Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / In Europe -- Travels Through the Twentieth Century

In Europe -- Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Max, Pantheon '07, $35, 876 pages, ISBN #0375424954. Index, glossary, no bibliography, source notes or illustrations but features maps of the changing face of Europe over time.

It is rare that the sometimes conflicting approaches of a journalist and a historian merge towards one goal. So it is with Geert Mak, a popular Dutch writer, who in 1999 was assigned by the newspaper NRC Handelsblad to spend a year touring Europe stem to stern, to determine what the 20th century had done to it and to take its pulse at century's end. To do so, he visited the European places that had made history and interviewed scores of people whose fathers and grandfathers had built, destroyed, triumphed and suffered.

And, of course, he often came up against the reality that there is no one Europe, as much as the European Community now seeks to create one. Mak describes some of his subjects: "the older Polish truck driver I spoke to, who had been forced four times in his life to learn a new language; the German couple, bombed out of their home and then endlessly driven from place to place throughout Eastern Europe; the Basque family that fell apart one Christmas Eve arguing about the Spanish Civil War, and never spoke to each other again."

In the course of his meanderings, Mak gains some searing insights. In an Eastern European cafe, an old sage described the mixed blessing of being able to migrate to the prosperous West: "...you're going to lose some very precious things: friendship, the ability to get by without a lot of money, the skills to repair things that are broken, the freedom to raise your own pigs and slaughter them as you see fit, the freedom to burn as much timber as you like...." Mak's is an innovative approach that deepens historical understanding.

Book Alert / Revolution On My Mind

Revolution On My Mind -- Writing A Diary Under Stalin by Jochen Hellbeck, Harvard UP '06, $29.95, 436 pages, ISBN #0674021746. Index, note on sources, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Some writers approach the writing of serious nonfiction in a deliberate way, taking a subject on which they'd written their dissertation, for example, then obtaining a research fellowship to gain the time to write a full manuscript. And others fall into their subjects quite by chance. Rutgers University historian Jochen Hellbeck is one of those.

In 1990, he had just completed research in Moscow on the fate of Russia's peasants under Stalin and was preparing to leave for America when a street sign titled "People's Archive" caught his eye. He knew that Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal reforms had opened up Soviet records for the world to see, but he was quite unprepared for what he would encounter once he had negotiated the aisles of an old Times Square-type shop selling music tapes and transistor radios. For behind the shop lay a mission: the collecting and preservation of diaries of ordinary citizens, recounting what it was like to live under Stalinism.

The first diary Hellbeck came across told of a man persecuted by the Soviets because his father was a "class enemy." In this, as in later diaries he accessed, Hellbeck found oppressed citizens who, movingly, tried to adapt to Stalinism by trying their best to become model communists. Of the diary of Stepan Filipovich Podlubny, he writes: "The diary revealed a double life fraught with tension and danger; but most remarkably it documented this man's attempts to remake himself -- he seemed to yearn to become the person he impersonated."

Hellbeck draws from dozens of such diaries -- from students to housewives to intellectuals -- to reconstruct life in a lost era. Watching people try, to various degrees, to subordinate their individualism to a collectivist movement aimed at building a socialist society I found to be a vigorous affirmation of the virtues of democracy.

Arthur Miller's "Missing Act": Son Born With Down Syndrome

The New York Times:

"It had been something of an open secret for years, but most people did not learn the story of Daniel Miller until last week, when Vanity Fair published an article called 'Arthur Miller’s Missing Act.' As described in Suzanna Andrews’s 5,000-word article, Arthur Miller, who died in February 2005, and his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, had a son born with Down syndrome in 1966. Soon after, they made the painful decision to put the child, Miller’s youngest, in an institution for the mentally retarded before Miller essentially cut him out of his life.

"Ms. Andrews describes in detail how Miller rarely, if ever, accompanied his wife on weekly visits to see Daniel, almost never mentioned him to shocked friends and didn’t mention him in his memoir, 'Timebends.' The picture that emerges is of a father in denial and a son who has moved on to live a happy life without him. 'Miller excised a central character who didn’t fit the plot of his life as he wanted it,' Ms. Andrews writes.

"Reactions to this article, among those working in theater and on a flood of message boards and blogs, have been emotional, and they have raised questions about what effect, if any, this will have on this playwright’s legacy."

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Evolution Possible In Texas? Governor Commutes Death Penalty To Life

The Nation:

"There are many Americans who do not believe in evolution. And it is probably fair to say that a disproportionate number of them reside in Texas. But it is from Texas that we gain confirmation of the absolute certainty that human evolution is a reality.

"When George Bush was governor of Texas in the 1990s, he approved executions with impunity, sending to death those who might have been innocent and those who might have been guilty, those who had repented and those who had not, those who had adequate representation and those whose lawyers slept through the trials, those who had the mental capacity to understand their crimes, those whose mental state would have barred even a trial in more civilized jurisdictions.

