One problem with writing the history of celebrity is that that history is not over yet. In fact, you might say that we are living through a period of fundamental change in the meaning of celebrity. The rise of social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) means that you no longer need to have a press agent to publicize yourself; an ordinary person supplying pictures and videos and sound bites of herself is effectively acting like a celebrity in the micro-world of her acquaintances. At the same time, the popularity of reality TV has blurred the lines between celebrity and anonymity from the other direction: reality "stars" have the recognizability of celebrities, but are in no way glamorous or enviable. On the contrary, the purpose of celebrities like Heidi Montag or Snooki from "Jersey Shore" is primarily to be mocked and looked down on -- they are more like our culture's court jesters than the demigods of the silver screen that Inglis grew up with. In his paeans to Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant, Inglis expresses nostalgia for a kind of celebrity that has largely vanished, belonging to a time when movie stars were "not only larger than the life they represented on screen. They were also somehow representative of their nation, available to all who watched them as picturing the impossible version of the best selves audiences could hardly be in everyday life."

But as Inglis shows in the historical sections of the book, modern celebrity has always been an unstable compound of admiration, envy, and contempt. Lola Montez, the mid-19th-century erotic dancer whose conquests included the King of Bavaria, comes across in Inglis' description as a proto-reality star: "an ungifted, tarty fake who, without any insight into what she was doing, intuited how to make herself into a celebrity while lacking talent, opportunity, birth, and money." If Montez was a celebrity, however, does the same word really apply to some of the other figures in Inglis' history -- like Baudelaire, whom he describes as holding "a singular niche in the pantheon of [French] national celebrity," or, at the other extreme, Mussolini and Hitler ("the dictator is no doubt the supreme celebrity")? As these examples show, Inglis does not distinguish clearly enough between celebrity and related but very different notions like power, fame, notoriety, and renown; he leaves the reader with only a vague sense of where celebrity came from and where it is going. Inglis' confusion, and his noble-mindedness, come across most clearly at the end of the book, when he nominates as the most admirable living celebrity -- Seamus Heaney! There's a man you won't see on the cover of People any time soon.

Buy This Title

A Short History of Celebrity

by Fred Inglis

• $23.96

The Huntington has had charge of the four pages since Gen. George Patton deposited them there at the end of World War II. Patton, who disobeyed orders when he spirited them out of Germany, grew up in San Marino and was friends with Huntington officials.

U.S. Archivist David Ferriero said he hoped to put the Nuremberg Laws on display in Washington by Sept. 15, the 75th anniversary of their signing by Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials.

"It's important to me as the archivist to have these on display from the 15th of September, the day they were signed," Ferriero said.

The papers, which among other things rescinded the citizenship of German Jews and forbid them to marry non-Jews, are the only original pieces of Nuremberg trial evidence missing from the collection, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.

Holocaust scholars have described them as priceless, saying they provide an outline of the beginnings of a movement that led to the most atrocious act of genocide in history.

It hasn't been lost on officials at The Huntington that Patton, a notorious war trophy collector, carried the papers out of Germany illegally.

"We were aware of the fact that Gen. Patton, who had received the documents from his staff as a gift and deposited them at The Huntington, had not paid attention in his souvenir hunting to the orders of his commander in chief," library President Steve S. Koblik said.

The papers should have gone to the U.S. government, which was collecting evidence to use in the Nazi war crimes trials that took place in Nuremberg shortly after the war. Prosecutors had to use photocopies instead.

"Had Gen. Patton not taken these documents, they would have been part of the collection the government was putting together in order to prepare for the Nuremberg trials," Koblik said.

Patton, instead, deposited the papers at The Huntington in 1945. The general grew up next door to the library and his father once worked for its namesake, railroad baron Henry Huntington.

The laws, which also forbade Jews from having sex with non-Jews, flying the German flag or hiring non-Jewish women to work in their homes, remained quietly filed away in a bombproof vault until 1999, when Huntington officials announced they had them.

