History

History (from Greek ἱστορία - historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it sometimes attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events. Historians debate the nature of history and its usefulness. This incl...more

New Releases Tagged "History"

A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons

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Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

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Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina

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Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot

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Revolution 2:0: A Memoir and Call to Action

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Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

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God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

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Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

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The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree And The Heroic Age Of Arctic Exploration

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Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America

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More new releases tagged "history"...

Giveaways

Love Bomb and the Pink Platoon
by Ryan Gielen (Goodreads Author)

Release date: Feb 14, 2012

Love Bomb and the Pink Platoon:

When a military experiment goes horribly wrong and turns his entire platoon gay, a washed up General must l…more view details »

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Giveaway dates: Feb 17-Feb 24, 2012

5 copies available, 296 people requesting

Countries available: US

I Am a SEAL Team Six Warrior by Howard E. Wasdin

I Am a SEAL Team Six Warrior: Memoirs of an American Soldier
by Howard E. Wasdin, Stephen Templin

Release date: Apr 24, 2012

This Explosive National Bestseller—now written for a young adult audience!

When the U.S. Navy sends in their elite, they send in the SEALs.…more view details »

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Giveaway dates: Feb 01-Feb 29, 2012

25 copies available, 490 people requesting

Countries available: US

The Norseman (The Norseman Chronicles, #1)
by Jason Born (Goodreads Author)
----SIGNED COPY----

The Norseman is the first volume of the vividly-detailed historical chronicles of Halldorr, an orphan whose entire desi…more view details »

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Giveaway dates: Feb 03-Feb 29, 2012

1 copy available, 327 people requesting

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Most Read This Week

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

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Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

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Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever

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At Home: A Short History of Private Life

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Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

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The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

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Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

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Lists

My Favourite Historical Romance

892 books — 1,004 voters

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

Teen Historical Novels

321 books — 447 voters

History as Literature

282 books — 219 voters

The Constitution of the United States of America by Applewood Books

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The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the Unit... by Thomas Jefferson

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276 books — 326 voters

Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs

Best Non Fiction About Music

417 books — 310 voters

By the Light of the Silvery Moon by Tricia Goyer

The Watch That Ends The Night by Allan Wolf

Titanic's 100th Anniversary

49 books — 36 voters

Popular History Books

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

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The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

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Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

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Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

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Recent Reviews

02/22

Vj gave

to:

Looking at Lincoln

by Maira Kalman

bookshelves: children-s-books

recommended for: teachers of elementary grades

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Vj said: "The author states that "there are over 16,000 books written about [Lincoln]," and I think this is a really good one for children to read. Written from a young girl's point of view, the book has just enough factual information to be informat...more"

7 hours, 46 min ago · see review

02/21

Valentina gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Valentina said: "The portray of contemporary America, a class society divided between the Haves and the Have Nots, where a successful, powerful elite, lives in a bubble isolated from the lives of regular Americans, is spot on. However, when Murray offers his analysis...more"

Feb 21, 2012 12:11pm · see review

02/20

John gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

read in February, 2012

My rating:

John said: "This was a very frustrating read. Dr. Murray is certainly engaging an important topic -- the economic/educational/class segregation of the United States over the past 50 years. And much of the descriptive evidence he cites is persuasive. We all kn...moreThis was a very frustrating read. Dr. Murray is certainly engaging an important topic -- the economic/educational/class segregation of the United States over the past 50 years. And much of the descriptive evidence he cites is persuasive. We all know the "superzips" he describes -- well-heeled areas of Boston, New York, D.C., Seattle -- where everyone has advanced degrees and lives in an elite bubble looking out with wonder (and often disgust) at the rest of the country.

But Murray's pervasive smugness and woolly-headed libertarian nostalgia send the whole project off the rails. Does he really have to mention Harvard on every page? Honestly, this book reads like someone wrote down the chatter at the conservatives' table in the Harvard faculty club on a particularly smug afternoon.

I'd much rather have a rigorous discussion of the effects of the kind of sorting by intelligence and education that he describes. On the subject of homogamy -- people marrying and/or procreating alike on the high and low ends of the intelligence scale with genetic and social implications for their children -- the implications are actually pretty disturbing. If it continues, one imagines a Brave New World filled with bright Alphas and dull Gammas who have less and less in common and no ability to ever mix again. This thought is not really explored by Murray, but then that's a pretty dangerous line of thought that risks veering into eugenics wars.

He also gives short shrift to the effects of sorting itself on the "left behind" areas who are losing their most gifted children to the elite schools and then the superzips. I think of the town in Texas where I grew up. None of my honors student friends from the high school still live there as far as I know. How much better off would the area and its residents be if we had all stayed and applied our talents to local organizations and issues? Murray talks about how the New York Police Department benefited from an infusion of high-IQ recruits in one trainee class in the 1940s, but he never discusses the obverse of this strategy -- all the organizations that lost potential leaders precisely because NYPD skimmed this cream. The sorting he describes is a zero-sum game, and yet he seems to find it all rather comforting and amusing from his Harvard perch.

