A review of books: On Empire, cntd.
I started sleeping through the night and taking an even harder math class, so the book consumption has declined...
I tend to get a little obsessive about particular temporal eras or subfields of history - and it is usually about US history. However, living so close to the border, and living in Mexico, really, has made understanding the US as empire more pertinent and relevant to my immediate existence, especially given current debates about our borders. As a reminder, California was Mexico, and by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, were it honored, maybe still *should* be.
To understand the US Empire, though, you need to understand the Spanish Empire. To understand Latin America requires both. I used the word “understand” lightly here, in that I mean that there is a more than superficial knowledge of how places, people, cultures, and events in the past intersect and shape contemporary life - like, you can guess at a Rembrandt (or was it his workshop!?) and know that The Night Watch was important, and feel that it is unique and beautiful, but maybe you don’t know much about the context beyond that. That’s something, still, and this sort of knowledge to me gives shape to circumstance, allows me to find hope in the present, and … well, to wit… the books of the past few months:
Empire books:
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformaiton of America, 1815-1848, Daniel Walker Howe.
The most whiggish book I’ve read in a while - reads like a far more in-depth approach to my high school history textbooks. Very little critical examination, lots of post office, telegraph, and inevitable righteousness of the Union. Then I realized that it was part of the Oxford History of the United States series and it made sense. But, I do think having the *default* history is helpful for anything else that follows, and without it, one can easily get lost in scholarship that is less temporally/periodized. Samuel Morse gets his F.B. here, Jackson gets lionized, etc.
The History of the American Frontier: 1762-1893, Fredric L. Paxon
Wow, I was really starting this epoch of reading off with some doozies, but this one was a Pulitzer winner. I am pretty certain it was making me a worse writer. My big takeaway from this was that the essential tension between state and federal government was a big loophole for exploiting indigenous Americans and enslaved peoples. The empire is not considered conquered until after the Spanish-American War, but then the age of empire is “over.”
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr
Loved, loved, loved this. Explains how the US myth of exceptionalism as a democracy that didn’t conquer anyone is pure garbage. This introduced me to the concept of a pointilist/pointillism empire - just enough of dots around the map to ensure trade, where the empire of capitalism is more important than actual land itself. This is the US difference in the end - the extension of empire by power of fleet and capitol, and explains why Micronesia, Bikini Atoll, and Guam are still very much in US lands despite being barren pieces of rock. My favorite bubble, the guano bubble, is in here. The building of Manilla, then the WWII battle of Manilla, and the epic fighting in the Philippines for the better part of a century in between those events was astonishing to learn about. I literally knew nothing about the history of the US-Filipino relationship -somehow it was always appended to the Spanish American war, and it was even done so on maps from the era - literally “our possessions” just the continental US on most printed maps. MacArthur comes across as a fascinating man with Daddy issues, and I really really need to read more about him.
This book gave me great hope that we might invent our way out of declining natural resources. The reminder that synthetic rubber was an invention of necessity when the Brits couldn’t get to their rubber plantations in WWII or that nitrogen used as fertilizer happened in a lab under the duress of WWI (in Germany) due to aforementioned guano, well - I do think we will invent our way out of rare earth metals being so rare - legitimately, there is a world of capitalism depending on these innovations and discoveries.
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Greg Grandin
Takes the Fredrick Jackson Turner thesis to its fullest extension: if the frontier is a pipe valve unleashing the fury of our contradictions, then what to do without a frontier? JFK tried Space, but there must be more. Without a place to literally “let of steam” of the American contradiction between individual liberty and social and collective welfare and public interest, we are doomed to our own destruction.
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Part of the revisioning America history series that comes out of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US aftermath. (It should say something that this was one of my favorite books in high school. HIGH SCHOOL! Also James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me). Anyway, this books attempts to DE-periodize history away from the “Jamestown” “Pilgrims” …. Jacksonian … etc. epochs and instead let the story of indigenous people unfold in the diversity that they are across the US. I had no idea about the large urban centers that emerged for indigenous trading that at times would rival the largest cities of the time in the US. I also appreciate Ortiz’ resistance to assuming genocide by small pox and disease - her reminder that this was not a foregone conclusion and should not be used to cleanse our guilt of the destruction of native peoples. I am particularly taken by learning about the confederacy of the Iroquois, in part because these were the tribes that my own hometown was in dialogue with (I grew up in an area that was ode to James Fenimore Cooper, the house in our middle school I was in was Cooper House, and Cooper’s old stable had been repurposed as an auxilliary classroom). I am not sure she succeeds in moving away from the periodizing of white history, but I learned so much more about the social organization of indigenous Americans and how some of our most lauded heroes that remain uncanceled would scalp everyone they came into contact with (the history of California is so, so bloody, and John Frémont was a monster).
