Steve Goddard's History Wire

FOCUS: American History -- Ethan Allen / So Rugged and Mountainous / Lies My Teacher Told Me

Ethan Allen -- His Life and Times by Willard Sterne Randall, Norton '11, $35, 617 pages, ASIN #0393076652. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Just in case you were wondering, the name Ethan Allen denotes much more than a furniture store. In historian Willard Sterne Randall's new book, he draws on previously unused source material to provide a complex portrait of this handsome, rebellious, libertarian, anti-slavery crusading soldier. Because of "only recently accessible databases," Randall is able to go further than any historian "in refining the Ethan Allen who has erroneously been branded a real life Robin Hood -- one who selflessly represented the needs of the struggling Grfeen Mountain settlers." In fact, Randall argues, "Allen used his political disposition to aggrandize and unabashedly so, the holdings of his own family...." Willard Sterne Randall has written 12 books and teaches history at Champlain College. His book won starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.

So Rugged and Mountainous by Will Bagley, Overland West -- The Story of the Oregon and California Trails, Volume 1, Oklahoma UP '11, $45, 480 pages, ASIN #0806141034. Index, bibliography, footnotes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

After years of research he conducted for the National Park Service's Long Distance Trails Office, Will Bagley decided to weave "a wealth of primary sources -- personal letters and journals, government documents, newspaper reports, and folk accounts -- into a compelling narrative that reinterprets the first years of overland migration." The result is an elegant, oversized volume that attempts to chronicle America's westward migration, in which "almost a million eager fortune-hunters, pioneers, and visionaries transformed the face of a continent -- and displaced its previous inhabitants," largely Native Americans." Bagley's book is the first of a projected four-volume history. Will Bagley is author or editor of more than a dozen books on the American West.

Lies My Teacher Told Me --Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, New Press '07, $26.95, 444 pages, ASIN #1595583262. Index, appendix, notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

First published in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me is has sold more than a million copies. Its reissue contains the original content but also recounts world events that have happened since then, such as the War in Iraq and the 2001 New York terrorist attacks. While an avowed foe of racism, Loewen devotes chapters both to "the invisibility of racism in American History textbooks" and "the invisibility of anti-racism in American History textbooks," suggesting that teachers and textbook publishers often duck important issues, to the detriment of the American public. His scope begins with the pre-Columbian period, "ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, and the MyLai massacre." James W. Loewen is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont. He lives in Washington, D.C.

FOCUS: Historical Fiction -- Leaving Van Gogh / Night Train

Leaving Van Gogh -- A Novel by Carol Wallace, Spiegel & Grau '11 $25, 268 pages, ASIN #1400068797.

Books, both fiction and nonfiction, are now in vogue about the link between madness and both art and leadership. Carol Wallace's debut novel's protagonist is a Dr. Gachet, personal physician to painter Vincent Van Gogh, whose mission is to explain Van Gogh's suicide at age 37. What a shame that this master had painted 2,000 works of art at the time of his death yet was a virtual unknown, even though many of those works have become acclaimed and valued today. In pursuing her quest, the author relies on primary historical documents, including the artist's prolific correspondence with his brother, Theo. New Yorker Carol Wallace has written numerous books, including co-authoring The Official Preppy Handbook. 

The Night Train -- A Novel by Clyde Edgerton, Little Brown '11, $23.99, 215 pages, ASIN #0316117595.

Fans of Clyde Edgerton's fiction know his penchant for humor and music. He employs both in his latest novel, whose two protagonists are a 17-year-old white North Carolinian and devotee of singer James Brown and his friend, a young black jazz afficionado named Larry Lime, who dreams of playing piano like Thelonious Monk, and whose mother prays her son's love for music will allow him to escape the South. In spite of racial pressures around them, the two youngsters use humor, a dancing chicken, and a mutual passion for music to achieve their dreams. Edgerton's humor reminds us "not only of the divided national history of our recent past but of the important role music played in bringing people together and transcending racial lines..." Clyde Edgerton, a musician and former Guggenheim Fellow, has written nine previous novels.

