The current president of the US announced yesterday that a former president, Andrew Jackson, was angry about the Civil War and would have avoided it. Never mind that Jackson died 16 years before the war started. The media was buzzing with historians pointing out Trump’s ignorance about history as well as his embrace of a populist role model. The implicit message that a strong-man slaveholder would have gotten it right pointed to a position that the assumptions underlying slavery – the racial hierarchy that allows perceived superior Whites to own perceived inferior Blacks – are acceptable. The claimed causes of the war – slavery vs states’ rights – are of course still debated by historians with different political bends.

What caught my eye, though, was an opinion piece that compared Trump to Kaiser Wilhelm II, both with regard to relentless, manic communications that did not mind being self-contradictory and with regard to “idiotic bellicosity.”

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/germany-used-to-have-a-leader-like-trump-its-not-who-you-think/2017/05/01/0dd9cce8-2e88-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a329730e859a

World War I started during Wilhelm II’s reign, and many historians have wondered, just as about the Civil War, what led to the slaughter of 17 million people, or what could have prevented it. Cohen’s article recommends Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, a learned treatise on the causal circumstances of World War I. On my reading list is a book that covers the same topic, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963.

The reason for my choice is first of all that I yet have to read a Tuchman book that isn’t challenging, informative and deeply influential at the same time that it is a fun read. More importantly, this particular book influenced another president of our nation, J.F.Kennedy, to narrowly skirt another war during the Cuban missile crisis. He read. He processed what he read. The lessons from history mattered. Here is a link to a short analysis of how J.F.K’s reading of Tuchman guided his decision making process.

http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/how-barbara-tuchmans-guns-of-august.html

Photographs are from Berlin, Germany where the last German Emperor and King of Prussia lived.