S. focus on the problems past, present, and future. These books are certainly important. In We Had a Dream: A Tale of the Struggles for Integration in America, however, Rolling Stone writer Howard Kohn acknowledges the problems but reports on what has been happening, often positively, in Prince George’s County, Maryland. As one resident says, That’s how integration succeeds best, on a personal level. And Kohn relates the stories of individuals who have coped, in quite different ways, with integration.
These stories of families in everyday situations who are trying to come to terms with major changes in their lives will sound familiar to many of us. Kohn, perhaps best known for his Who Killed Karen Silkwood?, writes that he began the book with two biases. One is that good people matter. Fever and adrenaline aren’t always on the side of people with guns . . . His second bias is that individual actions coalesce into social change. Those who wonder how changes in social attitudes come about and how difficult it can be will want to read this powerful book.
Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.
Many of the books on race relations in the U.
S. focus on the problems past, present, and future. These books are certainly important. In We Had a Dream: A Tale of the Struggles for Integration in America, however, Rolling Stone writer…
We Interrupt This Broadcast captures a host of life-stopping events, from the Hindenburg to the death of Princess Diana. Each event is chronicled within 2-3 pages as readers re-visit the Roosevelt presidency, the first moonwalk, the fall of the Berlin wall, and other major events of the past 50+ years. Complete with vivid photographs, a foreword by Walter Cronkite, and two audio CDs of the actual broadcasts, this makes a wonderful gift for media and history buffs.
We Interrupt This Broadcast captures a host of life-stopping events, from the Hindenburg to the death of Princess Diana. Each event is chronicled within 2-3 pages as readers re-visit the Roosevelt presidency, the first moonwalk, the fall of the Berlin wall, and other major events…
Nonfiction is the broadest publishing category, with books that delve into the past, present and future of every aspect of our world. There are books that rifle through our innermost emotions and books that search the outer universe. Books that strike while the iron is hot and books that are cool and classic. You’ll find a little bit of everything on our list of our most highly recommended nonfiction books of 2021—from timeless instant classics to breathlessly of-the-moment reports.
With interesting characters, new historical insights and dramatic yet accessible writing, Ada Ferrer’s epic history of Cuba will grab and hold your attention.
Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor’s latest American history, covering the United States’ expansion from 1783 to 1850, is sweeping, beautifully written, prodigiously researched and myth-busting.
Unbound is Tarana Burke’s unflinching, beautifully told account of founding the #MeToo movement and becoming one of the most consequential activists in America.
For readers seeking to understand the twists, turns and amazing potential of gene-editing CRISPR technology, there’s no better place to turn than The Code Breaker.
This heart-rending yet exhilarating memoir by a world-famous artist gives a rare look into how war and revolution affect innocent bystanders who are just trying to live.
This epic, transformative book covers 400 years of Black history with the help of a choir of exceptional poets, critics, essayists, novelists and scholars.
Gorgeously written and sophisticated, Jonathan Meiburg’s book about a wickedly clever falcon will move readers to protect this truly remarkable creature.
From surviving a lynching to discovering the transformative power of art while imprisoned in a chain gang, Winfred Rembert recounts his life story in his distinct and unforgettable voice.
Most of the Japanese American patriots who formed the 442nd Infantry Regiment are gone, but their stories live on in this empathetic tribute to their courage.
Clint Smith’s gifts as both a poet and a scholar make this a richly provocative read about the ways America does (and doesn’t) acknowledge its history of slavery.
In jaw-dropping detail, Patrick Radden Keefe recounts the greed and corruption at the heart of the Sackler family’s quest for wealth and social status.
In her debut memoir, Michelle Zauner perfectly distills the palpable ache for her late mother, wrapping her grief in an aromatic conjuring of her mother’s presence.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s brilliant commentary shuffles forward, steps sideways, leaps diagonally and waltzes gracefully throughout this survey of Black creative performance in America.
You’ll find a little bit of everything on our list of our most highly recommended nonfiction books of 2021—from timeless instant classics to breathlessly of-the-moment reports.
In Our First Civil War, historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands brings to life the families, communities and tribes torn apart by opposing beliefs during the American Revolution.
Our First Civil War is a concise history of the American Revolution told largely through first-person accounts from letters, diaries and memoirs written by the Founders, prominent Loyalists and other lesser-known participants. Why did you take that approach? Were any of the documents difficult to find and research? I myself am most engaged by primary sources: the words of the men and women who lived and made history. So it comes naturally for me to write history that way—and indications are that my readers like it.
As for documents, as the digital world expands, historical research becomes easier. There was almost nothing I wanted to see for this book, by way of letters, diaries and the like, that wasn’t available online.