After lending them for several years to Los Angeles' Skirball Cultural Center -- whose mission is to promote Jewish culture and heritage -- The Huntington announced this week it was handing them over.

The time had come to take them off display, Koblik said, adding the papers' fragility doesn't allow they be exposed to light indefinitely.

"We've never made them an official part of the Huntington collection," Koblik told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He said the nonprofit institution, known for such treasures as its priceless Gutenberg Bible and early editions of the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, has very little material on 20th century Germany.

Although the laws didn't directly call for the execution of Jews, they laid the groundwork for that, several scholars said, by marginalizing a group of people, turning them into second-class citizens.

"It's important to our understanding of genocide that genocide is always a process," said Stephen Smith, executive director of the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation Institute, which documents evidence of the Holocaust.

"That was not an order to murder the Jews, it was an order to exclude them from participation in society," Smith said of the Nuremberg Laws. "Once you start excluding a group for whatever reason you are on the path to the ultimate exclusion."

A more reductive description would say that Daniel Swift has gone in search of his grandfather, a bomber pilot in the Royal Air Force who was shot down and killed in the summer of 1943 during a raid on Germany. It would also say that it is a book about war poetry, conclusively and powerfully giving the lie to the claim that the First World War monopolized this genre; for Swift shows that the Second World War's poetry-inducing equivalent of the trenches was the bombing war, in outstanding poetry both by and about the bombers and the bombed, both by and about those who fought and those who suffered.

I start

At sirens, sweat to feel the whole town wince

And thump, a terrified heart,

Under the bomb-strokes"

wrote Cecil Day Lewis in "Word Over All," and when one reads it in the knowledge that this is a genuine report of a horrible reality, it lances through to one's own heart, thumping to think of what has been and -- alas -- still is endured by millions in the dire territories of our human condition. Swift sees Day Lewis as challenging the bombers to write poetry from their own point of view:

"Speak for the air, your element, you hunters

Who range across the ribbed and shifting sky:

Speak for whatever gives you mastery --

Wings that bear out your purpose, quick-responsive

Finger, fighting heart, a kestrel's eye."

Day Lewis was writing from the viewpoint of the civilian craning his neck to watch the aircraft flying to their work of death, or coming to kill him and all around him: he wants their side of the experience too, and so commands them to tell us:

"Speak of the rough and tumble in the blue,

The mast-high run, the flak, the battering gales:

You that, until the life you love prevails,

Must follow death's impersonal vocation --”

Speak for the air, and tell your hunter's tales."

And, as Swift shows, quite a few did so, in poetry sometimes of the highest quality. When the response came, it could have a shattering frankness:

"In bombers named for girls, we burned

The cities we had learned about in school --“

Till our lives wore out."

Thus Randall Jarrell, airman.

"Where cloud rained fire, and we were in the cloud --”

Its climate, dark, and deluge. And we spread

Simple as rain, like thunder loud,

To be the following weather of the dead."

Thus John Ciardi, rear-gunner in a B-29 bombing Japan.

The point is not that Swift's grandfather was a poet, for he was not. It is instead that in seeking to understand the warrior life and warrior death of his lost grandfather, who was killed in action when Swift's own father was a very small boy, Swift discovered that it was not just the detailed archives kept by both sides in the struggle, not just the survivors, reminiscences, debates and histories, that fill out the picture of Squadron Leader J. E. Swift's military life and death, but poetry: remarkable poetry, all the more remarkable when one sees it in the context Swift provides. Poetry is a torch that shines into experience, and in this book its light is so brilliant that it illuminates not only the landscape of that era, but individual figures within it, including that of the lost Squadron Leader.

I should declare an interest. Swift mentions my own book on the bombing campaigns of the Second World War, in which I essay a moral audit of one significant aspect of it, namely "area bombing," which is the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilian populations with the aim of terrorizing them, killing large numbers of them outright, and destroying the survivors' means of existence. He does not agree with all my conclusions, which are that although the primary duty of the Allied powers was to vanquish Nazism and Japanese aggression, the use of area bombing as one means to that end was not morally justified; and further, that it lacked the uncomfortable justification of being essential to achieving victory, which it was not -- for in fact it might even have prolonged the war, and made it harder for the Allies to win.

