Top Ten Books I Was Assigned to Read in School
Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.
It’s another Top Ten Tuesday and this week’s prompt is “Top Ten Books I Was Assigned to Read in School”. Let me tell you what–I was trying to think of books I had to read in middle and/or high school, because I figured that’s what most people who read this would relate to, but… that was a long time ago for me. I was in graduate school for about seven years so the only books that came to mind were the ones I read during that time. So that’s the focus of this post, as boring as that might seem.
I read a lot during grad school. I specialized in 19th-century U.S. history at both the master’s (where I also had a concentration in museum studies) and the Ph.D. level, further specializing in the history of how people understood mental illness, asylums, and (in another vein of research) murderers in the 19th century (I left my program when I was ABD for various reasons, not least of which was my own mental state–but I’ll save that for another post).
So, I’ve read a lot of non-fiction history books and can tell you that some of those were BOR.ING. Capital everything, emphasis on boring. Which is really sad, because history is honestly a super interesting, complicated, wonderful, heart-wrenching, drama-filled subject that I feel most people would enjoy if the educational system (looking at you, U.S.) would allow teachers to teach it in a relatable way.
But I digress.
Long story short, I didn’t have to think hard to come up with my top ten assigned books from those 7+ years–they stood out in a sea of difficult and overly-complicated books and most of my classmates would rave about them as much as I did. Seriously, give them a try–they’re all interesting reads!
And if you have a particular topic/subject/figure/etc that you’re interested in learning more about, leave a comment! I’m more than happy to hunt down a book or two for you.
Okay, enough blabbing. Here’s my list of the top ten books I was assigned to read in school (grad school edition).
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Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 by Clare A. Lyons
(Excerpt from Goodreads) Sexuality became the vehicle for exploring currents of liberty, freedom, and individualism in the politics of everyday life among groups of early Americans typically excluded from formal systems of governance–women, African Americans, and poor classes of whites. Lyons shows that men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture, as eighteenth-century readers became fascinated with stories of bastardy, prostitution, seduction, and adultery. In the post-Revolutionary reaction, white middle-class men asserted their authority, Lyons argues, by creating a gender system that simultaneously allowed them the liberty of their passions, constrained middle-class women with virtue, and projected licentiousness onto lower-class whites and African Americans.
Lyons’s analysis shows how class and racial divisions fostered new constructions of sexuality that served as a foundation for gender. This gendering of sexuality in the new nation was integral to reconstituting social hierarchies and subordinating women and African Americans in the wake of the Revolution.
Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination by Karen Halttunen
(Excerpt from Goodreads) Confronting murder in the newspaper, on screen, and in sensational trials, we often feel the killer is fundamentally incomprehensible and morally alien. But this was not always the popular response to murder. In Murder Most Foul , Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution of murderers, through the nineteenth century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the sacred treatment of the crime, to today’s true crime literature and tabloid reports.
Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, & Criminal in 19th-Century New York by Stacy Horn
(Excerpt from Goodreads) Today it is known as Roosevelt Island. In 1828, when New York City purchased this narrow, two-mile-long island in the East River, it was called Blackwell’s Island. There, over the next hundred years, the city would send its insane, indigent, sick, and criminal. Told through the gripping voices of Blackwell’s inhabitants, as well as the period’s city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the famous Nellie Bly), Stacy Horn has crafted a compelling and chilling narrative.
Damnation Island recreates what daily life was like on the island, what politics shaped it, and what constituted charity and therapy in the nineteenth century. Throughout the book, we return to the extraordinary Blackwell’s missionary Reverend French, champion of the forgotten, as he ministers to these inmates, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Corrections Department and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious trials, and in his diary wonders about man’s inhumanity to man.
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South by Martha Hodes
(Excerpt from Goodreads) This award-winning book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America’s liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation.
The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America by Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz
(Excerpt from Goodreads) This narrative history brings to life the spiritual and sexual tensions of mid-19th-century America through the sensational story of the cult of Matthias.
The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America by John P. Demos
(Excerpt from Goodreads) In 1704 an Indian war party descended on a Massachusetts village, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. The minister was released, but his daughter chose to stay with her captors. Her extraordinary story is one of race, religion, and the conflict between two cultures.
What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by Chandra Manning
(Excerpt from Goodreads) A vivid, unprecedented account of why Union and Confederate soldiers identified slavery as the root of the war, how the conflict changed troops’ ideas about slavery, and what those changing ideas meant for the war and the nation.
A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial by Suzanne Lebsock
(Excerpt from Goodreads) It’s 1895 in Virginia, and a white woman lies in her farmyard, murdered with an ax. Suspicion soon falls on a young black sawmill hand, who tries to flee the county. Captured, he implicates three women, accusing them of plotting the murder and wielding the ax. In vivid courtroom scenes, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Suzanne Lebsock recounts their dramatic trials and brings us close to women we would never otherwise know: a devout (and pregnant) mother of nine; another hard-working mother (also of nine); and her plucky, quick-tempered daughter. All claim to be innocent. With the danger of lynching high, can they get justice?
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
(Excerpt from Goodreads) An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual.
The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.
The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright by Ann M. Little
(Excerpt from Goodreads) Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696–1780) was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven. Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like any other young girl in the tribe. At age twelve, she was enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the order’s only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwright’s life was border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural. This meticulously researched book discovers her life through the communities of girls and women around the free and enslaved women who raised her in Wells, Maine; the Wabanaki women who cared for her, catechized her, and taught her to work as an Indian girl; the French-Canadian and Native girls who were her classmates in the Ursuline school; and the Ursuline nuns who led her to a religious life.
Wow, it sounds like you studied some really interesting things in college. I’m kind of obsessed with books about asylums, so I get that interest. I’ve read several about Blackwell Island. It has a fascinating history.
Happy TTT!
Susan
http://www.blogginboutbooks.com
I thought Damnation Island was a great book. Women of the Asylum is also really interesting–I used it several times for my research!
Happy TTT to you!
I don’t think I’ve read any of these books before, I’ll have to look into them 🙂
They’re all really interesting! Definitely a great alternative to traditional history books.
These all look like such good reads. I’m checking to see which ones my local library might have in circulation.
I’m sorry grad school was so tough on you.
Yes! I miss my university library sometimes because my local library’s non-fiction section is a bit sparse. Good luck!