So from where did the myth come that a woman could “have it all” without “doing it all”? Helen Gurley Brown’s popular 1982 book, “Having It All,” certainly popularized the idea that women could, in fact, have everything—a career, children, a husband and great sex. Even before her book appeared, however, magazines had begun offering advice to the new working mothers just entering the labor market. They prescribed how women should dress for success, assert their authority, flaunt their skills, reach for the glass ceiling, give their children “quality time” and end the day with the sexual passion of a woman who did none of the above. In short, women gained the impossible “goal” of becoming the perfect working mom. They could have it all, if they did it all.

This madness has hardly gone unnoticed. During the last 40 years, dozens of books have described and analyzed the impossibility of “having it all.” Some of these books advise women to “lean in” and reach for the glass ceiling. Few address the sticky floor that keeps most women in low-paid, marginal jobs. At least once a decade, The New York Times Magazine features an article about women who have opted out of their careers....

It is no news that the age of political correctness and revisionist history is upon us, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the subject of slavery and the American Civil War. In the past half-dozen years, literature has appeared condemning the Southern general Robert E. Lee as a traitor, slaver, and racist. In Memphis, the city council has voted to remove the names of Confederate leaders from its city parks, and similar efforts calling for the removal of statues and other symbols commemorating the old Confederacy are in progress across the South.

Recently, an op-ed column appeared in the New York Times insisting that Southern Army posts such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Benning in Georgia, Fort Lee in Virginia, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana, and five others—all named for Confederate generals—should be renamed, since their provenance might be offensive to black soldiers. Having served, in 1965-66, at the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, and the Airborne School at Fort Benning, with both white and black soldiers, I believe I can say that there is a certain pride in having participated in those tough military programs. The very names of these bases inspires awe and reverence in Army circles. 

Clearly a move is afoot among a certain school of activists, including some historians, to expunge all vestiges of legitimacy, or pride, in the Southern Confederacy of the 1860s. In 2011, for example, when the city of Charleston organized a reenactment of the sesquicentennial of South Carolina’s secession from the Union, one activist told reporters that it was “almost like celebrating the Holocaust.” The movement has even developed a name for those who disagree with it: “Lost Causers,” whom they mock in the same manner as they do “birthers,” “truthers,” and the like. “Confederate apologists” is another frequent appellation for this race-baiting, for that’s ultimately what it is. By this movement’s lights, anyone who takes pride in his Southern ancestors is, by their definition, a condoner of slavery and de facto racist....

THIS SUMMER MARKS the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg, and November holds the anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — “the words that remade America,” according to journalist and historian Garry Wills. Part of the address’ power flows from the image of the dead as martyrs for “a new birth of freedom,” the promise that the unprecedented savagery of the American Civil War was not a departure from the American project but a necessary part of it. We tend to remember this civil war for the positive reasons that Lincoln primed us to believe. But Lincoln’s rhetorical accomplishment makes us forget that death and civil war are more often toxic things. And few here remember that, at the same time that Lincoln was delivering his speech, China was witnessing its own civil war, with even higher costs and more unclear ends.

The Taiping Civil War (1850­–1864) started with a dream. Hong Xiuquan, a young scholar from Guangdong, a province in southern China, aspired to the government position and the unassailable status guaranteed by success in imperial civil service examinations. However, in 1837, Hong flunked the provincial-level examination in Canton, the province’s major city, for the third time and returned home broken. He collapsed into episodic trances in which he traveled to a heavenly realm and met an old man in a black dragon robe. The man, whom Hong understood to be his “father,” stood grieving at the edge of heaven, dismayed by the people of his creation who had been led astray by demons. He dispatched Hong to earth, along with a middle-aged man identified as Hong’s “elder brother,” to slay these devils. 

Until 1843, Hong had no vocabulary to explain his visions. That year, he rediscovered a collection of Bible passages he had obtained in Canton years before, and the meaning of his visions became clear: his heavenly father was God. His elder brother was Jesus. The demons were China’s false idols and Hong was China’s savior. Hong immediately began to preach his vision along with the New Testament in the mountains of southern China and quickly amassed a growing following among the farmers and villagers. 

