Experimental Blog #26

Comments on 2 books

"Franklin Pierce" by Michael F. Holt

The author of this book, possibly the briefest in "The American Presidents" series, writes that although Franklin Pierce was one of the "most amiable and congenial" and personally charming men to ever become an American president, he served from 1853 to 1857, he is usually ranked by historians as one of the 6 to 8 worst because of "his obsession with preserving the unity of the Democratic Party." He did what he did by consistently catering to, or appeasing the southern Democratic slaveholders. Franklin Pierce was from New Hampshire. However, could the Democratic Party, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slaveholder; and later identified, almost to the present day, with the politics of Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee slaveholder, really have been expected to do anything to limit the expansion of slavery?
Another book in this series claimed that Zachary Taylor, who was a southern Whig, and who was inaugarated in 1849 and died about 20 months later in 1850, was America's last chance to avoid civil war, because Zachary Taylor, although a large scale slaveholder, was sincerely opposed to the expansion of slavery to the new territories.
However, would northerners have accepted a serious and firm enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Laws, including the suppression of the famous Underground Railroad? And could Zachary Taylor, had he lived, have persuaded enough southern slaveholders to accept that there would be no more new slave states?
"And so the war came," said Abraham Lincoln years later, in 1865, when the war was almost over.


"The Cave Painters" - Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists by Gregory Curtis

For about 1000 generations, or about 20,000 years, as far as we know; that is, from about 32,000 to 10,000 years ago; anatomically modern Europeans created an artistic record of cave paintings and engravings. Almost 350 such caves have been discovered so far, and except for a "widely scattered few", they are all located in southern France and northern Spain.
These cave paintings and engravings reveal the abundant large animal world in which their creators lived. The animals are represented in great, but fluctuating numbers; sometimes in "huge vivid herds" of horses, reindeer, bison, mammoths, cows, bulls, bears, and even a rhinoceros.