Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / In the Footsteps of the Prophet

In the Footsteps of the Prophet -- Lessons from the Life of Muhammad by Tariq Ramadan, Oxford UP '07, $23, 242 pages, ISBN #0-19-530880-8.  Index, source notes, no bibliography, unillustrated.

Author Tariq Ramadan is a man on a mission. An Oxford University research fellow and a prominent Muslim scholar, he is disturbed by the rigid formalism of many Muslims at a time when personal and social interaction are vital to the future, not only of Islam but the world. He seeks to point a way back to a richer, more productive life by studying the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

Ramadan concedes at the outset that his book does not "disclose any new facts, or provide an original or revolutionary reinterpretation of the history of prophethood and its context." But as the one who received and transmitted the Quran to the masses, the story of the Messenger of Islam bears repeating. "Muslims do not consider the Messenger of Islam a mediator between God and the people. Each individual is invited to address God directly," Ramadan asserts.  Not only is the person-to-God linkage an opportunity, he says, but also a responsibility. So that vital message needs to be reinforced with each succeeding generation.

So the author begins by drawing spiritual teachings from the events of the Prophet's life. Then he interprets the historical events that occurred during Muhammad's life as well. "Our aim," he says "is more to get to know the Prophet himself than to learn about his personality or the events in his life. What is sought are immersion, sympathy, and, essentially, love." Time, in reviewing the book, said "Thanks partly to Ramadan, Islam is on its way to becoming an integral part of Europe's religious landscape."

Book Alert / Hitler's Beneficiaries

Hitler's Beneficiaries -- Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State by Gotz Aly, Metropolitan Books '05, $32.50, 431 pages, ISBN #0-8050-7926-2. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

In the six decades since the end of World War II, a troubling question debated again and again is why did the German man in the street quietly assent to the unspeakable genocide Adolf Hitler unleased against the Jews? Some have gone so far as to suggest genetic anomalies within the German people that incline them towards barbarism.

Historian of the Holocaust Gotz Aly asserts another reason in his gripping book. Just as American politicians generally seem to have higher approval ratings in times of prosperity, Hitler knew at the outset that the best cover for his evil deeds would be to insure that the German middle and working class enjoyed a higher standard of living than ever before, inducing them to turn a blind eye towards the Fuehrer's policies.

Much of the rationale for the Anschluss, Aly finds, was to loot money and property from countries Hitler was capturing and send it quickly home to finance both his military aggression and to create generous social programs for German civilians. Tax breaks and preferential treatment, he contends, helped anesthetize the populace to what their government was doing to a whole race of people.

Recalling Greensboro Sit-Ins: "Freedom On The Menu"

The Chicago Tribune:

"Carole Boston Weatherford wants children to know about the 1960s sit-ins at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. So she wrote 'Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins' about an 8-year-old who doesn't know ordering a banana split at a lunch counter is not child's play.

"She wants boys and girls to recognize the deeds of Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who donated money to build schools for blacks in the early 1900s. So she crafted 'Dear Mr. Rosenwald' about a community coming together to match Rosenwald's funds to build a school. She wants children to understand that Harriet Tubman helped many fellow slaves escape through the Underground Railroad. So she penned 'Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People To Freedom.'

"Weatherford knows, if unguarded, the past can disappear. So the High Point, N.C.-based author writes stories, she says, that focus on fading tradition and forgotten struggles, heroes and heroines. 'People in Greensboro tend to think everyone knows about it, but as you get farther and farther away ... you find fewer and fewer people are familiar with the sit-ins,' she says.

David McCullough's "John Adams" Coming to TV Next Year

BaltimoreSun.com:

"The great historian David McCullough won the Pulitzer Prize for writing the biography of the second president of the United States, John Adams. The other day Mr. McCullough was down near Richmond, Va., visiting the replica that HBO has created there of the famous Massachusetts house of Abigail and John Adams.

"When David walked into the 'Braintree Cottage' set, he broke down and wept. It had taken him seven years to write the book John Adams, and now it was all coming to cinematic life. But after wiping away his tears, McCullough made a wonderfully inspiring speech to the cast and crew. This story is all about Tom Hanks' seven-hour production that stars Paul Giamatti as the man who led the brand-new United States after George Washington. And it's about his devoted and beloved wife, Abigail, as played by Laura Linney. We should see this series next year. Filming has just begun and will take all of spring and summer.

