✭✭✭✭✭: The 2010s saw more people in the streets than any point in world history. From Brazil to Egypt to Hong Kong to Ukraine, millions came together to demand restructuring of their societies along different lines. And as often as not, they got the opposite of what they asked for.

The bundle of "protest" techniques we see evolved in the very specific context of post-McCarthy America. Prior to the New Left, the dominant way to contest power was the Leninist cadre-organization. Hierarchically organized, it combined the ability to act decisively with a mass-scale. Groups like the Chinese Nationalists (GMD) explicitly copied this structure, even while rejecting the underlying Marxist goals. Despite its obvious virtues, by the 1950s and 1960s, the American Left decisively abandoned it, for a mix of the following reasons:

• The horrors of the Soviet Union were explained on the Left with structural ("power always corrupts") not ideological ("socialism leads to starvation") terms. Thus the way to protect ideology from corruption was to prevent the concentration of power.

• McCarthyism severed the link between Old and New Left.

• Evolving media made communication sans formal power seem more efficacious than before.

• America's post-war culture generally super-charged individualism in all aspects, with politics being no exception.

• The Left became more reliant on those for whom failure wold not be painful as long as they had acted non-violently—i.e., middle-class kids.

The horizontally-organized, "leaderless" movements like Students for a Democratic Society were able to kick up a huge storm and destabilize the existing power-structure. However, unlike their hierarchical counterparts, they are unable to fill the resulting power vacuum. Spooked elites asked what level of concessions would be enough to return to peace, only to find they had no one to negotiate with. They could not make a deal even when they wanted to.

Bevins points out that this failed form of American New Left organization has now become ubiquitous across the world, even where the conditions to its success are even more hostile than 1960s America. The sheer Americanness of global culture, including the internet, where so much political thought is disseminated, has made everywhere America. Hence why Hongkongers adopted an English phrase from the Hunger Games series for their signs: "If you burn, you burn with us." Ten times in the 2010s, a government has been brought to its knees by these mass movements only for a better organized, hierarchical alternative to move into the resulting empty space.

✭✭✭✰✰: Naming and Necessity is certainly worth a read, even if it is just as a historical object. Adapted from three lectures Kripke gave at Princeton during the winter of 1969 - 1970, it lays out a forceful metaphysics which provided Anglo-American analytic philosophers an escape from the dead-end of logical empiricism.

A major part of Kripke's "brand" is his supposed transcendent genius—that if you don't have the same underlying intuitions as him, it is due to an inferior intelligence. I cannot help but see this as a rhetorical maneuver. I do not doubt that his ideas are coherent, and that they offer real insight; still, there is a weird interplay between normative and descriptive claims, between stipulation and assertion, which I think limits his arguments to a narrower socio-linguistic context than is openly stated.

I think the importance of Kripke's authoritative genius is why there was such a backlash when many pointed out that his ideas were not sui generis. Without getting into the details, there is very strong evidence that Kripke developed his ideas only after hearing Ruth Barcan Marcus propone similar ones. If even he needed to be a member of a linguistic community, then that undermines the self-justifying nature of his claims.

Now that I am busy teaching my dream course (US History since 1877), I do not have the time to read many full books. Instead, I have been having to piece together chunks of different works. Here are some quick thoughts on nine of them: 

• Children of Fire: A History of African Americans: Very good, want to read it straight through at some point. I only read the middle section on 1860s to 1920s so far, with bits and pieces from elsewhere.

• Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America: Very good, love the conceit of two different interpretations of Czolgosz as cipher into Progressive America.

• Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State: Very good, love the clarity of the writing style. Just wish I had more time to read it.

• A New History of the American South: Scholarly synthesis of a lot of big questions. Read whole second half (South since c. 1860), and found it very informative.

• Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor: Lots of interesting anecdotes, but I am in no rush to finish it.

• The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams, and their clash over America's Future: Fine, but too great-man-y; makes me feel like I need to carefully track a small cast through a short period of time, which is not my favorite thing.

• Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression: Important but did not grab me. Reminds me of histories of Ancient Greece where we have fairly limited sources and have to extrapolate from trace evidence.

• The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925: Incredible, just very dense. Only got like 1/3rd through it in the few weeks I had it, unfortunately.

• The People No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism: Core argument seems right, but too polemical to be interesting once you agree with it.

✭✭✰✰✰: This was a totally serviceable pop-history of the Medici, though the wider time-frame (14th through 18th centuries) made it less engaging than The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior. I read it because I am exhausted, and needed something easy and irrelevant to my class so I would not feel the need to ruin my time by taking notes.

The author did write some wild stuff, such as repeatedly linking over-bearing mothers to homosexuality and implying that a Slavic slave owned by a Medici probably consented to sex because she would have been treated well (???). I feel like this was already out of vogue when this was published in the early 2000s, and it has aged to be positively cringe-inducing.

✭✭✭✭✭: This was a fantastic book which did the near-impossible task of simultaneously challenging and clarifying a concept—here, "Progressivism." Progressivism is the middle class, previously aligned with the national elite or sectional power brokers, coming on line as not only a class "in itself" but "for itself." I think it will influence the very structure of my US history courses for the rest of my career, shaping how I understand events well outside of its direct chronological scope.

Progressivism emerged as America was experiencing its most intense period of open class struggle. If one thinks of Gilded Age society as a pyramid, the wealthiest ~2% ("upper tenth" in the parlance of the time) was at the pinnacle, the poorest ~80% at the bottom (heavily slanted towards Farmers in 1870, and gradually becoming majority urban by 1920), and the middle ~20% between them. Piketty, in his Capital in the 21st Century, estimates that the 1910 per-capita wealth of the "1 percent" was 350 times larger than that of the "80 percent". Being poor in this era was truly wretched: a Chicago meatpacker working full-time earned less than 2/5ths what a family of four needed to subsist, requiring wives and children to be hired out. This was not just a degradation of the man's honor and an obstacle to the bourgeois home, but child labor replaced the valuable investment of education with the constant risk of permanent injury. Children traded away their lifespan and future earnings for the privilege of hawking newspapers or sweeping cotton or dyeing shirts.

Americans did not take this peacefully. The first year of the 20th century saw 3000 work stoppages and the assassination of the president by an anarchist. The wealthy were willing and eager to use violence to maintain the social order, but the middle class was no longer. They had become disgusted not only with the inequality, but the social rot they saw it engendering. Out of touch with the proper unit of social reproduction (the bourgeois family), America's super-rich had twenty times the divorce rate of other Americans. The middle brought their education, cachet, money, and spare time (especially that of women lacking formal employment) to the four tasks it saw before it: ending class struggle, controlling corporations, improving the environment, and segregating off what could not be "fixed."

That last item should cause unease. This is the era when de jure Jim Crow triumphed, seen by white reformers as a solution to the conflicts caused by racism. Just as factories deformed nearby residents by polluting the environment, non-whites were seen as polluting potentially reformable lower-class whites. Middle-class WASPs, so often presented as the drivers of American progress, are equally (and correctly) shown to be the source of their own pathologies (Nazi race science being perhaps the most infamous). Many leading Progressivists (Jane Addams, Herbert Hoover, George Creel, Al Smith) became anti-New Deal critics, while Progressivism's prescription on women (Victorian over liberated), business (Brandeisian over Fordist), labor (apolitical craft over social-democratic industrial), and alcohol (prohibition) were abandoned.

✭✭✭✭✰: As with Richard White's other works, this is a superb history on a topic with surprising significance for understanding our past.

America's Gilded Age railroads were, it turns out, ecologically destructive, the vanguard of empire, and the nexus through which corporations came to dominate government. But White takes a hammer to both the Libertarian view of railroad executives as "captains of industry" and the Marxian view that they effectively conquered the market through ruthless rationalization and scale. The huge amounts of capital invested into the transcontinentals did not provide efficiency gains, or creative destruction. C. P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Henry Villard, Tom Scott, Jay Cooke, and all the rest were mere crooks, dancing (often unsuccessfully) on flows of credit which only fraud and corruption could keep going. Periodic contractions would rattle the whole economy, provoking bankruptcies, political crises, and industrial action, leading president after president to call out the soldiers to shoot common citizens.

There was no final reckoning with this disaster. Leland Stanford, despite being considered a moron even by his allies, founded an elite university (the one at which White teaches today). Andrew Carnegie, a man who made his fortune through the "pull" of Tom Scott, became an influential moralizer. Their descendants still hold vast fortunes and populate the American ruling class. Even though Charles Francis Adams Jr. only made it six years as president of the Union Pacific Railroad, Charles Francis Adams IV could be found as president of Raytheon a half-century later. In White's own words,

Despite his excellence as prose stylist, I found the book hard to read. I think this is because White trusts his reader: he juggles many detailed stories without explicitly drawing the through-line. While I bet this would help the book be a better second-read, I often lost track of what exactly was happening with each of the railroads.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is a phenomenal single-volume history of the United States, perhaps the best I have read. While primarily concerned with economics, Jonathan Levy integrates politics, social history, and world events to create a cohesive story of American society. He is in conversation—directly and indirectly—with a giant variety of other scholarship, but in a way so plain you would not pick up on it if you didn't know it was there. His central typology (Commerce, Capital, Control, Chaos) will be in the background of my own periodization. He demystifies the post-1980 world, which too many historians and political commenter play dumb about; it has been over four decades, the asset-appreciation-led economy is not a fluke but an intentional growth model actively pursued by concrete actors for specific reasons.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is a very important book, and one which everyone should grapple with. When Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, the Confederate social order was still in effect for the vast majority of Southerners—black and white alike. In order to turn victory into liberation, as mandated by the Emancipation Proclamation, soldiers had to credibly threaten punishment for disobedience in every plantation and village. Without the army's extraordinary wartime powers to suspend habeas corpus, depose elected governments, and put down vigilante groups like the KKK, neo-Confederate rule would have instantly been reasserted. Whenever presidents tried relaxing martial law, the local planter elite used a mix of anti-black terror and state power to resubjugate freedmen to the degree the North would tolerate.

This prompts the question: was it possible for the South to become a multiracial democracy? Gregory Downs seems skeptical. The early occupation had perhaps half as many soldiers as was needed, so from the beginning there were zones of control, zones of resistance, and anarchic conflict zones in between. The ever-increasing fiscal austerity, in pursuit of putting the dollar back on the gold standard, meant a continuing whittling down of soldiers, civil servants, and economic investment. Without a completely different political economy, the project seems untenable. 

