Thursday, October 26, 2023

October 26, 2023: New Scholarly Books: The Vice President’s Black Wife

[It’s been a bit since I dedicated a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books—so this week I’m dedicating a blog series to highlighting great new scholarly books. Please add more recommendations, new, old, and anywhere in between, in comments!]

As someone who has struggled at times to come up with catchy book titles, and who has recently changed the title of his work in progress, I’m always impressed when a scholarly author can come up with a title that is both extremely catchy yet at the same time truly captures key subjects of the project (ie, isn’t just clickbait, understandable as that goal always would be). No recent publication manages that difficult balance better than Amrita Chakrabarti Myers’ The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn—that title sounds like a sleazy campaign attack ad, and indeed this figure was used in precisely those ways to destroy the career of Martin Van Buren’s VP Richard Mentor Johnson; but it’s also a genuine reflection of the nuanced layers of Chinn, Johnson, their marriage, and the many early 19th century historical and cultural issues to which Myers connects them in this fascinating book. Come for the title, stay for the whole thing!

Last book rec tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other books or publications you’d recommend?

No comments:

Post a Comment