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!
Most important books/books with the most impact:
ReplyDelete1. The Strange Career of Jim Crow
2. Roll, Jordan, Roll
3. American Slavery, American Freedom
4. Radicalism of the American Revolution
5. The Incorporation of America
The ones I liked best:
1. The Incorporation of America
2. Manliness and Civilization
3. Three Generations, No Imbeciles
4. Unruly Americans
5. City of Quartz
Cubs fan?? What??
I'm not surprised Chris and I have a similar list. besides both being snappy dressers, we are clearly mental connect.
ReplyDelete1) The Incorporation of America
2) Manliness and Civilization
3) No Constitutional Right to be Ladies
4) Three Generations, No Imbeciles
5) The Strange Career of Jim Crow
Oh, and if President Obama can accept that the Cubs will never win the World Series, so can you:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/74627
Books have been great all semester. It is hard to pick favorites, but I will try.
ReplyDelete1) Three Generations, No Imbeciles
2) Unruly Americans
3) Manliness and Civilization
4) American Slavery American Freedom
5) Radicalism of the American Revolution
With honorable mentions to Roll Jordan Roll and The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
By the way, beating the Pirates is nothing to brag about. Sorry about the weekend series. Go Braves!!!
Favourite (yes, the original spelling. I can't use it on papers, so I post online using the queen's English) books so far this semester:
ReplyDelete1. Manliness and Civilization
2. Three Generations, No Imbeciles
3. The Incorporation of America
4. The Wages of Whiteness
5. The Strange Career of Jim Crow
I have no interest in baseball, but you should have seen the shakeup in placements at the US Ballroom Championships this weekend - it was crazy!
Roger
I've enjoyed the readings in general this semester, but the five that I think should be repeated in the next 7010 course are:
ReplyDelete1. Morgan
2. Holton
3. Kerber
4. Woodward
5. Genovese
Especially as someone fairly new to the discipline, I thought these texts raised important historical and historiographical questions that opened the door to fruitful discussions. I hate to leave out Bederman since her book contributed an important facet, gender, but I wonder if there might be another text that would work instead? Perhaps a collection of essays rather than a monograph?
I posted this once earlier, but I'm not sure if I put it in the right section or not, so I'm just going to post it again. 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.
ReplyDelete1. 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.
:)
Just saw that everyone put their comments here...whoops. I just went ahead and made a favorite to least favorite post that went a lot longer than I expected as I ended up just adding all of them and my very general thoughts regarding each of them.
ReplyDelete