This would be a reasonable lament were it true. I recently read, in Chernov’s Washington: A Life, that George Washington was anti-vax, before he changed his mind based on evidence made clear to him, and then became pro-vax. That was in relation to smallpox, and the “vaccine” was actually “variolation,” which is to modern vaccines what a camel is to a modern RV. Same idea, different technology.

Polio still exists, it is just very uncommon in the United States. Some of this is because of continuing anti-vax misinformation. For example, in Pakistan, there is a false anti-vax belief that the vaccine contains ingredients that are haram, and could cause male impotence. During the era of the American polio epidemics, and in connection to Franklin Roosevelt’s war on polio, there was a vibrant and damaging anti-vax movement. Historian David Oshinsky notes that the post World War II era was a high point for respect for, and awe of, science in the US. But even in this golden age of fear and love for things science could fix or provide, polio anti-vax did fine. (see: Polio: An American Story.)

This is not the place to talk about vaccines or the enemies of science who prefer infection-caused morbidity and mortality for their fellow citizens, though I am rather fed up with the Trumpsucker Contaminants and their ways. I want to talk about something else: The contrasting role of history vs. now in our perception of things.

I’ve always been a student of, a fan of, history, and all of my professional work has involved the study of history in some way or another. But, I am not a historian, and the streams of history I have studied, and the methods I’ve used, would not get me through the final exam of a college history class. But over the last few years, I’ve been reading the better biographies and histories, focusing mainly on American history (though I’m currently reading a mainly European classic). I am doing this to preserve sanity and be better at certain conversations. There is a danger that a close look at antebellum politics in the US will make the recent rise of Tump Fascism seem less severe or important, but that would be a miscalculation. When we look back at the Congress in the 1830s through the beginning of the Civil War, we see actual literal violence in the Capitol building carried out by the elected representatives themselves, and that may seem worse than a crowd of Trump organized insurrectionists breaking into the same exact building, some of them intent on murdering the Vice President of the United States and/or the Speaker of the House. But both are bad things, and they are utterly different kinds of things, and thus hard to compare.

I think about history not as a way of being less upset about now. It is simply a way of understanding now (as well as then). Historian Jon Meacham had a similar idea, and he put his approach to understanding the present out as a podcast, called “Hope Through History.” I’m not a big fan of the musical scoring, but otherwise, the podcast is a must-listen. Meacham addresses a wide range of historical events or periods, and with the use of a lot of excellent commentary from other historians, and a mix of primary sources, describes and explains major past events in a way that one thinking of present events can relate to. He covers the war on polio, including the anti-vax, Selma, the Gettysburg address, the shift from nationalism to engagement in the middle of World War II, the Great Depression, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and so on. You can, if you want, do exactly as I’ve done over the last five years, but instead of reading book after book after book after book, you can listen to a nice podcast while folding the laundry or driving to work. Either way, your concern for our future will not diminish, but your hair will be less on fire about it.

But that is also not what I’m really talking about here. Since this is a blog post, you know there is at least a 50-50 chance that it exists because I had a random thought and I’m working it out with you. Thanks for that opportunity, by the way. And here is the random thought. Really, a random memory. I remember, some ten years ago or so, needing to look something up in an atlas. I was at work, so I went to the office and asked the office manager if we had an atlas. She pointed to the bookshelf, and sure enough there was an atlas up on the top shelf gathering dust.

I pulled it down, and yes, there was a lot of dust. I don’t remember the exact atlas, but it was something like a Rand McNally or Hammond (as distinct from a Colliers). It dated to World War II. From within the war. So the people who made it, and originally ordered it and put it on an earlier version of the shelf I had just taken it from, were in the middle of the war, and some of their friends, relatives, and co-workers were in North Africa, Europe, or the Pacific (or somewhere else) fighting in this war. The atlas had, as do most, one or a few orientation maps inside the covers and on the first pages, so one could find the more detailed maps within. And, one of these orientation maps indicated which parts of the world were under occupation by one of the three major forces: Nazis, Japan Imperial, or Allies.

