Brian Eshleman’s Reviews > A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 > Status Update

On his daughter‘s amazed recollection that Schlesinger managed to write with his kids screaming around him, he admits, “True, I didn’t close my study door to the life of the household.

Historians are, like anybody else, prisoners of their own experience.

Schlesinger divides the 1947 Supreme Court between those addicted to process and those addicted to results.

Pretty accurate description of fallen humanity , I’d say.

Recognizing from half a century past that contemporary historians would emphasize different things than he did in the age of Andrew Jackson: “The present persistently and inevitably re-creates the past.“

My WASP snob is in insulin shock imagining the Good Old Days with the Georgetown set. I need to reread that book.

Schlesinger is narrating his and the country‘s transition from World War II into the 50s, and simultaneously giving the blow-by-blow on which is the dominant American nearest tube of the 1830s. Action on two screens is keeping my undiagnosed history major ADD riveted, but it may not be for everybody. I’m starting to understand why well-meaning people find my writing hard to follow.

On the slow adjustment of life after the official conclusion of World War II: "The war was over, but the melody lingered on."

It takes almost nothing to remind me that Christ is coming by fat He has not yet made all things new, but this certainly does.

Particularly with respect to the dropping of the atomic bomb, chip Bolin calls out what he calls hind-myopia, a refusal to take into account all the contemporary factors of a decision, including the negatives of what would happen if it was not made.

I'm going to have to try this again. I just wanted somebody else's vantage point on JFK. Turns out those around a president, maybe especially historian wordsmiths, have time and space to give to the grist of THEIR times as well. Hits some of my other likes such as wartime London, and those I didn't know I had like wartime political intelligence.

On JFK: as his political aide Fred Dutton once noted, that even if what was shown on the evening news did not by his definition constitute reality, then nonetheless in millions of homes it was perceived as reality.¹