Michigan Books

This book is an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in the Illinois and Michigan (I&M) Canal National Heritage Corridor (in Illinois) and its associated parks and forest preserves. The book begins with a nice history of the Canal, and then launches into information on the trail. Starting with Starved Rock State Park, the book then goes through the various sites along the Corridor, giving a nice map of the site, directions on how to get there, and information that was obviously gathered firsthand by the author.

This is a nice book, and (as I already said) an excellent resource. If you are at all interesting in hiking or biking along the I&M Canal path, or are merely interested in parks and forest preserves in North-Central Illinois, then I highly recommend that you get this book!

While I attended Michigan State University right out of high school, I finished my undergraduate work in music at the University of Michigan School of Music (now the School of Music, Theater, and Dance) and later in life, I received my MBA from the U of M Business School (now the Ross School of Business). My wife and I also had our children here in Ann Arbor and raised all of them here. The University plays a big role in the life of Ann Arbor and it has certainly been a significant part of my life.

This book takes us through the various stages of the University's development from the 1860s through the last picture of former President Gerald R. Ford at the beginning of construction of his Presidential Library in 1979. I was in my first year at the music school when the ground breaking took place just down the road a mile or two. And I graduated the same month it was dedicated in April of 1981.

I really like the way this collection shows women participating at the University, albeit in largely segregated ways. And while there weren't many African-Americans at the University, there was a presence and some are represented here. The pictures are centered around medicine, law, the sciences, and athletics. My field, music, is only shown in passing and our school is not even pictured. A disappointment! It is a beautiful building with a lovely pond and would have made a nice addition to the book.

We also see some of the rituals of student life and how the football teams evolved over the decades (just a few representative shots). I love the picture of the big hole being prepared for Michigan Stadium and the shot when the top was at ground level.

A few of the pictures are also in the Historic Photos of Ann Arbor collection, but only a few. Some of these pictures are familiar to those who follow the history of Ann Arbor and the University, but I think some are rarely seen.

Nice collection, helpful captions, good book.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

David Cartwright's "A Historical Commentary On Thucydides gently guides the reader through the historians complex narrative paving the way for making this history a very enjoyable read. This book includes a plethora of maps, definitions and cross-references to help modern readers become more immersed in the text. The greatest of all Greek historians was the Athenian general Thucydides (455-400 B.C.E.). Thucydides' classic work, "History Of The Peloponnesian War", provides us with the historical framework for 5th century Greece, a golden age of intellectual achievement and creativity rarely equaled in human history. This history is by far the best account of the bitter war between Athens and Sparta as well as the only surviving contemporary record of the rise of the Athenian empire. Thucydides as a master story teller doesn't just cover the battle scenes, he records the great political speeches of Pericles, leader of Athens, and Lysander leader of Sparta with great acumen. He is recognized as the first historian to actually go and get eyewitness accounts, visit battlefieilds and research documents and records. This work took him over 20 years and it shows!

The lessons he teaches about imperial over reaching and unreasonable peace settlements are prescient today as they were during his times. President Woodrow Wilson, read this book on his voyage across the Atlantic to the Versailles Peace Conference and vociferously fought the other Allies in making unreasonable demands of the Germans. Wilson learned the dangers that the world would be placed in by backing the Germans into a corner politically and economically from Thucydides book.

I recommend this timeless classic to anyone who is interested in political philosophy, and history. I highly recommend you read it with David Cartwright's "A Historical Commentary On Thucydides.

This edition of the History of Connecticut is a reproduction of an 1857 historical treatis by G. H. Hollister. It is not only an interesting historical account of the colonization of Connecticut, but also an excellent window into the perceptions of 19th Century historians whose interpretations are of course quite different from that of today. Bravo to the University of Michigan University Library that created this, and other, reproductions of primary source historical material.

Living in Virginia, I needed historical information on Lynn, Essex County, MA, for genealogical research purposes. I found the book, a new edition published in 1865 (an update to the 1844 initial publication), provided excellent historical background information regarding each location cited in the title of the book, a year-by-year highlight of the more significant events in each locale, biographical sketches, various tables (to include a list of surnames), and a health index. In all, 620 pages of information I would not have otherwise had but for the University of Michigan Historical Reprint Series.

I bought this book as a reference. It sounded dreary, but I figured it would answer occasional questions.

Instead, it was quite fascinating in a variety of ways. It dealt with the background of Michigan's Finnish immigration (the first and biggest 19th c. migration stream), the decline of the tar trade as sailing ships became obsolete, the dreadful winters and crop failures of the late 1860s.

The settlement of small communities is detailed -- interesting to Upper Peninsula people. I had to stop before the meaty chapters on the Apostolic Finns and the politics and purposes of the 20th c. cooperative movement, headquartered in Superior, Wisconsin. Its relics can be seen throughout Finnish rural areas of Upper Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Probably the author's bi-cultural perspective, being a native of Finland transplanted to Suomi College in Hancock, Michigan, makes this such an interesting book.