Over time, Hong resolved to establish on earth the kingdom he had seen in heaven. He redefined the demons from the idols of China’s cultural inheritance to the alien Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty. “God had divided the kingdoms of the world […] just as a father divides his estates among his sons,” Hong said. “Why should these Manchus forcibly enter China and rob their brothers of their estate?” In 1850, Hong and his Society of God Worshippers openly rebelled against Qing authorities. In 1851, Hong formally declared the existence of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with himself as Heavenly King. By 1853, his resourceful, ever-growing army had captured the old Ming Dynasty capital of Nanjing. From that point until the end of the civil war, there were effectively two states within China....

Once upon a time, the University of California was a sacred trust, the top tier of a model educational system that helped lift the state to unprecedented prosperity. It was jealously protected from outside political interference.

Now UC is more often described in profane terms. The state's entire higher education system has been under assault for decades — free access is long gone; investment per student has shrunk; some rankings have slipped. The passage of Proposition 30 last year will help repair some of the damage, but UC's stature has been diminished and with it the dream of a truly excellent education for every qualified native son and daughter.

The causes are complex and largely economic, but in an important way, the troubles of the nation's greatest public university can be traced to the ascent of a California icon, Ronald Reagan, and his brand of anti-government conservatism.

UC's downfall was eerily anticipated by a man Reagan made his scapegoat: Clark Kerr, UC president from 1958 to 1967. Kerr, an economist and renowned labor arbitrator, sought to make a college education universally accessible. He oversaw the 1960 adoption of the influential Master Plan for Higher Education, coordinating the state's junior colleges, four-year colleges and universities to avoid redundancy, save tax dollars and deliver on the state's commitment to provide a quality education for its high school graduates....

The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber’s absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain “slummy,” and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction.

Still, it comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern. It’s like discovering that Jesus Christ regularly organized bake sales at his local church. So inflated and elevated is the global image of Marx, whether revered as a revolutionary icon or reviled as the wellspring of Soviet totalitarianism, that it’s unsettling to encounter a genuine human being, a character one might come across today. If the Marx described by Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri specializing in European history, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.

But that’s cheating. The express purpose of “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-­Century Life” is to dispel the dominant notion of a timeless Marx — less man, more ideological canon — and relocate him where he lived and belonged, in his own time, not ours. Standing firm against the avalanche of studies claiming Marx as forever “our contemporary,” Sperber sets out to depict instead “a figure of the past,” not “a prophet of the present.”...

In December 1993, a slum landlord in Baltimore named Lawrence Polakoff rented an apartment to a twenty-one-year-old single mother and her three-year-old son, Max.1 A few days after they moved in, Max’s mother was invited to participate in a research study comparing how well different home renovation methods protected children from lead poisoning, which is still a major problem endangering the health of millions of American children, many of them poor.

Congress had banned the sale of interior lead paint in 1978, but it remained on the walls of millions of homes nationwide, and there was no adequate federal program to deal with it. In Baltimore, most slum housing contained at least some lead paint, and nearly half of the children who lived in these houses had levels of lead in their blood well above that considered safe by the Centers for Disease Control. Max’s blood lead was low when he moved into Polakoff’s apartment, but Polakoff had been cited at least ten times in the past for violating Baltimore’s lead paint regulations, and several former tenants would later sue him for poisoning their children, so the boy was now in great danger.

The research study in which Max and his mother participated was run by two scientists affiliated with Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University with support from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The scientists had formed a partnership with a local contractor, who identified slum landlords like Polakoff and urged them to rent preferentially to families with children aged six months to four years, just when they start crawling around the house and when lead exposure is most dangerous to the developing brain. If the parents agreed, their home would receive one of three different types of lead removal and their children—all of whom were healthy and normal and had low blood lead when they joined the study—would be given regular blood tests to see if their lead levels rose or fell.2

The three lead removal methods varied in cost and thoroughness. In twenty-five of the homes, areas with peeling paint were scraped and repainted and a doormat was placed by the main entrance. This was called “level I abatement” and the cost was not to exceed $1,650. Another twenty-five homes received more extensive “level II abatement” in which chipping paint was scraped and repaired, doormats were placed at all entrances, an easy-to-clean floor covering was installed, and collapsing walls were covered with plasterboard. The cost of this was not to exceed $3,500. In a third set of twenty-five dwellings, all of the above was done, but in addition, all windows were replaced. The cost of this “level III abatement” was not to exceed $7,000. Two control groups of twenty-five families each were also recruited into the study. Half lived in houses that had been built after the interior lead paint ban in 1978, and half lived in older houses that were supposed to have been fully renovated in the past.

