Blackhawks’ history won the National Book Award last year. It’s a comprehensive history of the North American continent told from the perspective of native peoples encountering white settlers from Europe, their enslaved populations taken from Africa, and the resulting effects of settlement, colonialism, warfare, disease, and population shifts and all of their aftereffects. By flipping the perspective on American history and settlement to center the experience of native populations, this book lets us think in a more nuanced way about the long history of this continent and our shared place here.
Richard Rothstein. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
I’m part of a faculty/student research group this summer looking at land use in Greenville in the mid-twentieth century and Furman’s role in selling and purchasing property for its campuses. Rothstein’s book documents how segregated communities in this country were not organically developed, but created and actively sustained by acts of legislation at the federal, state, and local levels, all across this country.
Joan Didion. Slouching Toward Bethlehem.
California has always attracted and fascinated me, in all its inscrutability, and no one apparently has captured some of its meanings, as well as what the 60s and 70s meant in various ways like Didion, which I’m sorry to have never gotten to. Bethlehem is a collection of essays and magazine pieces all about California written for a national audience in the latter 60s. If there’s time, I’ll follow up this book with her second collection, The White Album, which moves forward into the 70s.