It was static. It was not an historical map. It was not a map about the war. It was a map in the war. It is where you would look up and say, “Oh wait, I can’t use that service to send a manuscript to that particular city, because it is in German-occupied Europe. I’ll have to use a different service.” Then you go on with your business as though … well, as though half the world was under the occupation of fascists. Because it was. As a static phenomenon, not a historical process viewed in the halogen light of later time, as history.

In other words, the map did not show the dynamic, and eventually ending, process of a great war, like this map does:

See all those lines and things happening? See that history, that happened, and is now diagrammed out for you? That is how we, now, think of then. But if you were then, how would you see that vintage 1943 now? More like this:

See the difference? In the first map, you see how things happened over time. The Germans spread out across Europe and the Allies pushed them back into Germany, plus or minus. In the second map, you can find out if you are supposed to do the whole “Heil Hitler” thing if you visit a particular city. Ireland is a little confusing. What’s that one circle there in Italy?

This is not the map I saw a decade ago. I actually had the chance to acquire that atlas. I was commenting on it and the office manager said, “you can have that if you want, it’s old.” It didn’t seem right to take it, though.

Here’s another one where the color coding makes more sense:

If I track down the original, I’ll add it here.

I think most people made a mistake, over the last few years, of characterizing Trump as a potential dictator. He was in fact a dictator the entire time he was in office. Many dictators started out being in a position of executive power of one kind or another, but within a system where the person in that role was not explicitly hooked up to the rest of the system as a dictator. The institutions of democracy, or in some cases, royalty, persisted and held power for a period of time. Eventually, the person seen later, by history, as a dictator would abrogate or take over each of those institutions, but the person was a dictator the whole time that was going on. Trump was the dictator of the Unites States and its territories from the moment he was inaugurated, right through his last days in the White House (some would sat to this very day). The institutions that persisted kept him from being an effective dictator, but had he been in the White House longer, or if he is put back there by McConnell and Manchin, there will be a redrawing of the atlas.

Our grandchildren can look at this map with wonder and possibly amusement:

Or this one, a last gasp for democracy on its decline, made just before a coalition of oligarchs and tyrants takes care of the remaining democracies:

In the early 1990s, in an essay and a book called “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama told us that humanity has reached the end of the historical road, having achieved a normalcy based on Western liberal democracy, and that this has emerged, or was emerging, as the final form of society. Many agreed. It was apparent.

Fukuyama needed a better atlas.

I’ve always liked historical fiction as well as history, and I’m starting to work on a project that puts the two together: a list of accessible histories (books written by historians who are good writers) and parallel (maybe even matched-up) novels that may be reasonable representations of the past. The novels are a challenge in this project. A book can be a good novel but a lousy history. Also, what do we do with historical science fiction or fantasy, that might involve a good description of some bygone era or culture, but that includes aliens or ghosts? (Time machines probably don’t present this problem, in and of themselves.)

By and large, I expect that most novels are not good representations of our past. I believe culture can vary dramatically across time and space. A 20th century account of the 17th century (anywhere) or a contemporary account of a very different region of the world (or neighborhood) is likely to be written to be understandable and relatable. That may require significant shifts in nuance and context, expectations and norms. By sticking with work covering time periods that are not too far in the past, and on the North American Continent, this problem is somewhat reduced. Or, made worse, because our own history, as quasi-scholarly work or as fiction, is bound to be biased in ways that get around our own BS filters. One way to pretend to avoid that is to include more work by women, non-white people, and stories about someone other than white men. That does not really remove all biases, but it makes us feel better, and that is what is important, right?

The following is a first draft of a list (with links*) of some of the fiction items in this project.