"I had a talk with the 34-year-old 'child prodigy' (my term) director of this endeavor. Tom Hooper comes from London. He is the man who is overseeing the re-creation of this most important part of American history. Tom, who is half-Australian, says being a Londoner helped him, since the arguments John Adams and his fellow revolutionaries are having in this life drama are arguments with the very power center of King George III's England. In fact, when the story begins, John Adams is fighting for his rights as a natural-born Englishman in British America.

"'I find it fascinating -- the gap between rhetoric about the birth of this nation and the reality,' Hooper said. 'Thomas Jefferson was a deep romantic who believed that people are perfectible and could become self-governing. John Adams had a pessimistic view of human nature. Coming from 1770s Boston, he feared the mob and believed people needed strong government. From the clash of these two views comes the whole American debate about more or less government. The debate that resounds today about the power of the executive.'"

"Amazing Grace" Focuses On Antislavery Pioneer William Wilberforce

(California) Daily Pilot:

"As Americans this week partly commemorated the birthday and political career of Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery, British film director Michael Apted brings British antislavery pioneer William Wilberforce to the screen in 'Amazing Grace,' making its Orange County premiere tonight at the Lido Theater in Newport Beach.

"The film's nationwide release on Friday marks 200 years since the passage of the bill that outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, the result of a persistent parliamentary campaign led by Wilberforce. 'This is a true story that had a fairly considerable impact on American history, and it's a story that American audiences don't know anything about,' said Apted, director of the 1980 Academy-Award nominated film 'Coal Miner's Daughter' who is also known for the 'Up' series of documentaries that tracks the lives of a group of individuals every seven years and won a directing Emmy award for 'Rome.'

"The Orange County Film Society — founded in 2006 by the Newport Beach Film Festival with the intention of prolonging the festival experience year round — presents tonight's screening as the first of its 2007 film series. After hearing about the narrative drama's success at the Toronto Film Festival, where it premiered in September, society co-founder Gregg Schwenk was eager to bring the production to Newport Beach. 'Michael Apted is an extremely gifted director and someone who exceeds expectations in any genre,' he said. 'With this film, he tells a very powerful and moving story that needed to get out to audiences prior to its release.'"

Book Alert / Union 1812

Union 1812 -- The Americans Who Fought The Second War Of Independence by A. J. Langguth, Simon & Schuster, $30, 482 pages, ISBN #0-7432-2618-6. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

It's been a long while since most of us stopped thinking of wars as having clear winners and losers and the white flag of surrender as settling matters for all time. Recent years have brought us a cornucopia of books on how the First World War (ironically called the Great War) did little more than create the tensions that paved the way for the Second World War.

As historian A.J. Langguth reminds us, America's Revolutionary War "signified only the end of a first act; the emergency of America as a fledgling nation in no way guaranteed longevity." And tensions developed not only from foreign bullying but from internal conflicts as well. So the seeds of the author's subject, the War of 1812, were laid decades earlier. He profiles the role of John Adams, named "His Rotundity" after he complained president wasn't a sufficiently grand title; Presidents Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison and their interaction with the likes of duel-prone Andrew Jackson, scheming Vice President Aaron Burr, pirate Jean Lafitte and Shawnee chief Tecumseh.

The roiling soup of tensions boiled over in 1812, when Madison declared war against Britain. Unlike the Revolutionary War, this conflict seemed eminently winnable, especially with England's ongoing engagement with Europe.  But so did the Iraq War to one American head of state. By 1814, Britain had invaded and razed the President's House, the Capitol and Treasury, War and State departments. Conflicts rage on in a stop-and-start manner, interspersed with peace negotiations until Andrew Jackson wins the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. One of the war's legacies, Langguth writes, is the exacerbation of sectional conflicts over slavery that would lead directly to the Civil War nearly a half-century later.

Book Alert / Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints -- Essays

Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints -- Essays by Joan Acocella, Pantheon '07, $30, 524 pages, ISBN #0-375-42416-8. b&w images sprinkled through text.

