How should we select books to read in the future

Some months ago the group decided to select books from a list, going down the categories month by month. There are 10 to 12 books loosely grouped under each category, and ten categories. I have listed below the current categories and the number of books we have read in each going back some 30 months.

• Local Interest (1)
• American History (other than local) (8)
• Native American History (1)
• History of Religion (1)
• European History (6)
• History of Other Regions (6)
• Ancient History (3)
• About History (2)
• Economic History (1)
• History of Science and Technology (1)

Other (3) March of Folly, 1493, Cold War

Perhaps it is time to rethink our approach. Do we want to use these categories? For example, would we like a category of "marginalized groups" that might include women's history and minority groups, or how about "cultural history". Are we interested enough in Religion or American Indians to read a book a year?

Alternatively, since we seem to have been happy reading quite a bit of American, European and other regional history, should we pick from these groups more often than from some of the other groups?

Please comment below.

The Reformation: A History

The result has been a remarkable exercise in honest thinking. In the words of the great Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Kung: "modern biblical criticism.....belongs among the great intellectual achievements of the human race. Has any of the great world religions outside the Jewish-Christian tradition ever investigated its own foundations and its own history so thoroughly and so impartially?"
Diarmaid MacCulloch, page 704

On Wednesday night, 10 or 12 members of the History Book Club had a vigorous discussion of The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch. On a winter evening, unusually cold for our region, we were warm and snug in the Kensington Row Bookshop. MacCulloch produced an award winning book; he is a professor of the history of the church at Oxford University.

The discussion was unusual for us in that several of the members had been able to read only part of the book before the meeting. The book, with over 700 pages of text, was unusually long for our group, and was originally planned to be read over a two month period. (In November, however, we decided to discuss the founding documents of the United States at a special December meeting -- see the summary of the meeting.)

Before this January meeting, four short online lessons from the Khan Academy were identified that would provide a basis for the discussion. They are on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and are easy listening:

• Introduction to the Protestant Reformation: Setting the Stage (Part 1 of 4)
• Introduction to the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther (2 of 4)
• An Introduction to the Protestant Reformation: Varieties of Protestantism (3 of 4)
• Introduction to the Protestant Reformation: The Counter-Reformation (4 of 4)

Also circulated before the meeting was a recent report on the regional distribution of Christians in the world.

The Opening Discussion

The discussion began with one member commenting that, while she had only read a couple of hundred pages, she found the book very well written. Another commented that the author had too often told more than we needed to know, apparently showing off the massive knowledge he had accumulated on the subject. A third chipped in that he felt the book had really required some tables to provide a visual aid to the reader to organize the flood of information on differing theological positions and their proponents. Finally a fourth member suggested that he found the book very good indeed, summarizing a vast amount of information in a clear manner.

Following the discussion, an email was sent identifying this useful website:

Christian Denomination Comparison Charts

With the comment:

I was struck by how many ways the churches are similar. The Apostles and Nicene Creeds are widely shared. The major Christian churches use very similar versions of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, rejecting most of the same Biblical apocrypha. They have religious services led by priests or ministers, on very similar schedules, and many use books of common prayers much like the missal of the Catholic Church. 

What Was the Situation of the Catholic Church in 1500?

Author MacCulloch provides an appendix with the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, the Lords Prayer, the ten Commandments, and the Hail Mary. A member criticized these as not conforming to those she was familiar with from her church. Another suggested that these are held commonly among the Roman Catholic and the major Protestant denominations, having been originally in Latin or Greek, then translated into German or French according to denomination, and then into English, and as a result the version by MacCulloch might differ in specific wording from that used in a specific church.

More fundamentally, the member wished that the book had provided a clear statement of the theology used throughout the Roman Catholic Church before Martin Luther began his effort to reform the church. Another member (citing MacCulloch's book, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, which he had also read) suggested that there were many poorly prepared priests, and that the church was spread over a very large geographical area without a strong church effort to assure theological consistency. Under those circumstances, it would be impossible for the author to provide an accurate description of the theology of the church in 1500.

The Book Is Intellectual History

MacCulloch focuses much of the book on the theological debates during the 16th and 17th centuries, and to a lesser extent on the humanists that preceded the Reformation. A member noted that she learned for the first time of the advances made by theologians of the Western or Roman Catholic Church in the centuries before the Reformation.

The History Book Club has focused primarily on the history of nations. Members are interested in political and economic institutions. These clearly had an important role in the Reformation, but seemed to be of secondary concern in MacCulloch's book. For some, that was a deficiency in the book. They might have preferred a less detailed account of the theology and theologians, and an account that explained more of the political and economic causes implicated in the Reformation.