Indeed, you have to examine the effects of the zero-sum sorting on a social scale to pronounce them good or bad. Only if the organizations skimming the cream put it to higher and more productive use than the alternative organizations that would receive it under a more neutral regime would the system be beneficial in a social sense. Even if that's true, costs are imposed on one group and benefits are granted to another, and the groups are now segregated, so some kind of compensation would be in order. Without much in the way of argument, Murray dismisses any attempt at redistribution or compensation or any intervention, really, intended to balance out the costs of all this talent sorting. Rather, he expects, deus ex machina, a new Great Awakening, whatever that means, to restore the American Project, whatever that means, and take out the (assumed without argument) discredited Welfare State, whatever that means, at the same time.

I guess what I'm saying is that I expected better argumentation from Harvard. But then again, I decided not to attend that school, so what do I know.(less)"

Feb 20, 2012 11:33am · see review

02/19

Socraticgadfly gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

bookshelves: politics-public-policy

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Socraticgadfly said: ""Coming Apart" is quite possibly more mendacious than "The Bell Curve." It's certainly more hypocritical, and given that Murray's whole thesis is ultimately a screed against the Great Society more spiteful.

In this long ...more"

Feb 19, 2012 01:07pm · see review

02/20

Jim gave

to:

Glock: The Rise Of America's Gun

by Paul M. Barrett (Goodreads Author)

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Jim said: "this is an interesting book for gun or non gun fans.
the book says there are 200-300 million guns in the US.

the book also highlights how American companies failed to keep up with improving their products in the 80s and 90s and lost o...more"

Feb 20, 2012 06:50am · see review

02/17

Dave gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

bookshelves: great-non-fiction

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Dave said: "This is one of the most important books written in the last 10 years. Charles Murray does an outstanding job of showing how over the most recent half century the United States has split along class lines. My Libertarian bias admitted, but the bulk of...more"

Feb 17, 2012 09:49pm · see review

02/20

Shawn gave

to:

The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree And The Heroic Age Of Arctic Exploration

by Alec Wilkinson

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Shawn said: "I had lofty hopes for this, as I have read Wilkinson in The New Yorker for many years and have enjoyed his earlier books. But this never really engaged me. It seems to occupy an uncomfortable middle ground between serious history and quirky nonfict...more"

Feb 20, 2012 07:09am · see review

02/16

Marcy gave

to:

Looking at Lincoln

by Maira Kalman

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Marcy said: "Looking at Lincoln, by Maira Kalman, is an amazing depiction of Abraham Lincoln with magnificent colored pictures and not only factual information, but the "thinking" about Lincoln by a small girl who is looking at his statue in the Lincoln...more"

Feb 16, 2012 12:30pm · see review

02/16

Sean Chick gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Sean Chick said: "You mean the decline of America has to do with government? That thing that socially speaking has been shrinking since 1980? I also love the part where the wealthy are virtuous and the poor whites are now slobs. Of course like most conservatives he be...more"

Feb 16, 2012 09:15am · see review

02/20

Jon Malysiak gave

to:

Revolution 2:0: A Memoir and Call to Action

by Wael Ghonim (Goodreads Author)

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Jon Malysiak said: "Powerful and very affirming! Mr. Ghonim's memoir shows just how effective social media can be when it used intelligently and as a means of rallying mass groups of people in support of a cause. For anyone who is interested in the Arab Spring and how, ...more"

Feb 20, 2012 10:38am · see review

02/21

Famillo2001yahoo.com gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Famillo2001yahoo.com said: "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

I am less than enthusiastic about books which are mostly statistics and the interpretation of those statistics. Honestly, page after page of statistics, graphs, and inter...more"

Feb 21, 2012 05:17pm · see review

02/19

Jeff Vista gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Jeff Vista said: "One of the most important books I have read in the past year. Liberal/progressives will hate it, because it challenges their worldview with 50+ years of hard data. Notice that the one-star reviews are ad hominem attacks, not backed by hard data of ...more"

Feb 19, 2012 01:13pm · see review

02/12

Diana Vale Balatico gave

to:

Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

by Mark R. Levin

bookshelves: good

read in January, 2012

My rating:

Diana Vale Balatico said: "I see. I see what this book is trying to say. I respect his point-of-view, and I sometimes share his view as well. But I feel like he has totally given up on America and is trying to criticize every part of this land."