"In all, Bush signed more 150 execution orders as governor, a record for the state and nation. The world press recognized him as the 'Texecutioner' or, in the slightly less volatile phrasing of London's Independent newspaper: 'a death penalty enthusiast.' As president, Bush has continued his energetic advocacy for state-sponsored slaying. Only this month, it was reported that Bush and his soon-to-be-former Attorney General had developed a plan to speed up the executions of Americans lingering on the nation's death rows. The plan, which will be one of the last initiatives of Alberto Gonzales, is to make it easier for executions to be 'fast-tracked' by states that want to avoid long appeals processes in the federal courts.

"The Bush-Gonzales plan is to borrow a page from recent anti-terrorism legislation -- which strip away habeas corpus protections and other legal guarantees -- in order to allow states to rely on the Justice Department, rather than the federal courts, to decide whether death-row inmates received adequate representation at trial. That would eliminate one of the primary avenues of appeal from convictions in states such as Texas, which have a history of providing inadequate representation for poor and minority defendants. Bush and Gonzales, who have worked together since the president's days in Texas to make the killing machines of the states run more smoothly, also want to reduce the amount of time that death-row inmates have to file federal appeals and to pursue them.

"So what's this about evolution? Clearly, Bush has not grown as a human being or as a public official with the power to decide who lives and dies. But Bush is no longer the governor of Texas. Conservative Republican Rick Perry has the job. And on Wednesday, Perry commuted the sentence of Texas death row inmate Kenneth Foster's sentence to life. The decision came just hours before an innocent man was to be killed by the state -- a prospect that would not, in all likelihood, have concerned George Bush or Alberto Gonzales but that did concern Rick Perry."

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David Frum Casts Critical Eye On Colin Jones's History of France

National Review:

                                                         By David Frum         

"The Great Nation is hailed by its publisher as the first single-volume history of 18th-century France in English in 40 years. That's a pretty remarkable claim, but it's not the reason I bought the book. I bought it because it was written by Colin Jones, whose delightful history of the city of Paris I read and praised earlier this summer.

"As scholarship, The Great Nation represents an even more impressive achievement than Jones' history of Paris. The book takes its place in Penguin's projected new multivolume history of France (as far as I can tell from the Penguin site, it is the only volume as yet published), and it attempts to synthesize a generation of scholarship in multiple languages.

"Perhaps for that reason, The Great Nation is alas not only far less enjoyable than Jones's history of Paris, but oddly, far less useful. Over the past four decades, French history has turned away from high politics to a close study of local social realities. Under the influence of the structuralist 'Annales' school, recent French history writing has tended to emphasize the supposedly unchanging (or only very slowly changing) dynamics of everyday life rather than dramatic events in far-off capitals. Marginal persons — slaves, poor peasants, subordinated women — have been spotlighted as central characters."

Book Alert / Bridges of Memory

Bridges of Memory -- Chicago's Second Generation of Black Migration  -- An Oral History by Timuel D. Black, jr., Northwestern UP '07, $34.95, 392 pages, ISBN #0-8101-2295-2. Index, no bibliography or source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

As described so masterfully in Nicholas Lemann's Promised Land in the early 1990s, a huge wave of African-Americans, largely from Mississippi and Louisiana, surged north in the first half of the 20th century, changing forever both the land they left and their new home in Greater Chicago. Now Timuel D. Black, Jr., social scientist and one of the first wave of migrants, has chronicled the experience of those pioneers, in their own words.

His first volume of this series interviewed the first generation of migrants, who reached the Windy City from 1915 to 1950. In Bridges of Memory, he concludes their story and then "bridges" to the second generation, who stood on the shoulders of the first, and had a qualitatively different experience. Chicago was largely segregated when the  first generation arrived, whereas the second generation, many of whom took part in the civil rights movement, met a mixture of racial gains and persistent discrimination.

Those Black interviewed are those prominent largely in the Greater Chicago region. However, such national figures as actor and activist Paul Robeson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randoph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and aviator Bessie Coleman, sweep through the memories of these Chicago residents.

Richard Nixon in 1987: "You Didn't All Go To Harvard, Did You?

The American Spectator:

"Hands clasped behind his back, he was a silent silhouette as he gazed out the window overlooking the Washington skyline.

"Hearing our entrance, former President Richard Nixon turned and crossed the room to greet us. 'You didn't all go to Harvard, did you?' he asked with a smile. None of us had, something that clearly appealed to the graduate of Whittier College. Ironically, the only Harvard graduate in our midst was Hugh Hewitt, a Nixon aide (and ex-Reagan aide as well) who today is a radio talk show host.

"It was July 1987. In a rare Washington visit to attend the funeral of Arthur Burns, a former Federal Reserve Board chairman who had also been the President's friend and economic adviser, word reached the Reagan White House political staff that Nixon would like to meet with us.

"Shuttled from the White House over to a nearby Washington hotel to avoid press attention, all of us in our early thirties, it would be a moment to remember. Scheduled for a half hour, the meeting went almost two. The topics ranged far and wide, with Nixon's complex personality, keen political understanding and mastery of world affairs all on display. Topics included current events (the Iran-Contra affair was then unfolding on the nation's television screens and Robert Bork had just been nominated to the Supreme Court) the upcoming 1988 presidential campaign, the 1960 election, and the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union."

