Smithsonian Magazine publishes a list of new books every year that the scholars at the Smithsonian have picked as their favorites. These are individual choices compiled by writer Beth Py-Lieberman. A lot are on the sciences. Here were the books that made the list that have to do with America in the 19th Century.
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
Recommended by Paul Gardullo, director, Center for Global Slavery, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Encountering Ashley’s sack, the artifact, for the first time in 2009 at the museum’s Save Our African American Treasures program in Charleston, South Carolina, is burned into my memory. I have sat with this small piece of fabric that had been hurriedly packed with survival goods and stitched with the words “It be filled with Love always.” For more than ten years, it has remained at the center of many of my museum talks. I have had dreams about it and the lives of the family members, Ruth, Ashley and Rose. Countless people have visited with it in Washington, D.C. and South Carolina to witness its powerful presence. God bless Tiya Miles for giving us this beautiful, heartbreaking book about this simple object that a mother gave her daughter before they were to be sold away and a granddaughter who embroidered and made visible its enduring message of love. Miles finds it bottomless because it is filled with love across generations that cannot be quenched by slavery. The author puts her whole heart and soul all the way into it. This amazing work of history charts a path forward for how we can and should expand ways of writing about histories excluded from the archives by racism. It is an amazing work of research coupled with imagination, generosity, community, care and love. This soul stirring book is a fitting testament to the determination and full lives of the women who crafted it. It should be on everyone’s reading list.
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Recommended by Chris Wilson, director, Experience Design, National Museum of American History
As the nation simultaneously nears its 250th birthday and the moment when it will become a majority-minority nation, it’s understandable an increasingly diverse society would struggle with historical memory in public spaces, especially related to issues like slavery in America. As we navigate the challenges related to examining and rethinking what we remember about slavery, there is no better guide and teacher than historian and poet Clint Smith, who masterfully explores our complicated and spotty memory of the institution that was fundamental and defining in American history. In How the Word is Passed, Smith wields his words like a virtuoso musician in concert. He takes the reader with him to eight places in the United States and one abroad to explore how each understands and reckons with its relationship to slavery—either as truthtelling, running away from it, or doing something in between. At a moment when the nation suddenly and surprisingly developed a willingness to re-examine how it rejects history in favor of comforting nostalgia, but also at a moment when manufactured issues of “unpatriotic” history drove political races across the country, Smith’s stellar work is indispensable.
The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915
Recommended by Peter Liebhold, curator emeritus, division of work and industry, National Museum of American History
Are you frustrated by the decline of democracy as reported on cable news? Well take a break and read The Age of Acrimony from Smithsonian’s Jon Grinspan, a political historian at the National Museum of American History. You will be surprised to learn that today’s anti-democratic chaos is nothing new. For those that love the messy politics of the Gilded Age or the complicated history of industrial capitalism, this book will prove fascinating. Grinspan tells a surprising story through the experiences of a father-daughter duo William “Pig Iron” Kelly (a working-class radical, Republican member of Congress and ardent supporter of protective tariffs) and Florence Kelly (a reformer pushing for child-labor restrictions and founder of the National Consumer League). Grinspan’s history is wonderfully nuanced and balanced. Rigorous but not turgid, the book paints a picture where the good guys are not always pure, and sometimes do bad things. The book might anger you at the late 19th-century push for a more deliberate electorate (code for marginalizing immigrants and people of color), but will give you hope that today’s problems are not as apocalyptic as they sometimes feel. After all, the nation survived.
The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America
Recommended by Alexandra Piper, program manager, office of audience engagement, National Museum of American History
Slavery’s long shadow over American history is constantly changing and shaping our understandings of the nation’s ideals, freedom and progress. In The Ledger and the Chain, historian Joshua Rothman meticulously explores another repulsive aspect of slavery: the business and practices of the slave traders who brutally trafficked thousands of human beings across the country in the 19th century. Through the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield and Rice Ballard, three slave traders of the era, Rothman illuminates the economic expansion and profitability of the forced labor market that brought prosperity to the United States. Rothman’s history reveals the slave traders’ sickening enjoyment over their successes, at the cost of Black people’s families, freedoms and lives. It is a challenging history, but it is a reality from which we must not ever turn away.
The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation
Recommended by Timothy Winkle, curator, division of culural and community life, National Museum of American History
In his timely book, historian Zachary M. Schrag takes on another period in this country’s history when Americans were sharply, even violently, at odds over immigration, economic opportunity, racial justice, the integrity of elections, the role of law enforcement, even what could be taught in public schools. Schrag explores antebellum Philadelphia and the cultural, religious and political tinderbox that would ignite “the first great riot in the history of the United States,” a series of violent outbreaks over the summer of 1844 when xenophobic Nativist mobs launched attacks on Irish Catholics that saw dozens killed, churches burned and volunteer militias trading cannon fire with rioters for control of the streets. Schrag’s deep research and command of detail reads like moment-by-moment reportage, while at the same time, he skillfully introduces the players in this crisis, exposes the deeper rifts that brought Philadelphia into open warfare, and navigates the aftermath, in which the effectiveness of the police came under scrutiny.
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