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Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America: Pre-1770s history of ferment across the continent--not just the parts that became the 13 rebel colonies--focused on the interaction and conflict of cultures, emphasizing how Europeans and indigenous groups used each other to gain advantage over their neighbors—and how the latter were repeatedly disadvantaged by diseases brought by Europeans, or by their own neighbors who were reacting to European predations.
Erin Thompson, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments: One of the first acts of the American Revolution in NYC was the destruction of a gold-leafed lead statue of King George, which was partially melted down for bullets (Loyalists seem to have absconded with some parts to deny the rebels the lead). Thompson leads with this to point out that who gets a monument matters; monuments, unlike historical exhibits, are instructions about what and who to value. Most of the most offensive ones were put up as part of the death of Reconstruction—celebrating not just the Confederacy but the ongoing exclusion of Black citizens. Sometimes, she contends, monuments should be removed or even destroyed because of who we are now, but across the country (and especially but not only in the former Confederacy), states have deprived citizens of the ability to revisit the choices of the past through democratic discourse. The ending discussion of Stone Mountain in Georgia—built using unpaid prison labor and serviced for many years by unpaid prisoners—nicely sums up the themes of racial oppression and the way that monuments often also rely on making other people invisible.
Jeffrey A. Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War: Covers 1989-1990, focusing on Bush’s reaction to perestroika, Tiananmen Square, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bush was conservative in the classic sense: he distrusted change, which meant he was far less sympathetic to Chinese protesters and supporters of the dissolution of the USSR than you might have thought/than he was willing to be in public. This translated into a basic philosophy of “don’t just do something—stand there!” which led to domestic public criticism but denied Chinese (and Soviet) leaders easy opportunities to claim that protests were foreign tools. He really did use “prudent” a lot; it wasn’t just a SNL caricature. And even in a book focused on Bush, it’s very clear that Gorbachev was the world-historic leader who kept deciding against bloodshed to maintain his position and that of the Soviet government. Although it’s clearly “too soon to tell,” in Mao’s words, one can look at Russia and the PRC now and see the continuing consequences of decisions in those years.
Brooke Lindy Blower, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper: An accident in the middle of American involvement in WWII provides the hook for the book, which traces the lives of seven Americans—immigrants and native-born—who were on the flight, which was secretly operated by the US military. Some, but not all, survived the crash. Many of the passengers were civilians; Blower follows a singer who was on a USO tour, a fascist sympathizer/owner of a shipping company that supported Franco’s Spain, a military administrator who supervised procurement in England as part of Lend-Lease, and others. It’s a good way to support the thesis, which was that, despite American isolationism, Americans were heavily involved in global economy and politics even before Pearl Harbor.
Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History: What it says on the tin, including discussions of the ebb and flow of assimilation, the rise of Reconstructionism as the only US-grown version of Judaism, and the role of civil rights/support for Israel in the second half of the twentieth century.
Andrew J. Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East: Annoying habit of repeating the book’s title every seven paragraphs or so, but otherwise an outraged account of US policies since the 1970s. “Controlling the oil” as a key aim—without much thought to the strategies required to do that—gave way to “shaping history”—without any doubt that the US could actually do that and thus without, again, attention to the strategies required to do that. Includes the interventions into Kosovo because, Bacevich argues, that’s relevant to the argument that Americans kept assuming that Muslim groups would eventually agree on a set of universal human rights and democratic norms, and they rarely did, at least on American terms. Evocative description of the response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as, from the American military’s perspective, “a proxy war with the Vietnam War.”
Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia: Growing up in the 80s, I mostly knew Nixon from Doonesbury and other elements of popular culture. I knew he was vain and unstable, but I didn’t remember how precisely the beats between him and Trump matched, though I’d have to call it tragedy both times rather than tragedy repeated as farce. Nixon and Kissinger loved dictators, blamed everyone but themselves for their problems, cut established structures out of decisionmaking, lied with abandon, especially to Americans and most especially to other members of the American government (at one point Eisenberg describes them as “as candid as they were capable of being,” which is to say not very), and disclosed core American positions to supposed enemies the USSR and China, even sharing intelligence with them. Nixon needed constant praise for his brilliance. He was smarter than Trump and less interested in accumulating money for his own personal use, but that’s about it. And the same dynamics might enable the nation to survive Trump as it survived Nixon. Or not. As for the wars themselves, I was reminded of the story of Elon Musk “winning” at poker because he could afford to buy back in every time he busted, until he didn’t. Even the US couldn’t quite pull that off, but it was rich and powerful enough to keep trying at the cost of millions of lives and billions of dollars. In a conventional war, no nation currently can outproduce the US; the constraints on whether we keep fighting are essentially entirely domestic. That’s why lying to Americans can make a president look like a foreign policy success.
Eric Klinenberg, 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed: Klinenberg has always written about people in social context, which makes him a good reporter of NYC in 2020. It’s not surprising that we’d be memory-holing what actually happened, since America’s fault lines were perfect for failing more than other developed countries. As he points out, lots of other places struggled, but they didn’t have a record increase in homicides or fatal car crashes, or a major decline in social trust. In fact, violent crime declined in most other places. “[I]t takes a lot of additional murders to change the overall rate in the U.S., whereas in other places relatively small increases can make a big difference. This makes it all the more significant that, in the United States, the homicide rate spiked by 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, the highest single-year increase in more than a century. By contrast, England and Wales experienced a 12 percent drop in homicides during the first pandemic year. Australia’s homicide rate fell by 3 percent, Taiwan’s by 15 percent, and Hong Kong’s by 9 percent.” (Canada’s did increase.)
He does criticize global messaging on “social distancing,” when the message should have been “physical distancing; social closeness protects people.” That includes reaching out to people who live alone, masking to protect others, and so on. As a reminder, we were uniquely bad to prisoners and nursing home residents, who died at much higher rates than in other countries, in part because of how little we did to support the people who were supposed to take care of them. At the same time, individual Americans often wanted very much to help others—one of the things that motivated the Black Lives Matter protests, along with “biographical availability”—that is, being able to show up because other things weren’t in the way.
Perhaps surprisingly, loneliness didn’t rise much if at all—people responded to physical isolation by reaching out in other ways. But “structural isolation”—"feeling abandoned by government or marginalized by society at large—was a greater emotional burden than they had anticipated.” People who lived alone missed touch, but—as I recall—people who lived with others “had a hard time dealing with the loss of their option to not be alone.” Social infrastructure like public parks was really important, as was some way to engage in collective action. Migrants were at higher risk of emotional distress, as were women.
Klinenberg argues that it’s not enough to blame US individualism, especially given our strong history of voluntarism; Americans are more likely to go religious services and get married than Europeans, and “America’s underlying proclivities for violence don’t explain why homicides dropped so precipitously in the decades leading up to the pandemic.” Instead, he points to specific choices. Trump’s endorsement of violent rhetoric increased violence, including notable spikes in assaults wherever he had rallies. Unlike most other places, “instead of coordinated collective action, Americans would largely be free to do as they pleased.” Trump “urged citizens to distrust scientific experts and gave tacit permission to ignore public health guidelines that they disliked.” This was corrosive to the functioning of civil society, and it feeds on itself—you have to look out for yourself, because no one else will, though maybe the people most like you may share your interests. In surveys, “Denmark, Sweden, South Korea, and Australia—all countries with contentious politics” still had a majority of respondents say that their nation “is now more united than before the coronavirus outbreak.” In France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K., the numbers were between 39 and 47. The United States “was the one clear outlier in the study, in a class by itself,” with only 18% agreeing. We are not ready for the next time.
Annette Gordon-Reed & Peter S. Onuf, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination: How did Jefferson understand himself and what he wanted, and what exactly did he have to ignore? This book focuses on Jefferson’s self-understanding and private life, which he kept insisting was distinct from his politics. I guess I’m more interested in his politics, though the ending observation was quite sharp: He didn’t free Sally Hemings in his will because to do so he would have had to put her name in a public document, and Virginia law at the time required an explanation of how a formerly enslaved person of her age would be supported, which he was unwilling to do. So instead she just left and people treated her as having been freed.
