Why am I passionate about this?
For me, history is always about individuals; what they think and believe and how those ideas motivate their actions. By relegating our past to official histories or staid academic tellings we deprive ourselves of the humanity of our shared experiences. As a “popular historian” I use food to tell all the many ways we attempt to “be” American. History is for everyone, and my self-appointed mission is to bring more stories to readers! These recommendations are a few stand-out titles from the hundreds of books that inform my current work on how food and religion converge in America. You’ll have to wait for Holy Food to find out what I’ve discovered.
Christina's book list on the hidden history of America
Why did Christina love this book?
I stumbled upon this 100-year-old book during my research for my upcoming book. Seldes proved to be the exact type of irascible storyteller I needed to read to frame my work. He is irreverent, lyrical, and highly opinionated! Seldes is a self-proclaimed (maybe the first) pop culture critic who turned his finely honed intellect to profiling the religious seers and conmen of the first two decades of the United States.
The Stammering Century set the template for the newly minted genre of author—the ‘public intellectual.’ Seldes weaves disparate first-person accounts and his own ideas about how religion in America twists and turns to become something entirely new and not always welcomed. This edition features a delightful essay by noted cultural historian, Greil Marcus that inspires us to read history not just as a series of dates but as a wildly entertaining and oft-times accidental series of bad ideas.
1 author picked The Stammering Century as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Gilbert Seldes, the author of The Stammering Century, writes:
This book is not a record of the major events in American history during
the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the
cults and manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals,
and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements
and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a back-
ground in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pentecostalists;
the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors
and the Fundamentalists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks…