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

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

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by Karl Wolff

4/17/2019

May 16, 2019

Discussion led by Alan Rubin

The history of the United States is not only a parade of rugged individuals and hardy pioneers, but one of family dynasties, entrenched power relations, and colossal wealth. History, like the intelligence services, is as much about protecting the vital interests of the United States as it is about burying evidence, silencing witnesses, and establishing a good cover story. The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot is a book chronicling the collision of two powerful dynasties, the Dulles family and the Kennedy family.

While conspiracies and the vilification of the military-industrial complex runs through fictional works from Oliver Stone's JFK to James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy, in nonfiction the same ground usually gets covered by kooks inhabiting the political fringes. The lack of credible evidence and the Noble Lie keep the citizenry asleep, reenacting John Carpenter's They Live without a second thought. Keeping employed, paying the bills, and watching prestige television has become far more important than what happened in late November 1963 in Dallas, Texas.
David Talbot, a senior editor at Mother Jones and the author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, plunges into the intimidating field of CIA history. His latest book, The Devil's Chessboard, presents itself as a peculiar hybrid. Part biography of Allen Dulles and part history of the Central Intelligence Agency, it eventually becomes a lengthy examination of the Kennedy assassination.
Not that Mr. Talbot is the first person to assert the fateful day in Dallas was the work of a conspiracy, but he has crafted a panoramic historical narrative with newfound evidence. He asserts the conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy came from Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The practice of verifying history has similar traits to the practice of verifying a crime. In order for a charge to stick, an argument must be made and evidence collected.
Asserting Dulles had a hand in the Kennedy assassination means inevitable sensationalism and charges that Talbot is a “conspiracy nut.” But Talbot walks back the story to Dulles's days in the Office of Strategic Services, acting insubordinate and forging his own foreign policy. This policy included negotiating with the SS and establishing rat-lines. Like the early space program, the postwar intelligence game could be glibly expressed as “Our Nazis against their Nazis.” Talbot traces how Dulles, now in the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency, set up West German intelligence along Nazi lines with the Gehlen Organization.
New revelations show Dulles's epic mismanagement of the Bay of Pigs invasion. No CIA operatives with knowledge in the Spanish language were used. It also involved bottom-rung CIA personnel. Along the way the story shifts to the coups in Iran and Guatemala. The coup attempt by the OAS against Charles De Gaulle bears similar resemblance to the Kennedy assassination.
The sheer heft and scope of The Devil's Chessboard threaten to undo the narrative momentum. At times Talbot's style veers off into excessively tabloid material. His description of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn seem written with a homophobic relish, gloating over the sexual and moral hypocrisy of these titans of Cold War anti-communism. While the evidence is irrefutable, the tone wavers from hard-boiled investigative journalism to supermarket tabloid sensationalism. For a book attempting to give gravitas and legitimacy to a dangerously controversial topic, this weakness doesn't help.
In terms of sources, Talbot relies a lot on interviews, oral history, and secondary sources. Due in part to the US intelligence services destroying any paper trails and silencing witnesses, it also doesn't help that any individual seeking to shine a light on government malfeasance immediately gets labeled as a “conspiracy nut.” But Talbot backs up his asserts with admirable finesse, calling attention to the Lincoln assassination.
The Kennedy assassination, while tragic, wasn't without historical precedent. Even if this volume doesn't change minds, it does help in asking a battery of questions and dissecting the oddball nature of Lee Harvey Oswald. Talbot discusses how Oswald had terrible aim and the necessity of killing an alleged assassin to contain any unnecessary blow-back or exposure. And why was Allen Dulles as “The Farm” (the CIA's military base) during late November 1963? The evidence becomes murkier the closer the investigation gets to Dulles. While not necessarily damning, the activities of Dulles during that week seem mighty suspicious.
After the thorough investigation of the Kennedy murder, the book loses a bit of steam. The assassination of Robert Kennedy lacks rigor and scope, although Talbot does question the Lone Nut premise and Sirhan Sirhan. The book ends with the death of Allen Dulles, a memorable character in American history who can be set alongside the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. The Devil's Chessboard shines a light on his villainy and sociopathic drive to defeat Communism.
Karl Wolff is currently the Staff Writer/Associate Editor for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. In 2013 CCLaP released his book, On Being Human, an exploration of the question, “What does it mean to be human?” investigating the question by looking at various pop cultural artifacts from science fiction dystopias to Beckett novels to roleplaying games.

