Category: History

This is an awesome idea book. You know, a book that’s chock full of ideas for essays one could write about historical personages or whatnot.

This book collects, by state, a number of historic homes you can visit in each state and details why they’re historical. As the book covers the Midwest region, you get some rather old homes in Ohio and Kentucky, but some nondescript and only regionally important homes in the Dakotas.

The book is 63 years old at this time, so it’s a historical document of its own, describing people who the author thought was important enough to commemorate the homes at that time. In many cases, the historical figures died only a decade or so before the book was written and the historical personage or his or her family lived in the house to press time.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book as a bedstand book (marked as one that one can read in short segments, stories, or columns and put down for a couple of days without having to remember where you are) over the course of several months. I’d recommend it for aspiring writers and people interested in random history trivia.

Of the homes mentioned, I have been to two: the Mark Twain House in Hannibal, Missouri, and the Daniel Boone Home in Defiance, Missouri.

As a final note, most of the states came up with pretty relevant people, but poor Iowa only came up with people who visited for a while, like Antonin Dvorak, and people who were born there or lived there but moved away and got famous. Or who ended up mostly known in Iowa. Sadly, not many of these personages serve as fodder for essays targeted to national magazines.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book for Christmas from my beautiful wife. As I have moved to the Springfield area and actually live within walking distance of the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield and along the old Wire Road where the troops marched, I figured I ought to read up on it, you know? Heaven knows I read enough history books about the suburb of St. Louis where I used to live.

This is a full on history book, researched meticulously from the records of the time, including correspondence from participants as well as news accounts in the participants’ home towns. And the home towns there were; both sides of the battle featured a large number of volunteer companies from places such as Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Texas, and so on, most of the companies representing individual towns. But when the call to arms came, many able men joined either to punish the traitors or to defend themselves from the treasonous. Note that unlike some of the history books I’ve read recently centering on a historical person and making that person somewhat heroic (see Scipio Africanus and Hannibal), this book is very evenhanded in treatment of both sides.

Now, for those of you unversed in your Civil War history, Wilson’s Creek was a very early battle. The second of the war, as a matter of fact, following the first Battle of Bull Run. In August 1861, west of the Mississippi, the two armies marched quite a ways from their logistical bases, kinda felt each other out for a while, and then had a battle. General Lyons of the Union side marched down from St. Louis, essentially, and General McCulloch marched up from Arkansas and hooked up with the Missouri State Guard headed by former governor Price. Both sides lacked in intelligence and constantly acted on rumors of major enemy concentrations and both sides had serious trouble keeping their armies fed and shod (see my post about selling shoes to the armies in the Civil War).

At any rate, one August morning, the Union army snuck out to catch the rebs by surprise and attacked from two sides. They might have wanted to forestall an attack on Springfield until the Union Army had a chance to retreat to Rolla or they might have thought they could beat the superior forces of Price and McCulloch. The battle started well for the Union side, but a couple twists of fate and they ended up retreating not only from the battlefield but also from Springfield. So, to make a short story long, the Federals lost.

But it’s a fascinating look at this battle and will probably be a gateway for me into the large collection of Civil War history books I inherited from my uncle-in-law.

It’s a real shame that a lot of people don’t read history any more. It really gives one perspective. And a lot of interesting stories to tell, particularly if the history occurred near where you live.

Books mentioned in this review:

Porch Girl posted a This Day In History bit about La noche triste, a night where the Aztecs almost wiped out Cortes and his crew. Huh, I though, that’s not something I’m familiar with, and it’s definitely something begging a historical essay, so I ran right out and grabbed this 600 page academic tome about the conquest of the Mexica.

This is an excellent book on the subject. I mean, the author’s completely in the bag for the Aztecs (he saves his most poetic language for describing the glories of the human sacrifice, what he calls the “astonishing, often splendid, and sometimes beautiful barbarities” on p24) and he’s as pink as farm raised salmon (his previous books are The Spanish Civil War and The History of the Cuban Revolution, he makes a point of saying that winning wars without fighting are notable goals of Clausewitz and Lenin–but no mention of that Sun Tzu guy, and he muses that the conquistadores must have called each other comrade). But he merely weights things that support his idea; he includes a lot of detail and does not omit things which would counter his bias, so someone not like him–like me–could make other inferences from the data.