An African American and Latinx History of the United States, Paul Ortiz
Another book I really loved. In particular, the discussion of international emancipatory activism really brought the connections across Latin America and African colonized nations and the US home. The idea of mutual aid by looking out for others who are similarly disenfranchised and the organization - from newspapers to letter campaigns to congresses - points to the existence of post-colonial democratic and socialist organizing far before post-colonialism was ever possible. This is a story of emancipatory thought that reminds us of the capacity of marginalized peoples to connect across great distances against many odds. Also, more on Cuba being totally a landing pad for all bad about the US slave system, and beyond.
Unrelated content:
Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma, Clair Dederer
*The best nonfiction book I’ve read in the past six months, easily*
I’m not a big memoir person, and this was initially classified as such. However, my friends Ron and Sarah convinced me to give this one a try. This could be taught in a Comm PhD seminar as it is an audience study - an audience-industry study, mostly with an audience of one, but still a mediation on what it means to be an audience member in the media industries run by $ and men. The big question here - told initially through the author’s personal interest in Polanski - is how do we love the art and hate the artist? That is, how do we make sense of the work of art as beauty or emotion and know the person making it was utter *hit. Is there some calculator we can use? Does knowing more about the artist necessarily taint his/her work (there are some hers in here, JK Rowling, ahem). Artist is broadly applied to writers, filmmakers, and actual artist artists. I did not like the Raymond Chandler/drinking/redemption bit, although it was an unexpected turn.
She takes on David Bowie, and in her wrestling with Bowie I found the weakness in my own take on this - you need the people who save you to remain somewhat pure, as people, too, and hope that one accusation of groupie sex isn’t enough to destroy a lifetime of truly amazing music, emblematic queerness, and an insider-outsider’s embrace of difference.
I read this in a single night, and it was completely worth being busted the next day.
Kissinger’s Shadow, Greg Grandin
Liked my first Grandin history, why wouldn’t I like this one? Perhaps it is that Kissinger is pure evil. Perhaps it is that the book focused way too much on Kissinger’s dissertation. Perhaps it was that Kissinger’s life as an assistant professor involved meddling in presidential campaigns and screwing up Vietnam. Hm. (It is possible the timeline there is wrong). I gave up on this one, and I don’t give up on many books so - yeah. The big takeaway was that Kissinger - in the known unknowns school of thought - didn’t think, he just assumed his instinct was correct and that power was everyone’s ultimate goal, and thinking you are right is enough justification for the pursuit of state action backed by military power. Sounds very Trumpian to me, actually. I read this when Kissinger died, and I couldn’t finish it.
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
I was promised this would be good. And while I do still think about this book, I feel like I got all of this in ProPublica articles about the opioid epidemic in West Virginia. I do love the incidental queerness that pops in. I love the redemption story. I think the research and storytelling around on foster care just guts me. If you have someone in your life who has addiction issues, as most of us do, I think you will find this more ripped from the headlines and less of a beautiful ode to Dickens and Appalachia stitched together. Chosen family and its limits is an important theme here - your chosen family has no life debt obligations to you, and that is a brutal truth to say, but it is true - will your chosen family deal with your nursing home or burial?
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Embarrassingly, I have read so little Didion. Perhaps it is my penchant for her contemporaries like Norman Mailer and Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe (see Monster’s a Fan’s Dilemma, though Wolfe wasn’t that bad, actually) - but really - this is not the Didion to start with. She’s mourning her husband, dealing with her daughter’s horrible illness, and making sense of life between Los Angeles and New York. It is a reminder of what is to live in a nostalgic past while muddling through the present, and that is impossible, but easier if you are wealthy, famous, and housed.
Still Life, Sarah Winman
Book club pick for my new mom’s book club. Was delighted, surprised, pleased? to see a novel with such a queer sensibility make the list. I would not have read it otherwise. And while I thought the ode to Florence and its piazzas were overly stylized and stereotyped, I did still want to be in Italy.
In the holiday break interregnum of what is my year plan: Attempts at great American post-modern fiction - Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (traumatizing, no more please), and Sophie’s Choice by William Styron. I hated the holocaust theme, but stayed for the white male southern privilege, and I think that’s a real problem. I avoided the book for decades at this point, but it caught up to me. I loved the writing. What can I say? It was an ode to being young and broke and obnoxious in New York, and there was something so timeless and on-point about that. I also think the serial fabulist gets a good sympathetic airing here, so not sure how to end on that one.
-Really, this is like 7 months worth of books (Sept to March?) and I’d trade the hours of sleep back for all of these to remain unread.