Mac-ke-te-be-nessy or Andrew J. Blackbird gives us a personal insight into his life as a lens to view the life of American Indians in Michigan. He explains the legends of his people and the influence of the Christian missionaries on his beliefs. He also writes of the difficulties or what we today call racism that he encountered through his dealings with the US Government and the higher learning institutions of his day (University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University). The history is rich and presented with sincerity. Anyone looking to know more about history from the perspective of a man who lived through it, especially American Indian history in the mid 19th century will benefit greatly by this book.

The text of this book is available in the book, Odawa Language and Legends: Andrew J. Blackbird and Raymond Kiogima.

Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be `objective'. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. Furthermore, in Trotsky's case there is nothing like having a central actor in that drama, who can also write brilliantly and wittily, give his interpretation of the important events and undercurrents swirling around Russia in 1917. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr's History of the Russian Revolution offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920's. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution. For a more journalistic account John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World is invaluable. Trotsky covers some of this material as well. However, if additionally, you want to get a feel for the molecular process of the Russian Revolution in its ebbs and flows down at the base in the masses where the revolution was made Trotsky's is the book for you.

The life of Leon Trotsky is intimately intertwined with the rise and decline of the Russian Revolution in the first part of the 20th century. As a young man, like an extraordinary number of talented Russian youth, he entered the revolutionary struggle against Czarism in the late 1890's. Shortly thereafter he embraced what became a lifelong devotion to a Marxist political perspective. However, except for the period of the 1905 Revolution when Trotsky was chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and later in 1912 when he tried to unite all the Russian Social Democratic forces in an ill-fated unity conference, which goes down in history as the `August Bloc', he was essentially a free lancer in the international socialist movement. At that time Trotsky saw the Bolsheviks as "sectarians" as it was not clear to him at that time that for socialist revolution to be successful the reformist and revolutionary wings of the movement had to be organizationally split. With the coming of World War I Trotsky drew closer to Bolshevik positions but did not actually join the party until the summer of 1917 when he entered the Central Committee after the fusion of his organization, the Inter-District Organization, and the Bolsheviks. This act represented an important and decisive switch in his understanding of the necessity of a revolutionary workers party to lead the revolution.

As Trotsky himself noted, although he was a late comer to the concept of a Bolshevik Party that delay only instilled in him a greater understanding of the need for a vanguard revolutionary workers party to lead the revolutionary struggles. This understanding underscored his political analysis throughout the rest of his career as a Soviet official and as the leader of the struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution. After his defeat at the hands of Stalin and his henchmen Trotsky wrote these three volumes in exile in Turkey from 1930 to 1932. At that time Trotsky was not only trying to draw the lessons of the Revolution from an historian's perspective but to teach new cadre the necessary lessons of that struggle as he tried first reform the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International and then later, after that position became politically untenable , to form a new, revolutionary Fourth International. Trotsky was still fighting from this perspective in defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution when a Stalinist agent cut him down. Thus, without doubt, beyond a keen historian's eye for detail and antidote, Trotsky's political insights developed over long experience give his volumes an invaluable added dimension not found in other sources on the Russian Revolution.

As a result of the Bolshevik seizure of power the so-called Russian Question was the central question for world politics throughout most of the 20th century. That central question ended practically with the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990's. However, there are still lessons, not all negative, to be learned from the experience of the Russian Revolution. Today, an understanding of this experience is the task for the natural audience for this book, the young alienated radicals of Western society.

The central preoccupation of Trotsky's volumes reviewed here and of his later political career concerns the problem of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement and its national components. That problem can be stated as the gap between the already existing objective conditions necessary for beginning socialist construction based on the current level of capitalist development and the immaturity or lack of revolutionary leadership to overthrow the old order. From the European Revolutions of 1848 on, not excepting the heroic Paris Commune, until his time the only successful working class revolution had been in led by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. Why? Anarchists may look back to the Paris Commune or forward to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 for solace but the plain fact is that absent a revolutionary party those struggles were defeated without establishing the prerequisites for socialism. History has indicated that a revolutionary party that has assimilated the lessons of the past and is rooted in the working class allied with and leading the plebian masses in its wake is the only way to bring the socialist program to fruition. That hard truth shines through Trotsky's three volumes. Unfortunately, this is still the central problem confronting the international labor movement today. Read this book many times.

This is the original book by L.L. Langstroth that changed beekeeping forever, so you can enjoy this aspect, but the plus is the added notes that put it into historical and scientific perspective. Dr. Hoopingarner shows great respect and admiration for Langstroth's insights that have since been proven correct and points out the few places that have been clarified over the years.

It is a great book by Langstroth brought up to date by great insights by Hoopingarner.

It used to be available, new, here at Amazon, for considerably less than the used price listed here. I am certain it is still in print.