Feb 12, 2012 02:01pm · see review

02/14

Stuart gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Stuart said: "This isn't a serious book. On the plus side it does document the fact that the lives of the middle class have, on average, changed for the worse. We have become increasingly a society of permanent haves and permanent have nots. I'll give it an extra ...moreThis isn't a serious book. On the plus side it does document the fact that the lives of the middle class have, on average, changed for the worse. We have become increasingly a society of permanent haves and permanent have nots. I'll give it an extra star for the charts that document this change. But the rest of this book is just plain idiotic eugenics.

The take home message from this book? The rich are rich and stay that way for generations today because they are smarter and the elite colleges they attend serve as eugenics factories for mating. Supposedly the rich didn't keep to themselves nearly as much way back when. And good jobs didn't require brains like they do now. Apparently, the rich were marrying bartenders and mud wrestlers with reckless abandon before the 1960s came along. Physicists and financial analysts in the 1950s could have the IQs of cucumbers. I don't understand how this book merits anything approaching real discussion. The graphs can be nice, though.

No, Mr. Murray, colleges don't filter for the smart today. They aren't eugenics factories. At undergraduate schools like you went to, legacies, children of the super-wealthy, and decent athletes will, all things being equal, have twice the rate of acceptance as the very smart hoi polloi. Talk to admissions deans after they've had a few drinks. They'll tell you that when all the slots for preferential admits are filled, they have so little room for anyone else that they have to turn away gobs of highly qualified, very smart children of the middle class. Elite colleges prefer the wealthy, smart or not, pretty much like they always have.

Even if you buy this filtering premise, the numbers don't add up. We're talking about 50 colleges and universities producing about 100,000 graduates a year in a population of over 300 million people. It's a tiny percentage of the population, far, far lower than even the residents of all those fancy zip codes of elites Murray talks about. Rule number one in science is to make sure your theories pass simple mass quantity constraints. Murray doesn't even come close.

We have retarded social mobility in this country, it's true. In comparison to most countries in Europe - which have been pre-selecting smart and privileged kids for college for a long time - our poor tend to stay poor and our rich tend to stay rich. Why? Because the system is rigged. It's rigged in college admissions. It's rigged in the job marketplace. Crony capitalism isn't maintained through eugenics. It's maintained through corruption. This book is one big crazy libertarian fantasy.

According to this book, the rich are rich because they are smart, moral and work hard. The poor are poor because they are dumb, immoral and lazy. Supposedly, the 60's and LBJ are the culprits for the laziness and immorality of the poor. All those jobs in my old neighborhood and across the industrial Midwest and East working on assembly lines for over 50 dollars an hour in the 1970s (in today's dollars) that went poof didn't have a thing to do with it. And according to Murray, if the rich would simply reach down to the less fortunate with their precious hands and big brains and show the poor how to lead hard working, moral lives, America might get back on track. Ultimately, Coming Apart is two doses of Horatio Algier mixed with one dose of condescension.

I've lived the American dream. My parents came from dirt. They came to this country, worked hard, and built something for themselves. I went to college and built even more. But what separated me and my parents from other hard working people who didn't make it, who are still struggling today? When I look back, I see one major difference: blind luck. That luck is harder to find today. Go off on your own and chances are, even with hard work and brains, you'll fail. What if you don't go off on your own? Those high paying jobs of my youth - the jobs that convinced many of my friends not to take the time to go to college - are flat out gone. A college degree is no longer a consistent path to those jobs, either.

We have "come apart", it's true. But hard work, intelligence, and morals have little to do with it. As Billie Holiday used to sing, "Them that's got shall have. Them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says and it still is news." She sang those words in the 1930s. They're even truer today. There's far more wisdom in one two minute song, God Bless The Child, than in this entire book.(less)"

Feb 14, 2012 09:56pm · see review

02/11

Dan gave

to:

Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

by Mark R. Levin

bookshelves: politics

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Dan said: "I was predisposed to like this book: a defense of liberty and individualism with serious emphasis placed on primary sources of original utopian thought. Unfortunately the author chooses only tiny fragments of his opponents' writings, so the chapter ...more"

Feb 11, 2012 09:42pm · see review

02/20

Bojan Tunguz gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

My rating:

Bojan Tunguz said: "Charles Murray is one of the most distinguished and insightful social scientists of our time. His work over the past few decades has systematically and methodically probed into some of the most consequential and momentous societal and policy issues. ...moreCharles Murray is one of the most distinguished and insightful social scientists of our time. His work over the past few decades has systematically and methodically probed into some of the most consequential and momentous societal and policy issues. Unfortunately, due to the highly politicized and contentious nature of many of such topics, he and his work have been subject to some very severe and withering criticism over the years. It's a testament to Murray's courage, integrity, and intellectual honesty that he stuck to his guns and pursued his research and intellectual interest, often paying a pretty high price in his professional career.