FOCUS: Horsing Around -- The Sport of Kings and the King's Crime / The Horse in the City

The Sport of Kings and the King's Crime -- Horse Racing, Politics, and Organized Crime in New York, 1865--1913 by Steven A. Riess, Syracuse UP '11, $45, 432 pages, ASIN #081560985X. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Time was when fans gravitated to horse racing because of its elite status, its pageantry, and the excitement of the races themselves. But to coin a cliche', to learn why the sport became hugely popular in the long term, follow the money. And that means gambling, practiced legally and illegally, on-track and off-track, and as innocent as a $2 beg or as corrupted as a mafia don. Historian Steven A. Riess writes, "The sport's survival depended upon the racetrack being the nexus between politicians and organized crime. The powerful alliance between urban machine politics and track owners enabled racing in New York to flourish." Riess probes the history and effect on the sport of the American Jockey Club, the  New York Racing Commission, and Tammany Hall. Steven A. Riess has taught history at Northeastern Illinois University for 35 years and has written several books on the history of sport.

The Horse in the City -- Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century by Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, Johns Hopkins UPress '11, 242 pages, ASIN #142140043X. Index, no bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w images and other b&w images sprinkled through text.

From the book's cover: "Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, prominent scholars of American urban life, here explore the critical role of the horse in the growing nineteenth metropolis. Using diverse sources, they examine how horses were housed and fed; how workers bred, trained, marketed, and employed their four-legged assets; and how horses affected the physical form of the city. In addition to providing an insightful account of life and work in nineteenth-century urban America, The Horse in the City brings us to a richer understanding of how the animal fared in terms of both treatment and health in this unnatural and presumably uncomfortable setting." American Historical Review, in reviewing this book, called it "A brilliant account of an incredibly important but understudied topic." Clay McShane teaches history at Northeastern University. Joel A. Tarr teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University.

Author Robert Dallek Relates "Untold Story" of the Bay of Pigs

Newsweek.com:

"From a transport ship floating in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, CIA operative Grayston Lynch knew the U.S. mission to overthrow Fidel Castro was faltering. The Cuban exiles he had brought with him had abandoned their posts, so he grabbed the boat’s recoilless rifles and machine guns and began firing at the aircraft overhead.

"On a day of chaos and infamy in April 1961, Lynch would soon understand the consequences of his shooting. He had fired on his agency’s own planes, which were trying to protect the U.S.-led Cuban exiles invading the island from being slaughtered by Castro’s forces. 'We couldn’t tell them from the Castro planes,' Lynch later explained. 

"The Bay of Pigs is one of America’s most infamous Cold War blunders, and it has been studied, debated, and dramatized endlessly ever since. Yet, for 50 years, details like Lynch’s story were hidden away in top-secret CIA files that were finally released this month and reviewed by NEWSWEEK.

"The CIA’s official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how the still-green President John F. Kennedy scrambled to keep the U.S. from entering into a full conflict with Cuba."

                                           (Click above link to read more)

 

 

Son of a...... What Happens to Offspring of Deposed Dictators?

Slate.com:

 

A videograb shows Seif al-Islam Kadhafi,

son of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi

"Libyan rebels swept into Tripoli on Sunday, taking three of Muammar Qaddafi's sons into custody along the way. The National Transitional Council is in negotiations to hand over Saif al-Islam, Qaddafi's second son, to the International Criminal Court. Do the children of dictators typically go down with their fathers?

"Only if they're in politics. The son of a bloody tyrant can go on to lead a relatively normal, even productive life if he convinces the new government that he had nothing to do with his father's regime. Nicu and Valentin Ceausescu, the two sons of executed Romanian strongman Nicolae, are examples. Nicu was a high-profile participant in his father's government. When the revolution came, he was tried as a member of the regime and sentenced to 20 years. Valentin had nothing to do with the bloody dictatorship, and the rebels let him walk.

"Today, the 'soft-spoken' 63-year-old physicist is the poster child for the surviving offspring of overthrown dictators. There are plenty of other blameless children of dictators who have walked away unscathed. Jaffar Amin, the 10th of Idi Amin's 40-or-so children by seven wives, currently does voice-over work in commercials in Uganda.'"

                                          (Click above link to read more)

Happy Birthday, Greenbacks! Sorry 'bout That, Gold Standard

The New Yorker: 

"Last Monday was the fortieth birthday of the United States dollar as a fiat currency—that is, a currency backed not by a precious metal, or something solid like it, but by the promissory authority of a government. On August 15, 1971, President Nixon, after a secret meeting at Camp David with his economic advisers, closed the gold window and effectively ended the gold standard. Henceforth, the Federal Reserve would no longer exchange other central banks’ dollars, or anyone’s, for gold at a fixed price. Instead, it could print as much money as it felt it needed to. 

