Happy Independence Day!
I'm pleased to offer a collection of history, primary sources, and
political philosophy in honor of the great American Experiment! We
began by selecting books anchored in time by the revolution of 1776
and the subsequent composing and ratifying of the United States'
current constitution. We also include and feature a number of primary
sources that are philosophy classics from an era when philosophy and
politics seem to have been felt as deeply interpermeable.
Where I have tried to expand is by thinking about how our ideals--and
especially our words--once they are written down, talk back to us and
haunt how we live our lives. These writers decided, and we decide
every day, in the polity of a republic, whether we will rise up to our
ideals--the ideals that they wrote down with a secular fire and
revolutionary zeal.
These sources remain controversial. As history, to know a thing
honestly and in its own context is plainly hard. But, understanding
history deeply feels worth it to me. For the 4th of July, I like to
read books that help me cultivate a sort of meditation, and I actually
like to read parts or all of them aloud when I can. I want to remember
my connection to the truly bold proposition that is implied by the
broader era of human and civil rights that the Revolution inaugurated:
that each human being has access to a birthright of justice that
fundamentally can never be sold or justly alienated. Our universal
rights are not extrinsically received, but internally recognized.
For primary sources, we have handsome versions of the Declaration
itself. Put it in your back pocket and take a motorcycle trip? The
Federalist Papers: great for those who want to see the nuts and bolts
of thinking it through. Cato was a play that the founders would have
probably insisted be on our table--George Washington is even said to
have performed it with his troops--dramatizing the historical struggle
for civic virtue by the statesman, Cato, in the ancient Roman
Republic.
We included in this collection some children's titles, including
especially an illustrated version of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is
Your Land, popularized in the schools of many of our childhoods--for
sure to read or sing aloud! We also included the outstanding,
well-researched, and empathetic children's graphic books Nathan Hale's
Hazardous Tales: One Dead Spy (Washington's spy); Lafayette (dashing
French aristocratic buddy of the revolution); and Blades of Freedom
about the nearby Haitian Revolution.
Howard Zinn's People's History of Empire is a graphic history, too, so
we have a nice vein of visual material, if that form speaks to you.
More contemporary to the revolution, the story both told and created
by history painting in the work of John Trumbull is explored in
Glorious Lessons, by Richard Brookhiser.
Excited by poetry and the poet's truth that runs through all of this,
I leaned on titles that quoted our words back to us. Jill Lepore's
These Truths expresses this thesis I'm imagining directly and with
historical narrative. Similarly, and again looking beyond our nation's
shores for the influences of the international currents of revolution
and rights-talk, I have included a history of the Somerset decision:
Though the Heavens May Fall. This is the British case that established
the idea that no one could be enslaved after touching British soil. As
with the play Cato, here the challenge is the integrity of facing the
reality of virtue demands, even if "heavens," or the whole
transatlantic economy of Britain, fall.
I've also included the paperback version of Nathaniel Philbrick's
Bunker Hill. It is a rigorous, exciting, and illuminating military and
social history. If you want to be able to picture what the American
Revolution looked and felt like around here, it is a great way to
bring that into view. As a bookseller, it also warms my heart to find
in Philbrick's book what has become my favorite example of the virtues
of 'book learning': when the officer overseeing the defenses at Bunker
Hill gets the last minute lender of a book called something like: "How
to Defend Against British Artillery," which then leads to a even more
last minute series of projects that look like an episode of the
A-Team.
For more modern questions of the challenges of living our ideals, I've
included Stephen Bright's and James Kwak's recent book on the criminal
legal system and its tension with the underlying ideas and ideals of
justice.
If I'd had more space on the table, I might have also included some of
the excellent recent books on Lincoln, and particular primary sources
from our president-poet, but for that, I really like to read directly
from the words carved into the Lincoln Memorial. We do have a nice
deep collection of American History, used and new, much of which
develops these themes and "these truths" if that's what we choose to
make them.
We'd love to have you over! There's more, there's more! Come and
stay all week if you like.
Raymond