Category: Progressive Era
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Summer For The Gods: The Scopes Trial And America’s Continuing Debate Over Science And Religion (1997) by Edward J. Larson
Historical dramas “Argo” and “Lincoln” dominated the Academy Awards this year. I’m not sure that is a good thing, although I very much enjoyed those fantastic movies. It seems to me that there is an inherent danger in allowing the theater to tell history, as artistic license is sure to modify the storyline for dramatic…
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Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge (1997) by Gerald Gunther
Author Gerald Gunther was one of the country’s most prominent twentieth century legal scholars. He authored the authoritative constitutional law textbook and was widely regarded as most deserving of a Supreme Court justiceship, if the criteria were purely based on merit and intellectual gravitas. Gunther clerked for Learned Hand on the Second Court of Appeals…
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Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (2001) by David McCullough
“Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt,” the 1982 bestseller and National Book Award-winner by David McCullough, is a wonderful book, but it’s not the family biography I expected. Yes, the homely and crippled big sister Anna, known as “Bamie,”…
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A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (2006) by Michael Kazin
Every February or March, all across America, local Democratic Party organizations hold their annual Jefferson-Jackson Day fundraising dinner in honor of the third and seventh presidents of the United States, respectively, widely regarded as the founding fathers of the party. In 1997, President Bill Clinton helped dedicate the new, sprawling memorial to President Franklin Roosevelt…
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First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power (2002) by Warren Zimmermann
In 1986 Walter Isaacson published “The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made” about how a group of East Coast foreign policy establishment leaders helped craft U.S. national security and foreign policy in the early Cold War era. Warren Zimmermann’s “First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power,” first…
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The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013) by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Teddy Roosevelt has long been a personal hero of mine. However, after reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2013 bestseller, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” I now may be an even bigger fan of the jovial but largely misunderstood and now generally forgotten William Taft. As sometimes happens,…
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The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2002) by Louis Menand
Socrates (or possibly Eleanor Roosevelt) reportedly once said, “strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.” No matter what kind of mind you possess, Louis Menand’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America” might be the book for you because it discusses lots of ideas,…
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Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010) by Daniel Okrent
The United States Constitution prohibits the federal government from doing a lot of things. However, over the past 235 years it has only spelled out two things that citizens cannot do: own slaves (13th Amendment) and purchase alcohol (18th Amendment). Author Daniel Okrent tells the fascinating story behind the passage of the 18th Amendment and…
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