Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 10th, 2013 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I Just Finished Reading
Lawrence Goldstone’s Dark Bargain, which I really liked, although the Publisher’s Weekly review at Amazon panned it as “weak and derivative,” so possibly months of reading academic history has so distorted my cognitive processes that I fall with glad cries on any history that might be called “entertaining.”
Probably the fact that I enjoyed reading it should have tipped me off that this book would not constitute an appropriate source for my paper.
Nonetheless! If you’re looking for a novel and entertaining book about the Constitutional Convention, this one is pretty fun - although pretty low on Madison and Hamilton, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Goldstone basically argues that the northern states, which tended to be keener on Union than the southern, gave in to the south on quite a lot, particularly slavery - slavery being basically all that the Deep South cared about.
What I’m Reading Now
Barbara White’s The Beecher Sisters, which is about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s natal family, who were sort of like the clerical Kardashians of the nineteenth century in that they were EVERYWHERE. Harriet is the most famous now, but her big sister Catharine was huge in the world of women’s education reform, while her little half-sister Isabella eventually became a radical feminist with, possibly, delusions of grandeur that led her to believe she was going to lead the world into a matriarchal state.
Feminism ran in the family: Charlotte Perkins Gilman was Harriet’s grand-niece.
The boys were somewhat less exciting. But! Harriet’s brother Henry was involved in one of the first clerical sex scandals: he wrote a novel, which he shared with his admiring parishioner Elizabeth Tilton, and inevitably one thing led to another and...next thing you know, all the newspapers are talking about it. Oops?
I think there is MORE than enough material here for a miniseries. The time span might have to be a bit compressed to get both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry Ward Beecher’s sex scandal in there, but I have faith in the magic of television. And the beginning of the Civil War would be the perfect ending, don’t you think?
What I’m Reading Next
Well, I want to read Sanditon...but in actual fact I’m going to be reading more books for all my final projects.
Lawrence Goldstone’s Dark Bargain, which I really liked, although the Publisher’s Weekly review at Amazon panned it as “weak and derivative,” so possibly months of reading academic history has so distorted my cognitive processes that I fall with glad cries on any history that might be called “entertaining.”
Probably the fact that I enjoyed reading it should have tipped me off that this book would not constitute an appropriate source for my paper.
Nonetheless! If you’re looking for a novel and entertaining book about the Constitutional Convention, this one is pretty fun - although pretty low on Madison and Hamilton, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Goldstone basically argues that the northern states, which tended to be keener on Union than the southern, gave in to the south on quite a lot, particularly slavery - slavery being basically all that the Deep South cared about.
What I’m Reading Now
Barbara White’s The Beecher Sisters, which is about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s natal family, who were sort of like the clerical Kardashians of the nineteenth century in that they were EVERYWHERE. Harriet is the most famous now, but her big sister Catharine was huge in the world of women’s education reform, while her little half-sister Isabella eventually became a radical feminist with, possibly, delusions of grandeur that led her to believe she was going to lead the world into a matriarchal state.
Feminism ran in the family: Charlotte Perkins Gilman was Harriet’s grand-niece.
The boys were somewhat less exciting. But! Harriet’s brother Henry was involved in one of the first clerical sex scandals: he wrote a novel, which he shared with his admiring parishioner Elizabeth Tilton, and inevitably one thing led to another and...next thing you know, all the newspapers are talking about it. Oops?
I think there is MORE than enough material here for a miniseries. The time span might have to be a bit compressed to get both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry Ward Beecher’s sex scandal in there, but I have faith in the magic of television. And the beginning of the Civil War would be the perfect ending, don’t you think?
What I’m Reading Next
Well, I want to read Sanditon...but in actual fact I’m going to be reading more books for all my final projects.
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no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 08:00 pm (UTC)