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The Blog that Changed the World
September 6, 2007
So there I was a couple of weeks ago, paging through the spring catalogs that arrive by the boxload these days (Randam House-Doubleday-Bantam-Dell..., Penguin-Putnam-Viking-Dutton...—does anyone else remember the long-ago year when such mega-amalgamations were an April Fool’s joke in the Times Book Review?).
Anyway, there I was, taking note of noteworthy books, and suddenly, I saw it, one of those titles I have come to loathe: Bananas!: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. I’d thought we were done with this particular title trend, with x’s that changed the world and y’s that shaped America, histories of the color mauve (which “changed the world”) and dust (which should be a parody of this genre but, sadly, isn’t).
It’s old news that history is no longer made by towering figures like Julius Caesar or Elizabeth I or Abraham Lincoln. But now, it seems, history is not made even by that amorphous mass called “the people,” by the powerless and dispossessed. Now history is made by bananas. Or gunpowder (“the explosive that changed the world”). Or a home run (Hank Aaron’s, which “changed America”).
Someone has to take the blame for this reducionist view of history, and I say it’s Mark Kurlansky, whose Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, came out in 1997. At the time, I was unconvinced that cod would captivate me, but I did try to read Kurlansky’s later book, Salt: A World History (admittedly, a less grandiose title than Cod’s.), and at first I did love it—it was filled with wonderful facts. The word salary comes from salt! The word salad also comes from salt! But it felt a bit like a trivial pursuit, and when we got to Venice’s rise, built on a mountain of sodium chloride, I . I thought, Well, that’s enough about salt.
I assume people read history for the same reason I do—to encounter fascinating personalities and understand the complex interplay of factors (of which cod might be only one) that led events to turn out as they did. This is accompanied by the sometimes titillating, sometimes frightening realization that a slight shift in the balance of factors might have caused events to turn out very differently.
There are numerous books due this fall that take a wide-angle view of history, but the one I’m reading right now is Joseph Ellis’s American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (Knopf, Nov.). a subtle study of America’s origins and of the men we call the founders.
While Ellis focuses in on particular moments—e.g., the Continental Army’s deadly winter at Valley Forge, the battle over ratifying the new Constitution—he offers a complex picture of each, extracting the notion that the entire Revolution was an improvisation. There was no grand plan for the new republic, he says; the founders were winging it.
Pleasurable to read, with both insight and narrative pull, this is an excellent way to get behind the myths about the American Revolution and begin to understand the reality.
And, as we know, the American Revolution was an event that did truly change the world.
Posted by Sarah Gold on September 6, 2007 | Comments (3)