We noted that one of the slogans of the time came to be, "My realm, my religion." Kings and queens, the Holy Roman Emperor and Electors, princes and other nobles had their own reasons for supporting or opposing the reformation, and one assumes that they were not always theological in nature. The support of political officials for Luther in Germany, for Zwingli in Zurich, for Calvin in Geneva, and for the communities that grew around them were important for the survival and success of the Reformation.

The pope was himself sire of the Papal states, and popes had been engaged in power struggles with emperors for many years. By the 16th century, the church was facing the emergence of modern nation states in France, England, Scotland and Spain. On the other hand, Germany and Italy were not unified as modern nation states until much later. Poland/Lithuania had its own complex history.

There were tensions over the role of the church and the state in the appointment of bishops and cardinals, and longstanding tensions over the rights of secular and religious authorities to adjudicate different issues.

"If someone says its not about money, its about money." The church had a great deal of wealth in 1500 and was accumulating more rapidly. The huge expense over the building of St. Peters and Rome, the simony of high church officials, and the huge expenses for the installations of the papacy in Avignon were only the most visible signs of that rapid accumulation. We assumed that some of the secular powers saw the opportunity provided by the Reformation to obtain some of that wealth.

Motivations were not constant for the entire period of the 16th and 17th centuries. The concerns of people also changed over that long period of time, as indeed did the principal players in the Reformation and Counter Reformation.

The invention of the printing press in the mid 15th century, together with the insistence of the reformers on people learning to read, led to an increasing distribution of bibles, books and pamphlets, notably in the vernacular. People of all ranks would over the centuries have become much more aware of and concerned with the theological issues, including the common people. (Moreover, there was much more of an effort to teach people from the new catechisms and to preach the theology from the pulpit.)

The Theological Debate

MacCulloch traces the roots of Reformation theology to a rejection of many practices of the Catholic Church, especially those of the 15th century. Luther in his 95 theses focused on the sale of indulgences. The huge flow of pilgrims to sites holding putative relics of saints and the cross -- with the pilgrimages fueled by the Church's promise of forgiveness of the sins of pilgrims -- was also of concern. Rich people endowed monasteries and churches to say perpetual masses, with the Church holding that the masses said for their souls would reduce their time in purgatory. Reformation theologians felt that these could not be legitimate ways to assure salvation. If the Church had gone wrong on such serious matters, then the Reformation theologians concluded that, as currently led and operated, the Church could not be taken as a reliable source for authoritative theological knowledge.

Of course, professional theologians were concerned with truth in theology. However, the issues were not merely academic. People were extremely concerned with achieving an eternity in heaven and avoiding an eternity in hell, probably on average, much more so than today. (MacCulloch points out that the Catholic Church had for many years emphasized that the church was the way to reduce time spent in Purgatory and achieve salvation of the soul.)

The general approach of the theologians of the Reformation to finding the truth in religion, Christians as they were,  was then to seek to learn from the bible and from the early church leaders who had the closest connection with Jesus Christ, the source for truth in theology in their judgement, Thus, using the tools of the humanists, they went back to the sources of Christianity.

They were concerned with key issues. For example, the nature of Christ and specifically the nature of the Trinity. Could Christ be worshiped as true god, or would that somehow violate the first commandment. Sacraments such as baptism and communion had firm biblical bases, but were they properly understood? If not, would the performance possibly be sacrilegious? There was biblical support for the ministry of the apostles, but how should priests and ministers be selected in their time?

We briefly discussed the theological debate about predestination versus the role of good works. would those who tried to avoid sin and do good works go to heaven, or was the ultimate fate of each individual predestined, determined only by the grace of God. We wound up in laughter on facing the difficulty of modern folk in appreciating the importance and intricacies of such a debate in the 16th century.

It turned out that the most eminent of the Reformation theologians -- Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc. -- sometimes (often) came to different conclusion about some such issues. Thus the Reformation leaders also had conclaves to negotiate formulas seeking theological positions that the various Protestant groups could all or in majority accept. These were not always successful in doing so, and thus there was a proliferation of Protestant churches.

The Changing Intellectual Climate of the Time

We noted that this was also the time of the scientific awakening. (Copernicus published his book saying that the earth revolved around the sun in 1543; Galileo was condemned in 1635). Were scientific knowledge to successfully contradict statements in the bible, then the authority of the bible -- on which so much depended -- would be compromised in the view of the theologians of the time.

We noted that Galileo's heliocentric model of the solar system was more fundamentally correct than that of the church's belief that the earth was the center. We also thought that the failure of Galileo to fully understand the orbital mechanics may have led to inaccuracies in his predictions of the locations of the planets in the sky; thus the church officials may have had some justification in saying that if his theory did not result in predictions that corresponded to measurements, then the theory was suspect. It would await Newton's theory of gravity to more accurately map planetary motion. (We were not aware of this very nice discussion of the Galileo Affair during our discussion on Wednesday.) (Following the discussion, a member shared this reference: "The Case against Copernicus" by Dennis Danielson and Christopher H. Graney in the January 2014 Scientific American magazine.)

