A People’s History of the American Revolution - How Common People Shaped and Fought for Independence by Ray Raphael - 2001

A People’s History of the American Revolution
⁃ How Common People Shaped and Fought for Independence by Ray Raphael - 2001

"The Best Single-Volume history of the American Revolution I have read" - Howard Zinn

An Autodidact Corner Selection

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July 4, 1776 - The Declaration of Independence Signed, authored by Thomas Jefferson, second president of the USA

October 11, 1781 - The British Surrender at Yorktown, ending combat

September 3, 1783 - Treaty of Paris Signed in which England ratified American Independence.  The USA was granted all land east of the Mississippi River but for Florida.  The American negotiators and signers were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens.

Most books on the American Revolution Era focus on the famous men of the period.  Recently I read biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow and a work on Benjamin Franklin's time as America's minister plenipotentiary to France by Stacey Schiff.  American school children, or at least they were decades ago, were told about how the founding fathers won the war.  As to why Americans wanted to break away from England, we were told about the tea party. The leaders, called the Founding Fathers,  had and still do have an almost mythological status.  

There  was no mention of slavery or the American Indians.  In fact virtually nothing was said about the life of common people.  

Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution tells the story of ordinary Americans.  We learn who signed up to fight.  It was largely young men from poor families, often lured in by a bonus and a promise of more after the war.  People married young in those days and started bigger than now families.  Most soldiers were farmers or agriculture workers.  No one signed up for more than a year.  Raphael shows us how the families of soldiers coped.  Many women became camp followers.  There were no provisions for widows and orphans.

Raphael tells us a lot about particular people, lots of details on rank and file soldiers.  There are sections on the impact of the war on women from non-elite families, on the lives of Americans loyal to England.  Both sides recruited Indian tribes  to join their side.  Most tribal groups aided the British, often being paid for scalps.  Indeginous people saw the Americans as invading enemies and the British played on this.  After the war I learned from Raphael that this turned most Americans against Indians.

The original sin of America was slavery.  The British told enslaved persons to join them and fight for their freedom.  They were also told in large numbers that if they fought for the revolution they would be freed and given land after the war.  Of course these were mostly lies on both sides.

All teachers of American history need to read this book.

From Rayraphael.com


Over the last two decades Ray Raphael has emerged as one of our leading writers on the birth of the United States. In 2001 his acclaimed People’s History of the American Revolution widened history’s lens to include those not generally present in tales of our nation’s founding. In 2002 The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord led to marked rethinking about the Revolution’s beginnings in academic circles. In 2004 Founding Myths: Stories that Hide Our Patriotic Past established new standards for future renderings of our nation’s birth. In 2009 he incorporated his work into an original synthesis featuring seven diverse characters, Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation, and in 2011 he was asked to create another broad synthesis for a different audience: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers and the Birth of Our Nation. Also in 2011, with Gary B. Nash and Alfred F. Young, he co-edited a book of biographical essays from 22 noted scholars, Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation. Recently he has focused on the historical context of the Constitution. Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive was published in 2012 and Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right in 2013. In 2015, with his wife Marie, he coauthored The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began. In 2017, spurred by the hit musical Hamilton!, Barnes & Noble asked Ray and Marie to provide a biography of Alexander Hamilton for a general readership: Hamilton: Founding Father. Also in 2017, Vintage (Penguin/Random House) asked Ray to provide an updated annotation of the Constitution: The U. S. Constitution: Explained—Clause-by-Clause—For Every American Today.

I hope to read more of his work.

Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk by Elissa Bemporad - 2013

A presentation by Elissa Bemporad

Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

Elissa Bemporad - 2013 

Elisa Bemporad helped me understand the political, religious and cultural challenges faced by Jews living in Minsk, now capital of Belarus, adjusting to the replacement of Czarist rule with that of the Bolsheviks. She focuses on the between the World Wars period.  She begins with an overview of Minsk just before World War One begins.

Minsk was in 1914 a heavily Jewish city, part of the imperial Russian Empire located in area of Russia, called the Pale of Settlement where Jews were allowed to live.

Jews occupied professional positions, were sucessful in trade and commerce.  Bemporad uses Minsk to explain what happens to the Jewish population of 

Russia when the Communists took over the government.  This was an frequently very violent period.  Young Jewish intellectuals were often in support of the  ideology of the Communists while older people feared a change.

