92 books like A True Picture of Emigration

I first got acquainted with John Seymour through the original version of this book, The Self-Sufficient Gardener. I was charmed by his earthy lore and practical tips – an author who truly knew his stuff. A plus was the beautiful illustrations in the book. Its new permutation, The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It was been expanded to cover everything from micro-urban gardens to 5-acre homesteads. While gardening is the focus, the book includes plenty of information on butchering, brewing, canning—even spinning flax. What the book doesn’t include are plans and step-by-step photos for building structures, though it does include rudimentary information on metalworking and carpentry. Most importantly, Seymour has a lifetime of gardening and farming experience to draw upon. The reader reaps the benefit.

I’m a sucker for any book about vanishing skills. Shopwork is loaded with such lore. For example, the section on harness repair reminds us “thread should be torn instead of cut, in order to give a long tapered end.” Why? The better to thread a needle. The “Ropework” chapter has detailed options for making splices and loop ends—and enough knots to challenge any sailor. How many books offer on steps on knife whetting or how to set the teeth of a crosscut saw?

This book can brighten a winter’s evening with things you can be glad have vanished, like spooning toxic white lead to mix paint or soldering with a gasoline-fueled blowtorch. Overall, it equips you to follow the maxim, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

Setting up and maintaining a backyard homestead is honest, fulfilling work. For those who prefer productive labor as exercise (rather than heading to a gym), this book is an inspiring look backward at satisfying, useful skills. Take Seymour’s wattle hurdle. Used as a herding panel, the hurdle is woven entirely from hazel sticks. Any supple wood will do. The result is a portable fence panel that cost nothing but a bit of labor.

Many of the projects featured are out of reach (like millstone dressing or coopering or charcoal burning) but all are fascinating and most still relevant today. For example, Seymour demonstrates that engineering a wooden gate that wouldn’t sag was worked out a long time ago—in several variations. Like all of Seymour’s books, this one is exquisitely illustrated.

Anyone intrigued by the ingenuity involved in farming will be fascinated by this time in American history when farming moved from mere subsistence to offering a marketable surplus. Initially, a farmer's concern was modest: first to “raise sufficient corn for the family and their livestock; next, to be assured of an abundant supply of pork.” But as methods improved, there was soon plenty to take to market. A flatboat traveling from Indiana to New Orleans in 1826 could boast 18 barrels of whiskey, 70 barrels of oats, 8,000 pounds of pork, and 300 barrels of corn. 

Unfortunately, demand could tempt producers to abuse: Milk delivered to New York might be shamefully watered down and colored with chalk. World demand for sugar, tobacco, and cotton production fueled slavery, whose brutal conditions this book does not ignore.

Lots of blood and guts in this book. It’s 1916, and Howard is learning what happened to his family back in 1861. That’s when a pair of young women stepped off a Mississippi River steamboat, and into a tiny town on the Illinois side. The townsfolk - noting the elegance of one girl, and the dark skin of the other - decide they are seeing a mistress and her slave, and go back to arguing about what really interests them: which of their boys are going to fight for the North? Which are going to fight for the South? The Pruitt family has the same concerns - and makes the same assumptions - as everybody else. But in wartime, everything can be turned upside down.

In an age of global warming, Klinenberg’s study of how Chicago did (and did not) cope with a horrible heat wave that hit the city in 1995, killing 739 residents, is more relevant than ever.

He shows how death rates varied hugely across neighborhoods, not so much based on socioeconomic status but on the cohesiveness of the community. In places where neighbors looked in on each other the death rate was lower.

Strong neighborhoods do not just enhance our lives, they can save lives.

I’ve long advocated for women’s rights and deeply respect feisty, determined women, so I was thrilled to learn about Elizabeth Packard.

In pre-Civil War America, men could have their wives committed to insane asylums merely for being too smart, too independent, too sassy, or defiant. Elizabeth was one such woman. She was much smarter than her pastor husband, and he had her committed when she publicly disagreed with his theological views.

After years of fighting the system, she was finally released and dedicated the rest of her life to getting legislation passed to save other women from this fate.

Chicago is where I grew up watching the fascinating interplay between the so-called forces of law and order battle the criminal element. It wasn’t much of a battle unless the law-and-order guys and the crooks found themselves reaching for the same loot. Mike Royko’s book describes very well the interplay. On a personal note, I once worked for one of the Illinois governors who ran as a reform candidate. He ended up going to jail on a fraud scheme.

I have a thing for Pinkertons. They’re so often portrayed as villains, but this one is a hero: Kate Warne, the (real-life) first female Pinkerton detective. Kate’s story is fascinating and tense, full of surprising twists—some real and some fictional. At times Girl in Disguise reads more like a spy novel than a detective story, especially when it comes to a certain real-life assassination attempt I’d never heard about, and which literally dropped my jaw. Readers interested in fascinating women largely forgotten by history will devour this one.

The oral historian and radioman Studs Turkel takes us around American without leaving his Chicago via Division Street America. Sparsely contextualized by his interstitial commentary, Turkel exercises his embracing interviewing skills to bring poignant stories of the non-celebrity class into sharp, relevant focus. This same type of unornamented approach earned a Nobel Prize in literature for Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich and her Chernobyl.