Conservative Bookshelf - Volume 2

From Cahill to Tuchman, from McCullough to Roberts we provide a series of authors and books to fill your bookshelves, and your minds, with great history.  

Transcript

Conservative Historian Bookshelf 

June 2024

“One glance at a book, and you hear another person’s voice, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” – Carl Sagan.

“If you think you have it tough, read history” books. 

Bill Maher

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

Groucho Marx

This is one of my favorite pieces and something I have not done in over three years—way too long. A bookshelf of which some pieces are repeats for new listeners or reminders for older ones, there are a host of new books on this list.  

A particular group of historians, almost entirely academics, dismisses what they call popular history or, worse, Dad history. One can practically hear the sniff as they say this. Some might even say that “we cling” to popular accounts the way we do our guns and religion. 

There are three types of history. The first is among accredited scholars such as Sean Willentz, Gordon Wood, HW Brands, and Joseph Ellis. Then there are the types that earn the gall of academics, such as Journalist David McCullough, who did not go through the academy but built a massive following through his work. Then there are the semi-historians. These are TV and radio personalities who write history – but not really. You can always tell the wheat from the chaff by whether they include a second author on the cover, usually with the telltale “with.” These folks have the second author do the work, then utilize their viewer and listenership to sell the books. Some are decent (Brett Baier), and some are crap (anything with Bill O’Reilly on the cover).  

I have read all kinds of history. Social history features not kings, popes, caliphs, or emperors but rather what the other 99.9% of humanity participated in. For some, learning about crops, how horses were shooed, or how someone kept from freezing in a bitter winter is not as much fun as reading about the battle of Waterloo, but each has its pleasure. I love it all, and I have noted, as I am in the middle years, how the Grand Canal lived and how rice was harvested in the 200s BCE. China has as much purchase on my mind as Qin Shi Huang Di uniting the six kingdoms. There are religious, economic, and labor histories. I have even read works from the School of Subaltern Studies, a movement that emerged around 1982 as a series of journal articles published by Oxford University Press in India. A group of Indian scholars trained in the West wanted to reclaim their history. The primary leader was Ranajit Guha, who had written works on peasant uprisings in India. The point of Subaltern studies is a type of grievance history focused on colonialism. In some regards, the historiography, the actual research, compilation, and writing of history has its own spectrum, with Biographies being the easiest to century, culture and geographic spanning narratives being the most difficult.  Then there is the source issue.  Writing for the Persians or the Punic-founded Carthage is challenging because they did not employ historians whom we have to this day.  In the former, we rely on Greek views, and in the latter, Roman.  And even then, there are very few sources.  In modern times, this is the opposite problem.  If I wanted to do a biography of FDR or a history of his New Deal, it is what I would leave out, not what sources I could find, that presents the challenge.  

Regardless, the discovery of the tales of our human past, as recorded in writing and not fossils or archeology, is still one of our greatest pleasures.  Historical narratives are better than fantasy or science fiction because they are all real, and though we may conjecture the excellent question of what is more or less real, we know some things are true.  We live in the United States and can send a piece like this to anyone who has a computer and wishes to learn about some incredible works.  

So, let me begin with a book for a history buff or historian.  Like so many, I love the stories of our Revolution, Civil War, and World War II.  For many listening, the names of Joseph Ellis and David McCullough are pretty familiar in our War of Independence.  Or Kearns Goodwin, HW Brands, or Ron Chernow in the Civil War.  And Stephen Ambrose and, more recently, Rick Atkinson for World War II.  If you do not know these names, check them and their works.  

But for that soul who wants even more, there is Norman Davies and his Vanished Kingdoms.  A collection of states that, at their time, contended for supremacy over their places on the Earth but have since fallen into strictly historical memories.  Burgundia between France and Germany, Borussia in Eastern Europe or Aragon in Spain and Italy, all once mighty states now gone, and a dozen more.  Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian notes, “This is a monumental work, then, exhausting in its detail but never losing its sense either of the broader picture or the impact at the human level (where possible: archives and sources pertaining to Alt Clud, the post-Roman “Kingdom of the Rock” around what we now call Strathclyde, are notoriously patchy and vague). Davies visits the places he writes about and quotes their songs, defiant or melancholy as needs be. If this makes you think of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you’d be on the right lines.”

Thomas Cahill’s Hinges of History

We lost this incomparable historian two years ago. His Hinges of History series is a prospective seven-volume series in which the author recounts formative moments in Western civilization. 

Thomas Cahill takes an exciting approach to his work. “We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence.” The Hinges series, however, is dedicated to “narratives of grace, the recounting of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.” 

Despite this rather flowery description, Cahill writes that his history is different. Rather than focus on a specific person or single event, Cahill takes a singular moment in time, such as when Abraham (Avram) leaves Mesopotamia, 400s BCE Greece, or the late 1st century after the birth of Christ, and provides perspective about the importance of that time to history. Not everyone is a fan. However, the Catholic World Report “Outrage-free history” has never been easy to write. He professes that his goal is to focus on the inspiring aspects of the Renaissance and the Reformation; Cahill can hardly be said to gloss over the catastrophes and outrages of early modern history.”

