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Margaret MacMillan is the author of the international bestsellers The War that Ended Peace, Nixon in China and Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize. She is also the author of The Uses and Abuses of History. The past provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, she is now the warden of St. Antony’s College and a professor of international history at Oxford University and a professor of history at the University of Toronto.
History's People: Personalities and the Past
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ISBN-13:
9781487000073
- Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
- Publication date: 09/08/2015
- Series: CBC Massey Lectures
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 304
- File size: 2 MB
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In this year’s highly anticipated Massey Lectures, internationally acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan gives her own personal selection of the great figures of the past, women and men, who have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times — and sometimes with huge consequences.
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The New York Times Book Review - Amy Finnerty
MacMillan offers us a guide to these vivid figures, using characteristics like hubris, curiosity and daring to make thematic connections among them…Avoiding arid timelines, MacMillan…instead provides intimate human encounters. She seems to love sifting through the revealing details. "I want to gossip," she confesses—and so do we.Publishers Weekly
★ 08/31/2015In this erudite analysis of major historical figures, MacMillan (Paris 1919) spotlights individuals who have either made history or documented it. Each chapter focuses on one of five qualities: persuasion, hubris, daring, curiosity, and observational power. The first three chapters present those who have “left their mark on history,” while the last two showcase history’s recorders, who shared a “refreshing freedom from the prejudices and judgments of their own times.” MacMillan’s more surprising choices are her most interesting. While Hitler and Stalin are obvious examples of political hubris, Woodrow Wilson is an idiosyncratic—and more fascinating—choice. Nixon, hardly the most the charismatic of American presidents, is convincingly portrayed as a leader of considerable daring in his outreach to Mao’s China. MacMillan’s fascination with history’s more curious observers builds the book’s strongest chapters. Through describing the lives of people such as Victor Klemperer, a German Jewish academic who survived and documented life in Nazi Germany, or Count Harry Kessler, one of the great record keepers of European life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, MacMillan deftly and engagingly shows that history is a process of capturing the minutiae of life as much as time’s epic strokes. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"[O]ne of our era’s most talented historians.” — Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of StateKirkus Reviews
2015-08-17An acclaimed historian gives her take on some of the important people who have shaped the present world. In this compendium of the 2015 Massey Lectures, MacMillan (International History/Oxford Univ.; The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, 2013, etc.) analyzes a variety of historical global leaders—e.g., Otto von Bismarck and Franklin Roosevelt—and gives snippets of their early lives and the ways their upbringings influenced their decisions. She studies the human trait of hubris and how people such as Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Margaret Thatcher were victims of their own arrogance. The author commemorates adventurers and explorers, as well as those willing to go out on a limb, for their daring and bravado. She discusses Richard Nixon and his start of a relationship with China and Samuel de Champlain, who bravely crossed the Atlantic nearly 30 times in his quest to explore the coast of North America and the St. Lawrence River. MacMillan also considers the roles women played as they accompanied their husbands to North America and India or set out on their own to places like Albania. The author adeptly navigates a host of personal journals and diaries, which have given modern historians fresh insight into the everyday comings and goings of ordinary people. Without these writings, we would not be able to fully comprehend certain historic moments—e.g., the years leading up to and through World War II as seen through the eyes of a German Jew. Although some of the people MacMillan has chosen are not well-known, their accomplishments are no less important than those well-recognized by first or last name. Her prose is succinct and informative, and even when her transitions from one person to another are not the smoothest, the information imparted is solid. A concise, educational overview of some of the men and women who have carved out spots in the annals of history and why they should be remembered. Fans of the author are in for another treat.