I am a little confused about the exact importance of 1871 versus 1877; this is not a bad thing, as it will force me to truly understand the details of different sorts of federal intervention. I also want to better track the different kinds of repression unleashed—the Wilmington Coup implies that white supremacy was not yet hegemonic 1898, but North Carolina stopped voting for the Republicans after 1872. What I need to do next read more state-based microhistories for each of the former slave states, which implies a tremendous amount of work.

✭✭✭✭✰: As a leading expert on the topic, Eric Rauchway was a natural choice by Oxford University Press to write this installment of the "Very Short Introduction" series. More than any other period of American history, the New Deal was a time of very rapid fluctuations in conditions. Any overview of the period will have to balance coherence and depth, especially about the false starts, dead-ends, and recommitments that define Roosevelt's response to the cascading crisis. Once one brings in Hoover's technocratic volunteerism, congressional politics, and the international situation, it becomes a mess even for experts. Worse still, modern American politics can be understood as divided into those who think it "was a necessary evil," "didn't go far enough," and "ruined the country," which gives too much incentive to political actors to obfuscate the era. Rauchway successfully avoids these pitfalls, giving an extremely clear while still nuanced exploration of the economic and social developments of the era. Any lesson I teach will use this as a model for how to condense without oversimplifying.

✭✭✭✭✰: Injustices presents itself as a compilation of the Supreme Court acting on the wrong side of history. It is actually much more sophisticated than that. While maintaining the brisk pace of a "worst hits" history, it is more of an articulation of how the Reconstruction legal movement to create a uniform national citizenship (well documented in a work like Eric Foner's The Second Founding) became hijacked by an anti-democratic legal movement. All law is subjective, as the boundaries between any two person's rights gradually blend into each other. No cut and dry rule works in practice, which is why we need judges. Even something as simple as "freedom of speech" is limited in that it is still illegal to perjure, commite fraud, or organize violence. Piece by piece, judges used their latitude to strip away the rights originally meant for black Americans and reassigned them to corporations. By 1935, this "Lochner" Court had held that segregation was legal while it violated the rights of national citizenship for either states or the federal government to regulate child labor. The sweeping majorities of the New Deal finally rebalanced the bench, asserting racial and democratic rights over corporate rights.

What makes Millhiser's work more than whiggish liberal triumphalism is his deep explorations of the intellectual history intertwined with the material history of the periods in question. He is deeply interested in how hyper-educated jurists talked themselves into such absurd conclusions, while never losing sight of the real people (children, workers, women, racial minorities) impacted by what was, to SCOTUS, a parlor game.

✭✭✭✰✰: This was a fun book. The central conceit is to understand the 1929–1931 banking collapse through the eyes of the world's four most important central bankers—Benjamin Strong of the USA, Montague Norman of Britain, Émile Moreau of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of Germany—as well as their perennial critic John Maynard Keynes. The central focus on a very small number of men is not due to a Great Man historiographical bias; it is meant to show that very important decisions were made by humans fumbling from crisis to crisis, always considering a mix of conditions which seemed very different at the time than they do in retrospect. Well written, engaging, and filled with interesting details, one comes away with a feel for the cultural milieu of Belle Époque and interwar finance. 

The core economic argument, that the gold standard was an anchor around the neck of the world's industrial powers, is persuasive. A second implicit argument, that complexity is part of what led to the crucial (bad) decisions of important actors, seems mostly true. By 1929, Britain, France, Germany, and the USA had six distinct and deeply antagonistic relationships which prevented effective trust and thus concerted action. I do think some of the sections on the broader context are weak (the collapse of Weimar and the relationship between Hoover and FDR come to mind, and the economics is handled better by Adam Tooze and Zach Carter), but as a joint biography it was fun.

✭✭✭✭✭: Ira Katznelson's writing style is grating to me. Instead of the classic "Say what you are going to say, say it, say what you just said," he somehow manages to get stuck at the first step and spin his wheels. I wonder what the writing process for this book was like—the structure makes me think he had many different drafts trying to approach the same topics that he finally just cobbled together and published so he could move on, but his style of airy language (intermixed with far too many quotes from Goethe and Shakespeare) seems to be chic with elite boomer historians at the moment so maybe it is intentional. With no exaggeration, I can say the first 1/4th of the book had absolutely nothing of value, and maybe 60% of the rest could have been edited away with no loss. Italo Balbo and Theodore Bilbo are interesting characters, but nothing is accomplished with the space allotted to them.

So why does this book get a five out of five rating? Because, buried in-between repetitive framing prose and interminable descriptions of all kinds, there is the best analysis of the central political issue of the New Deal: what was the relationship of the Southern Democrats with their Northern colleagues? How were they able to cohere enough to pass sweeping legislation, while also capable of cutting against each other at a moment's notice?

With much more nuance than I can describe here, Katznelson lays out the dynamic of the three party system of the 1930s and 1940s: Southern Democrats were willing to work with their Northern wing on any number of issues, except when it would impede Southern racial hierarchy. Then they would defect to the always willing to help GOP, blocking all legislation until the Northern Dems capitulated. Through this they dictated the terms the New Deal regulated corporations, passed welfare measures, and pumped fiscal stimulus into the economy. Despite their careful calculations, the Southern Democrats unleashed a force they had not anticipated: a powerful labor movement. The booming national jobs market gave black workers much more power and the wave of unionization unleashed by the Wagner Act created new institutions with a vested interest in fighting racism. This tension erupted into open war with Operation Dixie, when the CIO plunged a knife into the heart of Jim Crow. In a pyrrhic victory, white supremacists retaliated with Taft-Hartley, ending the possibility of a nation-wide labor unionism. Within forty years, formal segregation and radical unionism would both be dead, synthesizing into the birth of the neoliberal, formally desegregated world of today.

✭✭✭✭✭: Over a generation after the defeat of the Confederacy, black people still enjoyed rights in North Carolina. They could vote, conduct business, and even rise in the world. Wilmington—then the state's largest city—had a black coroner, black churches, several successful black lawyers, and a black newspaper. Of the city's 21 police officers, 10 were black. In 1894, poor whites (represented by the Populist Party) joined blacks and scalawags (represented by the Republican Party) in a "Fusion" ticket, defeating the Democrats who had run the state on behalf of the white elite for the previous 16 years. Pro-democracy reforms (e.g., the election of local office) were implemented, and black North Carolinians, as a vital part of the winning coalition, were duly rewarded with public services. Henry George White was elected to the House of Representatives—becoming America's only black congressman. This infuriated most elite whites, used as they were to an unquestioned monopoly on public office.

The Democratic Party organized as its vehicle to power "the white supremacy campaign", a full-frontal assault on multi-racial society. The states' leading politicians planned to create the appearance of a spontaneous anti-black movement to provide the pretext for a coup. It is hard to overstate how thorough the effort was: orators, newspaper articles, vigilante groups, and meetings were all meticulously timed to reach a simultaneous fever pitch in November 1898. Fusion whites, including the states Republican governor, agreed to not contest local elections in order to prevent violence. It was no use. Voter intimidation, fraud, and the defection of white turned the previously two-thirds Fusion state legislature eight-tenths Democratic. Two days after the election, the white supremacists leaders unleashed open terror on the black population of Wilmington. They gunned down about sixty black men in the street, forced the city government to resign, and ordered the core of the black middle class to leave forever. Women and children fled into the swamps for several days, where several died. This spectacular violence reverberated throughout the state. The number of registered black voters fell to just 15,000 by 1900, from a high of 80,000. As a capstone, a constitutional amendment implementing harsh voter restrictions along with a grandfather clause meant black North Carolinians were de facto permanently disenfranchised.

Every Confederate state had a campaign of "redemption" which re-subjugated its black citizens after Reconstruction—the value of Wilmington's Lie is in how well it documents of one case. Perhaps this is naïve of me, but it is not obvious exactly why white terror was a successful tactic in every single state. One obvious explanation is that whites outnumbered blacks. Yet I do not think that is quite it; federal soldiers, carpetbaggers, and scalawags together meant that a majority of each state usually was anti-Confederate. Even if we grant that white supremacy worked by uniting all whites against all blacks (which really does not seem to be true), we are still left with the question of why the tactics still worked in black-majority areas like Wilmington, South Carolina, and Mississippi. This is where I find the examination of oligarchy by Matt Simonton [reviewed: July 2022] so useful: it is not about creating an actual majority, but about simultaneously dictating public discourse and private violence in such a way as to make it seem as though there might be such a majority. Why could the oligarchs control discourse? Because they had a network of experienced orators; they controlled the telegraph and telephone networks; they owned almost all of the state's newspapers; banks, railroads, and other wealthy institutions opposed to the Populists paid for their race-baiting propaganda to be spread by the hundreds of thousands; they had better connections with Northerner, including journalists and politicians (e.g., the only local who talked to the Republican president about the bloodshed was his former neighbor, a white supremacist woman). This control of public discourse is a precondition to their ability to deploy violence with impunity. One black man described himself as literally "whipped out of politic" by night riders; one suspects that terror which targeted elite whites would not have had this effect, as they would have recourse lacking to blacks in late 1898. Thus, Wilmington's white supremacist minority could stockpile hundreds of guns in anticipation of their coup, while the few blacks who tried to order weapons were blocked by the Winchester corporation and had their efforts publicly announced. It is only by an in-depth investigation of the sort Zucchino conducted that such questions can be definitively addressed.

✭✭✭✭✰: The German Empire was established by Bismarck in 1871, and toppled by democratic revolution in 1918. Despite having a three decades shorter life than the average American man, it gave birth to several of the most important ideologies of the 20th century: Orthodox Marxism, social democracy, and racial fascism. Hans-Ulrich Wehler argues this is not coincidence—by 1918, Germany had perhaps the most profound gap between its social and political institutions out of any country in world history, leading to extreme solutions to cope with its tensions. In this drive, he also locates the origin of World War I, with all its attendant horrors.