We briefly noted that modern science gives an understanding of many phenomena that is very different than that of the people writing at the time of Christ or the people of the time of the Reformation. As a result, terms in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds would seem to have quite different meanings today than they would have had in the distant past.

Why Did the Reformation Happen?

It was suggested that in an earlier time, Luther might simply have been killed quickly as a heretic after he posted his 95 theses. Why did his action -- at the particular time and place that it occurred -- trigger so broad a response?

There have been 21 ecumenical councils in the history of the Catholic Church, including the Council of Trent in the 16th century.  Each of them was occasioned by some issue on which a decision was needed by the church to resolve a dispute or to reconcile some competing points of view. In some of the Councils, negotiation succeeded and compromise reached. In the time of Constantine and Justinian, the Roman Empire accepted a specific creed; the might of the empire was then used to persecute as heretical any Christian groups that refused to accept the Council's decisions. Councils failed to heal the division between the eastern Orthodox Church and the western Roman Church, leading to permanent schism in the 11th century. The Council of Trent, in the middle of the 16th century, essentially formalized the schism between Protestant and Catholic Churches.

As had happened 500 years before, in the 16th century many Christians thought that the world would soon end; many of them believed that communities "polluted" by the wrong religion would be condemned with all their people to hell at the end of days. A member of the Club cited MacCulloch's belief that the dramatic Muslim incursion into Europe also led people to increased fear of the end of the world and increased demand for Christian theological purity. Thus it would seem that it was the complex pattern of current beliefs and problems, theological differences, power politics, and economic concerns that institutionalized the split between Catholics and Protestants.

The Violence

While perhaps compared with the genocides of the 20th century or modern industrialized violence, the Reformation was not so violent, it was still marked by religious wars and even by neighbor killing neighbor in the name of religion. To the people of the time in Europe, their time seemed very violent. That people would kill each other over what seem like fine points of theological dispute seemed inexplicable to members of the book club.

We noted, however, that there are recent examples of equally hard to understand violence: Catholics and Protestants in northern Ireland, the various factions after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Rwanda's genocide, the Violencia between Blancos and Colorados in Colombia, and the fighting between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. We even mentioned the violence between loyalists and neighboring revolutionaries in the American revolution. We concluded that there are many hidden grudges among neighbors that can erupt in violence in the wrong circumstances -- especially if there were authorities promoting violence.

In the Reformation, fear of Islam and millennial fears were implicated as causes of the violence. We noted that there was a great concern for pollution. In neighborhoods dominated by members of one religion, members of the majority would fear that members of another religion in the neighbor would pollute the entire neighborhood, condemning all to damnation. What we now would call "ethnic cleansing" could follow. That has been described as happening in Paris during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Today

Many of the reforms promulgated in the Protestant religions have also been adopted by the Catholic Church. Indulgences are no longer sold. Simony seems to be gone. The mass is now said in local languages rather than Latin. The bible is also available in Catholic editions in local languages and read by the laity. Music associated with the mass is now much more like the hymns in some of the Protestant churches. The possibility of allowing priests to marry is still under discussion. On the other hand, papal infallibility was proclaimed a matter of doctrine in the 19th century.

One of the members read the section from the modern Catholic catechism reflecting the decision in the Vatican Council in the 1950s on the primacy of following one's conscience. The recognition of the importance of conscience was an important change in Catholic theology. That reading, however, pointed out that the conscience should be informed of the true virtue and sinfulness of the alternatives, and that there are many dangers of accepting a sinful choice by an uninformed conscience.

Some of the conditions that were present during the 16th century and the Reformation appear to be present again today. We noted that there are again people who believe the world will end near the year 2000; Secretary of the Interior James Watt of the Reagan Administration is believed to have been one, and that his conduct in office is thought by some to have been affected by that belief.  Christian fundamentalism grew significantly in the 20th century, and there are still more recent evangelical and spiritualist movements; there are many new congregations that are not affiliated with either the Catholic nor with Protestant churches born in the Reformation.

The Great Geographic Divide

We briefly wondered why when the Reformation and Counter Reformation had run their course, the Catholic Church dominated southern Europe and the Protestant churches north western Europe. We suggested that the wealth flooding into Spain and Portugal from their colonies in the Western Hemisphere may have helped the Catholic Church retain its influence in those countries. We also suggested that greater integration of the Catholic Church and the secular powers in the south, or the role of the Dominican and Jesuit Orders which were strong there may have been important. (Of course, it may have simply been that the cultures were different -- that the areas of Europe that spoke Romance languages were more willing to remain with the Roman Catholic Church, while the Anglo, Germanic and Scandinavian peoples who had not been as closely linked to Rome were culturally more disposed to the new Protestant religions.)

