U.S. Intellectual History Blog

USIH-adjacent Books that I’m Enjoying in 2021 (Continued)

Below are some of the USIH-adjacent books that I’m enjoying currently. For more, please see my previous blog post. How many of these have you read or are you planning to read?

ONE: How the World is PassedA Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith (June 2021).

The book “we need” according to world-famous antiracist historian Ibram Kendi is How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith, who is a contributor to The Atlantic, author of Counting Descent, and a former co-host of Crooked Media’s Pod Save the People with a doctorate in education from Harvard. The book is divided into an author’s note about memorializing slavery, a prologue distinguishing between history and nostalgia, chapter one on a plantation, chapter two in a prison, chapter three remembering the confederacy, chapter four on Juneteenth, chapter five on northeastern elites’ attempts to distance from slavery, chapter six on memorizing slavery in practice, and an epilogue entitled “I lived it” incorporating Smith’s own perspectives and reflections. Smith explains: “I travel to eight places in the United States as well as abroad to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery… a mix of plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, historical landmarks, and cities.” Smith’s writing style is profound, and the book as a whole interrogates how and why America has a long road ahead grappling with legacies of enslavement. This is an extraordinary work of antiracism, history, memory, and public history.

TWO: Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz by Gail Crowther (April 2021).
For readers who loved Sylvia Plath’s poems, novels, or diary; author Heather Clark’s 2020 Plath biography; or public historian Alexis Coe’s No Man’s Land podcast episode on Plath, now you can read about Plath’s friendship with Anne Sexton. In Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, British sociologist Gail Crowther traces the intersections of affluent white women Sexton and Plath’s lives, as they grew up near each other a few years apart, yet charted different courses. Plath and Sexton were both ambitious, career-driven poets in an era when society expected women to be neither ambitious nor career-driven. Crowther suggests that this paradox compounded both women’s mental illnesses and – content warning – their suicides.

THREE: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed (June 2021).

On Juneteenth is the newest – slightly more personal book – by Harvard law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, whose scholarship on Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson revolutionized early American historiography. Gordon-Reed was born and raised in Texas, where her family descended from enslaved persons, celebrated Juneteenth annually, and endured the Jim Crow segregated South. As a recent New York Times book review recounts, Gordon-Reed herself helped to integrate schools racially in her hometown. This new book integrates the author’s intersectional perspective with a long history of marking the abolishment of enslavement in the Lone Star State.

FOUR: Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence by Robert G. Parkinson (May 2021).

Thirteen Clocks by historian Robert G. Parkinson presents an abridged version of Parkinson’s massive 2016 monograph The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. As historian Gautham Rao wrote for USIH in 2018: “Parkinson argues that national political elites at the helm of the Revolution used race to manufacture patriotic consent among white colonists… By illustrating the centrality of racial fear and identity to the patriots’ ‘common cause,’ Parkinson… crashes down upon historians who cling to a normatively proud national history of the Revolution and the founding.” Put simply, American white-supremacist racism and the American founding have always been deeply intertwined. Further, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project has provoked debate between 1619 and 1776 as America’s founding moment, Parkinson focuses in on 1776 to reveal that it was fundamentally about racism, too. Since I have witnessed the 768-page Common Cause assigned to undergraduate students, the 256-pageThirteen Clocks will be a welcome replacement.

FIVE: Americanon: An Unexpected U.S. History in Thirteen Bestselling Books by Jess McHugh (June 2021).
Journalist and scholar Jess McHugh crafts a narrative of American history through the lens of best-selling, nonfiction, how-to books. McHugh divides ten chapters using the following books: The Old Farmer’s Almanac; Webster’s DictionaryBenjamin Franklin’s AutobiographyMcGuffey ReadersHandbook to American WomanhoodEtiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at HomeHow to Win Friends and Influence PeopleBetty Crocker’s Picture CookbookEverything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. She describes them as “American ‘bibles’: those dog-eared books for daily life that ostensibly taught readers one subject, all while subtly instructing them about their role in society and their responsibilities to family and to country.” McHugh contends that “the gap between reality and the mythology that these books represent can offer a glimpse into our shifting understanding of what being American means.” Indeed, readers can learn a lot about society by what nonfiction, how-to books convey, who writes them, how well they sell, and how they appear in national media, which McHugh also explores.

SIX: Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States by Jonathan Levy (April 2021).

Ages of American Capitalism opens with claim that all American capitalism stems from the project of empire. This was specifically a seventeenth-century British empire crafted by “imperial statesmen, pious Christians, aristocratic lords, and gentlemen capitalists.” Levy writes: “English colonizers, with their prayer books, farm animals, and sea-worn nerves, brought the habit of capitalist commerce to North America in the seventeenth century.” For readers interested in Alexander Hamilton and/or the musical, chapter three situates Hamilton’s financial system in this narrative. Chapter five reminds me of Levy’s first book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, which offers a history of the idea of risk, because Ages of American Capitalism’s chapter five, “Confidence Men” reintroduces a human element to high political-economic theory by unpacking the “moral sense” that men like Henry David Thoreau and P. T. Barnum sought within American capitalism. In 945 pages, Levy traces capitalism in the United States, capitalism’s relationships with policy and morality, and how all of the above stems from an imperial drive.