PHR 12 (06/07): Getting Things Done!
"What if you could dedicate fully 100 percent of your attention to whatever was at hand, at your own choosing, with no distraction?"
Although my primary focus in PHR will always remain to provide readers with guidance in finding the best history books ever written, since I have found that my ability to sustain this newsletter along side all my other chosen obligations has been directly related to how well I have implemented the advice of a man named David Allen, whose book, "Getting Things Done," represents the nearest thing to a revolution in personal workflow management as I can imagine. It would not be an exagerration to say that it is because of this book that Powell History Recommends has returned to a monthly schedule. And in connection to the usual theme of PHR, I can honestly say that if you're looking to make time to read more history books, you'll need his guidance to do so!
The virtues of this book are many, but I will focus on just one that is worth the price of the book a hundred times over. Allen's advice is grounded in a remarkable understanding of the identity of consciousness, and in particular, its limitations. Allen's advice flows from his recognition of the factors that create clutter in people's minds and sap their motivation to pursue and sustain organizational systems.
Among these is the presence of "stuff" in one's mind, which he defines as "anything you have allowed into your psychological world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step." It is generally the presence of so much stuff in our lives that renders our myriad goals into what one of Allen's clients called "an amorphous blob of undoability!"
The answer to this problem is an efficient procedure to capture and process the "stuff" in our lives, remove it all from our consciousness, and puts it into an organizational system. The result is a level of clarity and definition that frees your mind from the lower-level value tracking that it otherwise insists on performing at the expense of the focus you need to be optimally productive. Although there's nothing easy about the procedure itself, and the system, like any other, requires maintenance, the payoff is very real.
(I'd like to thank my friend Frode for recommending this book to me, when I really needed it.)
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AbeBooks.Com. |
PHR 11 (05/07): Reconstruction and the Constitution, by John William Burgess
John William Burgess strikes again! In a previous issue of PHR, I recommended a book called "The Middle Period" by this terrific author. Although that book falls short of a proper periodization or abstract integration of the time between the Missouri Compromise and the Secession of the Cotton States, what struck me about Burgess's effort was that it involves the premise of periodization, which, as my students know, is the key to properly integrating history.
Recently I read another title by Burgess, "Reconstruction and the Constitution," and yet again Burgess delivers a uniquely well-crafted narrative that relays both compelling details and a fascinating theme. In this case, I agree with Burgess's basic idea: that northern leaders, including Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson failed to grasp the intellectual foundations for the proper re-integration of the South once it was conquered. Burgess presents an interesting analysis of the nature of a federal system, and argues for what I think is a basically a correct view of both the secession movement and the proper approach to reconstruction. This is exciting stuff, especially given that the Civil War remains such a topic of heated debate, including among Objectivists! Grab it quick, because my students are already snapping up copies from dealers around the internet!
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AbeBooks.Com. |
PHR 10 (02/07): Recommended Bibliography for Twentieth Century America
The quality of historical pedagogy exhibits a precipitous drop after the close of the "long nineteenth century" in 1914, which makes it nearly impossible for the student of history to obtain a clear, integrated perspective on the basic narrative of American history in the twentieth century, despite its relative simplicity as a historical period. A proper narrative introduction to the entire period does not yet exist, but there are relatively useful sources on the period up to the cold war, which I am happy to recommend. Probably the best telling of the story is by William Catton and Arthur Link, whose American Epoch is comparable to Palmer and Colton's excellent single volume history of the West in being both readable and reasonably comprehensive. As a single reference is exceeds all others in my experience, but other sources are excellent complements. First among them is Foster Dulles's Twentieth Century America. To work one's way, back and forth between the two volumes is a good way to progress through the story, and to fill the gaps that exist in each. The following list is designed to provide the ambitious reader with a relatively complete set of references, whose bibliographies represent the next step for the reader.
BEST FIRST HISTORY
Link, Arthur S., and Catton, William, B., American Epoch: A History of the
United States Since the 1890s (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1967)
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AbeBooks.Com. |
BEST SECOND HISTORY
Dulles, Forster R., Twentieth Century America (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1945)
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AbeBooks.Com. |
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Patterson, James, America in the Twentieth Century: A History
(New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)
Wish, Harvey, Contemporary America (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1955)
FOR SPECIFIC PERIODS
World War I
Hayes, Carlton, A Brief History of the Great War (MacMillan, New York, 1926)
American Between the Wars
Faulkner, Harold, From Versailles to the New Deal (Yale Univesity Press, 1950)