Keep Reading

There’s a lot of overlooked history out there

I’m gathering a bag of books to take to the beach later this month. Of course we’ll spend time in the water and playing with the grandchildren, but we’ll also relax with some books.

My favorite diversions are mystery books, about spies or detectives, but I also try to catch up on new nonfiction, mostly history. I prefer real printed books, not the electronic variety where it’s confusing to turn pages or check back on earlier passages.

There are limits. I don’t think any book should have over 500 pages because they can’t be read in bed without risking chest compression. I just gave up on Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain because its 1,174 pages had too many details and would have taken too long to finish.

One reason I value my Harvard classmates and keep going to reunions is that, even as we entered our 50s, they were still reading books and talking about them. The busy doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives still made time for ideas and stories in print.

As an academic, I feel obligated to read widely, to “keep up.” It’s easy because I enjoy it.

Some books have deepened my knowledge of events I thought I knew well. Philip Zelikow's The Road Less Traveled revealed to me that leaders missed a chance to end the war in December 1916 with a poorly staffed peace initiative by Woodrow Wilson that was undercut by Secretary Lansing and "Colonel" House. Christopher Cox’s Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn documents how strongly Wilson’s racism and opposition to women’s rights affected everything he did as president. Jonathan Schneer's Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet persuaded me that much of Britain's success was due to the way the cabinet worked together; Churchill dominated, but the cabinet mattered.

Other books have broadened my knowledge by putting particular events into their broader context. James Lacey’s Washington at War showed how FDR’s administrative and economic policies had as much to do with America's ultimate success as its military operations. Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy's history of British politics during the American revolutionary war, The Men Who Lost America, proved that the conflict was a global war, with battles in North America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Mediterranean and even India.

As I wrote earlier this year, books have changed my mind about several former presidents.

I recently got engrossed in another new book despite its 737 pages. Historian Greg Grandin has written America, América: A New History of the New World , a book about ideas that shaped the history of North and South America, ideas of sovereignty and society, cooperation and conflict. He has historical details but they are embedded in the broad paths of parallel and sometimes intersecting developments in Spanish América and British America. One of his themes is that through much of our common history, Spanish law and practice was racially egalitarian, in contrast to the white supremacy of the northerners.

I’ve never studied USA-Latin American relations to any great detail, not much beyond the 1898 war, military interventions, and modern Cuba. [I used the full abbreviation because Grandin tells of 19^th century disputes where diplomats in Washington strongly objected to repeated calls from elsewhere in the hemisphere to call our country the United States of North America so that they could assert themselves as the United States of South America.]

Among my discoveries are some minor facts that I had never known before. These are not earth-shaking revelations but to me they are intriguing .

1. The Pilgrims found empty villages. Grandin says that the plague that killed probably 90% of the coastal Indians was “rat fever,” spread after 1614 from visiting ships. The peak year for native death was 1616, four years before the Mayflower landed. The new settlers found established villages and fields and took them over. I guess I assumed that the deaths came mainly from diseases among the settlers and that the Wampanoags were nomadic.

2. The brutal suppression of the natives in America mirrored the English killing and torturing of Irish Catholics in the 16^th century. An English commander in the Irish Midlands in 1557 ordered his men “to plague, punish, and prosecute with sword and fire and other warlike manners all Irishmen and their countries.” Royal troops in Elizabeth’s reign created famines by destroying village crops and confiscating livestock. I hadn’t realized how vicious the English were.

3. In order to keep the new USA confined east of the Spanish-controlled Mississippi River, the Spanish lured American settlers to their territory by allowing slaveholders to establish plantations but sought escaped slaves as well by promising them asylum. I hadn’t known that the Spanish worked so hard to populate their American territory to prevent US western expansion.

4. The liberation of the Spanish republics by Simon Bolivar and others was not a revolution from below in imitation of the USA, but an opportunity created by Napoleon’s overthrow of the Spanish king and the collapse of royal authority abroad. This to me was an example of most people not seeing the broader context that shaped local events.

5. Woodrow Wilson had a much more idealistic view of the Mexican revolution than I had realized. He supported the Huerta government against the opposition and used diplomatic pressure for arbitration as a precursor of his plan for the League of Nations. He also used the invasion of Mexico in search of Pancho Villa as training for possible later use of troops in Europe. I previously thought he was much more belligerent, in keeping with his 1913 statement, “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.”

I’m currently going down another intellectual rabbit hole. The Grandin book mentioned that the Dutch had a colony in Brazil from 1630 to 1654. Really? Then I read a review of a new book about the Dutch in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley. Got on the waiting list for it at the local library. Then saw a mystery drama where the plot point was a fake Vermeer painting. When I reached into my memory, all I could find was a vague recollection that the Netherlands had been controlled by the Habsburg king of Spain, but eventually the northern region became the Dutch Republic. When? How? Why?

These questions have led me to get more books from the library, including a huge 1995 history text, The Dutch Republic, by British historian Jonathan Israel. I can barely lift it [1231 pages] and intend only to skim it, but already I’ve discovered –

-- that the Dutch Golden Age of the 17^th century was launched after 1590 by the movement of tens of thousands of Protestants into the northern provinces to escape Catholic rule and repression.

-- that the northerners could accommodate and accept them both because of their tradition of religious toleration and because they could build housing quickly.

-- that the immigrants brought trade skills lacking in the north because of its reliance primarily on bulk shipping of goods like timber and herring.

-- that the Dutch system of government relying on councils and votes made it easier for financial innovations like joint stock companies.

-- that William of Orange’s invasion of England in 1688, which led to Parliament’s approving him and his wife Mary as king and queen in what is now called the Glorious Revolution, was prompted by a trade war with France escalated by Louis XIV.

It’s fun to follow questions and jump start your curiosity. You can learn new facts and interpretations about historical issues. I hope you can find the time to experience some of the same pleasures in your reading.