We don’t know

     how it’s going to turn out…

Book review:

These Truths:

    A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

932 pages, including fabulous extended note, bibliography, index

Jill Lepore makes it easy to read authoritative accounts of our history as a nation. She is already a venerable historian.

These Truths offers two things that I crave when I’m reading/learning history: context, and a penetrating commitment to seek truth in terms of what they were thinking and what they knew way back when.

One of the thrilling and challenging realities of studying history is this humdinger: pick your time in history, and you can say “They didn’t know how it would turn out.”

Barely weeks away from the November 1864 presidential election, Abraham Lincoln expected that he would lose his bid to stay in office.

Hannibal didn’t know what the other side of the Alps looked like, and didn’t know what he would find there, if he made it across.

Eli Whitney was tinkering in the shop in 1793, watching a cat trying to pull a chicken through a fence, when he invented the cotton gin—he didn’t know that the machine would make slave-based cotton agriculture a booming industry in the 19th century before the American Civil War.

Lepore puts a lot of history into These Truths. Her scholarship and her insights make it obvious that every reader has a lot to learn.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

Book review: Shawshank Redemption

A world I do not want to know…

by Stephen King

click here

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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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…men who brought

    their own shovels to work…

Book review:

Who Built America?

Working People

   and the Nation’s Economy,

   Politics, Culture, and Society,

   Vol. 1 To 1877

by Christopher Clark and Nancy A. Hewitt

New York: Worth Publishers, 2000

721 pages, with a substantial Appendix and index

Who Built America? is a comprehensive, widely sourced reference work that tackles the story of the actual building of America and our cities, commerce/industries, and infrastructures.

Clark and Hewitt give full respect to the groups of people who labored to do so: native Americans, women and children, minorities, and immigrants are fully credited.

I think that a useful feature is the summary chronology and suggested complementary readings at the end of each chapter.

Who Built America? is a go-to reference for any serious student of American history.

Volume 2, covering the Reconstruction through the end of the 20th century, is an equally appealing component of this series published by the American Social History Project, City University of New York.

This 2000 edition of Who Built America? was written by Christopher Clark and Nancy A. Hewitt, based on the original edition written by Levine, Brier, Brundage, Countryman, Fennel, and Rediker.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

Book review: Forced Founders

by Woody Holton

The so-called “Founding Fathers”

weren’t the only ones

who helped to shape our independence…

click here

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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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”good people” owned slaves,

       think about that…

Book review:

Clotel,

or The President’s Daughter

by William Wells Brown (c1814-1884)

Introduction by Dr. Joan E. Cashin

M. E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, New York, 1996

191 pages

This is a workmanlike treatment of a subject that is an all too imaginable foundation of early America: slavery.

It’s more a documentary than any modern understanding of a novel. Brown does a good job of character development for a limited cast of characters, including Clotel, the “mulatto” daughter of a black slave mother and a white father. This story of many aspects of slavery—disruption of families, cruelty of masters, the abolition movement, the economic importance of slave-based agriculture and production, the moral, philosophical and political debates about the “peculiar institution”—is written in a style that is manifestly journalistic and prosaic, not literary.

Slave auction block in Virginia

Clotel is a high impact read. Brown was born a slave in Kentucky circa 1818. He escaped, became an abolitionist and a writer in England, and was purchased by friends and freed in the middle of the 19th century. He published Clotel in 1853 as the first “novel” written by a black American.

It’s harsh reading. It’s a terrible, candid condemnation of a despicable fact of American history. It’s a catalog of shame and endurance and human spirit.

You might know that the subtitle acknowledges Brown’s unabashed reference to the story, well known in the mid-19th century, that Thomas Jefferson dallied with his slave, Sally Hemings, and had children with her.

Here are a couple highlights:

Prof. Cashin notes: “Historians estimate that perhaps 10 percent of the four million slaves living in the South in 1860 had some white ancestry.”(1) Too many white owners forced themselves on their female slaves. In some parts of the South, a person with white lineage except for a black great-great-great-great grandmother could legally be sold as a slave.

Brown underscores the hypocrisy of slave owners who professed political, philosophical, or religious convictions that were nominally opposed to slavery. For example, Brown states that in the middle of the 19th century, more than 660,000 slaves were owned “by members of the Christian church in this pious democratic republic.”(2)

Slavery died hard.

(1) –  p. xiii

(2) –  p. 187

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

Book review:

Founding Mothers:

The Women Who Raised Our Nation

by Cokie Roberts

The Revolutionary War,

        as fought by women…

click here

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 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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