"Forty, as anyone who has turned it can attest, is, at best, an occasion for ambivalence and, at worst, a bracing peek over the top of the hill. For its four-decade birthday, last week, Paper Dollar, Jr., was confettied with grim statistics and hooted anew by goldbugs and critics of the Fed. The slide show of P.D., Jr.,’s life, to be sure, features some ugly bits—inflation, recession, rising unemployment, harmful speculations, ballooning debt.

"The regime of which the dollar is the centerpiece, in its role as the world’s reserve currency, is now teetering. It is a shadow of itself. Stooped and arthritic, it smells of mothballs and can no longer afford its beloved Swiss chocolates. It keeps forgetting our names and getting lost on the way home. Still, the average life expectancy for a fiat currency is twenty-seven years; so, by that measure, the greenback has had a good run. 'Speech! Speech!'"

                                   (Click above link to read more)

World War II Japanese Interment Camp in Wyoming Revisited

The Los Angeles Times:

"Reporting from Heart Mountain, Wyo.—

"When they first came to this corner of Wyoming 69 years ago, shops and restaurants in the tiny town of Cody hung banners warning 'No Japs Allowed.' A local newspaper announced their arrival with the headline, 'TEN THOUSAND JAPS TO BE INTERNED HERE.'

"But this weekend, as hundreds of Japanese Americans interned during World War II at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center returned, many for the first time, new signs greeted them: 'Welcome all Japanese Americans. Congratulations.'"

                                               (Click above link to read more)

 

Team Claims It Has Found Oldest Fossils On Earth

The New York Times:

"A team of Australian and British geologists have discovered fossilized, single-cell organisms that are 3.4 billion years old and that the scientists say are the oldest known fossils on earth.

"Their assertion, if sustained, confirms the view that life evolved on earth surprisingly soon after the Late Heavy Bombardment, a reign of destruction in which waves of asteroids slammed into the primitive planet, heating the surface to molten rock and boiling the oceans into an incandescent mist. The bombardment, which ended around 3.85 billion years ago, would have sterilized the earth’s surface of any incipient life.

"The claim is also a new volley in a long-running conflict over who has found the oldest fossil. The new microfossils are described in Sunday’s issue of Nature Geoscience by a team led by David Wacey of the University of Western Australia and Martin D. Brasier of the University of Oxford. The fossils were found in sandstone at the base of the Strelley Pool rock formation in Western Australia."

                                            (Click above link to read more)

FOCUS: American History -- The Last Gunfight / American Nursing / Killer Stuff and Tons of Money / Age of Greed

The Last Gunfight -- The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral -- And How it Changed the American West by Jeff Guinn, Simon and Schuster '11, $27, 392 pages, ASIN #1439154244. Index, bibliography, notes, note on sources, grouping of b&w glossy images.

 

Jeff Guinn's new book is a revisionist account of the legend of the shootout at the O.K. Corral. To gain a new take on things, the author draws on diaries, letters, "and Wyatt Earp's own hand-drawn sketch of the shootout's conclusion," as well as documentary research in the archives of the town of Tombstone and state of Arizona and dozens of interviews. The author stresses that the gunfight wasn't a defining white hat/black hat battle between good and evil. But he calls it an "inevitable clash between competing social, political, and economic forces representing the old West of ruggedly independent ranchers and cowboys and the emerging new West of wealthy mining interests and well-heeled town folk." Jeff Guinn has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction and was a finalist for the Edgar Award in 2010.

American Nursing -- A History of Knowledge, Authority, and the Meaning of Work by Patricia D'Antonio, Johns Hopkins UP '10 paperback. 251 pages, ASIN #0801895650. Index, essay on sources, notes, appendix, b&w images sprinkled throughout text.

My nurse mother (Class of 1929 Hartford Hospital) once recalled that during her career, nurses were taught to spring to their feet whenever a doctor entered the room, a custom my nurse practitioner wife (Class of 1975 Hartford Hospital) finds terribly inequitable. In her new book, nursing scholar Patricia D'Antonio takes readers back to a time that both my mother and wife would abhor -- when nurses were largely volunteers and uncompensated. "This began to change at the end of the 19th century," she writes, "when the prospect of formal training opened doors for women which previously had been closed." Such training led to economic mobility and stability and the author explores the intersections in the field of identity, work, gender, education, and race. Patricia D'Antonio is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

Killer Stuff and Tons of Money -- Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America by Maureen Stanton, Penguin '11, $26.95, 326 pages, ASIN #1594202931. Index, bibliography, notes, list of pseudonyms, unillustrated.

