Rating of Books for the Semester

1. Roll Jordan, Roll
2. Three Generations, No Imbeciles
3. Manliness and Civilization
4. American Slavery, American Freedom
5. Strom Thurmond's America

Crespino definitely presents Strom as a mutable figure starting with the early decades of the twentieth century.  I did learn that Strom had more "change" than President Obama's campagin. Again, he was a politician and he adopted his issues and principles to what he thought was popular and would get him elected like his calculation to switch from a conservative Democrat to a Conservative Republican.

America has spoken, and they demand more Strom Thurmond!

I get the feeling that Crespino is carefully navigating the tricky historical waters which arise while writing about a polarizing figure in recent history (George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Mikael Gorbachev suffer an equal fate). He is straightforward about how most people either treat Thurmond as a misunderstood political relic or as America's answer to Adolph Hitler. Though he states that he does not want to write another book which falls into one of these camps, it leaves one to wonder what his argument actually is. Am I wrong in interpreting his goal as much loftier than mere biography? Is he trying to write a Southern history, an American history, or a mere biography. Though it could be all three, it seems as though he wants to present something new about the oft-chronicled Thurmond. Is Thurmond really just a narrative concierge of a larger Dickensian fable, a la Robert Caro's multi-volume doorstop about Lyndon Johnson? I guess I should have just written this in one sentence and ask what the author feels his new angle accomplishes in the larger historiography. Please Help! I may write a review and I hear Dr. Baker does not suffer fools lightly.

Rating the Books From This Semester

So I thought I'd give my list of the books that I liked, ranking from my favorite to my least favorite. I, like anyone else writing this list, have a bias towards my historical interest (Progressive Era, social and culture U.S. history, etc.). I really like books that are accessible, engaging and expose me to new ideas or forms of historical thinking that I had never came across before. I'll give a little short explanation blurb about each one too.

So here's my list.

1. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age

So I feel pretty certain I'm in the minority, like probably the only one, who would call this my favorite book of the semester, but for students like me who are very interested in studying cultural history and Gilded Age American history, then this book is foundational. I loved how Trachtenberg weaved in the culture of the times into his book, even though at times the text was difficult to read and fully comprehend. I just enjoyed the content of the book and the focus on cultural history as Trachtenberg gave a very rich, detailed account of the famous figures, ideas, and concepts of the period. I think its a book that made me want to go back to it and continue to decipher and unravel its themes, so it kept me intrigued.

2. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

I really liked this book because Woodward provided a new and interesting way to look at the Jim Crow era. I liked how he elaborated on the nuances that did or did not differentiate between race in the South and I thought it was interesting that he took the discussion into the 1970's, making connections between Jim Crow as it looked in different eras of time and comparing that to how Jim Crow manifests itself in issues like "white flight" urban development. This book has a lot of applications to community and public history as well, which I really like.

3. Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies

This book surprised me, as I wasn't sure if I was going to like it. I felt like it was one of the books that I understood the most, very easily readable, applicable. I liked the format of her argument, how she broke it down into interesting historical stories. I found her argument to be intriguing and fascinating.

4. Paul Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, The Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

Probably helped that Professor Lombardo was kind enough to come to the class and speak with us, adding an added bonus of being able to meet the author and exchange in dialogue. But I also loved this book because it read like a novel. It didn't feel like you were being lectured about a historical topic, but rather taken through a historical topic filled with mystery and intrigue.


5. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

I really liked this book because I felt like it taught me a lot of new material about an era of American history that I felt has been discussed time and time again. But Morgan and his arguments about the incorporation of American slavery and its different manifestations really made me rethink how I viewed America's earliest settlers. Very engaging writing as well, with a good deal of wit mixed in, which I always appreciate.

6. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919-1930.

So we had to read the book for this week. I haven't had the chance to discuss it with the class, so i don't know where to put the book on the list. Also, labor history is not really a topic that I enjoy very much, so that dropped it a bit on the list. But, having said that, I think there is a lot of merit to studying this historical period and I thought Cohen did a good job writing about the topic.

7. David Roediger,  The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

This book was ok, but I just couldn't get very engaged in the book. I thought the concept of racial tensions within the American working class to be very interesting, especially how Roediger looked into how African-American workers were discriminated against by Irish and Italian-American workers.

