Here are 100 books that Elephant Complex fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been moved by women’s stories that are buried in time (but not quite gone!) since I was a young girl. As a college student and now professor (I teach writing and gender studies), much of my work is focused on telling hidden stories for the first time and stories where the record needs correcting. This is probably to do with my childhood; I am the oldest daughter in a loving but difficult Irish-Catholic family where women were often shamed for many reasons. When I was 15, I read Sylvia Plath for the first time and knew—there was more to this story, and I meant to find it out.
I love nothing more than a book that unsettles me, that I grasp almost bodily in the reading but have to return to again and again to truly understand. Lose Your Mother is that kind of book. In Chapter Seven, Hartman tells us that, while working in the archive of the Atlantic slave trade, she came across a scandal: on board the slave ship Recovery, two African girls—one named Venus—are murdered by the captain, John Kimber.
A trial ensues. A mate is put on the stand, who admits there was a book on the ship, a list of all its horrors, The Dead Book, but it’s lost now. Lose Your Mother is Hartman’s attempt to write her version of The Dead Book without committing the same violence against the girls that they endured in their short lives. How she wonders, can we reimagine life for Venus when all we know…
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy.
There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger—torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I first turned to the ‘dark side’ of travel when a student of mine introduced me to ‘dark tourism’. Sadly the world is littered with places of tragedy where our misfortunes are exposed by dark tourism. As a social scientist, I have been writing about visiting our significant dead for over 20 years. I am fascinated as to why particular deaths are remembered, by whom, and how our dead are (re)presented within visitor economies. I have lectured and published extensively within academia, as well as being a media consultant. I continue to tell tales of our dead and how we attach cultural importance to certain kinds of death.
With a healthy dose of gallows humour, Sarah Vowell explores glorious conundrums of American history, politics, and culture. As such, the book provoked me to appreciate how visiting sites of the significant dead has long been in the touristic imagination. The book takes you on a journey – part history lesson, part travelogue – through the black spots of American political violence. Through a bizarre road trip to places where American politicians met a bloody end, I found Vowell’s own thoughts on the American character both witty and quirky. I also love how she explodes myths and, consequently, exposes a profound level of hypocrisy in the quest for (American) political and cultural advantage.
Transporting us from Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to Key West, Vowell has crafted a narrative that is much more than a historical travelogue - it is the disturbing and mesmerising story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including film, literature, and - the author's favourite - historical tourism. Skilfully belying the undercurrents of loss and violence that course through her journey, Vowell injects a range of lighter detours along the way, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult - and exactly how Lincoln's Republican Party became Bush's Republican Party. Assassination Vacation…
I have inventoried hundreds of cemeteries and thousands of historic gravestones, my mentor (Jim Deetz) wrote the seminal study that brought the study of gravestones into archaeology, and I truly believe the words of former English Prime Minister William E. Gladstone, who said, “Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.”
Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries is two books in one. It is a traditional survey of a particular region’s graveyards that is rich in history and lore. But it also exposes historical racial inequities in the care of a city’s dead and sets the stage for current activism that is seeking to reclaim important sites of memorialization for the area’s disenfranchised population and its current descendants.
This exploration of Richmond's burial landscape over the past 300 years reveals in illuminating detail how racism and the color line have consistently shaped death, burial, and remembrance in this storied Southern capital.
Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, holds one of the most dramatic landscapes of death in the nation. Its burial grounds show the sweep of Southern history on an epic scale, from the earliest English encounters with the Powhatan at the falls of the James River through slavery, the Civil War, and the long reckoning that followed. And while the region's deathways and burial practices…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I have always been passionate and outspoken about fairness. This passion evolved into my attention to words and laws and a belief that they could affect behavior. This passion evolved into my passion for social change. Finally, it evolved into a passion for public service, where I could make things happen that I believed would help people. My first action as Chief Ranger for Legislation in the Boston office of the National Park Service was proposing a new park for women’s history, which eventually became the Women’s Rights National Historical Park.
I wish I could have read this book as I struggled to promote the sites in Seneca Falls to become a new national park. The US Congress directed the National Park Service to seek out and preserve sites that tell “nationally significant” aspects of our country’s history. Naming a place and its remaining structures nationally significant brings notice, interest, visitors, and support. Severely limiting parks focused on women might suggest that women’s history is not nationally significant.