Cahill was not just a brilliant writer but also had a flair for the dramatic as the first, in terms of writing, if not chronology, his How the Irish Saved Civilization was described by Frank Delaney of the Wall Street Journal as follows, “This is the work that most assists a deeper understanding of Ireland’s spirit. If the question is, “How did an island of 33,000 square miles daub such a wide green stripe across the globe?” Thomas Cahill has the answer. His learning matches the depth of field, and his powers of overview and summary can settle eons of debate. “Whether insoluble political realities or inner spiritual sickness is more to blame for the fall of classical civilization is, finally, beside the point,” he writes. The point, he says, is that Irish monks, drinking deep from the Latin and Greek of what was called “civilization,” gave it out to the world from their scriptoria in the Middle Ages and thus prevented its death. The book is in itself an illuminated manuscript.”

Cahill also delivers a book on Jesus’s time, the Desire of the Everlasting Hills, and finds the startling moment when a man of peace commands the minds of the ancients who, before, would have worshipped warriors and conquerors such as Alexander and Caesar. Other books cover the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Yet my favorite is the one that chronologically comes first, the Gifts of the Jews.  

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times notes that “The Gifts of the Jews” is finally persuasive and entertaining. “Where are the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians today?” he asks, remarking on Jewish identity and the “unique miracle of cultural survival.”

“The Jews gave us the Outside and the Inside _ our outlook and our inner life,” he concludes. “We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact, _ new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice _ are gifts of the Jews.”

And so is Cahill’s book, which is a gift. It is hard to explain the difficulty of what Cahill is doing.  Going from Sumerian’s Gilgamesh to Jesus’s Aramaic to 13th Century Italy, but trust me, he makes it look far easier than doing the actual work.  

Barbara Tuchman

Tuchman’s efforts and research come clear in an era when so-called “historians” who also do full-time cable news TV shows need an additional name on their books explaining this discrepancy and can churn out books every two years.  There are four years before her First World War I book, the Guns of August, and the pre-war The Proud Tower.  Her book on medieval times, A Distant Mirror, took over six years to write.  Some on this list have had their research questioned.  No one has questioned Tuchman, who adds incomparable scholarship with brilliant prose.  

The Conservative Sensibility by George F. Will

If this book does nothing else, it provides the core principle of modern American conservatism: “What do we seek to conserve? The proper answer is concise but deceptively simple: We seek to conserve the American Founding. “However, what does it mean to conserve an event-or, more precisely, a congeries of event-that occurred almost 250 years ago? This book is my attempt to answer that question by showing the continuing pertinence of the Founding principles and tracing many of our myriad discontents to departures from those principles.”

Will divides his book into sections that discuss the Founders’ vision and how the progressives are delineated from the original course. Each chapter could be a small book or an extensive essay on Will’s vision of and for the Republic. This will be familiar ground for those readers of Will’s opinions and assertions over the years.

Napoleon by Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia.  I am not necessarily enamored of nobility, but Roberts did not inherit his peerage but was awarded, so okay.  Roberts has penned several works, including the latest biography of Winston Churchill, but I have only been able to read his Napoleon, and that is enough.  

The Guardian notes, “Andrew Roberts’s marvelously readable and sumptuously illustrated new book is the second of two major studies of his life to appear this year. So, what kind of Napoleon does our generation need? The last one tried to pull him down off his pedestal to emphasize the violence and the love of power that drove him, even to represent him as a precursor to the dictators of the 20th century. This rather silly approach has thankfully now largely been abandoned. The title of Roberts’s book indicates the positive attitude it shares with other current works: Roberts is keen to stress the ruler’s achievements, not his crimes; he wants us to like – or at least respect – the man. There are good reasons to go along with this. After all, although Roberts does not dwell on this point, Napoleon did more than anyone to redefine the meaning of greatness itself – by showing to later generations not only that the individual counted, but more importantly to most of our predecessors, that talent mattered more than birth. Glory depended on achievements, not status, and no one worked more tirelessly than Napoleon to affect the world.”

After Tamerlane by John Darwin 

The death of the great Tatar emperor Tamerlane in 1405, writes historian John Darwin, was a turning point in world history. Never again would a single warlord raiding across the steppes be able to unite Eurasia under his rule. After Tamerlane, a series of massive, stable empires were founded and consolidated; Chinese, Mughal, Persian, and Ottoman—realms of such grandeur, sophistication, and dynamism that they outclassed the fragmentary, quarrelsome nations of Europe in every respect. The nineteenth century saw these empires fall vulnerable to European conquest, creating an age of anarchy and exploitation, but this had largely ended by the twenty-first century, with new Chinese and Indian super-states and successful independent states in Turkey and Iran.

A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz 

Writing a formal review of the book in 1965, H.G Johnson wrote, “The long-awaited monetary history of the United States by Friedman and Schwartz is in every sense of the term a monumental scholarly accomplishment the volume sets, a new standard for the writing of monetary history. One that requires the explanation of historical developments in monetary theory and its application to the techniques of quantitative economic analysis. One can safely predict that it will be the classic reference on its subject for many years to come. 