So I lavish praise on Swift's remarkable book not because we are on the same side of the argument, for we are not wholly so. It is because, having read many books about the air war, and having written about it myself, I recognize the special qualities of Swift's account: scrupulous research, perceptiveness, sensitivity, depth of personal engagement, synoptic understanding and breadth of intellectual sympathy, all going far beyond the usual histories and memoirs on the subject.

One thing we emphatically agree about, though, is the heroism of the flyers. Fifty-five thousand British and Commonwealth airmen died in the dangerous skies over Europe during the war; 45,000 USAAF airmen died there and over the Pacific likewise. These were great sacrifices, and they were made in circumstances that would test the courage of the best in any war. For them and the survivors who flew in fighters and bombers alike I have the greatest admiration. Though one aspect of the bombing war was a major moral error, that fact does not impugn the courage of the air crews or the scars, visible and otherwise, of the veterans alive today. They have an epic stature, not least those among them whose retrospective on their war chimes with the kind of memory James Dickey captures, opening a fridge door late at night decades after bombing Japan:

"a reed mat catches fire

From me, it explodes through field after field

Bearing its sleeper another

Bomb finds a home

And clings to it like a child."

Swift builds a picture of his grandfather's experience from a wide range of apt resources, from Hector's farewell to Andromache before his fatal contest with Achilles in the "Iliad," through Dante's inferno, to Breughel's painting of Icarus plunging from the sky -- just as his grandfather had plunged from the sky into the North Sea, still in the cockpit of his Lancaster bomber. He was on his way back from a raid on Münster, and Swift's careful research suggests that he was probably shot down by a Luftwaffe night-fighter pilot called Oberfeldwebel Karl-Heinz Scherfling, flying a Messerschmitt 110. Scherfling was in his early twenties at the time, and was himself killed in action the following year: the tragedy of lives lost, individually and in the mass, was not reserved to just one side of the argument.

Swift went to speak to Germans who had endured the onslaught of the Allies, so vastly greater than the Blitz on Britain in 1940 and the indiscriminate missile attacks by V1 and V2 rockets on London and elsewhere in the summer of 1944. These attacks, as polling showed, made their victims less likely to wish for retaliatory bombing on Germany than those who had not been bombed; the people keenest on bombing Germany to smithereens were Americans in their unbombed cities far across the Atlantic.

And when Swift sat in the kitchens of old ladies in Cologne and elsewhere, hearing them speak of their experiences, one of the things he remembered about the encounters was laughter; they had all shared in the double-sided tragedy that was bombing, and were released from the obligations of apology.

At the end of the war Churchill's personal physician, Lord Moran, wrote a book called "The Anatomy of Courage" about how military personnel withstand the stresses of combat. He remarked, "We must practise a prudent economy of emotion in time of war if we are to remain sane." Swift discusses the need for such economy, particularly by limiting the imagination. Imagination made the work called for in war impossible; waiting for tonight's raid and picturing one's aircraft falling like a burning torch from the sky would unnerve one too much. He sees in what is never mentioned or even alluded to in his grandfather's letters evidence of a tight mastery of imagination. "There is no news," his letters to his family often say, shortly after and before going on bombing raids. Quoting Dante's "I, one man alone / prepared myself to face the double war / of the journey and the pity," Swift comments that "To be a bomber is daily to war against an alternative version of your own story."

Swift tells us that a naturalist who studied postwar bomb sites in London found them rich in unexpected wildlife. Rosebay willow-herb had sprung up on scorched-earth sites cleared of rubble; black redstarts that normally nest in rocky cliff-crags had colonised the broken walls and exposed interiors of bombed-out buildings. The strange beauty of cities on fire -- stark silhouettes against flames, water-covered streets where the fire-fighters struggled, reflecting the roaring inferno around them -- had transmogrified into subtle reclamations by other kinds of beauty.