I found the 19 chapters describing the benefits and challenges of selecting, preserving, and promoting the sites, structures, and stories of women’s trials and achievements heartening and inspiring. Each chapter provides valuable insights into the complex process of protecting historical places that reflect women's contributions to our nation's history. These stories highlight the importance of giving due recognition to sites connected to women's experiences and struggles.
Historic sites are visited by millions of people every year, but most of these places perpetuate the public notion that men have been the primary agents of historical change. This book reveals that historic sites and buildings have much to tell us about women's history. It documents women's contributions to the historic preservation movement at places such as Mount Vernon and explores women's history at several existing landmarks such as historic homes, as wells as in a wider array of cultural landscapes ranging from nurses' residences in Montreal to prostitutes' quarters in Los Angeles. The book includes essays on six…
I remember well my first visit to Gettysburg on a high school trip. I had trouble expressing what I felt until I read the words of a battlefield guide who said that he often sensed a “brooding omnipresence.” I have often felt such presences across the historic landscape in the U.S. and elsewhere. I am now Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, and former editor of the Journal Of American History. I have also written Preserving Memory: The Struggle To Create America’s Holocaust Museum; The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City In American Memory, and co-edited American Sacred Space; History Wars: The Enola Gay And Other Battles For The American Past; and Landscapes Of 9/11: A Photographer’s Journey.
Photographer Andrew Lichtenstein and historian Alex Lichtenstein offer readers compelling visual expression of the instability of public memory. The authors ask who and what gets remembered and forgotten, and where and how? What is consigned to oblivion and why? What do such choices reveal about what national stories we prize and those we find uncomfortable, even indigestible? The powerful photographs suggest how volatile historic sites can be marked by absence as well as presence.
From Wounded Knee to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster to the Trail of Tears, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered presents photographs of significant sites from US history, posing unsettling questions about the contested memory of traumatic episodes from the nation's past. Focusing especially on landscapes related to African American, Native American, and labor history, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered reveals new vistas of officially commemorated sites, sites that are neglected or obscured, and sites that serve as a gathering place for active rituals of organized memory.
These powerful photographs by award-winning photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein are interspersed with…
Laura A. Macaluso researches and writes about monuments, museums, and material culture. Interested in monuments since the 1990s, the current controversies and iconoclasm (monument removals) have reshaped society across the globe. She works at the intersection of public art and public history, at places such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Controversial Monuments and Memorialswas published the year after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which saw whites rally around the monument to Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus. This event, and the murders of nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC in 2015, hastened public discord with symbols of the Confederacy and white supremacy. Allison’s book was the first to step into the space where scholars, museum staff, and community activists came together to examine how monuments were used as tools for systemic racism as well as progressive social change. The book is a great resource for those looking to enter the conversation about controversies surrounding monuments and memorials in the United States.
Out of the chaos and pain of Charlottesville, museum professionals, public historians, and community leaders must move quickly to face the challenges of competing historical memory, claims of heritage desecration and the ongoing scourge of racism. This book takes on the tough issues that communities across America---and analogous locales overseas---must face as white supremacy, political quagmires and visions of reconciliation with the past collide.
The events of summer of 2017 that culminated in Charlottesville are outgrowths of ongoing dialogues and disputes about controversial history that encompass numerous historical situations and touch every part of US history. Strategies for working effectively…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I started my career in tourism but soon discovered my passion for urban heritage. Working as a site manager for a world heritage site, I gathered extensive insights on various levels of heritage management and urban governance from many colleagues around the world. Today there is no single project or meeting that does not address the challenges of climate change. Obtaining my Ph.D. late in life, in Heritage-Based Urban Development, I quicklybecame convinced that the traditional ideas of what cultural heritage is do not reflect the situation today and hinder giving cultural heritage a role in climate change prevention and adaption, beyond the narrative that it has to be preserved.
Kalman's book on Heritage Management provides a great introduction and overview to the topic. He embraces an integrated and modern understanding of cultural heritage and addresses the potential obstacles heritage managers meet at the crossing points between the different relevant factors.
By focussing on the process, he gives fruitful insights based on case studies from around the world. Climate change, sustainability, and resilience are also integrated into this useful book.