You wrote The First American about Benjamin Franklin 20 years ago. Why have you now come back to the American Revolution, in a book that again looks closely at Franklin, among others? While recently writing about the Civil War (of the 1860s), I remembered how divisive the Revolutionary War had been. And with the civil war model in mind, I took a new look and discovered how apt a model it is for viewing that earlier conflict.
You devote a considerable amount of the book to Franklin’s evolution from believing in a transatlantic British empire to his firm advocacy for independence. How was he pivotal to the Revolution’s ultimate success? No single person is indispensable in something as large as the American Revolution. But Franklin comes close. He was a great fan of the British Empire until the people who ran that empire treated him like a foolish and venal provincial. He then concluded there was no future for people like him within the empire. George Washington had a similar experience. They were both unlikely revolutionaries, but British folly provoked them beyond forgiveness.
Some readers may be shocked to learn that Franklin’s son William was not only a prominent Loyalist but also someone who instigated what can be seen as a Loyalist terror campaign late in the war. Why did he take such a different path from his father? Benjamin Franklin had revolted against his own parents and against the theocrats who ran Boston when Ben was young. William Franklin came to his independence of mind honestly. In addition, where Ben was abused by the British authorities, William found his honor and honesty called into question by American rebels. From his position, loyalty to Britain was the only possible course.
You write about how people of relatively similar backgrounds and early beliefs, like Franklin and the Loyalists Thomas Hutchinson and Joseph Galloway, ultimately developed sharply different positions on independence from Britain. How much of their divergence was ideological, and how much derived from personal experience? I think, for example, of Hutchinson losing his home to the vandalism of a Patriot mob. Every decision for or against independence was deeply personal. In some cases it was ideological, too. In almost no cases was it simply ideological. To put your life on the line in revolt requires a powerful emotional commitment.
Historians who want to examine the role of women in the Revolution often focus on Abigail Adams. In contrast, you tell us about a Philadelphia Loyalist named Grace Growden Galloway. Why was she interesting to you? Grace Galloway suffered grievously as a Loyalist in Philadelphia, primarily from the Patriots, who confiscated her property, but also from abandonment by her Loyalist husband, who had to flee for his life to Britain. Yet Grace discovered in her sufferings and abandonment a personal freedom she had never imagined.
“Every decision for or against independence was deeply personal.”
George Washington and Benjamin Franklin wrote often about how the British were treating Americans no better than “slaves”—obviously a sore point for both. But neither seemed to address the existence of slavery in the colonies, including, in Washington’s case, his own possession of enslaved workers. Did they really not see the contradiction between their beliefs and the injustice in their own system? Both recognized the injustices of slavery, but they didn’t see enslaved people as their social and political equals; almost no white people at that time did. In any case, they believed that before enslaved people could be freed, the United States would have to win its freedom from Britain. The revolution in rights that they were waging wouldn’t be won all at once.
How does your focus on Mohawk leader Joseph Brant address the Native American side of the Revolution’s story? Brant and the Mohawks faced the same question everyone did at that time: Which side will you choose? Brant had good relations with the British and leaned in their direction. He also supposed his tribe and the larger Iroquois Confederacy would have an easier time dealing with Britain than with an independent United States. Some of his fellows agreed with him; others did not. The war split tribes just as it did families and communities among white Americans.
Among the other fascinating but lesser-known characters in the book are two enslaved men on different sides of the war, Boston King and Jeffrey Brace. Why would enslaved people have fought for either side? Boston King accepted the British offer of freedom to those enslaved by rebel masters if they crossed lines and came to the British side. He took a gamble: that the Patriots wouldn’t capture him, that the British would win, and that they would honor their promise at war’s end. Although the side he chose—the British—lost the war, King won his freedom and evacuated to Canada with the British at war’s end.
Jeffrey Brace went to war on the Patriot side because his enslaver did and took Brace along. Brace noted the irony of fighting, enslaved, for his master’s freedom, yet didn’t see an appealing alternative. The Patriot side won, with Brace still enslaved, but his master decided Brace had earned his freedom and let him go.
“As worrisome as the current divisions in American society are, this country has survived much worse.”
At times in the book, it seems like Washington was desperately trying not to lose to the British until Franklin had negotiated an aid treaty with France. French ships were crucial to the outcome at Yorktown. Did the French really win the American Revolution for us? French help was crucial, but France was fighting not for American independence but to weaken Britain. For a time, the interests of France and the United States coincided. Franklin and Washington capitalized on that coincidence, to America’s benefit.