The progress made by 19th-century Germany in science, industry, and military still define the stereotype of the country in our day. A part of this process I had not previously understood, though, was the "Marriage of Iron and Rye"—the policy of jointly protecting both Germany's industrial and agricultural sectors. Traditional economic thinking is that this should not really be possible; in order for effective industrialization to occur, food should be cheap and farms forced to rationalize production. Wehler cuts through this by noting that there was a third group besides agriculture and industry who could be soaked to the benefit of both: the worker-consumer. The subsidization of the Junker elite was thus not taken from industrial profits but from the growing gap between worker productivity and pay, an exploitation even more extreme than that seen in the Gilded Age United States or Victorian Britain. The pairing of material reward to elites with anti-democratic politics is the key fact of Wehler's model. By means of a strategy of Sammlung (English: "Rally together"), each counter-systemic tendency (liberals, Jews, Catholics, Poles, socialists, Alsatians) could be isolated and declared traitorous by the Reich. Given that this was a super-majority of the German Empire, the ruling class had to be in lockstep behind the "Bonapartist" chancellorship to prevent any threat of democratization.

The brittleness of this arrangement was a perennial source of internal tensions, and the main technique of diffusing them was foreign adventurism. Bismarck defeated liberalism for a generation with the initial wars of unification, and Bülow tried the same to socialism, though his success lasted scarcely an election cycle. By 1914, a typical member of the ruling class would consider perhaps 2/3rds of deputies elected to the Reichstag to represent a "treasonous" party, despite the advantages of gerrymandering and clientelism. Even though Wehler musters an impressive number of quotes to this effect, I'm not convinced that this should be seen as the primary cause of World War I. No matter why it started, the failure of the German state in that conflict caused the social tensions to erupt. During the revolution, the inept and over-cautious leaders of the SPD allowed the old elites to put enough poison pills into the new republic to have it collapse after just 14 years.

✭✭✰✰✰: To Make Men Free has several interesting arguments, but is primarily a polemic about how the good Republicans (which Richardson identifies with Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, and Eisenhower) have held something similar to her politics, while the bad Republicans (basically the rest of them) have not. She strains the historical record to make this point, which clouds more than it clarifies.

One of her core motifs is the way red-baiting is used to defeat programs which would enable multi-racial democracy. Yet, she does not explore how "socialism" became a dirty word; I suspect because her argument would then become circular, as she both assumes socialism is a priori disliked, and that benefits which can be called "socialist" are inherently popular. Her middle-class bias shows through when she goes further into labor, with little mistakes (e.g., saying "craft" unionist when she meant "labor" or "trade") as well as major ones (e.g., calling the ultra-nationalist, military-funded Black Hand of Serbia "anarchist"). She claims the great strikes of the 1880s were "for conditions that would enable [workers] to rise if they worked hard." This is wrong. They were for safety, higher wages, and an eight-hour day. This is not "rising" in the sense Cox Richardson means it, where you leave the wage-earning class, but rather about increasing the dignity and living standards of people who stay in it. She complains about the "anti-intellectual" Reagan "taking a pot shot at a Harvard education as useless", even when he is explicitly attacking an “elite in a far-distant capitol [that thought it could] plan out lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” Being Harvard educated from BA to PhD, she probably does not realize one can be irritated by Harvardians while not being stupid. Out of all the things Reagan said and did with regards to education, it is telling that this is the one she got hung up on.

All of this wouldn't matter if the core of the book was good. But the narrative oscillates from simplistic to confused. Usually the story is framed around two factions (a good and a bad one), but she has to over-homogenize to make the pattern work. This also takes very much a Great Man approach, focusing on individual patrician white men while completely ignoring the material and social conditions on the ground. An indicative example is the anecdote of Theodore Roosevelt inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner. It is not, as she has it, because Theodore was a Good Republican and thus Not Racist. He was actually very racist! Rather, Washington was an important patronage dispenser for the African-American and southern party wing, a major part of the story completely glossed over. A more holistic account would have talked about him for more than the paragraph one could get from a middle school textbook and Henry Cabot Lodge less than the forty-one times she did. (Or at least used Lodge to make an interesting point, rather than mention him because he is a Great Man main character.)

✭✭✭✭✰: Books like this are a guilty pleasure of mine. It is like a biography of a loose social-network rather than an individual; I'm not sure if the genre has a name. Similar books are Dawn of the Belle Epoque, When Paris Sizzled, The Proud Tower, and At the Existential Café. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday scratches a similar itch, because he seemed to know just about everybody.

Logical Positivism was perhaps the most genius movement in a century full of genius movements. Following a generation of breakthroughs in logic and mathematics (notably the works of Georg Cantor, Gottlob Frege, Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and Bertrand Russell), "the Vienna Circle" sought to crack philosophy into its 'meaningful' aspects (concerning logic, language, and mathematics) and its 'meaningless' aspects (concerning, at minimum, metaphysics and its accompanying sophistry). Unlike similar projects (the shearing of astrology from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry, and pseudo-medicine from medicine), this one failed: no matter how they tried, there was no clear (or even defensible) line to be drawn in philosophy between 'sense' and 'nonsense'. It was not due to a lack of talent: Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Karl Menger, and Moritz Schlick—the titular professor—numbered among the inner circle, with Karl Popper, W. V. O. Quine, Otto Bauer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Tarski, A. J. Ayer, and Albert Einstein being important interlocutors.

The Circle thrived during "Red Vienna" (1918–1934), the post-WWI attempt to rebuild along pragmatic socialist lines. Austrofascism (1934–1938) and Nazi Rule (1938–1945) proved less fruitful. One suspects that their brilliance, left-wing sympathies, commitment to truth, and predominantly Jewish character (at least according to Nazi race categorization) over-determined their persecution. Their leader, Moritz Schlick, was murdered by a former student who was then given a light sentence by emphasizing the "Jewish" nature of Schlick's thought. Remarkably, almost the entire circle was able to escape Europe. Their presence throughout the Anglosphere seeded their ideas right before the post-war expansion of higher education, leaving them among the most influential philosophers in history.

The methods developed by this group, despite the ultimate failure of their project, have become the core of Analytic Philosophy. Even a century later, the cutting edge of American philosophy is figuring out why and how their project (Logical Positivism) failed. By accident, they proved the reality of metaphysics and gave us excellent tools for pushing it further.

✭✭✭✰✰: Jurgen Habermas is an interesting figure, and one I think I need to engage with more. James Gordon Finlayson organizes his contributions into five interlocking "research programmes": (1) the pragmatic theory of meaning; (2) the theory of communicative rationality; (3) the programme of social theory; (4) the programme of discourse ethics; and (5) the programme of democratic and legal theory. Together, they posit something like this: because of the way human language works, there is an actual distinction between language meant to communicate honestly and language meant to mislead and dominate. Pro-democracy politics uses the former, and there is a real asymmetry between democratic and oligarchic approaches to strategy and communication (as democracy thrives on openness and requires mass coordination). The primary goal of democrats, besides maintaining democracy and the communicative channel it requires, is to regulate non-human algorithms (e.g., the market) which parasitize on human flourishing.

This is very much my gloss, but if this is remotely what Habermas means I think this has strong explanatory power in any context when democracy and oligarchy conflict.

✭✭✭✰✰: While Kevin Passmore does not reach the level of a Robert Paxton or an Eric Hobsbawm (or even a Stefan Zweig) in his analysis of fascism, this book still presents a number of interesting issues in understanding the phenomenon. His engagement with Fascism's cynical manipulation of the women's movement in ways similar to earlier interpretations of its relationship to religion and the workers' movement is thought-provoking. I do think he is too credulous when it comes to the Establishment Right's relative deferment of nationalism when it comes in conflict with property rights. As Hans-Ulrich Wehler (above) makes clear in his study of pre-1918 Germany, German conservatives were perfectly willing to seize property of ethnic Poles during non-crisis conditions.

The book is very obviously of the author, as he is overly focused on events c. 2002 (when it turns out the book is written), and misunderstands the USA in ways only a Brit would (gets an election date wrong, a presidential date wrong, and sees the KKK as too "libertarian" to be fascist, focusing too much on rhetoric over actions). None of it is too bad, but worth noting.

✭✭✭✭✰: This is commonly cited as the definitive book on Weimar Germany, and I see why. Very well written, it tries to understand the 14 years prior to Nazi rule not merely as the 14 years leading up to Nazi rule. Weitz points out that it took three massive crises (Defeat, Hyper-Inflation, Depression) for the republic to fall, and it survived earlier right-wing coup attempts by General Kapp and Adolf Hitler. For the five years of Goldene Zwanziger Jahre (English: "the Golden 1920s"), it even saw stability—economically and politically, though culturally there was no consensus as sexual, technological, and artistic revolutions deepened the disparities of German society. Weitz spends a great deal of time on these aspects; while fascinating, I cannot help but feel that they go on a little too long. Weitz synthesizes a tremendous amount of complicated events into understandable form, creating a very useful scheme of three periods each book-ended by crises:

• First Crisis: Revolution

• Period One: Center-left in power, inflationary economics, expressionism peaks

• Second Crisis: Hyper-inflation

• Period Two: Center-right in power, economic rationalization, culturally mixed

• Third Crisis: Depression

• Period Three: Authoritarian right in power, deflationary economics, new objectivity ascendant 

• Fourth Crisis: Nazis come to power

Weitz' clarity comes at the expense of certain details. For example, how exactly the Communists fumbled the bag in the first period, how the different reparations repayment plans came into being, and how hyper-inflation kicked off are all issues which I have seen historians take very different stances on, and would have enjoyed seeing Weitz' take. Weitz understandably avoids weighing the evidence of these contentious subjects, but the book is weaker for it here merely stating "what" instead of also arguing for "why." When it comes to the emergence of the Nazis, though, Weitz pulls no punches: it was the fault of the establishment Right deciding it was worth the risk as long as it hurt the Left more than it hurt them. Without their material support, legitimization, and political collaboration, Hitler would have been nowhere near power.

Despite my nitpicks, I would strongly recommend this book. If I ever get to teach Weimar again, this will be my core reference.

I have not kept up my "Lunar Linguistics" updates this year, and I think part of that is that the "month" is not a good unit for tracking language learning. I try to do some every day, though in practice that might mean doing some flash cards or a Duolingo lesson—not the most interesting stuff to report, especially as the effect is to just tread water. Supplementing this, though, are periods of more intense work where more progress is actually made. So I think 90 day periods ("seasons", loosely) might be better.

