'But This Latter Person, I Am Not Trying To Convince'
One of the best parts of the old blogging system, here, was the ability to talk about what I was reading at the time. I think I’m going to try to bring some of that back.
I’ve read a lot over the past year or so (though less than previous years) and there’s a lot I want to talk about: Yaa Gyasi’s Homecoming (inspiring in its generational ambition), Laurent DuBois’s Avengers of the New World (history of the Haitian Revolution, an idea some 200 years ahead of its time), John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (conservative and romantic in every way that I love), Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s Black Widow (so intense, and this story never lets you take a break—oddly reminiscent of Mad Max: Fury Road), William Doyle’s Oxford History of the French Revolution (great primer for anyone starting—as I was—with just the barest knowledge of the French Revolution.)
But those are things I’ve already read, or, in the case of Black Widow, ongoing things which I’m in the process of reading. Right now my eye is trained on a book that my historian friends have been demanding I read for the past few years—W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction In America. I just started yesterday, and already I can see why the book has so many fans in the academy.
Over the past 40 years or so, there’s been a movement among some American historians to put white supremacy at the center of their field of study. Much of my own work, and my current understanding of American history, pulls from these historians—Edmund Morgan, Beryl Satter, Ed Baptist, Thomas Sugrue, Arnold Hirsch, Eric Foner, Barbara and Karen Fields.
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