by Richard Subber | May 23, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality, Revolutionary War
ordinary folks had a lot to do with it…
Book review:
The Urban Crucible:
Social Change, Political Consciousness,
and the Origins of the American Revolution
by Gary B. Nash
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979
The Urban Crucible is a densely researched and fully explored comparative history of the economic, social, and political environments in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Here’s my hint: there was more well-informed “mob” action than you have read about in other histories.
The early colonial experiences in the three principal seaport towns are vividly contrasted and authoritatively explained. Nash candidly digs deep and deeper into a wide range of primary sources. The sins and the heroics of the leadership elite and the “leather apron” artisans and the anonymous working poor are examined in profoundly realistic historical context.
You can’t read The Urban Crucible and not learn a lot.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Is the public interested in public interest news?
Isn’t news the new stuff you suddenly want to know?
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 18, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, History, Joys of reading, Language
“…I feel a goneness…
Book review:
Golden Tales of New England
May Lamberton Becker, ed.
New York: Bonanza Books, 1931
378 pages
Writers used a different kind of language to create feel-good stories in the 19th century. In Golden Tales of New England, May Becker selected a feel-good sample of 17 of them.
You’ll recognize some of the authors: Hawthorne, Thoreau, Louisa Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe…
The other writers might be new for you, as they are for me, like the offering of Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), “A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse.” It’s an authentic, ample exhibition of New England patois and sturdy New England character. Meet “Mandy” and “M’lindy,” two aging sisters who were born Amanda and Melinda, and who were fated to share their living, mostly at a distance but, in the end, so inescapably together.
Here’s Amanda sadly recounting her sister’s death: “I guess I’ve got through…[Melinda] went an’ married that old Parker, an’ then she up and died. I wish’t I’d ha’ stayed with her longer; mabbe she wouldn’t have died. She wa’n’t old; not nigh so old as I be…I feel a goneness that I never had ketch hold o’ me before…”
Doesn’t that passage pluck at your heartstrings?
Hawthorne’s “Old Esther Dudley” is a dainty adoration of a venerable lady who never gave up being a Tory during the Revolutionary War, and persisted in being the almost ghostly guardian of Province House in Boston after the British departed.
The other Golden Tales are equally exotic morsels of what entertained the citizens of the Republic long before television and Twitter.
Try some of them.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
-30- The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper
bad news about the news (book review)
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 13, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Revolutionary War
It’s historical, but it’s not history…
Book review:
The Liberty Bell
by Gary B. Nash
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010
The Liberty Bell is lavishly detailed, and it’s a quick read. Give it a try.
Much of what you “know” about the Liberty Bell isn’t quite right. For starters, the dramatically cracked icon sitting in the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia isn’t the “real” bell ordered in 1752 by the Pennsylvania Provisional Assembly. The original bell cracked the first time it was rung, and it was melted and recast as the one-ton bell we now think of as “the” Liberty Bell. It was cracked in the middle of the 19th century. It doesn’t ring any more.
It wasn’t called the “Liberty Bell” until about 50 years after the Revolutionary War started, when it was “adopted” as an icon of freedom by anti-slavery advocates.
I remember seeing the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia in the 1950s when I was a child. I think the guards said nobody could touch it, but I think I put my finger on it when they weren’t looking.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Clotel, or The President’s Daughter
by William Brown,
America’s first black novelist
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 2, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
p.s. there weren’t any Indian “savages”…
Book review:
New England Encounters:
Indians & Euroamericans, ca. 1600-1850
Alden T. Vaughan, ed.
Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999
427 pages
New England Encounters is a wide-ranging collection of essays from The New England Quarterly.
The relationships of the indigenous Indians and the European colonists were complex. The essays in New England Encounters help to make those relationships more understandable. This process reinforces our understanding that the Indians were not “savages”—they had sophisticated, dynamic cultures.
The Europeans brought guns, germs, and steel (tip of the hat to Jared Diamond).
Nevertheless, Indian cultures persisted for quite a long time.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
How the Irish Became White (book review)
another slice of American history by Noel Ignatiev
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Apr 22, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
toil and trouble….and craziness
Book review:
The Witches: Salem, 1692
by Stacy Schiff (b1961)
Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2015
498 pages
It may be that Stacy Schiff has neglected to include some fact or sentiment about the Salem witch trials, but I can’t imagine what it might be. The Witches is an expansive compendium of the whos and whats and whys and wherefores of this compelling—yet essentially impenetrable—story about a community gone crazy.
Maybe you had to be there to understand it.
It’s too easy to suggest that the McCarthy Communism hunting in 1954 is a modern analogy, but it won’t work. The whole dreadful McCarthy thing was a political football, approaching a sideshow even though it attracted the nominal attention of the nation and destroyed many lives.
The Salem witch trials (and the witch hunting that went on in neighboring towns) consumed the waking hours of all the townsfolk, who were deeply convinced that witches exist and that they were in league with satanic forces.
For my taste, Schiff tells too much of the story. I would have been content with a less detailed account. There is repetition that is dispensable.
For my taste, she struck a good balance between telling the story as it happened, and inviting the reader to suspect that the teenage girls were fooling all along, and that too many accusers had a personal reason to “get” the accused, and that too many religious and civic leaders who struggled unsuccessfully with their religious faith and the opposing impulses of their arguably decent selves had quickly figured out that the witch craze was a very nasty game.
You don’t need to read the whole book to figure out that there was some very destructive bogus stuff going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692.
Maybe you don’t need to read the whole book to be convinced that some folks aren’t continuously motivated by a decent streak of good will and a desire to support communal well-being.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Cleopatra: A Life
…don’t even think
about Gordon Gekko…
by Stacy Schiff
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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