Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2022
Pirajno, Alberto di. A Cure for Serpents. Eland, 2006.
The Italian colonial empire (Libya, and to a lesser extent Eritrea) through the eyes of an Italian doctor turned colonial administrator. He plays on orientalist fantasies, but offers perspectives you can’t really find elsewhere, especially on Tuareg and Imazighen in the Sahara; take his stories with a grain of salt.
al-Koni, Ibrahim. Gold Dust. Translated by Elliot Colla. Hoopoe, 2020.
My second Koni, imbued with the same satisfying Saharan Sufism. Where The Bleeding of the Stone is an ecologists’ manifesto, Gold Dust is about inter-species relationships and what it means to be willing to do anything for a non-human companion.
Very little is written on Tunisian history in English, so this is by definition welcome: Lewis shows how the protectorate’s extraterritoriality laws gave other European nations a say in Tunisia’s sovereignty, and how French attempts to close that gap inadvertently galvanized the nationalist movement.
Gaddafi, Muammar. The Green Book. 2016.
Frankly, Gaddafi is a pretty garbage political theorist. His Third Universal Theory means to maximize democracy beyond liberalism and Marxism, but it’s even less workable than the two it seeks to supplant, and the political material is such nonsense I’m not certain Gaddafi could make sense of it.
Saint-Exupéry de, Antoine. Wind, Sand and Stars. Harvest Books, 2002.
Good vignettes from the early age of flight; the best is the Sahara crash that inspired The Little Prince, the worst the wishy-washy Spanish Civil War chapter (why can’t we hang out with fascists without problems?). You can feel the mythmaking emerge through his writing, and I honestly love that.
Ben Hameda, Kamal. Under the Tripoli Sky. Translated by Adriana Hunter. Bath: Peirene Press, 2014.
Ben Hameda gives us a window into the profoundly gendered women’s spaces of 1960 Tripoli through Hadachinou, a young boy in the midst of a sexual awakening; it reminds me a lot of Halfaouine. The novella meanders, but it isn’t pointless: by no means profound, but worth taking time with.
A great history of Libya up to the end of its “pacification” (actually a genocidal war culminating in the internment of the entire population of Cyrenaica), picking up in the fourth chapter with the Sanusi. In short, a classic.
Tushnet, Mark V. Why the Constitution Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
The argument is quite obvious: the constitution matters not because it protects rights (rulings on those tend to be arbitrary) but because it defines how American politics are practiced. I wish there was something new here; it’s a summary of things already widely known.
A scientific survey of the psychology-of-eating literature as of 2010: family background, eating disorders, obesity, fad diets, nutrition. Not a light read, but useful for framing the way we think about eating; great for an undergraduate survey or as a primer for further research.
An interesting, actionable book by two therapists, though gendered female, focused on restriction over bingeing, and at times a bit too informal for my liking: I couldn’t help feeling I’m not the audience. Still worth reading for those struggling with eating disorders.
Against the traditional narrative, Nicholls argues the French revolutionary tradition didn’t die with the Commune in 1871; it kept its outline until 1885, syncretizing a flexible “French Marx” with Blanquists and anarchists. She dwells on historiography a bit too much, but it’s an excellent study of a supposedly sleepy period.
Kim traces how seemingly small decisions by individual bureaucrats culminated in the banning of opium across British Burma, Malaya, and French Indochina. The larger value: she shows when “global” history does not work; prohibition looked driven by global factors but was almost wholly local. The organization could be better.
Casimir’s decolonial history leaves Western epistemologies behind: the Haitian Revolution wasn’t a bid for a liberal republic but the engineering of a wholly new society, built on the lakou, that supplanted the slave system. I’m not steeped enough in the literature to fully get all of it, but it’s an important piece of scholarship.
An enlightening history of how presidents moved from Washington’s “prelegal” maneuvers to nearly unlimited executive prerogative after 9/11, with Congress just as at fault for acquiescing. The early theory section is the weak part; deeper dives into specific cases would have served better.
Kamrava, Mehran. A Concise History of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
The title says history, but this is classically political science: three ideal types (spontaneous, planned, negotiated revolution) imposed on revolutionary situations in hopes that everything fits. The models obscure as much as they illuminate; useful insights, but I wish for a more historically-sound treatment.
