April-June 2018 - 19th C Northern America (inc Civil War; exc Old West)

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April-June 2018 - 19th C Northern America (inc Civil War; exc Old West)

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1majkia
Mrz. 14, 2018, 8:40 am



Our focus turns to North Armerica, where the new nation of the United States and the colony Canada have plenty to offer in terms of historical events. The War of 1812, Canadian rebellions against British rule, abolitionism, the American Civil War and the Gilded Age are examples. Immigration stories that focus on building a new life in North America also belong in this quarter.

Please note that next quarter we will be focusing on the Old West. Books about Native Americans (including the Indian Removal Acts), westward expansion, gunslingers, pioneers, explorers and the Californian Gold Rush – while also fitting in this quarter – might be saved for the July-August theme.

Here's a tagmash of books that fit 19th Century and North America: https://www.librarything.com/tag/19th+century,+North+America

Please update the Wiki here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Reading_Through_Time_Quarterly_Theme_Rea...

2Tess_W
Mrz. 15, 2018, 9:01 am

I'm going to read Irving Stone's Love is Eternal which is the love story between the Lincolns.

3CurrerBell
Mrz. 15, 2018, 10:15 am

I'll probably do some Henry James, especially a reread of The Princess Casamassima (it's been ages) and a first-time of What Maisie Knew (disgrace I've never read it).

4Tess_W
Mrz. 29, 2018, 6:37 pm

For some reason, I can't find Love is Eternal and I've seen it on my shelf a million times! Will look again and if I don't find will look for something else that fits.

5Tess_W
Mrz. 29, 2018, 6:46 pm

>3 CurrerBell: Mike, do you thing James' The Turn of the Screw would fit in this category. I haven't read it...don't know much about it.

6CurrerBell
Mrz. 29, 2018, 7:03 pm

It's 1898, which is still (barely) 19th Century so it certainly ought to fit. I plan on reading What Maisie Knew (1897) and rereading The Princess Casamassima (1885-86), which I haven't read in some half-a-century. You've got to be a bit careful with James, though, because the latest novels stretch into the Edwardian period.

If you're concerned about the English setting, I wouldn't be. I think anything by James would qualify for North America because James is absolutely an American author, despite his long residency in England and his eventual assumption of British citizenship a year before his death. The mere setting of the story doesn't make it any the less an American novel. For example, I wouldn't consider Typee a Polynesian novel or Heart of Darkness an African novel.

7Tess_W
Bearbeitet: Mrz. 31, 2018, 3:24 pm

Will do The Turn of the Screw for sure, and will also try to get in:

Madame Castle's Lodger a 1951 book that I inherited from by grandmother
Forest Rose about a girl in the Ohio territory (not the old west) 1959 edition I picked up at a garage sale for 5 cents
The Complete Works of O'Henry 1936 leather backed 1st edition, spine tore away from cover, pages yellowing, also from my grandmother's stash. Mind you, she passed in 1999 ........

So trying to get rid of some of the oldest books on my shelf, literally!

8CurrerBell
Mrz. 31, 2018, 7:41 pm

Some time late last year I bought Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder in anticipation of this quarter's RTT. It's by the editor of the Library of America's two-volume "Little House" series so it should be pretty good. Now I just have to find where I put it. {grrrr}

In any event, though, I've got Virginia of Elk Creek Valley, Mary Ellen Chase's second (I think) novel. Probably not very good (her first, The Girl from the Big Horn Country, actually made Angela Brazil look good), but worth reading for my interest in Chase, who was the successor to Sarah Orne Jewett and the predecessor to Elizabeth Strout among Maine writers.

And I've got plenty of Henry James.

9countrylife
Mrz. 31, 2018, 7:55 pm

The only Mary Ellen Chase I've read is Windswept, to which I gave a mediocre rating, but tagged it with "sense of place". I may give her another try yet.

For this challenge, I'm going to choose between The Night Birds, Kindred, or Cold Mountain.

10CurrerBell
Mrz. 31, 2018, 9:18 pm

>9 countrylife: Her best (and I understand her personal favorite) was The Edge of Darkness. It's a collection of short stories/vignettes organized around a central character – an elderly woman (I forget her name, but personifying old Maine) who has just died and is to buried later in the day. As a collection of stories organized around a central character, it resembles The Country of the Pointed Firs (Almira Todd) and Olive Kitteridge (Olive).

Of the four major novels, I think Windswept is probably the weakest – though Silas Crockett (which was quite popular in its day) is one of those "family sagas," and I don't care for James Michener.

11Tess_W
Apr. 1, 2018, 6:51 am

>8 CurrerBell: I also have that Ingalls book....you don't think that belongs in the old west? And I love James Michener!

