Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / The Vertigo Years

The Vertigo Years -- Europe, 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom, Basic Books '08, $29.95, 466 pages, ISBN #0465011160. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of color glossy images, b&w images sprinkled throughout text.

One difficulty in compartmentalizing a period in history and then explaining it organically is that history doesn't move in chapters. So when historian Philipp Blom characterizes the period from 1900-1914 as "dizzying years of tremendous change," it would be incorrect to consider them an isolated period, since they were informed by the decades that preceded them and went on to inform the years of World War I and the those that came afterward.

That said, Blom has produced an engaging and wide-ranging survey of the years leading up to Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, exploring such varied topics as feminism, quantum theory, atonal music, mass communication, psychoanalysis, and consumerism. Influential events covered include Paris's world's fair, the death of Britain's Queen Victoria, the "Bloody Sunday" mayhem in St. Petersburg, Louis Bleriot of France's monoplane flight across the English Channel, and the first international conference of eugenics in London.

It is Blom's thesis that "The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele -- but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I....Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society -- as well as the very fabric of sexual relations."

Author Philipp Blom, born in Hamburg and educated as a historian in Vienna and Oxford, has written two other books. He lives in Vienna.

Book Alert / There Is A God

There Is A God -- How The World's Most Notorious Athiest Changed His Mind by Antony Flew, HarperOne '08, $24.95, 222 pages, ISBN #B001FOR58K. Source notes, two appendices, no bibliography, index or illustrations.

A twenty-seven year old philosopher writes a landmark essay, arguing God does not exist, which treatise becomes the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the past 50 years. Now, at 85, he disclaims it, arguing that there is indeed a deity. Perhaps, you ask, he's done so because there are no athiests in the foxholes of mortality.

Antony Flew is canny enough to see you coming and cut you off at the pass. As early as his introduction, in what he calls his "last will and testament," Flew zeroes in on those who think he may have changed his mind to create the comforting expectation of an afterlife. "For over fifty years," Flew writes, "I have not simply denied the existence of God, but also the existence of an afterlife.....This is one area in which I have not changed my mind." Fair enough -- that evens the playing field....somewhat.

Antony Flew was born in London in 1923, the son of a Mathodist minister. During his career as an Oxford-trained philosopher, he has published more than 30 books while a professor of philosophy at the University of Keele, as well as in positions at Oxford, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Reading.

Judge Drops Spanish Civil War Probe

Time.com:

"Spain's most famous judge abandoned a drive for a symbolic indictment of the late Gen. Francisco Franco and his regime, dropping a probe Tuesday into atrocities committed during and after the country's ruinous civil war. Judge Baltasar Garzon reluctantly yielded in a dispute over jurisdiction, and transferred the case to lower courts.

"Garzon, a human rights and terrorism crusader known for going after Osama bin Laden and Chile's late Augusto Pinochet, launched a probe last month into the killings of tens of thousands of civilians by Franco supporters during the 1936-39 war and in the early years of his right-wing rule.( See TIME's Today in Pictures. )

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Obama Looks To Lincoln

Newsweek.com:

"It is the season to compare Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln. Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis. Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing. Obama, like Lincoln and unlike most modern politicians, even writes his own speeches, or at least drafts the really important ones—by hand, on yellow legal paper—such as his remarkably honest speech on race during the Reverend Wright imbroglio last spring.

"Obama does have a talented young speechwriter named Jon Favreau, and on the day before the election, Favreau worked up a draft of a victory speech and sent it to Obama. The word came back from Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, who was sitting with Obama in Charlotte, N.C.:

"'Barack wants to lean into bipartisanship a little more. Even though the Democrats have won a great victory, we should reach out and be humbled by it. Figure out a good Lincoln quote to bring it all together,' advised Axelrod, who suggested looking at the end of Lincoln's first Inaugural Address.

"More than familiar with Lincoln's rhetoric, Favreau decided to pass on the most overquoted passage of all, invoking 'the better angels of our nature,' and to quote the words that came before: 'We are not enemies, but friends … Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.'"

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Out in Paperback / Honest Horses

Honest Horses -- Wild Horses in the Great Basin by Paula Morin, UNevada Press '06 paperback, 376 pages, ISBN #087417631X. List of contributors, bibliography, glossary, appendix.