I like this better for teaching than most modern Europe texts: Mason offers the main points without diving in too deeply, leaving the instructor free to choose what to pair it with. Not the place for depth; the definitive text for a quick overview built out with other materials.
A great popular history: Brook pulls one or two details from each painting (herring boats, a Chinese fruit bowl, a VOC warehouse) and follows the threads out to the “second contacts” of the seventeenth-century world. Nothing new for world historians, but I consumed it in one sitting.
It made a splash in the journals, but I can’t say I’m impressed: I expected scholarly analysis from Yale and got narrative commodity history, with the contrast between Western and indigenous knowledge underexplored. Worth a read for a glimpse; Jay sets the ground for more rigorous histories.
A great introduction to African diaspora history, especially because it sets the black Atlantic within a larger diaspora history (notably the Middle East). Nothing new for those already familiar with the topic, but a great entry point for those who aren’t.
Emecheta, Buchi. Second Class Citizen. New York: George Braziller, 1983.
Brief and good account of Nigerian immigration to the UK in the 1960s from a woman’s perspective: the multifaceted discrimination black immigrant women faced, whether from gender structures replicated from West Africa or from British racism.
A hard book to get through (so many unfamiliar names and societies), but Green’s story makes sense to me: West Africa’s many currencies lost out to a gold-and-silver world, value came to be held in slaves, and Islam rose as a leveling force. One to come back to.
I expected a study of Genoese-Turkish relations; Zarinebaf’s book is something even more interesting: Galata’s development under Ottoman policy, the ahdnames that opened Mediterranean trade, and French merchants becoming “Levantines.” A must-read for the early modern Mediterranean.
A very French study (arguments implicit, conclusions left to the reader) of why public executions disappeared in France by 1939: shifting sensibilities plus the broader privatization of French society. Interesting, but the theoretical debates over sovereignty and theatricality crowd out what may be the more important story.
A Foucauldian rejoinder to Scott’s Art of Not Being Governed: “frontier governmentality” segregated frontier peoples rather than ruling them directly, cheaper than civilizing or exterminating them. Really dense, but I expect it to reframe how I think through colonial history.
Comparing Tunisia and Libya immediately after 2011, Henneberg argues that the actual actions of provisional governments, not just structures and starting points, determine outcomes. The argument seems obvious, but it’s nice to see someone pushing back against political science’s natural determinism. Recommend.
Not a total history of the French extreme right but a collection of essays on its “aspects”: the Action Française abroad, the interwar leagues, the “political”/“non-political” distinction in collaboration. Not the place to start, but great supplementary case studies.
Public history at its best: Falck traces how Natchez produced Lost Cause memory from the Civil War to World War II, lament becoming reverence until the town was effectively a Disneyland for Lost Cause partisans. The photography chapter (the “lost” images of the black upper class) is the most interesting. Highly recommend.
The first study I’ve seen of the asylum in French Southeast Asia, and what makes it important is how Edington moves beyond its walls to the asylum’s place in Vietnamese social life: a technology of colonial control that patients and their families actively negotiated. An excellent window into colonial psychiatry; recommend.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Woof, this is such a bleak story. Spiegelman’s framing makes it incredibly human, and as Volume 1 moves toward Auschwitz you can feel Vladek and Anja’s increasing dread and uncertainty.
A great set of short chapters on Africa between roughly 700 and 1500. It lacks cohesion, but that may be the point: there was no single “Africa,” so it’s best to see the continent through different lenses. Very heavy on Saharan Africa, weaker on Mediterranean Africa.
An excellent study of something we give very little thought to: how Indigenous peoples and the French actually communicated. Carayon shows that sign languages and gestures were rich rather than basic, rooted in a wholly North American Indigenous epistemology of communication; a must-read for colonial North America.
Historical scholarship at its best. Akin asks why World War I was so devastating in the Ottoman Empire: weak infrastructure, a war fought within its own borders, a CUP primed to see the war as existential and as opportunity; the state’s intensified grip on its subjects was a net-negative for nearly everybody.
Really interesting research on how northeastern Bulgaria was Islamicized and brought into the Ottoman system, built largely from tax registers; material I’d never seen in Anglophone historiography. It would have been five stars if Antov hired a better editor: every sentence is ludicrously complex.