12CurrerBell
Apr. 1, 2018, 9:14 am

>11 Tess_W: Whoops! Yeah, that's where I meant for it. Good. It gives me another three months to find where I put it! (And ditto the Mary Ellen Chase book, though I do know right where that one is.)

13lkernagh
Apr. 9, 2018, 8:40 pm

I made rather quick work over the weekend of a book that has been on my TBR piles since 2014: The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay. The story is set in the tenements of lower Manhattan in the year 1871 and while there isn't much of a plot, the story focuses attention on the historical setting and themes such as poverty, prostitution, gender roles, and sexuality.

14MissWatson
Apr. 18, 2018, 4:27 am

I finally picked up Washington Square and loved it. I was surprised to find it is set (mostly) in the first half of the century, and the first chapter gave me a distinct echo of Gwen Bristow's Jubilee Trail with its description of NYC social life. In all, I found it much more accessible than The portrait of a lady.

15MissWatson
Apr. 20, 2018, 7:54 am

I followed up with The Europeans, set in Boston. Very enjoyable.

16Tess_W
Bearbeitet: Mai 5, 2018, 4:51 pm

I did read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It does fit the time period, but not the locale---my bad! I will read another one before the end of the quarter that better fits this category. (Although the author is American)

17cfk
Jun. 12, 2018, 10:19 am

Sharon McCrumb's "The Songcatcher" spans from Scotland to America during the 18th through 20th Century following Malcolm MacQuarry (McCourry) and his descendants. He begins his internship as a lawyer New Jersey and ends on the American frontier in Tennessee. He and his descendants will serve in the American Revolution, the Civil War and both World Wars.

18CurrerBell
Jun. 14, 2018, 9:27 pm

Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club (3½***). Murders in Boston inspired by the tortures of Dante's Inferno – investigated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his fellow "Dante Club" members James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, and James Fields. Clever, and quite good except toward the end when it wrapped up a little too quickly and the author forgot the adage "show don't tell." Also, I found the last chapter a little too rushed and a bit confusing as to whether or not Burndy got hanged???

19CurrerBell
Jun. 15, 2018, 3:48 pm

Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century). I gave this 2½** but mainly for the quality of some of the current-day critical essays. If I were rating it on the main Fuller text alone I would have rated it lower, because it's largely an comprehensible hodgepodge of Emersonian Transcendentalism and Graeci-Orientalist mysticism.

I'm going to be reading Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (whose author, Megan Marshall, was a Pulitzer Finalist for another biography), and this may be more elucidating on Fuller than the Norton Critical was.

20CurrerBell
Jun. 18, 2018, 1:37 pm

Dunno if I've mentioned this one yet, but I've read Mary Ellen Chase's The White Gate, which just barely clocks in at the end of the 1890s, and posted a review. Finished it a little while back.

21CurrerBell
Jun. 26, 2018, 1:43 pm

>19 CurrerBell: Just finished Megan Marshall's Fuller biography and it's definitely a good deal better than Fuller's own Woman in the Nineteenth Century. It's a shame that Fuller's history of the Roman Republic (Mazzini and Garibaldi in the late 1840s) was lost at sea in Fuller's own fatal shipwreck, because it was probably a great deal more readable than Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

22countrylife
Jun. 28, 2018, 6:05 pm

My reads for this quarter:

Boston Jane, Jennifer L. Holm (19th century Washington)
The Children's Blizzard, David Laskin (1888 Great Plains)
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1860s North Carolina)
Destiny of the Republic, Candice Millard (1880s Washington DC)
Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway, Kirkpatrick Hill (19th century Alaska)
The Night Birds, Thomas Maltman (1862 Minnesota)
Run Away Home, Patricia Mckissack (1880s Alabama)
The Silk Train Murder, Sharon Rowse (1899 Vancouver, British Columbia)
To the Bright Edge of the World, Eowyn Ivey (1885 Alaska)

23Tess_W
Jun. 28, 2018, 9:51 pm

>22 countrylife: very nice, country! There's some good reading there!

24Familyhistorian
Sept. 3, 2018, 5:03 pm

So I started to read The Alienist in time to finish by the end of June but then didn't finish it until the end of August. I don't think it was the writing as much as the subject matter – the serial murder of child prostitutes in the late 1800s – that made it difficult to get through.

25majkia
Sept. 3, 2018, 9:52 pm

>24 Familyhistorian: I thought the book was great. Did you happen to see the TV series? I believe it was on TNT. Very well done, I thought.

26Familyhistorian
Sept. 5, 2018, 1:25 am

>25 majkia: I never saw the TV series although the book was a tie-in which you could tell by the people pictured on the cover.