Current Reading - July 2023

I just finished And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Meacham, which was excellent. A different perspective on Lincoln and his times.

New here. Pocket bio: Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, jazz, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea.

I read too many books “at once”, as witness this list of non-fiction books related to American history that I have in various stages of completion, God help me. 🙂 But don’t worry, I have a method and everything gets finished eventually.

My mind compartmentalizes naturally and I don’t get books confused, even when I’m reading rather similar novels.

Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson
John Quincy Adams, The Diary of John Quincy Adams 1794-1845
Kurt E. Armbruster, Before Seattle Rocked: A City and Its Music
John C. Baker, Farm Broadcasting: The First 60 Years
Craig Fehrman, Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote
Jacqueline Simmons Hedberg, Roger Hooper and the Sheriff: Hoopers Island’s First Hundred Years (my ancestors in Maryland!)
Richard Hildreth, The History of the United States of America
Christian Holmes, Company Towns of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
Preston Lauterbach, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll
Douglas Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War
Gilman M. Ostrander, Nevada: The Great Rotten Borough, 1859-1964
Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography
Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World
Karen E. Robbins, James McHenry, Forgotten Federalist
Barbara Sicherman, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women
Andrea Sutcliffe, Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention
Edwin A Tucker / George Fitzpatrick, Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest
Mark Twain, Roughing It
Louis B. Wright, South Carolina: A Bicentennial History (I really like this series of bicentennial state histories, and am trying to read through all of them)

>2 PatrickMurtha: That's quite an interesting list. I think I only have 4 books going at the moment, I'm not even close.

^ I didn’t realize that I had so many in this category until I looked at my lists!

Craig Fehrman’s Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote is a solid study that is self-recommending for Presidential history enthusiasts. I might dock a half-point because Ferhrman’s prose is functional at best - one imagines what Edmund Wilson or Van Wyck Brooks might have made of this material. But of course, no one really writes like that anymore, which is why I read so many books from the past. 🙂

Richard Hildreth’s six-volume History of the United States, which was published 1849-52 and covers 1492-1821, and of which I recently finished the first volume, gets a bum rap as overly dry, which is nonsensical. It is in fact a very well-written and compellingly readable account. Now I need to compare it with George Bancroft’s History, which had a long publication between 1834 and 1888.

Currently reading the first of Francis Parkman’s monumental seven-volume France and England in North America, Pioneers of France in the New World. Vivid prose! One can see the strong influence of Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England * , which I’m on the second volume of.

* The title “The History of England” is more than a little misleading, since the incredibly lengthy and dense five volumes only cover 18 years, 1685-1702. No matter, Macaulay’s prose is beautifully wrought and his analysis penetrating (although contentious).

I’m currently reading The Diary of John Quincy Adams: 1794-1845, a selected (but long) edition edited by Allan Nevins in 1951. JQA is an interesting case because he appeared to dislike politics and public life, frequently stating his preference for being a reader, writer, and scholar; yet when he had a chance to do that, after his Presidency and in his early 60s, he launched right back into a nine-term career as a US Representative that took him to his death at age 80. It is theorized that he suffered from depression, and he consistently seems to have sought out whatever conditions would make him most miserable. The family mantle always weighed heavily on him * , and although one might find his sense of public service admirable, he was privately quite cynical about political life and constantly frustrated by it. It is not just that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted through politics - that is common - but he took no pleasure in the process, as the more extroverted can. Meeting with supplicants, for example, was profoundly tedious for him.

So the effect of the diaries which he assiduously kept is sad, but also stimulating because he was a man of genuine cultivation and always “in the thick of things”.

* Not just on him. His oldest son committed suicide at 28, and his second son drank himself to death by 31.

I seem to be running into King Philip’s War a lot in my reading, so I thought I would undertake a classic history of the subject, Douglas Leach’s Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War. This is very well balanced between military, political, and social history, with plenty of conflict detail as best can be reconstructed.

Just started Christian Holmes’ Company Towns of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Seems a little specialized? Well, pull up a chair…

Local history is a distinctive branch of publication, and one dear to my own heart. Much of it is produced and distributed locally, by small presses, state and municipal historical associations, museums, etc, and may not be obtainable through Amazon or conventional sources. Looking for a specific older piece of local history literature can be as daunting as seeking a rare edition of an obscure novelist.