Burnard, Trevor. The Atlantic in World History, 1490-1830. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Despite the title, not the Atlantic in world history (no Indian Ocean or Pacific connections); what it is: a welcome, undergraduate-level survey of Atlantic history proper, with a standout chapter on the plantation system as a specifically Atlantic structure.
A tough read, but not Gomez’s fault: the sources are by nature arcane to Euro-American audiences, and he is transparent about their contradictions rather than smoothing them into narrative. Easy to get lost in the details, but it respects the methodological problems of doing African history immensely.
James, Henry. The Bostonians. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Really beautiful writing, a still-recognizable Bostonian progressivism (promise, pitfalls, hypocrisies), and a rare pre-1945 depiction of closeted homosexuality; but the main characters are the actual worst, with no redeeming aspect among them, and nothing happens, at all, whatsoever.
My first major foray into pre-2010s American short stories, and definitely the place to start: Oates’s selections are (mostly) good, but the real treasure is the biographical and contextual material she gives before each story. I’m excited to read more.
Adorno’s big contribution is showing that the 16th-century debates over territory and conquest (las Casas and Sepúlveda, Inca Garcilaso, Cabeza de Vaca) continue to predominate in Latin American literature. More literary studies than history, which to me is dense and confusing; I’m not the intended audience.
Gross. Greene is right that New England was the exceptional case, but his chapters effectively install the Chesapeake as the real normative one; “declensionist” and “developmentalist” are horribly useless categories, and the whole project is an exercise in futility.
Revisionist when published, now the dominant narrative: colonial American religious life was vibrant, broadly latitudinarian, and central to society and politics, with churchgoing nearer 60% than the old 5-20%. The absences (African American and Native religion, Catholicism) mark the time in which it was written.
Earle shows how Galenic humoral theory made food fundamental to maintaining the self in the Spanish colonies: eat American foods and a Spaniard might physically become Amerindian. Her pushback against scholars who stretch “race” into anachronism is the complicated part; I learned a ton and highly recommend it.
Woof, this is a tome, and it takes work to make sense of, but it’s absolutely fascinating: northern Europeans refused to take Spanish historical writing seriously no matter which sources it used, dismissing even indigenous evidence as “uncivilized.” All historians should read this, whatever they work on; highest recommendation.
More interpretive essay than book: the tidewater planters’ perpetual debt, and their fury when British merchants tried to cash in, primed Virginians for revolution (and explains why Jefferson hated Hamilton). Illuminating and easy to skim, but I’d like more primary source rigor.
Beeman argues there was no single political experience in British North America, only distinct styles: Virginia and Massachusetts, the oligarchies of New York and South Carolina, the backcountry, the northeastern cities. Worth reading, but very slow; the near-impossibility of generalizing is its strength and what makes it so hard to retain.
Boxer, Charles Ralph. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. London: Hutchinson, 1969.
Now this is a great book about a colonial empire. The chronological first half goes a bit slow, but the second, on the sinews of empire (the actual mechanics of travel and sail, religion and race, messianism and Sebastianism, intellectual life), is absolutely excellent. Great stuff.
Martínez sounds like she was gaslit by the entire historical establishment while writing this, and the book vindicates all of her efforts: limpieza de sangre crossed the Atlantic and was reappropriated from “old Christian” ancestry into the sistema de castas. Really theory-heavy, but here it works.
A full break with earlier scholarship: imagine the Revolution never happened, and colonial America emerges as the most royalist part of the British Empire, its rebellion a personal betrayal ending in symbolic regicide. It made Bailyn click into place for me, though I suspect McConville overstates his case.
I’m impressed: not a book about Andean religion in a vacuum but about how it shaped Spanish perception, with the Devil looming large once priests decided oracles couldn’t be hearing from God. The Aristotle-heavy intellectual history goes a bit over my head; it wants readers better grounded in classical philosophy than I am.
A very smart intellectual history of how 16th-century Spain legitimated its American rule, from Amerindians as “natural slaves” to las Casas’s still messed-up “children” needing Spanish help toward maturity. Very much a text for scholars who know the literature; I don’t see it changing how I see the past.
Such a fun book: Bonomi shows that almost no historian had critically analyzed Lord Cornbury’s administration, relying instead on opposition rumors amounting to character assassination. Less a vindication than an illumination of the “dark side” of colonial politics, a rough-and-tumble world that makes our own era look tame.
