I am fascinated by historical figures who were deemed marginal, outcast, or eccentric and also by experiences (like sleep or madness) that usually fall beneath historical scrutiny. I am drawn to nineteenth-century literature and history because I find such a rich store of strange and poignant optimism and cultural experimentation dwelling alongside suffering, terror, and despair. As a writer, I feel a sense of responsibility when a great story falls into my hands. I try to be as respectful as I can to the life behind it, while seeking how it fits into a larger historical pattern. I am always on the lookout for books that do the same!
Marshall is my favorite working biographer, and this book had me hooked from page 1.
Fuller’s life almost demands Hollywood treatment. This early feminist thinker was a great friend, intellectual sparring partner, and collaborator of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the first editor to publish Henry David Thoreau.
Less well known is her second career as a pioneering newspaper reporter, who eventually became the first female foreign correspondent in US history. Her dispatches on the cultural scene in Europe and then her eyewitness accounts of the revolutions of 1848 were riveting. Traveling with her Italian aristocrat-turned-revolutionary lover and their young child, she returned to the US with a draft of a history of the Roman republic.
But the ship sank off Fire Island; Fuller, her lover, their child, and the manuscript were lost. But thanks to Marshall, we at least have her story!
The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters takes a fresh look at the trailblazing life of a great American heroine. Whether detailing her front-page New-York Tribune editorials against poor conditions in the city's prisons and mental hospitals, or illuminating her late-in-life hunger for passionate experience - including a secret affair with a young officer in the Roman Guard - Marshall's biography gives the most thorough and compassionate view of an extraordinary woman. No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
I lived in sixteen places by the time I was twenty-two. A peripatetic youth may teach you that different is interesting, that stereotypes don’t hold, that the emperor has no clothes. When I moved South and worked as a journalist, I found black elders’ stories so different from the official stories of white authorities. Horrified that these men and women would die with their heroism untold, I interviewed more than 150 black activists for Stories of Struggle. I want to know what is missing; I want it found. Like a detective, an anthropologist, a scientist, and yes, a journalist, I want to know, and I want others to know.
The History of White People tracks the creation of race as a fact, rather than an idea or social construct, and of Anglo-Saxon whiteness, for the free male, as a promise of power and supremacy.
Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton professor of American history, emerita, begins with Greek historians and Roman conquerors BCE, who thought not of race but of place, the highlands and lowlands shaping appearance and temperament.
Along the way, Rome’s scrubbed-up copies of Greek statuary become the ideal for beauty, and skin colors and skull measurements become a way to rank superiority. Painter traces the United States’ enslavement of Africans, slaughter of Native Americans, eugenics, endorsement of male brutality (Ralph Waldo Emerson! Teddy Roosevelt!), and race-oriented immigration control: all play a role in whiteness.
Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of "whiteness" for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of "race" is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and…
Though I’ve always found the idea of survival after death fascinating, it was my interest in Modern Spiritualism that really sparked the desire to write Chasing Ghosts. That era (mid-1800s to the early 1900s) was a time when millions confidently believed they could communicate with the dead. Of course, this was only the tip of the paranormal iceberg. So I continued the journey into the lore of haunted places, ancient cultural beliefs, and scientific endeavors to find evidence for paranormal experiences or to debunk it. As a historian of the weirder pages of the past, this topic endlessly fascinates me. I hope it will for you as well.
This obscure 1896 book is a collection of interviews with dead luminaries. At least, that’s what the psychic author alleges. Inside you’ll find conversations with Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Discover their wisdom from beyond the veil, and in the case of Ben Franklin, you can enjoy a new set of his famous aphorisms, including this one: “Spiritual knowledge, like gems hidden in the bowels of the earth, is only to be reached by patient upturning of the soil.”