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Arkansas Bumper Sticker Battle: "I Miss Bill" Vs. "Monica Misses Bill Too"

Rocky Mountain News:

"Little Rock, Ark. - Skip Rutherford is not on the unofficial Clinton-tour brochure you get at the airport. But he ought to be. He is pulling on a bottle of Dr Pepper - no diet, full strength - in the hotel dining room and talking to me about his old friends, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Let's just say he's so practiced at it he almost makes you believe he enjoys it.

"And not long after we sit down, he has this to say about Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes: 'I learned long ago to never underestimate the Clintons. Never.' The Clintons have been, of course, the main topic of conversation in Arkansas for about 30 years. No one underestimates that. And Rutherford is the go-to guy for a reporter coming to town.

"He was the point man in building the Clinton Library, which is packed with tourists. He's the University of Arkansas' William J. Clinton professor at the Clinton School of Public Service, which is hard to fit on a business card. He met Bill and his girlfriend, Hillary, in 1974 during Bill's first campaign, his losing run for Congress. He was an adviser in Clinton's first presidential race. His daughter played softball with Chelsea. (Note: Chelsea caught and his daughter played third.) Rutherford knows where the bodies are buried, not that he'd tell you without a subpoena.

"He does advise a visit to the library and to the library gift shop, where the 'I Miss Bill' bumper stickers and T-shirts are best-sellers, which particularly annoys state Republicans. Later, one would slip me a copy of the unofficial counter-Clinton bumper sticker: 'Monica Misses Bill Too' - just to remind us that Arkansas, where politics can be a blood sport, is still very much Arkansas. And that the Clinton divide is as wide as ever."

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Teen Novel Focuses On 1957 Little Rock School Integration Struggle

CincinnatiEnquirer.com:

"Kennedy Heights author and former teacher Sharon M. Draper is back with her first teen novel since 'Copper Sun,' which won the 2007 Coretta Scott King Author Award in January. "Fire From the Rock' (Dutton/Penguin, $16.99) is historical fiction, and as with all her books, race relations play a central role.

"It's 1957 in Little Rock, Ark., and 15-year-old Sylvia Patterson is about to enter high school. She's looking forward to it for all the normal teen reasons. Then, her teacher asks if she can submit Sylvia's name to be among the first students to integrate the city's Central High School.

"Even though the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Central High remained all white.

"The book is timed to the 50th anniversary of the landmark moment in American history. Draper, 59, pulled the idea from her childhood. She vividly recalls sitting in her family's Cleveland living room watching news reports about Little Rock and being terrified by what she saw. The story is told chronologically starting on Jan. 1, 1957, and is broken up by Sylvia's diary entries, making it intimate and highly personal. Early reviews are good. 'Draper evokes the escalating tensions and violence of that seminal summer, giving them a sense of immediacy via a strong central character,' said Kirkus magazine."

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Book Alert / The Smoke of the Gods

The Smoke of the Gods -- A Social History of Tobacco -- by Eric Burns, Temple UP '07, $29, 280 pages, ISBN #1-59213-480-7. Index, select bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

A mere half-century ago, Connecticut celebrated the Tobacco Valley Festival, replete with floats honoring Miss Broadleaf Tobacco or Miss Shade-Grown Cigar (where was Monica Lewinsky when we needed her?). After the parade, we'd head to downtown movie palaces to watch leading men and ladies puff away sexily, even in love scenes. If your state grew tobacco then, you could undoubtedly recount similar memories.

Today, of course, smoking is banned in restaurants and most public places. A few diehards still decry government's intrusion into people's personal habits, but others wonder why it took four decades following the 1964 U.S. Surgeon-General's announcement that smoking is hazardous to our health for these prohibitions to occur.

Eric Burns recounts this transformation in his new book, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Burns, who also wrote a social history of alcohol (which vice will he tackle next?), takes us back to the Mayan civilization of 1,500 years ago, when a clay or stone pipeful of tobacco was considered "a portable altar" and the "most ingenious religious artifact ever invented." Burns traces the use of tobacco for medicinal use and its massive contribution to the economic health of American colonies and the bankrolls of our founding fathers.

Along the way, he recalls paeans to tobacco, such as this overblown one from French missionary Jacques Cartier:

"There is nothing more mysterious or respected than the pipe....Less honor is paid to the crowns and scepters of kings. It seems to be the god of peace and war, the arbiter of life and death. It has to be but carried on one's person, and displayed, to enable one to walk through the midst of enemies, who, in the hottest of fights, lay down their arms when it is shown."

Yet Burns is under no illusions about tobacco's true nature: "It was from the start a commodity that could be adapted to many ends, that could be dressed up in so many convincing disguises that it would take centuries for human beings to strip away all the layers and work their way down to the bitter, uncompromising, and often fatal truth."