Colonial era

Caleb’s Crossing: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks (author of one of my favorite novels, People of the Book). Bethia Mayfield is a restless and curious young woman growing up in Martha’s vineyard in the 1660s amid a small band of pioneering English Puritans. At age twelve, she meets Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret bond that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia’s father is a Calvinist minister who seeks to convert the native Wampanoag, and Caleb becomes a prize in the contest between old ways and new, eventually becoming the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. Inspired by a true story and narrated by the irresistible Bethia, Caleb’s Crossing brilliantly captures the triumphs and turmoil of two brave, openhearted spirits who risk everything in a search for knowledge at a time of superstition and ignorance.

Colonial Era and beyond

These novels start in the Colonial area then continue, epic fashion:

Chesapeake: A Novel by James Michener (a classic, needs no introduction) and New York: The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd (also a classic).

Revolution and Federal Era

Someone Knows My Name: A Novel, originally published as The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill is the story of an African woman who is abducted as a girl in her native village and sold in to American slavery. Her subsequent story is complex and fascinating. I think this book is underappreciated in the United States because Americans can’t handle the name. The author, who is Black and Canadian, explains the title: “”I used The Book of Negroes as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War. It documents the 3,000 blacks who had served the King in the war and were fleeing Manhattan for Canada in 1783. Unless you were in The Book of Negroes, you couldn’t escape to Canada. My character, an African woman named Aminata Diallo whose story is based on this history, has to get into the book before she gets out.”

I am putting these two novels I’ve not read (but plan to) here because they belong here and maybe you will tell ME about them.

I, Eliza Hamilton by Susan Holloway Scott “In this beautifully written novel of historical fiction, bestselling author Susan Holloway Scott tells the story of Alexander Hamilton’s wife, Eliza—a fascinating, strong-willed heroine in her own right and a key figure in one of the most gripping periods in American history.”

and

My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamole. From the New York Times bestselling authors of America’s First Daughter comes the epic story of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton–a revolutionary woman who, like her new nation, struggled to define herself in the wake of war, betrayal, and tragedy. In this haunting, moving, and beautifully written novel, Dray and Kamoie used thousands of letters and original sources to tell Eliza’s story as it’s never been told before–not just as the wronged wife at the center of a political sex scandal–but also as a founding mother who shaped an American legacy in her own right.
Antebellum

Civil War, Mid-19th Century

There is approximately one gazillion novels set in the US that have something to do with the Civil War, so this is a very much narrowed down list. I won’t make it bigger until some of the other time periods are better covered. Ultimately, there are probably two or three dozen excellent novels in this era, which perhaps can be divided into categories like “the Civil War is actually in the novel” vs. “The Civil War just ended but the smoke still rises from the ashes,” and also, along gender or ethnic lines.

The March: A Novel by E.L. Dostorow. In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E. L. Doctorow’s hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.

Late 19th Century, Turn of the Century

Little Big Man: A Novel by Thomas Berger is said by some to be one of the most underappreciated American novels. One reason may be that the literati saw no need to appreciate a Western. Another may be that Berger eschewed the establishment in the publishing world. It is, of course, the story that is told by a very old man who may or may not be an unreliable narrator of his life wafting back and forth between being a white settler/cowboy/gambler/gun slinger/guide vs. a Native warrior, husband, and student of a great shaman. This book was made into what may be one of the great movies of the 20th century. It is also, sadly, the only contribution I can find that involves Native Americans that I’d recommend. Still looking.

A Study in Scarlet: A 1887 detective novel written by Arthur Conan Doyle marking the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who would … most famous detective duo in popular fiction. by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You may not think of a Sherlock Holmes story as an historical novel. Well, it really isn’t because it is a bit more of a contemporary novel. But that was then, and it was set in the American West. I have to add this caveat: I’m not sure if this book is the sort of insightful and real look at a particular historcial time period as the other novels discussed here. But it is a classic, and I wanted to include it simply because if you nave not read it, you now must do so! Wikipedia actually has a nice summary of the conversation over Doyle’s coverage of the Mormons. Do not, that he was an historian as much as he was a detective story writer. But not of that time or subject necessarily.