The division extended in the centuries since the Reformation, as the Catholic Church still has large numbers of members in large parts of the world colonized successfully by Spain, Portugal, and France, while the Protestant churches are strong in parts of North America, Australia, New Zealand and sub-Saharan Africa colonized by the Protestant peoples.

Source

Founding Documents of the United States

Last night ten members of the club met in the Kensington Row Bookshop for a lively discussion of the founding documents of the USA. The members had been asked to read the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the Constitution, and its amendments before the meeting. One of the members has also suggested The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution by Richard Beeman. Other online resources were identified including:

• The Founders' Constitution edited by Philip Kurland and Ralph Lerner
• Constitute
• The Federalist Papers

Who Were the Founding Fathers and What Were There Interests?

We began by discussing who the "founding fathers" were and what their interests were. They were property owners and leading members of their communities chosen to represent their colonies/states.

A number of British actions were cited by members including the Proclamation of 1763 which forbade settlers from settling past a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains, tariffs that reduced the profits of exporters, enforcement of laws against smuggling, and the effective abolition of slavery in England in 1772.. The Quebec Act of 1774 gave rights to Quebecois to use French law for some purposes, rights to practice the Catholic Religion, and dominion over lands to the Ohio River

These we saw as threatening the economic interests of the founding fathers. After independence when the Proclamation of 1763 no longer applied, land sales would eventually make many Americans rich and would pay for government for decades; George Washington himself had nominal rights to thousands of acres in the west. Merchants would lose money under the tariffs; John Hancock, a rich merchant and probably a leading smuggler whose ships were specifically targeted by the British, was very prominent among the founding fathers. Any hint that slavery would be abolished would be perceived as threatening by many; slaves were found in all the colonies before the Revolution. Some Protestants would take any opening to Catholicism as a threat.

Thus the affluent, powerful founding fathers may well have felt that their economic and other interests were threatened, and that they could better manage their own government to protect those interests.

Why Didn't We Learn These Things In School?

The discussion of the failures of our schools to teach history adequately was rather emotional. Reference was made to the school book purchasing procedures of the large states of California and Texas, and their influence on the publishing industry to produce texts that are sufficiently conservative and uncontroversial to pass the inspection of their selection boards.

It was also noted that World Wars tend to bring demands for histories of American exceptionalism and success in military endeavors, while the Cold War brought demands for books that would stress the positive aspects of American culture and downplay the less admirable aspects such as racism.

The Continental Congress

We commented on the difference between the Declaration and Resolves of the Continental Congress in 1774 and the Declaration of Independence of 1776. The earlier document has a statement of rights and a description of how parliament has passed legislation infringing on those rights. It asks for the support of the British and American people, and states that the king will be petitioned for a redress of those rights. The Declaration of Independence, written after the delegates to the Convention had received new instructions from their state legislative bodies and after a year of war, was a frank break with Britain. It ascribed the acts causing the break to the king, not the parliament.

We discussed how the founding fathers had been of divided mind, both valuing the relationship with England and valuing their own self determination. Not only did they consider themselves British in 1770, but Britain had helped defend the colonies during the French and Indian War in their lifetime, and provided a defense from other predatory imperial powers. But the founding fathers came to support independence: they thought themselves better able to advance their interests by governing themselves. However, they were not "small d" democrats, wanting to share power widely with the people.

We noted that the two documents were written by politicians to persuade people. The Declaration was initially distributed in the States and intended to gain support for Independence and the Revolutionary War; only later was it carried to England (via British troops) and the European mainland. We did not trust the members of the Continental Congress to give the real and deeper reasons in the minds of the founding fathers for independence in these documents.

We also noted that apparently the Declaration of Independence was little known and seldom referred to in the 80 years after it was promulgated. Apparently it only began to attain its current importance after the Gettysburg Address by President Abraham Lincoln. The opening of the second paragraph is relatively newly famous:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

And that has come to be seen as an important statement of the purpose of the American government, but the founding fathers were focusing on white men, and perhaps were especially interested in creating a government to secure the rights of "substantial" men like themselves.

The Articles of Confederation and the Constitution

The founding fathers had conflicting objectives. On the one hand, they needed the colonies/states to act together militarily to protect themselves.  In fact, independence from Britain was not achieved by the Americans themselves, but only when France, Spain and the Netherlands joined the war against Britain. The people of the United States could did not have the economic power, the manpower, the military power nor the naval power to defeat Britain; each of the states alone would have fallen easy prey to more powerful states. We recalled that after the Revolutionary War ended Spain still had huge colonies in North America, Britain had Canada and would seek more territory in the War of 1812 and thereafter, and France would soon acquire the Louisiana Territory. Even the Dutch, who had had a colony in New York, were still an important and active imperial power. Thus protection of the states and their people could only be guaranteed by a central government that could coordinate an army and navy and finance the defense.

