Books like "There Is a North"

The epic, multi-volume work of one of America's great mid-century historians. An old-fashioned work of immense erudition, vivid narrative, decisive judgment. Never before or since have so many great and consequential speeches been delivered in Congress; Nevins furnishes every one of them with suitable embellishment. Vols. 2-4 (in the 8-volume version) offer wonderful set pieces on the great events of the time--the Kansas-Nebraska debate, the Dred Scott case, the rise and election of Abraham Lincoln.

If you can read only one book on Lincoln, this is the one I would choose. In my opinion—as well as that of many professional historians—it is the best book ever written to examine why Lincoln waited two years after becoming president to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In this brilliant and elegantly written book, a Pulitzer Prize historian argues, entirely convincingly, that the need to keep together his pro-union coalition required Lincon to proceed very cautiously.

To be sure, Foner writes that while Lincoln’s long-held anti-slavery convictions were not in doubt, he also initially shared the racist attitudes that black people were not ready for full freedom. However, Foner emphasizes that as Lincoln grew in office, his beliefs increasingly moved towards those of Frederick Douglass—whom Lincoln came to greatly admire—and other full-fledged abolitionists.

Americans experienced a kind of practice round of the Civil War when both Southern and Northern settlers flocked into Kansas--the first determined to make it a slave state, the second, a free one. The savage political and military conflict left both sides convinced that the nation could not, in fact, survive half slave and half free. Bleeding Kansas, though a work of serious scholarship, draws heavily on the letters and diaries of those settlers to depict an irreconcilable clash of rival ideologies, ambitions, characters; you would not want to be caught in a bar with the drunken lowlifes who poured across the border from Missouri to rig elections on behalf of slave-owners.

We’re taught in school that the Civil War began in 1861, with the firing on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Technically, that’s true. Yet the nation had long been debating about slavery, whether to let it flourish or to outlaw it. When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, major stops on the Underground Railroad, like the Cataract House Hotel in Niagara Falls, became very important.

In the shadow of the famous tourist stop, it was located alongside the last river to cross before escaped slaves could reach freedom. Against this backdrop of beauty, the wait staff at the Cataract House stepped to the forefront, opposing local authorities and bounty hunters. Their courage was unmatched, and they remain unsung heroes from this tumultuous time in our nation’s history.   

Perez is a commanding figure in this scholarship, deeply learned. I like teaching this concise book of his, full of powerful illustrations (cartoons over many decades), because it really gets at how North Americans have projected their racialized and sexualized fantasies and obsessions onto this island, unable to perceive Cubans as real people, let alone historical actors.

Weaving together the influence of film, television, sport, and punk rock, Horten’s book describes how Western media or, specifically, how the East German population’s desire for Western media and consumer culture and the regime’s efforts to satisfy those desires contributed to the peaceful revolution in 1989.

Despite assumptions that the socialist dictatorship in East Germany was omnipresent, this book, like many others about everyday life under communism, undermines that notion. Horten shows the regime locked in a downward spiral. Faced with economic crises and increasingly unable to afford domestic television and film production, the regime turned to Western imports.

This fed the people’s desire for Western media while increasing that appetite and exposing the regime’s weaknesses in the process.

If you’ve ever wondered (or haven’t) what Richard Nixon, Jane Fonda, Linda Ronstadt, All in the Family, and the films Chinatown and Shampoo share in common, and why it matters, author and political correspondent Ronald Brownstein connects the dots in a compelling examination of how the seismic cultural upheavals we attribute to the late 60s were in fact late bloomers, leaving their mark only in the early 70s.  

Part nostalgia, part pop and TV history, part political analysis, this book zeros in on the cast of personalities and classic artistic works that collectively made 1974 the pivotal year in the modern American zeitgeist. Something for everyone who lived through that time—I can attest to that—and a timely cultural history lesson for those who didn’t.

Iton’s book isn’t restricted to popular music but ranges more widely across Black popular cultures.

However, in the ways he understands the historical intersection of popular music and institutional politics (especially in a magisterial chapter on soul music), Iton gave me a way of conceptualizing music as a form of political expression and organization in itself.

Alice Echols is not only a renowned historian of the post–World War II era, exploring gender, politics, and pop culture, but she is also a former club DJ herself. She brings those experiences to her resurrection of the much-reviled disco scenes of the 1970s, which, before they became corporate big business, were the site of contests over the voices of American culture.

But more than that, Echols reveals how disco was an underground phenomenon, one whose origins are somehow more hidden than punk’s, and connects transnationally across oceans and across U.S. communities that reveal a complicated map of U.S. culture that defies common tropes.

More than a chronicle of disco’s rise and fall, Hot Stuff instead explores “shifts in identity and representation and the debates they triggered,” as well as reveals the dynamics between underground and commercial that would roil college radio. On top of it all, Echols’s engaging writing… show more.

I grew up at the best moment to fall in love with Britpop—Pulp is the best of them, by the way. But I digress. As an American, I knew little about the culture that birthed Britpop; I just consumed it without context. Daniel Rachel’s oral history on Cool Brittania explains this entire culture where a bunch of ’90s British rock bands were influenced by ’60s British rock bands.

This cultural blip was also tied to soccer, Trainspotting, the work of Nick Hornby, and “lad culture.” Oh, and I even learned what lad culture was! It was a straightforward read but packed with a ton of info that helped me appreciate British pop culture even more than I already (superficially) did.