Erin Thompson, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments: One of the first acts of the American Revolution in NYC was the destruction of a gold-leafed lead statue of King George, which was partially melted down for bullets (Loyalists seem to have absconded with some parts to deny the rebels the lead). Thompson leads with this to point out that who gets a monument matters; monuments, unlike historical exhibits, are instructions about what and who to value. Most of the most offensive ones were put up as part of the death of Reconstruction—celebrating not just the Confederacy but the ongoing exclusion of Black citizens. Sometimes, she contends, monuments should be removed or even destroyed because of who we are now, but across the country (and especially but not only in the former Confederacy), states have deprived citizens of the ability to revisit the choices of the past through democratic discourse. The ending discussion of Stone Mountain in Georgia—built using unpaid prison labor and serviced for many years by unpaid prisoners—nicely sums up the themes of racial oppression and the way that monuments often also rely on making other people invisible.
Jeffrey A. Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War: Covers 1989-1990, focusing on Bush’s reaction to perestroika, Tiananmen Square, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bush was conservative in the classic sense: he distrusted change, which meant he was far less sympathetic to Chinese protesters and supporters of the dissolution of the USSR than you might have thought/than he was willing to be in public. This translated into a basic philosophy of “don’t just do something—stand there!” which led to domestic public criticism but denied Chinese (and Soviet) leaders easy opportunities to claim that protests were foreign tools. He really did use “prudent” a lot; it wasn’t just a SNL caricature. And even in a book focused on Bush, it’s very clear that Gorbachev was the world-historic leader who kept deciding against bloodshed to maintain his position and that of the Soviet government. Although it’s clearly “too soon to tell,” in Mao’s words, one can look at Russia and the PRC now and see the continuing consequences of decisions in those years.
Brooke Lindy Blower, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper: An accident in the middle of American involvement in WWII provides the hook for the book, which traces the lives of seven Americans—immigrants and native-born—who were on the flight, which was secretly operated by the US military. Some, but not all, survived the crash. Many of the passengers were civilians; Blower follows a singer who was on a USO tour, a fascist sympathizer/owner of a shipping company that supported Franco’s Spain, a military administrator who supervised procurement in England as part of Lend-Lease, and others. It’s a good way to support the thesis, which was that, despite American isolationism, Americans were heavily involved in global economy and politics even before Pearl Harbor.
Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History: What it says on the tin, including discussions of the ebb and flow of assimilation, the rise of Reconstructionism as the only US-grown version of Judaism, and the role of civil rights/support for Israel in the second half of the twentieth century.
Andrew J. Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East: Annoying habit of repeating the book’s title every seven paragraphs or so, but otherwise an outraged account of US policies since the 1970s. “Controlling the oil” as a key aim—without much thought to the strategies required to do that—gave way to “shaping history”—without any doubt that the US could actually do that and thus without, again, attention to the strategies required to do that. Includes the interventions into Kosovo because, Bacevich argues, that’s relevant to the argument that Americans kept assuming that Muslim groups would eventually agree on a set of universal human rights and democratic norms, and they rarely did, at least on American terms. Evocative description of the response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as, from the American military’s perspective, “a proxy war with the Vietnam War.”
Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia: Growing up in the 80s, I mostly knew Nixon from Doonesbury and other elements of popular culture. I knew he was vain and unstable, but I didn’t remember how precisely the beats between him and Trump matched, though I’d have to call it tragedy both times rather than tragedy repeated as farce. Nixon and Kissinger loved dictators, blamed everyone but themselves for their problems, cut established structures out of decisionmaking, lied with abandon, especially to Americans and most especially to other members of the American government (at one point Eisenberg describes them as “as candid as they were capable of being,” which is to say not very), and disclosed core American positions to supposed enemies the USSR and China, even sharing intelligence with them. Nixon needed constant praise for his brilliance. He was smarter than Trump and less interested in accumulating money for his own personal use, but that’s about it. And the same dynamics might enable the nation to survive Trump as it survived Nixon. Or not. As for the wars themselves, I was reminded of the story of Elon Musk “winning” at poker because he could afford to buy back in every time he busted, until he didn’t. Even the US couldn’t quite pull that off, but it was rich and powerful enough to keep trying at the cost of millions of lives and billions of dollars. In a conventional war, no nation currently can outproduce the US; the constraints on whether we keep fighting are essentially entirely domestic. That’s why lying to Americans can make a president look like a foreign policy success.