Beloved by Toni Morrison. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

Ultimately I want this list to go up to and include World War II. I am not short of entries for that period, but I’ll get to that later.

Welcome to 1861.

“On the eve of his 52nd birthday, February 11, 1861, the President-Elect of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, walked onto a train, the first step of his journey to the White House, and his rendezvous with destiny.

From the moment the Presidential Special left the station, a new Lincoln was on display, speaking constantly, from a moving train, to save the Republic. The journey would draw on all of Lincoln’s mental and physical reserves. But the President-Elect discovered an inner strength, which deepened with the exhausting ordeal of meeting millions of Americans.” (Publisher’s summary.)

I herby recommend* Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington by Ted Widmer.

This is a very good book, compelling, startling, and if you don’t already know the story, highly informative. I won’t push it because it is already widely acclaimed. Even the guy who wrote Hamilton says it is a must read. I know you are going to get it and read it. Instead, I will point out two arguments made in the book that are not necessarily the main arguments, but that I found to be very important.

First, trains. The story is of course almost entirely played out on a train or near a train, in a train or on the way to or from a train. This gave the author license, appropriately and we are glad he took it up, to discuss the role of trains in the formation of North and South differences in the US. I won’t make the argument here, I’m just telling you that you will find it in the book (mainly in the beginning chapters) and you will find it fascinating.

Second, Lincoln’s prowess as a speech writer and speaker. Surely you’ve heard the story that Abe Lincoln write the famous Gettysburg Address as an afterthought on the back of a napkin on the way to the battlefield (on a train). That of course, never happened. Lincoln worked hard on that address, over a longer period of time. It is a finely crafted speech based on a thousands of years old oration by the first citizen of Athens, but of course much updated. Lincoln crafted that, and other speeches, with an earned, and learned, appreciation of rhetoric as well as history.

But it is also true that Lincoln was probably not the best presidential orator before he was president. Prior to 1860, Lincoln argued cases against fellow lawyers in front of tough judges. He entertained his colleagues on the circuit court with memorable stories and parables, back in the days when the “circuit” meant lawyers, and sometimes judges, travelling, eating, and sleeping together while going from one town to the next to handle cases. He ran for office a few times (won once) and engaged Douglas in the famous Lincoln Douglas debates. He studied the classics, and he studied history, not formally but by walking in total hundreds of miles to to borrow books. Then he ran for election again and won, having made very few speeches during that campaign. So, on the day Lincoln was elected President, he was a skilled communicator, but not necessarily a skilled presidential speaker, at a time when a skilled presidential speaker seemed rightly to be a key factor in ultimately keeping the United States alive.

And he understood this, and every day for the entire train trip, he worked on that. He gave over 100 speeches in 13 days. A handful of these, including the one he gave at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, are counted among the great speeches. Another handful, he really screwed up, such as one of the first, given in Ohio, in which he pulled an Omar, saying something like “nothing is really happening.” (Ilhan Omar meant, “one thing happened and then an inappropriate reaction to some other thing occurred in an exploitive manner, which was bad” and Lincoln meant “so far no full-on battles have been fought yet.”) For both Ilhan and Abe, the press and the detractors went to town.

But overall, what Lincoln did was to fine tune his skill. For two weeks he gave many great speeches — and lived several near death experiences involving crushing crowds, being shot at with friendly cannon fire twice, nearly bombed once or twice, and nearly assassinated by a thousand assassins once — while the whole country followed every move reported near real time by telegraph. Abe Lincoln purposefully (and incidentally) set up a nation wide culture of expectation and commitment. He created, over this two week period plus a few days in DC and his inaugural, a North ready to fight and a South forced to define its own role as starting a war to defend slavery.

That final real life master class in presidential speech giving turned an excellent orator into one of the best ever.