 

A brief excerpt:

"Curt Avery scans the tables with a piercing gaze, like the Six Million Dollar Man deploying his laser vision. Twenty feet away from one table, he sings a ditty into my ear. 'I just made a hundred doll-ars." He picks up a butter churn, a small glass canister with a wooden paddle wheel inside, and pays the asking price of $40. 'They made very few one-quart butter churns,' he explains out of the dealer's earshot, 'because for all the work you did, you only got a little butter. You do the same amount of work in a two-quart churn and double the butter. Once they figured that out, they didn't make too many of the one-quarts. They're rare.' This bit of esoterica -- and Avery has hundreds more like it -- will earn him a clean C-note when he resells the one-quart churn for close to $200." Maureen Stanton, who teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Missouri, has written for a number of journals. Three of her essays were listed as Notable Essays in the Best American Essays series.

Age of Greed -- The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick, Knopf '11, $30, 464 pages, ASIN #1400041716. Index, no bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

When I watched economics writer Jeff Madrick deliver a university lecture some years ago, I marveled at his ability to drive home a complicated thesis, completely without notes, while pacing up and down the auditorium aisles. He brings the same fluency to his writing, as he describes the "single-minded pursuit of huge personal wealth" that has dominated American economic thinking since the 1970s to the detriment of the republic. In so doing, he recounts how American presidents from Kennedy to Obama interacted with such economists as Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alan Greenspan and such corporate heavyweights as Walter Wriston, Sandy Weill, and Michael Milken. Jeff Madrick is a former economics columnist for The New York Times, has written several books on economics, and has taught economic policy at several educational institutions.

FOCUS: A Little of This, A Little of That -- The Violent Empire / All About Love / Hedda Hopper's Hollywood

The Violent Empire -- The Birth of an American National Identity by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, UNo. Carolina '10, $45, 512 pages, ASIN #0807832960. Index, no bibliography, footnotes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

For all its compassion, foreign aid, and progressive politics, America's flip side deals with violence, racism, and paranoia. The author traces these negative elements directly to "the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self." The author argues it was because of the lack of a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture that America had to solidify its national sense of self by imagining a series of "'Others' (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless), whose differences from European-American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders." Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan, has written numerous books.

All About Love -- Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion by Lisa Appignanesi. Norton '11, $28.95, 401 pages, ASIN #0393069451. Index, bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinled through text.

"Unruly and unpredictable," Lisa Appignanesi writes, "love rules our lives. It shapes not only our dreams and fantasies but also literature and music, the course of history, and the fabric of society. In her new book, she draws on history, literature, psychology, philosophy, and popular culture to flesh out her narrative. She divides her book into six sections: Part One: Overture: The Riddle of Love; Part Two: Configurations of passion: First Love, Young Love; Part Three: Love and Marriage; Part Four: Love in Triangles; Part Five: Love in Families; and Part Six: Love and Friendship. Along the way, the author discusses such questions as "Does love that encounters no obstacles have meaning? How has the nature of intimacy changed? What gains and losses have come from greater openness and equality? And In a world of seemingly infinite opportunity, why are we still not satisfied? Laura Appignanesi, who lives in London, has written numerous prize-winning books of fiction and nonfiction.

Hedda Hopper's Hollywood -- Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism, New York UPress '11, $35, 281 pages, ASIN #0814728235. Index, no bibliography, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Few people under 60 have ever heard of Hedda Hopper, who as a columnist was as outspoken and controversial in the middle of the 20th century as Rush Limbaugh is today. After struggling for some years as an actress, in 1938, Hopper rose to fame at age 52 by starting a gossip column, "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood." Not only did she eviscerate many stars of Hollywood, she used her column "to push her agenda of staunch moral and political conservatism, using her column to argue against U.S. entry into World War II, uphold traditional views of sex and marriage, defend racist roles for African-Americans, and enthusiastically support the Hollywood blacklist." Author Jennifer Frost, who teaches history at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, springs to Hopper's defense, arguing she had "a profound and lasting influence on popular and political culture and should be viewed as a pivotal popularizer of conservatism."