Now, onto the story.

Most history books mostly gloss over the conquest of Mexico, turning it into a very simple tale of Spain pillaging the New World again, this time swapping the name Cortes for Columbus or Pizarro. Still, the story is much more than a morality play where the Western power is bad and the natives are blissful.

The Mexica, as Thomas calls them, were a nation built on winning at wars and getting tribute from conquered tribes. They had conquered everything within a reasonable march from their capital excepting those pesky Tarascans who used metal in their weapons (the Aztecs used stone knives and spearpoints). Each leader, elected from a pool of aristocrats, got a bit more lavish with the lifestyle, and by the time Montezuma rolled in, the city of Tenochtitlan was huge and sprawling and, did I mention, totally dependent upon tribute from conquered tribes around them for its lifestyle. I’ll be frank, the picture Thomas paints shows me an empire on the edge of collapse, Spanish arrival or not. I think the Aztecs ended up being remembered, instead of the Olmecs or the Chichimecs or the Totonacs, because they got conquered by the Spanish.

And let’s not forget the human sacrifices. By the 1520s, the priests were killing ever-increasing number of war captives and people sent to the city as tribute. Maybe the gods were building up a tolerance or something. Thomas tries to tell us how the natives could think of no greater destiny than to die atop a pyramid and to have their bodies cast down the steps and how the subjects of the sacrifices ultimately weren’t in pain because they were whacked out on pulque or peyote.

Thomas, of course, points out that the Aztecs didn’t own slaves as such, and that all the tribesmen who carried the tribute hundreds of miles over mountains and through deserts were volunteers who just wanted to see Tenochtitlan. And maybe be sacrificed.

So that’s the situation when the Spanish show up. Which wasn’t sudden, mind you. Ships appeared off of the coast for years and even landed a couple times. By the time Cortes lands, a couple previous expeditions had visited Yucatan and even Aztec areas and had fought battles with the natives. But Montezuma didn’t prepare. When Cortes lands, Montezuma, the great Aztec leader, behaves like Hamlet, consulting astrologers, not acting, consulting priests, not acting, weeping because he’s doomed, sending gifts to the Spaniards but asking them to stay away from the capital, claiming he cannot meet with Cortes because he’s sick, and doing everything but planning to handle the Spanish expedition precisely.

On the other hand, the Spanish are a developed society with conscience decrying the treatment of the natives and legal mechanisms for control. Also, they work the iron. Thomas tries to place the two civilizations on equal footing (as do many historians, I wager). However, featherwork, a good calendar, and pretty colors painted on humans whose hearts are going to be ripped out are not really a match for the wheel and iron.

Contrary to the short shrift Cortes gets in more summary and cursory historical textbooks, the outcome of the expedition was potentially in doubt throughout. Cortes landed with only 300 men, after all, and not only had to contend with millions of natives, but also with courtly politics and the governor of Cuba who wanted to thwart Cortes. Cortes wanted to capture/dominate the city of Tenochtitlan without a battle and without destruction, perhaps introducing the Venice of the West to Christianity and certainly to exploit its riches. However, the initial plan doesn’t work, culminating in the death of Montezuma, la noche triste, and the assault on Tenochtitlan. Even then Cortes wanted to capture it intact and only ended up burning much of it as a last resort.

The book was quite the eye-opener and really was well done. As I said, even though Thomas favors the Aztecs a bit, he provides the data that can lead to other interpretations (unlike, say, the Oxford History of Mexico, which devotes only a chapter to the conquest, discards contemporaneous Spanish sources as biased, and uses its authors’ own “logic” to suss out the way it really happened almost five hundred years ago). The book lags when it gets into the courtly politics involved and goes into elaborate genealogies of everyone involved. But I cannot but recommend it if you’re interested in this event at all.

Also, personally speaking, this book re-energized my cultural chauvinism. The closer cultures are to American culture, the better. I mean, how can you defend a culture that does this?