Here's a perfect pick for the horse lovers on your gift list. Photographer/oral historian Paula Morin has interviewed 62 people who know horses from a variety of perspectives: "ranchers, horse breeders and trainers, Native Americans, veterinarians, wild horse advocates, mustangers, range scientists, cowboy poets, western historians, wildlife experts, animal behaviorists, and BLM (Bureau of Land Management) agents..."

From this database, Morin draws insights and opinion about "the nature of horses, ranching and the western environment." Some of this is positive, such as the majesty and beauty of horses. Other parts are sobering, such as interviews with those "who understand how precariously all life exists in the arid vastness of the Great Basin."

Book Alert / Our Lincoln

Our Lincoln -- New Perspectives on Lincoln and his World, Edited by Eric Foner, Norton '08, $27.95, 336 pages, ISBN #0393067564. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

One of the keenest insights History Wire has gained in the four years of its existence is the unslaking thirst of American readers for books about Abraham Lincoln and his times. And while the fashion has been towards scathing, revisionist tracts about the grand old men of our nation's history, surprisingly few seem to be written about our 16th president. No wonder that polls on the subject usually show Honest Abe ranking 1st or 2d among our chief executives.

So the fact that 2009 marks the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth is just one more excuse for  new tomes on this transformational man. Yesterday we reviewed Fred Kaplan's Lincoln -- The Biography of a Writer. Today, we turn to a compilation of new perspectives on Lincoln, edited by Eric Foner. And publisher's advance notices assure us more are on the way.

Comprising the collection are essays by eleven historians: some well known, like James M. McPherson, who writes on Lincoln as commander in chief; and Mark E. Neely, Jr., on how Lincoln dealt with the Constitution and civil liberties; and others less well known, such as Manisha Sinha, who explores the topic of Lincoln and black abolitionists; and Harold Holzer on Lincoln as student, subject and patron of the visual arts. You'll see Holzer's name a lot this year -- he's the chair of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Other contributors include Sean Wilentz, James Oakes, Eric Foner, Andrew Delbanco, Richard Carwardine, Catherine Clinton and David W. Blight.

Book Alert / Covenant

Covenant: Scenes From An African American Church, Photographs by Tyagan Miller, Essay by Yusef Komunyakaa, Indiana UP '07 in coffee table-size format, ISBN #0253348358. Scores of b&w glossy images.

Meet the parishoners of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. Meet 'em up close -- crying, laughing, praying, shouting, grieving. Why should you care about one small, African-American church out there in the heartland? Because its 93 images communicate what it is for any of us to live a life in a way that few readers won't be able to relate to.

The book begins with a movingly evocative essay by Yusef Komunyakaa. Yet just as moving are brief recollections from those pictured, some of which may break your heart. In a graveyard tent, next to a casket settled on silver rails, ready to lower into the grave, a man embraces a woman holding a lone, white rose. She is "Sister I.T., 52 years old," who comments:

"He left me here for a reason. What it is I don't know. He lifted me through all these deaths, through all of the heartache and the pain of burying my father, mother, and brother in a five-year period. And that's a hard thing to go through. But with God, anything can happen. I have no one else. I don't have a mother to lean on. I don't have a father to lean on. I only have God to really talk to, and He knows my heart. It was only Him that brought me through all of this. To see everybody gone, and you're the only one left, and I still don't know why."

 

Attention Carole Lombard Fans: Film Series Coming Up

The New Yorker:

"With immaculate timing, Film Forum has scheduled a series of Carole Lombard films: the perfect response to recession, depression, and other ills, whether of the economy or the soul. One of her most glittering works, showing on Nov. 21 and Nov. 22, is 'My Man Godfrey,' directed by Gregory La Cava, from 1936. Lombard plays Irene Bullock, who scavenges a tramp (William Powell) from the city dump, to use as sport for socialites. He earns a place in her home, as a butler, and consequently in her heart, thus proving his status as one of nature’s gentlemen.

