History Matters

We have a small family and Christmas is a quiet affair since the grandkids have matured beyond the screaming, paper-ripping affair when they open their gifts. Eventually another generation will make the scene, and I hope I’m still around to enjoy that. Receiving a gift card from Barnes and Noble always pleases me, and I’ve already spent one of them on a history book. Actually it’s a biography, but the author was an international journalist who witnessed and experienced much first hand, and his reporting is closely akin to history.

The book’s title is Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life. The author Nicholas D. Kristof writes for the New York Times and his topics always interest me. While reading this book, I came upon a passage that made me stop, re-read,  and then mark with bold strokes of a pencil so it could be easily found again. It had to do with something he experienced in Afghanistan. 

We’ll quote a significant passage: “On one of my early trips, some entrepreneurial Afghans told me of the latest get-rich-quick scheme. They would set up a fake campsite on a hillside, with a few empty tents around a fire, and then collect a cash reward from Americans for offering intelligence about a Taliban camp there. The Americans would drop $10 million worth of bombs on the fake camp, and the Afghans would go the next day on horseback and collect the scrap metal from the bombs and sell it for a few hundred dollars.”

That head-shaker highlights just one little incident of the probable graft and corruption that takes place in a war zone.  It should be no secret that I am a serious student of history. There are not enough hours in a day to read it all, but I try to read “the good stuff.” The historian David McCullough wrote  material that appeals to me. It was he who said that we in this country are historically illiterate. Open any of his books and find reward, such as 1776, which tells the story of those who marched with General George Washington, or Pulitzer Prize winning John Adams. He won another Pulitzer for his book titled Truman, the biography of the man who came to the presidency during a pivotal point in history. Mornings on Horseback relates the story of the young Theodore Roosevelt and The Path Between the Seas covers the creation of the Panama Canal.

His last book has become available after his death in 2023, History Matters. Compiled by his daughter and a research assistant who worked many years for him, it contains many speeches and essays he wrote. McCullough is just one of the good ones, but there are more with whom a reader can spend quality reading time. Most any book by William Stegner, Jon Meacham, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Doug Brinkley, Stephen Ambrose, or David Halberstam will open new worlds of history and understanding. 

There are other directions historical study can take. I read what Daniel Boorstin in The Discoverers thinks was the main factor leading to the advancement of the world as we know it today. What is it? Well, it’s the clock. Yes, a clock built with spiraling threaded screws that can be turned with a driver and driven into surfaces to join objects together and precision measured and cut gears to run inside the clock. In a chapter titled “Mother of Machines,” we read of the need for accurate timekeeping. 

Before clocks people only had the sun’s position in the sky to tell them the time of day. Getting to the point of having available, accurate timepieces took some time and doing. That is the story Boorstin tells. Both metal screws and uniform gear wheels took ingenuity to devise. Gears needed to be cut into precisely measured toothed wheels, while metal screws required the improvement of the metal lathe for their manufacture. Screws had been in use a long while, but they were wooden screws with their  hand cut spirals that sufficed for such things as wine presses. Clocks demanded precision. A whole new world of manufacturing methodology opened up!

The sad story of Anne Frank, forced into seclusion to escape capture by Nazis in World War II, is a modern day story of timekeeping. The Nazis had started taking down the church bells in Amsterdam to melt for weapons and ammunition. Their measured ringing at certain times gave her in her secluded windowless hideaway a sense of time that was lost when the bells disappeared. Now she couldn’t tell night from day. 

But wait! Someone else has a different twist on early beginnings of humankind’s advancement, and it wasn’t screws or gears. One historian says rope, or twisted fibers, became the backbone of civilization. In his book Rope, Tim Queeney includes a picture of a piece of 50,000 year old rope discovered in a cave in France. 

Rope was a necessary element in holding a sailing ship together. Take a look at a picture of a full-masted sailing ship and find a multitude of ropes holding the sails in place. Explorers could now begin finding unknown ports and people and knowledge. Could the pyramids have been built without ropes tugging the stone into place? A structure like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland used rope in the form of twisted metal fibers in construction.

 

And there is always the story of the printing press having the biggest hand in moving civilization forward. Like I said, there is not enough time to read and weigh it all. We’ve got family history, local history, and state history to read, too.