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Showing posts with the label American History

MARCH: BOOK ONE (graphic novel) by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin

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Published in 2013 by Top Shelf Productions. Written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. Illustrated by Nate Powell. Winner: National Book Award Winner: Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Winner: Coretta Scott King Book Award Winner: ALA Notable Books Winner: Reader's Digest Graphic Novels Every Grown-Up Should Read Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) tells his life story in this graphic novel, focusing on his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. This is the first book in a trilogy, covering the first 20 years of his life. Lewis is interested in three things as a young man - education, preaching, and the Civil Rights movement. Lewis listens to the traditional African American leaders and he hears talk of moderation (or, even worse, nothing at all about Civil Rights.) He doesn't know what to do, but he knows this is not the way forward.  Lewis's growing frustration and the moment when Lewis hears MLK . One day, he hears Martin Luther King, Jr. speak over the radio and he knows t

BASS REEVES: TALES of the TALENTED TENTH, no. 1 by Joel Christian Gill

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 Published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2014. Artist and author Joel Christian Gill is writing and illustrating a series of graphic novels that look into the lives of lesser known, exceptional African Americans. His inspiration is this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: "The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground." In other words, some will rise up and inspire/lead the rest. This is Gill's way of providing inspiration. Bass Reeves was a legendary lawman in the Old West. He was a Deputy U.S. Marshal that chased down bad guys who would flee into Indian Territory (Oklahoma and Kansas) to hide from law enforcement in the neighboring states. If you've seen either of the two versions of the movie True Grit, that is the exact situation. The character Rooster Cogburn would have been real-life Bass Reeves' co-worker if Cogburn were a real person. The graphic novel tells about Reeves' childhood as a slave in Arkansas, how he escaped durin

SLAVERY, RESISTANCE, FREEDOM (Gettysburg Civil War Institute Books collection) edited by Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock.

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  Published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. The book consists of six essays about the experience of African Americans from the early American period through Reconstruction.  They are arranged in chronological order and, as is the way with all collections, of varying quality. I did not enjoy either of the two essays by one of the editors, Scott Hancock. I did enjoy reading two of them quite a bit. There are two strong essays that read more like small chapters from a Civil War history  about the United States Colored Troops (USCT) - the segregated units of black soldiers led by white officers.  The last essay was by Reconstruction expert Eric Foner. It was a bit tedious to read, but it ruthlessly lays to rest that old Confederate and neo-Confederate lie that Black Reconstruction (when Blacks could actually vote and the old leaders of the Confederacy were not allowed to run for office) just elected illiterate field hands to the highest offices. The men Foner describes were mostly (80%

THANK YOU for VOTING: THE MADDENING, ENLIGHTENING, INSPIRING TRUTH ABOUT VOTING in AMERICA (audiobook) by Erin Geiger Smith

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  Published in 2020 bt Harper Audio. Read by Lisa Cordileone. Duration: 6 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. As the title says, his book is intended to be a primer on the history of elections in America and how elections work now in different states. It was thorough enough without drowning the listener in details. The book does a solid job with both of those major topics without feeling partisan. Those topics comprise the first and last two hours of this audiobook. The middle two hours just felt like padding. There was an extended discussion of how to raise the voter participation rate that just dragged with discussions of how businesses can encourage employees to vote, ad campaigns from local government, and so on.  I would rate the first two sections 4 stars out of 5, but the middle section is a 2 out of 5 at best. That makes a final score of 3 out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THANK YOU for VOTING: THE MADDENING, ENLIGHTENING, INSPIRING TRUTH ABOUT VOTING in AMERICA (

FIGHTER PILOT: THE WORLD WAR II CAREER of ALEX VRACIU by Roy E. Boomhower

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  Published in 2010 by Indiana Historical Society Press. Alex Vraciu (1918-2015) was a World War II flying ace, ranking fourth in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He destroyed 19 Japanese planes in the air and 21 on the ground.  This short book is very approachable and tells the story of Vraciu's childhood during the Great Depression in Northwest Indiana (now commonly known as "The Region") and his college years at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.  Vraciu took advantage of a U.S. government program that trained civilians to be pilots with the understanding that if the U.S. went to war those pilots would become military pilots. He trained in Muncie, Indiana and immediately joined the U.S. Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Vraciu had a remarkable military career over the next 23 years. Besides destroying 40 Japanese planes, he lost multiple planes, including being shot down over the Philippines and leading a group of guerrilla figh

PATHOGENESIS: A HISTORY of the WORLD in EIGHT PLAGUES (audiobook) by Jonathan Kennedy

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  Published by Random House Audio in April of 2023. Read by the author, Jonathan Kennedy. Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Kennedy presents a compelling argument that disease has had a profound impact on world history by just telling a history of Europe from the days of cavemen up until now. The first 45 minutes or so of this audiobook seemed to be wandering around and not going anywhere, but Kennedy was laying a strong foundation for the rest of the book. The book makes it painfully obvious that humanity has bounced from one biological disaster to another. Humanity has adapted (either by behavior - like building sanitation systems to deal with body waste to control cholera) or biologically by simply having a large body count until those with immunity can rebuild (the Black Plague is a prime example.) Kennedy persuasively argues that infection and disease helped the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam, the end of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, and the European conques

THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

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  Published in 2018 by Hourly History. Hourly History is a publisher that specializes in short histories and biographies in e-book form that are designed to be read in about an hour. Sometimes, an hour is not long enough to explain a topic, but in this case an hour is just about right. Since the Cuban Missile Crisis is a pretty well known historical event, just let me say that this short e-book delivers a concise, well-paced history. It also manages to present a balanced history that spreads the blame for the crisis and somehow keep up a sense of tension even though the reader knows for a fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not actually cause a worldwide global thermonuclear war in 1962. I rate this e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History.

PROHIBITION in the UNITED STATES: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

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  Published in 2019 by Hourly History. Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for larger topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it works out about right for this topic. This history goes all of the way back to the arrival of the  Mayflower in 1620. Turns out the Puritans brought hundreds of gallons of alcoholic beverages with them to the New World and immediately set up the means to produce even more. The book then goes on to show the ups and down of America's relationship with alcohol. When the reader gets to the temperance movement, there is a solid context to understand why the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1919 and why it was eventually abolished by the 21st Amendment a mere 14 years later. For a short read, this book provides a lot of good, basic information.  I rate this e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.c

PONTIAC'S WAR: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

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  Published by Hourly History in 2021. Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for larger topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it works out about right for this short war (1763-1766.) The war arose directly from unaddressed issues as a consequence of the French and Indian War (1754-1763.) In the French and Indian War, the American frontier became a battlefield. American settlements were wiped out, Native American villages were destroyed. French and English soldiers participated and ultimately agreed to a settlement that ignored the realities of the vast borderlands between the colonies and the Native Americans. The biggest issue was constant push westward from European (American) settlers into areas that were already inhabited by Native Americans. The colonies were all for this westward push, even if the British government was ambivalent or even against t

STORM OVER the LAND: A PROFILE of the CIVIL WAR by Carl Sandburg

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  Originally published in 1942 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. I read a 2009 re-print published by Konecky and Konecky. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) In 1940, the famed poet, journalist and author Carl Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize for his four volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (published in 1939.) In 1942, his publishers came to him and asked him to re-work the biography into a history of the Civil War in response to America's recent entry into World War II.  The result is a pretty solid history of the Civil War from basically the Union point of view.  Carl Sandburg is best known as a poet and that shines though with some of his prose. From time to time, he comes up with a different and interesting way of telling the story of the war.  The most obvious weakness to this history is the story of African-Americans in the war - the free, the enslaved, the recently freed, the soldiers and others. He mentions them, but does not look at them very hard. To be fair to Sandbur

WHITE EVANGELICAL RACISM: THE POLITICS of MORALITY in AMERICA (audiobook) by Anthea Butler

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  Published by Tantor Audio in 2021. Read by Allyson Johnson. Duration: 3 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. This book takes a short look at how the people that refer to themselves as Evangelicals and their forebears have dealt with race over time. An interracial marriage protest. The signs claim that interracial marriage is Communist and a sign of the anti-Christ. The book starts with the justifications that religious leaders used to defend slavery. After the Civil War, they modified those justifications slightly to defend the Jim Crow system. Butler contends that the Evangelical movements in the 1900's were worried about things like Communism, but it usually had a racial overtone to it - like when Martin Luther King was accused of spreading Communism to Black communities all over the country when he was just asking for the rights that White Americans already had. The heart of her book is about Billy Graham and what she calls out as a wishy-washy approach to racism. I am a bit more fo

THE FALSE CAUSE: FRAUD, FABRICATION, and WHITE SUPREMACY in CONFEDERATE MEMORY (audiobook) by Adam H. Domby

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  Published by Blackstone Publishing in 2022. Read by Jack de Golia. Duration: 8 hours, 58 minutes. Unabridged. The cover of the book and the short description offered by my library app gives the impression that this book is pretty much about the "Silent Sam" Confederate memorial that stood at the University of North Carolina from 1913-2018. This book is much more than that, though. It uses Silent Sam as an entry point into a larger discussion of how North Carolina chose to remember how it performed in the Civil War (more than 10% of Civil War soldiers from North Carolina actually fought for the Union.) He also discusses how White men lied about their service to get Confederate pensions and the government turned a blind eye in the name affirming White unity and White Supremacy. Whites that fought for the Union (but couldn't qualify for a Union pension) or actively fought the Confederate draft with violence or by simply going AWOL at every point possible were given pension

CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH (kindle) by Hourly History

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  Published in 2022 by Hourly History. The short histories produced by Hourly History are designed to read in about an hour. In some cases the size limit makes for a very incomplete history. In this case, I thought that topic and the size limit matched up pretty well. This e-book details from the beginning (spoiler alert: John Sutter of Sutter's Mill fame was clearly not a good guy) and details the good as well as the bad of the Gold Rush. Turns out there was a lot of bad, such as environmental destruction on an unprecedented level (they used mining techniques that were outlawed just a few years later. How obviously bad were they if people who let children into mines said that these techniques are clearly out of bounds?!??)  The white miners also used genocidal techniques to wipe out the local Native American populations, killed Chinese immigrants that came across the Pacific to find gold and, of course, jumped the claims of other white miners and killed them. All of the gold and

