My Life Makes Sense Now!

Reading the mutli-volume, multi-author Oxford History of the United States has been quite an adventure. I’ve read seven of the volumes now, and overall I’m quite happy I put this project on my reading schedule. The quality has gone up and down (although it’s been mostly quite high), and the prices have gone up and down (altough they have tended to be low lately). But even with the vicissitudes, as a whole, it’s been a very satisfying and instructive experience.

The most frustrating problem with the adventure is the lag in publication. When I started this Third Decade list, Bruce Schulman’s contribution, covering the years 1896-1929, was scheduled to come out, I believe, in 2016. Great! I wanted to read the volumes in historical order, and Schulman’s would be out by the time I made it that far. But over the years, I’ve seen the expected date of that volume move back and back. Last year, the year I had originally scheduled Schulman, I had to jump ahead and read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear, about the Depression and World War II. By that time, Schulman’s book was scheduled to come out in September of 2024. Soon, I was seeing an ISBN number for it and a page length, and Amazon from Canada and the UK were taking pre-orders. So I thought my reordering would only last one year: just wait until September this year, I thought, and fill in the gap. Alas, September came and went this year, and still no Schulman. I wrote to Oxford Press and got an answer from some nice agent of that company saying that the book would come out in September of 2025. We’ll see.

In any case, I had to change gears again and read one more volume “out of order” (this kind of thing is really only a problem because of my mild-grade OCD). So a few weeks ago I bought the next book in the series, James T. Patterson’s Grand Expectations.

I’ve said before that I must have something in common with the Pulitzer committees, because my favorites had all won the prize for history: Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought (2008), James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1989), and Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear (2000). The ones I would put in the second tier were finalists, and the one I really didn’t like is not mentioned on any Pulitzer page. That streak of harmonized opinion broke this year. I had only one complaint about Freedom from Fear: that, since its years witnessed two greatest-in-all-history events that demanded all the attention, Kennedy had no time to dwell on sports, clothing, movies, literature, leisure, etc. Well, today I just finished reading Grand Expectations, and I declare it even better than Pulitzer-Prize-winning Freedom from Fear partly because it did cover lots of cultural details in addition to the traditional historical subjects of politics, war, and economics – even though there was naturally plenty to report in all three of those areas in the years 1946-1974. But sadly, it did not receive a Pulitzer Prize and wasn’t, as far as I can see, even a finalist. Obviously, the committee didn’t know what it was doing in 1996. Poor Patterson had to settle for the slightly less prestigious Bancroft Prize instead. (I think he’s probably pretty happy with that honor!)

I should not neglect to say that the book was well researched, that the prose was polished, that it made both factual observations and subjective interpretations, and that it gave proper attention to the widely varying contemporary views and opinions on McCarthy, Korea, Vietnam, the Great Society, Nixon, and other controversial people, movements, and events. But the thing that made this book stand out to me is that it’s the first history book I’ve ever read in which I appear: the baby boom gets a long section and many mentions throughout the chapters. And many events I remember from when I was a kid – two Kennedy assassinations, the space race, color television, hippies, bombing in Cambodia, the My Lai massacre, Watergate, and more – finally made sense. OK, wrong phrase. Most of those events will never make sense! But I understood them in historical context for the first time, which is to say that I understand much of my childhood and youth in historical context now.

So maybe I have a bias that the Pulitzer committee doesn’t share. But this book was terrific! I hope I actually get to read Schulman’s book next year. (Boy, all those delays don’t give me much hope of it’s being any good.) But if not, I’m happy to say that the next volume in the series, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore, was also written by James T. Patterson. So whether my date with Restless Giant happens in 2025 or 2026, I know I’m in for some more good, eye-opening history.