Bailyn, Bernard. The Origins of American Politics. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.
Three lectures asking why the colonies had a revolution while Britain did not: after 1730 colonial governors grew strong relative to the other branches yet hamstrung by London, so government looked arbitrary rather than good. Worth skimming, but not particularly comprehensive.
Legal history is always hard for me, and this is no exception: Premo’s subtle, interesting arguments link law to the history of childhood in colonial Peru, where “minority” was a status indigenous adults could claim and orphanages assigned caste. Illuminating material, though the overarching arguments stayed a bit unclear to me.
Far more fascinating than I had any right to find it: I picked it up as a nice legal history and found the whole Spanish legal system shoddily jerry-rigged, with no distinction between public and private personage; its entanglements can’t even be called corruption. A must-read on state-building and law.
Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. New York: Signet Classics, 2002.
I’m sorry, but Ramona is trite. Jackson wanted to do for Native Americans what her friend Stowe did for enslaved peoples, but the story is wooden, falling entirely on stereotypes without any sense of humanity; little question why it’s been forgotten outside California.
Morgan at his magician’s work of weaving political theory into on-the-ground practice: divine right and popular sovereignty are both fictions, and both ended with the consent of the many guaranteed by the few. It lacks the dynamism of his other books; great for the nitty-gritty of political thought.
Wood takes the fact most of us know (colonial South Carolina was majority black) and asks what it means: Sullivan’s Island as a coercive Ellis Island, African rice expertise, Gullah, resistance, Stono. Little of it was new to me, but it’s a great introduction to colonial South Carolina.
A really complex book, but not so subtle, which helps: before citizenship existed, Spanish identity ran through vecindad and naturaleza, fluid uncodified categories one could hold, lose, or hold both of. Tough without a sense of Spanish legal frameworks, but illuminating on being “Spanish” under the Habsburgs and Bourbons.
Comparative slavery within the US rather than across the Americas: Chesapeake against Lowcountry. I was impressed by Morgan’s subtlety; demographic dominance gave Lowcountry slaves skilled positions and kept African traditions alive (hence Gullah), even as racism ran stronger there. A must-read.
A good introductory, synthetic text: worth reading to get your feet on the ground, but those who work on slavery in Latin America won’t find much new here outside of some comparison. Nothing trailblazing.
I read every poem from Dunbar’s earliest years and was sampling by the end; the dialect poetry is where he really shines, though his Standard American English poems are all excellent. Finding the rhythm of the dialect took work, and favorites like “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” and “The Colored Soldiers” outdo the famous “Sympathy.”
Lynch, John. Bourbon Spain: 1700-1808. Basil Blackwell, 1989.
I hoped to like this better than Elliott’s Imperial Spain; I didn’t. It’s almost entirely dynastic history, the view from the monarchy and its bureaucrats, though the Americas and the Bourbon reforms get welcome attention. An adequate politico-economic introduction; the better text hasn’t been written yet.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
Third read, and the first that worked: with better historical and literary context the dialect reads as craft rather than bad writing. Huck’s gradual moral development on slavery is beautiful to see, and Huck and Jim’s conversation about the French language had me cackling out loud.
A short but interesting survey of a usually ignored dimension of Latin American history: indigenous women, from the pre-Hispanic period to current activism. The brevity makes strong take-aways impossible; a good starting point, not the end of the discussion.
An ambitious, hard-to-assess book: late seventeenth-century Virginia would be unrecognizable from the late eighteenth, transformed through family, class, and racial relations rooted in demography and labor. Quasi-Marxist in outlook; Kulikoff gives a bit too much weight to modes of production, but it’s useful on the origins of Southern social structures.
Probably the oldest truly great history of American slavery, since surpassed but chock-full of detail. Jordan’s subject is how white Americans saw black people: the black-equals-slave idea was a mid-seventeenth-century invention, rationalized on religious grounds that became coterminous with race. The chapter on sex and reproduction is crucial.
Where other Potosí studies stay in the mines, Mangan dives into the city itself: indigenous women brewing chicha around a Spanish corn-flour embargo, a silver capital running on credit. Markets just don’t interest me as much as labor systems; worth a read if you’re really interested in Potosí.
