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E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class: Like a fair amount of academic history, especially older academic history, assumes you know an awful lot going in (e.g., what was the event known as Peterloo?). But a lot of interesting details about the lifeways of the English working class, with emphasis on how what we know is limited because many of the people involved left no records, some deliberately and some because their lives didn’t allow for it, while the records we do have were made by people with very different perspectives from that of most workers. Favorite tidbit: after a Luddite raid on a mill, two raiders were captured alive and probably tortured for information about their compatriots. A clergyman aligned with the ruling class exhorted a 19-year-old to confess. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked. “Yes, yes,” the clergyman said, leaning forward eagerly. “So can I,” he said, and died.
Marcel Danesi, The Art of the Lie: How the Manipulation of Language Affects Our Minds: I didn’t find any new insights here; a lot of stuff about how Trump gaslights us and rouses supporters with a welter of words and lies, where he wins because people give up on the concept of the truth. Best random factoid: A 1932 experiment on the power of language to shape perception found that “when they showed subjects a picture and then asked them later to reproduce it, the drawings were influenced by the verbal label assigned to the picture. The picture of two circles joined by a straight line, for instance, was generally reproduced as something resembling ‘eyeglasses’ by those subjects who were shown the eyeglasses label. On the other hand, those who were shown the dumbbells label tended to reproduce it as something resembling ‘dumbbells.’”
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us: Intertwines some detailed histories of murdered women and one ambiguously reformed abuser with broader investigations into what we know about stopping domestic violence. We do know the biggest risk factors for homicide (including prior strangulation, which can produce lost memories/brain injury making it even harder for victims to be taken seriously); what is often missing is training for first responders about how to identify who’s at greatest risk; connections among service providers so that people who could help know that help is needed; and resources in general. Among the most interesting parts: the idea that a domestic violence shelter is both a terrible solution (it requires the victim to uproot her life and her children and hide from the abuser, and often forces women into poverty if they weren’t there already) and a necessary backstop absent other resources. Snyder looks at some innovative programs that try to find victims ways to stay in their communities; right now, this mostly seems to involve locking abusers up for relatively extended periods, and she doesn’t inquire much into whether this is a good long-term solution.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, She Came To Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman: Title way too cutesy, especially given that Tubman supported John Brown but as far as we know neither killed people herself nor led others in killing people, though she threatened to shoot at least one man to keep him from deserting (and thus revealing her paths through slaveholding Maryland). But I wanted to learn more about Tubman, and this book adequately reports what we do know about her constant struggles, visions possibly resulting from early head trauma, and iron will. When they wouldn’t let her spy during the Civil War, she nursed and sold pies to soldiers; when they wouldn’t give her a pension, she fought for decades until she got something.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge: It’s very hard to write history of people who were deliberately kept out of history/only reported on by the people who had a vested interest in disrespecting their humanity. Dunbar has to do a lot of speculating about what Judge would have seen and felt, but it’s still a powerful story, emphasizing that the Washingtons not only enslaved people but specifically schemed to ensure that bringing their enslaved people to Pennsylvania—a free state—would not lead to their freedom. And George Washington used his power as President, then former President, to continue to search for Judge and try to get local officials to help bring her back.
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: The author spent a number of years playing the violin live at fairs etc. to help a man she identifies only as The Composer sell CDs—but her mike was low/off, and the audience heard only the perfect recordings. It’s a really interesting memoir of loving music, not being very good at it, struggling financially in NYC, workaholism, the conflict between patriarchy’s version of femininity and competence, developing anxiety, and failing to get a job as a Middle East affairs reporter, which is what she really wanted to do. She’s not wrong that Americans would rather read about Milli Violini than learn about the region where we are still, again, mired in war. I have to admit, though, that when she describes middle-aged white guys at the NYT telling her that they were hiring local reporters for that, I thought that was probably the right call—but then again, look who gets to decide to do that, and I bet that a white American dude who graduated from Columbia could impress them enough to get that job.