This last season (April through June), I had two languages I did significant work on:

Russian: I have officially completed the second of four Duolingo sections. I know it is goofy, but I genuinely have greatly increased my vocabulary and sight recognition of tense. Finishing Duolingo won't get me close to fluency, but it will be a nice foundation to begin a more traditional Russian grammar course.

French: I am trying to not lose my hard-won French reading ability, and for that reason read this season the first French-language volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, Le trône de fer. It came to 480 pages—very proud to have made it through such a long work! Despite having been more than a decade since I read the book in English, I was at that time at the highly impressionable age of 14 and still remember a surprising number of very specific turns of phrase. This means that I can more easily figure out weird phrases (e.g., "La graine est vigoureuse" means "The seed is strong" or "Lait de Pavot" means "Milk of the Poppy"), which I think is a real advantage to practicing fluent reading.

✭✭✭✰✰: We call the way economics, politics, and religion fit together c. 1000 in Western Europe "feudalism". Disagreements about the period become debates about the term, even though it is a later invention and was coined long after the age it is described. This is a bizarre way to conduct research, but it is an inheritance I am unable to break out of. [Note: what follows in italics is very much "I am trying to figure out the historiography and this is my best guess at this moment", not an informed opinion] Research into this topic culminated with Georges Duby's synthesis c. 1980. Since then, historians have argued about to what extent, when, and where Duby's formulation of feudalism is true. Now, as far as what Duby actually argued, apparently the best single volume introduction is The Feudal Transformation: 900–1200 (1991), written not by Duby but by two of his students. [End of uninformed take] So here I am, at the beginning of an effort to understand the feudalism debate with a book whose context is only vaguely familiar to me. My primary goal is just to appreciate the terms of debate. 

The Feudal Transformation definitely suffers from translation. It is filled with Latin (or even Old French) terms left in the original language, even when the author refers to literal meanings which is opaque to an Angloid like myself who can usually read contemporary academic French. There is also an assumption, one which I did not ever see explained, that power had to move from the state to local strongmen in a specific, legally bound way. (This might be a result of the authors engaging with the models of prior historians?). Further, the central claim is muddled... I am just not quite sure what they would say "feudalism" was, a severe failing for what is supposed to be an overview.

While the overall picture is lacking, the details are incredible. Example after example are provided of what, concretely, life was like in the era. It would not be an exaggeration that I learned 1000 interesting facts about the world around the turn of the millennium. Each of these, I suspect, are counter-evidence against a specific previous historian, but that context remains invisible to me at this moment. I am thus left with a tremendous number of questions, but few good answers. This is an exciting place to be, as one dives into a new area of scholarship.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is an incredible book. Prefiguring works such as Daniel Walker Howe's What Has God Wrought (2007), Charles Sellers sees "Jacksonian America" as defined by a "market revolution"; that is, an increasing orientation of quotidian production not towards immediate needs but towards the acquisition of cash with which needs can indirectly be met. Sellers argues that this basic shift in the habit of production reverberated through every aspect of society, and explains many of the often-opaque conflicts historians find. Personal relationships moved from kin-based networks where surplus was shared to the cash nexus. This revolution caused people to work more and in a more specialized (and thus productive) way. Per capita GDP growth went from ~0.4% annually (about 50% per century) to ~3% (almost 2000% per century). Patriarchy was undermined, while capitalist aristocracy was strengthened. Two migrations remade the geography of the young United States, as masses went from east to west and from countryside to city. Traditional religion was undermined, leading to a brutal culture war between "antinomian" and "arminian" varieties of Christianity.

The two modes of production, one land-based and subsistence oriented, the other capital-based and market-oriented, came into grinding friction wherever the two political economies touched. Whigs wanted the state to increase market access, to "improve" its citizens, and advance technical skills. Democrats wanted to increase the land-to-person ratio, keep taxes low (cash taxes require selling goods on the market), and allow white men to resist the force of the market. One should not think that Sellers is proposing a schema like that of the historian Eugene Genovese, where a Northern, industrial elite came into conflict with a Southern, slave-based elite. A given slaver might favor internal improvements and thus make common cause with a "Cotton Whig", or might want to dispossess Indians and thus support a "Young American."

I don't think this dichotomy between pro- and anti-market societies fully explains the era (I think Sellers is too sanguine on the Democrats and too harsh on the Whigs), but it complements Howe, Michael Holt, and Robert V. Remini's efforts to explain how such arcane issues as the Independent Treasury, tariff, and discount for land fit together into fiercely partisan politics that does not well translate to our own.

✭✭✭✰✰: The Oxford History of the Biblical World (2001) represented the academic consensus at publication. Thirteen chapters cover a variety of topics about ancient Judah/Israel and its neighbors, each supplied by a leading expert. An unusually high number are women, which is nice to see in a 20-year-old book in such a male-dominated field.

I actually finished this work about three weeks ago, and by this point I have to confront my notes to remember much about it. A lesson to not put off your book reviews! Lots of interesting small details (some disagreement with Finkelstein and Silberman's account [reviewed: April 2023], a lot of latent social theory about early states, and an interesting interpretation of Jewish ethnogenesis), nothing which stands out enough to write about.

✭✭✭✰✰: The Middle Kingdoms is an odd book. It is brand new, published just at the beginning of this month. Most of the time it feels like a popular history skimming along the surface recounting the greatest hits before moving on. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Martyn Rady is affiliated to UCL as an expert on early modern Habsburg institutions—so being able to write something accessible is impressive, even if I am not a fan of how often it reduces processes to individuals. He does not, for example, well integrate archaeology to understand the structure of society, instead letting the narrative fade in along with written sources c. 1000 CE. Despite this, there are still very good sections which take a very different methodological approach to the development of Central Europe (here defined as the rectangle of Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Czechia, Slovenia, Austria, and Switzerland).

I am not sure why Rady chose the title he did. Both "Middle" and "Kingdoms" are misnomers, and de-emphasize what he is trying to highlight. The fact that all eight Central European states are republics (in striking context to the eight monarchies and just four republics of Western Europe and Scandinavia) supports Rady's claim that the region fully participated in the march to modernity. The more important discrepancy, though, is Rady's rejection of seeing Central Europe as a transition ("Middle") between Eastern and Western Europe; rather, Rady argues Central Europe is simply that part of Western civilization which is not shielded from the East. Endogenously, it has enlightenment, parliaments, Catholicism, industry, and universities. Any gap between it and the West is because "those threats coming from the east have been the most terrible. Huns, Goths, Avars, Hungarians, Mongol-Tatars, Ottoman Turks, and Cossack and Crimean raiders have all broken into Central Europe on its eastern flank, bringing with them murder and rapine." The existence of Nazism makes clear how untrue and dangerous this statement is. Not only are they (not anything from the East) history's most murderous, rapacious, and terrible threat to Central Europe, they used exactly the above rhetoric (that the East is a perennial source of barbarian threat) to justify their attempted genocide of tens of millions. I do not think it is ever appropriate to label an ethnic group as "dogmen with rocket launchers, tanks, and drones... subversive of the [Western] ideals" as Rady does to Russians.

Out of 34 chapters (each an exploration two to three topics), only a few are undermined by this Huntington-esque othering. One cannot help but feel that current outrage surrounding Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine may have affected the book's final rounds revision. I quite enjoyed (and find insightful) Rady's sections on medieval peasants, corporate bodies, "gypsies", Hungary's economic development, the 1848 revolution, 19th-century ethnogenesis, and the 1918 collapse of Kaiserreichs; he had provocative (if not always convincing) ideas on Roman law, national discourses, and Central Europe's contemporary integration into Western Europe.

✭✭✭✭✭: Amazing book. Christopher Clark expertly narrativizes the lead up to World War I as well as analyzing its components. He comes out much harder against the Entente than most: Serbia was not the victim of an opportunistic great power, but an ultra-nationalist state sponsor of terrorist assassins; Russia was the first to fully commit to the notion (at the July 24th - 25th meetings) that it was how, not whether, war would occur; France set the terrain for war, by refusing to relinquish its revanchist claim to Alsace-Lorraine, funding Serbian and Russian military build up, and locking the three into an inflexible bloc; and Lord Grey maximized both sides bellicosity by telling France and Germany conflicting information about British intentions. By contrast, Kaiser Wilhelm was not the hawk he is usually seen as, but a habitual flincher who wanted to avoid war. Austria was the most justified of all, as a beleaguered victim of an irredentist, war-hungry neighbor supporting an insurgency to destabilize the state. Only the dangerous ideological blinders of the Entente, seeing a multi-national polity as ipso facto illegitimate, could make Austria seem unjustified in responding to Serbia as it did.

I think the above, while not the whole picture, is certainly a useful corrective to the typical "Kaiser and Kaiser bad" narrative. Beyond the analytical claims, the general framework (emphasizing complexity, contingency, and confusion) and incorporation of other fields of history (e.g., the gender history which deeply informs our understanding of the men who went to war) will be the books lasting impact on me.

✭✭✭✭✰: There is a stereotype of the "history dad" whose book collection looks like this. I am not one of those, and I find it hard to relate to them. The Nazis are unpleasant to read about, and the broad outlines of Nazi history are not complicated. The trivia with which people too often seem entranced (Was Himmler a pagan? Which tank was best? Did Hitler only have one testicle? How prevalent was amphetamine use?) distracts from, rather than explains, the Holocaust and other crimes. It took the sheer thoughtfulness of Mark Mazower's The Balkans [reviewed: March 2023] and The Greek Revolution [reviewed: below] to make me excited to give Hitler's Empire a try.

This account of the interlocking fiscal, military, and political structures of 20th-century Europe fits well with other recent works in emphasizing the cross-ideological pressures facing the continent at this time.* The 19th century saw the power of European states multiplied relative to the rest of the world: France ruled an area twenty times the size of l'Hexagone, and the British 170 times that of their home island. Even Belgium, half the size of San Bernardino County, at its height controlled an area larger than the Qin Empire. This was unsustainable: as European techniques diffused, the per capita power differential would sharply shrink, causing a global reordering.

