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Featured Selections: History
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Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
by John M. Barry
An almost novel-like history of one of the most pivotal points -- and certainly the greatest natural disaster -- of America's 20th Century: the Mississippi River Flood of 1927. Barry presents a sweeping history of the old "New South" and the omnipresent power of the River, and shows how the Great Flood elevated Herbert Hoover to the White House, paved the way for the New Deal, and brought about the exodus of Blacks from the Republican Party. A must-read.
Read Rod D. Martin's review of Rising Tide.
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America: The Last Best Hope (Volume I) : From the Age of Discovery to a World at War
by William J. Bennett
America: The Last Best Hope is a vibrant account of this country's record from before the Founding of the United States to the present day. In recent decades, many histories have treated the American story largely as a social study of missteps and injustices. This treatment is different. Dr. Bennett does not shrink from any hard truths about the nation's past, but he trumpets the glory, romance, and exceptionalism of American achievement. At 512 pages, the first volume covers the discovery of the Americas to the eve of World War I. Volume Two will take readers from World War I to September 11, 2001, and will be released in 2007. |
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Witness
by Whittaker Chambers
First published in 1952, Witness was at once a literary effort, a philosophical treatise, and a bestseller. Whittaker Chambers had just participated in America's trial of the century in which Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a full-standing member of the political establishment, was a spy for the Soviet Union. This poetic autobiography recounts the famous case, but also reveals much more. Chambers' worldview -- e.g. "man without mysticism is a monster" -- went on to help make political conservatism a national force.
A Morton Blackwell "Read to Lead" Selection.
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The Black Book of Communism
by Stephane Courtois, et al.
When it was first published in France in 1997, Le livre noir du Communisme touched off a storm of controversy that continues to rage today. Communism did kill, Courtois and his fellow historians demonstrate, with ruthless efficiency: 25 million in Russia during the Bolshevik and Stalinist eras, perhaps 65 million in China under the eyes of Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia, millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America--an astonishingly high toll of victims. This freely expressed penchant for homicide, Courtois maintains, was no accident, but an integral trait of a philosophy, and a practical politics, that promised to erase class distinctions by erasing classes and the living humans that populated them. Courtois and his contributors document Communism's crimes in numbing detail, moving from country to country, revolution to revolution. |
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A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years With Ronald Reagan
by Michael K. Deaver
Says Newt Gingrich, "This is simply the best book that has been written about how Reagan operated and how he was successful in getting things done. Deaver communicates a deeper personal sense of Reagan than any other book I have read. For any student history interested in how this remarkable man could carry the conservative movement to the White House, defeat the Soviet Empire, restart the American economy and rebuild faith in the American civic culture, this book is must reading. Deaver was with Reagan for thirty years and has thought deeply about his leadership since then. This book captures that analysis in remarkably few pages." |
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Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader
by Dinesh D'Souza
Dinesh D'Souza rates America's 40th president as one of its greatest, right below Washington and Lincoln. He makes a forceful case for this rank, probably the best yet and perhaps the best possible. In the process, he analyzes Reagan's leadership style with remarkable clarity and subtlety. Reagan seemed ordinary in so many ways, still, millions of people believed in him and followed him. Moreover, he is the patron saint of the modern conservative movement--something that he did not create, yet nonetheless came to embody.
A Morton Blackwell "Read to Lead" Selection.
Read Rod D. Martin's column "Remembering Ronald Reagan".
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With No Apologies: The Personal and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater
by Senator Barry M. Goldwater
The 1979 edition of Goldwater's memoirs, covering nearly the entire career of this founder of modern conservatism. Ronald Reagan said that "everyone in America should read this frank accounting of backstage Washington by an honest man. With No Apologies is required reading for those who want to know the inner workings of the political world."
Read Rod D. Martin's review of With No Apologies.