THE REST I WILL KILL: WILLIAM TILLMAN and the UNFORGETTABLE STORY of HOW a FREE BLACK MAN REFUSED to BECOME a SLAVE (audiobook) by Brian McGinty

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  Published by HighBridge in 2016. Read by Sean Crisden. Duration: 4 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederacy authorized ships to be privateers. Privateers are basically pirates with the explicit backing of a government. The idea was to authorize as many ships as possible to attack Union shipping as part of the Confederate war effort.  William Tillman (c. 1834-?) One of the early victims of these attacks was the S.J. Waring , a ship out of New York City bound for South America. On July 4, 1861 the ship was attacked, captured, and most of the crew was taken off the Waring to the privateer ship but they did leave a few people behind, including the ship's cook - a free black man named William Tillman.  The privateers made it very clear that they were going to sell Tillman in the slave market in Charleston and Tillman was not going to let that happen... Unfortunately, there just isn't a lot of information about William Tillman - either befo

LIBERTY'S EXILES: AMERICAN LOYALISTS in the REVOLUTIONARY WORLD (audiobook) by Maya Jasanoff

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Published by Recorded Books in 2012. Read by L.J. Ganser. Duration: 16 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. In 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, Loyalists (Americans who opposed the American Revolution and stayed loyal to Britain) had a choice to make - stay and ride out the anti-Loyalist bias in the United States or move somewhere else. In the two years between the last major engagement (Yorktown) and the official end of the war and withdrawal of British troops the British decided to evacuate any Loyalists that wanted to go to other parts of the British Empire. One of the biggest advocates of this position was Guy Carleton, the British commander in America after Yorktown who later went on to become the Governor-in-Chief of Canada. He had more to do with what happened in this history than any other single person. Guy Carleton (1724-1808) The British government made an effort to make things right for these Loyalists. Not many Loyalists were completely reimbursed, but the fact that an

THIS REPUBLIC of SUFFERING: DEATH and the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Drew Gilpin Faust

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Published by Blackstone Audio in 2008. Read by Lorna Raver. Duration: 10 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. This unique Civil War history isn't driven by the timeline of the Civil War, the strategies, or the personalities. Instead, it is a look at how the soldiers, the government, the families on the home front and post-war politics were affected by the massive amount of death that the war created as it ground on. In all previous wars, the U.S. government did not worry too much about how to bury the dead because there just weren't that many when compared to the Civil War. Soldiers were properly buried, but there wasn't much thought given to keeping records about where they were buried, marking their graves or even keeping track of who had died. The sheer quantity of death in the Civil War made the government change its approach.  The book starts with a look at how dying a glorious death was all everyone wrote about. But, once the reality of the war was apparent, the talk shifte

THE PARANOID STYLE in AMERICAN POLITICS and OTHER ESSAYS by Richard Hofstadter

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  -Originally published by Harper's Magazine in 1964 and in book form by Alfred A. Knopf in 1965. -Audiobook published in 2018 by Tantor Audio. -Read by Keith Sellon-Wright. -Duration: 10 hours, 44 minutes. -Unabridged. Award-winning historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) wrote these essays over a series of years and compiled them into a collection with a loose theme of how American politics is affected by paranoid conspiracies.  Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) He starts with the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater and the political commentary of groups like the John Birch Society. His descriptions of the Goldwater campaign sound so much like the Trump campaign of 2016 that a reader can almost replace the name Goldwater with the name Trump. The details are, of course, different, but the tone is practically the same.  The ideological framework of the John Birch Society is replaced with QAnon, the fear of communism is replaced with the fear of immigrants but the tone is practica

STRENGTH for the FIGHT: THE LIFE and FAITH of JACKIE ROBINSON (Library of Religious Biography) (audiobook) by Gary Scott Smith

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  Published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in October of 2022. Read by Shamaan Casey. Duration: 10 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. Jackie Robinson.  He is an icon of sports. And politics. And American history. All fans of baseball know at least the broad strokes of the story of Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) and how he integrated baseball. This book offers a detailed re-telling of that story with a twist - a look at how Jackie Robinson's faith led him to this path and helped sustain him. Robinson's early life, his time in service during World War II and his college sports career and his relationship with his wife are all covered. The biggest single part of the book is, appropriately, the story of how he and Branch Rickey (the head of the Brooklyn Dodgers) worked together to integrate Major League Baseball in 1947. The book also looks at how Rickey's faith led him to act to make the world a more just place by acting in such a symbolic manner. Jackie Robinson stealing hom

GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

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  Highly Recommended Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio. Read by Gabriel Vaughan. Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Flag of the German American Bund In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation). There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America  (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin  was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was so en