Since I don’t go out much I can’t tell if there is a lot of hoopla around the publication of the Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors-edited A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press) —although I do take exception to a use of “America” that is exclusive to the United States—looking at this titanic tome’s web site one might infer such.

I do know our local Mr. Fussy, Alex Beam, was not overly impressed: “With this many monkeys hammering away at this many typewriters, there is bound to be some good material.” Evidencing, shall we say, a certain low level of generosity of spirit.

Though I am not convinced a pastiche of 200 essays qualifies as a history (though part of me wants to argue this is the best kind of history), a compendium on any subject that contains the likes of Sarah Vowell, Michael Ventura, Sean Wilentz, David Treuer, Walter Mosley, David Thomson, Camille Paglia, Helen Vendler, Jonathan Lethem, and many other thinkers is a great value.

Monkeys they are not! —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 14, 2009

By now if you have any interest in American history or Abraham Lincoln, you are aware that 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth, and naturally there is a gush of books adding to the already voluminous Lincoln bibliography. I have already dealt with a few of these tomes earlier, knowing an update would be useful as the year wore on. Rather than wading through more Lincoln titles, I am inclined to focus on the long and the short of recent Lincoln scholarship.

Princeton mentor emeritus James M. McPherson offers a paradigm of concision with his Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press), a 96-page introductory essay with a well-annotated bibliography for the benefit of the curious and the diligent. Historian Michael Burlingame (The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln) has reportedly been working on this two-volume, 2,024-page magnum opus, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University Press), for years, using field notes of previous scholarship, neglected newspapers, and mountain ranges of archival material.

Christopher Hitchens writes of this impressive work, “No review could do complete justice to the magnificent two-volume biography that has been so well-wrought by Michael Burlingame,” but it didn’t stop him from trying; Hitchens goes on:

“But one way of paying tribute to it is to say that it introduces the elusive idea of destiny from the very start, and one means of illustrating this is to show how the earlier chapters continually prefigure, or body forth, the more momentous events that are to be dealt with in the later ones.”

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 22, 2009

Naturally, my recent roundup of books on Cuba missed a couple of important contributions to that magical island nation’s bibliography. Alongside Ned Sublette’s seminal Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Cuban saxophonist-turned-historian Leonardo Acosta’s Cubano Be Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba (Smithsonian Books) is a fundamental (not to mention the first) history, which among other things traces the evolution of Latin or Afro-Cuban jazz through the inspiration of players like Machito, Mario Bauza, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chano Pozo. One alert reader reminded me of British historian Richard Gott’s (Guerrilla Movements in Latin America) update on Cuban history, Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press), with a chapter on Cuba during the post-Soviet “Special Period.”

The University of North Carolina Press may be an unlikely center of Cuban scholarship, but it continues to publish highly useful tomes, such as political scientist Lars Schoultz’s comprehensive analysis of the longstanding failed American policies toward our Caribbean neighbor in That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution. His organizing principle is viewing U.S.-Cuba engagement through 10 presidential administrations—one would hope the present president might take heed of America’s voluminous past mistakes and foibles. —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 9, 2009

My recent roundup of books on Cuba made no claims for completeness—nonetheless I think it a glaring omission not having included University of Alabama history mentor Howard Jones’s vital monograph, The Bay of Pigs. Included in a series from Oxford University Press called “Pivotal Moments in American History,” Jones reaffirms the position that this great blunder is a link in a causal chain leading to the Vietnam fiasco—not to mention the massive shadow it casts on the C.I.A. Series editor David Hackett Fischer quotes Marine Colonel Jack Hawkins, who worked on the Bay of Pigs invasion and other secret operations, saying that 30 years later, civilian leaders “continue to harbor unrealistically overblown ideas about what can be accomplished by covert, deniable means.” And we can see where that led us. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 29, 2009

If you are paying attention to the ideas I am trying to express here (I hope they qualify as ideas, and I thank you if you are paying attention), my vexation at the declining attention paid to the study of history is a regular sore spot. I lay the fault for this cultural somnambulism at the deficient pedagogy entrusted with this important task—but maybe it is all merely a little rebranding, the ubiquitous strategy of choice in our brave new world. Let’s call history “back in the day,” which plays to an important human instinct: the desire to know what happened, especially before.

Anyway, that’s what I think history is about. That and good storytelling, which is why three recent books about history have grabbed my attention (when I am not being beaten over the head by Michael Jackson mania or the sex scandals of white Christian politicians). Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan (Modern Library), Inventing American History by William Hogeland (Boston Review/The M.I.T. Press), and World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone (Basic Books) are all excellent examples of concision and the attainable skill of being succinct.

