History Ago Go

When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the 48 percent who wanted to stay and the 52 percent who wanted to go each accused the other of stupidity, fraud, and treason. In reality, the Brexit debate merely reran a script written ten thousand years earlier, when the rising seas physically separated the British Isles from the European continent. Ever since, geography has been destiny―yet it is humans who get to decide what that destiny means.

Ian Morris, the critically acclaimed author of Why the West Rules―for Now, describes how technology and organization have steadily enlarged Britain’s arena, and how its people have tried to turn this to their advantage. For the first seventy-five hundred years, the British were never more than bit players at the western edge of a European stage, struggling to find a role among bigger, richer, and more sophisticated continental rivals. By 1500 CE, however, new kinds of ships and governments had turned the European stage into an Atlantic one; with the English Channel now functioning as a barrier, England transformed the British Isles into a United Kingdom that created a worldwide empire. Since 1900, thanks to rapid globalization, Britain has been overshadowed by American, European, and―increasingly―Chinese actors.

In trying to find its place in a global economy, Britain has been looking in all the wrong places. The ten-thousand-year story bracingly chronicled by Geography Is Destiny shows that the great question for the current century is not what to do about Brussels; it’s what to do about Beijing.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Laughing Monk Holy Ghost Pilsner, Rose and Crown Pub, Palo Alto, California

BOOK:  Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History
https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Destiny-Britains-000-Year-History/dp/0374157278/ref=sr_1_1?crid=R24C7TCGUGOM&keywords=ian+morris+geography+is+destiny&qid=1655264272&sprefix=ian+morris+geo%2Caps%2C433&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  BoneS Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

What would Willa Cather's widely read and cherished novels have looked like if she had never met magazine editor and copywriter Edith Lewis? In this groundbreaking book on Cather's relationship with her life partner, author Melissa J. Homestead counters the established portrayal of Cather as a solitary genius and reassesses the role that Lewis, who has so far been rendered largely invisible by scholars, played in shaping Cather's work. Inviting Lewis to share the spotlight alongside this pivotal American writer, Homestead argues that Lewis was not just Cather's companion but also her close literary collaborator and editor.

Drawing on an array of previously unpublished sources, Homestead skillfully reconstructs Cather and Lewis's life together, from their time in New York City to their travels in the American Southwest that formed the basis of the novels The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop.  After Cather's death and in the midst of the Cold War panic over homosexuality, the story of her life with Edith Lewis could not be told, but by telling it now, Homestead offers a refreshing take on lesbian life in early twentieth-century America.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Transcendental Cloudscape, Boiler Brewing Company, Lincoln, Nebraska

BOOK:  The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather & Edith Lewis
https://www.amazon.com/Only-Wonderful-Things-Creative-Partnership/dp/019065287X/ref=sr_1_6?crid=XANO588EXJF1&keywords=willa+cather+homestead&qid=1654314701&sprefix=willa+cather+homestead%2Caps%2C97&sr=8-6

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to reconstructing the burned and broken faces of the injured soldiers under his care.

Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world’s first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of practitioners whose task was to rebuild what had been torn apart, to re-create what had been destroyed. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits.

The Facemaker places Gillies’s ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine can be an art, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Dark Matter, Hoyne Brewing Company, Victoria, British Columbia

BOOK:  The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I
https://www.amazon.com/Facemaker-Visionary-Surgeons-Disfigured-Soldiers/dp/0374282307/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1TJ250O6VH0FZ&keywords=the+facemaker&qid=1653953986&sprefix=the+facemaker%2Caps%2C116&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice.

From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court’s race record―a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century Reconstruction Amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights.

Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court’s race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving America’s racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justices’ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings. We learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history also reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the country’s promise of equal rights for all.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Lowcountry Lager, Palmetto Brewing Company, Charleston, South Carolina

BOOK:  Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court
https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Deferred-Race-Supreme-Court/dp/0674975642/ref=sr_1_1?crid=30T9ZFZCXRMRL&keywords=vernon+burton+justice&qid=1653778788&sprefix=vernon+burton+justic%2Caps%2C185&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

The past few years have seen relations between China and the United States shift, from enthusiastic economic partners, to wary frenemies, to open rivals. Americans have been slow to wake up to the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party. Why did this happen? And what can we do about it?
 
In America Second, Isaac Stone Fish traces the evolution of the Party’s influence in America. He shows how America’s leaders initially welcomed China’s entry into the U.S. economy, believing that trade and engagement would lead to a more democratic China. And he explains how—although this belief has proved misguided--many of our businesspeople and politicians have become too dependent on China to challenge it.

America Second exposes a deep network of Beijing’s influence in America, built quietly over the years through prominent figures like former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, Disney chairman Bob Iger, and members of the Bush family. And it shows how to fight that influence–without being paranoid, xenophobic, or racist. This is an authoritative and important story of corruption and good intentions gone wrong, with serious implications not only for the future of the United States, but for the world at large.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Golden Dragon Asian-style Golden Ale, Asian Brothers Brewing Company, Isleton, California

BOOK:  America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger
https://www.amazon.com/America-Second-Americas-Elites-Stronger/dp/0525657703/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1AYG8EKNNIK8D&keywords=america+second&qid=1652841634&sprefix=america+se%2Caps%2C785&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

