100 books like Gender on Ice, Volume 10

A collection of very short but incredibly interesting and illuminating essays, this book inaugurated the field of study we might call “feminism and empire.” Strobel and Chaudhuri gathered up the most important histories written to that date that explained how nineteenth and twentieth-century feminism emerged from colonialist contexts all over the world. Asking the question “what difference does gender make?” each author teases out the importance of gender for colonial travel and politics in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Reading this book made me want to contribute to that kind of historical understanding of gender, modeling for me what an “intersectional feminist” method of historical investigation might look like.

This book takes a tour through the most impactful and influential popular literature circulating in the 19th and early 20th centuries—the stories that laid the groundwork for a collective Anglo-American consciousness—and explains how these stories produced a set of feminist ideologies that were reliant upon a racist and imperialist imaginary. Whether it is her chapter on the “King and I” in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or her tracking of the “picanninies” romping through “Peter Pan” and a “Passage to India,” Donaldson explains how we came to associate feminism with the ideologies of slavery and colonialism in the deepest recesses of our imaginations.

This book teaches us how German imperialism tied itself to the emancipation of women, by focusing on the expansion of the German state into Africa and the Pacific rim. In the generations leading up to the establishment of the Third Reich, German women made themselves indispensable to German imperialism as nurses, wives, missionaries, mothers, sexual partners, and upholders of racial purity. This is simply one of the smartest books I’ve ever read, making clear the granular details of how empires were built and why gender matters in our understanding of them.

This might be my favorite history book, period. Conor explains how “modern womanhood” in Australia came into being and was marked by the successful managing of one’s (sexualized and objectified) public appearance, including the way “primitive woman” (aboriginal or black) was constructed as a colonialist foil for the modern (white) Australian woman—whether she was a “screen-struck” movie fan, beauty contestant, or flapper. This book makes clear how women, as the principal focus of a newly visual mass media, came to define their “liberation” in sexual as well as racial and nationalist terms.

First published in 1991, this book draws on Inuit oral history to challenge the “standard reconstruction” of how the Franklin expedition played out, presenting a more complex narrative. A master mariner, Woodman not only repeatedly searched King William Island for relics and bones but was the first to do an in-depth analysis of the unpublished Inuit testimony gathered by Charles Francis Hall with the help of Tookoolito. 

Woodman deduced that after the abandonment, some of Franklin’s men returned to the ice-locked vessels. Intensely focused and detailed, this book speaks to aspiring experts–and, for me, drew attention to the need for a broad, accessible survey of Arctic exploration highlighting the Indigenous contribution.  

A few days out of high school, I found myself on a forest fire crew at the North Rim of Grand Canyon, and returned for 15 seasons. The more I pondered the Canyon, the more I wanted to learn about why this strange landscape was valued, which led me to William Goetzmann, who became my grad school advisor.

New Lands, New Men is the third and final volume of a trilogy Goetzmann wrote on the theme. (His second book, Exploration and Empire, won a Pulitzer.) It’s a bit looser, willing to play with the material, and full of the quirky as well as the renown. Its organizing concept that exploration rekindled in the 18th century (with a significant input from modern science) is a major innovation in a field usually devoted to stirring tales of individual adventure and discovery.

If you read this book about the early cross-Atlantic explorers and substitute today’s technology entrepreneurs, the metaphors fit cleanly.

They sold exuberant, sometimes-fulfilled, and often-failed stories to profit-seeking backers, took inordinate risks, and results were often winner-take-all.

As Mark Twain, another famous explorer, once said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

This collection of letters is part of the canon. First, it brings the men of the final Franklin expedition to life. We hear them coming and going, speaking to their contemporaries as if in private. We marvel at the extent of John Franklin’s religiosity and his sense of having a Christian mission. And at last, we understand his refusal, during his first overland expedition, to turn back before it was too late. Instead, he stood waiting for a miracle, convinced that any minute now, Edward Parry would arrive in a Royal Navy ship.

What’s more, in his succinct introduction, editor Russell Potter dismisses theories that the final Franklin disaster was caused by lead poisoning or botulism, clearing the way for the truth of trichinosis. 

This isn’t a book about middle age as much as it is a book about a middle-aged woman. Margery Benson, schoolteacher and spinster, has been overlooked and overworked. She’s ready for an adventure and to find the beetle she’s been obsessed with since childhood.

Margery doesn’t go on this adventure alone, and the friendship between Margery and the younger, flashier Enid Pretty is the real heart of this novel. Adventure, friendship, women finding their strength: it’s exactly what I want from a book.

Imagining different cities from different viewpoints in history is the focus of Calvino’s wonderful set of vignettes between Marco Polo from his 13th-century travelogue and Kublai Kahn as they explore different ways they see cities that lie along the Silk Road. Weaving fact into fiction, they point up the essential logic of how cities are formed and how they evolve. What we remember, how we perceive these memories, and the size and shape of cities are all ideas which is the canvas on which Calvino describes the many cities of our imagination.

This is a wonderful set of stories–you can dip into them and read them if you are on the subway or waiting in the dentist's surgery or anywhere where you get a free moment. The stories are memorable.