Marcia Chatelain, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America: All fast food chains, really: Chatelain tracks both how 20th-century America made it possible for white guys like Ray Kroc to get the trust and loans they needed to start franchises and how black entrepreneurs eventually wanted in, only to find that they got the most difficult, oldest, not updated stores in poorer and more dangerous neighborhoods—despite making higher-than-average profits for the franchise in many cases. There’s interesting stuff in here, including on McDonald’s response to the LA riots, but basically it is about how capitalism implicates everyone and there’s no way out individually.
Russell Shorto, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom: I enjoyed this a great deal—Shorto follows a number of people around the Revolution, including an Iroquois war/peace leader; a New York politician who was ultimately an antifederalist (and whose worries about presidential power sound pretty prescient, although Shorto himself selected those quotes in the past year or so, so no surprise there); a young British woman whose attempts at freedom didn’t end up well for her; an enslaved and then free man trying to carve out a life in the North; a British lord; and George Washington. Each of these people interacted with at least one of the others (mostly George Washington), with the exception of the African-turned-American who went by Venture Smith; the closest Shorto gets is that Smith could have gone to see Washington at one particular point where Washington was nearby and publicly feted, but there is no evidence one way or the other (and he didn’t seem like the type to go watch politicians). He successfully gets across the many ways in which the Revolution did, and didn’t, change things for various people.
Robert A. Caro, Working: Musings and interviews about Caro’s life as a writer and chronicler of what it means to have power. He worked very hard to show people both the human costs and benefits of the exercise of power—Robert Moses’s destruction of thriving neighborhoods and thus of many of the people who lived there; LBJ’s transformation of the lives of rural Texas women who used to have to pull hundreds of gallons of water up from wells by hand, then transport those hundreds of pounds to their houses, every single day, through rural electrification. He tells a wonderful story about figuring out how LBJ went from random junior Congressman to a person that senior elected officials wrote to deferentially—in October 1940, he transformed and organized political donations from Texas businesses, putting more money into congressional campaigns around the country than had ever been available, but kept them firmly under his own control. LBJ had tried to keep most of this off the record, but just enough survived (sometimes mysteriously filed) for Caro to piece together the story. In the end, Caro says, power doesn’t necessarily corrupt, but “what power always does is reveal.”
Marcel Danesi, The Art of the Lie: How the Manipulation of Language Affects Our Minds: I didn’t find any new insights here; a lot of stuff about how Trump gaslights us and rouses supporters with a welter of words and lies, where he wins because people give up on the concept of the truth. Best random factoid: A 1932 experiment on the power of language to shape perception found that “when they showed subjects a picture and then asked them later to reproduce it, the drawings were influenced by the verbal label assigned to the picture. The picture of two circles joined by a straight line, for instance, was generally reproduced as something resembling ‘eyeglasses’ by those subjects who were shown the eyeglasses label. On the other hand, those who were shown the dumbbells label tended to reproduce it as something resembling ‘dumbbells.’”
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us: Intertwines some detailed histories of murdered women and one ambiguously reformed abuser with broader investigations into what we know about stopping domestic violence. We do know the biggest risk factors for homicide (including prior strangulation, which can produce lost memories/brain injury making it even harder for victims to be taken seriously); what is often missing is training for first responders about how to identify who’s at greatest risk; connections among service providers so that people who could help know that help is needed; and resources in general. Among the most interesting parts: the idea that a domestic violence shelter is both a terrible solution (it requires the victim to uproot her life and her children and hide from the abuser, and often forces women into poverty if they weren’t there already) and a necessary backstop absent other resources. Snyder looks at some innovative programs that try to find victims ways to stay in their communities; right now, this mostly seems to involve locking abusers up for relatively extended periods, and she doesn’t inquire much into whether this is a good long-term solution.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, She Came To Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman: Title way too cutesy, especially given that Tubman supported John Brown but as far as we know neither killed people herself nor led others in killing people, though she threatened to shoot at least one man to keep him from deserting (and thus revealing her paths through slaveholding Maryland). But I wanted to learn more about Tubman, and this book adequately reports what we do know about her constant struggles, visions possibly resulting from early head trauma, and iron will. When they wouldn’t let her spy during the Civil War, she nursed and sold pies to soldiers; when they wouldn’t give her a pension, she fought for decades until she got something.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge: It’s very hard to write history of people who were deliberately kept out of history/only reported on by the people who had a vested interest in disrespecting their humanity. Dunbar has to do a lot of speculating about what Judge would have seen and felt, but it’s still a powerful story, emphasizing that the Washingtons not only enslaved people but specifically schemed to ensure that bringing their enslaved people to Pennsylvania—a free state—would not lead to their freedom. And George Washington used his power as President, then former President, to continue to search for Judge and try to get local officials to help bring her back.