A big, difficult, nearly comprehensive study of Bahian plantation society through a quasi-Marxist lens. My disappointment: Schwartz never looks beyond Bahia, to other Brazilian regions or to Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, so what actually defines Brazilian society stays unclear. Great material for future comparativists; not quite what I’d hoped.
The gold standard for historical writing on slavery in the Americas: New World slavery as uniquely brutal, racialization as a hemispheric process rather than the Bacon’s Rebellion story alone, and North American slavery contextualized geographically within the Western Hemisphere. A must-read.
A good introduction to how labor actually functioned in early colonial Potosí and how the mita system came to be (Toledo doesn’t deserve the blame he’s normally given), but largely surpassed: Tandeter is superior on the actual mechanics of mining in colonial Peru.
Short and fascinating: free black Virginians like Anthony Johnson held near-equal rights and status until Bacon’s Rebellion and the 1705 Slave Codes stripped them away. Compelling evidence that anti-black racism was produced for a specific end, not something that has always existed.
Adelman rejects the Age of Democratic Revolutions paradigm: Spanish Americans didn’t initially seek independence; the imperial center imploded, and they had to come to terms with an empire without a core. A difficult text, not for newcomers, and I took off a star for the approachability.
Elliott, J.H. Imperial Spain 1469-1716. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
A decent introduction to the Spain of Fernando and Isabel and the Habsburgs: an interpretive narrative that treats the reader as a mature adult and examines Spain’s constituent parts together and separately. But where are the Americas? Flawed and dated, needing supplements, yet one of the best on the market.
The creation story from hell: American liberty and slavery rose together, inextricably linked, with independence itself bought with slave-produced exports. Bleak and well told, though the aristocratic Founders clamoring for liberty (the very class Bacon’s Rebellion fought) are an enigma Morgan leaves unanswered.
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. London: Penguin Classics, 2012.
The most Protestant American novel I have ever read, and I don’t know that I like it very much: the characters are iconic and the book heartwarming (excepting, of course, the death of Beth), but the pace is so slow and episodic it lacked momentum.
Effectively the same arguments as Generations of Captivity, with more attention to region and types of labor: the North, the Chesapeake, the Carolina lowcountry, the lower Mississippi. I’m a huge fan of Berlin, but I may have wasted a bit of time here; his later work treads the same ground.
Statistics-heavy study showing 18th-century Potosí would have been unprofitable without the mita: owners paid only for workers’ reconstitution while indigenous communities swallowed maintenance and reproduction. A bit of a slog evaluating the evidence, but illuminating on how the social structure around the mines worked.
Broke a lot of my notions of a relatively homogeneous Spanish America: Bourbon treatment of independent borderland peoples changed depending on where and when you look, with traders and scientific expeditions far more benign than missionaries and soldiers. Early Americanists will find much familiar here.
A monograph that doubles as a really good overview, and Rodríguez O.’s sense of “empire” matches my own: not colonies subordinate to Spain but two realms under one Monarchy, whose dissolution in 1808 unleashed movements that meant autonomy when they said “independence.” I learned so much.
An illuminating study of legitimacy and political power in 17th century New England: Massachusetts and Native nations both began the period seeing themselves as sovereign and both ended fully subordinate to the English monarchy. It gave me the narrative I lacked; what had been a cacophony of names comes together really well. Highly recommend.
A leviathan of a text: Brading traces creole patriotism from Garcilaso and Torquemada through Hidalgo to the liberal state, reading Latin American independence as intra-elite competition between creoles and peninsulares. A lot here seemed convincing, though intellectual milieu alone can’t be the whole story.
I like Calloway’s vision of Indians and Europeans remaking each other into something more alike, but he overstates the case: much of the fusion is surface-level or temporary, and there was more coercion than he lets on. A useful what-might-have-been that needs supplementing for a true picture.
The Florentine Codex in four columns (original Nahuatl, Lockhart’s English, Sahagún’s Spanish, that Spanish in English), so you can see how the 16th-century translation differs from the original. Rediscovering this after undergrad reframed how I read it; a good collection of conquest sources from the Mexica perspective.
Dominguez, Jorge I. Insurrection or Loyalty. De Gruyter, 1980.