On the other hand, the founding fathers didn't want to sacrifice local governance to a distant central authority more than was necessary. The colonies had very different peoples, cultures, and colonial governments. Someone from South Carolina was unlikely to have any contact with someone from Maine or New Hampshire. The founding fathers had had a bad experience with government from afar, and were not comfortable delegating a lot of power to a central government, albeit one on the Atlantic coast of North America; The preferred to keep as much power as possible close to home in the state government.

We noted that the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union established that the union was intended to be perpetual, and that the Constitution was intended "to perfect that union". Thus the Constitution was to perfect a perpetual union, and the two documents together precluded legal secession from that union. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was cited by members as a law passed by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation that remained in force under the Constitution.

That Northwest Ordinance was written to define the governance of territory ceded by several states to the federal government after the Revolutionary War. That territory would eventually be divided into several states, and the Northwest Ordinance set a precedent for establishment of new states from federal territories. It also includes a bill of rights for the people living in the territory, and forbade slavery in the territory.

The Articles of Confederation give the central government power to declare and prosecute war. The central government conducts international relations and the individual states are prohibited from doing so independently. The Articles allow the central government to assess funds from the states apportioning them according to the value of landed property in the states, but did not provide means for the collection of the assessed taxes. While the delegations of the states to the Congress can be of different sizes, each state would have only one vote.

It became clear that the central government did not function well under the Articles of Confederation. During the Revolutionary War, the troops were sometimes not paid. Some states did not pay their taxes to the federal government, and the bonds issued by the government lost their value. Shays Rebellion, in part brought on by a post war depression and lack of hard currency, catalyzed reform efforts.

A convention was convened to revise the Articles, but over time its function was transformed to writing a new Constitution. Led by the Virginia delegation that was especially concerned with the weakness of the government under the Articles, the delegates created the government with legislature, executive and judiciary branches, and gave it more power than had been given under the Articles. One of the differences we notices was that under the Constitution finance of the central government was to be raised from the states based on the population census. Thus taxes would be population based rather than property based as before.

Many of the founding fathers had read history and political philosophy and had knowledge relevant to their task. James Madison, perhaps the key member of the Constitutional Convention, before it began asked Thomas Jefferson, who was then representing the United States in France, to send him books that could inform his deliberations. On receiving a couple of hundred such books he spent time reading and thinking, preparing a memo for himself defining his constitutional philosophy.

Notably, Madison believed that the Roman Republic and the Swiss republics worked as long as they were small, but historical large republics had failed due to factionalism. That was a fear shared by many of the founding fathers, including George Washington, who warned against factions in his farewell address on leaving the office of President. Madison however proposed that a very large republic, which necessarily would have many factions, could remain functional; in such a republic, no faction could alone come to dominate. That view came to be accepted in the framing of the Constitution.

We noted that while the powers of the different branches were specified in the Constitution, as were their limitations, no duties were specified. Thus the Congress does not have a duty to pass legislation in a timely fashion in order to fund government operations and keep government open; there is no sanction if Congress fails to do so. We recalled times when the government shut down because the Congress failed to appropriate funds for its operation.

The 14th amendment to the Constitution states:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

However, the Constitution does not explicitly state that Congress has no duty to authorize funds to meet the payments due on the debt; were the government to default the Congress would not be held to account for that failure.

The Great Constitutional Compromises

We discussed the two great compromises in the negotiating the Constitution:

• That necessary to include the small states, and
• Than necessary to include the slave states of the south.

These compromises perhaps indicate the critical importance that the founding fathers attributed to finding a way to hold the union together. As Benjamin Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Indpendence, "we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Large states wanted a legislature responsive to the needs of their large populations. The small state compromise resulted in a House of Representatives that had membership proportional to population and a Senate with two senators for each state. In the presidential electoral college, each state had one member for each representative in the House and one for each senator. Thus citizens of small states got more influence per capita in national politics than did citizens of populous states. We recalled from previous reading, that in the latter part of the 19th century Republicans created several states with tiny populations and Republican leanings to cement their electoral advantage in the Senate and presidential elections. This Republican advantage remains. Thus in the Bush-Gore election in 2000, Gore won the electoral vote and Bush was elected president with a majority in the electoral college.