8. Gordon Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution

I will acknowledge that this is an extremely important book in the study of Revolutionary American history, but I just never could get myself into the argument. I don't like Wood's highly academic style of writing and I just don't really buy into the American Revolution being as "radical" as he made it out to be.


9. Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll

Same as above. I think this book is very important to the study of slavery and paternalism in America, but as many have mentioned, Genovese's ideas seem to me to be outdated and at times very controversial. In fact, the controversy regarding this book was about the only part that really engaged me into reading this book.

10. Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution

I just did not like this book. While he makes an interesting case in establishing the economic factors that contributed to the formation of the Constitution, I found the book either very hard to follow or extremely dull. I think, as other classmates were, that I was misled into thinking the book was going to be about something else besides economics.

My Top 3 Favorite Books of the Semester

 I just decided to go with the somewhat generic "my top 3 favorite books of the semester," so these are just going to be the books that I enjoyed reading the most, and am most likely to recommend to people who like history, etc. I'm also going to include a little blurb about why I liked them, and things like that just to give some background.

1.  Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell by Paul Lombardo
 This was definitely my favorite book of the semester, and I really enjoyed having the writer come in and answer questions, etc. But also, the subject of the book was really interesting, and pretty scary; going into reading it, I knew just a small amount about eugenics in this country, and reading this was incredibly eye-opening for me.

2. The Strange Career of Jim Crowe by C. Vann Woodward
  I also really enjoyed Vann Woodward's book. I didn't get to read it in a way that was  as "in-depth" as I would have liked, since I gave my oral presentation that week, but I did enjoy it, since I've always been interested by Southern history.

3. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1930 by Lizabeth Cohen
  Even though I wasn't incredibly excited going into reading this (I'm not hugely into Industrial/history of labor), I did end up liking this book a lot more than I had expected; maybe because it is mostly focused in Chicago, which is one of my favorite cities; I'm not going to comment on the Cubs debate, since the only baseball team I really follow anyway is the Orioles (I'm from Maryland). Anyway, I would definitely recommend this to anyone who read and enjoyed The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (a novel that I first read in high school, and have read a couple times since), because it deals with the history behind a lot of things in the novel.

-Becky J.
:)

Rating the Titles--a running post

I'd like everyone to weigh in, from time to time, with your musings about your favorite books in the course. The criteria is completely open--you can put up lists of your "most important" or "most illuminating" or "most surprising" or "top choices for a book club." You can weigh in multiple times if you so choose. You can change your mind, although I do ask that you leave up your previous comments so I have a historical record of the thinking process here. You can also respond to one another. And obviously you haven't read all the titles yet, so it is likely that your ideas may change after you've read Crespino's or Cohen's or Davis's books.

Have some fun with this. I am after honest opinions here and will not hold any of your posts against you in any way. Unless you say something negative about the Chicago Cubs, who I might add won their first series of the year against a recharged Pittsburgh Pirates. On to the pennant!

Eugenics, motive, and judgment

To put it mildly, Lombardo spends a lot of time in this book revealing the lack of scruples that often came with eugenics. The characters of Laughlin, DeJarnette, Estabrook, Priddy, and others involved in the Buck case are drawn with clarity, and the picture is not a sympathetic one. While Lombardo does reveal some motivations, most are not honorable. Priddy's motive is perhaps the most troubling since it is not really addressed. So my first question is: what were the motives of these eugenicists? Money, fame, and sex are named among the motives, as are bigotry and prejudice. Yet in the Epilogue, L. cautions the reader not to issue too stern a judgment. While it is no secret that practices continue that will be condemned in decades to come, I am not sure of why we shouldn't judge. In order to avoid repeating such atrocities, we need to continue to question the motives of key players in the game of progress today. The study of bioethics is designed to keep such questions in play. I was impressed with Lombardo's consistent consideration/treatment of ethics and wonder: should we discount the importance of the role of ethics in the writing of history? Thoughts on ethics in historiography/motives/judgments?

Buck/Roe

What do you think about Lombardo's assertion that you can not be both against Buck v. Bell based on  the belief government should not interfere with an individual's body while at the same time being against Roe v. Wade? Does this quandary hold water? Is he speaking from a strictly judicial standpoint, or does moral perspective allow for this apparent contradiction?