James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

Although it's been illegal here since the Civil War, it's a semi-regular event for stories to keep showing up in the news in the U.S. even now about people being illegally held in slavery - most often immigrants being forced to work as domestic servants, but it has also included situations like men who were brought into the U.S. to do reconstruction work after Katrina, then had their passports seized by their 'employer' and found themselves locked in compounds under armed guard, working under horrible conditions with the terms of the contracts under which they'd come here being ignored. Sometimes in the U.S. and often elsewhere in the world, including Russia and other parts of the former USSR, children and young women are often forced into prostitution.

I like Ambrose's books - The Wild Blue is excellent. It told about a side of George McGovern I hadn't heard about, too. 35 combat missions and a Distinguished Flying Cross - as a retired military guy, I'm humbled by that.

I'm with you, Marian. It's past time we started behaving reciprocally in terms of extending the same respect to other peoples and their cultures that we want for ourselves.
One of the sore issues along those lines here in the Southwest has been that of rock climbers climbing some of the mountains that are considered sacred by native faiths, especially when they do the kind of technical climbing involving hammering pitons into cracks and stringing ropes. As one person put it, how would people feel if a group of Navajo climbers showed up in Rome to climb the face of St. Peter's?

The two problems with that would have been that, first, just as now, it would have been much harder to get out of Iraq than in, and Bush Sr. realized the American public wouldn't be up for an indefinite occupation and the inevitable insurgency it would inspire, and second, he and Baker wanted to leave Iraq strong enough to keep Iran from dominating the region militarily.

Bush Jr. should have stuck with finishing the war in Afghanistan, tearing Al Qaeda and the Taliban out by the roots, and left Iraq to continue withering on the vine. It was a shadow of its former self and a hollow threat.

The other thing that could have made the world safer would have been for the CIA, FBI, and NSA to do a better job of cooperating (or to have cooperated at all) to share information before 9/11; if they'd pooled their info and capabilities, they'd have caught or killed Bin Laden and caught the hijackers when they came into the US.

I remember being very frustrated during one of the Apollo missions because my class in school was watching the launch on TV and they made me go outside because it was my turn to be crosswalk guard. Couldn't have been Apollo 11, though, because that wasn't during the school year.

The hot air ballooning museum here in Albuquerque has an exhibit on the zeppelins, with photos of the passenger accommodations and some mementos like a place setting of the silverware. It looks similar to what traveling on an ocean liner was apparently like.

I like all three of the titles Marian mentioned, too; they can be grouped with "The Great Influenza" - another that looks at the impact of an epidemic is Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror", which explores the huge impact of the Black Death in the 14th century on European culture.

Forty Signs of Rain - hadn't heard of it. Thanks! I'll take a look.

Well, his writing style isn't the smoothest, but the ideas he explores are fascinating and his characters are interesting people. His love for and strong grasp of history are evident. I'd recommend trying some of his books and seeing what you think, rather than judging by synopses.

I'm reading Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku, and I just finished Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. Both great.

Barbara Tuchman was wonderful; she got the facts, presented the context well, and kept her writing focused on both why people in power did whatever they did and how it affected others. "The March of Folly" is one of her best - it was written as a reflection on the Vietnam war; I can only wonder what she'd be writing about the current situation if she was still alive.

The best reads-like-a-novel history I've read lately is "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry. He chronicles the flu pandemic that overlapped the end of World War I - it is an intense story, which he tells in terms of both the doctors and other scientists working to stop the pandemic and the people and social institutions experiencing it day-to-day. Powerful and scary.

The Flying Dutchman was a ghost ship, one of those legends about a phantom ship - in the story, it was doomed to sail forever without coming to port, and seeing it was an omen of doom.

Welcome, Holly!
It's like the best history professor I ever had put it - the problems of life are universal, and history is about all the varied ways people have come up with to solve those problems. It's fascinating for the same reason psychology is.

MacAulay has written some other good things too - he wrote a great parody of the way anthropologists sometimes spin their own interpretations of the meanings of artifacts, called Motel of the Mysteries; a hilarious goof on some classics of his own profession, Great Moments in Architecture; and a really wonderful encyclopedia-like book for kids (and adults), The Way Things Work, explaining the functioning of technology ranging from nail clippers to CD players in terms anyone from about age ten up can follow (and the illustrations are a hoot for that one, too; for some reason, he picked woolly mammoths as his favorite theme.)

There's a great book, which was also made into a video, title Castle by David Macaulay - it not only explains the hows and whys of the building of a castle, but does a nice job of portraying the society that gives rise to the castle in the book. It's a children's book, but I think it's a great read on an adult level too.

It was pretty successful, so Macaulay wrote similar books about other kinds of structures: Cathedral, Pyramid, Mill, Mosque, City (about a Roman city), and Unbuilding (in which he imagines the reversal of the construction of the Empire State Building (so it can be shipped to the Middle East by the imaginary buyer.)

Great story about the Original Redcoat, Manuel! I'll bet Twain was laughing.

Ever read his piece "The War Prayer?" It's one of the shortest, and most powerful, things ever written on the subject. I think it should be required that it be read into the record at every Congressional hearing in which an authorization for a war is considered, and at public ceremonies on Memorial Day and Veterans Day.

There are times when a war is necessary and right, like fighting the Civil War or World War II, and the people sent to fight any war should be respected and honored. But even then it's tragic and should be entered into reluctantly, somberly, and solemnly; and I think every reenactment should include recognition of that side of it... since the reenactments don't include the screaming, the stench, and the lifelong suffering of many of the survivors. I dislike anything that sanitizes the understanding of war and makes it easier for people to decide to start one.

I would include the "What If" books as alternate history; I like them and they were among the books I had in mind with the original question.
I'd define "alternate history authors" as writers who start by picking some major event that, had it turned out differently, would have caused history to take a different path, then explores what that possible different path might look like.
It can range from the very plausible - what if General Lee's dispatch rider hadn't accidentally dropped a copy of Lee's plan for the battle of Antietam where they were found by a Union soldier and passed up the chain of command to General McClellan? - to the farfetched - what if some South African racist extremists had gotten hold of a time machine and equipped Lee's Confederate Army with AK-47s?
Both those ideas were explored by Harry Turtledove, the first in a whole series of novels following the USA and the victorious CSA through several generations and wars into the mid-20th century, the second in a one-off novel titled The Guns of the South (I'd have bought it just for the cover illustration, a picture of Robert E. Lee standing holding an AK-47. Priceless.)
The best alternate history tends to written by authors who are historians, period, either as their primary profession or as dedicated amateurs.

I've never followed sports much, but from what little I do know, when Jackie Robinson broke the de facto apartheid of major league baseball it was one of the most significant events - it seems to have led to the integration of top level professional sports in general, and brought minorities onto the TV sets of America in a way in which they had been pretty much invisible until then, and that changed the whole experience and perception of America to Americans and the rest of the world.
No doubt Hitler's ghost was mightily peeved! :)

Suzanne Vega has a great song about that titled "Yesterday's Troubles", on her album "Songs in Red and Gray" - it uses pirates as an example of how we see things as romantic and glamorous if they're far enough in the past, but to the people at the time they were just the troubles of the day.

It will be interesting to see whether Vietnam, Beirut, etc., are being romanticized in another generation, or whether there was enough realistic journalism at the time to make that permanently impossible.

No, but I've seen dogs act guilty and embarrassed. Cats, now, they're a different matter, they're shameless!