Myth of the Robber Baron by Burton W. Folsom

I have to confess to a significant historical pet peeve. I really (really) dislike the narrative around the “Gilded Age.” Though the quote probably did not begin with Churchill, “the victors write history” resonates regardless. And the victors in the academy include the progressives. 

And because their favorite time of American history (well, maybe next to the New Deal was the Progressive era, it was necessary to make the proceeding era so demanding that only progressive governance could save the union. Thus, he was born not just in the Gilded Age but also in the “Robber Barons.” Folsom does an admirable job of dispelling many myths surrounding late 19th-century American history.    

Imperial Twilight: A History of the Opium Wars by Stephen Platt

The Reviews of History blog, “By giving life to major historical figures, the book explores major events chronologically between 1759 and 1842 in a most readable fashion. Nonetheless, Platt’s work stands out because of his ability to interweave well-documented events and figures at the heart of Sino-British interactions with the Qing domestic political situation.”

For a comprehensive review of Platt’s other book, The Taiping War, please check out my piece in the Freemen News.  

David McCullough 

Jefferson Lecturem, writing for the National Endowment for the Humanities says of McCullough.  “He is called the “citizen chronicler” by Librarian of Congress James Billington. His books have led a renaissance of interest in American history--from learning about a flood in Pennsylvania that, without warning, devastated an entire community to discovering the private achievements and frailties of an uncelebrated president. His biography of Harry Truman won him a Pulitzer, as did his most recent biography of another president, John Adams.”

Russel Contrareas has a different view of McCullough, but with his latest book, “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West,” McCullough is seeing some of the sharpest criticism of his career. Days after the book was released and reached Amazon.com’s top 20 best-seller list, a new generation of historians, scholars, and activists took to social media to accuse McCullough of romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans. Criticism has also come from many reviewers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times.

“He adopts settlers’ prejudiced language about ‘savages’ and ‘wilderness,’ words that denied Indians’ humanity and active use of their land,” Harvard history professor Joyce E. Chaplin wrote in a review for The Times on Monday. “He also states that the Ohio Territory was ‘unsettled.’ No, it had people in it, as he slightly admits in a paragraph on how the Indians’ considered’ the land to be theirs.”

Philip Nobile says of McCullough, “He has not yet claimed to land at Omaha Beach or to hit a game-winning grand slam for his high school baseball team. However, McCullough may be on a slippery slope to the minors based on mistakes in his two latest biographies- the current best-selling John Adams and the 1992 blockbuster Truman. Whether the errors were calculated or the result of reckless research is explored below.  The false step in John Adams is a virtual copycat of the foul-up in Truman. In both books, McCullough, a non-academic popularizer, purportedly discovered the gold that had eluded generations of dogged history professors. In John Adams, a quote from Thomas Jefferson called Adams “a colossus of independence.” In Truman, it was a “TOP SECRET” 1945 War Department document backing up HST’s previously unconfirmed and suspiciously sky-high casualty estimates for the planned invasion of Japan.

Significantly, McCullough built both biographies around his “just-so” findings. His Rushmore portrait of Harry Truman depended on smoothing over the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the War Department memo very neatly did.”

To these criticisms, I have one thing – popularity.  McCullough did not just sell books; he sold an optimistic, positive vision of our nation in an era of 1619 Project pessimism or downright hatred.  His winning the Pulitzer was especially grating to many because it usually goes not to the best writer but the composer of the most acceptable ideas, those ideas being of the left.  So why have I spent a considerable time on the negativity surrounding McCullough to give you a little insight into what awaits a great historian who beats the academy at its own game and sells many more books?   

1177 BCE: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline

Finally, one of my favorites, which contains arguably the greatest mysteries of ancient history. The Bronze Age began before writing, so it predates history. But its end occurred in the Near East and Europe around 1100 BCE. In 1177 BCE, five kingdoms, including the Minoans, Hittites, Mitanni, Babylonia, and Egypt, were assaulted, and all but Egypt was destroyed within 50 years. This led to a Dark Age that was to last some 600 years before trade, culture, or statehood was revived.  

What happened?  Was it the mysterious Sea Peoples only mentioned in Egyptian reports?  Eric Cline sets out to find out.  But like all great mysteries, his well-researched and reasoned theories may be wrong.  We do not know and may never find out.  As Jessica Mills writes, “Overall, Cline’s book offers a useful foray into the new kind of history of networks and ancient globalization. This new wave of scholarship is taking these moments, such as the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, and coming to new conclusions that I find more compelling in their complexity than a singular reason for such a drastic change. Cline explores the ancient world by looking at the entire spectrum of available evidence to conclude that today's world is not as different as the world was in 1177 BC. This book takes an event thousands of years ago and makes it relevant for today’s readers. No nation is completely independent and cannot thrive as such. This itself is a useful lesson for today.”  

I conclude with the concept that in 1177 BCE, in its concept of the interconnectedness of trade, culture, and migration, a book about events some 3100 years ago may have more insight than one written some 30 years ago. But books are not just about insights, knowledge, or careers. They can be pleasures unto themselves, and I sincerely hope you find some of these as pleasurable as they have been to me.