Max’s apartment received level II abatement. While carrying out the work, the contractor noticed some “hot spots”—areas of lead paint that could shed dangerous dust. He pointed them out to Polakoff, and also recorded their location on forms that were sent to the researchers, but no one told Max’s mother. Because of the cost limits for level II abatement, the hot spots were not repaired. When Max was tested six months later, his blood lead had nearly quadrupled, to a level known to cause permanent brain damage.

In 1990, Leslie Hanes, another young black single woman, moved into an apartment that was supposed to have been fully stripped of lead paint years earlier. In 1992, she gave birth to a daughter, Denisa, and in the spring of the following year, she too joined the toddler lead study.3 The day before Hanes signed the consent form, the contractor found that her apartment was not in fact lead-free. The remaining lead paint was removed, but by the following September Denisa’s blood lead level had more than tripled and was now six times higher than that currently considered safe by the Centers for Disease Control.

Denisa’s mother was not informed of the blood test result for another three months, by which time it was nearly Christmas. The research assistant who told her about it wished her happy holidays and advised her to wash her front steps more carefully and to keep eighteen-month-old Denisa from putting her hands in her mouth. When Denisa eventually entered school, she had trouble keeping up and had to repeat second grade. This came as a surprise to her mother, a former high school honors student. As Hanes told The Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia in 2001, sometimes Denisa came home crying because she thought she was stupid. “No, baby, you’re not stupid,” Leslie told her. “We just have to work harder.”...

"I voted quickly and went over to stand at the exit from the No Lobby. Mrs T as usual was the last one out. She timed her exit so that colleagues wishing to lobby her could do so. 'Shall I follow you, Prime Minister?' I asked. 'People usually do,' was the reply."

So Labour MP Frank Field describes one of his regular tete-a-tete's with Margaret Thatcher at the apogee of her pomp and prime. This is a book about those glory days of Gloriana. Crafted as a response to Meryl Streep's portrayal of the former prime minister as a dotty old pensioner in The Iron Lady, it is a set of reminiscences to remind us of Thatcher as a world-historic figure. As such, it is part of the beatification of the blessed Margaret as Britain's finest postwar premier and, when the sad hour arrives, a leader worthy of a state funeral.

Unfortunately, former Conservative education secretary Gillian Shephard does her cause few favours with this poorly constructed work. It is clumsily written, shoddily edited, and often embarrassingly reverential. Within Shephard's collection of accounts of working with Thatcher – as provided by former advisers, ministers, and journalists – there do lurk some gems. But the best way to read this book is as a marked critique of the David Cameron premiership. What Tory grandee Baroness Shephard suggests is that everything the heroic Mrs T was in office, the callow Old Etonian is not....

Eric Hobsbawm was the best-known and most celebrated historian of the 20th century, not just in Britain but all over the world. His major works, four substantial volumes covering the history of Europe in its global context from the French revolution in 1789 to the fall of communism two centuries later, have remained in print ever since their first publication. More than half a century after it appeared, The Age of Revolution is still a staple of university reading lists. The Age of Extremes has been translated into more than 50 languages, and no doubt the foreign publication record of his other books is just as impressive.

Hobsbawm was as widely known in Italy – you can view him on YouTube speaking about Antonio Gramsci, in Italian – as he was in Brazil, where President Lula's confession that he had been the biggest influence on his thinking turned The Age of Extremes into a bestseller. Hobsbawm received honorary degrees from many countries, including Uruguay and the Czech Republic. He was an honorary citizen of Vienna. He won the Balzan prize, Europe's most coveted (and richest) award in the humanities. He was awarded the Frankfurt Book Fair's Prize for European Understanding. In the UK he was made a Companion of Honour, the equivalent of a knighthood. The news of his death, on 1 October 2012, was carried by papers across the globe....

