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.
:)
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