24in48 Hour Twelve: Audiobook Story

It's hour 12 of the 48 hours of reading time this weekend, and I'm 6 hours into my (hopefully) 24 hours of reading. Now I'm alternating between two books, one print, one audio, to rest my eyes and keep my body moving. I didn't plan it this way, but Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give and Stephen Markley's Ohio are a good match. Both are fiction crafted in an immediate response to violence and poverty in America. One is focused on police violence against Black people and features a young girl becoming an activist. The other about the Iraq war and the opioid epidemic, and at least partly concerns a young man becoming an activist. Both also describe drug use and drug dealing as a product of poverty and despair, and both address how larger conflicts interrupt and clarify friendships among young people.  And because of where I am in each book, I wound up reading and listening to two different descriptions of high school proms in the same two hour period this afternoon. I'm only a little ways into Ohio, but it seems to take racism seriously as part of its story line from the perspective of a white man who is increasingly critical of the casual racism and patriotic illusions in his small town in Ohio, while The Hate U Give comes from the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Here's Tupac's Thug Life, which I think works for both books, even though it's most obviously connected to the Hate U Give, which takes its title from Tupac's explanation of the T.H.U.G L.I.F.E (The Hate You Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody).

24in48: It's a Book-Fiend Holiday!

It's the 24in48 readathon, the weekend that comes twice a year, when I and thousands of others read for 24 hours between Saturday and Monday at midnight and take breaks to chat and share our bookish glee.

I've only been reading for a little over an hour. I conked out almost immediately after starting my first book last night at hour zero.

And now we're between hours 6 and 9, and i'm posting for the Hour Six challenge: Show off your SFF. This was the perfect one for me, since my husband and I created a science fiction bathroom after realizing how much shelf space we had in there. Before you ask, no, there's no tub or shower in this small bathroom, so we're not worried about the books getting ruined. We've been collecting posters and other decor for the last couple of years. Now that my husband runs a Science Fiction book-club through our local indie bookshop, we're also building a great collection of contemporary international SF.

Some history recommendations for July 4th

Since the first thing I saw this morning was a scandalous New York Times editorial that dramatically misrepresented the history of the American Revolution and its relationship to the French revolution, I thought it would be a good idea to post some recommendations of books that show a different side of the American Revolution and the "Age of Revolutions" more generally.
  Let's get the party started:

Some of the best books on the American Revolution start with an analysis of the social conflict and popular demonstrations among the era's workers, both enslaved and free and how they pushed the colonies toward independence. Probably the most influential of these works is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic which describes revolts by sailors and dock-workers across the Atlantic  from the 1600s through the French Revolution.

The most classic work on the subject of 18th century radicalism and its relevance for modern politics is C.LR. James' brilliant Black Jacobins. This book is more focused on the Haitian and French Revolutions, but it places the American war of independence in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and provides the underlying perspective that explains much of the more grounded work on the 18th century Atlantic world today.

Edward Countryman, whose work was the subject of a round-table of historians in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1996, is another historian whose work emphasizes class differences and contrasting agendas of the groups who participated in the American war for independence and the transformation to the early Republic. His most frequently assigned work is The American Revolution which is now out in a new edition. 

An equally important classic is Benjamin Quarles' study, The Negro in the American Revolution, recently reissued by the UNC press. I learned a great deal from this book when I was preparing to teach African American history before 1865 for the first time after I had just finished by PhD.

For a very recent work by an anthropologist about the legacy of the revolution for Black Americans, see Mitch Kachun's new book on the memory of Crispus Attucks, First Martyr of Liberty I haven't read this one yet, but it looks full of fascinating material. Here he is being interviewed on the New Books Network

Other historians who have moved beyond staid representations of founders made of marble include Annette Gordon-Reid, Woody Holton, Jean H. Baker, Gary Nash, Jeff Pasley, and Dana Frank, whose book on boycotts and economic nationalism in the revolutionary era may have new relevance in the age of Trump.