Clint Smith’s new book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America topped the New York Times Bestseller list this week right after it was released. The book looks at how historic sites remember slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The New York Times review said of the book:
Smith’s unapologetically subjective map of American memory is an extraordinary contribution to the way we understand ourselves. As the great Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot once wrote, “The inability to step outside of history in order to write or rewrite it applies to all actors and narrators.” Statues, curriculums, bank notes and symbols matter deeply, but all we have, in the end, is the sum of our reckonings.
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