[Writing about Kidada Williams’ new book a couple weeks back reminded me that it’s been too long since I’ve focused a series on new scholarship. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of great recent books—add your nominations for a crowd-sourced Friday post (ahead of the monthly recap on the weekend), please!]
For my Wish
for the AmericanStudies Elves this past holiday season, I highlighted one
of the phrases that has most consistently defined my goals for both this blog
and my work overall: expanding our collective memories. That often means
focusing (here, in my Saturday Evening
Post columns, in the specific examples I include in book chapters, and so
on) on subjects that have been less well-remembered. But that is of course not
the only kind of subject that needs our AmericanStudying, and another interesting
category would be those topics that we do seem to remember well but that need a
lot more depth and nuance than we too often give them. It’s in that category
that I would place David Waldstreicher’s
excellent new biography of Phillis Wheatley, The Odyssey of
Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey through American Slavery and Independence
(2023). Whatever we think we know about Wheatley—and I’m entirely include
myself in that “we”—Waldstreicher reveals how much more we have to learn, and
all the American lessons we can draw from those layers. That’s a pretty great
pair of AmericanStudying goals as well!
Next
scholarly highlight tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other scholarly books or work you’d highlight?
PPS. For a
lot more—I mean a lot more—great recent books, check out that section of all my
#ScholarSunday
threads!
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