Much of this material is “non-book” and even downright ephemera: periodicals, booklets, brochures, flyers. Much of it is produced by dedicated non-professionals.

When I lived in Northeast Wisconsin in the Oughties, I was really involved in local history - and arts, economic development, small town revitalization, journalism; too much really, but it was fun. For several years I lived in the town of Little Chute, on the Fox River between Appleton and Green Bay, one of the most Dutch-American municipalities in the country. I was very active in the Little Chute Historical Society and Little Chute Windmill Association (which eventually succeeded in its goal of building an authentic Dutch windmill as an attraction).

I also served on the Editorial Board of Voyageur Magazine, “Northeast Wisconsin's Historical Review”. This was a great gig! I got to review and comment on submissions for the magazine, and the Board met quarterly to hash out the contents of future issues. Those sessions were intensely stimulating, because we had the cream of local history professors, librarians, and dedicated amateurs on the Board.

Here in Mexico, government funding for local history publishing is EXCELLENT, way exceeding the US on a per capita basis. Every Mexican state capital seems to have at least one bookstore devoted to local history, and the number of very substantial publications on offer is simply amazing.

I would be most interested to learn what the situation is in other nations in this respect. I would assume that the conditions are good in the UK, which has long been a bastion of local history, but elsewhere I don’t know.

Among the rather specialized titles I’m currently reading is Farm Broadcasting: The First Sixty Years (1981). I’d like to own it, but hard copies are pretty pricey and it can be read for free online:

http://publications.iowa.gov/30172/1/Farm-Broadcasting-The-First-Sixty-Years-Bak...

When I was a New Jersey kid waking up gosh darn early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons like Colonel Bleep and Dodo the Kid from Outer Space at 6 AM, there were farm programs scheduled even earlier - Modern Farmer or Agriculture USA * at 5:30 AM. This Baker book includes info about the latter, which started on KNBC in Los Angeles in 1961, produced and hosted by John A. Stearns, and was widely syndicated over the next two decades. Information about the production history of Modern Farmer is more elusive, even though I’ve seen old New York Times TV listings for it, and many people online remember the show. No footage from either series on YouTube - probably all wiped a long time ago.

The book contains proportionately much more information about farm radio, surveying the field state by state. I love forgotten pockets of media history like this.

* Also the title of a USDA radio series produced in the 1950s.

I comb through the notes and bibliographies of any non-fiction book I am reading and make lists of follow-up books and articles, frequently buying one or two immediately and putting others on the to buy / locate list. Of course, this strategy leads me in new directions, which is part of the point.

Here is an excellent example: In the end notes of Robert F. Gish’s fine biography of New Mexico-born novelist Harvey Fergusson, Frontier’s End: The Life and Literature of Harvey Fergusson, there is a reference to Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest, published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1972. Well this sounded interesting. So I poked around, and found a beautiful dust-jacketed copy signed by one of the authors, George Fitzpatrick, at an extremely reasonable price. Snapped it right up. And now that I have it and am reading it, it is indeed very interesting!

Although I haven’t the money to be a real book collector, I am always happy to own interesting things. Perhaps it is just as well that I have to buy online now, instead of having access to used bookshops, because the problem with those is that my interests have broadened to the extent that I want to at least look at everything in the shop, and then desire to buy way too much.

Finished a very good Valley Forge by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin.

Henry Charlton Beck (1902-1965) was New Jersey’s pre-eminent folklorist, with six excellent volumes to his credit, of which Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey, which I’m currently reading, is the first. Great material captured in an individual writing style. Beck is especially interested in ghost towns, odd place names, and interesting but obscure individuals.

I highly recommend reading Beck’s books about southern New Jersey in tandem with John McPhee’s later classic The Pine Barrens. They complement each other nicely.

I love history books of the past because they were not written for us, nor with our preoccupations in mind; they had no way of knowing what our preoccupations would BE. They do provide a sense of the time when they were written, as well as the specific past they were written about. I don’t generally see them as “superseded”; they are informative. Whether the theory-ridden, hectoring books of today will hold up as well remains to be seen.

The 50-volume Chronicles of America series published by Yale University Press in 1918 makes for delightful reading, and are very handsome hand-sized volumes as well. I have read Charles M. Andrews’ Colonial Folkways: A Chronicle of American Life in the Reign of the Georges and Maud Wilder Goodwin’s Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York, and am just about to start Emerson Hough’s The Passing of the Frontier; A Chronicle of the Old West.

