|
From Professor Darrow:
I attended a conference last year on the Revolutionary Era—1750-1850; the
main focus, of course, was on the French Revolution. One of the sessions
was entitled “Why Are We Still Assigning Twelve Who Ruled?” I
decided to attend because I do assign, year after year, R. R. Palmer's history
of the Terror, Twelve Who Ruled, originally published in 1939. I
expected to get told, by the French Revolution mavens on the panel, such as
Isser Woloch and Don Sutherland, how retrograde I was to do this and what I
should be having my students read about the Terror. Instead, it turns out, they
all keep assigning Twelve Who Ruled. It's engrossing, a great
read, and remains provocative, even after nearly seventy years. So, if
you did not read it at Dartmouth, read it now: R. R. Palmer, Twelve
Who Ruled (Princeton University Press).
A recent book that is almost as fascinating is Raymond Jonas, France and
the Cult of the Sacred Heart (University of California Press, 2000), which
tells the story of the other side of the French Revolution, those who opposed
it, and continued to oppose its legacy throughout the nineteenth century.
Jonas begins with the story of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque and her visions in the
seventeenth century and concludes with the monumental effort to build the
basillica of Sacré Coeur on the summit of Montmartre at the end of the
nineteenth century. When you are next in Paris, I guarantee that your
view of that landmark will be entirely different.
Another engrossing recent book, in an entirely different field, is Mark
Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews,
1430-1950 (HarperCollins, 2004). It is a social history of the
Macedonian port city and especially of the long and complex relations among the
different religious and ethnic communities that made it up. It is a
sparkling micro-history of that subject that most intrigues historians:
change over time.
Finally, for World War I buffs, I recommend a new book by Martha Hanna,
Your Death Would Be Mine (Harvard, 2006), a study of the relationship
between the French home front and the war, based upon the hundreds of letters
exchanged by one peasant couple, Marie Pireaud at home in the Dordogne and
Pierre Pireaud on various battlefronts including Verdun. It is a touching
story, reminding us how close we are to these people of a century ago.
From Professor Edsforth:
Trying to put “the big picture” into focus? Here are two very short
books that will give you a lot to think about. The first may have you
reconsidering the meaning of the word “globalization”; it's Bruce Mazlish's
The New Global History (Routledge, 2006). My other suggested
reading is related but larger, and its achievement is even greater. This
book, titled What Is Global History?, is by our own Pamela Kyle
Crossley, and it was just published in the U.K. by Polity.
From Professor Heck:
Alums who focused their studies on American history, particularly its
colonial phase, may be relieved that historians (with the exception of Joseph
Ellis) seem to have exhausted the possibilities of “Founders' histories.”
Founders' studies now have been overtaken by studies of America as part of the
“Atlantic world.” From the perspective of Atlantic historians, America no
longer is a passive recipient of (mostly) English culture, but an active agent
in a vibrant transatlantic culture. To date historians have used the concept of
an Atlantic world profitably to rethink the transatlantic slave trade,
migration, colonial political policies, religious beliefs, and the economic and
social implications of the consumer revolution.
While not focused on an American topic, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A
Woman in World History (Pantheon, 2007) by Linda Colley is a vivid and
highly readable account of one 18th-century woman's life. Nothing in Marsh's
biography attracted historians until Colley, who frequently writes on the
Atlantic world, came upon her. Colley tracks Marsh from Jamaica, where she was
conceived, to England where she was born in 1735, and on to Menorca and Morocco
(where she nearly ends up in the Sultan's harem and later writes a popular
memoir of the experience), then back to England, where she marries James Crisp
(who speculates unsuccessfully on land in Florida) and moves on to Dhaka with
him. If you think a “shot heard round the world” is quaint but exaggerated,
when Crisp loses his job in India in part because of the American Revolution,
you may have to reconsider. Marsh's tale is a remarkable reminder that in the
18th-century world, including the Atlantic world, people, goods, and ideas
moved swiftly and with startling range.
Many with an interest in the Civil War no doubt already have read Harvard
president Drew Faust's earlier works on the topic. Her recently published
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf,
2008) deserves the considerable praise it has received. Less about the war
itself than the long-lasting transformations in American culture it set in
train, This Republic of Suffering offers a fascinating study of what
happened when the killing ended and America faced the dreadful task of dealing
with the more than half a million soldiers whose lives ended on the country's
most storied battlefields.
From Professor Kremer:
A Pulitzer Prize winner by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin: American
Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York:
Knopf, 2005).
From Professor Miller:
Readers interested in World War II should check out Ernest May’s study of
the fall of France in 1940, entitled Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of
France (Hill and Wang, 2000). Although the story of the Nazis’
stunning triumph over British and French forces in May-June 1940 has been told
many times before, May makes an original contribution to scholarship by
examining the role of intelligence in the outcome of the battle. May
explains how the Allies’ overwhelming superiority in soldiers and materiel was
neutralized by a “failure of imagination” among their commanders. Readers
may be particularly interested in the conclusion of the book, in which May
draws an analogy between the French and British shortcomings and U.S.
intelligence practices at the time of the book’s publication in 2000.
May’s arguments on this point seem especially remarkable when read alongside
Chapter 11 of The 9/11 Commission Report. This part of the
report—which May helped to draft—concluded that the problem of imagination was
a key contributor to the U.S. failure to prevent the attacks.
|
