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

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

8/25/2018

October 18, 2018

Discussion led by Lucy Kennedy

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”
One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?
Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.
Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens
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Bill Gates disagrees with some of author Yuval Noah Harari's premises in her book.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Sapiens-A-Brief-History-of-Humankind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 by Rosemary Ashton

8/25/2018

November 15, 2018

Discussion led by Alan Rubin

A unique, in-depth view of Victorian London during the record-breaking summer of 1858, when residents both famous and now-forgotten endured “The Great Stink” together

While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in this compelling microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence.

Ashton mines Victorian letters and gossip, diaries, court records, newspapers, and other contemporary sources to uncover historically crucial moments in the lives of three protagonists—Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli. She also introduces others who gained renown in the headlines of the day, among them George Eliot, Karl Marx, William Thackeray, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Ashton reveals invisible threads of connection among Londoners at every social level in 1858, bringing the celebrated city and its citizens vibrantly to life.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300227260/one-hot-summer

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/15/one-hot-summer-rosemary-ashton-review

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic by Joseph Ellis

8/19/2018

September 20, 2018

Discussion led by Peter Bluhm

Acclaimed historian Joseph J. Ellis brings his unparalleled talents to this riveting account of the early years of the Republic.
The last quarter of the eighteenth century remains the most politically creative era in American history, when a dedicated group of men undertook a bold experiment in political ideals. It was a time of both triumphs and tragedies—all of which contributed to the shaping of our burgeoning nation. Ellis casts an incisive eye on the gradual pace of the American Revolution and the contributions of such luminaries as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, and brilliantly analyzes the failures of the founders to adequately solve the problems of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. With accessible prose and stunning eloquence, Ellis delineates in American Creation an era of flawed greatness, at a time when understanding our origins is more important than ever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/books/27kaku.html

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joseph-j-ellis/american-creation/

War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier by Smedley D. Butler

8/16/2018

August 16, 2018

Discussion led by Will Singleton

Unique among the high ranking military officers of the US and the world I do not know of any other high ranking military officer of the US or the world, who has spoken or written such most important truths and facts about the nature and causes of war.

General Butler wrote these in simple and direct language that everyone can understand. His honesty; care for society, humanity, and justice for all; and profound insights; are self-evident in his writing. Moreover, it is even much more relevant now than when it was written in 1935.

War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit (including war profiteering) from warfare.

After his retirement from the Marine Corps, Butler made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a small book with the same title that was published in 1935 by Round Table Press, Inc., of New York. The booklet was also condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader's Digest version, Lowell Thomas, the "as told to" author of Butler's oral autobiographical adventures, praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

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The Untold Plot to Over-through FDR

Most people will be shocked to learn that in 1933 a cabal of wealthy industrialists - in league with groups like the K.K.K. and the American Liberty League - planned to overthrow the U.S. government in a fascist coup. Their plan was to turn discontented veterans into American "brown shirts," depose F.D.R., and stop the New Deal. They clandestinely asked Medal of Honor recipient and Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to become the first American Caesar. He, though, was a true patriot and revealed the plot to journalists and to Congress. In a time when a sitting President has invoked national security to circumvent constitutional checks and balances, this episode puts the spotlight on attacks upon our democracy and the individual courage needed to repel them.

New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

7/19/2018

July 19, 2018

Discussion led by Kate Kidd

This non-fiction book argues that the popular image of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus is inaccurate, and based on emerging scientific thought, Mann presents a picture of life in the pre-Columbian Americas far more advanced, and much more bustling, than is generally imagined.
Mann’s introduction starts by refuting the notion that Native Americans arrived on the content solely by way of the Bering Strait 20,000 to 25,000 years ago. He also disputes the common preconception that Native Americans did little to change their environment through all that time. This incorrect conclusion about early Americans is largely based on observations of scientists who met primitive peoples in Bolivia. The main scientist, Allan R. Holmberg, incorrectly concluded that the people he found there had always lived a primitive existence, marked by low population numbers. He failed to take into account the ravages of smallpox that decimated the tribe’s numbers. Mann calls his error “Holmberg’s Mistake.” This sets the stage for further complicating what people generally think of life in the pre-Columbian Americas.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/

http://www.powells.com/book/1491-new-revelations-of-the-americas-before-columbus-978140003205

http://www.supersummary.com/1491-2/summary/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin

5/28/2018

June 21, 2018

Discussion Led by Stan Applebaum

A frenzy of hunting for spies and subversives shook the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, as Joseph Stalin propelled his police to unmask Trotskyite-fascists, rightist and leftist deviationists, wreckers, and hidden enemies with party cards. Yet if we apply the perverse logic of Stalinism, the greatest subversive agent to undermine the promise of the revolution of 1917 and transform the aspirations of millions into bloody despotism — objectively, as Stalinists would have said — was the dictator himself. Stalin killed more communists and did more to undermine the international communist movement than Adolf Hitler did. Rather than Lenin’s comrades Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and Lev Trotsky allying with Hitler, as they were falsely accused of doing in the great show trials of 1936-1938, it was Stalin who in 1939, as Trotsky explained, advanced “his candidacy for the role . . . of Hitler’s main agent.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/terror-and-killing-and-more-killing-under-stalin-leading-up-to-world-war-ii/2017/11/22/7c4d26ca-b998-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.c923e1179570

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Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin continues his definitive biography of Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror through to the coming of the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history.

When we left Stalin at the end of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power: 1878-1928, it was 1928, and he had finally climbed the mountaintop and achieved dictatorial power of the Soviet empire. The vastest peasant economy in the world would be transformed into socialist modernity, whatever it took.
What it took, or what Stalin believed it took, was the most relentless campaign of shock industrialization the world has ever seen. This is the story of the five year plans, the new factory towns, and the integration of an entire system of penal labor into the larger economy. With the Great Depression throwing global capital into crisis, the Soviet Union's New Man looked like nothing so much as the man of the future. As the shadows of the 30's deepen, Stalin's drive to militarize Soviet society takes on increasing urgency, and the ambition of Nazi Germany becomes the predominant geopolitical reality he faces when Hitler claims that communism is a global "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy to bring the Slavic race to power.
But just because they're out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid. Stalin's paranoia is increasingly one of the most horrible facts of life for his entire country. Stalin's obsessions drive him to violently purge almost a million people, including military leadership, diplomatic corps and intelligence apparatus, to say nothing of a generation of artistic talent. And then came the pact that shocked the world, and demoralized leftists everywhere: Stalin's pact with Hitler in 1939, the carve-up of Poland, and Stalin's utter inability to see Hitler's build-up to the invasion of the USSR. Yet for all that, in just 12 years of total power, Stalin has taken this country from a peasant economy to a formidable modern war machine that rivaled anything else in the world. When the invasion came, Stalin wasn't ready, but his country would prove to be prepared. That is a dimension of the Stalin story that has never adequately been reckoned with before, and it looms large here.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler: 1929-1941 is, like its predecessor, nothing less than a history of the world from Stalin's desk. It is also, like its predecessor, a landmark achievement in the annals of its field, and in the biographer's art.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMM5VzDGLUU

Monthly Schedule

4/30/2018

--January 14, 2019--Andy Fisher--"How Democracies Die" by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

February 21, 2019--Nathan Doctrow--"The Wright Brothers" by David McCullogh

March 21, 2019--Joel Wolk--"Presidents of War" by Michael Beschloss

April 18, 2019--Peter Bluhm--1993: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" by Charles C. Mann

May 16, 2019--Will Singleton--"Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right" by Arlie Russell Hochschild

"The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennslyvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America" by Ben Bradley, Jr.

June 20, 2019--

July 18, 2019

August 15, 2019--Ed Lane--To be determined.

