History That Doesn't Suck

While the movie isn't a scene-for-scene lift from author Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, it's close enough that Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, sued the filmmakers for copyright infringement.

Bram Stoker's Dracula tells the tale of an ancient vampire who leaves his homeland to terrorize Victorian Britain.

On May 26, 1897, the British publishing house Archibald Constable & Company released a new book. Bound in cheap yellow cloth, it was written by a little-known Irish theater manager living in London.

But Bram Stoker's Dracula would change the world of fiction forever. Stoker's novel was an elaborate synthesis of folklore, social commentary, and psychological thrills that melded legend with history and modern science with age-old nightmares.

And I was stunned at what a treasure chest of themes and tropes were in there. And the book just kept unpacking and exploding and exploding. It's just an amazing gothic thriller.

See, while the movie isn't a scene-for-scene lift from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, it's close enough that Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, sued the German film company, Prana, for copyright infringement.

Bram Stoker's Dracula. If you've never read it, it totally holds up.

Based on collected legends, folklore, and some history, Irish author Bram Stoker tells the ultimate vampire tale.

We follow Jonathan Harker to the Transylvanian castle of the vampire, Count Dracula.

The count then uses Jonathan to get himself to London, only to then prey on the young professional soon-to-be bride, Mina.

I really did like Margaret Macmillan's point in her book Paris 1919 that their successors, they made choices. So yes, we shouldn't just look at the Versailles Treaty and blame everything as though the dominoes had to fall, but the domino was not. Yeah. It was a big part of that. It set up the hyper...

And it's these sorts of instances where I contrast this to the Congress of Vienna and the words of Abraham Lincoln actually come to mind for me, with malice toward none, with charity for all. When you go tooth for tooth, you do that in... It doesn't end well. It never does. You have to go into it saying, I get that I'm really angry at you because of all this, but we have to find a way to work together. How do we build a better future? Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, I'll go with another analogy. It's like a fishtail in a car, right? Yeah. That just keeps swinging and swinging. It takes enormous strength to do what the leaders of Europe did in Vienna in 1815. To not pile all the blame. Yeah. To not pile the blame, to not say, well, we're going to make them pay. We're just going to crush you. And again, I totally get the strategic thought, the idea that we will neuter Germany so that they can't. Yeah. In doing so. Yeah. Really, Woodrow had it right on that whole self-determination point, allowing nations to be themselves. Yeah. And of course, to bring this full circle, we should discuss Woodrow, the idealist who in so many ways wouldn't compromise, yet he would readily compromise on that and many other points. Again, trying to get into his head, right? It's easy to point out where Woodrow became a hypocrite. Where he fell short. Yeah, and fell short. We can do that all day long with- Of course, but we could do that with everyone. Yes. Yes, we could do that with any villain, hero, doesn't matter, right? It's easy to do. To understand whether or not we agree or condone is to grasp how deeply he believed in the idea of the League of Nations. Yeah. And in his mind, if he could just get that across the finish line, we're golden because the League of Nations is going to fix everything. It's going to solve all the problems. Yes. Will be fixed. We'll all hold hands and sing Kumbaya. So it's okay, I can compromise on these other issues, but I can't do is compromise on the League, which he then, as we saw stubbornly, would not. He compromised in Paris to get the League, but he wouldn't compromise in the United States to get the Senate to approve the treaty, which as I just had this discussion with my students this last week, as I'm teaching my Middle East class and we were talking through covering the Iran nuclear agreement under the Obama administration and discuss the difference between binding treaties versus executive orders and so forth. Woodrow Wilson's looking for a binding treaty. The president, yes, oversees our foreign policy and secretary of state assists with that. But per the constitution, it's the Senate that approves the treaty. Yeah. So if you can't get- If you can't get them on board with it, it doesn't matter. Yep. It's toast. And as we know, he didn't. The agony. It's so ironic. It's super ironic. It's the only thing he wouldn't compromise on. Yep. So he gets his Nobel Peace Prize for the idea and we get the League of Nations. It's not like it doesn't exist. The United States is not a part of it. It is not. It super, super is not a part of it.

if they could have done much better, they certainly could have done much worse.

I'm I think about Victor Hugo, it's a it's a work of fiction, but his note for them to Pali that he was highlighting a forgotten forsaken overlooked Cathedral that most of us in the 21st century and In my childhood in the 20th We couldn't fathom Paris without it and the whole world mourned When the Cathedral caught fire a few years back

He soon publishes them along with the stories of the real people living in these deplorable conditions. Readers devour the stories, and in the 1890s, The Danish Immigrant produces a whole book packed with yet more stories, photographs, and drawings. It's called How the Other Half Lives, and the impact is both immediate and massive.

I have read your book and I have come to help.

I have come to write the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the labor movement.

Chicago will be ours.

I aimed at the public's heart and by accident, I hit it in the stomach.

the quote-unquote need for more land, that is, living space, or Lebensraum, for the expanding German people, as described by Adolf in Mein Kampf.

And yet Paxton's book, The Anatomy of Fascism, which is kind of the classic quintessential work, if you want to understand fascism, I highly recommend reading it.

And enduring literature like F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby...if you read it in high school but have forgotten, or if you've never read it, we get right to the major themes of it and why it's still relevant today.

But it's a very dark novel. And part of what makes it so great is the way that the darkness in it gives gravitas to what otherwise would be superficial party scenes.

But what makes Gatsby so great is that what Fitzgerald did was he suspended two things together. . . Basically, it's about the tension between America's illusions and its realities.

So if you ask me the question of why does Gatsby endure, Gatsby captures that constant need to reinvent our own idealism, to try to keep striving, to try to keep pushing forward.

Thomas Flexner, who is basically the god of George Washington.

He literally wrote the book on Washington. The multi-volume books. The books. Yeah, the multi-volume. Plural.

So you need to know that if you look at Chernow and you think, wow, that's a long, that's a long book. That's a dense book. That is. That is the Reader's Digest version of what Thomas Flexner did in terms of biographies.

Thomas Flexner mentioned there being 20 enslaved people.

an asylum for mankind, a quote from Common Sense.

Three years later in 1848, Friedrich serves as junior author and the primarily Karl Marx authored Communist Manifesto.

In this and future writings like Das Kapital, Karl explains his scientific socialism.

But don't let John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, make you think that all of Oklahoma is forced to abandon their homes for the green fields of California.

Between widespread newspaper coverage and later books, like Steinbeck's much-celebrated The Grapes of Wrath, the Okies and Arkies, as these dust bowl-fleeing migrant workers are derogatorily called, become a greatly exaggerated presence, an imagined nuisance in the minds of many Californians.

I'm reading the book. You are very slowly because it's a sad story.

Yeah, like and they go into a lot of detail about what happened to these girls in the book. And it's just really sad.

Oh, like, yeah, I'm trying to imagine. They're like, your bones are like breaking. And you have no idea why.

They didn't know why. Because radium was supposed to be this miracle, you know, and we can look back and say, oh, my gosh, how did I know that? But we've done this many times over.

It's you only know what you know. Exactly.

That's my half a sentence and not doing full justice summary of The Call Of the Wild.

And a reference to the golden age of piracy is spot on because the modern day pirates that are rum runners do a lot of business among the same group of islands that those early 18th century pirates used.

Good God, no wonder historian W.J. Rohrabach's book on this era of American history is titled The Alcoholic Republic.

You, my son, have shown me God. Your kiss upon my cheek has made me feel the gentle touch of him who leads us on.