MakingHistory

First meeting to discuss Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass . I was much more impressed with the quality of both the writing and the ideas than I had expected to be. We cover most of the first section in this talk and spend some time on the themes of gifts, thankfulness, subjectivity, wild strawberries, and nut trees.

This is the final meeting of the discussion of Adrian John’s book, which we had on August 31st.

The first unit of my Fall 2024 US History 2 course, titled "Capital and Labor".

Primary Source Excerpt

We discuss the first and second chapters of Adrian Johns’ recent book. Some of the topics include the late-19th-century panic over the exhausting effects of “unnatural” reading and neurasthenia, other technologies (of both acquiring knowledge and making notes) and their advantages and disadvantages, saccades and thought, the strange misuse of the incorrect theory or recapitulation, and the general...

In this talk we cover the third and fourth chapters of Adrians Johns' book. The things that stood out to me were more about the social importance of reading rather than the research technologies and data collected. There was a profound anxiety that an American public that wasn't literate would not be up to the challenges of the 20th century. There's an explicit connection here to Morti...

After a couple weeks break while I moved into my apartment in Saint Paul, the Saturday Book Club reconvened to begin discussing Adrian Johns’ 2023 book, The Science of Reading: Information, Media & Mind in Modern America . Although I had originally been a bit skeptical, I’m enjoying this book. We discussed languages and reading, the particularity of the reading experience, a bit of book histor...

Our first book club meeting, to discuss David Graeber and David Wengrow's book, The Dawn of Everything , in December 2021.

This is an audio version of the first chapter of my Open Textbook, US History II: Gilded Age to Present . You can read along at https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/ushistory2/chapter/chapter-1/

Source: Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1886), II, 483-496. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/436/mode/2up  

Source: Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands (1893), 82-129. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/444/mode/2up  

Source: General William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs (1875), II, 171-90. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/428/mode/2up  

Source: Daily Sun (Columbus, Georgia), October 13, 1863, quoted in Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's History of the United States .

Source: Anna E. Dickinson, What Answer? (1868), 243-257. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/376/mode/2up  

Source: James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox (1896), 385-395. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/372/mode/2up  

Source: James K. Hosmer, The Color-Guard (1864), 187-195. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/264/mode/2up  

Source: George Washburn Smalley in New York Daily Tribune , September 20, 1862. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/346/mode/2up  

Source: Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War (1889), 86-96. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/220/mode/2up  

Source: Jefferson Davis, in The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , Fourth Series (1900), I, 104-106. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/188/mode/2up  

Source: Abraham Lincoln, Complete Works (1894), I, 657-669. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/202/mode/2up  

Source: Samuel Wylie Crawford, The Genesis of the Civil War (1887), 47-55. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/182/mode/2up  

Source: Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the late War between the States (1870), II, 279-299. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/164/mode/2up  

Source: Senator John Sherman, letter to William Tecumseh Sherman, The Sherman Letters , 1837-1891 (1894), 85-88. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/162/mode/2up  

Source: Speech of Horatio Seymour to New York Electoral Commission (1876) quoted in John Bigelow, The Life of Samuel J. Tilden (1895), 84-9. https://archive.org/details/lifesamtilden02bigerich/page/84/mode/2up