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

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.

On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker by A'Lelia Bundles

6/30/2020

November 19, 2020

Discussion led by Ellen Croibier

Soon to be a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, On Her Own Ground is the first full-scale biography of “one of the great success stories of American history” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Madam C.J. Walker—the legendary African American entrepreneur and philanthropist—by her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles.

The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Breedlove—who would become known as Madam C. J. Walker—was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then—with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women—everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: building a storied beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women, and devoting her life to philanthropy and social activism. Along the way, she formed friendships with great early-twentieth-century political figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-684-82582-3

The President Is Dead!: The Extraordinary Stories of Presidential Deaths, Final Days, Burials, and Beyond by Louis L. Picone

6/29/2020

December 17, 2020

Discussion led by Bob Rosen

A fun, anecdote-filled, encyclopedic look at the circumstances surrounding the deaths of every president and a few “almost presidents,” such as Jefferson Davis.

Packed with fun facts and presidential trivia, The President Is Dead! tells you everything you could possibly want to know about how our presidents, from George Washington to Gerald Ford (who was the most recent president to die), met their ends, the circumstances of their deaths, the pomp of their funerals, and their public afterlives, including stories of attempted grave robbings, reinterments, vandalism, conspiracy theories surrounding their deaths, and much more.

The President Is Dead! is filled with never-before-told stories, including a suggestion by one prominent physician to resurrect George Washington from death by transfusing his body with lamb’s blood. You may have heard of a plot to rob Abraham Lincoln’s body from its grave site, but did you know that there was also attempts to steal Benjamin Harrison's and Andrew Jackson’s remains? The book also includes “Critical Death Information,” which prefaces each chapter, and a complete visitor’s guide to each grave site and death-related historical landmark. An “Almost Presidents” section includes chapters on John Hanson (first president under the Articles of Confederation), Sam Houston (former president of the Republic of Texas), David Rice Atchison (president for a day), and Jefferson Davis. Exhaustively researched, The President Is Dead! is richly layered with colorful facts and entertaining stories about how the presidents have passed.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

The Kerner Report

6/10/2020

August 20, 2020

Discussion led by Lucy Kennedy

Pent-up frustrations boiled over in many poor African-American neighborhoods during the mid- to late-1960s, setting off riots that rampaged out of control from block to block. Burning, battering and ransacking property, raging crowds created chaos in which some neighborhood residents and law enforcement operatives endured shockingly random injuries or deaths. Many Americans blamed the riots on outside agitators or young black men, who represented the largest and most visible group of rioters. But, in March 1968, the Kerner Commission turned those assumptions upside-down, declaring white racism—not black anger—turned the key that unlocked urban American turmoil.

The Kerner Report is a powerful window into the roots of racism and inequality in the United States. Hailed by Martin Luther King Jr. as a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life," this historic study was produced by a presidential commission established by Lyndon Johnson, chaired by former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, and provides a riveting account of the riots that shook 1960s America. The commission pointed to the polarization of American society, white racism, economic in-opportunity, and other factors, arguing that only "a compassionate, massive, and sustained" effort could reverse the troubling reality of a racially divided, separate, and unequal society. Conservatives criticized the report as a justification of lawless violence while leftist radicals complained that Kerner didn’t go far enough. But for most Americans, this report was an eye-opening account of what was wrong in race relations.
Drawing together decades of scholarship showing the widespread and ingrained nature of racism, The Kerner Report provided an important set of arguments about what the nation needs to do to achieve racial justice, one that is familiar in today’s climate. Presented here with an introduction by historian Julian Zelizer, The Kerner Report deserves renewed attention in America’s continuing struggle to achieve true parity in race relations, income, employment, education, and other critical areas.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/1968-kerner-commission-got-it-right-nobody-listened-180968318/

https://timeline.com/kerner-report-race-america-b99e3eac0cac

Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood by Kai T. Erikson

6/4/2020

October 15, 2020

Discussion led by Alan Rubin

On February 26, 1972, 132-million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.

Making extensive use of the words of the people themselves, Erikson details the conflicting tensions of mountain life in general—the tensions between individualism and dependency, self-assertion and resignation, self-centeredness and group orientation—and examines the loss of connection, disorientation, declining morality, rise in crime, rise in out-migration, etc., that resulted from the sudden loss of neighborhood.

https://www.supersummary.com/everything-in-its-path/summary/

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/20/archives/everything-in-its-path-more-was-broken-than-a-dam-everything.html

Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump by Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

5/25/2020

September 17, 2020

Discussion led by Alan Metzger

Americans constantly make moral judgments about presidents and foreign policy. Unfortunately, many of these assessments are poorly thought through. A president is either praised for the moral clarity of his statements or judged solely on the results of their actions.

In Do Morals Matter?, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., one of the world's leading scholars of international relations, provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in US foreign policy during the American era after 1945. Nye works through each presidency from FDR to Trump and scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions of their intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which ones do not. Regardless of a president's policy preference, Nye shows that each one was not fully constrained by the structure of the system and actually had choices. He further notes the important ethical consequences of non-actions, such as Truman's willingness to accept stalemate in Korea rather than use nuclear weapons.

Since we so often apply moral reasoning to foreign policy, Nye suggests how to do it better. Most importantly, presidents need to factor in both the political context and the availability of resources when deciding how to implement an ethical policy-especially in a future international system that presents not only great power competition from China and Russia, but a host of transnational threats: the illegal drug trade, infectious diseases, terrorism, cybercrime, and climate change.

https://time.com/5771368/morals-american-foreign-policy/