Hey, did you bump on my wording in the first sentence, above? (“The United States are divided between white supremacists and others who feel that African Americans should have the same rights as anyone else.”) That’s how they would have said it before Lincoln’s presidency, and before the Civil War. “The United States are …” The United States became a singular entity because of Lincoln and the war. Now, it is “The United States is…”

If you went back in a time machine to become an antebellum grammar Nazi, you would have to learn this.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro. Good reviews, but this is outside my area of expertise so I can’t say for sure, but it looks good.

Creek Mary’s Blood: A Novel by “Burry my Heart at Wounded Knee” author Dee Brown.

Africa: A History is an anthology that includes some older material, but all good. This is totally within my area of expertise, and I can say this book is full of classic writing by classic scholars. Not a light read. Edited by Alvin Josephy.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick.

The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election by Malcom Nance.

I hate it when the author of a book about something historical (history = written records) or even contemporary requires a paleolithic or prehistoric context. If I had a dime for every first chapter I’ve seen where a perfectly expert expert drones ignorantly on about how their book is a follow on of something that started in Olduvai Gorge and side stepped the Neanderthals and all that, I’d have several dollars. Praise the gods that Julian Cribb, in his new book Food or War, only does that for a few paragraphs and does it well!

This book is important, impressive, and a must read.

Food has organized society, politics, war, settlement, colonialism, and the economy more than any single factor, and food has been revolutionized by those things as well. As a simple way to understand this, consider any particular traditional food ask yourself, “would this even be possible were it not for the ability to sail up wind in a ship?” The answer, once you get to it, will almost always be no. Plantains, grass-based cereal crops, maize, potatoes, cassava, a range of vegetables such as tomatoes and various gourds and squash, green leafy things, all of it, are now available to grow in each and every habitat they can be grown in, not just the habitats that happen to be in the geographical region they were domesticated in. And, importantly, this transition happened centuries ago, depending on where one looks. Much of it happened before missionaries or explorers accounts even have a chance to flesh out the details of native live, and certainly long before anthropologists or other professional observers arrived on the scene.

Food or War is the book you must read now to understand the complex historical dynamics behind what you are eating.

The book covers food up to the present, and all the major considerations related to it. Drought, loss of land, climate change, migration, foodies, permaculture, organic farming, and on and on are all addressed in this well written scholarly but for everyone volume. And Cribb makes a stab at projecting into the future, and suggesting what we may consider doing about our food related problems.

This is not a happy book. A book dedicated to Paul Ehrlich is not going to be a happy book. It is a black book with blood red writing and a skull and crossbones on the cover. The title puts an or between the words food and war. This is not the read you need to get you away from the awful discourse polluting our psyches at this moment in history. But it is the book you need to read in order to understand and contextualize many of our policy related problems in the here and now. Plus, it is simply very well written, very well researched, and you will learn things. Many things.

Here’s the TOC:

1. Food and conflict
2. War and hunger
3. The strategic importance of food, land and water
4. Is ‘agriculture’ sustainable?
5. Hotspots for food conflict in the twenty-first century
6. Food as an existential risk
7. Food for peace
8. Urban dreams and nightmares
9. The future of food
10. Conclusion: key recommendations of this book.

I strongly recommend this book. It is available for pr-order, coming out in September.

The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth’s Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Anil Ananthaswamy. Sais to be “A thrilling ride around the globe and around the cosmos.” —Sean Carroll.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018 (The Best American Series ®) edited by Sam Kean. An amazing diversity of topics, including politics of and in science.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel. Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that “the longitude problem” was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land.

Out There: A Scientific Guide to Alien Life, Antimatter, and Human Space Travel (For the Cosmically Curious) by Michael Wall. In the vein of Randall Munroe’s What If? meets Brian Green’s Elegant Universe, a writer from Space.com leads readers on a wild ride of exploration into the final frontier, investigating what’s really “out there.”

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern. Called “spellbinding” (Scientific American) and “thrilling…a future classic of popular science” (PW), the up close, inside story of the greatest space exploration project of our time, New Horizons’ mission to Pluto, as shared with David Grinspoon by mission leader Alan Stern and other key players.