I found this book useful because it describes cases, focuses on transferable principles, and emphasizes that the process is equally important as the desired result. By reading this book and the introduced approach, I really felt encouraged to follow up on my own approach, which I always focus on extracting strategies and principles from good examples because I strongly believe that they can be transferred much better to different places.
I also enjoyed the attention that has been given to…
This new and substantially revised edition of Heritage Planning: Principles and Process offers an extensive overview of the burgeoning fields of heritage planning and conservation. Positioning professional practice within its broader applied and theoretical contexts, the authors provide a firm foundation for understanding the principles, history, evolution, debates, and tools that inform heritage planning, while also demonstrating how to effectively enact these processes.
Few published works focus on the practice of heritage planning. The first edition of this book was developed to fill this gap, and this second edition builds upon it. The book has been expanded in scope to…
A few years ago, I began rediscovering my hometown of Denver as I walked neighborhoods and revisited landmarks of the city that I had not seen since I was a kid. Essential Denver highlights the fabulous things the city offers from my perspective as a Denver native. I encourage readers to explore Denver, plan outings, and become involved in the community. I hope this Denver book list sparks more interest in landmarks, treasures, and the history of Denver to ensure the city’s future is strong and vital.
As the title indicates, history lovers will enjoy this book. I appreciated the short, easy-to-read entries. It was a well-written book with excellent photography. The author Mark Barnhouse is a Denver native and has published six history books on Denver. As a result of his experience, this book is of high-quality and polished.
Founded in an unlikely spot where dry prairies meet formidable mountains, Denver overcame its doubtful beginning to become the largest and most important city within a thousand miles. This tour of the Queen City of the Plains goes beyond travel guidebooks to explore its fascinating historical sites in detail. Tour the grand Victorian home where the unsinkable Molly Brown lived prior to her Titanic voyage. Visit the Brown Palace Hotel suite that President Dwight and First Lady Mamie Eisenhower used as the "Summer White House." Pay respects at the mountaintop grave of the greatest showman of the nineteenth century, Colonel…
Holly Worton is an author, podcaster, and speaker. She writes nonfiction books about her adventures to inspire people to get outdoors and reconnect with nature so they can reconnect with themselves. Holly enjoys spending time outdoors, walking and running long-distance trails, and exploring Britain's sacred sites. Travel is important to her: she's originally from California and now lives in England, but has also lived in Spain, Costa Rica, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. Holly is a member of the Druid order OBOD, and nature connection is an important part of her spirituality.
Nature connection is also about having adventures in the outdoors. What better way to plan new outdoor adventures than to be inspired by someone else’s? This book follows the author on an unconventional new route through England.
Robert Twigger, poet and travel author, was in search of a new way up England when he stumbled across the Great North Line. From Christchurch on the South Coast to Old Sarum to Stonehenge, to Avebury, to Notgrove barrow, to Meon Hill in the midlands, to Thor's Cave, to Arbor Low stone circle, to Mam Tor, to Ilkley in Yorkshire and its three stone circles and the Swastika Stone, to several forts and camps in Northumberland to Lindisfarne (plus about thirty more sites en route). A single dead straight line following 1 degree 50 West up Britain. No other north-south…
I am a historian primarily of western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. My leading interest has shifted over many years from the people who were persecuted as heretics at that time to their persecutors, as it dawned on me that whereas scepticism about the teachings of the Roman (or any) church was easily understandable, the persecution of mostly rather humble people who presented no real threat to that Church or to wider society was not, and needed to be explained.
The Silk Road is a nineteenth-century invention, but the movements of people, things, and ideas in and through the immense and often terrifying space between modern Iran and China generated change in every sphere and engaged an astonishing variety of people. Valerie Hansen’s exploration of seven places along the imagined route and what has been found in them offers a lucid and lively introduction to a wider medieval world and how we know about it.
The Silk Road is as iconic in world history as the Colossus of Rhodes or the Suez Canal. But what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different-and far more interesting-as revealed in this new history.
In The Silk Road, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionize our understanding of these trade routes. For centuries, key records remained hidden-sometimes deliberately buried by bureaucrats for safe keeping. But the sands of the Taklamakan Desert have revealed…
