Terence's comments (member since Jun 29, 2008)

Terence's comments from the History is Not Boring group.

how can they (government) handle the entire health care system? Actually, the government handles large-scale, national programs pretty well - highways, Medicare, mail delivery, Social Security. Unfortunately that largely positive record has been tarnished by 30 years of anti-government ideologues gaining far too much influence in (ironically) government.

As to the second part of that sentence - I don't think anyone is proposing that the federales "take over the health care" system like the old National Health Service in Britain, where the state employed the doctors et al. In most modern healthcare systems, the state simply assumes the role of insurer. Or, in the case of Switzerland, regulates the heck out of the private industry, ensuring universal coverage.

Only in America is there a faction that thinks entrusting a for-profit, private insurance industry (mandated by law to maximize profit as their first priority) with rationing medical care is a smart idea.

I'm a single-payer advocate but, as a start, I'd be happy with eliminating the for-profits from the picture and lifting the anti-trust exemptions. Then we could see about breaking the link between healthcare and employment.

The American people don't like radical change - I wouldn't be so dogmatic about this. The New Deal or WW2 mobilization were all done in a few years and profoundly altered US society. The Progressive Era also implemented some profound changes in a relatively short time. The problem is that the scope for public discussion has become so narrow that problems that might have been addressed early in their development are ignored and fester until we're up against the wall, the cancer has metastisized and radical surgery is necessary.

cute it up into pieces and introduce it slowly so that people can get a feel for it - Almost surely the death knell of any real change and a sure recipe for the for-profit insurance industry to kill reform with the torture of a thousand cuts.

The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, Mark Lewis
Rome and the Barbarians 100 B.C.-A.D. 400, Thomas Burns

Both are interesting, general overviews of their respective subjects.

Does it count if I bought them for myself?

The only history-related book that someone else bought me this Xmas is Mike Davis's Buda's Wagon.

I just ordered Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger, a memoir of his experiences in WW1, and there's Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's The FBI: A History.

While I understand Duntay's point of view, I'm afraid our "sausage-fingered potter" will remain forever unknown, alas, so we're stuck (for better or for worse) with the people who made an impression (also for better or for worse).

And here's eleven historical figures who, if I don't necessarily "like," I admire for some reason:

1. Heraclitus, pre-Socratic philosopher who believed "change" was central to the universe

2. Augustus Caesar
3. Vespasian
4. Septimius Severus
5. Aurelian
- this is the roster of my favorite Roman emperors

6. Henry II Plantagenet/Eleanor of Aquitaine

7. Peter Abelard, Medieval philosopher & castrato for love

8. Elizabeth I of England

9. Abraham Lincoln

10. Anton Chekhov

11. Taizong (Li Shimin), 2nd Tang Dynasty emperor

I'll bite: The Battle of Trafalgar.

Now for something completely different:

1. 10 August 955
2. Otto the Great
3. Germans v. Magyars
4. Widukind of Corvey

Sorry to be such a wet blanket :-)

The romantic in me would dearly LOVE to see the best side of things but the cold-hearted, empiricist bast'id always says, "yeah, but...."

Isabella (& Max),

I watched 1900 House with the Ex when it first came out and was appalled at how much work went into maintaining a household. Sheesh - I can barely keep up w/ my cleaning chores and I have all the modern conveniences :-)

Forgive me for seeing the glass half full, perhaps, but you're just not selling me on the "happy" status of women before modern times (and then only in some parts of the planet as you rightly point out). In Rome, perhaps, if you were lucky enough to have your spouse kick the bucket, a wife could acquire a measure of control over her property (and, thus, herself) but before then you were under the tutelage of dad or husband. And under the empire (particularly the Christian), a woman's status deteriorated terribly. I'm not saying there haven't been powerful women down through history - obviously, there have - but they're the exceptions, not the rule. And they often had to fight fiercely against the status quo: Hatshepsut of Egypt, whose stepson did his best to erase any memory of her; Empress Wu of China; Irene of Constantinople, whose gender so offended Charles the Great that he had to assume the mantle of Roman emperor; and even Elizabeth I had to contend (at least in the first part of her reign) w/ fractious nobles unhappy with the unnaturalness of a ruling female monarch.

And (as if I weren't gloomy enough :-) the lot of the overwhelming majority of urbanites was terrible. Ancient and medieval cities were dank, dark and dangerous warrens. Even the ones with advanced sewage systems were not the healthiest of environments.

I still think all of these places would be interesting to visit - but to live there? Probably not.

And, though Pope Joan is a nice Medieval legend, Donna Cross wrote a good novel around it: Pope Joan.

Coyle,

For the morbidly curious about the death throes of the empire, I'd recommend Peter Heath's The Fall of the Roman Empire and James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire (for starters, anyway, the bibliographies are well worth mining).

As long as we can avoid being part of the 95%-98% of humanity that toiled in the fields to support the 5% or so who lived at the top, I would have to opt for Tang China before the An Lushan Rebellion, particularly under the second emperor, Tai Zong (626-649), or Xuan Zong (712-756). It also might be interesting to live under the only Ruling Empress in Chinese history, Wu (684-705), but she was somewhat bloodthirsty and living around her court might be too "interesting" for comfort.

In my opinion, Tang China represented the Chinese at their best in art, literature, culture and openness to new ideas.