This book is infuriating: Domínguez tests historians’ hypotheses about why Spanish American territories rebelled or stayed loyal, landing on elites and the empire’s internal balance. The ideas are interesting, if a little obvious; the structure almost physically repels me. Political scientists will have more fun with it than historians.
Richter reframes early America by facing east from Indian country, with anecdotes embellished like a fisherman’s tale and no worse for it. The major contribution is the reframing itself, and on that count he’s largely successful: I can see North American history from the perspective of American Indians much clearer now. Recommend.
Smith, Tracy K. Life on Mars. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2011.
A great set of poems from the former poet laureate: family and social life couched in the language of astronomy, eliciting a real sense of wonder. The lines that rely on heavy consonance are what I eat up.
White, Richard. The Middle Ground. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
A good book historically, a great one theoretically: in the pays d’en haut no power was dominant, so accommodation and productive misunderstanding replaced acculturation. White’s insistence that the middle ground be grounded spatially is what makes the concept so resilient; not everything is or can be one.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. London: Penguin Classics, 2019.
Mixed thoughts: the opening chapters are a realistic treatment of grief that fits my own experience, but the mid-19th-century consensus Heaven (a primordial soup straight out of Neon Genesis Evangelion) sounds like my own personal Hell. The book made me think a lot, even though I disagree with Phelps by the end.
Kupperman’s myth-busting study: English settlers found so much in common with Native peoples that they may as well have been a “mirror” of their own societies. The religion chapter, with its less rigid, syncretized Christianities, fascinated me; the subtitle is almost a misnomer, since there’s constant interplay but very little facing off.
How did a “mere stop-over” become a critical node of the Spanish empire? Fuente shows how constant ship traffic, Mexican silver, slave labor, and sheer defensibility let Havana cultivate a prosperity few port cities could; an excellent explanation of how a city I’ve long wanted to visit came to be.
Merrell’s enthusiasm for the topic is contagious, and his treatment makes me inclined to call him the father of the “New Indian History”: through contact with Europeans, the Catawbas discovered a “New World” just as much as Europeans did.
I’m sorry, but this book is really bad: jam-packed with information that never comes together cohesively, written in textbook-speak, with a miserable thematic middle section that buries the big picture. Do not recommend.
Jacobs, Harriet Ann. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.
Of all the slave narratives I’ve read, probably the most detailed about personal experience: less on the mechanics of slave life than 12 Years a Slave, but the psychological toll of enslavement shines through. Jacobs has absolutely zero patience for slaveholders and their sympathizers, and I am here for it.
A great text that sets the ground for White’s The Middle Ground: English, French, and Native Americans each trying to “convert” the others to their way of life, with the French most successful. Should be recognized as a classic, though I was left wanting more on Native Americans.
Probably the first major American study of the subject (1916), arguing the Americas freed Spain from its limiting circumstances in Europe; but I find in-depth discussions of “trade” (I want to call it “robbery”) a bit of a sleepy topic. Far surpassed by more recent works.
Trying to be two things at once: the claim that Jamestown, not Plymouth, is the true start of the Anglo-American project is half-baked, but the analysis of English mental maps (Ottoman anxieties, an Atlantic seen as three seas) is bright and thorough. Disjointed; Jamestown itself doesn’t appear until the last third.
A remarkably comprehensive narrative of early colonial Brazil centered on indigenous peoples, though the analysis isn’t as strong as the research. Two critiques: African slavery gets too little weight, disease too much; emphasizing disease lets readers put blinders on the scale of brutality inflicted by colonization.
Morgan, Edmund S. Puritan Family. New York: Harper Perennial, 1942.
Is this work ever dated (my copy was printed in 1944), but quite important. The chapters on servitude and slavery and on the dissolution of the Puritan experiment taught me the most, though Morgan’s hunt for a “bright side” to involuntary servitude rubs me the wrong way.
I honestly love this book: the first American novel to sell a million copies, running at a nice clip balancing intrigue, action, and character-building. I was disappointed by the cliffhanger (nothing here is self-contained), and someone needs to do an analysis of blackness in this story.
I gobbled down this massive tome in one day, hardly taking time to eat. Fischer revives the “Teutonic germ” argument via four British folkways; a massive accomplishment, but I side with the pluralists: the folkways shaped early America, then largely crumbled, and he undervalues American pluralism.
Northup, Solomon. 12 Years a Slave. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.
