Book Review: A History for Peter
Nov. 26th, 2022 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerOnly the first and third books of Gerald W. Johnson’s 1959 trilogy about American history, A History for Peter, won the Newbery Honor, but it seemed silly for me to skip directly from the American Revolution to Woodrow Wilson, especially given that the middle volume is most useful for Sleeping Beauty reasons, offering a sixties-eye-view of the Civil War and aftermath.
Johnson propounds the then-current view that Reconstruction failed because Congress was too harsh on the South. The pendulum has since swung in the opposite direction, to the view that Congress was too lenient, and if Congress had hit on a Goldilocks level of just-right sternness, they could have convinced Southern whites to go, “You know what, let’s give racial equality a try!” (Maybe if that just-right sternness involved decades of military occupation.)
The books are America Is Born, America Grows Up, and America Moves Forward, and they start with Columbus and go right up through the Korean War. I’ve read about various parts of this history at various times, but history is so protean that you almost always pick up interesting new tidbits, especially about things like Spanish explorers that you haven’t studied since elementary school. (This is probably incorrect, but my recollection is that we covered those explorers in at least three grades, and they got more boring every time.) A few interesting facts:
- Johnson notes that the Spanish explorers were probably not more wicked than the English ones. American history books just tend to portray Spanish explorers in an especially dim light because they draw on accounts written by the English, who were intensely anti-Spanish. (This was the era of the Spanish Armada, after all.)
- During the Constitutional Convention, the representatives of small states were genuinely concerned that the large states might invade their territory and gobble them up, partly because of the entire history of the European continent and also because there had been armed clashes between the colonies before. The eventual solution was equal representation for every state in the Senate. As with many highly effective solutions, this one worked so well that the original problem it was intended to solve now seems mildly comical (what? Like New York is going to invade Connecticut?), while we are left with the unintended consequence that sparsely populated states punch far above their weight in the Senate.
- Speaking of unintended consequences: the fact that every permanent member of the UN Security Council has a veto over action was originally intended as a sop to the US Senate, to ensure that the Senate allowed the US to join the UN, as they had not joined the League of Nations. If the US has a veto, went the reasoning, then the US can’t be forced into action against its will! Unfortunately, and although this was clearly unintentional one would think it must have been very foreseeable indeed, this has the side-effect of making it almost impossible for the UN to act.
Johnson propounds the then-current view that Reconstruction failed because Congress was too harsh on the South. The pendulum has since swung in the opposite direction, to the view that Congress was too lenient, and if Congress had hit on a Goldilocks level of just-right sternness, they could have convinced Southern whites to go, “You know what, let’s give racial equality a try!” (Maybe if that just-right sternness involved decades of military occupation.)
The books are America Is Born, America Grows Up, and America Moves Forward, and they start with Columbus and go right up through the Korean War. I’ve read about various parts of this history at various times, but history is so protean that you almost always pick up interesting new tidbits, especially about things like Spanish explorers that you haven’t studied since elementary school. (This is probably incorrect, but my recollection is that we covered those explorers in at least three grades, and they got more boring every time.) A few interesting facts:
- Johnson notes that the Spanish explorers were probably not more wicked than the English ones. American history books just tend to portray Spanish explorers in an especially dim light because they draw on accounts written by the English, who were intensely anti-Spanish. (This was the era of the Spanish Armada, after all.)
- During the Constitutional Convention, the representatives of small states were genuinely concerned that the large states might invade their territory and gobble them up, partly because of the entire history of the European continent and also because there had been armed clashes between the colonies before. The eventual solution was equal representation for every state in the Senate. As with many highly effective solutions, this one worked so well that the original problem it was intended to solve now seems mildly comical (what? Like New York is going to invade Connecticut?), while we are left with the unintended consequence that sparsely populated states punch far above their weight in the Senate.
- Speaking of unintended consequences: the fact that every permanent member of the UN Security Council has a veto over action was originally intended as a sop to the US Senate, to ensure that the Senate allowed the US to join the UN, as they had not joined the League of Nations. If the US has a veto, went the reasoning, then the US can’t be forced into action against its will! Unfortunately, and although this was clearly unintentional one would think it must have been very foreseeable indeed, this has the side-effect of making it almost impossible for the UN to act.
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Date: 2022-11-27 04:27 pm (UTC)