And, not science but still cheap right now:

The classic Texas: A Novel.

Eleanor: The Years Alone

He, She and It: A Novel by Marge Piercy.

This is not a book that fully explores the alliance and overlap between war and makers of war on one hand and science and scientists on the other. Authors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang focus on one part of that relationship, the link between astrophysics and related disciplines (really, astronomy at large) and the military.

Even as I recommend Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military, which I do, I want to broaden the conversation a little with a couple of thoughts about the relationship, from my own experience. Then, I’ll give you my strident critique of the book (there is One Big Problem), and then, again, tell you to buy it

Back when I was working in or near the Peabody Museum, in Cambridge, the museum’s assistant director, Barbara Isaac, hired me to work with the NAGPRA database. NAGPRA was the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Ultimately, large swaths of the Peabody Museum’s collection would be turned over, or some other thing done to it, as per the wishes of the various Native American groups associated with that material. Most of the work had already been done. But, Barbara is a meticulous person and wanted to make sure the dotting of each i and crossing of each t was double checked. So, I was one of two people charged with going over the printouts, on that old green and less green striped paper, bound in large blue cardboard books. Each line (or two) was an item or collection of items, with notes, and an indication of what was going to happen to the material. There were just a few options, but the basic idea was this: An item listed was either going to be returned to a tribal group, or not. My job was mainly to look at stuff that was not going to be returned and, given my ongoing scan of what was going to be returned, and my knowledge of North American prehistory, ethnography, and archaeology, to earmark things that said “do not return” but where maybe we should be returning it. So, for example, after noting that a particular South Dakota Lakota tribe would have this, and that, and this other, soapstone tobacco pipe returned to them, when I saw that the ninth pipe on the list, several lines down and all by itself, is labeled to not be returned, I’d earmark that. Nearly 100% of the time, that ninth pipe was just something that nobody wanted, or it didn’t really exist (not all museum databases are exactly accurate). But, it would be earmarked.

Many items on the list had information as to how the item had originally gotten to the museum.

Many, many items, especially items taken from Native Americans living in what was the frontier between about 1840 and 1900, were taken by medical doctors who, as we all know, also stood in for naturalists, or some kind of traveling scientist, on military and quasi military expeditions (Like Darwin).

And many of those items were taken for use as medical specimens.

We initially learned that Native Americans have a particular blood type because, in part, of studies done on blood stains on shirts of slain warriors, collected after various battles with the US Army units accompanied by such scientists. There are a few famous cases of Native American bodily remains, mostly but not all skeletal remains, sitting in the anatomy teaching rooms of this or that college. But a lot more, a lot not noticed by either historians or even the all seeing all knowing Wikipedia, are or were sitting in museums around the world. Collected, by scientists wearing military uniforms, on military ventures, with a scientific twist.

So the science-military link is not exclusive to astronomy and astrophysics.

I wrote elsewhere about the person I met who was taking Pentagon funding to build an object that would help cure cancer. An example of a scientist subverting the military funding process. And so on.

OK, my complaint.

The authors have two long chapters (and references elsewhere) covering the early history of human endeavor in general (not limited to military) and the evolution of astronomy, mainly as it related, over a very long period of time, to navigation. One chapter covers land, the other the sea.

Staring somewhere along the way in each chapter, we get a very nice, well done, and pretty full description of the process of humans learning about the stars, about the earth and how to find one’s way, etc. But prior to that, the authors do what so many authors do and I so much dislike. I’ve written about this before. We get a version of human prehistory, and indeed, current human variation (or at least, ethnographically recent), that is bogus. For example, the authors speak of the first modern humans wandering around in the Rift Valley of Africa. There is no evidence that modern humans evolved there. Using just the archaeology, southern Africa is a more likely origin, and the physical anthropology record is simply incomplete. There are early fossils there, but that is because the rift valley is and was a big hole that made fossils. The entire rest of the continent is big, and the evolution probably happened there, not in the rift.