Turkey is a country with two right wings. One is nationalist and secular, built on the oversized legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the nation’s first president. The other is nationalist as well, but rooted in Islam and a renewed interest in the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. For all their differences, the two sides share some crucial features: besides being nationalist, they are also anti-imperialist, see Turkey as having a unique role to play in the region, and are not inclined to consider themselves as being on the right. Although the Islam-based wing currently governing the country—with Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) at its head—has gained popularity by casting itself as a more benign alternative to the authoritarian and militarist tendencies of the secular Kemalist leadership, in its actions and even its views, it has increasingly come to resemble its adversary: initiating repressive measures against the opposition, upholding and in some cases expanding limitations on free speech and freedom of the press (imprisoning no fewer than seventy-six journalists), and continuing to restrict the use of the Kurdish language and limit the extent of Kurdish political representation in the country. Like the secular Kemalists before it, the Erdogan government also disapproves of anyone using the term “genocide” to describe the widespread slaughter of Armenians that occurred in 1915 in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor to the modern Turkish state.

What exactly happened to the Armenians, and why are so many Turks still sensitive about the issue? According to a number of Turkish scholars, including Türkkaya Ataöv, a professor emeritus at the University of Ankara, Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were armed and fighting actively in World War I alongside the empire’s enemies in the Entente, and so posed a threat to a state that was already on the defensive. Their fate cannot count as genocide because it was decided by a “civil war.” In talks he has given on college campuses and to audiences around the world, Ataöv generally does not offer any figures to establish how many Armenians lost their lives in this “civil war,” except to say that of the 235 who were removed from Istanbul, just three of them died, one of natural causes and two at the hands of thugs who were later tried and executed for their crime. Ataöv’s is an especially extreme version of denialism. Other Turkish scholars have conceded that the Armenians suffered great losses, reaching even into the hundreds of thousands, though many argue that the massacres were the work of bandits or marauding Kurds rather than Ottoman Turkish officials operating under orders from the government....

The adage “history is written by the winners” is no more than a half-truth. Losers, too, have always written history and, more important, enshrined their losses in memory. A new history of Poland in World War II thus has particular significance. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth gradually vanished from the map of Europe at the end of the 18th century, when Russia, Prussia, and Austria divided it up among themselves; and the Poles regained their independence only in 1918.  In their new republic, ethnic Poles were a majority, but Ukrainians, Belorussians, Germans and, of course, Jews constituted a large minority.  The Jews alone made up more than 10 per cent of the country’s population.   Mustn’t any history of Poland in the Second World War therefore put the Jews and the Holocaust at the center?  If it does not, is that originality or revisionism?  Halik Kochanski’s The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War offers important insights into the Polish experience of the war, but her treatment of the Jewish Question is less satisfying.

Kochanski’s story of Poland in World War II blends betrayal, incompetence, uncommon bravery, and colossal failure against a backdrop of pervasive brutality.  Poland’s location between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union spelled disaster; its choice of allies in Britain and France was both unavoidable and fated to fail. Lacking money, arms, and military doctrine, Poland stood little chance of defending its long borders, and fell quickly between September and October of 1939.  Over the next two years, Poland was reduced to a German slave province in the west and a Soviet rump, drained of people and goods, in the east.  From the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 until the end of the war, it became a vast killing ground. 

It was hard for the Poles to build a resistance movement in the face of both the Gestapo and the NKVD, which initially worked together. Creating a Polish underground government, and a separate government-in-exile, was exceedingly difficult in a partitioned country. Some Polish soldiers joined the French and British armed forces. Hundreds of thousands more became Soviet prisoners, but many of them were released in 1941 and allowed to join forces with the British under the leadership of Władysław Anders. Far from their own country, they fought bravely on many fronts. The Polish contribution to deciphering Germany’s Enigma codes was so vital and so secret that it was not revealed until the 1970s....

In this dazzling 650-page feat of historical reconstruction, Karl Schlögel, a professor at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), has summoned up a great city—what was once the New Jerusalem for much of the world’s intelligentsia and downtrodden—as it consumed itself in an orgy of fear, paranoia, denunciations, mass arrests, suicides, and executions.

