Perhaps it is a consequence of being raised by two teachers who were avid readers and loved to ostentatiously label themselves “autodidacts” and “bibliophiles.” Even when I am busy teaching summer classes, working on book manuscripts, or writing curriculum for the next school year, the summer always pulses with possibilities for leisurely self-improvement.
Virtually every major American newspaper or magazine regales its readers with a list of “Summer Reading” or “Things to Read at the Beach This Summer.” Breezy mysteries or accessible literary fiction are always fun, especially in a swimming pool or under an umbrella on the beach while sipping exotic cocktails.
But here is a serious suggestion: use your remaining leisure time this summer to read a weighty biography about a significant American.
I know. A seven-hundred-page tome with a cold painting of an enigmatic 18th century figure on the cover may not sound particularly inviting or fun. But digging down to discover the wellspring of another human being’s life, especially those who lived lives of deep significance for the American experiment, is rewarding in ways that are utterly surprising.
So, let’s start with a brutal truth: many modern Americans are deeply ignorant of their own history. Many of us, especially the young and the academic, are mired in the lens of the moment, ensnared and paralyzed by a chic cynicism about American history. Broad generalizations abound about “Founding Fathers” while hyper-critiquing has become normal practice, from the 1619 Project’s endeavor to “reframe” the country’s founding to the enduring appeal of Howard Zinn’s critique that traditional history is simply “fundamental nationalist glorification of country.”
Use this summer to find out for yourself.
Politicians and pundits with an agenda will always cherry-pick information to advance their own aims. One of the reasons the Roman Empire was in possession of so many home-grown historians—Tacitus, Suetonius, Livy, Ploybius—is because they were hyper aware of just how unique and special their own civilization was in the annals of history.
Likewise, modern America is littered with extraordinary historians and biographers. If you want titanic volumes written with exceptional prose and research, read any one of Ron Chernow’s books about Washington, Grant, or the inspiration for one of the most popular musicals of our time, Hamilton. If you want to know about all of the founding fathers and how they inter-reacted with one another, both Joseph Ellis and Gordon Wood are encyclopedic in their treatment of the founding generation. If you want singular devotion to a subject, read any of Robert Caro’s exhaustive books about Lyndon Johnson who Caro has been writing about for four decades. At the age of 86 he is working on his final installment of the LBJ series. Both David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin write splendidly about the distant and recent, from John Adams and Harry Truman to FDR and Abraham Lincoln.
One of the most pleasant elements of reading a dense biography is that it quickly deprives us of the notion that historic actors are somehow magically imbued with knowledge of how their words and actions will be interpreted in the future. The nauseating rhetoric from progressives about always being on “the right side of history” assumes a providential omniscience that no humble reader of history could ever attain.
For example, in just the past two decades the rankings of presidents have significantly changed. When I was a kid (not that long ago, mind you), Andrew Jackson was still considered a top fifteen or “near great” president. Back then, he was the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, the original presidential populist, the man who quelled the Nullification Crisis and famously toasted during a ceremony celebrating Jefferson’s birthday, “Our Federal Union! It must be preserved.” In the latest presidential ranking, he has fallen to twenty-two. Likewise, Eisenhower was once seen as aloof and inconsequential, a forgettable middleman between the consequential presidencies of Truman and JFK. Today, he ranks higher than either man.
So, what changed?
We did. We changed in what we value and what we consider to be praiseworthy. No one knows how we will look in fifty or a hundred years. Learning the deep and vivid details of the past teaches us this.
Thus, reading deeply allows us to understand the fickle and ephemeral nature of human judgment. It empowers us to appreciate how men and women from ages past can be simultaneously extraordinary and flawed. It serves as an antidote to the pernicious notion that Americans from previous eras can never be celebrated if their sins coincide with our most potent modern grievances. Reading deeply allows us to understand that civilizations advance when agency is wedded to idealism and it does us no good to haughtily conclude that history before 2015 was merely a parade of unenlightened clowns.
Beloved American historian David McCullough often quotes Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, who once observed, “history is philosophy taught with examples.”
We read history to anchor and fortify ourselves within the generational chorus of our nation’s story, to define our role and hopefully magnify our voice. This is the ultimate act of American-style optimism, to believe the horizon of our ideals is righteous but that the march forward requires constant vigilance.
As John F. Kennedy once said, “I can assure you that we love our country, not for what it was, though it has always been great—not for what it is, though of this we are deeply proud—but what it someday can, and, through the efforts of us all, someday will be.”
Jeremy S. Adams is the author of the recently-released Amazon best-selling book Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation. He has taught American civics for 24 years in Bakersfield, California and was the 2014 California Teacher of the Year (DAR). You can follow him on Twitter @JeremyAdams6.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.