Another surprise for some readers will be how restive and even mutinous the Patriot army was, to the point that the safety of Congress was under genuine threat. What was Washington’s role in turning that around, and how was that important for the nation’s development? Mutiny—its threat and its actuality—was a real danger during the Revolutionary War. Many other generals have taken it upon themselves to assume political power when the civil government seems feckless, as the Continental Congress often did during the Revolution. But not Washington. His authority compelled the mutineers to stand down. Quite possibly no other person could have accomplished that feat. Had he not done so, the United States might have gone the way of revolutionary France, into dictatorship.
What do you hope contemporary readers learn from this book, and how might it help them see our current political divisions in a different way? As worrisome as the current divisions in American society are, this country has survived much worse.
Your 30-some books on American history are incredibly wide-ranging in their subjects, from capitalism to foreign policy, American presidents and recently John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Is there a period you haven’t yet explored that you want to tackle? I’m thinking about something on World War II.
Author photo by Marsha Miller.
H.W. Brands illuminates the intensely personal convictions of the Patriots and Loyalists during the American Revolution.
History fans have big treats in store this year, including groundbreaking books on American history and baseball, plus visual extravaganzas devoted to legendary women and design innovations. There are even lessons in how to survive a sea monster attack—because you just never know.
Relics
Relics: A History of the World Told in 133 Objects is my idea of the perfect coffee-table gift book. Billed as “four billion years in the palm of your hand,” it’s small enough not to be cumbersome, weighty enough to be substantial and full of colorful photos and intriguing text. Open it to any random page and get lost in the images of tiny relics and their histories, ranging from a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid fragment to a tiny piece of Winston Churchill’s faux leopard-skin hand muff. (Poor circulation in his later years caused Churchill’s hands to get cold.) The book is part of the Mini Museum project, intended to share a collection of hand-held bits of wonders from around the world—a whole exhibition, Polly Pocket-style.
Young and old will be enticed by the variety of natural, historical and cultural tidbits, including a specimen of petrified lightning from the Sahara, a piece of a Martian meteorite, coal from the Titanic and a morsel of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding cake. Enjoy at your leisure, with no museum crowds invading your space.
★ Original Sisters
Award-winning artist Anita Kunz certainly made the most of her COVID-19 lockdown: She began researching and painting portraits of more than 150 extraordinary women from ancient times to the present, many whose stories have been lost to history or whose glory has been stolen by men. The result, Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage, brings these heroines to life in wonderfully bold portraits, each accompanied by a paragraphsummarizing her notable life. These portraits are so vivid that readers will feel as though they are meeting these women face-to-face—and believe me, you will feel their power.
You’ll recognize many women’s names, like Temple Grandin, Nina Simone and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but others may be new, such as Amanirenas, the partially blind African warrior queen who defeated Augustus Caesar. Patricia Bath, the first Black female ophthalmologist, invented a medical device to remove cataracts. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was a Chinese American suffragist who led a parade on horseback in New York City to advocate for voting rights. A wonderful gift for friends, family or yourself, Original Sisters is an inspiring springboard for further study of these noteworthy souls.
★ The 1619 Project
For any lover of American history or letters, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is a visionary work that casts a sweeping, introspective gaze over what many have aptly termed the country’s original sin: the moment in 1619, one year before the Mayflower arrived, when a ship docked at the colony of Virginia to deliver 20 to 30 enslaved people from Africa. While many books have addressed enslavement and its repercussions, few, if any, have done so in such an imaginative, all-encompassing way, incorporating history, journalism, fiction, poetry and photography to show the cataclysmic repercussions of that pivotal moment.
A superb expansion of the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” issue, this book contains 18 essays as well as 36 poems and stories that examine how slavery and its legacy of racial injustice have shaped the U.S. over the last 400 years. Each piece was curated by MacArthur “genius grant” winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, who pitched the original “1619 Project” to the Times and won the Pulitzer Prize for her contribution to it. The book’s many talented contributors include Ibram X. Kendi, Terry McMillan, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, ZZ Packer, Darryl Pinckney, Claudia Rankine, Jason Reynolds, Bryan Stevenson and Jesmyn Ward. Seven essays are new, and existing essays have been substantially revised and expanded to include additional details. Black-and-white portraits have also been added—both historical and present-day images—as another way of allowing readers to look history in the eye.
A new concluding essay from Hannah-Jones explores economic justice, and her wonderful preface is a special standout. It’s a powerful, personal essay in which she notes that she is “the daughter and granddaughter of people born onto a repurposed slave-labor camp in the deepest South, people who could not have imagined their progeny would one day rise to a position to bring forth such a project.”
