat lower classes on whom to offload societal anxieties. By treating these illnesses as exotic diseases faced by poor, underdeveloped nations populated by lower-caste people, white Americans failed to realize that they could easily fall victim to the same virus. “This was a problem for Africa, seen as a place of misfortune filled with people of the lowest caste, not the primary concern of the Western powers,” she writes of the anemic involvement of the U.S. in finding treatments for Ebola during the epidemic in West Africa. This dynamic continues to play out today, as white Americans defy masking and social distancing guidance ― perhaps partly because COVID-19 originated in China and has disproportionately sickened Black and brown people, allowing white people to dismiss it as a disease of the lower castes ― very likely fueling outbreaks that leave Americans of all races dead.
The myth of American exceptionalism is enduring though frequently debunked. The nation’s centuries-old pattern of imperialism and violent racial subjugation has always been presented to the world as natural and inescapable, where other countries’ systematic oppression and genocide of certain groups are framed as human rights violations, a function of the United States’s wealth and influence rather than its morality.
Wilkerson matter-of-factly punctures this inflated image not just by examining the unique cruelties of American caste, but by refusing to present it as utterly exceptional. She compares the American racial caste to the “lingering, millennia-long” Indian caste system and the “accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished” caste system implemented in Nazi Germany. The similarities between the systems are clearly laid out and convincing; Nazis, as she notes, even researched Jim Crow law as a model for instituting legal restrictions on Jews.
Yet the comparison has already drawn outrage. Bari Weiss referenced the argument, which Wilkerson advanced last month in a New York Times feature adapted from the book, in her public resignation letter as an example of the hostile working environment she claimed she faced at the Times. “The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people,” she wrote. “This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its ‘diversity’; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.”
For immigrants separated from their children and held in detention centers, or Black people funneled into the prison industrial system at hugely disproportionate rates, this characterization of American caste may not seem distant from their own lives at all. But it is distant from the American self-mythology, honed over centuries, which positions the United States as a country uniquely devoted to freedom, tolerance and justice.
People bridle instinctively at stigmatizing comparisons. Wilkerson points out that “[t]he dominant caste resists comparison to lower-caste people, even the suggestion that they have anything in common or share basic human experiences, as this diminishes the dominant-caste person and forces the contemplation of equality with someone deemed lower.” Many may balk, as Weiss did, at the idea that America’s racial caste system can be put in the same category as that of Nazi Germany. But Wilkerson’s brutal accounting of the unimaginable cruelty inflicted under slavery, Jim Crow and the following decades makes a powerful case that white Americans resist being shocked and a bit peeved and acknowledge the truth revealed by her comparisons.
American exceptionalism is a lie. To fix our broken country, we have to learn not just from our own crimes, but from how much like other evil-doers we actually are.

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.