What was necessary, in the meantime, was a suitable appeasement of Tlaloc, the rain god. He had to be given food, precious objects, people, chlidren (small, like the little Tlalocs who were believed to wait on the chief god of that name), in a series of festivals. The children had to cry, in order to indicate to the god exactly what was required; and to achieve this, their nails were often drawn out and thrown into the lake monster Ahuitzol, who usually lived from the nails of drowned persons. (Thomas 332)

Brothers and sisters, that’s a culture that needs to be put down. Heather informs me that, in biblical times, tribes like this were completely obliterated instead of conquered, introduced to superior technologies, and Catholicized. Remember, according to some theories of moral calculus, if it saves one child, it’s worth any price! so the conquest of the new world by the old was good.

That being said, one final note: in addition to making me want to read other accounts, including Bernal Diaz de Castillos contemporaneous account, I had the urge to watch Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto; since I don’t have that handy, I’ll have to settle for Firewalker, which, as a man, I must own. Also, the book gave me the urge to play Civilization IV so I could take a turn pasting the Aztecs, which I did.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book through an intra-library loan because I thought I could squeeze an article out of John Hawkwood based on a sidebar I saw in Renaissance magazine. If you are like I was, unaware of who Sir John Hawkwood was, I’ll explain a bit. Sir John Hawkwood was a mercenary operating in 14th century Italy. A veteran of the Hundred Years War, Hawkwood came to Italy, played all sides against the middle, and became one of the most profitable and well-known mercenary leaders of his day. He spent the last years of his career with Florence, and the city eventually immortalized him with a frescoe over his tomb.

That being said, the book is a very detailed timeline of Hawkwood’s life and adventures, from his arrival in Italy to his participation in numerous “Free Companies” (unemployed bands of mercenaries pillaging the land) to his various employments with Pisa, Milan, the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples, and Florence (employed bands of mercenaries pillaging the land). Over the course of the latter three decades, Hawkwood became a known and feared figure amongst the city-states of the early Renaissance. For example, Hawkwood made a trip through Tuscany with a free company wherein he systematically visited the environs of each city state in the region and demanded payment to move on. Most of these payments came as lump sums, but often they had additional payments so you could put the sparing of your crops on credit. By the end of the year, Hawkwood had earned more on his trip than most city-states made annually, and to this day, you can still go into an Olive Garden and order the special Hawkwood Tour of Italy, wherein the restaurant will feed your entire party, will give you 10,000 florins, will put you on the payroll for the rest of the year, will gas your car, and will give you the directions to the nearest Pasta House and hope you go there.

John Hawkwood was so well known and feared that the things we pass around on the Internet as Chuck Norris lists originated as John Hawkwood lists in Renaissance Italy. For example, a Florentine banker carried the following items to the Holy Roman Empire:

• John Hawkwood invented the color Burnt Sienna. Poor Sienna.
• All the towers in Pisa were straight until John Hawkwood glared at one as a warning.
• The Italian penninsula was shaped like a pair of boots until the arrival of John Hawkwood.

Hawkwood became a fixture in English fiction (and some in Italy, too) in the centuries after his death, and this book tries to get to the bottom of the myths built by the fabulists by using actual historical sources. Unfortunately, that means the book lacks a certain amount of narrative or insight into Hawkwood himself, as all we get are really lists of dates, movements, and rosters. Still, it’s enough to stand in awe at a man who traveled to Italy and grew wealthy through shrewd contracts, ruthlessness, and the occasional battle.

This book, from 2006, must have been a vanguard, as I see a couple more books are coming out this year about Hawkwood. Ultimately, I guess it stands as a testament to the impact of the man and his uniqueness in his time that he fascinates people centuries later.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book has a sort of double-effect twist going on; Clarissa Start, a former columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and former resident (as of the writing, she had moved to High Ridge, Missouri), wrote this book at the behest of the city government in Webster Groves as part of its bicentennial celebration. That means it’s a history book that’s 30 years old.