Eric Klinenberg, 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed: Klinenberg has always written about people in social context, which makes him a good reporter of NYC in 2020. It’s not surprising that we’d be memory-holing what actually happened, since America’s fault lines were perfect for failing more than other developed countries. As he points out, lots of other places struggled, but they didn’t have a record increase in homicides or fatal car crashes, or a major decline in social trust. In fact, violent crime declined in most other places. “[I]t takes a lot of additional murders to change the overall rate in the U.S., whereas in other places relatively small increases can make a big difference. This makes it all the more significant that, in the United States, the homicide rate spiked by 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, the highest single-year increase in more than a century. By contrast, England and Wales experienced a 12 percent drop in homicides during the first pandemic year. Australia’s homicide rate fell by 3 percent, Taiwan’s by 15 percent, and Hong Kong’s by 9 percent.” (Canada’s did increase.)
He does criticize global messaging on “social distancing,” when the message should have been “physical distancing; social closeness protects people.” That includes reaching out to people who live alone, masking to protect others, and so on. As a reminder, we were uniquely bad to prisoners and nursing home residents, who died at much higher rates than in other countries, in part because of how little we did to support the people who were supposed to take care of them. At the same time, individual Americans often wanted very much to help others—one of the things that motivated the Black Lives Matter protests, along with “biographical availability”—that is, being able to show up because other things weren’t in the way.
Perhaps surprisingly, loneliness didn’t rise much if at all—people responded to physical isolation by reaching out in other ways. But “structural isolation”—"feeling abandoned by government or marginalized by society at large—was a greater emotional burden than they had anticipated.” People who lived alone missed touch, but—as I recall—people who lived with others “had a hard time dealing with the loss of their option to not be alone.” Social infrastructure like public parks was really important, as was some way to engage in collective action. Migrants were at higher risk of emotional distress, as were women.
Klinenberg argues that it’s not enough to blame US individualism, especially given our strong history of voluntarism; Americans are more likely to go religious services and get married than Europeans, and “America’s underlying proclivities for violence don’t explain why homicides dropped so precipitously in the decades leading up to the pandemic.” Instead, he points to specific choices. Trump’s endorsement of violent rhetoric increased violence, including notable spikes in assaults wherever he had rallies. Unlike most other places, “instead of coordinated collective action, Americans would largely be free to do as they pleased.” Trump “urged citizens to distrust scientific experts and gave tacit permission to ignore public health guidelines that they disliked.” This was corrosive to the functioning of civil society, and it feeds on itself—you have to look out for yourself, because no one else will, though maybe the people most like you may share your interests. In surveys, “Denmark, Sweden, South Korea, and Australia—all countries with contentious politics” still had a majority of respondents say that their nation “is now more united than before the coronavirus outbreak.” In France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K., the numbers were between 39 and 47. The United States “was the one clear outlier in the study, in a class by itself,” with only 18% agreeing. We are not ready for the next time.
Annette Gordon-Reed & Peter S. Onuf, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination: How did Jefferson understand himself and what he wanted, and what exactly did he have to ignore? This book focuses on Jefferson’s self-understanding and private life, which he kept insisting was distinct from his politics. I guess I’m more interested in his politics, though the ending observation was quite sharp: He didn’t free Sally Hemings in his will because to do so he would have had to put her name in a public document, and Virginia law at the time required an explanation of how a formerly enslaved person of her age would be supported, which he was unwilling to do. So instead she just left and people treated her as having been freed.
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