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

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.

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/