Southern states delegations wanted protection for the continuance of the institution of slavery, and wanted power in the central government reflecting the number of slaves in their states even if those slaves were not to be citizens. The compromise with the slave states made slavery legal in the United States, called for the return of fugitive slaves across state borders, and added 3/5th of the slaves to the white population to define the number of seats in the House of Representatives, and allowed the importation of slaves for some years. It also set a $10 tariff per slave -- not enough to preclude importation of new slaves but enough to raise some significant tax income for the government -- perhaps the most specific item in the Constitution. (It would take the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement to rectify the problems created by this compromise.)

Representatives would be chosen by popular vote of adult males, Senators would be elected by state legislatures, not the people. Again, the presidential electors were to be chosen by the state, not elected. Thus control of government was not to be directly in the hands of the voters, but indirectly through the selections made by their state legislatures. The founding fathers were not too comfortable with direct democracy, rather preferring to have control in the hands of men much like themselves.

The Judiciary

There is very little about the judiciary in the Constitution. It seems that each branch of government was expected to observe the rules set forth in the Constitution; the legislature would not pass an unconstitutional bill, the executive would not sign one into law nor commit an unconstitutional act, and the judiciary would adjudicate issues in accord with the Constitution. It was not until the Supreme Court decided in Marbury vs. Madison that the Court assumed the role of judging the constitutionality of acts of the other two branches.

We took a detour to talk about the proposals to reform the Supreme Court and the Constitution coming from the extreme political right. These include having some of the Supreme Court Justices appointed by the Governors rather than by the President with the consent of the Senate. Indeed, ten new amendments to the constitution have been proposed. The role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was mentioned in working on the state level to promote policy changes.

We appeared to agree that some age or term limit would be appropriate for Supreme Court justices. The founding fathers did not expect individuals to live as long as we do now. While job security for the justices does promote their political independence, people in the 80's are likely to have less capacity to perform the demanding intellectual work required,  Indeed, members of Congress being carried into the chamber to vote seem inappropriate. Note that Jefferson believed that Senators should have six year terms to provide some insulation from popular pressure, but that they should return to private life after a single term. Perhaps some term limits or age limits for legislators might be considered. Even though President Wilson was incapacitated for a period of time during his presidency, it was not until the 25th amendment in the 1960s that the presidential succession was clarified.  So, constitutional reform to impose such limits may not be quick nor easy.

We also talked about "originalism" and the difficulty of discovering the original intent of the many people who drafted the Constitution; they did not agree uniformly among themselves. Is the intent of the people who ratified the Constitution critical" What did they believe that they were ratifying? (Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 by Pauline Maier was mentioned in this context.) The Federalist Papers, in which Hamilton, Madison and Jay argued for the ratification, were written to influence public opinion, and perhaps not simply to explain the thinking of the authors much less the meaning of the articles of the Constitution. It is clear that the Supreme Court has made radical changes in its interpretation of the constitution in the past -- e.g. Plessy vs. Ferguson as compared with Brown vs. Board of Education. (Still one clearly wants the law to be known and predictable, and thus the Court to interpret it consistently until the Constitution is changed or the laws themselves changed).

Amendment

During the ratification of the Constitution anti-federalists demanded that the Constitution include a Bill of Rights. Quickly after ratification the Congress passed a set of 12 amendments, and the first ten became the requested Bill of Rights.  It was suggested that the members of the Constitutional Convention rebelled against drafting a Bill of Rights; after a long summer of debates they wanted to go home.

There have only been 27 amendments since the Constitution was ratified, two being prohibition and its repeal and three implementing the changes after the civil war. The there were only 12 other amendments spread over more than two centuries. It is hard to amend the constitution.

We noted that the U.S. Constitution is not very specific, and believed that to be a deliberate decision by the founding fathers. While many Constitutions have been written and rewritten in other countries, the U.S. Constitution has lasted. It may be that it only generally lays out the structure and functions of government, leaving a great deal to be elaborated as problems are met and solved.

We cited Benjamin Franklin's wise comments recommending that the members of the Constitutional Convention unanimously sign the document, recommending its ratification.

The Discussion

Several members said that they had not read these documents before and were glad to have done so now. Generally the group felt that the topic for this meeting had been very well chosen, and that even without a common book to read we had learned a lot and had enough common information for an interesting and useful discussion. After two hours, when the bookstore was closing, we were still going strong, and members of the group had to be ushered out of the store, where they continued chatting on sidewalk in the cold.

Bonus Army: US military attacks demonstrating American War Veterans

One of the club members shared this video:

The Silk Road in World History

On Wednesday, November 13th, eleven members of the History Book Club met to discuss The Silk Road in World History by Xinru Liu.

We began talking about the beauty of silk, especially the long-strand silk originally found only in China. Silk has a special sheen, and its protein structure takes protein dies very well. In many ancient cultures, beautifully dyed and embroidered silk garments clearly distinguished the affluent and important from the common folk. They were expensive, but for people seeking to stand out from the crowd, the expense was justified.