Similarly, ethnographic variation we see in the present and recent times is stripped out. For example, most rain forest dwelling foragers are not known to have a sky oriented cosmology, or to use the sky for much information about seasonal change in ecology, or navigation. And, there have always been a lot of rain forest dwelling foragers.

Putting that criticism aside, however, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military is a very enjoyable and informative read, and makes all the important points about the sometimes uneasy, sometimes too easy, relationship between science and the military enterprise, with a careful look at politics, government, and powerful industrial interests.

Now we also need a book on the broader issue of military-technology links. And, we need a personal ray gun that zaps out of control robots:

She is an excellent historian and writer, and you probably know of her as the author of several of the best, or at least very nearly the best, volumes on a range of key subjects in American History. She wrote Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln about Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream: The Most Revealing Portrait of a President and Presidential Power Ever Written about Johnson, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II about FDR, and The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt and the Golden Age of Journalism about TR.

And now, we have Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader?

In Leadership, Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope.

Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times.

No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these men shared a fierce ambition and a deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon hardships. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others.

This seminal work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today’s polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency.

The volume is a bit low at the start but get goods before the first minute.

Presidents can leave office for a number of reasons, including getting tired of being President, or hitting term limits. Some are voted out of office before term limits are up even though they ran. It turns out that violence and natural death account for a very large percentage of departures for reasons other than term limits. Relatively few were simply voted out of office even though they ran for re-election, and of those, relatively few (though I provide no estimate of this) were clearly voted out of office for misdeeds. One resigned for misdeeds.

Here are the numbers.

43 men have served as president of the united states. (I am not counting Trump who has been in office for one year.)

Four died in office of causes other than a violent attack, all of these prior to the mid 1940s, after which modern medicine advanced considerably. (Harrison, Taylor, Harding, and Roosevelt)

Four were killed by assassins, ranging across time but all before major upgrades in security starting in the 1960s. (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy)

One was shot and wounded, but lived. (Reagan)

Five were involved in serious violent attacks or incidents that in one way or another involved someone else getting shot or killed. This is a diverse list, including a plot against Nixon that ended up becoming an assassination attempt (with shooting) of a governor, and an attempt to kill the president (Roosevelt) that ended up causing the death of a bystander, etc. Franklen Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, Jackson, and Ford were the targets in these instances.

Three presidents had violent attacks including the discharge of firearms perpetrated against them, but they were at no point in danger and no one else was hurt. (This is a mostly recent phenomenon — gun nuts too close to the White House mainly.)

A larger number of incidents occurred in which a plot to kill the president was discovered, and either fizzled by itself or was thwarted. However, it is probably safe to assume that not all known plots are publicly known, and the degree to which these plots may have been serious varies. Several fizzled on their own, so we should assume that there were also unknown unknown plots. Therefore, it is not really possible to count these.

So, all in all 17 fatal or seriously threatening situations occurred, but to 16 presidents (FDR suffered both a serious assassination attempt in which someone in his presence was killed, and died of natural causes in office).

Also not counted in this number is the shooting of Teddy Roosevelt, after he was President but while he was running for President again, and the shooting, attacks, or killing of any candidates for president (such as Wallace, shot, and Robert Kennedy, murdered).

To summarize, a president has a 37% chance of suffering natural or homicidal death, violent injury, a violent attack, or a bungled attempt at assassination involving the discharge of a firearm, while in office.

There is a 21% chance of death or violent attack likely but not always resulting in death, and a 30% chance of natural death or an attack in which a high probability of someone being killed or injured results.

The chance of a President leaving office on their own because of misdeeds is close to 2%. There is a slightly over 20% chance of a president being voted out of office after their first term. Of these, a much smaller percentage were clearly drummed out of office for unambiguous misdeeds that annoyed the electorate, perhaps about 5%.