September 19, 2019

October 17, 2019

November 21, 2019

December 19, 2019

April 20th, 2018

4/20/2018

May 16, 2018--Michael Margolis--"The Second Coming of the KKK: The Klu Klux Klan of the 1920 and the American Political System" by Linda Gordan

June 21, 2018--Stan Applebaum--"Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941' by Stephen Kotkin

July 19, 2018--Will Singleton--"War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Solder" by Smedley D. Butler

August 16, 2018--Kate Kidd--"1491: Vanished Americans" by Charles C. Mann

September 20, 2018--Peter Bluhm--"American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic" by Joseph Ellis.

October 18, 2018

November 15, 2018

December 20, 2018

The Second Coming of the KKK: The Klu Klux Klan of the 1920 and the American Political System by Linda Gordan

4/20/2018

May 18, 2018

Discussion led by Michael Margolis

Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon’s disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this “second Klan” spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant “hordes” landing on American shores. “Part cautionary tale, part expose” (Washington Post), The Second Coming of the KKK “illuminates the surprising scope of the movement” (The New Yorker); the Klan attracted four-to-six-million members through secret rituals, manufactured news stories, and mass “Klonvocations” prior to its collapse in 1926?but not before its potent ideology of intolerance became part and parcel of the American tradition. A “must-read” for anyone looking to understand the current moment, The Second Coming of the KKK offers “chilling comparisons to the present day”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/books/review/linda-gordon-the-second-coming-of-the-kkk.html

https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/1025/The-Second-Coming-of-the-KKK-explores-the-largely-forgotten-1920s-resurgence-of-the-Klan

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/conspiracy-theories-fake-news-racism-fueling-kkks-rise--in-the-1920s/2017/12/01/07ddbba6-c99c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bd7333dbcd03

The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour by Andrei Cherny

2/15/2018

April 19, 2018

Discussion lead by Alan Rubin

The masterfully told story of the unlikely men who came together to make the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, Andrei Cherny tells a remarkable story with profound implications for the world today. In the tradition of the best narrative storytellers, he brings together newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews to tell the story of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat but changed how the world viewed the United States, and set in motion the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and to America's victory in the Cold War.

On June 24, 1948, intent on furthering its domination of Europe, the Soviet Union cut off all access to West Berlin, prepared to starve the city into submission unless the Americans abandoned it. Soviet forces hugely outnumbered the Allies', and most of America's top officials considered the situation hopeless. But not all of them.

Harry Truman, an accidental president, derided by his own party; Lucius Clay, a frustrated general, denied a combat command and relegated to the home front; Bill Tunner, a logistics expert downsized to a desk job in a corner of the Pentagon; James Forrestal, a secretary of defense beginning to mentally unravel; Hal Halvorsen, a lovesick pilot who had served far from the conflict, flying transport missions in the backwater of a global war—together these unlikely men improvised and stumbled their way into a uniquely American combination of military and moral force unprecedented in its time.

This is the forgotten foundation tale of America in the modern world, the story of when Americans learned, for the first time, how to act at the summit of world power—a masterful and exciting work of historical narrative, and one with strong resonance for our time.

In 1948, West Berliners were suffering and hungry, existing on food rations transported by trucks, trains and barges primarily by the occupying American forces. The Russians, trying to control the divided city, blockaded the transports on June 24, 1948, and American and British pilots risked their lives to airlift in 4.6 billion pounds of food and supplies until the blockade was lifted in May 1949. Pilot Hal Halvorsen won Berliners' hearts by secretly dropping his and his buddies' candy rations by parachute into the waiting hands of the city's children. In the process, says Cherny (The Next Deal ), Berliners became devoted to democracy, and Washington foreign policy and military brass learned that the Cold War needed to be won not primarily with bullets but by appealing to hearts and minds. This book could have been cut by a third for better effect; Cherny's prose and his references to 9/11 are manipulative, and his subject, particularly the nuts and bolts of the airlift, will appeal primarily to WWII buffs, who should still find much to savor in this exhaustive, often absorbing and lucid account of America's successful standoff against the Soviets.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sweet-story-berlin-candy-bomber-180965156/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gail_Halvorsen