The book is "big history". It shows how trade, governance, culture and technology interacted over more than a millennium from Rome to China.

• Commercial linkages, once established, survived changes in governance.
• Large states, including China, Persia, the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic states, and Rome all provided safety for caravans using the trade routes under their authority.
• The technology, which changed with the development of better ships and understanding of wind patterns, and which benefited from the domestication of the Bactrian camel in the 3rd century bc.
• Culture, including the cultural value of silk. Buddhist monasteries provided early sanctuary for traders in the subcontinent, and with the development of Buddhist practice of endowing monasteries with silks and jewels, new markets for trade goods.

The Silk Road

Source: The Geography of Transport Systems

The group felt that goods tended to move bit by bit across the silk road; a merchant would obtain trade goods in his local marketplace, carry them along the silk road (route in his location), and trade them in the marketplace in his destination. A silk garment might pass through many hands as it traveled from China to Rome, and Roman trade goods similarly might be traded in many marketplaces en route to China. Note that in each market, barter might be necessary as there was no legal tender that was good across the silk road. In the case of ship born trade, a book was eventually developed on the basis of experience describing the goods sought and sold in each of the various ports along the marine trade route.

We discussed religion, noting the importance of Buddhism for the development of the silk road, but also the expansion of Buddhism along the silk road.

One member pointed out that the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all demand adherence to specific beliefs of their members and are evangelical, while polytheistic Asian religions are more permissive as to to individual beliefs. Buddhism notably was based on the idea that the Buddha was a human being who showed a path that could be and would be followed by many successors.

Another member was struck by a convergence. A school of Buddhism developed the theory that people could gain spiritual merit by making gifts to Buddhist monasteries. Our book for January, The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch, notes the theory developed by the Catholic church that people could gain spiritual merit by endowing churches and masses and purchasing indulgences.

The great set of websites identified in the back of the book was appreciated. The author, Xinru Liu, appeared to have great knowledge of Asian history, but seemed to us to have made some errors with respect to European history.

We felt that the book would have been greatly improved by the inclusion of better maps. One member mentioned that he would have preferred a more quantitative treatment of the material.

One of our members provided this blog post on the book.

A member provided a Silk Road Timeline and three maps of the silk road (map 1, map 2, map 3).

Possible Books for the February Meeting

According to our long term schedule, we will choose to read a book on ancient history for the February meeting. Here are some possibilities:

• The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern World by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid (4 stars, 290 pages of text) Goodreads reviews.
• Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman (4 stars, 416 pages) Boston Globe review.
• Pericles Of Athens And The Birth Of Democracy by Donald Kagan (4 stars, 320 pages) Commentary review.
• Persian Fire: TheFirst World Empire and the Battle for the West by Tom Holland (464 pages, 4 stars) Guardian review.
• Rubicon: The LastYears of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland (464 pages, 4 stars) Guardian review.
• The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146 BC by Adrian Goldsworthy (4 stars, 416 pages) Goodreads reviews.
• Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden (4 stars, 192 pages) World History Connected review.
• The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis (336 pages, 4 stars) A review from the Goodreads website.
• Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs (Ancient Peoples and Places) by Michael D. Coe and Rex Koontz (4 stars, 256 pages). Goodreads reviews.
• Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga edited by William F. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward (4 stars, 416 pages) Goodreads reviews.

Brazil on the Rise

Last night 11 members of the Barnes and Noble History Book Club met to discuss Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed by Larry Rohter. The discussion, as usual, was spirited and not slavishly constrained to the content of the book.

Brazil is a fascinating country, with a land area almost as large as that of the United States and a population just over 3/5th of ours; it has an extraordinarily complex society. Larry Rohter is a professional journalist and has produced a very readable book which lacks some of the quality of professional history, such as annotation of sources. The book deals with history from the colonization by Portugal to the 20th century in very broad strokes. It then goes into more detail on modern cultural, economic and political history, with some reflections on Brazil's future. With copyrights in 2010 and 2012, it is right up to date.

Brazil has enjoyed almost two decades of sound economic policies which led to economic growth; It has combined growth with pro-poor policies which led to a broader economic base. Health indicators were notably improved. The country is blessed with huge natural resources, including still to be exploited off-shore oil deposits. Still the country is challenged by a poor infrastructure a weak educational system.

Brazil has enjoyed a virtuous cycle in those decades. Controlled inflation and liberal policies encouraged foreign investment including the development of new factories.  New lands were brought into production and agricultural exports increased. As people were brought into the work force and incomes increased, there was a large increase in demand, which in turn created more jobs.