"The title alone lampoons the idea that one American should ever own another. If the movie has worn as well as any screwball, it’s because of the ferocious streak that courses through its revelry—not unlike the filthy laugh and the dirty looks with which Lombard punctuated her breathless chatter. Clad in silk, fluff, and loose pajamas, she bounces beautifully off Powell, who is suavity itself, and off the great Eugene Pallette. If anyone was born to play an angry man called Alexander Bullock, it was he."

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In the "It'll Never Happen" Category, Fidel Castro Gets Religion

Slate.com:

"In January of 2009—on New Year's Day, to be precise—it will have been half a century since the brave and bearded ones entered Havana and chased Fulgencio Batista and his cronies (carrying much of the Cuban treasury with them) off the island. Now the chief of the bearded ones is a doddering and trembling figure, who one assumes can only be hanging on in order to be physically present for the 50^th birthday of his 'revolution.' It's of some interest to notice that one of the ways in which he whiles away the time is the self-indulgence of religion, most especially the improbable religion of Russian Orthodoxy.

"Ever since the upheaval in his own intestines that eventually forced him to cede power to his not-much-younger brother, Raúl, Fidel Castro has been seeking (and easily enough finding) an audience for his views in the Cuban press. Indeed, now that he can no longer mount the podium and deliver an off-the-cuff and uninterruptable six-hour speech, there are two state-run newspapers that don't have to compete for the right to carry his regular column.

"Pick up a copy of the Communist Party's daily Granma (once described by radical Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman as 'a degradation of the act of reading') or of the Communist youth paper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), and in either organ you can read the moribund musings of the maximum leader."

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Book Alert / Lincoln -- The Biography of a Writer

Lincoln -- The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan, Harper '08, $27.95, 406 pages, ISBN #0060773340. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

Fifty years from now, history will size up Barack Obama against other presidents as a wordsmith. Based alone on his pre-presidential writings -- his two books, perhaps his Philadelphia speech on race, without even waiting to hear his inaugural address, it seems likely that he'll rank in the top half-dozen in his sense of composition, nuance, description, and persuasion, right up there with Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Ulysses Grant.

Oh, and that log-splitter from Illinois as well. In his new book, biographer Fred Kaplan describes how important language was to Abe Lincoln, how this autodidact taught himself to read and write, and how he employed the mobilization of language to move crowds. He describes how Lincoln devoured the works of such great writers as Byron, Burns and Shakespeare and how insights and constructions gained therein shaped his own writing.

"Lincoln was also the last president whose character and standards in the use of language avoided the distortions and other dishonest uses of language that have done so much to undermine the creidibility of national leaders," Kaplan writes. "The ability and commitment to use language honestly and consistently have largely disappeared from our political discourse."

While some presidents have respected language enough to hire top-notch speechwriters, says Kaplan, "....the challenge of a president himself struggling to find the language that respects intellect, truth, and sincerity, has largely been abandoned."

Book Alert / Emily Post

Emily Post -- Daughter of the Gilded Age: Mistress of American Manners, Random House '08, $30, 525 pages, ISBN #0375509216. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

In the words of humorist P.J. O'Rourke, "It was the genius of Emily Post to show us that manners are the small coin of morality. You can go years between saving people from burning houses, but you can be polite and kind every day."

But that "genius" was late in her career. Well born, Emily Price was one of Manhattan's most sought-after debutantes. When she married Edwin Post, she anticipated a privileged, happy life much like that of her parents. But when she found herself at the center of a scandalous, highly-public divorce, Emily realized that even though she was living at the turn of the 20th century, any stability she would acquire would come from standing on her two feet.

A 15-year career of writing novels would follow until at age 50, she turned a corner, writing her transforming book Etiquette. In spite of a small first print run, sales grew steadily until the book became a perennial, one its author would update twice a decade to keep it current.

Laura Claridge is the author of several books, including another biography of Emily Post, and has worked as an academic and a journalist.

Hillary Clinton Redux -- Take Note, Michelle

The New York Times:

Editor's Note: In 1992, Anna Quindlen wrote about the first ever professional woman in the White House.

"There's job talk in Little Rock, about who will be Secretary of the Treasury, chief of staff, Attorney General. And there's job talk across the country, too, among many women. Here's the question: Now that we have a First Woman as educated, intelligent, superachieving and policy-savvy as her husband, what do we do with her?