So I got a glimpse of the past from the past. The tone of the book is very exceptional, so Webster Groves has a hint of Lake Wobegon to it. Of course, a book written on the government dime would explain that the citizens are the best and the town is the best and everything else. I guess I cannot knock some exceptionalism in history, but when it’s applied to a small town, it’s odd. Also, the book ends with several chapters of Webster Groves at 1975, with a demographic study and the high school commencement speech. I just skimmed these.

Still, the book details the area at the turn of the twentieth century very well and explains the events that precipitated the incorporation (a mugging/murder), the resistance to a layer of government and its eager taxation, and a bit of perspective to the current complaints and how far back those tensions existed.

It brings the book forward, as I mentioned, and the conversational tone tells you what replaced the old blacksmith shop and early businesses downtown. However, 30 years later, the Farmers Home and Trust Bank is gone as well as the IGA grocery store, and those things seem quaint now. But I didn’t buy it for contemporary insight, I bought it for its discussion of the old times, and I got it.

More trivia for the cranium, and things that I can tell the child as he grows up so he will think I’m very smart. Fooling the children, really, is the secondary use of all knowledge that comes to the fore after you’ve succeeded in the primary use of all knowledge, fooling women into thinking you’re smart so they will mate with you. One, anyway.

Books mentioned in this review:

Like the preceding books Webster Park: 1892-1992 and How To Research the History of Your Webster Groves Home, I borrowed this book from the library; unlike those, however, it is still publicly available for purchase at Amazon.com, so I might get a copy.

This book tells the story of North Webster, a small community in the northwestern part of Webster Groves that is mostly black in racial makeup. The book traces its origins as a couple of freedmen’s houses in the middle of the 1800s to its annexation by Webster Groves in the middle 1900s and its integration into the community.

Of course, the best part about this book is the moments and tidbits it provides: Douglass High School became the first black high school in the county, and Carl Sandburg spoke there. The book tells about the young men from the town that joined the 92nd in World War I and their participation in the dedication of the World War I memorial on Big Bend and Lockwood–a war memorial that has since been moved so that the contemporary right-minded folk don’t have to think about the sacrifices and participation in war, but can soothe themselves with a giant sculpture designed to rust.

The book is about 50 pages of text with a large number of names of residents throughout the years (I suspect that much of the narrative comes from family remembrances) combined with eighty pages of photographs from the local residents.

An interesting piece; I’ve added it to my Amazon Wish List, not that you gentle readers are obligated to show me the love you have of this backwater blog with gratuitous gifts.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book wasn’t even on my to-read shelves; I went to the library and actually checked it out. Since we moved to Old Trees from our twenty-year-old incorporated-out-of-convenience suburban municipality to an older town, I grew interested in the history of the area and whatnot. It’s an interesting set of neighborhoods with homes that don’t all look the same, and so I borrowed a couple of books.

This particular one deals with a land development that’s now a neighborhood not far from here and details the first 100 years of its existence with an essay about its origin and early years, an essay about the governor and the Nobel Prize winner who lived here, some early maps, and an inventory of the homes and when they were built.

I enjoyed the book, which was a quick enough read and lots of pretty pictures. It’s given me some architectural insight (I know what a gambrel roof is) and some historical knowledge (I know how Big Bend got its name). These are the sorts of things that make people wonder how I learned the trivia I know, and these are the sorts of books I read to get that knowledge.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is what happens on the last day of a book fair. It’s a couple dollars for a bag, so suddenly, you’re not justifying the purchase of a book, you’re looking for an excuse. So when I’d put down $3 at the Webster Groves Book Fair this year, I had only to acknowledge that I didn’t actually have a biography of Charlemagne. Suddenly, I had one on my to-read shelf.

Fortunately, this is a brief book. At seventy some pages, it took me a little under an hour to read. Written by a contemporary of Charlemagne who was in the court of Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious, this book doesn’t interpret the Frank leader in some sort of modernistic mechanism. Einhard didn’t come to bury Charlemagne, Einhard came to praise him. The author, a member of the ninth century court, praises Charles the Great for his marital exploits, but also for his love of learning and his role in the Carolingian Renaissance. Although he couldn’t write, Charles I liked to read and to hear readings and encourage scholarship throughout his expanding realm.

