No one has written a full biography of Charles Sumner since David Donald's two volumes (Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man) in the Sixties. Everyone praises them effusively, though I know there's a more recent work that takes him to task on Sumner's childhood. He still gets plaudits for psychological insight and the prose is certainly good. It'a also clear from the beginning that Donald is pretty hostile to Sumner. He has that old Needless War/Blundering Generation attitude where everyone concerned with the slavery question is by definition irrational, but the antislavery side is far worse. Their politics are explained as a kind of psychological defect, which is all class.

I came in knowing that. But it's still the book(s), so if you want to get Sumner you have to start somewhere. I fell in love with the dude reading one of his speeches and he's directly relevant to my research, so in I go. Donald says a few infuriating things in the forward to the 1989 edition, but also admitted that he just found praise of Sumner less interesting than criticism. We've probably all been there.

Two chapters in now and Sumner's just about to go to Europe. There are points where I think most people would probably find the guy obnoxious, whether hostile to him or not. Donald depicts Sumner as a guy with few social skills, bookish, eager to please his role models, and not nearly so successful at lawyering as Sumner wanted people later to believe. He was only a middling student at Harvard, but somehow won the attention of more prominent men who saw to it he had doors opened for him.

Donald doesn't quite say so, but the reader's probably meant to believe they took pity on a room temperature intellect with a lot of ambition and delusions of scholarship. The thing of it is that he's focused on Harvard performance, which Donald admits doesn't indicate much given Harvard's generally useless curriculum at the time, and his commercial success. At the same time as all this goes on, Sumner is churning out well-received legal writing and his contemporaries think he's probably going to be a great judge in a few years. I'm not going to pretend that everyone (or anyone) rises much on merit alone and Sumner definitely made the right friends, but I'm getting a lot of satisfaction out of spite reading genuine ability from the facts presented.

Given how the academy has largely turned around on antislavery men in the past few decades and there's still no new treatment of Sumner's full life, I suspect I'm not alone.

Any good books on non-Nazi (especially American) eugenics? /u/restricteddata cited "Controlling Human Heredity" in his latest answer on the topic but I'm curious if anyone else has recommendations.

I originally asked this question here, but since no-one answered there, I'm going to try again in this thread.

How do historians view Presidential Autobiographies such as Reagan's American Life, Reagan's Diaries, Clinton's My Life and George Bush's memoir of his father 41? Are they historically accurate and useful resources for academics or are they just propaganda that isn't useful for gaining information? I'm thinking about reading them so I wanted to learn some background information about them to see how accurate they are. Also, as a followup question, what books would you recommend as supplement reading along with those autobiographies for additional info?

Thanks!

I will be going on a Baltic Sea cruise this summer to visit Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway. What are some good history books about these nations that you can recommend to me? I am mostly looking for books about medieval history (especially about warfare and castles) and very recent history. I would also like an emphasis on Estonia if that's possible.

Thanks!

Not my flair area (flairea?) but I have been reading Khalil Ghibran Mohammed's Condemnation of Blackness. He goes back to the period immediately following the civil war to prove that progressives, including some black intellectuals, as well as white supremacists, started from a shared assumption of black racial defectiveness to explain the struggles of black people in American society. Once good census data appeared in the 1890 showing that black people had a high incarceration rate and poor health indicators, basically everyone, race progressives included, joined in a consensus that black people were defective, though the white supremacist would say they were an inferior race while the race progressive would say the problem was with society and government policy. Lucid history, the sort that shines daylight on the present.

I'm still slowly working my way through Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, mostly because I need to take regular breaks to stop myself from rushing out and buying all the books in the bibliography. I have a few books from the bibliography on my Amazon wishlist for when my book budget recovers, but I think I'll avoid buying a new library.

I think the most interesting part of the book has been how early water power was used for things other than milling. I've always associated it with the late 14th century/early 15th century, but water power seems to have been used for all manner of things, like processing wool and linen, from the late 12th century, and others, like making paper or consolidating blooms, from the mid to late 13th century.

I've been rather interested in learning about Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of England, ever since I watched the Extra History series on the South Sea Bubble. However, I've been having trouble finding any books or biographies on him. If anyone could suggest a book(s) for me about him, a non-historian who is rather unfamiliar with the time period, that would be highly appreciated.

Any English sources on Amangkurat IV of Mataram? All the sources on the internet are in Indonesian.

I am working on my terminating thesis for my bachelor's on the environmental clean up of a former chemical testing and bomb making site in Southern California. I was wondering if anyone had any good book recommendations on environmental policies and legislation in California? I know it's a rather new area of history, but I feel as though I'm missing something when trying to do my analysis of why the clean of such a small and allegedly simple site has taken 25 years. I was hoping perhaps more background information would help.