When the bombing stopped in those landscapes the dead were silent, the survivors weary; the droning aircraft high above had gone home. Decades later Swift and his father traveled to the Netherlands to visit the cemetery where Squadron Leader J. E. Swift was buried, and to visit the beach where his body had washed up. They spoke to Dutch people who are still finding remains of crashed warplanes -- eight feet underground in some cases, so violent were the impacts. Sometimes the Dutch find unexploded bombs, too.

Swift was taken by one of the officials to see a recent war find.

For lunch, we have fried eggs with ham, and Gouda cheese in plastic wraps. We drink milk and eat an apple after, and then he takes me to a warehouse and shows me three wooden boxes full of jagged silver pieces. They are as sharp as a knife, he says, but to me they look like great boxes of salad. There are valves, pistons, the throttle. There are two engines and three propellers of a Lancaster ED 603, found fifteen metres down in the Ijsselmeer. One engine weighs 4000 lbs, and the propellers are twisted and organic. The whole looks once alive, with the barnacles and the propellers like fins and the valves below like gills.

This understated but piercing prose, this clarity, this juxtaposition of fried eggs with the twisted propellers of a four-engined bomber that was the coffin of dooming and then doomed men, is writing of an exceptional order. Combine it with its intricately woven personal and universal subject matters, and a classic emerges. Of all the books about war that I have read -- all war, not just the bombing war--this is among the most moving and telling.

Buy This Title

Among the Dead Cities

by A. Grayling

• $13.63

Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation, then the Iraq war showed us the same thing -- and yet now, we are somehow doing it all over again in Afghanistan. The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics, the Great Recession highlighted the same danger -- and yet the new financial "reform" bill leaves that laissez-faire attitude largely intact. Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity before George W. Bush proved the same thing -- and yet now, in a recession, Congress is considering more tax cuts all over again.

These are but a few examples of mistakes being repeated ad infinitum. In a Yogi Berra country, the jarring lessons of history are remembered as mere flickers of déjà vu -- if they are remembered at all. Most often, we forget completely, seeing in George Santayana's refrain not a dark warning, but a cheery celebration. And the logical question is: Why? Why have we become so dismissive of history's lessons and therefore so willing to repeat history's mistakes?

Some of it is the modern information miasma. Though the Internet makes eons of history instantly available, the 24-7, moment-to-moment typhoon of cable screamfests, blogs, tweets, e-mail alerts and "breaking news" graphics makes last week's news feel old, and last month's news feel positively paleolithic. Add to this reportage that is increasingly presented with zero context, and it's clear that journalism is sowing mass senility.

Politicians also make significant contributions to the problem. With the age of the permanent campaign intensifying and the era of the long-term electoral majority ending, both parties deliberately focus only on the very recent past -- and obscure the larger historical record. From the national debt to poverty to the downsides of American empire, Republicans tell us it's all the fault of Democrats' two-year-old reign, while Democrats blame it on Bush's eight-year presidency. This, even though these emergencies developed over decades.

And then, of course, there is ideology.

With the present so radically departing from our past, history has become a damning package of inconvenient truths -- and those truths are often shunned because they threaten today's most powerful ideological interests.

This is why in the debates over war, economics and taxes, we aren't urged to consider past conflicts; we aren't encouraged to remember that America experienced its most storied growth under the New Deal's aggressive financial regulation; and we aren't told that wages and job growth expanded in the mid-20th century with a top income tax bracket above 70 percent. We aren't reminded of these facts because they threaten the defense industry, Wall Street and high-income taxpayers, respectively -- and those forces exert enormous influence over our political discourse, whether through media sponsorship, political campaign contributions or lobbying.

No matter the issue, this axiom is the same: When money has a vested interest in burying history, history is inevitably buried, ultimately leading us from Santayana and Berra's aphorisms to Albert Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again and somehow expecting different results.