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: The author spent a number of years playing the violin live at fairs etc. to help a man she identifies only as The Composer sell CDs—but her mike was low/off, and the audience heard only the perfect recordings. It’s a really interesting memoir of loving music, not being very good at it, struggling financially in NYC, workaholism, the conflict between patriarchy’s version of femininity and competence, developing anxiety, and failing to get a job as a Middle East affairs reporter, which is what she really wanted to do. She’s not wrong that Americans would rather read about Milli Violini than learn about the region where we are still, again, mired in war. I have to admit, though, that when she describes middle-aged white guys at the NYT telling her that they were hiring local reporters for that, I thought that was probably the right call—but then again, look who gets to decide to do that, and I bet that a white American dude who graduated from Columbia could impress them enough to get that job.
Marcia Chatelain, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America: All fast food chains, really: Chatelain tracks both how 20th-century America made it possible for white guys like Ray Kroc to get the trust and loans they needed to start franchises and how black entrepreneurs eventually wanted in, only to find that they got the most difficult, oldest, not updated stores in poorer and more dangerous neighborhoods—despite making higher-than-average profits for the franchise in many cases. There’s interesting stuff in here, including on McDonald’s response to the LA riots, but basically it is about how capitalism implicates everyone and there’s no way out individually.
Russell Shorto, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom: I enjoyed this a great deal—Shorto follows a number of people around the Revolution, including an Iroquois war/peace leader; a New York politician who was ultimately an antifederalist (and whose worries about presidential power sound pretty prescient, although Shorto himself selected those quotes in the past year or so, so no surprise there); a young British woman whose attempts at freedom didn’t end up well for her; an enslaved and then free man trying to carve out a life in the North; a British lord; and George Washington. Each of these people interacted with at least one of the others (mostly George Washington), with the exception of the African-turned-American who went by Venture Smith; the closest Shorto gets is that Smith could have gone to see Washington at one particular point where Washington was nearby and publicly feted, but there is no evidence one way or the other (and he didn’t seem like the type to go watch politicians). He successfully gets across the many ways in which the Revolution did, and didn’t, change things for various people.
Robert A. Caro, Working: Musings and interviews about Caro’s life as a writer and chronicler of what it means to have power. He worked very hard to show people both the human costs and benefits of the exercise of power—Robert Moses’s destruction of thriving neighborhoods and thus of many of the people who lived there; LBJ’s transformation of the lives of rural Texas women who used to have to pull hundreds of gallons of water up from wells by hand, then transport those hundreds of pounds to their houses, every single day, through rural electrification. He tells a wonderful story about figuring out how LBJ went from random junior Congressman to a person that senior elected officials wrote to deferentially—in October 1940, he transformed and organized political donations from Texas businesses, putting more money into congressional campaigns around the country than had ever been available, but kept them firmly under his own control. LBJ had tried to keep most of this off the record, but just enough survived (sometimes mysteriously filed) for Caro to piece together the story. In the end, Caro says, power doesn’t necessarily corrupt, but “what power always does is reveal.”