[For this year’s
installment of my annual
Beach Reads series, I wanted to revisit favorites from different stages of
my life, all of which would make for fun additions to your summer bookbag.
Share your nominations for Beach Reads for a crowd-sourced weekend post that
doesn’t mind some sand between the pages!]
On the
book that helped open my eyes to a new career opportunity.
One of
this blog’s most overarching threads—indeed one of its central
purposes, but also one I have
explicitly discussed on
multiple occasions—has been
my evolving perspectives on and goals for a career in public scholarship. To
some degree this has been a last decade or so development in my thinking, and
one I could trace to the shift from my first book (which
was based on my dissertation and as such constructed almost entirely for an
academic audience) to my second (which I
hoped, and still hope, could interest American Studiers outside the academy
just as much if not more as those inside; check it
out and see for yourself, wherever you are!) and more and more fully
into my third and fourth
and beyond. Yet as I’ve made this shift in my thinking, I’ve been greatly
helped by the many strong examples of public American Studies scholarship I’ve
encountered throughout my life—and one that particularly stands out is Paul
Johnson and Sean Wilentz’s The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and
Salvation in 19th-Century America (1994).
I read
Johnson and Wilentz’s book as a freshman in college, in a History and
Literature (America) sophomore tutorial that included a ton of great scholarly
works: John
Demos’ The Unredeemed Captive, Christine
Stansell’s City of Women, and David
Hollinger’s Post-Ethnic America, to cite
only three. Yet The Kingdom of Matthias stood
out, as it’s able to combine some of the strongest features of each of those
exemplary works: it’s a narrative history every bit as compelling as Demos’, is
grounded in as extensive and thorough research and citation as Stansell’s, and
feels as relevant to big American questions and narratives as Hollinger’s
(particularly when Johnson and Wilentz get to their climactic reveal about Sojourner Truth, about which I’ve
blogged previously). This is a book that reads quickly and
compellingly while introducing its audiences to a great deal of specific sources
and history, that does justice to a bygone era and subject while feeling fresh
and relevant to our contemporary moment, and that highlights a far-too
forgotten set of American histories and identities without feeling the
slightest bit didactic or antiquarian.
Books are
only part of the future of public American Studies scholarship, of course; as
might be obvious, I’m also a big fan of blogs, websites, conferences and colloquia, and many
other ways American Studiers can connect and converse about these key
questions. But the truth is that what makes a great public scholarly book great
parallels very directly what produces the best of all those other forms of
scholarship; that means all those things in the last paragraph’s closing
sentence, but it also and most directly means this: that it be unique, based on
meaningful research and knowledge and analysis, and able to connect to other
American Studiers and what’s important to them. Content that’s worth our time;
authors with something genuine to contribute; an awareness of audience and
ability to connect to those audiences. Might seem like a simple enough equation,
but getting it right, well, that’s the trick (and one I’m most definitely still
working toward). To my mind, Johnson and Wilentz got it exactly right—even if
it took me a few years to really appreciate that college lesson.
Last Beach Read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Beach Reads you’d nominate?
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