Current Reading in January 2021

With the new year, new books to read, or listen to. I'm listening to Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones. This is a more scholarly work that looks at the holding of and policies towards prisoners held by both sides. It is a well researched work that explores how the treatment of prisoners changed constantly due to political and logistical pressures. Very interesting.

>1 jztemple: That looks really good. Happy reading to you in 2021.

Finished an excellent George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway by John McCabe.

Reading Manhattan '45 by Jan Morris. A book about Manhattan as it was in 1945, written in the 1980s by someone who never visited till 1953. It's rather uneven, jumbling from subject to subject without really getting into anything deeply. The footnotes are actually of more interest to me than the main text. I'll keep slogging away but I don't know if I'll get through it.

>4 jztemple: "A book about Manhattan as it was in 1945, written in the 1980s by someone who never visited till 1953."

How much do I love that sentence? It somehow reminded me of a Cuban-influenced rock band I saw a few years back called the Cuban Cowboys. Everybody in the band was the child of parents who had fled Cuba when Castro took over. The lead singer was actually quite poignant when he spoke of the scene he imagined of his parents getting off the plane in Florida, never for a second imagining that they would never see their homeland again. At any rate, after the show, I went over to buy one of their CDs and asked the question the poor guy I'm sure had answered a zillion times, which was "Have you ever been to Cuba yourself?" He said he hadn't been there because it would break his parents hearts for him to go while the Castro regime was still in power, so he would have to wait until his parents were gone. And then he said, "I still write songs about Cuba, though. I'm like an astronomer who's never been to Mars."

>5 rocketjk: Thanks for the story. Living in Florida I have heard quite a lot from folks who are second or third generation Cuban-American.

Just finished Grant by Ron Chernow, which was excellent. I read Washington: A Life a couple of months ago, I thought Grant was just a little bit better.

Working my way through the Audible version of Fort Laramie: Military Bastion of the High Plains (Frontier Military Series) by Douglas C. McChristian. Pretty good book, although much of it is about the activities going on in eastern Wyoming or adjacent states during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century.

I finished Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton. Written more as political and cultural philosophy than as history, this concise and well-written book was first published in 1967 as the Black Power movement and many other historical waves in world and U.S. history were coalescing. I do remember those days, although as young observer, as I turned 12 during the summer of 1967. "Black Power" was a term that made white conservatives angry and white liberals, and some Blacks, nervous. It seemed to speak of separatism, anger and violence. But as Ture and Hamilton described the philosophy, at least from this far historical remove, it seems more common sense than anything else, especially if one allows some--to me--clear fact of the pervasiveness in America of systemic racism, a term the authors here were using in 1967. (I don't know when that term was coined. Maybe it was new then, or maybe it was centuries old. Certainly the condition was centuries old.)

The authors here specifically reject separatism. They are basically calling for African Americans to coalesce into a group that can exercise civic and political power for their own self-interest. They point out that every other ethnic and national group in America had to do, and did do, just that before gaining justice for themselves and traction in the overall body politic.

At any rate, I feel OK about including this book in a history group thread because it is now an important historical document and even when first published included a great deal about the history of racism in America.

Finished the very long Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations by Charles D. Benson & William B. Faherty. This is a history of the Apollo program at the Cape Canaveral AFB and the Kennedy Space Center, focusing mainly on the ground facilities and people. Lots and lots about budgets, schedules, labor issues and other rather dull stuff, but I found it enjoyable since I worked at LC-39 (the Saturn V assembly and launch facility) during the duration of the Space Shuttle program, so it was interesting to see how the folks did things during the Apollo program.

I finished The Union Reader, edited by Richard B. Harwell. This is a very interesting anthology for those who care about American Civil War history. It’s a collection of letters, newspaper columns and journal entries from people of all sorts who took part in the war or witnessed it the war from the Union side. (Harwell also published a companion collection, The Confederate Reader.)

We get journal entries from Union soldiers in far flung theaters of war like New Mexico, but we are also taken inside Fort Sumter at the very beginning of the war, a diary entry of a woman watching the soldiers of both sides rush back and forth through the streets of her hometown, Gettysburg, first-hand accounts of major engagements like the Battle of Shiloh, letters and telegrams back and forth from an increasingly exasperated Lincoln to his generals during the early years of the conflict. There are accounts of life inside prisoner of war camps and a description of life in New Orleans during the Federal occupation.

Since we never got a February thread going, I'm just going to drop this here:

I finished American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country by Kay Bailey Hutchison. Hutchison was a sitting U.S. Senator from Texas and the Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference when this book was published in 2004. The book is a collection of short biographies (from around 8 to 20 pages in length) of influential women in many different fields and many different time periods throughout American history. The bios are presented by category, with one or two of the bios per section followed by one or two short Q&A conversations with category-appropriate contemporary (as per 2004) women.

All in all, the biographies are well written and interesting. There are a decent number of African American, Latina and Native American women represented, as well. Some of the biographies served as good refresher courses for me, but quite a few were women whose stories and accomplishments were entirely new to me. In the acknowledgements, Howard Cohn is acknowledged as researcher and draft writer. I don't know how much of the actual writing is his and how much is hers. I say that not because I doubt Hutchison's abilities as a writer--why should I?--but only because she was a sitting senator at the time, so I'm wondering where she would have found the time. At any rate, as I said, the book is clearly and informatively written.

So I think this is in fact a valuable and interesting volume. I could see it used in a high school or even a college syllabus.