Although I’ve read my Cantor a decade ago, it’s good to touch base with some medieval history–even if it’s French. So if I’m asked whom the line of kings Charlemagne replaced (the Merovignian, like that dude from The Matrix) or who succeeded him (his son Louis, the Pious), I’m set. I’d better hie to a Trivia Night hence.

However, before I go, I’d like to note, briefly, some of the things which struck me as I read this book:

• Man, the “great” leaders from history ruled a long time, ainna? Charlemagne ruled for 45 years in a time where that exceeded the life expectancy by a factor of 2. He was ruling his original subjects’ grandchildren. Think of Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower as our president.
• Charlemagne carried on a war, hot and cold, against the Saxons for 33 years. Obviously, he didn’t have a mainstream media complaining the whole way.
• Man, these old-style books are short. I mean, this weighs in at under 75 pages, The Prince weighs in at under 100…. The unfortunate rising tide of science and the standard of living has propelled modern books into the 300-400 page range and beyond, which slows down a “scholar” like me who reads any old thing I can stuff in a bag at a book fair.
• Sometimes, footnotes are less than worthless. In the edition I have, I started following the endnotes (which meant I was flipping back and forth, not only looking down), but many of the notes were only the names of other Frank rulers I should know if I were using this as a primary source in a college class or a reference to another freaking end note (see 93). I mean, unless you’re going to shed some light outside the translator’s/editor’s particular section of a college class, why bother?

Hey, all silliness aside, I’d recommend this book if you can grab it cheaply. If you click the link below, you’ll find a number of options, including the latest version available as a college textbook. This was the sort of textbook I loved in school: something I could borrow from the library and Xerox cheaply. Still, gentle reader, please take a moment to look for this book or similar material for low prices on eBay, Amazon, or your local book fair or garage sale. They give one such perspective into human history and the modern day.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, friends, I have stooped to a new low, lower than the previous new low and probably not quite as low as what I shall attain tomorrow, but nevertheless, I am going to review a schnucking pamphlet for you today. The title of the pamphlet is Britain’s Kings and Queens: 63 Reigns in 1100 Years by Sir George Bellew, K.C.V.O. It’s a pamphlet because it’s 32 pages long, and I snuck it into my reading as a nonfiction entry while I slog through Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in an omnibus paperback that includes two other short-but-tedious Russian novels (although they beat the regular-sized-but-tedious Russian novels). So pity me whatever affliction I have that drives me to read Dostoyevsky without an impending final, and just hear what I have to say about the short book I did read.

The edition I read, in its unknown softcover binding, was published in 1968, 15 years after Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne, but the whole thing’s an explication of the line of royalty in Britain, who they were, and why Liz II was going to be a great ruler.

All right, I shouldn’t go dumping royalty in the harbor with the tea, but the tone of the book is adulatory. It seeks to connect Elizabeth II with her ancestors and to shine a light on, or perhaps reflect the monarch’s own light, upon the history that legitimized the monarch.

After a brief forward, the book goes into brief capsules of monarchs starting with Egbert and on through the Saxon kings, William the Conqueror, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and on and on. Each monarch gets a couple of paragraphs, more if they’re remembered fondly.

They have to be brief. After all, only the even pages contain the biographies. The odd pages contain asides, photographs of Elizabeth II’s coronation, royal portraits, and other sundry trivia. You’ve heard the expression The Crown Jewels, haven’t you? Well, I know all four pieces of the regalia because they’re listed on page 7. I won’t mention them here because it will ruin the impact when I suddenly uncork that bit of trivia in a conversation.

So it’s not a bad little treatise. For its size, it makes a handy reference guide for those who might someday write something about a monarch. Hey, Shakespeare wrote his body of plays with a similar, albeit more fleshed out, history. So if you can nab one of those two dollar copies on an auction site, it might be worth it for you.

It’ll be more than worth it if you can correct me at some future date about the order of English monarchs or the dates of their reigns.