A previous volume, given through the mediumship of Mrs. Horn, entitled Strange Visitors, was so interesting, that it gave pleasure to learn that another volume of a similar kind was in preparation, and that the Spirit editor, Judge Edmonds, desired that it Should be placed in our hands for publication. The matter was found to be insufficient to form a volume of the kind intended, and during the movements of the medium, to secure favourable conditions for receiving further communications, much time was exhausted, as the dates appended indicate. The localities subjoined to the…
I first read Swann’s Way when I was seventeen. Throughout the following five decades, In Search of Lost Time has always remained within reach, a parallel universe more enriching than words can express. As a painter, I’m drawn to Proust’s subtle use of paintings to reveal and mystify the relationship between what we see and what we know. I’ve spoken on Proust at Berkeley, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Houston, and was invited to give the annual Proust lecture at the Center for Fiction in New York as well as the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.
Proust’s passion for the English writers George Eliot and John Ruskin is well known, as is his scrutiny of the Anglophilia of Parisians at the turn of the twentieth century, but his connection with American thinkers and painters has been less carefully scrutinized. ”It is strange," Proust wrote in 1909, "that, in the most widely different departments . . . there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as the English and American.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, and James McNeill Whistler are examined as Proust's key American influences. Critic Michael Murphy also investigates the previously overlooked influence of the American neurologist George Beard, whose writings on neurasthenia and "American nervousness” helped contribute to the essential modernity of In Search of Lost Time.
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.
"It is strange," Proust wrote in 1909, "that, in the most widely different departments . . . there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as English and American." In the spirit of Proust's admission, this engaging and critical volume offers the first comparative reading of the French novelist in the context of American art, literature, and culture. In addition to examining Proust's key American influences-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, and James McNeill Whistler-Proust…
Kim Heacox has written 15 books, five of them published by National Geographic. He has twice won the National Outdoor Book Award (for his memoir, The Only Kayak, and his novel, Jimmy Bluefeather), and twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel journalism. He’s featured on Ken Burns’ film, The National Parks, America's Best Idea, and he’s spoken about John Muir on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. He lives in Gustavus, Alaska (next to Glacier Bay Nat’l Park), a small town of 500 people reachable only by boat or plane.
This is a complete biography of Muir that according to the Journal of American History “Supplants all earlier Muir biographies and will undoubtedly stand the test of time for its sophisticated interpretations and impressive narrative power.” The journal added that it’s also “a pleasure to read.” Worster knows his stuff. He’s Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas.
Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards, yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores…
I received my Ph.D. and J.D. at Berkeley, and my next book Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood, is forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield. My research into literary and legal history made me fascinated with how people project hopes and fears onto the social construct of nature. How does one explain the contradictory ways white men imagined they could transcend painful isolation by merging into a nature coded as non-white and female? These fantasies play out in popular culture, e.g. in Avatar, in which men seek the unobtanium they lack: a nature that was always lost/a retroactively-constructed fantasy, and a cover for what it seemed to oppose—finally the corporation.
Though it focuses on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s Demonology is the arcane inversions, doublings, and “unconscious” of transcendentalism. Between many of Emerson’s pronouncements falls this shadow of Demonology, which provides key tenets of his philosophy. Demonology is the cumulative residue of an attempt to explain away that which resists Emerson’s theory that nature is consistent, explicable, rational, and benign.Encapsulating the uncanny, and the inexplicable forces of dreams, animals, and pseudosciences, Demonology consolidates all that is “outside” and negated for Emerson—everything that is, in his terminology, “not me.” Demonology locates the cracks in Emerson’s consciousness, as well as the hobgoblins in his notion of Reason. Emerson’s conception of nature here is notably modern, and often sounds Lacanian—the demonological exception or irrational, that which cannot be fully understood or described, is the necessary anomaly or remainder on which the universality of nature depends.
'"The name Demonology covers dreams, omens, coincidences, luck, sortilege, magic and other experiences which shun rather than court inquiry, and deserve notice chiefly because every man has usually in a lifetime two or three hints in this kind which are specially impressive to him. They also shed light on our structure."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson is one of the most influential thinkers in American history. His Transcendentalism preached a close communion with man and nature and is one of the great life-affirming philosophies of any age. As one of the architects of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embraced a philosophy…
This was one of my two favorite books I listed
by Geraldine Brooks. I often find that when I love a book, I immediately read
more by the same author.
