Please Help Us Grow!

[Au Courant]

There is a new reading group on Shelfari.com called Chronological Read of American History. Finding this new group was amazing as I had ready planned on doing this myself!

I plan my reading to try (mostly unsuccessfully) to rein in my tendency to buy every interesting sounding title I see.

I was so interested in the American History topic for my 2009 reading list that I set up a kind of questionnaire to help refine my search for appropriate titles. Just attempting to fill out this thing is overwhelming! I am trying to use online syllabi to help. I expect to use textbooks to further refine my plan as well.

This is the kind of stuff I'm hoping to get from my planned reading on this topic. I suspect that I will not get past Washington/Adams in 2009. I also suspect that I can plan on spending the entire 2010 year on Jefferson alone! (God willin' and the crick don't rise. Fellow Texans, I'm certain, are familiar with that phrase.) I don't want to substitute this effort for formal education but it does appear that I am creeping up on that. Sigh. One of my failures is limiting scope for any project. I always go too far.

Anyway - this is what I'm workin' on at the moment:

1) Period: pre-Revolutionary War through Washington's presidency
(Note: Once I've answered the questions for this period, I will have a better idea how to define the next period. I hope. This one period will be huge, though, because I really want to delve into the people/events that led to the Revolutionary War. I don't want to go too far back into the very early colonial experience though.)
2) Important events during the period:
(Will probably include more than just those events related to the US or which occured here but will include only those that influenced the US.)
3) Important writings/publications during the period:
4) Books/publications suggested for reading:

If you have recommendations or information you think could be applied to this set of questions, I'd really like to hear/see that info.

Also, if this topic interests you, join that new group on Shelfari. It was just opened yesterday and already has about 12 members. Note: The group is focusing on Presidents - they are NOT trying to boil the ocean as I appear to be doing.

Thanks,
aC

This post has been edited by Au Courant: May 5 2009, 06:11 AM

[Carol from Long ...]

To kindle or not to kindle ... What a wonderful son I have.

My son bought me a kindle for Christmas, and the only very, very minor complaint I have is that I wish I he had chosen the smaller one, not the larger one.

Meanwhile, I love the fact that it knows where I am in the book, which saves me time, and I love the fact that Amazon informs you if you try to buy the same book twice. Shipping is instant and free, no watching and waiting for packages.

It is harder to read the last chapter early, but I'll figure out something <grin>

Meanwhile, I'm still looking for employement, and my 'free' cobra runs out in 7 days. Unemployed and uninsured, me and 10 percent of the rest of the country -- Pray for us.

Carol

[Au Courant]

Thomas Jefferson by Richard B. Bernstein

Well written. Well organized. Enjoyed this read very much.

Learned several things about the period and Jefferson's role in it. Learned very little about the man. This is a brief recounting focusing on Jefferson's political life. Despite the fact that the man wrote literally 1000s of letters, Jefferson remains one of the most, er, "hidden" figures in American History from a personal standpoint.

Bernstein acknowledges this with his closing paragraph in the book:

...whether he would even comprehend the United States in the first years of the twenty-first century, Jefferson's shadow looms large over us, thanks to the conflicting influences of his thinking, doing, and - most important - his writing. That truth alone requires each generation to reacquaint itself with the life and work of Thomas Jefferson, and to grapple with his ambiguous legacies.

If you are lookin' for a brief catalog of important events driven or influenced by our third president, this is a book fabulous for that purpose.

If you are lookin' for an indepth character evaluation and to learn more about the man himself, you'll need to look elsewhere. Good luck with that. From what I've been able to determine such a book does not exist. I have come to the conclusion that it never will.

The great enigma of the Revolutionary period. Thomas Jefferson.

aC

[Au Courant]

John Jay: Founding Father, Walter Stahr

John Jay: Founding Father is impressive. Considering that it is Stahr's first book, my regard increases. It has been collecting ether-dust on my "I am reading" shelf for some months. I didn't want to start it until I could give it due attention and other things were taking up my time and energy. Good thing I waited because once I read the first page, I didn't stop until I was done except for 5 hours of sleep and occasional required online activities.

Stahr, like his subject, avoids dramatization but somehow manages to convey the person of John Jay. Presented in a factual and time-line structure, the book still conveys the rigors of the time and the complexities of the struggle for independence.