Detailed profiles of ten amazing women who lived in the Old West. They dared to step outside the traditional roles of wife and mother, and left society’s conventions behind them. These women engaged in a wide range of interests and professions, and their stories will inspire and entertain. They overcame incredible odds to make a place for themselves in their chosen world, despite the sometimes strong objections of both men and women. Each blazed new trails for women who would come after them. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for their strong will and perseverance.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Freestyle Pilsner, Santa Fe Brewing Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico

BOOK:  Scandalous Women Of The Old West: Women Who Dared To Be Different
https://www.amazon.com/Scandalous-Women-Old-West-Different/dp/B08JRP1TLH/ref=sr_1_2?crid=6NHKH1X5COAK&keywords=pedace&qid=1651453268&sprefix=ped%2Caps%2C1071&sr=8-2

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

Mostly hidden from public view, like an embarrassing family secret, scores of putative locks of George Washington’s hair are held, more than two centuries after his death, in the collections of America’s historical societies, public and academic archives, and museums. Excavating the origins of these bodily artifacts, Keith Beutler uncovers a forgotten strand of early American memory practices and emerging patriotic identity.

Between 1790 and 1840, popular memory took a turn toward the physical, as exemplified by the craze for collecting locks of Washington’s hair. These new, sensory views of memory enabled African American Revolutionary War veterans, women, evangelicals, and other politically marginalized groups to enter the public square as both conveyors of these material relics of the Revolution and living relics themselves.

George Washington’s Hair introduces us to a taxidermist who sought to stuff Benjamin Franklin’s body, an African American storyteller brandishing a lock of Washington’s hair, an evangelical preacher burned in effigy, and a schoolmistress who politicized patriotic memory by privileging women as its primary bearers. As Beutler recounts in vivid prose, these and other ordinary Americans successfully enlisted memory practices rooted in the physical to demand a place in the body politic, powerfully contributing to antebellum political democratization.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Elusive Memory New England Style IPA, Good City Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

BOOK:  George Washington's Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders
https://www.amazon.com/George-Washingtons-Hair-Americans-Remembered/dp/0813946506/ref=sr_1_1?crid=10OH3SXX5E0X3&keywords=washington%27s+hair&qid=1650320153&sprefix=washington%27s+hair%2Caps%2C106&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain’s most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the “last imperial war,” with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires.

Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath—which extended far beyond 1945.

Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Spitfire English Brown Ale, Tailspin Brewing Company, Coldwater, Ohio

BOOK:  Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Ruins-Last-Imperial-1931-1945/dp/067002516X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GXUJI9NJ8P5F&keywords=blood+and+ruins+the+great+imperial+war%2C+1931-1945&qid=1650139198&sprefix=blood+and+%2Caps%2C129&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels? That is the question H. W. Brands answers in his powerful new history of the American Revolution.
 
George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were the unlikeliest of rebels. Washington in the 1770s stood at the apex of Virginia society. Franklin was more successful still, having risen from humble origins to world fame. John Adams might have seemed a more obvious candidate for rebellion, being of cantankerous temperament. Even so, he revered the law. Yet all three men became rebels against the British Empire that fostered their success.
 
Others in the same circle of family and friends chose differently. William Franklin might have been expected to join his father, Benjamin, in rebellion but remained loyal to the British. So did Thomas Hutchinson, a royal governor and friend of the Franklins, and Joseph Galloway, an early challenger to the Crown. They soon heard themselves denounced as traitors--for not having betrayed the country where they grew up. Native Americans and the enslaved were also forced to choose sides as civil war broke out around them.

After the Revolution, the Patriots were cast as heroes and founding fathers while the Loyalists were relegated to bit parts best forgotten. Our First Civil War reminds us that before America could win its revolution against Britain, the Patriots had to win a bitter civil war against family, neighbors, and friends.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Washington's Porter, Yards Brewing Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

BOOK:  Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution
https://www.amazon.com/Our-First-Civil-War-Revolution/dp/0385546513/ref=sr_1_1?crid=14MCBU3L483L9&keywords=our+first+civil+war+hw+brands&qid=1649163061&sprefix=our+first+civil+%2Caps%2C120&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

In this sweeping saga that spans empires, peoples, and nations, M. Scott Heerman chronicles the long history of slavery in the heart of the continent and traces its many iterations through law and social practice. Arguing that slavery had no fixed institutional form, Heerman traces practices of slavery through indigenous, French, and finally U.S. systems of captivity, inheritable slavery, lifelong indentureship, and the kidnapping of free people. By connecting the history of indigenous bondage to that of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, Heerman shows how French, Spanish, and Native North American practices shaped the history of slavery in the United States.

The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds the diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, attempting to outmaneuver their antislavery opponents. In time, a formidable cast of lawyers and antislavery activists set their sights on ending slavery in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, Lyman Trumbull, Richard Yates, and many other future leaders of the Republican party partnered with African Americans to wage an extended campaign against slavery in the region. Across a century and a half, slavery's nearly perpetual reinvention takes center stage: masters turning Indian captives into slaves, slaves into servants, former slaves into kidnapping victims; and enslaved people turning themselves into free men and women.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Freedom Tower American Amber Ale, Tank Brewing Company, Miami, Florida

BOOK:  The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865
https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Slavery-Emancipation-1730-1865-Nineteenth/dp/0812225171/ref=sr_1_1?crid=33YTB0LB0FVI5&keywords=the+alchemy+of+slavery&qid=1649022104&sprefix=the+alchemy+of+slave%2Caps%2C656&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/