Schlögel’s book is a fragmentary yet meticulous social history of Moscow in the grip of the Great Terror—the period from the summer of 1936 to the end of 1938, when the already sanguinary Bolshevik regime let loose on itself its apparatus of suppression, purging, in waves, all Soviet institutions and at all levels of society, from the nomenklatura, the highest echelons of administrative, cultural, and scientific life, through the high command of the Red Army, to the engineers and apparatchiks, down to the factory workers and peasants. It is an almost impossibly rich masterpiece.

In Moscow 1937, Schlögel uses as a leitmotif the themes and settings of Mikhail Bulgakov’s great allegorical 1937 novel of the city under the Terror, The Master and Margarita. He opens with an exegesis of Margarita’s fantastical flight over the city in the 1930s, which allows him to establish the scene and dissect Moscow’s cultural and social geography....

More than thirty years after his retirement as anchor of the CBS Evening News—and over three years after his death in 2009—Walter Cronkite remains an iconic figure. He appears in the opening montage of Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama The Newsroom, and his name is routinely evoked in laments about the “decline” of broadcast journalism, which invariably remind us that he was the “most trusted man in America,” a courageous truth-teller committed to objectivity and “hard news.”

Douglas Brinkley’s long, absorbing biography of Cronkite does little to alter this impression. He tells us lots of interesting things about the man, but relatively little about how he became a mythic figure. Nor does he say very much about the particular kind of journalism that Cronkite and his colleagues produced. This is too bad, since Cronkite was at the center of a fascinating moment in the history of American mass media, and the television news that he came to embody was fleeting and highly unusual—an attempt to produce serious journalism in a medium associated with escapism.

Cronkite joined CBS in 1950, after a distinguished career as a wire-service reporter with United Press. He was one of many print journalists drawn to the new medium of television, and he remained committed to a relatively straightforward, just-the-facts approach to the news that made him a favorite of CBS executives, especially news division president Sig Mickelson. His first assignment was to explain developments in the Korean War to viewers of WTOP, CBS’s affiliate in Washington, D.C. Using maps, models, and other ingenious low-tech visual aids, he proved a master at the task. Soon he was hosting WTOP’s evening newscast and contributing short reports on the war to the fifteen-minute newscast that CBS produced in New York and fed to its growing number of affiliates.

During the 1950s, Cronkite was the network’s jack-of-all-trades. He narrated documentaries, “interviewed” actors impersonating famous personages like Joan of Arc and Benedict Arnold at the scene of groundbreaking historical events on the program You Are There, and even briefly hosted The Morning Show, an ill-fated attempt to duplicate the success of NBC’s Today. His most important job, however, was serving as the anchor of CBS’s convention and election coverage, a new role that Mickelson conceived for him in 1952. A quick study with an unusual ability to ad-lib, Cronkite was ideally suited for the assignment, as Mickelson and CBS officials immediately recognized. They made him the anchor of virtually all special live broadcasts, including the network’s coverage of space flights. It was a job that gave Cronkite lots of airtime and allowed him to “own” a story that was popular with the public. In April 1962, with the CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards well behind NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report in the Nielsen ratings, Cronkite became the program’s new anchor and managing editor, a joint position he held for the next nineteen years....

The British rule over Palestine lasted roughly thirty years, from 1917 until 1948. In a country that has three thousand years of recorded history, thirty years is a tiny fraction. If we conceive of three thousand years on a scale of one day, the period of British rule takes barely eight minutes. In comparison, Turkish Ottoman rule over Palestine, which lasted four hundred years, takes an hour and forty minutes. Yet the influence of these thirty years was deep and wide-ranging.1 Under British rule, Palestine became a political unit, not a marginal province of something else. The British made Jerusalem the capital city of Palestine; they introduced the idea of professional civil service, and they encouraged a lively civil society; they built roads and airfields, and provided sound legal institutions and reliable police.