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In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage
by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
The focus of "In Denial" is what the authors call "lying about spying." Haynes and Klehr examine the ways in which revisionist scholars have ignored or distorted new evidence from recently-opened Russian archives about espionage links between Moscow and the CPUSA. They analyze the mythology that continues to suggest, against all evidence, that Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and others who betrayed the United States were more sinned against than sinning. They set the record straight about the spies among us. |
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The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry
by Steven F. Hayward
Jimmy Carter: America's best ex-president? Only if you're not bothered by the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism (which started on his watch), the shamefaced foreign policy of Bill Clinton and John Kerry (ditto), and think that ex-presidents should travel the world coddling dictators and bad-mouthing America à la Jesse Jackson. Jimmy Carter has been given a free ride from the liberal media, liberal historians, and even the American people, who excuse his political delinquencies and disasters on the grounds that he is a "good" man. But as bank robber Willie Sutton said of Carter: "I've never seen a bigger confidence man in my life, and I've been around some of the best in the business." It's time to set the record straight. |
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George Washington: The Founding Father
by Paul Johnson
George Washington was one of the most important figures in American -- and world -- history. Yet despite the mountainous literature on him compiled by historians, Washington remains a distant figure to many Americans. Previous books about him are immensely long, multivolume, and complicated. Now, the eminent conservative historian Paul Johnson has produced a brief biography of Washington that seeks to answer the simple question: What sort of man was Washington, and how did he achieve so much? The result is a a brilliant, sharply etched portrait of this iconic figure -- both as a hero and as a man. |
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A History of the American People
by Paul Johnson
"The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures," begins Paul Johnson's remarkable new American history. The first and only conservative history of the United States, A History of the American People is a reinterpretation of every aspect of American history: its politics and economics; its art, literature, and science; its society and manners; and its complex and pervasive religious beliefs. |
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Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties
by Paul Johnson
Originally published in 1983 and named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, this bestselling history is now revised and updated and includes a new final chapter. A far-reaching and masterful work, it explores the events, ideas, and personalities of the seven decades since the First World War, "unburdened by the liberal worldview", and yet acclaimed by left and right.
A Morton Blackwell "Read to Lead" Selection.
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John Adams
by David McCullough
In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution. New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, Winner of The American Academy of Diplomacy Award, Winner of the Christopher Award, Winner of the Revolutionary War Roundtable Prize. |
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Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship With France
by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky
“If we grow exasperated at the French and demand gratitude, expect shared purpose, and wish friendship, we will probably grow only more exasperated--since John Miller and Mark Molesky show that French animosities are centuries old and derive from who Americans are rather than from what we do. Their romp through our shared history would almost be funny--if it were not so sad in the present post--9-11 world."
-- Victor Davis Hanson, best-selling author and
Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
And Also See:
• The French Betrayal of America
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Theodore Rex
by Edmund Morris
The second entry in Morris's projected three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt focuses on the presidential years 1901 through early 1909. Impeccably researched and beautifully composed, Morris's book provides what is arguably the best consideration of Roosevelt's presidency ever penned. |
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Ike's Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality
by Kasey S. Pipes
When Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock to integrate Central High, he didn’t know that he was fighting the last, great battle of his career…one that would change the nation. Ike's Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality tells how one of America’s greatest leaders finally confronted America’s greatest sin. Here, for the first time, is the unlikely tale of how Ike became a civil rights president.
Scrupulously researched, and utilizing never-before-released material, author Kasey Pipes details:
• Eisenhower’s belief in his black troops during WW II led to Truman’s executive order desegregating the military
• Ike’s personal thoughts on the crisis in Little Rock
• The legacy he left John F. Kennedy on civil rights
• Ike’s concerns about the GOP and its future
What better way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Little Rock than by revisiting Ike's Final Battle, the last priceless nugget of civil rights history yet to be mined. |
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Communism: A History
by Richard Pipes
With astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime's scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice.
At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state. Drawing on much new information, Richard Pipes explains the country's evolution from the 1917 revolution to the Great Terror and World War II, global expansion and the Cold War chess match with the United States, and the regime's decline and ultimate collapse. There is no more dramatic story in modern history, nor one more crucial to master, than that of how the writing and agitation of two mid-nineteenth-century European thinkers named Marx and Engels led to a great and terrible world religion that brought down a mighty empire, consumed the world in conflict, and left in its wake a devastation whose full costs can only now be tabulated. Pipes' tightly-reasoned, incisive work brings it to you in masterful form. |
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FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression
by Jim Powell
Says Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, "Admirers of FDR credit his New Deal with restoring the American economy after the disastrous contraction of 1929-33. Truth to tell -- as Powell demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt -- the New Deal hampered recovery from the contraction, prolonged and added to unemployment, and set the stage for ever more intrusive and costly government. Powell's analysis is thoroughly documented, relying on an impressive variety of popular and academic literature both contemporary and historical." |
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Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II
by Jim Powell
President Woodrow Wilson, according to the conventional view, was a great "progressive" who showed how America can do good by intervening abroad. But as historian Jim Powell (author of FDR's Folly) shows in Wilson's War, Wilson made the most catastrophic decision of the twentieth century when he committed the United States to fight in World War I. Far from helping "make the world safe for democracy," as Wilson claimed, Wilson's blunder contributed to the rise of some of the most murderous dictators who ever lived: Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. "No other U.S. president has had a hand -- however unintentional -- in so much destruction," argues Powell. That's why, Powell declares, "Wilson surely ranks as the worst president in American history." |
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A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen
For at least thirty years, high school and college students have been taught to be embarrassed by American history. Required readings have become skewed toward a relentless focus on our country’s darkest moments, from slavery to McCarthyism. As a result, many history books devote more space to Harriet Tubman than to Abraham Lincoln; more to My Lai than to the American Revolution; more to the internment of Japanese Americans than to the liberation of Europe in World War II.