The sheer breadth of this book is refreshing and illuminating, challenging each and every reader to confront America’s past, present and future.
As Hannah-Jones writes in The 1619 Project, “Slavery was mentioned briefly in the chapter on this nation’s most deadly war, and then Black people disappeared again for a full century, until magically reappearing as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech about a dream.” What happened in between? Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies, edited by Kinshasha Holman Conwill and Paul Gardullo, attempts to fill in those gaps, leading readers through Black history from 1865 to today.
Presented by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the book has a beautifully rendered and highly accessible narrative that’s also methodically organized, with helpful timelines, colorful illustrations and photographs. The book does a particularly good job of laying out the long view of events and their consequences while shining a light on more recent incidents, such as #SayHerName, George Floyd’s murder and the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Make Good the Promises is a distressing yet essential, enlightening read.
How to Slay a Dragon
Medieval historian Cait Stevenson admits that she has sometimes “trampled over scholarly conventions in ways that will leave other medievalists curled up in agony.” But armed with her passion for the Middle Ages, she has carved out a unique niche for herself, straddling the worlds of scholarly and popular history. Her fervor is contagious in How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero’s Guide to the Real Middle Ages.
In a tongue-in-cheek but firmly historical way, Stevenson addresses the stereotypical events that happen in popular media set in and inspired by the Middle Ages, like saving a princess, digging for treasure, slaying a dragon and defeating barbarian hordes. Her writing is informative yet humorous (there’s a chapter titled “How to Not Get Eaten”), so even if you’re not a gamer or “Game of Thrones” fan, you’ll find yourself riveted. In a section on bathing, she notes, “Twelfth-century abbess and prophet Hildegard of Bingen went so far as to suggest that natural hot springs were heated by the underground fires of purgatory, cleansing bathers’ souls as well as their bodies.” Stevenson may not be able to tell you where to find real dragons, but readers will have a blast getting ready for their quests.
★ The Baseball 100
Major League Baseball fans, you just won the lottery. In The Baseball 100, noted sports writer Joe Posnanski presents 880 pages of sheer baseball bliss, discussing the history of the game by examining the lives, obstacles and achievements of his nominations for the 100 greatest players of all time, including MLB stars and players from the Negro Leagues. It’s a true masterwork, and his writing is so good that it’s likely to engross even those who know nothing about the sport.
Avid baseball fans will easily become absorbed in these pages, and when they reemerge, they’ll be all too ready to debate Posnanski’s rankings. He’s prepared for this, writing, “I stand firmly behind them, and I expect you to come hard at me with vigorous disagreements. What fun would it be otherwise?” In fact, the author even teases, “I have a list of more than 100 players who could have made this list. I think I’ll save them in case the Baseball 100 ever needs a volume 2.” Perhaps he’d better start writing now.
Patented
At over 1,000 pages, Patented: 1,000 Design Patents is thicker than an old phone book but much more fun to thumb through. Architectural designer Thomas Rinaldi frequently found himself getting lost in “odd internet searches” of design patents, eventually realizing that he was uncovering “a design historian’s El Dorado, a proverbial rabbit hole of unfathomable depth.” He sifted through more than 750,000 patents issued from 1900 to the present to come up with this collection of visual treats.
The patents are presented chronologically, with line drawings and key information such as the date and designer’s name. It’s an interesting mix of many universally owned, everyday objects—ranging from teapots to barbecue grills, from salt and pepper shakers to the Fitbit—along with patents for much larger things, such as Pizza Huts and Boeing airplanes, unusual entries like the Mars Rover and famous designs like Eames chairs.
For some, this will become a trusted reference, but Patented will also appeal to historians, engineers and kids interested in how things used to look, plus anyone passionate about design, innovation and technology. One could even turn the pages and play a “name that item” game. Some are a cinch to guess, while others, like a 1930 “ozonizing apparatus,” will likely leave you stumped. Once you start browsing, however, you may find yourself hooked.
History fans have big treats in store this year, including groundbreaking gift books on American history and baseball, plus visual extravaganzas devoted to legendary women and design innovations.
A Spanish queen. A Florentine printer. An English wool merchant. A disgruntled German monk. A Genoese explorer. According to Patrick Wyman, author and narrator of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World (11.5 hours), these are among the actors who gave birth to the modern world. Wyman argues that from 1490 to 1530, a series of economic, religious and state-building revolutions transformed Europe from a backwater into the dominant global power. And like the song says, it was money—in the form of increasingly available credit—that made the world go round.