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/devils-chessboard

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-60-no-3/seeger-the-devils-chessboard.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-devils-chessboard-all_b_8959302

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/02/the-deepest-state-the-safari-club-allen-dulles-and-the-devils-chessboard/

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

12/23/2018

August 14, 2019

Discussion led by Will Singleton

What the veteran journalist learned in Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre is the major city in a predominately rural area) will mostly hearten devoted Republican supporters, mostly upset Democratic supporters, and perhaps baffle independent voters. By one measure, Luzerne County is typical because Trump won in 2,584 counties, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 493 counties. Looking closer, though, Luzerne is an atypical Trump stronghold, since many of the residents were labor unionists who traditionally supported Democratic Party candidates. During previous presidential elections, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had won majorities there. A Trump victory seemed plausible because during the Republican primary in Luzerne County, 5,643 registered Democrats shifted to the Republican side to choose among the large number of candidates, and many of the shifters decided Trump would be the best choice. As Bradlee relates the findings from his in-depth conversations with Luzerne voters, he avoids stereotypes and pat answers. Trump detractors across the nation labeled him a racist, but how could the author call Trump voters unadulterated racists when so many had cast ballots for Obama in the previous election? Regardless, race and ethnicity clearly influenced some Trump supporters interviewed by Bradlee. Trump’s draconian immigration policies aimed at Spanish speakers gained widespread favor among Luzerne County voters, many of whom were alarmed by the increase in the Hispanic population. Apart from support or opposition to Trump’s policy proposals, voters who spoke with Bradlee made clear that they would have preferred any candidate to Hillary Clinton, having believed every false Republican claim about her; that they knew nothing about Trump’s past as a failed businessman; and that allegations of his sexual assaults and overall misogyny could be forgiven at the polling booth.
A fascinating, ultimately puzzling deep dive into one county’s electoral behavior.

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This is a county called Luzerne County in northeast Pennsylvania. The county seat is Wilkes-Barre. It's not very prosperous, fraying at the edges, and has been hurting for a long time. And combing through the vote in the three critical swing states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, I discovered Luzerne County, which is a traditionally Democratic county, hadn't voted Republican since 1988 for Bush senior. President Obama won it twice, but it surged in the other direction for Trump, and he won it by 20 points, building up such a margin in this one county that it was 60 percent of his victory margin for the state of Pennsylvania. So without this one county he wouldn't have won the state or perhaps the presidency."
On how Trump was able to connect to voters in Luzerne
"Well, I think people base most of their vote for president on the extent to which they can relate to them on a human level, how likable they are. And I think that that is in the end more important than where they stand on a variety of issues. And I think the people that I settled on generally like Trump on most issues but really liked his style. They just liked his moxie, his feistiness, how he gets up every morning and has a tweetstorm and sticks it to the elites."
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/10/17/pennsylvania-trump-2016-election

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ben-bradlee-jr/the-forgotten-bradlee/

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Morning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

12/23/2018

August 14, 2019

Discussion led by Will Singleton

Arlie Hochschild’s generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party presents a likable fellow named Lee Sherman, who once worked for a Louisiana chemical plant where his duties included illegally dumping toxic waste into the bayou.
Sherman did the dirty work; then the company did him dirty. After 15 years on the job, he was doused with chemicals that “burned my clothes clean off me” and left him ill. But rather than pay his disability costs, his bosses accused him of absenteeism and fired him.

Sherman became a fledgling environmentalist and got his revenge after a giant fish kill threatened the livelihood of nearby fishermen. Company officials feigned innocence, but Sherman barged into a public meeting with an incriminating sign: I’M THE ONE WHO DUMPED IT IN THE BAYOU. Fast-forward a couple of decades and Sherman, still an environmentalist, is campaigning for a Tea Party congressman who wants to gut the Environmental Protection Agency. Sherman still distrusts chemical companies, but he distrusts the federal government more, because it spends his tax money on people who “lazed around days and partied at night.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/10/american-right-inside-the-sacrifice-zone/

https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10767-017-9266-6

The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America's Supreme Law by Joseph Tartakovsky

12/22/2018

August 15, 2019

Discussion Led by Ed Lane

In a fascinating blend of biography and history, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals―some renowned, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Tartakovsky brings to life their struggles over our supreme law from its origins in revolutionary America to the era of Obama and Trump. Sweeping from settings as diverse as Gold Rush California to the halls of Congress, and crowded with a vivid Dickensian cast, Tartakovsky shows how America’s unique constitutional culture grapples with questions like democracy, racial and sexual equality, free speech, economic liberty, and the role of government.

Joining the ranks of other great American storytellers, Tartakovsky chronicles how Daniel Webster sought to avert the Civil War; how Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood America; how Robert Jackson balanced liberty and order in the battle against Nazism and Communism; and how Antonin Scalia died warning Americans about the ever-growing reach of the Supreme Court.

From the 1787 Philadelphia Convention to the clash over gay marriage, this is a grand tour through two centuries of constitutional history as never told before, and an education in the principles that sustain America in the most astonishing experiment in government ever undertaken.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/the-human-factor/

https://www.josephtartakovsky.com/about/

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann

12/12/2018

April 16, 2019

Discussion led by Peter Bluhm

ABOUT 1493
A deeply engaging new history of how European settlements in the post-Colombian Americas shaped the world, from the bestselling author of 1491.

Presenting the latest research by biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the post-Columbian network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In this history, Mann uncovers the germ of today's fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars. In 1493, Mann has again given readers an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.

An excellent NY Times review
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/1493-uncovering-the-new-world-columbus-created-by-charles-c-mann-book-review.html