The Nazi solution to this specter was to take the colonial model and apply it to Europe at "breakneck speed." Hitler believed that, in order for Germany to survive the (imagined) coming onslaught of the flanking powers (USA, USSR) and "Asian hordes" (India, China, Japan), they needed to reorient the whole of European production towards Aryan reproduction. The project was fundamentally Malthusian and integrationist: the limited resources of Europe had to be turned towards multiplying 127 million "racial Germans", thus requiring tens of millions of Jews, Slavs, and other "racial undesirables" were to die. War, in the absence of any ideological breaks, radicalized regime actors at unprecedented speed: what was originally a far-out consequence of Nazi thinking (the racial reordering of Europe) became an immediate imperative. Hence, the Holocaust and Generalplan Ost. At every step of the conflict, Hitler prioritized material power over politics: by being willing to trample on any pretext of cooperation, he was able to consistently punch above his weight. However, this allowed the Allies to rally the vast majority of the world into their alliance at the cost of promising a new order based around non-domination. Mazower argues (quite convincingly) that this step, the Allies being forced to admit a broad principle of equality between nations, is what precipitated 20th-century decolonization. Interstate collaboration, not conflict, became the default mode of existence. Malthusian assumptions, supposedly requiring the annihilation of whole peoples, were refuted within two decades by mundane improvements in technology. European integration, centered around Germany, was the only project of Hitler's which lasted. Yet his negative legacy, in defining what was beyond the pale, is perhaps his most important. 

✭✭✭✭✰: I became interested in The Greek Revolution after seeing it cited as a main source for an excellent episode of The Siècle and actively excited after reading Mark Mazower's The Balkans: A Short History [reviewed: March 2023]. It did not disappoint. Mazower takes this provincial conflict and uses it to explore how one form of society ("Modern Europe") expanded into (was imposed on?) its periphery—demystifying both in the process.

The Greek Revolution (1821–1829) was won in an afternoon when the combined navies of Britain, France, and Russia inflicted 30-to-1 casualties against the Ottomans at the Battle of Navarino. It is crucial to notice that the first action of the western Allies was more decisive than six years of war between pro and anti-revolution forces: the global balance of power was in the process of tipping more towards one region of the world than at any point in history. The great historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) [reviewed: August 2021, February 2022, March 2022, May 2022] named this the "Dual Revolution", and I have yet to hear a better name. In order to get the benefits of western patronage, Greece had to contort itself to fit western categories. Their communal revolt first took on the veneer of a liberal revolution, then a conservative restoration—complete with a king supplied by the Bavarian Wittelsbachs. "Nationality" did not initially make sense in a region where one's economic, political, religious, linguistic, geographic, and social facts were not neatly correlated or even defined. One might partake in both Muslim and Christian traditions, be both influential in and discriminated against by the state, and speak none or multiple standard "languages." Populations were squishy and diffuse, with the Greek revolt beginning as an attempt by Russian-aligned merchants from Odessa to rally Romanian peasants a thousand miles from what we consider "Greece." Only in one place, the Morea, did a critical mass of disenfranchised Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians exist which could plausibly be congealed into a "nation." Time plus violence proved the key to this process: a Greek was someone who could be robbed, raped, enslaved, and murdered by the Ottoman state, and a Turk was someone who could be robbed, raped, enslaved, and murdered by the Greek insurgents. Before the conflict, most of those in the former category would not have even called themselves "Greek" (Greek: "Hellene"); they had been "Romans" (Greek: "Romaioi") for almost two millennia.

The new term was brought by the Philhellenes ("Friends of Greece"), westerners inspired to help modern Greeks because of their admiration for the ancient Hellenes. Their creed was a squishy Humanitarianism, a belief that one could cleanly divide life from politics, and combatants from non-combatants. As a group, they tended to lose heart upon actually arriving in Greece because they overwhelmingly witnessed Greek-on-Turk atrocities, rather than the expected converse. They still did fulfill their function: bringing 19th-century Greece its three most important ideologies (nationalism, liberalism, and post-Napoleonic monarchism), integrating Greek and western markets, and supplying the justification for eventual Great Power intervention.

✭✭✭✭✰: The Bible Unearthed (2001) is an attempt to make generally accessible 20th-century archaeology and source criticism regarding when, where, why, and by who the Hebrew Bible was written. This is not the only way to approach the Bible—it has tremendous theological and literary worth as well—but presently I have become interested in understanding it qua historical document.

Finkelstein and Silberman's interpretation centers around the reign of King Josiah (r. 640–609 BCE). After a prosperous century spent as an Assyrian vassal, Judah had the chance to expand into the power vacuum left by the empire's collapse—viz., by annexing what had once been Israel. Josiah already was lord of a significant population of former Israelites, as when the northern kingdom had fallen (c. 732 BCE), thousands had fled into Judah. This is detectable in the Pentateuch, with its two versions of several Hebrew stories: one set (conventionally called the 'J Source') usually calls God "Yahweh" and favors Judah, and the other (the 'E Source') usually calls God "Elohim" and favors Israel. The two were interwoven by the Deuteronomists (the 'D Source'), likely a group of Josiah-aligned court priests who implemented sweeping reforms like centralizing worship in the Temple, eradicating rural shrines, enacting a more egalitarian legal code, and creating a messianic cult around Josiah. The imagined history of the Hebrews—as compiled, edited, and supplemented by 'D'—justified these policies. The Davidic kings had (according to 'D') ruled the whole United Monarchy from Jerusalem, so annexing Israel would not be a conquest but a "reunion." The law (likely the one found in Deuteronomy) was restored to that given by Moses—despite it seeming very 7th century.

The Pentateuch and historical books are not fantasy. The Hebrews probably had many ancestors who had spent time in Egypt and King Omri definitely existed. Yet, they show clear signs of being massaged. Archaeology shows us that when Jerusalem was supposedly Solomon's grand capital, the whole region of Judah numbered scarcely 25,000 people. The disconnect is equivalent to someone suggesting that Manhattan housed the United Nations building in the 18th century; not only would they be wrong, they would be wrong in such a specific way as to suggest a 20th or 21st-century perspective. The entire 'JED' corpus—i.e., most of the Torah—went through this editorial bottleneck where existing material was tailored to suit the ideological needs of Josiah and the Deuteronomists. This project was still unfinished when King Josiah died in battle with Assyria's ally Pharaoh Necho at Megiddo (609 BCE). Judah was, from then on, on the back foot, suffering a succession of weak kings and being forced to pay tribute to both Egypt and Babylon. The prophecies of resurgence had failed to materialize; in the post-609 Deuteronomistic material, they take on a decidedly abstract gloss. Finally, around 587, Jerusalem along with its Temple was destroyed. In a series of deportations, the most ideologically committed were removed from the Promised Land.

Half a century later, Persia replaced Babylon as hegemon and freed deported populations to return to their homelands. The time abroad proved too short to erase Jewish identity, but long enough to cement 'JED' as a sort of canon. The Judahite elite returned, and restored/implemented the version of Judaism found in their grandparents' texts and stories (how historical it was is a matter of debate). A Second Temple was built and worship at competing sites suppressed. This conflict—between those who stayed and those who were in exile—is a theme in the final major layer of the Pentateuch, that written by the elite caste priests (the 'P Source'). Practices associated with the native-born—such as personifying Yahweh as a bull—are denounced, while the importance of centralized worship is emphasized.

Finkelstein and Silberman introduce their story not as I have done (the above is my reconstruction, and only the barest outline) but piecemeal, via a careful examination of each piece of evidence. A feature not well represented above is the importance of archaeology: not only is it used to corroborate or dispute parts of the Biblical narrative, but it also allows us to see how and in what ways the past became distorted. 

✭✭✭✰✰: A leading explanation for the structure of the Pentateuch is that at one point there were two Hebrew literary traditions: one based in the northern Kingdom of Israel (conventionally called the 'E Source'), and the other in the southern Kingdom of Judah (conventionally called the 'J Source'). They merged when thousands of Israelites fled the Assyrian conquest into Judah, requiring their similar but not identical traditions to be reconciled. While I did not learn as much about Assyria's forced resettlement policy as I hoped, nor its relationship with the Hebrew states, Assyria is still a compelling narrative of the ancient civilization.

Assur started out as an unusually peaceful Ancient Near East city noted for its extensive network of merchants. Its literary culture was downstream of Babylon's (analogous, perhaps, to the Rome/Greece or US/Europe relationship), as were its state structures and symbols of power. After the monarchy broke free of oligarchic constraints, it formed a territorial polity hegemonic over northern Mesopotamia, one of the "brother kingdoms" of the Late Bronze Age state-system. The Bronze Age Collapse (documented in Eric Cline's 1177 B.C. [reviewed: March 2023]) wiped the board clean and allowed for a new phenomenon: a single empire ruling the whole Ancient Near East. Neo-Assyria, as we call it, conquered Babylon, the Levant (including Israel), Egypt, and Hatti. Eckart Frahm calls this "the world's first empire" (in that it was the first state to dominate an entire world-system), and—while exact definitions are tricky—every subsequent empire in western Eurasia is some mix of descended from, a reaction to, and in emulation of Neo-Assyria.

My favorite parts are when Frahm (a professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale) goes deep analyzing specific sources. The archaeology of the Queens' Tombs at Nimrud provides great insights into the lives of elite women. The awkward relationship between Assyria and Babylon is epitomized by the former's wholesale adoption of the latter's creation myth (the Enuma Elish) until later scribes found it politically expedient to replace Marduk with Ashur. It was important to Ashurbanipal, the most famous king of Neo-Assyria, to be seen as a scholar. As one inscription boasts: 

I learned the craft of the sage Adapa, the secret and hidden lore of all of the scribal arts. I am able to recognize celestial and terrestrial omens and can discuss them in an assembly of scholars. I am capable of arguing with expert diviners about ‘If the liver is a mirror image of the heavens’. I can resolve complex mathematical divisions and multiplications that do not have an easy solution. I have read cunningly written texts in obscure Sumerian and Akkadian that are difficult to interpret. I have carefully examined inscriptions on stone from before the Deluge that are sealed, stopped up, and confused.

Yet Eckart points out that, despite his massive library, Ashurbanipal had amateurish handwriting, and in letters to him experts assumed he would not know how to pronounce basic academic vocabulary. Primary sources like these excite me because you can give them to students to interpret and allow them to participate in creating history, instead of passively consuming your interpretation.