Bemporad shows us how people kept their traditional beliefs while at least giving lipservice to anti-religious tenants of communism.  In order to get ahead, stay out of trouble you had to at least pretend to give up some of the old ways.

There is a very interesting chapter on the continuance of the custom of circumsicion.  The Kosher butcher was still an important figure.  Jews 

continued participated in labor bunds. She also talks about role of Yiddish in Minsk.  

As this period began, gender roles were clearly definded by Jewish tradition.  In theory, contrary to tradition, under Communism men and women were equal.  Bemporad devotes a chapter to “Housewives, Mothers, and Workers Roles and Representations of Jewish Women in Times of Revolution” that helped me understand these changes.  Educational and career oportunities for women expanded and cross faith marriages became more common.

The book is very well documented and an extensive bibliography is included.

Bemporad lets us see that being Jewish in Minsk was not just a matter of having a certain set of religious beliefs.  There were many who self-identified as Jewish who attended no services.  There was no contradiction to being a Jewish atheist in Minsk. Most spoke at least Yiddish and Russian.

Hanging over all histories of European Jews between wars is the Holocaust.  We see the impact on the community when Hitler and Stalin signed a treaty.  Eighty thousand Jews were murdered by Germans,nearly destroying all Minsk Jews.

Bemporad also treats The persistence of Anti-Semiticism after WW Two.

This book was published by The Indiana University Press.

They have lots of serious  books on Eastern European and Russian Jewish Culture.  

Their  website is below

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/index.php?cPath=1037_3130&CDpath=3_5

Author Bio

Elissa Bemporad is the Jerry and William Ungar Associate Professor of East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. The Russian edition was recently published with ROSSPEN, in the History of Stalinism Series. Her new book, entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, will be published with Oxford University Press in 2019. Elissa is the co-editor of Women and Genocide: Survivors and Perpetrators (Indiana University Press in 2018), a collection of studies on the multifaceted roles played by women in different genocidal contexts during the twentieth century. She has recently been a recipient of an NEH Fellowship and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Elissa's projects in progress include research for a biography of Ester Frumkin, the most prominent Jewish female political activist and public figure in late Imperial Russia and in the early Soviet Union...from The Stanford  Center for Jewish Studies.

I would happily read more works by Bamporad and greatly enjoyed this work.

Mel u

Sea People - The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson - 2019 - 362 pages

Sea People - The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson, 2019, 362 pages

An Autodidactic Corner Selection.

From the very start I loved this marvelous book.  It is the epitome of the very best narrative non-fiction. 

The publisher Harper Collins  description 

Is accurate:

“Sea People - The Puzzle of Polynesia is blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands 

of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.”

I am very interested in the history of the Philippines.  Once you go back to the days prior to the conquest by the 

Spanish everything is pretty much conjecture.  I have wondered where the first settlers of the Philippines came from.  The text book answer is it was traders from Malaysia and China.  But the archipelago as not unpopulated when they arrived.  Further the 

expeditions were largely men only.  So who were the people they met?  Recent studies have found human remains over 700,000 years old in Luzon.  This is not the topic of Thompson’s book but from it I learned how linguistics evidence, cultural artifacts show the first inhabitants of the Philippines probably were part of a very long term migration from Madagascar.  I was fascinated to learn from Thompson that the linguistic diversity of an area is a reflection of how long it has been settled.  The 100 plus languages of the 

Philippines testifies to a very old settlement.  It takes a long time for many languages to develop.  

Here is the puzzle this book comes close to answering:

“For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle 

stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in 

human history.

How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.” From Harper 

Thompson spends a lot of wonderful time detailing the first encounters of Europeans and Polynesians.  Some were 

peaceful, some violent. The two groups were very curious about each other.  Of course the sailors wanted sex and women were willing to service them for trade goods.  The people were considered very attractive. Thompson goes into a lot of details about  early studies and theories of Europeans.  Some thought the Polynesians were a lost tribe from Israel, others felt they were originally from South America or India.

Throughout the huge region, the people were similar in appearance, life style, religion, food and language.  Most islands had pigs, dogs chickens and an unwanted stowaway, the black rat.  They found some islands with only  dogs! 

Thompson  helped me understand how language similarities can be used to help us understand the history of ancient societies.  Polynesia was a pre-literate society relying on the memory of bards for their historical knowledge.  Thompson explains how the Polynesians viewed their past.  They knew they had come from else where and these views are fascinating. She details the work of early European students of the culture.  

