Posted on 07/05/2021 4:42:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
Writing and reading history is one of the greatest joys of life. Writing about Ronald Reagan and WWII has been singularly pleasurable for me. What was it the philosopher Erasmus said, “When I have a little money, I buy food and clothes. But anything I have left over, I buy books.” Now, we study history for many reasons: for the sheer joy of reading; of knowing more than the next guy, or as the noted teacher George Santayana said, just to learn about not repeating failures - “Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.” Teddy Roosevelt said much the same thing.
Down through the ages, from Benjamin Franklin to C.S. Lewis to Dorothy Parker, all have observed the importance of studying history. Some of them have actually made great statements about the study. Franklin once said you should either live a life worth writing about, or write things worth reading.
President John Kennedy lamented that his shipboard captains in 1962 had not read the masterpiece, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, for which she won the Pulitzer, about how the world blundered into World War I through a series of little things that started with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by a crazed young Serbian. Kennedy wanted to avoid the same mistakes in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The pseudo-intellectual snobs of the academy didn’t consider Tuchman a true historian because she had not led a college department. But unlike the pseudos, she wrote a great book.
It is sadly becoming increasingly difficult to separate good history from bad history because of the failure of public schools. I am reminded of a spinster lightweight who was a principal at our children’s grade school years ago. She was shallow, superficial, didn’t known her isms, in short the perfect liberal useful idiot. Lenin would have loved her. She didn’t possess the ability or strength of character to question authority and the study of good history was a minor disturbance.
History should be explored, studied and savored. History should not be manipulated to make a political point as in the case of the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project is a pack of lies manipulating facts to serve a political purpose. Everything associated with the 1619 Project should be discounted including the harebrained fallacy that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery. Black slavery and white indentured servants have their proper place in history, but they are not central to American Revolution history. That war came 90 years later with the properly identified and neutrally identified War Between the States. If the 1619 Project had been presented to me in a term paper, I would have given it a resounding “F” and a stern lecture to the offending student.
America has had a Poet Laureate for many years but I’ve often said that what America needs is a Historian Laureate. Imagine if a historian was there to tell George W. Bush that no one had successfully invaded Afghanistan since the days of Hannibal? Or if a historian had been present to tell Jimmy Carter the real intentions of the Soviets? Or if a historian was available to tell Richard Nixon of Teapot Dome on the eve of the Watergate break in, and the headaches it brought President Warren G. Harding?
The list I have compiled here is by no means complete. So many excellent books by so many historians have been written. Discounted here automatically are plagiarists. Plagiarism is just a lazy way of recording history. As far as I am concerned it is a scarlet letter one must bear for life as if they were banished from a sports hall of fame for cheating. Some judgments must be lifetime.
The assemblage is subjective, just a few of my favorite works, discounting my own books and, as a writer, I am forever remembering there is just one consonant’s difference between “book” and “kook.” As I look over the list, I see a few friends, many strangers, but all great historians and writers. I imagine my joy to be in a room, surrounded by this extraordinary talent, just listening and soaking it in. I am envious of their fine talents. Some books are by liberals, some are conservatives, some I truly don’t know. All are excellent chroniclers of American history.
18. The British are Coming by Rick Atkinson is a great, great read about the American Revolution. Splendid.
As I have indicated, this list is by no means complete or comprehensive. But I think it is a good cross section of the best of American writers and historians. Historian Doug Weed has written a number of fine books and he is unusual in that he is an unabashed truth teller making all his presidential books a “must” read. And there are a few others like him: Courageous in their principles.
I hope you will enjoy each book as much as I have. And I hope you will enjoy reading my books as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Today’s students get the Howard Zinn version of American History and are punished if they question it.
I have always liked the F. Van Wyck Mason books on the Revolutionary War. He often referred to it as the first civil war...American Tories v. American Patriots. I’m close to where the battle of Kings Mountain was fought. Not one Britisher was involved.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/929392/posts
Above is a link to a long booklet called “Revolution Was” written about FDR and the New Deal - in 1938. So much of the same stuff is still happening. I think Obama ripped off of FDR the same ideas - and words in speeches.
“Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention.
The end held constantly in view was power.”
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose.
A list of the 25 best histories should not include 25 books on American political history.
World history is more informative on the evolution of political thought and the evils of socialism.
Business history is more informative on the productive economic engine that permits the political sphere to exist at all.
Read the Will Durant series The Story of Civilization
Nothing on European History.
America was born with Anglo-Saxon common Law, the Roman Reoublic and Ancient Greece.
You can’t understand us unless you know where we came from and all political thought is rooted in history.
Cool. I just got my reading list for the rest of the year. Thanks, Kas.
Any list that doesn’t include Winston Churchill’s history of WW II is worthless.
As you mentioned, it is just too narrowly focused on US history.
But many of the books are worthy of being mentioned, and some of the books I had not heard of (”How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life”).
I am also finished reading about the Kennedy clan, though Papa Joe deserves a more thorough going over.
BUMP!
Rush’s stories for kids must be on that list.
1) What does Hannibal have to do with Afghanistan? He never came within 6,000 miles of the country.
The notion that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires" is a myth. Afghanistan has been successfully invaded many times. It is a Muslim country today thanks to the Arabs, who extirpated Buddhism and Hinduism, which most of its people followed, following their conquest of Afghanistan in the seventh century.
2) Watergate, which involved eavesdropping, is to Teapot Dome, a financial scandal involving oil reserves as apples are to pyramids. And the Teapot Dome scandal reached its zenith during the Coolidge administration. However, they are related in the sense that both presidents Nixon and Harding were unaware of what their underlings were doing.
Way too heavy on Reagan. Shelby Foote not on the list? Milton Friedman’s monetary history of the US? Amity Shlaes The Forgotten Man? Paul Johnson Intellectuals? Whitaker Chambers Witness. Michael Hitzik Colossus (Hoover Dam building).
If you want to read something on JFK. Read “A Question of Character “ by Thomas Reaves. A historian who expected to write the usual JFK hagiography but in doing the research found something different. It’s very well referenced. See the link below.
I have read some of them and it’s a good list.
I am more of a history nut than a pure political guy.
I started as a kid with a book called “Kings and Things” about Medieval England. Good kids book. I bought “the British Are Coming” and it’s great. A good introductory history to English history is Costain’s series on the Plantagenets.
From Wlliam the Bastard (not a Plantagenet) through Richard III and Henry VI. Covers Magna Charta and Simon De Montfort. “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is good.
Reading “In Search of an Empire” about Drake and Elizabeth I. What got me interested in US History was Bruce Cotton’s entire series on the Civil War. Now my main interest in US history is the Civil War, Revolution and early colonial wars.
Shirley they can’t be serious???
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