Probably the most interesting slave narrative I’ve read to date: more thorough than Douglass, covering Northup’s life in New York, his kidnapping, the Louisiana plantation years, and his legal liberation. The opening and closing chapters read with the tension of a well-written thriller; a must-read.
Profoundly dated lectures in historical sociology, situated in a thoroughly British Atlantic with no nod to the Spanish or African ones: a serious problem. The third lecture’s regional breakdown of colonial North America is the most interesting part; the whole doesn’t go far enough.
A great study of how conquest gave way to institutionalized Spanish rule in Yucatan, centered on the campaigns against Mayan idolatry: the Maya were receptive to Christianization, so long as it was on their own terms. The chapters on the Maya feel like a mere addition; a shame, since they’re the most interesting part.
Poe’s greatness lives in short form; the novel keeps his trademark gore and horror but its meandering nature takes away the pace that makes his other work so powerful. Influential (it inspired Moby-Dick and Verne), but nearly two centuries on it doesn’t stand up.
A study of how Peru’s Indians resisted Spanish conquest, from millenarian revolt to working the Spanish legal system, that reads more as anthropology or sociology than history. The political economy material went over my head; I didn’t really “get it.”
Woof, a difficult read: the culmination of Miller’s 25 years on Puritan New England, painting its leaders as intellectuals first and governors second. Not an introductory book; I read it with Wikipedia constantly open, and it needs supplementing with Edmund Morgan.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Longman, 1958.
A nice easy read: Winthrop’s life as a way into the Puritan dilemma, how far quasi-theocratic authorities must retreat from the world to build their city upon a hill. Morgan moved my image of the Puritans further from Hawthorne and Arthur Miller toward a far more dynamic people.
A fascinating cross-section of the 168 men who deposed Atahuallpa in 1533: over half under thirty, a third hidalgos, most ending their expeditions to lord over encomiendas rather than soldier on. Dated and meant for specialists, but a really important, illuminating read for me.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
Cooper writes sleep medicine masquerading as books: this one is almost entirely conversation in Otsego about what settlement means for those it displaces, ending in the dying-race trope. It had the theoretical potential to be interesting, but Cooper simply is not a good writer, and I don’t find his books worth reading.
Astounding work, dismissed at the time as “not history,” that foresaw environmental history: the linkages of 1492 reshaped the biogeography of the planet. Its contents are now received wisdom, the syphilis chapter doesn’t really belong, and Africa gets too little attention, but as a starting point you could do much worse.
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House, 2020.
One of those books that make you say “Aha!”: race is a meta-language, and the deeper thing it masks is caste. Wilkerson is absolutely right, though the India and Third Reich comparisons stay skin-deep; read her alongside others (McGhee pairs well). A must-read regardless.
A tough book to get through, though that’s the topic’s doing, not Morgan’s: a historical theology built around one question, how a church constructs membership. The Puritan attempt to shrink the visible church toward the invisible bred an obsession with purity that eventually collapsed the whole edifice.
Haig, Matt. The Midnight Library. Viking, 2020.
I can’t say this book cured my depression, but it has helped some: Haig paints chronic depression excellently and gave me means to think about what being “well” might look like. The story is nothing too special; the questions he raises are what matter.
I’ve never come across a synthetic text so jam-packed with information. The argument: in spite of rhetoric, the US has almost never been isolationist. The conspicuous absences, development and immigration, show Herring thinking about “foreign policy” in more limited terms than could be useful.
It came off as thoroughly light-weight at first, but McGhee’s argument separates it from the rest: racism doesn’t just harm the discriminated-against, it destroys opportunities for the racists too (the pools filled with concrete). Her solutions verge on platitudes, but she’s right. Required reading.
Erdrich, Louise. The Sentence. New York: Harper, 2021.
A testament to Erdrich’s ability that the main character is quite unlikable and I still rooted for her. An interesting ghost story marked by grave robbing and the more positive legacy of NAGPRA; also a decent primer on the events of 2020 in the United States.
Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.
A 21st century retelling of Flowers for Algernon: I was enamored by the first third, Robbie’s sense of wonder so lifelike I could almost feel it, before the book becomes something more mundane. Best on climate change, worst on funding and politics; Powers isn’t wrong, but he’ll convince no one not already on his side.