The legal frame for British rule was based on a mandate conferred on Britain by the League of Nations. It was meant to be a transitory trusteeship so as to prepare the country to be a “national home for the Jews,” without “impairing the civil and religious rights of the indigenous Arab people.” This contradictory task is at the heart of the story of the British Mandate. It is this mandate of the League of Nations that makes us call the political and military rule of the British over Palestine “The Mandate.” And it’s the Mandate that revived the old term “Palestine” (already used by Herodotus in his writings) to describe the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Before then the Ottomans divided the region into their own units, including, for example, the “Sanjak of Jerusalem.”

The Mandate didn’t provide collective liberty—namely, political independence. It didn’t provide for elections for local administrations that would ultimately be under British control. But it did provide a great deal of personal freedom. Following the Ottoman Empire’s Millet system, the Mandate left a great deal of internal autonomy to the various religious communities to conduct their life.

Hadara Lazar has written a remarkable book dedicated not so much to the British Mandate as to some of the people who were strongly involved with it. The book first appeared in Hebrew in 1990, under the telling title The Mandatorians: The Land of Israel 1940–1948, and has now been published in English under the rather misleading title Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel. It consists of interviews with British, Jews, and Arabs who recount life in Palestine under the British Mandate in its last eight years....

At the end of World War II, Eastern and Central Europe were “liberated” from Nazism only to see it replaced by a social order installed by the other great totalitarian nation, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. In his famous speech at Westminster College in March 1946, Winston Churchill told the world that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent.” The left wing at the time saw the charge as outrageous and as warmongering. Anne Applebaum’s book not only confirms the accuracy of Churchill’s understanding that Moscow was establishing regimes that would attempt to duplicate the Soviet system, but she shows that the Soviet-led rulers of those regimes would attempt to eradicate any independent civil society and build a new human being — “Homo Sovieticus,” the new Soviet man — who would accept his essential role as the builder of Communism.

What Applebaum has accomplished in her worthy successor to her Pulitzer Prize–winning Gulag is nothing less than the first full account of precisely how the USSR worked to create — in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, the three “people’s democracies” on which she concentrates — mechanisms that would make it virtually impossible to resist implementation of a Stalinist social structure. Any individual who sought to belong to or participate in a group not controlled by Communists was per se an “enemy of the state” and not to be tolerated. To insist on individuality or the right to belong to autonomous groups — even chess clubs — was viewed as a dangerous precedent that might lead to “anti-Soviet actions” by members, who thus deserved imprisonment before they could actually become opponents of the regime....

In 2003, I deployed to Anbar Province in Iraq with my armored battalion to conduct counterinsurgency operations. I had spent nearly a decade studying the subject academically, and my reading had convinced me that counterinsurgency was the hardest kind of war, much more intellectually and emotionally difficult than the tank warfare I had seen in Iraq in 1991. Even so, I was unprepared for the blind-man's-bluff challenge of fighting an enemy I could rarely see. I would have been on firmer ground if I had read Max Boot's "Invisible Armies" before I had deployed to Iraq. The prolific journalist and military historian has taken on no less a task than presenting the "epic history of guerrilla warfare from ancient times to the present."...

In between these personal glimpses into counterinsurgency campaigning is a definitive survey of the long history of irregular warfare, beginning with the Jewish uprising against the Romans in 66 A.D., running through the rising tide of rebellion against colonial powers—including the one that freed this country from the oppressive tax policies of imperial England—that reached a crescendo in the wake of World War II, and finishing with our long war in Iraq and a chapter on the "Failures and Successes of the Global Islamist Insurgency."...

...The novelty of [Applebaum's] approach comes as she examines the expansion of persecution. Poland had no radio station when under Nazi rule, as the Germans sought to deprive the country of every facility that could foster unmonitored communication. The Communists were no less suspicious of wireless sets. Boleslaw Bierut published a decree in mid-1945 making private possession of a radio a capital offense, and at least one unfortunate Pole was executed for holding on to a “Phillips” model. But Bierut’s larger ambition was not to silence Polish public communication but rather to restrict it to a framework favorable to the Communist cause. Stalin himself enthusiastically granted permission for the establishment of Poland’s first post-German radio station, for his goal was not to reduce the Poles to abject slavery and starvation but rather to turn them into happy collaborators in the communization effort. All modalities of advanced technology were to be employed in that effort.

