A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

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September 17, 2022: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume 2, The New World, by Winston S. Churchill (Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1956) Churchill, who excelled in the study of history as a child and whose mother was American, had a firm belief in a so-called " special relationship" between the people of Britain and its Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.) united under the Crown, and the people of the United States who had broken with the Crown and gone their own way. His book thus dealt with the resulting two divisions of the "English-speaking peoples".

Churchill's four volume epic, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, was published between 1956 and 1958. The work traces a sweeping historical arc from Roman Britain through the end of the Nineteenth Century. Volumes I & II deal primarily with Britain and her rise to become a world power, including early colonization of North America. Volume III necessarily broadens in scope, covering 1668 to 1815, including the American Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon. Volume IV covers 85 years of the Nineteenth Century, ending with the death of Queen Victoria. Perhaps not conincidentally, this is the very year that saw Churchill conclude his first North American lecture tour, take his first seat in Parliament, and begin to make history himself. Between 1485 and 1688, England became a Protestant country under Henry VIII. His daughter, Elizabeth I, battled for succession and supremacy at home, and the discovery of "the round world" enabled a vast continent across the Atlantic to be explored. While this new era was spawning the beginnings of modern America, England was engaged in a bloody civil war and sustained a Republican experiment under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. Take his coverage of Edward I as a case in point. While sparing few grisly details of the rule of "The Hammer of the Scots," aka the bad guy from Braveheart, Churchill also paints a picture of a dedicated administrator who set up a fair local judiciaries to limit baronial oppression and organized Parliament to make it a legitimate legislative body. Spanning four volumes and many centuries of history, from Caesar's invasion of Britain to the start of World War I, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples stands as one of Winston S. Churchill's most magnificent literary works. Begun during Churchill's 'wilderness years' when he was out of government, first published in 1956 after his leadership through the darkest days of World War II had cemented his place in history and completed when Churchill was in his 80s, it remains to this day a compelling and vivid history. This first of four volumes of Churchill’s long history of the English (up until the mid-twentieth century) is essentially a tale of murder and mayhem. The characters may have worn fancy clothing and lived in castles and other mansions, but their behavior, as reported here (perhaps inadvertently), was more suggestive of primitive tribalism.

Eventually, the small remaining area in and around Calais (Burgundian area) in France controlled by Britain was no longer an issue, due in part to the Wars of the Roses. The Earls and Lords were too busy killing each other. The work itself was two decades in the making. The Churchillian conceptions that underpinnned it were lifelong. Here is one of the great books of our age, Winston Churchill's most ambitious work and the crowning achievement of his career. His theme is a noble one, worthy of the great purpose and imaginative scope of its author: Firstly, he's a whig historian. For Churchill The History of the English-Speaking Peoples is a story of unstoppable progress towards a set destiny of world hegemony and endless greatness. He makes much of habeus corpus, of the spreading out of enlightened British folk across the globe, he recites all of the various constitutional debates that led to English Common Law, and he lovingly charts the growth of Parliament as an institution. It is very triumphalist, and that will bring him censure from more modern historians who aren't so keen on shouting about the British war record and the fact we haven't had a revolution since 1688 and that Anglos have controlled the world since at least 1815. I think they're too pessimistic. It's certainly true that not everything the British have done is worthy of praise, and making excuses for some of the Empire's handiwork is downright shameful to attempt, but I don't think it can be seriously denied that the world is a better place for it, in the end, and the new-founded countries Britain left behind are certainly a proud legacy. Churchill, refreshingly, knows this.

As with the U.S. first edition, there was also a Canadian Book-of-the-Month Club issue similar in style to the Canadian first edition, but bound instead in red cloth with blue spine panels and no head and foot bands. Assizes -one of the periodic court sessions formerly held in each of the counties of England and Wales for the trial of civil or criminal cases;

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Sir Winston was clearly always proud of the British Empire. He does overlook most of the that Empire’s mischief around the world; but, to be fair, during those past exploratory years it was generally acting in competition with other European empires to settle its own people in sparsely populated parts of the world that were gradually discovered by intrepid sailors who explored the oceans. And I concede that the language they spread with their colonized settlements included the forms of law from the mother country that enabled English-speaking peoples since 1901 to set examples of respect for individual freedoms and peaceful coexistence that perhaps the speakers of other languages might do well to model to their own---and the world's---benefit. When an obscure character was mentioned, I stopped reading, turned on my Kindle and read more about the person and how he/she related to the event happening. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples is a four-volume history of Britain and its former colonies and possessions throughout the world, written by Winston Churchill, covering the period from Caesar's invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the end of the Second Boer War (1902). [1] It was started in 1937 and finally published 1956–1958, delayed several times by war and his work on other texts. The volumes have been abridged into a single-volume, concise edition.