Thompson goes into the history of theories of scholars and anthropologists from the mid-19th century up to the great strides made when radio carbon dating was developed (Thompson does a fine job explaining technical matters in a lucid fashion.)She ends the book talking about how DNA research and computer analysis has advanced the field.

Thompson's book is not just science.  Her husband is a Maori and her sons carry the DNA  of ancient Polynesian.  

I loved this book for several reasons.  It taught me lots of history I did not know, in an intriguing fashion. Thomson showed me how conclusions are reached and justified.  I learned about language groups with thousands of items, including the 100s of languages of the Philippines.  

Christina Thompson is the author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia,  from Harper, and Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All,which was shortlisted for the 2009 NSW Premier's Award and the 2010 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. 

A dual citizen of the United States and Australia, she was born in Switzerland and grew up outside Boston. She received her BA from Dartmouth College and her PhD from the University of Melbourne and held post-doctoral fellowships at the East-West Center in Honolulu and the University of Queensland before becoming editor of the Australian literary journal Meanjin.

Since 2000 she has been the editor of Harvard Review. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Australia Council, as well as an NEH Public Scholar Award, she teaches writing at Harvard University Extension, where she was awarded the James E. Conway Excellence in Teaching Writing Award in 2008. Christina lives outside Boston with her husband and three sons.  From the authors website

Mel u

Bananas How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman

An Autodidactic Corner Selection. 

Bananas: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter  Chapman is a classic autodidactic corner work, teaching us what we never learned  at school.

1899 - United Fruit Company Formed from the merger of two companies involved in the banana trade 

1930 - Sam Zemurray sold his banana company, headquartered in New Orleans to United fruit for 31 million in cash and stock.  In 1892, as a young child in the company of his parents he immigrated from Kishinev, Russia to escape antiSemitism to Mobile, Alabama where they had relatives. In 1903 a terrible internationally reported pogram took place in Kishinev in which many Jews were killed, home and businesses burned and women raped  in a series of riots probably organised by the Tsar’s Secret Police, the Okhranka.  Recently I posted on Pogram:Kishinev and The Tilt of History by Steven Zapperstein, an Autodidactic Corner Selection, and I found it fascinating to learn of the quite significant impact an immigrant from Kishinev would have on 20th century history, becoming a great power in Central America.  Chapman shows us Zemurray starting out in his teens buying and selling stalks of bananas on the docks of New Orleans to president for twenty one years of a giant Multi national company.

In 1933 , Zemurray thinking with good reason that United Fruit was not being well run, took back the company by buying the majority of the stock. By then the stock had dropped ninety percent in value. He would remain as president until 1951.

Chapman goes into lots of very interesting details about the operations of the company in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras, bribing officials from top down to get what they needed.  The company owned at one time 3.5 million acres in Central America, much of it devoted to cultivating bananas on huge plantations.  The conceded by all view, as detailed by Chapman was that the company was very explotive of their workers, paying them in company script that could be used only as company owned stores.  Armies were called in to quell strikes.  

Chapman explains how United Fruit tried to solve their labor problems by importing workers from Jamaica and as far away as China.  The company executives felt they were better than locals.  Of course there was racism in this.

United Fruit inadvertenly educated a child, his father was a company supplier of bananas from his own plantation.  That child  would grow up to be companies worst nightmare, Fidel Castro.  ( I flashed to the scene in The Godfather Part Two at the birthday party for the Cuban 

President Juan Batista at which a United Fruit executive was a guest.)

Chapman goes into a lot of detail about how United Fruit used highly placed and expensive American lawyers  to convince American politicians that United Fruit was a bulkwork against Communism in Latin America.  Boats from United Fruit were involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion.  Of course the hope was Castro will be overthrown and the company given back their plantations.

Champman explains a lot about hazzards of the banana business, from strikes to banana diseaese, trade wars, labor troubles, hurricanes

and more.

He takes us from retirement of Zemurray, who was a very good manager up to the suicide in 1975 of a company president unable to cope with the decline of the company on to the final disappearance of the company in 1984.

There is a lot more in this fascinating book including the story of Chicquita Banana!  I recalled long ago my mother would serve my brother and I breakfast cereal with a chopped banana.  I learned from Bananas How United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter  Chapman that she got this idea, in fact a very smart one, from an advertising campaign sponsered by United Fruit.

All teachers of history should read this book.  Anyone into Latin American history will love it.