Conservative Historian Bookshelf - Volume 3

We explore books about the Roman Republic, Colonial America, England, the Ancient Greeks and more.  

Transcript

Conservative Historian Bookshelf: Version 3.0 

August 2025

Typically, I name specific books, but in this version, I will lead with authors. I want to note that, though there are certainly authors here of conservative bent, such as Milton Friedman, I have selected these books more as exemplars of my conservative historiography ethos: start with facts based on primary and secondary source material, sift all the facts together, then build a narrative.  This is opposed to the now common practice of Progressive historians and many on the right, who begin with a belief or statement, then cherry-pick facts, or make them up, to build their stories.  One is history, the other is propaganda.   

Stephen Platt

Part of the fun of reading Stephen Platt’s books about 19th-century China was how new it all was to me.  The characters and situations surrounding the so-called Taiping Rebellion, also known as the Taiping Civil War by Platt, were the most devastating Civil War in history in terms of the number of deaths.  

A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China.

As one of the most pivotal events in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. 

Looking forward to reading Platt’s The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II.  

David Parnell 

I had the opportunity to chat with David Parnell earlier this year. If you are interested in the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, David is your go-to author.  I thought Justinian’s Men was the more conventional book, but my favorite was Belisarius and Antonina.  The latter provides insight into two very influential figures during the reign of Justinian: Belisarius’ wife and the empress Theodora.  

Benjamin Menardi, writing for the Naval War College, states, “Notably, however, Platt’s discussion of the evolution of the relationship between Britain and China is driven by the actions of individuals of both nations from 1759 to 1842. Platt asserts that the Opium War in no way resulted from an inevitable clash of cultures, much less a premeditated imperialist plot; rather, the war represents a tragic culmination of mounting domestic crises taxing the resources of the Qing Empire coupled with the successful lobbying of the British Parliament by private merchants to protect their illicit businesses, despite many Westerners’ genuinely felt, albeit misinformed, admiration of Chinese civilization.” 

Marc Morris

Back in the Permian period, even before Dinosaurs walking the Earth, I did my senior Independent Study on the three Edwards of England.  I had noted that they began in the reign of King John and his son, Henry III, losing the entire Angevin Empire.  But then came along Edward I.  In my study, I included his son and grandson: Edward II and Edward III. I observed a medieval arc in the lives of all three, from a troubled Kingdom to an English Empire, and by the end of Edward III, back to a troubled kingdom.   

That was over 30 years ago, so imagine my excitement upon encountering Marc Morris’ A Great and Terrible King about Edward I.  I read it in about three days and was hungry for more.  I then moved on to different books, including one on King John.  More recently, it was his work on the Norman Conquest.  But I think my favorite is his work on the Anglo-Saxons.  I have a decent knowledge of the English monarchy, ranging from William the Conqueror to George VI, but before William, it was all new.  Names such as Edwin of Northumbria, Offa of Mercia, and post-Alfred Wessex rulers, including Athelstan, Edgar, Edmund Ironsides, and Ethelred the Unready.  

It is not just Morris’s supple writing style but also his research.  During that last period, there was very little source material, so much of the work relied on archeology.  Yet Morris makes the time come alive.  

Peter Wilson

The Tragedy of the Thirty Wars is indeed epic, and for the student of either that war or 17th-century European politics, this is the defining book.  My only issue is that at over 1,024 pages, Wilson left nothing on the cutting room floor.  From the vagaries of politics in Transylvania to a near book-length story about the Danish House of Oldenburg, Wilson’s incredible research is all there.  Yet, even as a consumer of politics, I felt more like the guy who had too much turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving than the guy who ate just enough food.  And amidst the detail, Wilson never really steps back and says what it all means.  

Mitchell McNaylor, reviewing the book for HistoryNet, states, “For the avid reader of military history, the Thirty Years’ War has everything—European Realpolitik, religious conflict, dramatic characters, military innovation, and violence enough to satisfy the most lurid imagination or touch the coldest heart. University of Hull history professor Peter H. Wilson’s volume is a superbly written, thorough introduction to the most violent, and arguably most confusing, conflict in European history.” 

Helen Carr

The Red Prince: The Life of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster

Gaunt was the son of Edward III, brother to the Black Prince, father to Henry IV, and the sire of all those Tudors. He’s had a pretty bad press: supposed usurper of Richard II’s crown and the focus of hatred in the Peasants’ Revolt (they torched his home, the Savoy Palace). Helen Carr will paint a complex portrait of a man who held the levers of power on the English and European stage, passionately upheld chivalric values, pressed for the Bible to be translated into English, patronised the arts … and, if you follow Shakespeare, gave the most beautiful oration on England (‘this sceptred isle… this blessed plot’). An engrossing drama of political machinations, violence, romance, and tragedy played out at the cusp of a new era.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett 

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

As King James I’s favorite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor, and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor.  A dazzling figure on horseback and a skillful player of the political game, Buckingham rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. He became one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life.

Buckingham is the classic exemplar of being good at one thing, but being ingratiating to vulnerable Stuarts does not mean excellence in another.  As high and fast as Buckingham rose, it is astounding how tone deaf he was in two key areas: dealing with Parliament and with War.  Though he was instrumental in building a fleet that could replace the Elizabethan one, his knowledge of maintaining a navy, an army, and both strategy and tactics was appalling.  He suffered the greatest calamity any Commander could: he never learned from his mistakes and kept on repeating them.  All of this comes out in Hughes Hallet’s work.  

Matthew J. Tuininga

The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People

Over several decades beginning in 1620, tens of thousands of devout English colonists known as Puritans came to America. They believed that bringing Christianity to the natives would liberate them from darkness. Daniel Gookin, Massachusetts’s missionary superintendent, called such efforts a “war of the Lord,” a war in which Christ would deliver captive souls from Satan’s bondage.

When Puritan soldiers slaughtered hundreds of indigenous men, women, and children at Fort Mystic in 1637, during the Pequot War, they believed they were doing God’s will. The same was true during King Philip’s War, perhaps the bloodiest war in American history. The Puritan clergyman Increase Mather described this conflict, too, as a “war of the Lord,” a war in which God was judging the enemies of his people.

And I always include Thomas Cahill, who we sadly lost in 2022.  He was best known for The Hinges of History series, a prospective seven-volume series in which the author recounts formative moments in Western civilization. Every year, I choose one or two of these for rereading.  This year, it was How the Irish Saved Civilization and Sailing the Wine Dark Sea. The first appears to be a history of Ireland, and you do get that, but it is a dichotomy of thought between one of the last Romans, Augustine, and Hippo, and one of the first post-Romans, St. Patrick, and their diverging views of Christianity.  Throw in the end of the Roman Empire in the West, and you get an incredible portrait of 5th and 6th-century Western Europe.  

Sailing the Wine Dark Sea is a more comprehensive history of Greece, ranging from the end of the Mycenaean era and the advent of Homer in the 9th century BC to the Roman conquest in the 1st century BC.  

Stephen Greenblatt

In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked an ancient manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the most excellent book hunter of the Renaissance. His discovery, Lucretius’ ancient poem On the Nature of Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years.

From the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the dark chambers of monastic scriptoria during the Middle Ages to the cynical, competitive court of a corrupt and dangerous pope, Greenblatt brings Poggio’s search and discovery to life in a way that deepens our understanding of the world we live in now.  Betsy Reed said of this book: “Greenblatt’s story of the unleashing of the pleasure principle on the European world after the discovery of Lucretius conveys his passion for discovery, and displays his brilliance as a storyteller.”  

Horace Samuel Merrill 

Here is an older book. Written back in 1957 by Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party paints a critical moment in the history of the Republic when states’ rights, small government advocates embodied in the Bourbon Democrats rose in the 1880s only to fall some 15 years later in the rout of the election of 1894.  As frequent listeners know, I do not like the moniker the Gilded Age, but since that misapplied term has pride of place, then for those who like this period, Samuel Merrill’s book is a great one.  

Milton Friedman

For those intrepid historians of economics, you cannot go wrong with the most outstanding economist in American history, one Milton Friedman, here joined by Anna Jacobson Schwartz in their epic A Monetary History of the United States – 1867 – 1960.  Written in 1964, Roy Harrod in the Review of Books noted, “This history of the dollar for nearly a hundred years is a massive piece of erudition, exhibiting the highest scholarly qualities. Immense work must have been involved in its composition. Two aspects may be particularly noted for praise. One is the great detail of the treatment. The 93 years are broken down in various significant ways, e.g., into business cycles and longer trend periods. But there is also a year-by-year treatment, and sometimes the authors give careful consideration to the succession of events in periods of months or weeks. Often, one gets to know the pattern of a particular year with great intimacy. This painstaking approach yields far richer knowledge than could be obtained by a mechanical treatment of long time series. The peculiar circumstances of a year, including, perhaps, institutional changes, are often relevant to a correct understanding.”

Cicero

And since I am presenting old books for your conservative shelf, let me go a little older than Friedman or Samuel Merrill.  Sadly, any speeches by Cato the Younger will have to be second-hand through writers such as Cicero, so that is where we will go.  Cicero: de Officiis or On Duty outlines Cicero’s views of virtue and Duty using Cato as an exemplar.  “But all that is morally right rises from some one of four sources: it is concerned either (1) with the full perception and intelligent development of the true; or (2) with the conservation of organized society, with rendering to every man his due, and with the faithful discharge of obligations assumed; or (3) with the greatness and strength of a noble and invincible spirit; or (4) with the orderliness and moderation of everything that is said and done, wherein consist temperance and self-control.” 

Rob Goodman, Jimmy Soni

For those who want a Cato biography, I would recommend Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Julius Caesar.  Marcus Porcius Cato, known as Cato the Younger, was a Stoic philosopher and a Roman senator — and the last man standing when Rome’s Republic fell to tyranny. His blood feud with Caesar began in the chamber of the Senate, played out on the battlefields of a world war, and ended when he took his own life rather than live under a dictator. Centuries of thinkers, writers, and artists have drawn inspiration from Cato’s example. Saint Augustine and the early Christians were moved and challenged by his example. Dante, in his poem The Divine Comedy, chose Cato to preside over the souls who arrive in Purgatory. George Washington so revered him that he staged the play Cato to revive the spirits of his troops at Valley Forge. And of course, his defense of the Republic against the coming of tyranny inspired the 18th-century authors of Cato’s Letters, which in turn were read by many of the American Founders and provided the name of the Cato Institute. Now, in Rome’s Last Citizen, Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni deliver the first modern biography of this stirring figure.

I hope you like these choices. For more, check out Conservative Bookshelves 1 and 2 in my archives.