 David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books "Hostile Takeover" and "The Uprising." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

It's hard to imagine a more up-is-down, freedom-is-slavery rendition of American history. Because if the struggle for racial equality under the law was anything, it was radical. For years, the only people willing to talk about redistributing rights were the ones who were also pretty interested in redistributing land and wealth. By and large, the struggle for civil rights was initiated by activists whom Glenn Beck might actually be right to call "radical revolutionaries."

It's now an annual custom, every January, for progressive pundits to repeat that Martin Luther King was a left-liberal social democrat. This is utterly beyond any honest dispute, but it still hews to the textbook version of the Civil Rights Movement that starts with Brown vs. Board of Education. In recent years, however, American historians have been rewriting the story. In particular, they've been moving back its start date. It may seem pedantic to quibble about when the movement began, but it's got enormous political implications.

The synthesis of this idea -- it's called the "Long Civil Rights Movement" -- comes from a University of North Carolina historian named Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. In her presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Hall argued that the neat bookends applied to the movement have concealed its true radical roots. There's a vast wealth of historical scholarship to back this up.

For decades after Reconstruction, the best-organized resistance to white supremacy looked a lot like what we'd now call black nationalism, in various incarnations: the Garveyites, the Exodusters. And when, at the pinnacle of the American left -- the 1930s -- even the sainted Franklin Roosevelt proved unwilling to carry the torch of racial equality, radicals to his left picked it up. (Roosevelt, dependent on the racist arm of his party, never had much interest in fighting for equality.)

The New Deal didn't have much to offer for many poor rural Southern folk, whose economy had been in depression since before the crash in 1929. So dirt-poor Southern farmers -- especially black ones -- didn't gain much from schemes devised in Washington. Social security and the minimum wage were laws were written to exclude them. Federal dollars headed south tended to get intercepted by "Big Mule" types -- the landlords and businessmen who owned the regional Democratic Party. The only major resistance came from groups like the racially integrated, politically radical Southern Tenant Farmers Union -- that is, the socialist left.

Likewise, communism, particularly in Alabama, became in many ways the home base for African-American political action. Most famously, the Communist Party’s legal arm took over the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, the group of black teenagers facing trumped-up rape charges in Tennessee. Obviously, the Party was very far from perfect. Its agents were pursuing its own interests, and in this period of reflexive loyalty to the Kremlin -- Stalin's Kremlin -- its members were hardly saints. Indeed, some black Southern radicals eventually went to Moscow, where they found out how much was wrong with the Soviet Union.  But pointing all that out does nothing to wash the guilt off of the political mainstream. And even the idea of a Southern African-American communist taking a pilgrimage to Red Square should be enough to give our right-wing heritage-burglars some pause.

Even after the crucible years of the Great Depression, the labor and socialist left continued to push for the full meaning of equality when few others would. In the immediate postwar period, the only major mass agitation for civil rights came out of the union movement, newly powerful since the 1930s. It was the explicitly left-wing, working-class institutions who pushed hardest on the boundaries of Jim Crow. Some workers' organizations, like the tobacco workers' union in North Carolina, were just about the only examples around of integrated institutions.

Labor radicals had a vantage point on society alienated enough to see what most people refused to. In fact, the originator of the idea of marching on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and a socialist. Randolph and Bayard Rustin, another socialist activist largely erased from the public memory, were arguably the two most important mentors to Martin Luther King.

Through these years, many mainstream liberals averted their eyes from the South (and, by the way, from the North too, which was hardly an egalitarian paradise). And conservatives actively fought against the incipient movement for racial equality. Alas, they were pretty successful. The coming of the Cold War and McCarthyism slowed the push for civil rights that had started on the radical left. The right wing succeeded in pushing back by years the onset of legal equality, and used charges of communism to devastate racially integrated organizations like the tobacco workers' union. They also pushed out of memory the original demand for economic redistribution alongside civil rights.

