"Paris, 1919" by Margaret Macmillan

Creating a just and lasting peace after the First World War was, according to Margaret MacMillan's account of the Paris Peace Conference, an impossible endeavor. However, it is still a fascinating and important part of history, and Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World tells its story very well, using the perspectives of nearly every major figure there as a vehicle for the narrative. In additon, the book also provides many succinct descriptions of the major changes that took place around the western world during and after the Conference, from the civil war in Russia to the rise of Turkish nationalism.

Although many parts of the book are broad in scope, MacMillan also looks closely at the world leaders who attended the conference, and the complicated relationships they often had with each other. Her discussion of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George is especially vivid, and gives the mpression of a shrewd, sober, and very competent statesman. Other subjects of close focus are, of course, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France, and President Woodrow Wilson of the US, two men replete with idiosyncracies that both helped and hurt their causes during the discussions.

Despite the political skill of these diplomats, the book gives a strong impression that the conference's goals were simply not achieveable. Though the power of Britain, France, and the United States was unparalleled after the defeat of the Triple Alliance, none of them had the power to dictate world affairs that they thought they had before the conference began. Beset by the conflicting demands and pursuits of the other delegations and each other, their mission quickly went from constructing a strong peace to scraping together a tenuous one that could gain the cooperation of all the parties involved before its presentation to their common enemies. Compromises were made left and right in pursuit of this goal, and many delegations wound up agreeing only with great reluctance and an ill-will that would last all the way up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

However, MacMillan also points out with great emphasis the many other factors that contributed to the world's inability to remain at peace besides the controversial decisions of the Peace Conference. Prominent examples of these include the global depression of the 1930s, Germany's social and political unrest after losing an incredibly costly war, and the tensions created between different racial and ethnic groups in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe after the imperial apparatae of Vienna, Budapest, and Constantinople were no longer around to keep them in check. Though the war had been won, it was not won completely, and as such neither was the peace.

"Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen

Lies My Teacher Told Me argues that the way history is taught to American high school students fails miserably at actually providing them with a well-informed historical perspective. In each chapter, author James W. Loewen highlights a different problem inherent in some of the most widely used US history textbooks in the American public school system, and in how they are used by teachers. In doing so, the book aims to radically change how its readers looks at both their own high school educations, and how they think about US history in general.

Between and betwixt his analyses of the books themselves, Loewen also provides a fair amount of information on the people, places, and events that high school textbooks typically omit Examples include the highly organized and sophisticated Native American societies that existed prior to Columbus's arrival, the brief period immediately after the Civil War in which newly-freed slaves actually enjoyed comparable rights to their white compatriots, and the prominent roles that people and institutions outside of the federal government played in shaping US history throughout the country's existence.

Teaching history, Loewen argues, should not be about transferring facts about the past from teachers' mouths into students' brains. but about getting students involved in the actual process of creating history. Although the book does not provide any substantial ideas of how this can be done, it can help teachers, students, and other people of history-related dispositions gain a much greater clarity of thought on the subject than they had prior. Meanwhile, most high school history textbooks, according to Lies My Teacher Told Me, are having the opposite effect.

The reasons for this are laid out in an exceptionally convincing and well-reasoned manner by the book. Each chapter also discusses a different reason why history today is taught in such a subjective, unstimulating way to high school students, most of which are based on the ulterior motives of publishers, school boards, parents, and even teachers themselves. In the last chapter, Loewen states that "[o]nly in history is stupidity the result of more, not less, schooling." After reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, the truth behind this statement becomes extremely apparent, as does the need to address it.

"The Gate of Heavenly Peace" by Jonathan Spence

A thorough understanding of twentieth-century China and its revolutions can only be attained by studying the ideas that inspired them. Unfortunately, much more is known about Chinese political leaders like Sun Yatsen and Mao Zedong than the intellectuals whose writings inspired these men. Jonathan T. Spence's book, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, however, studies China's twentieth century from their perspective.

In doing so, the book provides an interesting discussion of the role that ideas played in shaping twentieth century Chinese society, using the poetry, novels, written history, newspaper editorials, and other media of the time. The main people in Spence's narrative are Kang Youwei, an academic who rose to prominence at the turn of the century and wrote a controversal book about how to create a utopian society; Lu Xun, the great satirist who preferred to write about the ways things were over writing about how he believed they should be; and Ding Ling, one of the first major voices of Chinese communism, who would later be imprisoned by its leaders after the party rose to power in the late 1940s.

Guaging the role that these individuals played in shaping modern China is difficult, as the effect of the country's scientific and technological evolution is more immediately apparent therein. However, both the nationalists and the communists took a tremendous interest in what China's intellectuals were saying during the revolutions, and worked very hard to censor writers whose works they perceived to go against the government and the way it operated. In the end, the outpouring of philosophical, social, and political ideas that took place at this time may have had a huge role in shaping China as it is today, or none at all.

Either way, though, The Gate of Heavenly Peace is worth reading. The people it discusses were undeniably brilliant, and Spence's study of them provides an invaluable insight into their ideas and the astute observations they made and recorded about their home country during one of its most turbulent and dynamic centuries. A person who seeks dates and events should probably consult a different book, but for those who want to examine China in a slightly more intimate, spiritual way, this one is a very satifactory read.

"Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire" by C.A. Bayly

CA Bayly's Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire provides an incredibly informative and unembellished discussion of how society, politics, and commerce were structured on the Indian subcontinent when the British East India Company first began expanding its influence and control there on a large scale. In addition, it fosters a deeper understanding of what India's transition into being ruled by a colonial regime entailed, and of the complicated means by which the Company managed to establish hegemony for itself over the autonomous and semi-autonomous territories of the waning Mughal Empire. Military might, the book explains, was only one of several of those means.

The book spans the time between the Company's establishment of military strongholds in Madras and Bengal in the mid eighteenth century, and the series of military and civil uprisings that led to the Company's dissolution and the direct assumption of power by the British Government in the mid nineteenth. During this time, the East India Company had managed to expand its control from a few scattered coastal forts to over half of the Indian subcontinent. The ways it did this varied, and were dependent on the particular social, economic, and political setup of each area that the Company operated in.

The most prominent way was with support from indigenous elements of Indian society, which is discussed extensively in Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. By explaining how urban financial elites, peasant leaders, and other collaborating Indians constantly provided the British with financial and political support, Bayly highlights the unique nature of the Empire's presence in India, and how it differed from its counterparts in Australia, North America, and the Caribbean. where the British had operated independently and often in spite of the indigenous populations, In India, which already had very strong and highly advanced social and cultural institutions in place prior to European settlement, they were forced to be much more adaptable and acquiescent to the native population's will.

The amount of information that Bayly is able to convey in 230 pages is remarkable, but the consequently dense style of his writing also muddles some of his points. A minor improvement could have been made by extending the book's length, which would have allowed Bayly to write with a little more clarity when discussing especially complex aspects of his subject. Overall, though, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire is an excellent piece of historical writing that will greatly expand most of its readers' understanding of India during what Bayly calls its "first age of colonialism."