• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, August 15, 2024

Last week, I wrote about the optimism-enhancing skills my team and I learned from our leadership offsite keynote from Bill Burke, founder and CEO of The Optimism Institute and host of the Blue Sky podcast.

Bill told us one of the best techniques to temper the anxiety of the bad news that overwhelms our social media and newsfeeds today is to read them less -– and to read history more.

The algorithm-driven optimizations of today’s social platforms are designed to heighten emotional response, but have very little perspective on where today’s news really fits in the context of the world’s history.

So, we’re not living in the “most divisive time in U.S. history.” Not even close. This isn’t the most “horrific time for war around the world and innocent civilian casualties.” Not even close.

Environmental disasters aren’t new. Taking nothing away from the true certainty of climate change and climate disasters in our future, history is replete with natural disasters and humankind's fallibility in predicting and preventing them.

Below are some books that I’ve read (or reread) over the past year that have helped me put today’s news in its appropriate context. 

Horror of war. I highly recommend “The Second World War” by Antony Beevor. It may be the best overall history of that horrific war. Beevor, an extraordinary historian, puts  WW II in human terms in ways no similar book had done before.

Civil division in the U.S. Yes, there is a lot of civil discord in the U.S. today. Yes, what happened on Jan. 6 threatened key institutions of our democracy. However, take some time to read Erik Larson’s "The Demon of Unrest,” about the runup to the American Civil War, and you’ll realize the power and importance of optimistic leaders, both on the battlefield and in the White House and Congress, who aren’t afraid to step into the breach and do the right things.

Catastrophes. Want to learn about the early days of the U.S. weather service, a great storm brewing in the Caribbean, the fights between scientists against politicians, and the horror of not being prepared? “Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History” is another great one from Erik Larson.

Supreme Court Justices meddling in politics.  We are living in a moment when there’s a general low public opinion of the Supreme Court. Many worry, probably rightfully, about its increasing polarization and politicization.

But for more context, have a read of Bruce Allen Murphy’s  “The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices.” While the politics played by Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, starting in 1915 and ending with Frankfurter’s retirement in 1962, brought enormous benefits to the nation, much of it during extraordinary circumstances in wartime, there is no question the two Justices stepped way beyond the line.

I can’t wait for Murphy (my political science professor and advisor back at Penn State in the early 1980s) to finish the book he is writing on the politicization of the Rehnquist and Roberts courts.

Nonsensical Putin rhetoric around Ukraine invasion. No modern historian has done a better job relating the history of Central and Eastern Europe, Belarus and Russia than the acclaimed Timothy Snyder. Whether you read “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”; “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning”; or “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999,” you will come away much better informed about the region’s history and much better able to understand the Russian rhetoric (and its incomprehensible amplification in the west).

I am not offering these books to make light of challenges of current events, or to minimize atrocities of the past (or present). Quite the opposite. I am suggesting that we all benefit from historical context on these issues. They are not new. I hope that armed with better knowledge of the past, we all might help our nation find better paths forward.

What are your suggested history reads to give context to current events? Please post some suggestions in the comments.