"'Promise me she won't talk about cookies anymore,' moaned a woman in Philadelphia. 'She did what she had to do to get him elected,' said another in New York. 'Now let's give her a real job.'

"And a circle of professional women in San Jose, Calif., erupted at a question about what Hillary Clinton should not do in the White House: 'I don't want her to keep her mouth shut.' 'Forget the photo ops.' 'I don't want her to make hospital visits -- I want her to make policy so that all sick kids will get good care.'

"'The thing is,' said one finally, 'we feel so strongly about it because she's one of us.'

"One of us. So much of the discussion about Hillary Clinton has not been about her at all. It has been about how we feel about smart women, professional women, new women. It's been about nurturing moms and working moms and what we do for love, including keeping our mouths shut. We want her to make the world safe, not only for education reform and preschool programs, but for opinionated women who want to be taken seriously. To do that, she has to do something."

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Site Of Earliest Gay Rights Protests Named Historic-Cultural Monument

The Los Angeles Times:

"The old, illuminated sign of a black and white smiling cat still beckons patrons into a small windowless bar, the site of one of the nation's earliest gay rights protests four decades ago. Just last week, after thousands flooded the streets of Sunset Junction rallying for the rights of same-sex couples to marry, some demonstrators rested their placards under the sign and crowded into the Silver Lake bar now called Le Barcito.

"Forty-one years earlier, the Black Cat, as it was known then, offered a rare gathering place for Los Angeles gays. But it was no safe haven: Police commonly raided taverns, targeting patrons for their sexual orientation.

"In 1967, a police raid at the Black Cat touched off protests that predated by two years the historic Stonewall riots in New York City. The 1969 Stonewall riots, in which gays and lesbians fought back against the police for several nights, are commonly said to have sparked the gay rights movement.

"Last week in Los Angeles, the Black Cat cemented its place in history with a city designation as a historic-cultural monument."

                    

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Book Alert / Prodigy Houses of Virginia

Prodigy Houses of Virginia -- Architecture and the Native Elite by Barbara Burlison Mooney, UVirginia Press '08, $65, 400 pages, ISBN #0813926734. Index, source notes, appendix, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"In choosing to spend astonishing sums to provide themselves with grand houses that far exceeded their living requirements -- in some case, by a disastrous measure -- the owners of these mansions advanced grand claims to social and political prestige."

A commentary on 21st century McMansions? Not quite, though it is certainly apt. Rather, the author is describing the competition among the landed Virginia elite of two centuries ago, to showcase their own personalities and character through their residential architecture.

In doing so, they fed off a statement by fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson in 1788 that "Architecture (is) worth great attention. As we double our numbers every 20 years we must double our houses....It is then among the most important arts: and it is desireable to introduce taste into an art which shews so much." Accordingly, the University of Iowa art historian deals "less with issues of design and construction than with the social and cultural context in which the Virginia gentry commissioned their imposing dwellings."

The subject matter for Mooney's study includes such grand estates as Stratford Hall, Carter's Grove, and Gunston Hall among the 25 mansions studied. Yes, Jefferson afficionados, Mooney visits Monticello in detail as well.

 

Book Alert / Bethlehem Steel

Bethlehem Steel -- Builder and Arsenal of America by Kenneth Warren, Pittsburgh UP '08, $45, 344 pages, ISBN #0822943239. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Remember when the word "crater" described the ditch dug by a falling asteriod? More frequently today, it denotes a failed corporate enterprise and is often used as a verb. It is the bad fortune of author Kenneth Warren, Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, to have written his knowledgeable saga of the rise and fall of Bethlehem Steel just before the bottom fell out of the financial services and auto industries. Another crater? Yawn. Wake me when it's over.

Warren describes how the Bessemer process of refining steel enabled Bethlehem to become a corporate behemoth while helping mightily to build the American infrastructure and support heavy armaments for waging war. Between the two world wars, Bethlehem ranked as the world's second largest steelmaker.

"But in the 1980s and 1990s," the author writes, "through widely fluctuating times, losses outweighed gains, and Bethlehem struggled to downsize and reinvest in newer technologies. By 2001, in financial collapse, it reluctantly filed for Chapter ll bankruptcy protection. Two years later, International Steel group acquired the company for $1.5 billion."