I am reading the States and the Nation series of bicentennial histories; ex-library copies can be had very inexpensively. (I get this uneasy feeling that libraries don’t hold onto anything anymore, but are in a constant itch to deaccession.)

I read North Dakota first, because who knows anything about North Dakota? And it was fascinating. Now I am starting South Carolina, because my sister was until recently living in Charleston. And I have New Hampshire in my possession.

A nice feature of the series is the inclusion of a photographic essay about the state in each volume. The notes and bibliographies are excellent, and are hard on my wallet, because I have discovered MANY books that I want to have.

A benefit of reading these books is that I afterwards feel a deeper connection to that state, that I kind of “own” it, because how many residents of a state have read a full-length history of their home? One in a thousand? Probably not even that many.

So even though North Dakota is one of the few states that I haven’t visited, because it is not on the way to anything and requires a separate trip, I now feel very possessive of North Dakota. Did you know that Lawrence Welk’s distinctive accent was North Dakota Russo-German? He didn’t learn English until he was an adult.

When is a Western not a Western? When it’s a Northern!

The Wikipedia article on this subject is quite good:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_(genre)

“The Northern or Northwestern is a genre in various arts that tell stories set primarily in the late 19th or early 20th century in the north of North America, primarily in western Canada but also in Alaska. It is similar to the Western genre, but many elements are different, as appropriate to its setting. It is common for the central character to be a Mountie instead of a cowboy or sheriff. Other common characters include fur trappers and traders, lumberjacks, prospectors, First Nations people, settlers, and townsfolk.”

Some authors that are associated with this genre are Jack London, Rex Beach, Robert Service, Ralph Connor, and James Oliver Curwood. I am reading Beach’s The Spoilers at the moment, famously filmed five times (1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, 1955), the highlight always being an epic fist-fight towards the climax. The novel is rousing good fun, based on an actual incident of corruption during the Yukon Gold Rush * , which Beach had witnessed first-hand.

* The key malfeasor was Alexander McKenzie (1851-1922), whom I encountered in my recent reading in North Dakota history. A very nasty guy and machine politician who served prison time for corruption. He conspired, in collaboration with officials he helped place in office, to cheat Alaska gold miners of their winnings by fraudulently claiming title to their mines.

I just finished Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives by Darcy Eveleigh, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, and Rachel L. Swarns. This is a beautiful coffee table book full of great photographs and fascinating back stories. In 2016, New York Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh tumbled onto the fact that there were tens of thousands of photographs and negatives languishing, usually unseen for decades, in the Times photo archives. In many cases, Times photographers or freelancers would have shot several rolls of film (remember film?) while on assignment, and either only one of the photos would have been chosen for printing in the paper, or the editors would have ended up running the story without any photos, or the stories might never have been run at all.

Because of the prejudices of the day (impossible to confirm of course but highly likely) or for other journalistic reasons, many of the most expressive photographs were of black New Yorkers. Eveleigh and the three colleagues listed as authors here began a months-long process of deep diving into the archives to assemble a collection that could then be published. The did extensive research on each photo and have included much information about each one they included.

In many cases the photographs provided scenes of triumph and accomplishment, such as a photograph taken backstage at Carnegie Hall in 1982 depicting opera singers Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry embracing Marian Anderson after an evening of music celebrating Anderson's art and career. That 1982 photo is in fact one of the most recent. Most are from the 1950s through the 1970s. Many portray moments from the Civil Rights Movement and the uprisings of the 1960s. There are several searing photographs depicting the fierce Detroit riots of 1968 and the aftermath of destruction and anger.

There are heartbreaking and horrifying historical photographs: Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral, inside Malcolm X's house in Queens just after it was firebombed. No one was injured, but soon we see the photograph of Malcolm X's funeral after he was assassinated by rifle fire just eight days later. There is a photograph of Fred Hampton's bullet-ridden apartment immediately after his murder by Chicago policemen, and a series of photos of black soldiers in Vietnam.

Each of the photographs/photo series is accompanied by a short essay describing the photograph, the circumstances behind its creation and information about what photo was chosen to run in its place (or whether a photo was used at all or whether a story about the incident or scene was ever run). When possible, followup information and/or relatively contemporary interviews with the subjects are included, and a few times those essays are even written by the original photographer. This is simply a wonderful book that you'll want to take your time paging through and studying.