But no rival sources of information would be tolerated, and an aggressive prophylactic approach was adopted. Though there was no evidence, for example, that the YMCA in Warsaw was a nest of nationalist or anti-Communist resistance, Bierut and Gomulka saw trouble in the organization’s mission of providing shelter and food to disoriented young Polish men. They wanted the new state to be the sole provider of these services. An additional source of concern lay in the fact that the YMCA premises were not adorned with posters that hymned Lenin and Poland’s radiant Communist future. Nor could it be overlooked that the YMCA was an international body with a religious affiliation. For the Polish Communist leadership, Stalin and his party’s international department were the sole foreign authorities that offered healthy—albeit confidential—guidance. The YMCA was promptly ejected from Polish territory....

As we mark the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the publication of Allen Guelzo’s magisterial new account of that conflict is most timely. But given the fact that, by even the most conservative estimates, some 60,000 books and pamphlets have been written about what was once called the War of the Rebellion, the question naturally arises: Why do we need another one? 

A very compelling reason is that Guelzo is one of our most accomplished Civil War historians, and one of the country’s foremost Lincoln scholars. He is the first two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize—in 2000 for Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and in 2005 for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, the definitive treatment of that document. In addition, Guelzo’s prose is graceful and erudite—indeed, almost poetic. He is as comfortable with military topics as he is with the political, social, and economic aspects of the war and its aftermath. 

But the most important reason for embracing Fateful Lightning is that it continues an important trend regarding how we understand the Civil War, by overturning the “Lost Cause” school of historiography. As Edward A. Pollard wrote in the 1867 book that gave this interpretation its name, “all that is left in the South is the war of ideas.” The Lost Cause thesis is neatly summarized in an 1893 speech by the former Confederate officer Col. Richard Henry Lee:

As a Confederate soldier and as a Virginian, I deny the charge [that the Confederates were rebels] and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels, we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes.

As David Blight has observed in Race and Reunion, the Lost Cause interpretation of the war was the South’s response to the physical destruction and psychological trauma of defeat. In this view, the Old South was a racial utopia, an organic society composed of loyal slaves and benevolent masters. The war pitted this “slave democracy” against the “free mobocracy” of the North, and the noble side lost. The matchless bravery of the Confederate soldier succumbed to the “juggernaut of superior numbers and merciless power.” As Robert Penn Warren once wrote, “In the moment of its death, the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.”

Almost immediately after the conflict ended, the Lost Cause school towered like a colossus over Civil War historiography. Former Confederate general Jubal Early and other Lost Cause authors were instrumental in shaping perceptions of the war, in the North as well as in the South. The works of Douglas Southall Freeman, Virginian and biographer of Robert E. Lee, represent the epitome of the Lost Cause school; but even writers like Bruce Catton, who interpreted the war primarily from a Northern perspective, accepted many of the Lost Cause assumptions....

In 1934, on their first date, Lyndon Baines Johnson asked Claudia Alta Taylor, the woman who would become known as Lady Bird Johnson, to marry him. He was 26. She was 21.

They’d been driving around all day. He’d felt he’d been struck by lightning. She was less sanguine. “I just sat there with my mouth open, kind of,” she reports in a crisp and absurdly endearing new book, “Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History.” She adds, “I was far from sure I wanted to know him any better.”

President Johnson’s impetuousness came to mind when a copy of this volume made its way to my kitchen table a few weeks ago. I hadn’t planned to write about it. Other books out this month seemed more pressing. The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s titanic biography of Johnson, published just last year, looms in the rearview mirror. Hey, hey. Enough L.B.J....