Finally, there is an antidote to this biased approach to our history. Two veteran history professors have written a sweeping, well-researched book that puts the spotlight back on America’s role as a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world.
Schweikart and Allen are careful to tell their story straight, from Columbus’s voyage to the capture of Saddam Hussein. They do not ignore America’s mistakes through the years, but they put them back in their proper perspective. And they conclude that America’s place as a world leader derived largely from the virtues of our own leaders— the men and women who cleared the wilderness, abolished slavery, and rid the world of fascism and communism. |
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Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union
by Peter Schweizer
In this explosive book, Peter Schweizer provides the riveting details of how the Reagan administration undermined the Soviet economy and its dwindling resource base while subverting the Kremlin's hold on its global empire. Using secret diplomacy, the administration dramatically reduced Soviet income while at the same time driving Moscow to expend an increasing amount of precious assets. On another level, the administration provided covert aid to indigenous forces in Poland and Afghanistan to roll back Soviet power. |
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Breaking With Moscow
by Arkady N. Shevchenko
Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet defector ever, produced this magnificent memoir and stunning warning at the very height of the Cold War's dangerous end-game in the mid-1980s. Serialized in Time Magazine, it is an absolute must-read for the student of the Cold War, and especially of the Soviet Union and its war plans and espionage against the West.
Read Rod D. Martin's review of Breaking With Moscow.
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The Frontier in American History
by Frederick Jackson Turner
Frederick Jackson Turner is generally considered the most influential American historian of the past century, and his views continue to shape the controversial field of Western American history. This book contains Turner's most significant essays -- particularly "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" -- clearly demonstrating Turner's legacy and his effect on Americans' understanding of their national character. |
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The Arkansas Rockefeller
by John Ward
While far from exhaustive, The Arkansas Rockefeller -- written by longtime Rockefeller associate and Arkansas newspaperman John Ward -- remains the definitive biography of former Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, the first Republican to hold the office since Reconstruction and the father of the current Arkansas Lieutenant Governor of the same name. Rockefeller was a tremendous agent of reform, and was largely responsible for the enfranchisement of Arkansas's large black population, which in turn voted for him by overwhelming margins.
Read Rod D. Martin's review of The Arkansas Rockefeller.
Read Rod D. Martin's award-winning thesis, Winthrop Rockefeller and the Enfranchisement of Arkansas Blacks, 1960-1966.
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From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany
by Richard Weikart
From Darwin to Hitler elucidates the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. Weikart demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially the view that human life is sacred. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary "fitness" (especially intelligence and health) as the highest arbiter of morality. Darwinism played a key role in the rise not only of eugenics, but also euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination. This thinking had its biggest impact on Germany, since Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles, not on nihilism as popularly believed.
And See Also:
• Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood
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The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787
by Gordon S. Wood
This outstanding, yet brief, account is the first to offer a balanced view of how the Revolution was made by a variety of social groups--ordinary farmers and artisans as well as merchants and lawyers, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites--and how, in turn, these groups were transformed by the Revolutionary experience. |
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The Radicalism of the American Revolution
by Gordon S. Wood
In a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian depicts much more than a break with England. He gives readers a revolution that transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.
"A tour de force.... This is a book that could redirect historical thinking about the Revolution and its place in the national consciousness." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A breathtaking social, political, and ideological analysis. This book will set the agenda for discussion for some time to come." -- Richard L. Bushman |
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The Strange Career of Jim Crow
by C. Vann Woodward
An almost novel-like history of one of the most pivotal points -- and certainly the greatest natural disaster -- of America's 20th Century: the Mississippi River Flood of 1927. Barry presents a sweeping history of the old "New South" and the omnipresent power of the River, and shows how the Great Flood elevated Herbert Hoover to the White House, paved the way for the New Deal, and brought about the exodus of Blacks from the Republican Party. A must-read.
Read Rod D. Martin's review of The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
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See Also: History Magazines
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