The economy was boosted by demand for Brazilian exports, notably from China. With the slowdown of the Chinese economy, the problems of the European economy (and threats to the U.S. economy) Brazilian exports are threatened. As the graph below shows, the Brazilian economy grew by less than one percent in 2012 and the recovery in 2013 is not expected to be robust.

Source: The Economist magazine, September 28, 2013

It was noted that the economic policies introduced by Cardoso ( known by his initials: FHC) before he became president and continued during his presidency were continued by Lula da Silva; foreign investors, who had been concerned by Lula's populist background, were reassured and foreign direct investment in Brazil remained high.

During long years of inflation Brazilians got used to spending money fast before it lost value. The high levels of consumer credit that helped fuel the economic expansion during the FHC and Lula presidencies left President Dilma (Roussoff) facing a heavily indebted society, adding to the difficulties of sustaining economic growth.

We noted the importance of the family subsidies introduced by Lula which paid poor families as long as they immunized their children and kept them in school. We also noted that rich and middle class children had long enjoyed private schools which were better than the public schools, giving them a huge advantage in qualifying for free public universities. It was suggested that there is a demand for educational services as people seek ways into higher status, more lucrative jobs. Life expectancy has improved, although it is still far lower than that of developed nations.

Brazil has uniquely generous pension policies, with mid level government employees able to retire after 15 years of service on full salary, indexed at the inflation rate or higher. Moreover, widows receive the full pension until their deaths. There was some jealousy among those of us with less generous plans. There is also apparently a common phenomenon of newly retired men marrying young wives who outlive their husbands by decades, drawing pensions all the while. The pension system will burden the economy unless it is significantly revised.

A relatively small triangle formed by Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais has accounted for most of Brazil's economy; the development of the new capital of Brasilia is a part of and symbolic of the effort to expand development into other regions of the country. Still, Brazil remains extremely diverse. The Amazon remains relatively undeveloped, the large area called the cerrado has recently become a major global producer of soy beans, with many large, modern farms. Other areas are still being developed for agriculture and have a frontier character.

The book's discussion of race in Brazil was of special interest to members of the group. First time visitors (from the USA) note the variety of skin colors, and the book informed us that 70 percent of Brazilians have at least some African heritage. Yet there is a color gradient in the country. The slave population was very large in the north east and European immigrants more dominant in the south east and there remains a heritage from that past. Moreover, the upper classes are whiter than the lower economic classes. There is even a significant group of people of Japanese descent in Brazil, The book clarifies that race is more complex in Brasil than the casual visitor is likely to recognize.

We touched on aspects of social history -- carnival and the samba, the cult of physical beauty, beach culture, and importantly, soccer and the upcoming World Cup.

There was some discussion of the differences between Sao Paulo, a huge metropolitan city, Rio with its gorgeous natural setting and historic character, and Brasilia, a model city showing its age. We discussed the favelas, huge slums in which the government and criminal gangs have been conducting a virtual war. The cities of Brazil are not only very different, one from another, but also within themselves.

As an aside, one member mentioned a project funded by USAID in which a Brazilian scientist demonstrated that a microorganism living in the above ground parts of sugar cane could fix nitrogen and make it available to the plant. As a result, some varieties of sugar cane grown with the symbiotic organism did not need nitrogen fertilizer. While legumes have been grown without nitrogen fertilizer, the result suggested that food grains such as corn (maize) might also. It was reported that one third of Brazil's sugar cane was grown using the results of this research. Since Brazil uses gasohol in its cars (which now are engineered to work on either gasoline of alcohol), the impacts include more affordable fuel and less emission of greenhouse gases.

We also discussed in several different contexts the great differences among Brazilians. Sao Paulo has universities of international stature and major scientific accomplishments, while one can still find tribal Indians in the Amazon living much as their ancestors had in previous centuries. Brazil has very large economic divides, with some very wealthy families and many very poor ones. It has been called two countries living in one land (Benindia) for the division between its modern, affluent elite and its poor living in third world conditions.

A new member asked if the group had developed a different picture of Brazil and Brazilians as a result of reading the book. It turned out that several of us had been to Brazil, a couple of us had careers in international development and had worked in Brazil, and others had traveled considerably. The club has been meeting for a dozen years, reading a history book a month. Perhaps we had begun reading Brazil on the Rise with a better understanding of people in developing nations than might be expected of a random group of Americans. That said, it seems clear from the discussion that the members of the group did learn about Brazil from the book and emerged from the experience with a different view of that complex society.

We wondered about Brazil's future. A phrase was quoted: "Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be." Brazil has been seen as one of the BRIC emerging economies on a global scene, but it has a long history of economic busts following economic booms. We were unsure whether the economic and social progress of recent decades could be maintained, or whether lurking problems would intervene.

While one member of the group said that she didn't like the book and did not finish reading it, several liked it very much.

Click here for a review of the book posted by one of our members.