Creator of the podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome, Wyman is a skilled performer with obvious enthusiasm for his subject. His reading is also enhanced by the book’s structure: Each chapter focuses on a particular historical figure who in some way acted as a midwife to the new age, and Wyman’s narration emphasizes their humanity, warts and all. As a result, he makes this economic history of Europe an entertaining and informative audiobook.
Podcaster Patrick Wyman skillfully narrates his engaging economic history of Europe.
While the Middle Ages may seem like ancient history, the proliferation of medieval-themed festivals testifies to our enduring interest in knights, jousting and chivalry. Such gatherings present only the thinnest veneer of the times, of course, masking the rich details that characterized the Middle Ages. With fast-paced storytelling, historian Dan Jones’ captivating Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages carries readers over the expansive history of the years 410 to 1527. We meet kings and philosophers, clerics and bankers, theologians and scientists, and explorers and navigators as Jones illustrates an era full of the sorts of challenges we still grapple with today: pandemics, the privilege of a moneyed merchant class, war, climate change and more.
Jones’ magisterial history opens with the fall of Rome in the early fifth century. Mass migrations and a changing climate contributed to an already weakened imperial government, and invaders eventually tore down the walls of the empire. By the sixth and seventh centuries, the first Islamic empires came to power, ushering in new developments in politics and science. Jones examines the roles of monks and knights during this time and explores the age of the Franks, who established a pseudo-Roman Christian empire that gave birth to the Crusades. Jones also helpfully points out that the Crusades did not always feature conflict between Christians and Muslims in battle for control of Jerusalem, but in fact several Crusades grew out of intra-Christian disagreements about orthodoxy and heresy.
In all, Jones introduces readers to the “merchants who invented extraordinary new financial techniques to make themselves and the world richer; scholars who revived the wisdom of the ancients and founded some of today’s greatest universities; and the architects and engineers who built the cities, cathedrals, and castles that still stand five hundred years on, as portals back to the medieval world.” A sprawling book to cover a sprawling history, Powers and Thrones is essential reading for everyone interested in the ways a 1,100-year period changed the course of our cultural history in profound ways.
With fast-paced storytelling, Dan Jones introduces the kings, philosophers, clerics, bankers, theologians, scientists and navigators who defined the Middle Ages.
Edward Dolnick, author of The Clockwork Universe, has a remarkable ability to explain and contextualize complex topics and create compelling, lucid nonfiction narratives. In his new book, The Writing of the Gods, he tackles the Rosetta stone, a broken stone slab weighing three quarters of a ton that was discovered in a heap of Egyptian rubble in 1799.
Once news of this discovery got out, linguists and scholars were ecstatic. The stone contained three different kinds of inscriptions: Egyptian hieroglyphs (undecipherable at the time), a mysterious middle section (which turned out to be another form of Egyptian writing) and, at the bottom, 53 lines of Greek.
“The first guesses were that it might take two weeks to decipher the Rosetta stone,” Dolnick writes. It seemed plausible that the task would be simple: If all three sections were the same text in different forms, the Greek section should provide the key. The reality? It took 20 years to interpret. Along the way, Dolnick clearly lays out the high stakes of this battle to translate Egyptian writing for the first time.
Readers are immersed in the urgency of these scholars’ task and the weight of why it mattered.
In a conversational, accessible tone, Dolnick draws readers into the mystery. He introduces linguist rivals Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion and takes immense care to illustrate the daunting nature of their quest. The result is a book that’s much more than a simple biography or dull history. Readers are immersed in the urgency of these scholars’ task and the weight of why it mattered.
Reading The Writing of the Gods is like tagging along for a dazzling intellectual journey of discovery, akin to listening to a fascinating lecture. Dolnick brings this period of history to life in the same way the Rosetta stone revived ancient Egypt.
With a conversational, accessible tone, Edward Dolnick draws readers into the dazzling intellectual mystery of the Rosetta stone.
When we think of women’s contributions to World War II, what often comes to mind are bandanna-headed Rosie the Riveter types taking over factory work while the men were away. However, women journalists also reported on the war, facing challenges that male journalists did not, and their contributions are frequently overlooked.
Biographer Judith Mackrell’s wonderful new book, The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II, examines the war through the eyes of six reporters from this time. Mackrell posits that, though these women had a harder time accessing the front lines or the important political and military figures of the day, creative workarounds led to more nuanced and interesting coverage. “Over and over again,” Mackrell writes, “it was the restrictions imposed on women which, ironically, led to their finding more interestingly alternative views of the war.”