✭✭✭✭✰: The Anglo-Saxon World charts the contours of what became England from its time as a Roman province to its consolidation under Norman control. The broad strokes are well known, even to a general audience: Britain was in the process of Romanizing when, in the 5th century, the Empire's support for the province was withdrawn. Without the military garrison (it importantly provided economic and cultural structure, in addition to defense), the local Romano-British found itself squeezed between the indigenous Brittonic groups on the insular fringe and Germanic peoples (viz., Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) arriving from the continent. The former became the "Celtic nations" (Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland), while the latter became England. Because these 700 years have traditionally been considered a "dark age" (a period without enough surviving writing for us to be certain what was happening), historians have felt free to fill in the gaps as they wish; more often than not, this has meant racialist theorizing. By synthesizing the meager number of surviving chronicles, letters, and court records with a huge variety of evidence from place names, cemetery finds, DNA tests, linguistic analysis, field surveys, petrography, and paleobiology, the authors have reconstructed in detail Anglo-Saxon social and political life.

It turns out not to be any sort of predestined march to the kingdom of 1066. Rather, there were all sorts of dead-ends and unexplored potentialities: for long stretches the economy was oriented east towards Scandinavia rather than south towards Frankia; Vikings, not Anglo-Saxons, had almost complete control of lowland Britain for much of the 9th century; Mercia spent more than a 100 years as the ascendant power before being displaced by Wessex; literature and urban life had two distinct resurgences, with only the second one proving sustained. In order to explore this ambiguity, almost 300 high-quality images—maps, diagrams, and pictures of recovered artifacts—are included. A favorite of mine is from early in the book (2.27) which shows where either Anglian cremation or Saxon brooches from the 5th century have been found side by side with British drainage basins. There is an overwhelming correlation of Saxon remains along or near the rivers draining south and southeast, while those draining east are accompanied by Anglian ones. The conclusion—that culturally different bands penetrated England by its rivers while Romano-British populations receded into the highlands—is presented, with the caveats (e.g., one section on the Great Ouse is populated by Saxons crossing overland from the upper Thames, rather than the Angles who colonized downriver) plainer than if it were merely written out. This style of communication is well suited for a period with general trends but no absolute tendencies.

The highlight, though, is the sixteen "Sources and Issues" sections. In each, either Nicholas J. Higham or Martin J. Ryan goes deep into a source (e.g., the writings of Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Bayeux Tapestry), an interpretative dispute (e.g., the historicity of King Arthur, the trajectory of urban life, what Beowulf is exactly), or archaeological site (e.g., Spong Hill, Flixborough, the Staffordshire Hoard). These are not only interesting but are also packages that ask students, "What do you make of this?"

✭✭✭✰✰: This is a quick and thoughtful exploration of early Christian history (c. 30 to 325 CE) by using the historical-critical method on the Gospels (including non-canonical), and similar early church records. The central conceit of Bart Ehrman—who I think can fairly be called the most mainstream historian of the New Testament, as much as such a thing can exist—is that where public memory deviates from actual history, it probably in response to contemporary problems facing the author. For example, in the Gospel of Mark, some Jews are shown being afraid of getting expelled from their synagogue if they acknowledge Jesus as Messiah; given that this was not an actual concern during the life of the historical Jesus, Ehrman deduces that the author (an anonymous Greek-speaking Christian who wrote about 50 years after the death of Jesus) came from a community which had a suffered such a traumatic expulsion from Jewish synagogues. These deductions are interesting, but can be nothing more than probabilities. Luckily, Ehrman includes quite a bit of firmer history as background before he goes into speculation.

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✭✰: The island society of Utopia has a series of institutions which diffuse the sources of conflict, leaving its citizens unusually virtuous and happy. All religions are tolerated as long as they do not infringe on the conscience of others. Competition for jobs is limited, as carpenters have just as much respect and access to mental stimulation as phylarchs. Money does not exist, and gold used exclusively for the chains of convicts. No one has a need to hoard resources, as anything anyone needs is always freely available in ample supply. 

Thomas More coined "Utopia" for his fiction as an anglicization of two different Greek neologisms—εὖτοπος ("good place") and οὐτόπος ("no place"). The ambiguity was intentional, and meant to playfully draw attention to his true purpose: criticizing his own society. As Lord Chancellor, More was the most powerful person in England save for King Henry; yet he found himself little able to reverse the rot he saw all around him. The emblematic example was wool, England's most valuable export. The fiber's production was perpetually being ramped up by turning common land over to well-connected landlords for sheep pasturage. This deprived the traditional tenants of vital subsistence while creating little new work (sheep are profitable because they largely take care of themselves), forcing a huge number of peasants to choose between leaving their homes or starving. Thus, while the well-off got richer, England had a swelling number of visible poor. Rather than restore the commons, parliament passed a series of cruel laws to punish these "vagrants." While this process would eventually give birth to the modern economy (as documented by Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Origins of Capitalism [reviewed: May 2022]), it required later increases in agricultural productivity to provide cheap food to complement the cheap labor. Until then, generations toiled, wandered, starved, and died to fill the coffers of wool exporters.

In his advocacy for a republican state, women as priests, banning animal cruelty, pacifism, divorce for mutual incapability, the right of euthanasia, and public welfare More feels more a man of our time than his own. An argument posited by some (e.g., David Wootton's The Invention of Science [reviewed: January 2023] and John Darwin's After Tamerlane [reviewed: September 2022]) is that contact with the New World caused the Renaissance desire to match the Ancients to shift into the Modern desire to surpass them. Utopia makes the connection fairly explicit: its traveler returns to Europe and immediately dismisses the "proud, ridiculous, and stubborn" belief that "it would be highly dangerous if anyone were found to be wiser in some respect than his ancestors." More thus sees us having it in our power to begin the world over again, a message which deeply resonates to this day.

✭✭✭✭✭: This incredible book tells the story of Southeast Europe without buying into its core myths: those of backwardness, of discrete identities, and of nationalist teleologies. Instead, Mark Mazower shows how the 19th and 20th centuries unleashed a dialectic of modernizing states and popular input (both collaboration and resistance); by the dawn of the 21st century, this had created an unrecognizably homogenized landscape of nation-states, justified by these very myths.

"Nationality" is a concept so deeply embedded in our understanding of the world that non-historians seldom realize how recent it is; Eugen Weber perhaps explained it most clearly in his 1976 Peasants into Frenchmen: it was only after 1870 that the French State acquired the mass media, mass schooling, and mass conscription capacity to inculcate nationality identity into the bulk of the population. In the Balkans, this process came even later, and more haphazardly: five decades after their French counterpart, a peasant was assigned "Greek" because that is what they spoke in the market town, or "Bulgarian" because of their name, or "Turk" because they had served in the Ottoman army, or "Serb" because of where their village was. Those labelled as "Jew" were often deemed inassimilable and expelled (the demographic chart of a once Jewish-majority Salonika is a chilling example). Mazower does not naturalize this process, instead emphasizing its top-down, state-driven origin. Once the population was sheared apart into discrete "peoples," they then became constituencies which further radicalized the project of creating the nation-state.

Without being able to fall back on the lazy trope of "national development", Mazower articulates the actual forces shaping Balkans society: its centripetal geography, its status as a political borderland, its ambitious civil and state projects, and the ways its peasants resisted exploitation. These are so so insightful that it makes me want to teach a world themes or AP Human Geography extended unit only using this region as case studies.

✭✭✭✭✰: This is an extremely ambitious and thought-provoking book challenging the assumed categories we use for history. Like David Graeber's previous works (e.g., Debt: The First 5000 Years [reviewed: June 2022]), it has a meandering (and at times too-cute) style; yet, the bad is far outweighed by the good.

The core thesis of The Dawn of Everything comes from well-respected but poorly-publicized recent research on the intellectual history of native North Americans. The conventional view is that indigenous people were caricatured as "Noble Savages" in order to critique European society by Enlightenment writers (e.g., Jean-Jacque Rousseau) who possessed little actual knowledge of them. The revisionist points out that, while Rousseau himself was indeed writing in a discursive tradition going back more than a century, the first texts of that tradition were written by people who had close contact with Amerindians. Thus, when the Wendat leader and philosopher Kondiaronk is recorded laying out a detailed argument against European-style state society, we should take seriously the possibility it represents authentic, autochthonous political philosophy.

The premise leads to a dizzying spiral of tangents and digressions: can whole peoples collectively coordinate without the state? How would it work? Is there evidence that this happens? How do such anti-systemic systems persist? Each question leads to more examples from around the world, each in turn prompting more questions. The pay out—besides illuminating a tremendous amount of recent research in history, archaeology, and sociology—is that humans have more capacity for deciding what sort of society they live in than we are given credit for. North American Natives experienced a tyrannical state centered in Cahokia, collectively withdrew from it and its surroundings, and consciously created social institutions to prevent it from happening again. When confronted by Europeans, they thus already had sophisticated critiques of state-society deeply imbedded in their culture. The implications of this go far beyond North America: it means we should consider evidence that cities pre-date monarchy in the Ancient Near East, that the Tlaxcala democratically decided to join the Spaniards against the Aztecs, and that there is no such thing as "stages" to history; while almost every historian would say they agree with that last one, I struggle to think of one who actually writes as though they do.

Patrick Wyman well captures my own thoughts when he said, "the thing about books like Dawn of Everything is that you don’t have to agree with all the particulars, or even the overall argument (though I mostly do); the biggest asset is that even if you disagree, it forces you to strongly consider why."

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✭✰: For women's history month, I thought it was time I read the autobiography of one of history's most important women. Alexandra Kollontai's list of accomplishments are simply incredible: she was both the first woman in world history to hold a cabinet-level post in government (15 years prior to the USA's Frances Perkins) and the first woman in world history to serve as an ambassador-ranked diplomat; she oversaw the world's first formal legalization of abortion (despite, fascinatingly, her personal pro-natalist views); and she was the only woman on the Bolshevik Central Committee, being one of the ten to vote in favor of the armed uprising that became October Revolution. Yet her blame in creating the USSR is blunted to a modern audience by the fact that she led the pro-democracy faction against Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Her proposals for a worker-led, bottom-up democracy had her smeared as a "syndicalist" and ejected from the top echelons during the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1921. 

She wrote The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman five years later, while in de facto exile as a diplomat in Scandinavia. There, she would work to contain fascism and maintain peace (not always successfully) between the USSR and its neighbors. She would later be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Finnish President for her role in ending the Winter War. I heard an interview once where the guest offhandedly mentioned that she used her position to save his Jewish parents from the Holocaust. Because of her retirement from party politics, physical distance from the capital, and Joseph Stalin's personal sexism, she was the highest ranking anti-Stalinist to survive the purges.

Between when it was written and published, Alexandra Kollontai realized just how dangerous her position as an Old Bolshevik was. She frantically wrote to the editor and made significant, fearful revisions. This leads us with two completed versions—put side by side in this edition by the translator Salvator Attanasio—allowing us to see what Kollontai, a successful survivor, thought had suddenly become unmentionable. Her friendships with more moderate socialists (including Karl Kautsky and the Mensheviks) were crossed out by her blue pen, "I" is constantly changed to "we", and many of her personal accomplishments fully excised—one feels she feared appearing immodest. Saddest of all, sections about reconciling her revolutionary feminism with her passionate sexuality are wiped away, leaving a cold, matter of fact account of her career. There was no place for a sexually emancipated woman in Stalin's Russia, communist or not. 

✭✭✭✰✰: The halfway point of history (the 5000 years or so of written records, in contrast with pre-history) is c. 500 BCE (contemporaneous with the semi-mythical founding of the Roman Republic). If we entertain the view that all history is equally important and thus deserves an equal proportion of a world survey course, then everything since Themistokles (i.e., a traditional "Plato to Nato" class) would be jammed into second semester. This prompts the question: what would be in first semester?

1177 B.C. is a source-centered investigation into the end of that first semester from archaeologist Eric Cline. Prior to Greece, Rome, Persia, or Carthage, there was a vibrant world-system we now call the "Ancient Near East", centered around the major poles of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Three to six major states would compete economically and militarily, spurring many of the innovations which have lasted to the present. They had elaborate diplomatic and administrative systems, and is thus one of the best documented periods of pre-Common Era history. Around the year 1177 BCE, the last state system dramatically collapsed. This shattered not only the polities, but the economic and social structures as well, plunging the region into a period of relative chaos, weak states, and low levels of documentation—in sum, a "Dark Age."

It is important to realize that so-called "Dark Ages" were often not bad for the people living through them. What are later seen as historical high points are, in actuality, culminations of centuries of creativity and development during such periods. Modernity was born out of the European social crises of 1350 to 1650, and the High Middle Ages from the "Dark Ages" of 500 to 1000. What is too often considered "the beginning" (Homer shading into Herodotus) is nothing of the sort; it is, in fact, the result of the previous Greek Dark Ages (in turn, the local manifestation of the general Late Bronze Age Collapse). 

1177 B.C. comes to few firm conclusions, but it is a collection of interesting clues which would lend itself to letting students develop their own explanations for complex phenomena—hopefully gaining access to a once-lost world in the process.

✭✭✭✰✰: It is shocking how new “World History” as a subject area is; it only solidified in its current form in the 1980s, after several decades of concerted effort by scholars. Prior to that, there were really three distinct “histories”: histories of the West (“Western Civ”), history of Westerners abroad (“Imperial History”), and autochthonous historiographical traditions. To bring them together, Western-style histories of non-Western places had to be written (primarily) using local (i.e., non-Western) sources. While we now take the existence of such works for granted, it was genuinely notable in 1972 that A History of Japan was (1) written in accessible English, (2) not Orientializing, (3) drawing primarily from indigenous sources, (4) covering both modern and pre-modern Japanese history, (5) not merely following Japanese historiography (e.g., by being a court-centered or didactic account), and (6) not being part of a "doctrinaire-Marxist" (the authors' term) project. 

Though it is only an outline of Japanese history, it is a good one. One of my least favorite genres (seen in, for example, Martin Meredith's The Fortunes of Africa [reviewed: September 2021]) is a wandering between well-documented events without any reflection upon why and how they are linked; Mason and Craiger successfully avoid this, despite the clear difficulty of adapting their source base to include non-elite experiences.* The major shifts in government and society are well articulated in a way which neither denies the importance of structures, nor crudely force them into overdetermined stages. In addition to the social, economic, and political evolution of Japan, the authors have well-done discussions of its literature. In this, it complements Christopher Harding's more culturally inflected A History of Modern Japan [reviewed: August 2022] and reminds me to read the novels discussed there.

✭✭✭✰✰: Hinduism, broadly defined, is adhered to by about one in every six people on Earth. This alone makes it important, in particular for someone hoping to teach global history in an accurate and inclusive way.

Kim Knott—a professor of politics, philosophy, and religion—did a good job presenting the core of the tradition while emphasizing the diversity ("Hinduisms") of its practice. It was especially prescient of her to address the continuing role of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalism, considered a form of fascism by many) in Indian politics. In the twenty-five years since publication, it has become even more entrenched via the ruling party of the world's soon-to-be-largest country. That said, I did not learn a ton from this installment in the "A Very Short" series; it was more a confirmation that I did indeed know the basics.

Right now I am clearing out my backlog of half-finished works; my habit of reading four or five books concurrently has led to over a dozen books (many soon due at the library) sitting around my apartment. This was an easy one to finish, and provided a good "check-up" to my knowledge of this topic.

[Re-read]: While discussing A Distant Mirror [reviewed: October 2021], I mentioned that I considered Barbara W. Tuchman "perhaps the 20th century's greatest English-language writer of history prose." I cannot imagine reading the section I quote above and not wanting to keep going. It is remarkable how quickly taste evolves: her techniques are beginning to wear thin for me. It is like reading too many consecutive whodunits by the same author—even as the details change, the structure becomes obvious. 

I loved the way the eight sections interwove, creating a dense web of interconnections. Not only do the monarchs (Nicholas II, Wilhelm II, and Edward VII) and the near-monarchs (Theodore Roosevelt, Georges Clemenceau, and Winston Churchill) appear and re-appear, but so do a wide variety of supporting characters. Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld shows up in four different chapters, as does the industrialist Andrew Carnegie and the classicist Theodor Mommsen. Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, both socialist playwrights of a decidedly non-proletarian hue, make their way into five, as does the ever-vocal poet/jingo Rudyard Kipling. Tuchman uses these to give the culture wars of this era its unique texture from an ever-evolving constellation of elites.

This book was adapted into the core of the first 80-odd episodes of Mark Painter's excellent The History of the Twentieth Century podcast. Even though Tuchman went through the effort of collecting all the anecdotes which make her story so engaging, I actually prefer Painter's interpretation of events.

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✭✰: This is a book which has long intimidated me, so I was surprised when it turned out to be a booklet scarcely over 100 pages, including notes and introduction. The various interpretations (realpolitikal, satirical, republican, and Straussian) made me think there would hard-to-parse phrases or convoluted examples. After reading it, I am baffled. It feels a straightforward defense of raison d'état. Its "paradoxes" come from the fact that different circumstances require different approaches (in one section Machiavelli talks about the benefits of being feared; in another, how dangerous it is), and that Machiavelli is a funny guy trained in humanist rhetoric.

I know I am new to this work, and I am reading it in translation, and I am not nearly as smart as the many people who find an esoteric meaning hidden in it. But the only special gloss which I feels plausible is that, in publicly saying those in power retain it by strategically acting viciously, Machiavelli is helping bring reality and public discourse into alignment. This disproportionately benefits ideologies (such as republicanism) which rely on open coordination, at the expense of others (such as monarchism) which thrive when there is a gap.

✭✭✭✰✰: Professor Douglas Boin is a well-respected author of scholarly works (such as Wiley-Blackwell's A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity), but here he writes accessibly for a general audience. I wish more academics did this; popular history is too important to leave to popular historians.

Only a small amount of information directly on Alaric survives, but Boin is able to complement it with other sources—archaeological, cultural, comparative. For example, we know from the contemporary poems of Claudian and the writings of Socrates of Constantinople (as well as the continuing popularity of Juvenal) that the cultural atmosphere had turned sharply xenophobic in the decades prior to Alaric's decision to sack of Rome. The Goths, fleeing the advancing Huns, were subjected to an intentionally cruel policy of internment, starvation, and child abduction (Boin argues that this was more deliberate than presented on Wikipedia). Rome, which for generations* successfully incorporated outsiders into the military, squandered this chance. Unable to earn a share of Romanitas (a key term which I wish Boin had spent just a little bit more time on), Alaric led his people to seize it by force.

✭✭✭✰✰: Machiavelli is part of the excellent “A Very Short Introduction” series out of Oxford University Press, though it apparently is a revision of an 1981 book. The work itself was interesting, though there was not a lot of new information.

Though I have not read any of his other works, Quentin Skinner has a reputation as the most important contemporary historian of political thought. 

✭✭✭✰✰: This is an engaging popular history of Renaissance Italy, told through the intertwined biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia (respectively the titular "artist", "philosopher", and "warrior"). As this is a period I am not especially familiar with, I cannot comment on its veracity; it seems well-researched, but Strathern's bizarrely wide areas of "expertise"* invites some skepticism. Even so, the bare outline must be correct. In the complex world of politics during the Italian Wars, telling an interesting enough story for the order of alliances, betrayals, and truces to stick is itself valuable.

Besides providing the skeleton for future understanding (the best use of pop history, in my mind), it made me realize I am probably mistaken about Leonardo da Vinci. For some reason I got it into my head that he was a talented but not unique artist, and an imaginative but not competent engineer (as evidenced by my comments on The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction [reviewed: January 2023]). If Strathern's depiction is remotely accurate (and given the amount of primary sources he cites it would be hard not to be), then this is completely wrong. Leonardo would in fact be one of Italy's best engineers, such that Cesare Borgia specifically sought him out to service his military. It is for these sorts of oversights that I try to mix in more general works into my reading: since I thought it was mediocre, I would not have prioritized learning more about Leonardo's career as an engineer.

✭✭✭✰✰: Ritchie Robertson offers an impressive tour of Enlightenment thought. Organized thematically into 100-odd subsections (totaling almost 1000 pages in my version), Robertson does not restrict himself to the normal highlights of secularism, science/epistemology, and liberalism—making the good choice to include aesthetics, historiography, practical measures, and religious enlighteners. His most mentioned thinker is not Voltaire (as I would have expected, though he still comes second), but David Hume. In part this is because Hume wrote meaningfully on a tremendous number of topics, and in part because Voltaire already has gotten more than enough attention. More than that, though, Hume exemplifies how the Enlightenment synthesized rationality and emotion: his skepticism lead him to understand that even rationality has limits. In his memorable example of the Is-Ought gap, he proclaims that "it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger" because preferences are (and only can be) rooted in pre-rational values. In this way, the Enlightenment is as much about "feeling, sympathy, and sensibility" as "reason;" hence, the book's subtitle.