I found it fascinating that Brooks based her novel on
a fictional character, in this case, the mostly distant father of the March
family, made famous in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women.
I enjoy reading novels that take minor characters
from well-known books and reimagine the stories from their points of view.
As Valerie Martin did in Mary Reilly
(based on a character from Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Brooks
brings the main character, as well as other characters, real and fictional, to
vivid life in a story about the Civil War, an era I find of great personal interest
and about which I’ve written a novel myself.
From the author of the acclaimed YEAR OF WONDERS, a historical novel and love story set during a time of catastrophe, on the front lines of the American Civil War. Set during the American Civil War, MARCH tells the story of John March, known to us as the father away from his family of girls in LITTLE WOMEN, Louisa May Alcott's classic American novel. In Brooks' telling, March emerges as an abolitionist and idealistic chaplain on the front lines of a war that tests his faith in himself and in the Union cause when he learns that his side, too,…
Service and leadership have been a primary focus of my life and work for many years. Though today these are matters of academic study, they weren’t when I was in school. I’ve written and spoken extensively on these topics to corporate, military, academic, governmental, and NGO organizations. I strive to narrow the gap between those who study leadership and management and those who apply the principles in practice. My approach is to pose questions and share the experiences of those who have made significant contributions throughout history into the present moment. The books on my list have meant a lot to me and many others. I hope you’ll find value in them, too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is recalled as one of the great essayists and speakers of the nineteenth century.
In a time of extraordinary change, Emerson helped forge a universal voice through the prism of the emerging American experience. Emerson ultimately conjured a unique, unmistakable American narrative.
This renders his work timeless. His essays—such as “Self-Reliance”—have been rediscovered by new audiences in the early 21st century.
In another moment of tumult and evolution, Emerson continues to offer actionable inspiration, encouraging everyone to cultivate the courage to experience life and work as a great adventure.
Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes.
Here are all the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his listeners, the summons to “Self-Reliance,” along with the more embattled realizations of “Circles” and, especially, “Experience.” Here, too, are his wide-ranging portraits of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and other “representative…
I spent the last eleven years listening to people describe the worst day of their lives and how they found the grace and courage to persevere. Little in my professional training as a historian prepared me to sit with them and help them make sense of their past. Each of these books offers pathways to recapturing a violent past and imagining how we keep living.
Du Bois taught me how to be a historian. I began reading him while riding a bus home from a summer job in Boston and missed my stop by two miles.
He insisted that scholars engage in struggles for justice and refuse to spend their professional lives behind stacks of books. He demanded that we center the lives of the forgotten in our writing and allow them to tell us how to write history.
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature.
The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly. To develop this work, Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works…
I am a writer of biographical historical fiction, with some of my novels set in medieval and Tudor England, others set in nineteenth-century America. In researching my books, I try to immerse myself in my characters’ world, and that means reading primary sources, such as newspapers, periodicals, letters, diaries, and memoirs. I especially like to read my characters’ own words. Fortunately, the nineteenth-century feminists featured in this list left a lot of words behind them!
Before I stumbled across this book, I had never heard of Caroline Healey Dall, a prickly but vulnerable and fiercely intelligent Bostonian who knew almost everyone in the various reform movements that swept across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.
On one day, Dall is recording the details of a pregnancy that went horribly wrong; on another, passing along salacious gossip about a lady who propositioned Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May). All the while, she champions the cause of women’s rights while clashing with some of the many strong personalities in the movement.
This Journal is my safety valve-and it is well, that I can thus rid myself of my superfluous steam . . . I trust posterity will remember this, should it ever be gratified by a glimpse at these pages.
In the nineteenth century, Boston was well known as a center for intellectual ferment. Amidst the popular lecturing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the discussion groups led by Margaret Fuller sat a remarkable young woman, Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912): Transcendentalist, early feminist, writer, reformer, and-perhaps most importantly-active diarist.
Dall kept a diary for seventy-five years.She captured in it all the fascinating…