And to Autumnal Elizabeth, in case Mirela doesn't get back to her, the Tokugawa ruled Japan from about 1600 to 1868, when the Meiji emperor deposed the last Shogun. If you want an entertaining, if historically somewhat free-wheeling (i.e., inaccurate), tale of the period you might want to check out James Clavell's Shogun (or the miniseries if you don't have time for the 1000+ page novel :-)

And to the fans of Rome and its attitudes toward women...um...well, they were better than the Greeks, I suppose, but you were still a second-class citizen under the guardianship of male relatives or a husband. What little freedom a woman had depended upon her social class, and even then was quite restricted. Honestly, I can't imagine wanting to live in any era other than our modern one if you were a woman (and it's tough enough here).

French became moribund (sorry for the Latinism!) the minute the Academie Francaise began legislating on what constituted "good" French.

Good Lord! - Quotes like "They might mistake eg for egg and little things like that can confuse people" or "At the same time it is important to remember that the national literacy level is about 12 years old and the vast majority of people hardly ever use these terms" are utterly asinine (oops, another Latinism, perhaps I should have just said "stupid," at least then Marie Claire of the Plain English Campaign would have understood me).

So we're supposed to dumb down the language so a hypothetical 12-year-old won't buy "egs" instead of "eggs," instead of promoting literacy and extolling the incredible variety and richness of one of the most versatile languages in recorded history?!

Isn't this one of the things that Orwell was warning us against in 1984? The impoverishment of language? (oh, dang, another Latinism!!! When will I learn?!)

This may be cheating since I started it in September but I did finish it in October:

Young Stalin, Simon Sebag-Montefiore

As to the rest of the month, I'm focused on hominin evolution:

The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen
Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve, Steven Stanley
Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods, David Williams-Lewis

If I can get us back to the original posting :-)

I think slavery was definitely one of the primary, defining characteristics of America. Up to the Civil War it was the engine of economic growth for both the North and the South, and beyond if you consider how the South managed to maintain a slave culture after the war.

I'm finally getting around to Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin, a bio of the real Man of Steel from his youth to 1917.

I really enjoyed The Court of the Red Tsar but remember being dissatisfied with Montefiore's treatment of his early years so I'm looking forward to reading this.

While Rome is my first love, I have to weigh in here with Tang Dynasty China before the An Lushan rebellion.

A vibrant, expanding society, open to all sorts of influences and probably one of the best run paternalistic despotisms in human history.

Plus, it's the home of one of my favorite fictional detectives -- Judge Dee.

(Of course, if the East were excluded here, I'd go with Rome in an instant. Either under one of the "Good" emperors or under Aurelianus (270-275), one of the many emperors of the Crisis of the Third Century but (for reasons probably best not plumbed) one of my favorite emperors.)

Or -- the Angevin Empire under Henry II.

Or -- well, the list could go on for quite a while, really.

Barbarossa,

I'll grant you that there are periods, countries, people whom I'm not terribly interested in (the revolutionary era in South America, for example) but I've found that if I'm in an adventurous mood and pluck a book at random from a library or bookstore shelf about something I've never studied, I can be pleasantly surprised.

I'm thinking in particular of several books on African history that I picked up a couple, three years ago and found fascinating (if depressing, they were all post-Colonial).

This reminds me of Steve Allen's Meeting of the Minds (I believe that was the title). I only got to read the transcripts but I believe it was an actual TV show were Steve Allen and a bunch of actors playing historical figures got together to discuss "stuff."

Jessica,

I don't know if these suggestions will help, particularly since we're talking about middle school kids and none of these suggestions are geared toward "young adults" but you can take them for what they're worth:

China: Bridge of Birds, Eight Skilled Gentlemen & The Story of the Stone by Barry Hughart; the Judge Dee series of detective novels by Robert van Gulik. These latter are set during the Tang Dynasty and are the fictionalized adventures of a real Tang judge. The former are more fantasy/fairy tales set in ancient China.

Rome: I'm pretty sure it's beyond most middle schoolers (and I'm not sure their parents would approve) but there's always I, Claudius by Robert Graves.

Persia & Greece: Gore Vidal's Creation. Again, this is probably outside the reading levels of your typical middle schooler but it's a sweeping narrative that takes "our hero" from Pericles' Athens to Darius' Persia to the Buddha's India and Confucius' China.

The Lion in Winter (the O'Toole/Hepburn version, naturally).

Is there any other competition?

Well, OK, there is but this one is certainly in the Top 10.

This month the three I have to get through 'cuz they're library books are:

Endless Universe by Paul Steinhardt, a book on cosmology.

The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David Anthony, about the Indo-Europeans.

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory by Cynthia Eller, a corrective (purportedly) to the idea that there was a matriarchal "golden age."

I'm nearly finished with Arthur Cotterell's Imperial Capitals of China, an otherwise interesting look not only at China's capitals but also many other aspects of the empire marred by terrible editing (a sore point with me as I'm a copy editor by trade).

If I can, I'd like to squeeze in Simon Montefiore's Young Stalin, which has been sitting on the shelf lo these many months.

I'm not going to defend my position too strongly here. It is, afterall, a "what if." As I understand it, the rebellion wasn't too terribly popular in any of the colonies but resulted (in large part) from a combination of inept British policy and radical Americans (like Sam Adams) who forced their hand.

My point, I think, was that the Declaration and the Constitution are incomparable. Both are important in the contexts where they were conceived but one doesn't necessarily need the other to exist. And I think independence would have come eventually; either after a bloody rebellion (as it happened) or in a Canadian-style disengagement.

And sorry if my phrasing was confusing, I am aware that the Declaration predates the French Revolution by a few years :-) My point there was that after the two great Enlightenment-inspired revolutions, no other rebellion took the same form. Though, reflecting upon my original post, I realized that I don't know enough about the South American revolutions to know if my statement is true so any elucidation on that would be welcome.