The six women Mackrell focuses on are Virginia Cowles, an American correspondent who started her career as a New York City society reporter; Sigrid Schultz, a brilliant and brave Berlin-based reporter whom readers may remember from Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts; Clare Hollingworth, an ambitious and idealistic young Brit; Helen Kirkpatrick, whose college internship in Geneva led to a lifelong love of covering international relations; Virginia Cowles, an upper-class Bostonian who covered the war while remaining “disconcertingly glamorous in lipstick and high heels”; and Martha Gellhorn, a dazzling writer whom history primarily, and unfairly, remembers as Ernest Hemingway’s third wife.
Mackrell effortlessly weaves together the personal and professional stories of these six journalists, producing a hearty biography that feels almost like a novel with its rich details. She brings each woman to life, tracing her childhood and entry into journalism, as well as her work and romantic life, against the backdrop of a simmering conflict that boiled over into a disastrous war. Although these women covered hard news, delivering scoops about impending military moves, they also wrote human stories that almost certainly would have been underreported had the war been left entirely to male correspondents.
For example, Martha Gellhorn, one of the first reporters to bear witness to the Dachau concentration camp, wrote about one Polish inmate in the camp infirmary who was so wasted that his jawbone “seemed to be cutting into his skin.” After that experience, she wrote, “I know I have never again felt that lovely easy lively hope in life which I knew before, not in life, not in our species, not in our future on earth.”
Judith Mackrell’s biography of six female journalists during World War II feels almost like a novel with its rich details.
All statues are raised, but relatively few are razed; when they are, somebody is always upset. In recent years, statues have been vandalized, pulled down by crowds and plucked from public plinths and placed in secret warehouses in the dead of night—to both applause and outcry. Whenever a statue is removed, the same questions arise: Are we erasing history? Wasn’t he just a man of his time? Is this the beginning of a slippery slope?
In Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History, historian Alex von Tunzelmann addresses these questions by examining 12 different case histories of statues from around the world that fell (literally) out of favor. Tunzelmann makes the argument that statues are not history but rather representations of history. Josef Stalin’s statues were propaganda to justify his grip on the Soviet Union, for example, not depictions of historical fact. The statue of Robert E. Lee in New Orleans was erected as part of a deliberate campaign to rewrite the history of the Civil War by self-avowed white supremacists.
It’s clear from Fallen Idols that there are many reasons to tear down a statue. Removing Stalin’s statue in Budapest was the start of a revolution. Pulling down Saddam Hussein’s statue was a symbolic end to the Iraq War—a symbol that turned out to be disastrously wrong. Taking down a statue can also be an act of truth telling. Leopold II of Belgium was not a benevolent ruler of the Congo, for example, even though that’s how monuments depict him. Even during his lifetime, he was widely condemned for his bloodthirsty exploitation and colonization of the Congolese. In cases like these, Tunzelmann finds that, far from erasing history, the eradication of a statue can actually illuminate it.
In discussing these and other statues, Tunzelmann invites us to consider all public monuments. What are these statues commemorating? What are they hiding? Are there other, better ways to depict history in public spaces without resorting to images of great men (or women)? Fallen Idols is an illuminating guide to a much-needed discussion about history and how it is represented.
Historian Alex von Tunzelmann examines 12 different case histories of statues from around the world that fell (literally) out of favor.
Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s house in Boston was destroyed by a mob. Benjamin Franklin’s son William was imprisoned for political reasons and wasn’t allowed to visit his dying wife. Grace Growden Galloway, a prominent Philadelphian, was forcibly evicted from her home when it was confiscated because of her husband’s beliefs.
Who were the miscreants who beleaguered these upstanding citizens? In all three cases, they were supporters of American independence from Britain—the very people we now think of as Patriots. The American Revolution wasn’t just a conflict between colonists and redcoats, as it turns out. It was an unforgiving brawl between neighbors.
In Our First Civil War, prolific historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands zeroes in on that neglected aspect of the Revolution in a narrative told mostly through the writings of those who lived through it. He ranges from the very famous, such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, to the less familiar, such as two enslaved Black men who fought on different sides of the war and a Mohawk chief who chose the alliance least damaging to his tribe.
Much of the book is devoted to the evolution of Washington and Franklin from staunch Britons to unlikely leaders in the movement for independence. But Franklin’s sad family history is equally intriguing: He helped his son William achieve prominence as a colonial governor, then bitterly broke with him over their political differences. The two never reconciled.
Galloway’s experience is another of Brand’s poignant tales. After her Loyalist husband deserted her and fled to Britain, the Patriots seized her substantial property, and she was left in poverty. Her view of independence was not a positive one. But Brands also shows that the British were their own worst enemies, treating sincere compromise efforts with arrogant contempt, then ignoring informed advice from Loyalists over the war’s conduct.
