Category: History

Rating: 7.5/10. Local history book focused on Bellevue, beginning with the first settlers in the area in the 1870s: Mercer and Meydenbauer were the first pioneers, then by the 1890s, a variety of families had settled and built log cabins. The first school opened in 1883, and several more opened in the next few years,…

Rating: 6.5/10. Book about the early history of the computer focused on the Princeton group by George Dyson, the son of physicist Freeman Dyson. The book begins around 1953 when only a few computers were in existence, in the middle of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and von Neumann gets funding to…

Rating: 8.1/10. Book focused on the history and development of the transistor. It has some overlap with The Idea Factory, but is more focused on the transistor specifically, rather than Bell Labs. The transistor is a rather quiet invention: when Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain first announced it in 1947, it presented as a more efficient…

Rating: 8.3/10. Book about America’s hidden empire, and how it came to be like this rather than older colonial empires (like the British or French) which conquered large areas of land and populations. The US is now more of a “pointillist” empire that controls specific points of interest around the world, but it’s no less…

Rating: 7.8/10. Book that describes the origin and eventual breakup of Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T. In the early 1900s, AT&T’s phone service was seen as unreliable and only operated locally; it was expensive with a lot of technical issues. Jewett was a manager who recruited several graduate students at Millikan’s lab who…

Rating: 7.7/10. Book split into six parts about various parts of the founding of America and the key personnel involved. Now, the American Revolution is extensively analyzed in retrospect, but at the time, the participants had no idea whether their movement would succeed or what it would become. Historians now disagree on whether to analyze…

Rating: 7.8/10. Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography by David B. Williams Book about the history of Seattle focusing on how humans have changed its natural landscape, eg by filling in the shoreline and tide flats, creating artificial islands, and leveling hills near the city center. The landscape has changed quite drastically since…

Rating: 7.8/10. Book about strikes, unions, and labor movements throughout US history. The dynamics and expectations of the working class have changed significantly, but a common theme that occurs throughout history is that the role of government is crucial: if the government decides to side with employers to destroy unions, there is generally nothing that…

Rating: 7.9/10. The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 – 1066 by Marc Morris Fairly detailed book about Anglo-Saxon and English history, spanning from the collapse of Roman civilization until the Norman invasion of 1066. It is comprehensive and covers all the major events and kings of this time period. The focus…