Squeezing good fortune from adversity is the overarching theme of Joan Acocella's new book of essays. The New Yorker staff writer has a fascination with the creative process and how it intersects with luck, courage and perseverance. She illustrates her theme in essays about saints Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene and 31 lesser mortals like the rest of us. And an impressive cast of characters it is: from Simone de Beauvoir to Bob Fosse, from Dorothy Parker to Lincoln Kirstein.

We sometimes think of the "what might have been"s of life in terms of "If I didn't have a family to support.....if I had had a chance for an education." Acocella thinks of the same theme in the vein of "What if the Nazis had killed Primo Levi?" The fact that the renowned chemist managed to break free of those clutches allowed him to write Survival in Auschwitz as well as a dozen more books.

Aspiring lawyer Hilary Mantel, confined to home by a draining illness, figured out that she might not be able to practice law but she still could write and ended up becoming  a heralded British novelist. George Balanchine founded the New York City Ballet but not before surviving the Russian Revolution and escaping from the Soviet Union. Perhaps Acocella's book should be subtitled, "Think You Got Troubles?"

Students Puzzle Identity of Mystery Corpse

Lexington (KY) Herald Leader:

"A Madison County high school class is trying to solve the mystery of a lone body buried in a cast-iron coffin discovered when excavators were converting pastureland into a residential development. Students in Todd Moberly's advanced placement American history class at Madison Southern High School have received some help from state officials to answer their questions, the Richmond Register reported.

"Dr. Emily Craig, the state forensic anthropologist, determined that the death was not the result of foul play, and the Kentucky Archaeological Survey found no other burials near the unmarked grave. The body was dressed in a silk shirt with a hand-tied bow tie, Moberly said. It was adorned with a wool frock coat.

"'Someone must have really cared for this person to spend so much on his burial,' said senior Cory Jones. 'Why would anyone go to such expense and then bury this person in an isolated grave?' Moberly asked his students. 'In those days, most people were buried in family cemeteries.'

"Moberly theorizes that the deceased may have been a distinguished visitor, perhaps a traveling preacher, who died on a visit to Richmond. The burial site was not far from the White Oak Pond Church, founded in the early 19th century. After learning all they could from a visit to the state archaeologists' laboratory at the University of Kentucky, the students set out to determine who owned the property when the body was buried."

While decorative details cover the cast-iron coffin, it contains no identification except the name of its manufacturer, J.A. Fiske.

John Tyler, Forgotten President? Not in Chicago

Chicago Sun Times:

"Van Buren. Jackson. Harrison. Polk. Taylor. And even Fillmore. Who's missing from the presidents row of streets? It's Tyler, our 10th president, whom Teddy Roosevelt described as 'a politician of monumental littleness.' But the forgettable Tyler really wasn't forgotten, according to our reader-historians.

"Well, what do you know -- once upon a time in Chicago, there really was a Tyler Street. But apparently John Tyler proved so odious -- a miserable president who sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War -- that the City Council more than a century ago stripped him of the honor.

"Tyler Street became the Congress Parkway. Which, admittedly, is hardly much better. But at least now we know."

Bill Buckley On Ronald Reagan the Transcendentalist

The New York Sun:

                                                    BY WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

"Another birthday has slid by — Ronald Reagan would have been 96 on February 6. Recent books on Reagan and his reign were not designed to celebrate the occasion, but one in particular cannot be read other than as celebrating Reagan. How? Remarking what?

"A professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, John Diggins, has written many books, including one that celebrates the achievements of the American left. Mr. Diggins is not, in other words, a member of the Reagan camp; rather, a historian who surprises by his imagination and fluent capacity to integrate the figure he is looking at into the folds of distinctly American traditions.

"In Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, Mr. Diggins identifies Reagan as an Emersonian: that is, as following in the tradition of the Transcendentalist of pre–Civil War days who preached the doctrine of human freedom and self-fulfillment as the fruit of our likeness to God.

Mr. Diggins believes that Reagan was most remarkable for his optimism. When Reagan declared, in 1984, that it was "morning in America," he was exactly living out his mandate as an Emersonian, greeting each day with the joy that is natural on reminding oneself that God, no less, created you and that you serve him by expressing the joy in every morning as you absorb, and even reflect, divine generosity.