Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a timeless classic for many reasons. Twain’s wit and humor surpass almost every other American author. His moral clarity about America’s enduring troubles about race still instruct today. For these reasons, it continues to be taught in American high school classrooms. However, the story is told from the perspective of Huck, a white person, someone with inborn privilege. What would the story look like when told from…
This book deserves to be the next A Christmas Carol in the English language. Surely, even Charles Dickens cannot outdo Claire Keegan. In this work, she touches on themes of religious hypocrisy in the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. The message of Christmas and of the Christian Gospel, with their themes of oppressed things becoming great, is juxtaposed against an entrenched church beholden to money, power, and a corrupt socioeconomic system. This month of March,…
Facing a seven-hour drive, I picked up this audiobook so that I wouldn’t have to listen to a business book for that long in one day. The author David Blight had won a Pulitzer Prize and is renowned for his annals of African-American history. I knew his writing to be eloquent and clear, and his observations of human nature, compassionate and acute. I had great hopes for this drive, and thankfully, with Blight’s erudite help,…
I first heard the Crafts’ story as a student in American History class in a South Carolina high school. My teacher shared how the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was first tested with a couple in Boston who recently escaped slavery. Mass protests made a mockery of the enslavers’ efforts, the Crafts eluded capture by escaping, and the slave-catchers returned to Georgia empty-handed. I remember that the story seemed more complicated than that, but even…
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words were written by an enslaver who held to white supremacy, yet they inspired a nation and inspire it still. A few (like Dr. King) have reached Lincoln’s heights, but no one has surpassed his personal struggle for a union without…
The tragic death of George Floyd in 2020 prompted a mass reexamination of issues of race in America. Part of that self-review necessitated promoting voices of African-American history into the national narrative. New York Times writer Hannah-Jones compiled this anthology that seeks to unearth and publicize elements of American history long hidden due to tacit shame and injustice. The pieces contained herein make a forceful case that we need a broader, more inclusive understanding of…
In Western and Middle-Eastern thought, undergirded by three monotheistic faiths, the Moses story carries overarching significance. It tells of liberation from bondage and the struggle of living with that freedom. It tells of the temptations to lapse into prior, seeming comforts of slavery. It tells how freedom, best exercised, consists of communing with a transcendent yet imminent God. This story is taught to children regularly in synagogues, churches, and mosques the world over. For those…
African-American contributions to American history are often pushed to the side and either given a lower priority when presented or segregated into its own area. These stories are often discussed during Black History Month, but then forgotten in the remaining eleven months of the year. In this book, a (white) Pulitzer Prize-winning author seeks to make a comprehensive, foundational case that enslaved people significantly enriched the cultural course of America – all before the Civil…
This book took me all over the place. As a southerner, I felt a little defensive of the area where I’ve lived for most of my life. Though from Alabama, Perry’s point of view is clearly northeastern (especially when describing border states), and there’s a long history of northeasterners (i.e., Yankees) stereotyping southerners. As a software developer, I found that she overlooked the “New South” almost entirely. The research triangle in North Carolina was only…
For most of us, American history consists of well-attested narratives. Northerners were against slavery while Southerners were for it. General emancipation of slaves after the Revolution was impractical. The founding fathers were deist in their religious orientation. To these three national myths, the case of Virginian aristocrat Robert Carter stands in stark opposition. In the late eighteenth century, he freed around 500 of his own slaves, to the ire of his neighbors and without compensation,…