The work is strongest when it is grounded in concrete moments. When the author is just abstractly recounting ideas held by intellectuals, it forces the reader to trust that they are somehow representative of the period; for no catalog (even of this length) can be comprehensive. An indicative example is Robertson's treatment of 'tolerance.' He shows a few thinkers in the 17th century for whom it is a necessary evil, and then a few thinkers in the late 18th century who treat it as a positive good; we are thus to surmise a societal transition. While this is plausible, as presented one could cherry-pick an equal number of anecdotes going the other way.

One of my biggest frustrations is how Robertson handles the American Revolution. He takes the final result, very much the culmination of power-political conflict, as self-evidently the epitome of rational reflection. The prescient attacks levied by Tom Paine are dismissed by citing the very points he dismantles, as though Paine were unfamiliar.

An incautious historian might identify "modernity" with the nation-state—the histories of France, Britain, and Spain all invite such a view. Italy, though, was assuming many of its trappings without a "national" scope. Indeed, the fractious peninsula was precocious in its development of institutional learning, formal diplomacy, and debt-financing. Machiavelli, after all, came out of Florence not Toledo.

Two collections of essays on this topic caught my attention: The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600 and The New Cambridge Medieval History. Out of the former I read "Introduction" by Julius Kirshner (who also edited the volume), "Legitimacy, Discipline, and Institutions" by Pierangelo Schera, "The 'Private,' the 'Public,' and the State" by Giorgio Chittolini, and "Law and Jurists in the Formation of the Modern State" by Aldo Mazzacane. Out of the latter I read "The Maritime Republics" by John Pryor (V.15a), "Florence" by Louis Green (V.15d), "The Italian North" by John Law (VI.15a), "Florence and the Republican Tradition" by Louis Green (VI.15b), and "The Northern Italian States" by Michael Mallett (VII.23a). Together, I feel like I have a much better understanding of how politics worked in the lead up to the Renaissance. Louis Green's essays on Florence and its politics in particular stood out.

✭✭✭✭✰: David Wootton traces the development of 'science' as a distinct form of intellectual activity to two instigating processes of the 15th century: discovery and printing. The former provided a decisive argument against the previously hegemonic idea that 'the Ancients had a complete understanding of the world,' while the latter allowed for far more effective intellectual cooperation and dissemination.

New phenomena were of course always being encountered, but it was only in the 16th century that they began to challenge the overarching frameworks used to explain the world. The 1572 “Tycho’s Nova” led to serious questioning of Aristotle’s system (which allowed no changes outside the sublunary sphere). Its observer and namesake spent his life collecting data—data which his assistant would use against heliocentrism. Galileo too mustered new facts (e.g., Phases of Venus and Moons of Jupiter), and explicitly dismissed ancient testimony he found incredible.

If discovery and printing brought about the “killer fact”, there was also a cultural shift where these facts and their implication were publicly discussed. The split of Chymistry into Chemistry and Alchemy illustrates well how science was an open endeavor: the former was built in the newly founded Royal Society and Académie des sciences, while the latter was privately transmitted from one practitioner to another since, supposedly, Solomon. While they were sometimes pursued by the same individuals (e.g., Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton), they were not pursued in the same way.

A final shift is in the criteria for what constitutes a good “explanation.” Wootton agrees with H. Floris Cohen (made in The Origins of Modern Science [reviewed: December, 2022]) that quantitative description and prediction (“how”) replaced teleology (“why”): Newton’s gravity was very good at the former, and completely lacked the latter. Wootton further agrees that the gap between the development of “science” and its subsequent application to anything practical was large, though he nuances Cohen here by pointing out that progress on real issues was made almost immediately: the final successes to the problems of calculating longitude at sea, predicting the trajectory of a projectile, getting water out of mines, and making efficient mills all came from iterating on the first scientific attempts to solve them.

✭✭✭✰✰: What emerges in John Lynn’s account is much more interesting than the crass stereotypes of “the Sun King” Louis XIV (b. 1638 – d. 1715). Generations of careful work under Kings Henri III (r. 1574–89) and IV (r. 1589–1610) and Cardinals Richelieu (1624–42) and Mazarin (1642–61) had allowed France to recover from the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) and survive the Wars of Religion (1562–98) and Fronde (1648–53). Having opportunistically sided with Protestant powers (as well as the Islamic Ottomans) against their co-religionist Habsburg rivals, the French state inherited by Louis was the strongest in Europe.

But Louis was not raised a cautious statesman, but a gloire-seeking aristocrat. Upon his majority, he burst onto the European stage with the highly destabilizing War of Devolution (1667–68). Despite winning his sought-for acclaim, he alienated former allies to the Habsburg bloc. Louis never properly adjusted: again, and again, and again, and again, he wished to secure France’s international situation through displays of power, without appreciating how it also hardened opposition to him. By his death, he had entrenched the structures for a “Second Hundred Years War”—one which would lead to bankruptcy, regicide, and occupation.

Despite not being a military history guy, I am glad I read this book. It’s a period that is surprisingly important to the birth of our world, and misunderstandings of it have driven American policy from Alfred Thayer Mahan’s counsel to Roosevelt to Brad DeLong’s prognosis for Taiwan.

✭✭✰✰✰: I don't think this is a bad book, but I had a bad time reading it. I started in September, and it slowly killed my interest in the Greek world (hence the steady drop off in Greece-related entries on here).

Our understanding of Classical Athens is limited by the lack of surviving pro-democratic sources. The Invention of Athens (originally published in French as L’Invention d’Athènes) tries to overcome this through exploring the funeral oration, a democratic propaganda piece par excellence. Even though we lack the actual speeches, by using parodies, second-hand accounts, homages, and theatrical recreations (along with a heavy dose of 20th-century French structuralism), Nicole Loraux is able to have a vague sense of what topoi must have been employed, and to what effect. Beyond that, I "got" very little of the next 400 pages. When it did touch on areas I understood (e.g., the trivialization of the term 'democracy' from 'popular power' to 'sovereign government'), the conclusions did not make sense to me. The arguments were too complex, and the system of having both footnotes and endnotes, the latter without good page headings, made it difficult to quickly dissect her points.

✭✭✭✰✰: H. Floris Cohen's The Rise of Modern Science Explained [reviewed: December 2022] made me want to spend some more time in the mid-millennium intellectual milieu. I'm a big fan of the "A Very Short Introduction" series (as evidenced by last year, when I read three in one month [see: July 2022]), and I tentatively plan on using them to refresh and expand my knowledge on this period.

The move away from Eurocentric 'Western Civ' to a more global 'World History' has ballooned the amount of material to cover, even as the time allocated to social studies has continued to be cut in favor of vocation and STEM. This means making painful cuts to the curriculum, and the Renaissance is an easy choice: not only is it very limited (to an elite strata of one subcontinent), its influence today is primarily felt through subsequent events (Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment). This is a shame, because there are an unusually high number of conflicts where ideas, personalities, and structures all converge in fascinating ways: Machiavelli and the Medici; Henry VIII, Thomas More, Cromwell, and Anne Boleyn; the construction of Saint Peter's with money from indulgences; the councils which united and divided Christianity. My personal favorite is Lorenzo Valla, who proved that the Catholic Church had fabricated a crucial part of its justification for temporal power. What does it mean to live in a time when a major power could be harmed by a scholar's knowledge of Latin, and also a time when that power would be willing to then hire that same scholar?

I don't think the world would be very changed without Leonardo da Vinci—so by that measure, he is unimportant. Yet his massive cultural footprint is a testament to just how much the Renaissance and its concerns still speak to us. As a teacher, it always leaves me sad when the pre-existing interests of students are left behind.

✭✭✭✭✰: Major General Smedley Butler (1881–1940) died the most decorated marine in U.S. history. His two first decades in the service took him to Cuba, the Philippines, China, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Panama, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Europe's Western Front. While Spanish-America and World War I are not the U.S.'s most famous conflicts, their respective Rough Riders and Doughboys left their mark on popular consciousness. In contrast, there is almost no American awareness about the invasion of Veracruz, or the dissolution at gunpoint of the Haitian parliament, or the 24-year occupation of Nicaragua. That is a shame, though not a surprise, as the book's epigraph explains: "The one who deals the blow forgets. The one who carries the scar remembers. -Haitian Proverb." Smedley Butler did what was asked of him, though he became increasingly unsettled by what felt less like a defense of America than an excuse to help industrialists and bankers loot other countries.

Gangsters of Capitalism (the title being Butler's late-in-life phrase for his role in the Banana Wars) well complements to Black Spartacus [reviewed: December, 2022]. They both follow competent soldiers as they remake Latin America politics: one as the ultimate revolutionary, the other as the ultimate imperial goon. The interactions between the strands they represent are at the core of the making of the contemporary Haiti, as well as practically every other country once in the American orbit.

According to this site, last year I read 55 books, 35 essays, 33 pieces of Ancient Greek oratory and short prose, 5 plays, and 2 longer poems. I have eight "Lunar Linguistic" updates (ehh...), and completed eleven "Monthly Manuscripts" (woohoo!). Of the full-length books, 12 were five-stars, 17 four-stars, 20 three-stars, 2 two-stars, and 4 were unrated re-reads. I wrote nearly 30,000 words on it, too.

My favorite works fit into three broad categories: those which broadened and deepened my understanding of democratic society, those which synthesized recent historical research, and those which moved me.

In the first category, I would put The Price of Peace (about how economics is not independent of society), Classical Greek Oligarchy (about the emergence and defeat of anti-democratic ideology), and the essays of Cornel West.

In the second category, I would put the Penguin History of Europe (especially those covering 1648–1949), Alan Taylor's "American..." trilogy, and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler.

In the final category, I would put the plays of Aeschylus (especially The Persians and Prometheus Bound, the latter inspiring my first tattoo), the Fifth Head of Cerberus, and Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday. The last of these was also my favorite primary source ("manuscript"): a beautiful attempt by a suicidal Zweig to remember his youth, when annihilatory war did not seem an inherent part of the human condition.