Robert E. May's 3 favorite reads in 2023

I loved this book because it weaves fascinating anecdotes and factual information, including the meticulous tracing of legal documents and procedures, into one of the most important and troubling U.S. history books I have ever encountered.

Most Americans assume that slavery ended in their country in 1865, as the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. Blackmon shows us that, to the contrary, racial slavery in the most awful sense of the term persisted in the South well into the twentieth century, most especially in the form of convict labor in farm work, railroad work, and mining labor in states like Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia.

In fact, the prewar domestic slave trade, in new forms, as well as whippings as a means of control of kidnapped laborers, continued into the twentieth century. Even worse, some of our most respected political figures, including governors, profited off the system.

This compelling book is a must read for anyone doubting the need for reparations and the teaching of critical race theory. The race problem in America was systemic, and the results of re-enslavement were far-reaching and long-lasting. Blackmon’s mastery of detail, sleuthing, and writing skills are inspiring.

Until I read this book, I never dreamed that the intricacies of crew rowing could be so compelling; nor did I realize just how spotlighted a sport collegiate crew racing was in the early twentieth century.

This is microscopic history at its best. The focus is on a group of young Western American males, generally working-class, attending the University of Washington, and how they got sucked up into that world of competitive crew racing, a world that I always assumed was solely inhabited by (effete?) elite collegians at eastern colleges.

You learn so much about these particular young men, you learn a perhaps unfamiliar vocabulary (e.g., the shell house building) and you discover how excruciatingly difficult it was to row competitively, especially when so often the training weather was horribly inclement, at least near Seattle.

You also learn about the difficulties of financing an education in the middle of the Great Depression, and the dangerous employment some of these men found themselves accepting to keep going. And then, ever so gradually, you are sucked into the bigger picture, the rise of Nazi Germany, the preparations in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, and how the deck became stacked against the U. of Washington crew.

Brown’s ability to draw out the suspense of the stateside intercollegiate competitions to participate in the 1936 Olympics over a two-year period, the coaches’ approaches and rivalries, and then the actual Olympic gold-medal race is astounding.

This is a page-turner pure and simple. It is a history book that reads like a novel. I could not help but find myself thinking about the movie Chariots of Fire when reading the book, which was similarly inspirational.

I have always been fascinated with Edward Curtis, ever since my wife previewed a documentary film about him with memorable footage on Pacific Northwest Kwakiutls and their potlach rituals in preparation for showing it to one of her courses at Purdue University.

Then I became fascinated with Western art, when she and I researched together our book on the artist Howard Pyle (Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art), because Pyle had a close friendship with that great artist Frederick Remington, who often focused on Native Americans, for his subject matter. We often saw Remington’s fine paintings and sculptures on visiting the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis.

So, it was a no brainer for me to realize that Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher was a must read given my interests, and the book did not disappoint. I was captivated from the very first paragraphs contextualizing Curtis’s arrival in Seattle and his studio photograph of Chief Seattle’s only surviving child in 1896, the “Last Indian of Seattle” as author Egan puts it, at a time when, according to an 1855 treaty, indigenous peoples were prohibited from residing in town.

Besides covering the pathos and wrenchingly sad arc of Curtis’s career and failed marriage, the book is a goldmine of information about early photography, virtually every major native people in the Greater West, and the topography of the western U.S. Many readers will be awed by the patience Curtis displayed in dealing with the reticence of Natives to talk to Caucasians about their sacred tribal customs (e.g., the Hopi snake dance) or to let whites observe the rituals.

Readers also are likely to be surprised by what they learn about how Curtis’s dogged on-site research helped change forever the way historians regard George Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But I was consumed most by Curtis’s near career-long project and passion to photograph and document eighty U.S. native tribes before changes imposed on them by encroaching white Americans altered their character and culture forever.

Curtis’s obsessive search for funding for the project and field trips brought him into frequent contact with the Smithsonian and figures like Theodore Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan, Geronimo, Edward H. Harriman, Chief Joseph, and other figures at the center of American history during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

And in the end, his obsessions destroyed his marriage and brought his life to a lonely finale. Yet, his accomplishments remain to inspire and inform, even if they never attracted the mass attention Curtis set his sights on. I truly loved this book.