Like all civil wars, it was a bloody mess. Some Americans achieved better lives, but others were utterly devastated. Brands shows how fraught and complicated it was for the generation that lived through it, a perspective well worth considering amid our current divisions.
The American Revolution wasn’t just a conflict between colonists and redcoats. It was an unforgiving brawl between neighbors.
Nashville has been known beyond its borders for a number of things down through the generations. In the last two decades of the 18th century, it was a rising frontier outpost on the way to the West. It rode on Andrew Jackson's coattails when that redoubtable hometown boy was the nation's top war hero and twice its president in the first half of the 19th century. A major battle of the Civil War was fought in the city, and after Tennessee and the other Southern states lost their war of rebellion against the Union, Nashville was an Upper South capital city that bounced back fast. By the 1890s, it was one of the leading urban areas in the region, thriving on a New South philosophy of commercial boosterism closely linked to Northern industry and capital.
In the 20th century, the capital city of Tennessee was known in various quarters and at various times as the Athens of the South (for its early striving to achieve a cultural transplant in the American wilderness), the Wall Street of the South (for its own developed capital resources), the Protestant Vatican (for its many churches and denominational headquarters) and of course Music City U.S.A. (for its eminence in country and other forms of popular music).
Twenty-two years ago, when the city celebrated its bicentennial, a team of local researchers, writers, editors, photographers, artists and designers was commissioned to put together a big coffee-table book of illustrations and narrative history to mark the occasion. Nashville: The Faces of Two Centuries was published in time for the 200th birthday party in 1979. Its total printing of approximately 12,000 copies sold out in a little over a year, and the book was not reissued.
Now comes a companion volume, similar in size and appearance, to pick up the story of this middle America city with a higher profile than its modest size (a half-million plus) would suggest. Nashville: An American Self-Portrait is not so much history as current events, with the specific focus being notable events and personalities of the year 2000.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, and disarmingly simple: set up a framework of 12 chapters, roughly corresponding to the months of the year, and ask an equal number of experienced journalists to write topical essays for each month. As it turned out, that was only the beginning. Luckily, the year was filled with momentous events in the life of the city and the nation. But beyond that, the editors picked up 22 sidebar writers, more than two dozen photographers who collectively produced the book's 300-plus pictures, three local artists who contributed original works and a breaking news ribbon of trenchant stories from each day of the year.
Altogether, they add up to a large format, 384-page book full of four-color art and a cacophony of voices an engaging and provocative full-dress review of modern Nashville at the turn of the new century.
Playing to the strength of the city's reputation in the trade as a good book town, the editors went for an all-Nashville cast of writers, editors, artists, photographers, designers, production specialists, marketers and distributors. Even the name writers such as David Halberstam and Roy Blount Jr. lived in the city previously, as students or as young reporters. And Hal Crowther, a New Yorker transplanted to North Carolina, qualifies by virtue of his marriage to novelist Lee Smith, who taught school in Nashville in the 1960s. Crowther's sidebar describing Smith's luncheon meeting with Dolly Parton, another one-time Nashvillian gone big-time, at a local plantation restaurant is worth the price of the book all by itself [see excerpt].
So are two chapters on politics: Capitol Offenses, a telling comparison of state and local governments by Larry Daughtrey, veteran political writer for The Tennessean, Nashville's daily paper; and Favorite Sons, a candid assessment of Vice President (and former Tennessean reporter) Al Gore's failed quest for the White House. Daughtrey chronicles the state General Assembly's painful inability to come to grips with tax reform and the local government's recovery from a philandering mayor's public embarrassment.
Local political writer Philip Ashford tracks the Gore fiasco from the Democrat's national headquarters in Nashville, where overconfidence led to the loss of Tennessee and with it, the electoral college votes that would have assured victory.
Once before, in 1824, another Nashvillian Andrew Jackson won the national popular vote but lost when the counting moved to Washington. After history's lightning bolt struck again in the same place 176 years later, Nashville artist Nancy Blackwelder was inspired to paint her own version of a famous Jackson portrait, with Gore's face replacing Jackson's.
Like the city itself, Nashville: An American Self-Portrait is full of such surprises.
John Egerton's previous books include Southern Food and Speak Now Against the Day.
Excerpt: Lee and Dolly do Belle Meade
In Nashville: An American Self-Portrait, essayist Hal Crowther describes what happens when his wife, the writer Lee Smith, meets Dolly Parton for lunch at an antebellum plantation in an upscale Nashville neighborhood.
When you say that my wife [Lee Smith] is a novelist and a professor of English, you haven't begun to paint her portrait. When you say that Dolly Parton is a legendary country singer, songwriter, entrepreneur, and Hollywood actress, you've only scratched the surface of the smartest woman who ever grew up in Sevier County, Tennessee.