Admitting that this coalition of communists, socialists and labor activists deserves credit -- and the mainstream political class didn’t do itself proud -- doesn't make you a communist. And there are some good academic points to be made against the "Long Civil Rights Movement" argument. But none of them come from the right.

The "safe" civil rights movement we know and celebrate came out of this decidedly dangerous phenomenon. Just out of college, Shirley Sherrod -- the former Agriculture Department official recently martyred to Fox News race-baiting -- helped start an organization called New Communities. The group worked on getting a black communal farm up and running in rural Georgia, modeled on the Israeli kibbutz -- itself, of course a socialist institution. They were hobbled by opposition by white supremacist Governor Lester Maddox, and faced unremitting hostility from white neighbors, who thought they smelled a whiff of communism coming from the New Communities land. Sherrod's husband, Charles Sherrod, was an early member of SNCC, the crucial group behind what Beck might call the "civil unrest" of the 1960s. SNCC eventually became a seedbed of the Black Panther Party, which has lately been resurrected by Fox News to stir up racial panic.

It's hard to miss all the historical echoes here. After a couple of years of ritual denunciations of officials and activists somehow associated with Barack Obama -- loosely or not really at all -- as Marxists or Maoists or communists or Black Panthers, we're used to it. We get it already.

Laugh away at Glenn Beck's paranoia, but -- presumably unbeknownst to him -- he's actually got a point. The fact is that the basic norms of equality that we now think of as natural are indeed the result of radical agitation. Whatever her own politics are, Shirley Sherrod really was working in a tradition that goes back to people and groups whose beliefs Beck would find truly heinous. The grandparents of civil rights were folks who would never get through the vetting process for a job in the Obama administration today. They were much more like Van Jones than like his tormentor, Glenn Beck.

This August, Beck is planning a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of the famous speech King gave there. The explicit point is to reclaim the legacy that the left has "perverted." (This from the guy who accused Rep. John Lewis -- one of King’s top lieutenants -- of besmirching the memory of the Civil Rights Movement.)

Much as he’s done with the atheist radical Tom Paine, Beck is now trying to appropriate the memory of a cause that he'd undoubtedly fight tooth-and-nail if it were contemporary.  While bashing the NAACP as radical and anti-white, right-wing pundits like Beck have tried to identify themselves with true racial equality. But in trying to steal the legacy of the movement, they aren't only scrubbing the truth about U.S. history. They're making a mockery of the struggle for racial equality in one way, and of themselves in another. Beck and his comrades at Fox have robbed and defaced the graves of our heroes on the left, and are now strutting around in their stolen, ill-fitting burial suits. And if that's grotesque and insulting, it's also ironic beyond expression. If only Beck knew the real meaning of the ideas he pretends to believe.

Modern-day Manhattan, for example, owes its existence to the Dutch eagerness to establish dominance in the fur trade: New Amsterdam was first settled in the early 17th century as a trading post where they could exchange European metal goods for beaver pelts brought in by Native Americans. The Dutch wielded military power to oust rival Sweden from the colonial fur trade, yet the popularity of their wares proved their undoing. The intense competition from the English colonies and from French fur traders came with armed backing, and the English Navy ultimately ousted the Dutch from New Amsterdam in 1664.

Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created international tensions — in New England, the Great Lakes and the expanding West. As traders clamored for access to land controlled by Native Americans, tribes were pushed off their land, then given guns and liquor, wreaking havoc on their traditional way of life. The fur trade also triggered exploration more generally; fur traders were often the first white men to map major rivers, forests and mountains. The trade and the broader economy that followed in its wake pulled people west, including Lewis and Clark and Kit Carson, culminating in the monopoly of the 19th-century fur trader and celebrated philanthropist John Jacob Astor, whose American Fur Co. opened up trading posts across America (and whose fortune would endow the library that became a national icon). For all of fur's contentious position in American culture today, Dolin has skillfully illuminated its centrality in our nation's ever-surprising history.

Buy This Title

Fur, Fortune, and Empire

by Eric Dolin

• $21.62