MacMillan’s (Paris 1919 and Nixon and Mao) short text (under 200 pages) investigates how history affects us all:

History is something we all do, even if, like the man who discovered he was writing prose, we do not always realize it. We want to make sense of our own lives and often we wonder about our place in our own societies and how we got to be here. So we tell each other stories, not always true ones, and we ask questions about ourselves. Such stories and questions inevitably lead us to the past…

We use history to understand ourselves and we ought to use history to understand others…History can be helpful; it can also be very dangerous. It is wiser to think of history not as a pile of dead leaves…but as a pool, sometimes benign, often sulfurous that lies under the present silently shaping our institutions our ways of thought, our likes and dislikes.

Peppering her discourse with examples (Robespierre, Leon Trotsky, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Golda Meir, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, the Dalai Lama, and Henry “History Is Bunk” Ford) vividly and lucidly makes her uncomplicated point.

In his slender tome (132 pages), Hogeland (The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty) argues that American public history—the stuff of Ken Burns and other documentaries and museum exhibitions—is inclined to celebration (without the kind of scrutiny and careful analysis that inevitably leads to compromised conclusions). To make his point, Hogeland discusses three examples of distorted history—the rehabilitation and revival of Alexander Hamilton; recent tributes to gadfly, activist, and folksinger Pete Seeger and conservative standard-bearer William Buckley; and Philadelphia’s Constitution Center—and argues that there are negative consequences in politicizing historiography.

Even a brief glance at any bibliography on World War I will show you that there have been countless doorstop-sized tomes written solely on the causes of the war, particular battles, leaders, peace treaties, and on and on. That former Oxford University mentor and historian Stone (Eastern Front 1914-1917) has fashioned a concise 200-page survey is a commendable feat of clarity, bringing readers to the (inevitable) conclusion that the great disaster of the Great War’s end was that the Germans did not think they had been defeated. They had been, as General Ludendorff parroted, “stabbed in the back” by you-know-who. So the conflict that lead to 14 million deaths and 20 million wounded became a temporary cessation of hostilities.

And so it went. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 28, 2009

If you have read novelist John Crowley’s fiction (Endless Things and Little, Big), his new opus may come as something of a surprise—as his penchant is for what some refer to as slipstream or interstitial fiction.

Four Freedoms (William Morrow) is set in the early years of World War II (the worn-out phrase “back in the day” may actually apply here) and revolves around a sprawling aircraft bomber plant—the B-30 Pax (the largest bomber ever built)—and the community in the middle of Oklahoma that was created to support it. All manner of oddballs, drawn by a multitude of reasons and circumstances, end up at the Van Damme factory. Prosper Olander, the novel’s disabled and protean protagonist, serves as the touchstone for Vi, Connie, and Dianne, women who have embarked on liberating and evolving paths that will radically alter America’s social fabric. Crowley creates a quasi-utopian industrial organism with midgets, cripples, misfits, and women taking up the slack as American men ship off to a war. As the novel winds down, Pancho (is the name too obviously a literary reference?), Prosper’s roommate and a malcontent of the progressive stripe, considers attending the United Nations conference held in San Francisco to reaffirm the Four Freedoms that President Roosevelt enunciated on January 6, 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Crowley’s presentation of mid-century America is well and plausibly rendered (down to the price of condoms in 1944), though none more evocative than the mention of Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne’s “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” It’s a pitch-perfect reference point for yet another transformational shift in America. Listen to June Christie croon and see if you don’t agree.

The Van Damme brothers’ attempt to socially engineer a cohesive industrial community at what was called Henryville brings to mind Henry Ford’s ill-fated Fordlandia—his vision of recreating a Midwestern factory town in the Amazonian jungle. New York University mentor Greg Grandin ably assembles the details of Ford’s grandiose failure in Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books). In 1927, Ford’s initial motive was to manufacture rubber for his automobiles on a plot of purchased land (which happened to be the size of Delaware)—but the plan apparently devolved into something more ambitious and impossible, and not one drop of rubber was ever produced that was used by Ford. Historian Susan Hecht properly credits Grandin as an author who “places the Ford story [within a] much broader social history of Amazonia, and rather than a saga of some novelty or the vanity of the rich, makes the resistance and the failure part of a larger Amazonian history rather than just the exotic ambitions of a man with too much money.” —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 23, 2009

I first became aware of Uruguayan writer, activist, and dog lover Eduardo Galeano about 20 years ago through Lawrence Weschler’s investigations of the amnesty movements in Brazil and Argentina during their post-military dictatorship years (Weschler’s work culminated in his book, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers; Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America briefly put him in the news cycle when Hugo Chávez presented a copy to President Obama). Since then Galeano has gained international recognition, and in this country was awarded the (prestigious) Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. He also published his splendid Memory of Fire, the three-volume history of the Americas, and a number of other well-regarded tomes. Since Memory of Fire, Galeano has employed a kind of digressive anecdotal style which includes a variety of textual fragments, some fact-based, some invented. Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books) covers 5,000 years of human history with fragments, questions, vignettes, poems, dreamscapes, and more. Here is the book’s last entry, entitled “Lost and Found”:

The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one it inherited.
The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and justice, is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.
In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon.
But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed.
If not on the moon, where might they be?
Perhaps they were never misplaced.
Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 30, 2009