What's relevant is that they're both shrewd mountain girls with old-fashioned manners, and watching them recognize each other was a privilege I'll remember. I know one well, the other just slightly and recently. But my take on this pair of sisters is that if Dolly Parton had also been sent to Hollins College, they'd be virtually the same person. It's not surprising that each claims to have been the other's fan forever.
"I've got a confession—I tried to dress down a little today because you're a famous writer and I didn't want to look too cheap," says Dolly, who's wearing a black skirt slit almost to the thigh, and a purple sequined body sweater you could substitute for your Christmas tree.
"I've got a confession, too," says Lee. "I put on a little extra makeup to meet you, so you wouldn't think I was mousy."
By the time we reach the restaurant at Belle Meade Mansion, they're talking about their daddies. When we walk in, Dolly draws a round of applause from the lunch crowd. . . . Two hard-breathing autograph vultures hit her before she gets to her table, and Dolly treats them like kin, like royalty. The waitress requests a laying-on of hands, and Dolly indulges her, too.
"They love for me to touch them," she says, without condescension, and we contemplate the demands of serious A-list celebrity. At 54, this is a woman who seems to love her work, her fans, and the considerable responsibility of being Dolly Parton. Her fans are polite but hungry to make a connection, any connection, and the lady isn't stingy with herself. She doesn't know it, but there isn't one famous writer in the world who gets spontaneous ovations at lunch.
—Hal Crowther
Nashville has been known beyond its borders for a number of things down through the generations. In the last two decades of the 18th century, it was a rising frontier outpost on the way to the West. It rode on Andrew Jackson's coattails when that…
It took me some 50 years to appreciate Veterans Day, and that appreciation came when I began writing military biographies.
I grew up the firstborn son of a man who spent 33 years in the Army. After he retired, he was known in my hometown as “the Sarge,” and that was the way he wanted it. I missed childhood; instead I had a rather extended boot camp and I rebelled against everything the Sarge tried to teach me about the military.
The Sarge died when I was 16 and I did not mourn his passing. I flunked out of college and, for reasons I never understood, joined the Air Force. After facing three courts martial, I was kicked out of the Air Force and for the next 50 years I stayed as far as possible from everything to do with the military.
As a newspaper reporter I received two Pulitzer nominations. As a freelancer I wrote for most national magazines, including the New Yorker. I taught writing for 12 years at Emory. I wrote seven novels and three nonfiction books.
But my spirit was restless and my soul was unfulfilled.
Through a strange series of events I came to write Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. There was nothing in my professional background to indicate that I could write the sort of book that Boyd became. During the research about the life of this extraordinary man, I had intimations of what the Sarge had tried to teach me. But I pushed those feelings aside.
Success of the Boyd book was such that my publisher, Little, Brown and Company, gave me a two-book contract and stipulated that each book be a military biography. During the writing of the first book in the new contract, American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day, I finally understood; I got it, I knew with blinding clarity what it was the Sarge had tried to teach me so long ago. And I wept with the knowledge that I had rejected perhaps the most priceless gift a father can give to his son.
The understanding came when I was writing a scene involving a prolonged and particularly brutal torture session suffered by Colonel Day when he was a POW during the Vietnam War. He would have died—and almost did—before he violated the Code of Conduct that governed the behavior of POWs. He would return home with honor, or he would not return at all. Bud Day showed me, by his example, there are things worth dying for. Through him I understood commitment to duty, and honor, and what it means to be a man of character. Through him I understood the love of country that is part of the DNA of military people but simply beyond the understanding of most civilians. Colonel Day became in my mind the exemplar for everything that is good and noble about the military, everything the Sarge had tried to teach me.
Even today, I grow teary when I re-read the torture scenes in Colonel Day’s biography.
My next biography, Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine, I wrote free of the shackles of the past and in full recognition that I am a troubadour for America’s greatest heroes, the men and women who wear the uniform of this country.
While I admire and respect these men and women, I do my job. I do not write hagiographies. To do so would be an abrogation of the sense of duty I feel about my work; the understanding of which I learned from Colonel Day.
I fly the American flag at my home in Atlanta and at my studio on the Georgia coast. To me, Veterans Day is one of the very special holidays we celebrate. Writing military biographies not only turned my career around, it brought rest to my spirit and fulfillment to my soul.
Today, when I visit my 92-year-old mother in deep southwest Georgia, I always take time to travel up to the little country cemetery where the Sarge is buried. I sit on the side of his grave and I tell him of my work. And I believe, that after all these years, he is now proud of me.
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