"Coming Apart" is intended as Murray's valedictory. It's a book that crowns his professional career, recapitulates certain points and topics that have long been at the center of his interest, and offers his views of what the future may hold - both for the society and for the research into these issues. It is also a sequel of sorts to "Losing Ground", Murray's seminal 1980s book that explored the consequences (intended and unintended) of various welfare policies between the 1960s and 1980s. That book has pretty much launched Murray's career as a public intellectual, making his influence well beyond the academic and scholarly circles. "Coming Apart" explores the consequences of those same policies over the period of another thirty years of their implementation, ending roughly around the year 2010.

The first two parts of the book are primarily scholarly and descriptive. Here Murray lays down the facts in a very straightforward and informative way. He has always been incredibly adroit at presenting even the most arcane social science data in a way that makes them seem almost effortlessly intuitive. Using all the statistical and methodological tools that are at his disposal, Murray paints a very grim picture of the drastic divergence of the classes in American society. In order to avoid the false impression that the class division is in fact the racial division, Murray concentrates primarily on the divergence of the "white" classes in America. At a later point in the book he actually includes the figures for other ethnic group, but only to make the overarching point that the class divergence has very little to do with the racial and ethnic factors. Murray concentrates primarily on cultural and sociological measures in which the classes have grown apart, such as out-of-wedlock births, religious attendance, etc. One of the more interesting pieces of insight in this book was that, aside from the few large metropolitan areas (New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco), the elite neighborhoods are in fact very evenly split along the cultural and political lines.

The last part of the book is largely discursive and polemical in nature. Here Murray tries to give his own interpretation of the social forces that have driven America apart over the course of the past half a century. His overwhelming message is that America needs to go back to instilling its "founding virtues" in order return to the kinds of social cohesion and solidarity that was prevalent until the 1960s. (He indirectly blames LBJ for the start of the decline, although he never spells this outright.) The four virtues that he has in mind in particular are industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity. I particularly give him credit for including the latter two, especially considering that most libertarians have largely avoided (at best) promoting them. This is one of the main reasons why I have long held Murray in the highest esteem when it comes to discussing policy and social issues.

The founding virtues have in fact never gone out of fashion, and are significantly much more likely to be practiced by the wealthy educated elites than they are by the rest of the society, particularly those in the "underclass." This is very unfortunate, as these virtues are exactly what had enabled many of those in elite circles to obtain their high status. For this state of affairs Murray blames in large part the cultural norms of "inclusivity" and "acceptance," where it has become unfashionable to think that certain cultural norms and behaviors are, in fact, better in every meaningful sense. In Murray's words, it is high time for the elites to start preaching what they practice.

Even though this book is filled with a lot of sobering and depressing statistics, the saddest part for me was in the acknowledgment section. Murray refrained from mentioning ANY of the social scientists that he had consulted while researching and writing this book, because this could prove extremely harmful to their academic careers. It is a really sad that someone who I consider the foremost intellectual giant of our time has to be treated as toxic in the highest intellectual circles. It further highlights how much more someone of far lesser stature must be thought of as unpalatable by the same academics.

This is an outstanding, magnificent work that ought to be read by anyone interested in public policy and the cultural forces that are driving Americans away from each other.(less)"

Feb 20, 2012 02:04pm · see review

02/09

Doug gave

to:

Glock: The Rise Of America's Gun

by Paul M. Barrett (Goodreads Author)

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Doug said: "The Glock story is interesting, and Barrett tells it well and clearly; maybe I'd give it 3.5 stars. It might have been told more dramatically and perhaps with greater historical and/or cultural insight, but at least it isn't academic. It might also ...more"

Feb 09, 2012 10:15pm · see review

02/08

Jessica Scott gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Jessica Scott said: "If you want to have a discussion about class in America, you MUST read this book. This book was eye opening in many significant ways and the most troubling part is that if Murray is even half right, the American experiment is coming to an end. He ech...more"

Feb 08, 2012 07:33pm · see review

02/09

Joel gave

to:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

read in February, 2012

My rating:

Joel said: "The good news: here's somebody influential on the right who acknowledges America's deepening class divide--and believes it could be a problem for democracy. The bad news: he thinks this happened--in part--because the working class got indolent. Murra...more"

Feb 09, 2012 06:26pm · see review

02/11

Richard marked as to-read:

Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010

by Charles Murray

bookshelves: to-read, economics, non-fiction, social-political

recommended to Richard by: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/opinio...

My rating:

Richard said: "
David Brooks, the New York Times pet almost-a-conservative, claims about this book, “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.” Yeah, it looks seminal. See his review at The Great Divorce ...more"

Feb 11, 2012 08:59pm · see review

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Author Interviews

Erik Larson

The author of The Devil in the White City takes on history's worst villains with In the Garden of Beasts, his new nonfiction opus about the Nazi ascendance in 1933 Berlin.

20 likes · 20 comments

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Quotes Tagged "History"

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

375 people liked it

“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become ...more”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

88 people liked it

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