Following on the heels of Chinese and Japanese exclusion, Filipino immigration to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century was often referred to by American nativists as the “third Asiatic invasion.” Rick Baldoz’s book explores the ramifications of Filipino immigration understood as a kind of ongoing war on white society. The US invasion and occupation of the Philippines from 1898-1941 opened up the pathways for Filipino labor migration to Hawai’i and the United States between 1906 to 1934.  But the increasing number of largely male migrants—at one point, estimated to be near 50,000 in the West Coast alone—was seen by nativist groups as a kind of invasion and colonization of the United States by its colonial subjects. Educated in the colonial public school system to think of America as a democratic society, Filipino migrants were stunned and dismayed at the racial discrimination and harsh working conditions they were subjected to in the metropole. However, rather than accept the terms of their marginalization, Baldoz shows how Filipinos pushed back, refusing to stay on their side of the color line. He traces in great detail the history of this other Filipino-American war as it set in motion a series of conflicts: between nativists seeking the exclusion of Filipinos and Filipino immigrants insisting on their right to civil recognition; and between local officials and Federal judges struggling to parse and clarify the profoundly ambiguous status of Filipinos as “nationals.” As Baldoz points out, such conflicts highlighted the irresolvable contradictions between domestic fears of non-white immigrants contaminating white society and the imperial project of territorial expansion and the colonial uplift of racially heterogeneous populations....

Will there be “but one heart to the globe?” asks Walt Whitman in a poem that provides an epigraph in Mark Mazower’s new book, Governing the World: The History of an Idea. At the center of this expansive work is the question of how Americans and Europeans have imagined the world, its peoples, and its nations. Is there but one global identity, as Whitman surmises? Are the world’s peoples the focus of global politics, or should nations be privileged in international affairs? Do values and culture, or degrees of civilization, set nations apart? These questions inform global affairs over time. This history matters, Mazower argues, as “we find ourselves… in a hierarchical world in which some states are more sovereign than others.”

Power also matters: For Mazower, dominant nations come to play a role in defining the world. He embeds his narrative in the development of familiar institutions, such as the United Nations, and is especially compelling when he reveals lesser-known stories like the development of common units of measurement, presided over by social scientists in the West. This ambitious and largely convincing account falls short, however, when the author turns to contemporary matters. Disappointed that international law does not adequately constrain American war efforts, he misses an important turn in modern conflict: the way that law itself has been reimagined as a weapon of war.

To make the point that the history of ideas matters to contemporary policy-making, Mazower opens the book with a young Henry Kissinger writing about the Concert of Europe. The Concert, an innovation in global politics in 1815, enabled Austria, Prussia, the Russian Empire, and Great Britain to work together in an effort to contain the revolutionary spirit of France. Emphasizing order over rights and liberty, they saw themselves as speaking for Europe as a whole. Their accord legitimated intervention in the domestic affairs of other European nations. “[R]ight at the start of the history of international institutions,” Mazower writes, “we find states and politicians arguing over the limits of ‘the government of the world.’ ” As for Kissinger, his dissertation topic provided him with “a lesson of enduring value” for America: “What long-dead European aristocrats… could teach the United States was how to constrain a revolutionary superpower—for France read the USSR—and bind it into the rules of the international game.”

A leading scholar of twentieth-century European history at Columbia University, Mazower is at his best in Governing the World when he illuminates the way European and American understandings of global politics unfolded. Works on the history of world governance most often focus on diplomacy, international conflict, and the establishment of institutions like the United Nations. The history of ideas usually appears through the biographies of important leaders like Woodrow Wilson. But Mazower places ideas about the world and its governance at the center of the story, with individuals as the carriers of certain concepts. This makes an otherwise familiar story new and exciting. The author’s central thesis unfolds gradually and implicitly, and his narrative beautifully expounds the shaping role of ideas over time. But Mazower does not share enough of his own thoughts, withholding a more explicit theoretical analysis. That absence might have been intended to make the book appealing for a broad readership—and it is a wonderful read—but it also undermines the book’s power.

The very word “international” emerged in the 1780s, coined by philosopher Jeremy Bentham to distinguish between internal laws and what was then called “the law of nations.” Ideally, for Bentham, international law would promote “the greatest happiness of all nations taken together,” and would be crucial to maintaining peace. Before long, Mazower writes, “ ‘international’ had already become an -ism, a radical project,” which developed along with the rise of representative government. By the mid-nineteenth century, “[i]nternationalism, in its modern sense as a movement of cooperation among nations and their peoples, was moving from the realm of marginal ideas into the mainstream, while monarchy itself was obliged to accommodate itself to the era of large electorates and parliamentary power.”...