The book is the result of significant research and well-balanced. It has an oddly defensive tone as if Stahr considers Jay's treatment by other biographers and historians to be if not negative, at least unduly dismissive. I do think that Jay is not given his true due for his contributions but, as with our society today, the nation at that time was more fascinated with the "stars" - Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and to a lesser degree because he suffered the same "lack of sexiness problem", Adams. I suspect that there were many "quiet heroes" during that period who were patiently and continually actually doing the work of the nation rather than just talking about it.

Jay appears to have been an intellectual, quiet, and steady man of firm principles and true devoted Christian belief. He said on one occasion when begged to push back against unfair practices that cost him his first run as New York Governor, "It will be of more importance to me to have governed myself than to have governed the state." He put honor above office. He proved this on many occasions.

A man of some contradictions, he absolutely believed that slavery was wrong but he, himself, owned slaves. He argued against admitting Missouri as a slave state but for existing states wanted slavery to be abolished slowly over time. He was averse to conflict and considered the behavior of the French Revolutionaries to be like that of animals but, earlier, when first meeting with officials of Britain during our own Revolutionary War, he refused to start negotiations until he was personally addressed as and the first drafts of the agreements indicated that he was the representative of the Independent United States of American - not of a colony. He was a devoted family man and absolutely faithful husband and yet several of his children were almost completely raised by others. This was not just due to the extensive traveling to which he was subjected and the reasons were never explained.

Very early in his career - well prior to the Revolution, he advocated a separate and independent judiciary and, in fact, forcefully argued for a 3-house government of the state of New York. He followed up with this in his awful time trying to be President of the Continental Congress. He was a man of great dignity and careful attention to detail always striving to not only directly avoid misconduct but even the appearance of it. Yet, he accepted George Washington's plea to be the Envoy Extraordinaire to Britain to forge an agreement - while he was the sitting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Jay was first to state the premise of the Supremacy Clause - even though that label was applied later. He favored a strong National Government but wanted restraints. "The national government has only to do what is right and, if possible, keep silent." A primary contributor to the Federalist Papers, his words helped convince New York to support the constitution.

During the Revolutionary War, he was the "master" of an important American spy, Enoch Crosby. In his later years, Jay related most of Crosby's activities to James Fennimore Cooper who used it to write The Spy. A note from Stahr about this extraordinary part of Jay's contribution to the Revolution says, "The CIA recently honored John Jay by naming a conference room after him as America's first counter-intelligence chief." Who'd a thunkit?

The one part of Jay's history that did disturb me was his forceful support of Loyalty oaths and treatment of Tories. I found this very distressing and don't remember seeing much about this in the biographies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson which I recently read. Was this more an issue in New York than elsewhere or was this topic just not deemed important enough to these other "stars' and their biographers? The other alternative is that I just missed any mention of it although I do clearly remember Flexner saying that Washington required his troops to be careful with Tories and forbade mistreatment of them. Curious.

Jay was always aware of the historically important events of the time. He instructed clerks during the Continental Congress to spend at least an hour each day recording events for posterity. He said, "Americans are the first people whom heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon and choosing the form of government under which they should live."

The best quote, though, was about the constitution which he personally ensured that New York ratify: "...it is yet to be animated, and till then may indeed excite admiration, but will be of no use. From the people it must receive its spirit, and by them be quickened. Let virtue, honor, the love of liberty and of science be, and remain, the soul of this constitution and it will become the source of great and extensive happiness to this and future generations."

And so it has.

aC

[Richard Fifield]

I've just finished reading a book called Amending America by Richard B. Bernstein and Jerome Agel. It deals with the use of the amending process in the context of American constitutional history and politics. And while it does not per se deal with the Ciolonial or Federal periods, there is a lot of good information surrounding the Bill of Rights, the 11th Amendment, and the 27th Amendment (all of which date to that period).

More interesting is tis treatment of the background to, and some of the consequences flowing from, the Amendments, both those adopted and those rejected, as well as a discussion of attempts to call a second Constitutional Convention and gereral constitutional rewrites, including, but not limited to, Rexford Tugwell's The Emerging Constitution, written in 1974.

While I don't fully agree with parts of the authors' analysis (the section dealing with the 14th Amendment is a bit thin, and it contradicts other works on that subject, including Horace Flack's 1908 study in The Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment), there is a great deal of information collected in one place that isn't usually seen.\, and it constitutes the first study I've seen of the amending process in an historical context.

I recommend it to anyone interested in this phase of constitutional history.