New Books In History

I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both occasions, I found him tough to read. He was a very dignified man–I want to write “correct”–but also quite distant, even cerebral. Now that I’ve read Nicholas Thompson‘s very writerly and engaging The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (Henry Holt, 2010) I can see that my impressions were largely correct. He was distant, cerebral, and, well, a bit hard to read. Not so the other protagonist in Thompson’s tale of two key personalities of the Cold War. Paul Nitze–who was Thompson’s grandfather–was a sort of “hail fellow well met,” the kind of backslapping, can-do guy that Americans like to think characterizes the “American Spirit.” Thompson skillfully weaves Kennan’s ying and Nitze’s yang into the story of America’s long struggle to come to terms with the Soviet Union and its “ambitions” (or lack thereof). In my humble opinion, Nitze comes off a bit better than Kennan, and not because of any bias on the author’s part; he’s quite even-handed. But they were both remarkable figures, and the book is a suitable testament to their achievements (and, I’m quick to add, foibles). The world they lived in–a time when a few ambitious men who had gone to the right schools, met the right people, and were given the power to chart the nation’s course–is largely gone. We’re fortunate that Thompson has so admirably brought it, and the world it made, back to life.

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Tags: 20th Century, Bolsheviks, Capitalism, Cold War, Communism, Foriegn Policy, Historians, Intellectuals, Marxism, Neoconservatism, Nuclear Disarmament, Politics, Public Intellectuals, Russia, Russian Empire, Socialism, Soviet Union, Sovietology, Stalin by Marshall Poe
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I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you are likely to end as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (I didn’t, but that’s another story). “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Don’t historians get bored with their little time and place?” “Yes,” I replied. “Don’t they exhaust the topic and begin to work in circles?” “Yes, quite often” I replied. “Don’t they want to compare what they’ve learned about time/place X with time/place Y in order to better understand both X and Y?” “Probably,” I replied. “Then why,” she asked, “do historians continue to work the way they do?” It’s a good question, and one that deserves to be answered. On the one hand, ‘more and more about less and less’ has certainly enabled us–that is, the historical profession–to uncover a lot of the past that might have been forgotten. But, on the other hand, we’ve gone so far ‘inside baseball’ that we can’t and don’t talk to one another, let alone talk to colleagues in other disciplines or the public at large. There are exceptions, but they only improve the rule.

In their very readable new book Natural Experiments of History (Harvard, 2010), Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson point out that this way of going about history is a lost opportunity. If historians would pull up for a moment and look around, they would discover a world of “natural experiments” that could both shed light on their particular time/place and speak to larger patterns in world history. More specifically, “natural experiments”–what historians usually call the “comparative method”–would permit them to speak about the general causes of the specific events they study. To my mind, that is a laudable goal and one that we should pursue. Knowledge, as we know, is difference. If all you know is Russia in the 1600s, then you won’t really know Russia in the 1600s. We should do what we tell our undergraduates to do: compare and contrast.

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Tags: Anthropology, Comparative History, Frontiers, Historians, Historical Laws, Historiography, Islands, Natural Experiments, Sociology, Theory, World History by Marshall Poe
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When I was young, I remember going to my high school library (not to study, mind you) and thinking “Who the hell reads all these books? And who writes them?” Just a few years later I found myself enrolling in a graduate program in history to do both. I’d always been interested in history, by which I mean things that go off, blow up, or otherwise maim and kill. Yes, I admit it, my entry point into history was, well, war. But really my historical career (if you can call it that) was more or less an accident caused by my arbitrary assignment to this man in college. I wanted to play basketball; he wanted me to study history. As it happened, I was better at the latter than the former (though I did school Barack Obama once upon a time). My stumble into academic history was far from unique, as you can read in James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis’s interesting book Becoming Historians (University of Chicago, 2009). Not surprisingly, almost no one grows up wanting to be a historian. Astronaut, baseball player, doctor, yes–historian, no. History–and especially hardcore academic history–is clearly an acquired taste. Banner and Gillis asked nine historians born around World War II to explain how they acquired it. The results are fascinating. Let me tell you, academic history ain’t what it used to be. If you want to know how and why, read this book.

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Tags: 20th Century, Academia, College, Cultural Criticism, Graduate School, Historians, Historiography, Social History by Marshall Poe
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How different is the United States from other nations? American leaders and common folk have often said it’s very different. The Founding Fathers said it, Abraham Lincoln said it, Woodrow Wilson said it, Franklin Roosevelt said it, Bill Clinton said it, and George W. Bush said it–and they were hardly the only ones. It certainly seems that the history and nature of United States are quite different from other comparable nations. Americans often say that the U.S., almost uniquely, has been and remains ‘a nation of immigrants,’ the ‘land of opportunity,’ and the ‘arsenal of democracy.’ But how much of it is true? In his provocative new book The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale UP, 2009) Godfrey Hodgson attempts to answer this important question. He’s the right man to do so. Though British, he has observed the U.S. professionally for nearly half a century. Thus he has both the perspective of the detached outsider and the knowledge of the native insider. He challenges Americans to look at themselves as others see them. Whether you agree with Hodgson or not (and as you’ll hear, we sometimes cross swords), that is certainly a good thing and we should thank him for it.

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Tags: 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, American Exceptionalism, Anti-Americanism, Foriegn Policy, Founding Fathers, George W. Bush, Historians, Historiography, Ideology, Imperialism, Intellectuals, Iraq War, Liberalism, National Identity, Nationalism, Neoconservatism, Popular Culture, War on Terror by Marshall Poe
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