Any History Readers?

The book club of which I've now been a part for a few months is reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the world before the War: 1890-1914. It's not an easy read for me, since my knowledge of Europe at that time is minimal. I already knew a few of its writers, such as Oscar Wilde, to whom is given numerous pages. His treatment following the larger public's discovery of his flagrant homosexual displays is compared to that of Lord Arthur Somerset who was allowed to live comfortably after being found in a homosexual brothel raided by the police. Both were at fault, but only one was treated harshly.

It's not difficult to see how terribly one-sided was the power of privileged society in those days. "It was a time when the world of privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of protest was 'heaving in its pain, its power and its hate,'" reads the front flap. In other words, the gulf fixed between the haves and have-nots was enormous.

The book was, in its early stages, written as essays for a magazine, then blended together to form glimpses into personalities of privilege -- especially Prime Ministers Salisbury and Balfour, the terrorists of that era, imperialism and how the U.S. caught the fever, the Dreyfus Affair, assassinations, the Boer War, the Hague peace conferences, the beginnings of the labor party and so much more.

I am, so far past 100 pages because almost everything is new to me. I get easily distracted from completing the reading because I take one aspect and fly with it, reading all I can find online about a particular aspect of those times. Learning of the antagonism between the Uitlanders and Boers took me into an hour long side road.

The Dreyfus Affair was a major incident that split opinions enough to attract the war that did arrive.
Anyone familiar with this history? I have a week and a half to finish, and won't, I don't think. There's so much to learn, and I love learning it.

The second chapter, which details the assassinations by anarchists reminds me of today in regard to suicide bombers, only in the 1890s anarchists did not kill themselves in the process, but rather knew they were headed for death as the result of their actions. It was a time of false hope, thinking goals could be reached by terror, by murdering the elite, done by individuals, not groups, and in one case by a young man who flew from Ohio to assassinate a King.
David

 

This period is also not my expertise. But I did enjoy reading the first volume of William Manchester's The Last Lion: William Spencer Churchill. That volume also provides insight into the lives of the English aristocracy as well was Churchill's own family. Excellent reading if you're interested in Churchill. I confess to losing interest in the second volume, but I'm not fond of political history.

 

The development of political, psychological and social isms is an interest of mine. For instance, reading the history of mental health care is as attention grabbing as a true crime novel. The evolution of political thought carries with it the thought life of societies during particular periods, and that I'm open to learn as well. I'm a bit of a movement freak. Literary movements are also intensely interesting. Here is just a small portion of my personal library: