Current Reading - 2020

Guess I'll start us off for the year. I finished The Secret History of the War, Volume 2 by Waverly Root. This fascinating, if somewhat over-detailed, work about World War 2 by journalist Waverly Root was published in 1945 after the end of the war in Europe but before the Japanese surrender. However, some of the chapters were written even before V-E Day and so speak of the war in Europe as still ongoing. The "Secret" of the title refers to the fact that Root's primary themes are not the military conduct of the war (although that is certainly referred to), but the diplomatic, propaganda and economic machinations of the various powers, both public and, as the word suggests, clandestine. Although Root writes about events and power relationships all over the globe, his two main theses are that a) France was betrayed by traitors highly placed within their government and military who were themselves fascists and wanted to see the Republic eliminated and that b) the U.S. State Department made one wrong-headed move after another, particularly when it came to their decision to legitimize the collaborators within the Vichy government and freeze out De Gaulle and his Free French movement as much as possible, despite the fact that Vichy was willingly cooperating with the Axis and De Gaulle was actually fighting alongside the U.S. and England. The book's final 140-page chapter details at great length the ways in which this dynamic played itself out in France's vast colonial territories before, during and after the Allied invasion of North Africa. Root's thesis about why the State Department was so consistently pointed in the wrong direction was that the department was basically a clubhouse of Ivy Leaguers and others of the patrician class who had little comfort with or respect for the average American and, in actual practice, the ideals of Democracy. He believed that these men were more comfortable with their fellow rich kids within the Vichy government and not particularly uncomfortable with the fascist leanings.

I read Volume 1 of this set last year.

Finished an excellent biography, Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld's Broadway by Eve Golden. The book isn't as much about Ziegfeld as the title much suggest, which is fine since Anna Held is a far more interesting person than the character we saw played by Luise Rainer in the movie The Great Ziegfeld. Highly recommended.

Completed an excellent Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South by Christopher Dickey. The title is a bit misleading, as the central character was actually the British consul to Charleston, South Carolina, assigned there in 1853 and staying until just before the Union attack in early 1863. He was very instrumental in keeping the British government aware of the impending crisis and the true state of the political realities of the secessionist movement. Very much worth reading.

Completed Fort Sisseton by Harold H. Schuler. This is a history of the fort which is in northeastern South Dakota and was operational from 1864 to 1889. It is more than just a record of the events at the fort, there is also some excellent discussions of the many features of the fort and the people there. Chapters about how the officers and enlisted men lived, how they were fed, clothed and paid, medical treatment, communications and a number of other topics. The final chapter wraps up the story with how the fort buildings and grounds went from owner to owner and how, eventually, it became a state park and the buildings restored and preserved. Highly recommended.

Completed a short monograph, A Preliminary to War: The 1st Aero Squadron and the Mexican Punitive Expedition of 1916 by Roger G. Miller.

I finished Reminiscences of a Town With Two Names: Greenwood, Known Also as Elk by Walter Matson. This is a short history (47 pages all told) of what is now a small town on the Mendocino Coast, very close to the town I live in, which is 20 miles inland. Back in the day when logging was a major industry here, though, the town had several lumber mills and many more people. This book was originally published in 1980, and Walter Matson was already a longtime resident of the town at that time with access to the memories of the previous generation as well. The narratives are entertaining and at the same time give an idea of the very hard and dangerous nature of the work the men were doing, whether they were in the woods cutting trees, or on the extremely dangerous trains bringing the lumber to the mills, or in the mills themselves.

By the way, the reference to the town's two names comes from the fact that the town in its early days was always known as Greenwood. However, there was another town some distance to the north with the same name. When the U.S. Post Office modernized, they would not offer local post offices to two towns with the same name in the same state. So the Mendocino County town of Greenwood changed its name to Elk. However, the road that goes from the town of Philo (pronounced Fie-Low, not Fee-Low) in Anderson Valley that runs over the mountain and down to the coast is still called the Philo-Greenwood Road.

Gave up about two-thirds of the way through Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. After putting off reading this for fifteen years I finally decided to buckle down and give this tome a try. I've enjoyed other books by Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and Washington: A Life) and this one was good for the first half, but became harder and harder to enjoy after that. It wasn't the author at fault, but rather the major characters. As the 1790s progressed most of them turned out to be rather vain, childish, self-serving, vindictive and petty. Chernow shows through letters, diaries and other correspondence how these great names of the early Republic couldn't see past their own egos and self interests. Washington at least, while somewhat vain, comes across as someone who tries to rise above the pettiness for the good of the nation. And Aaron Burr, while somewhat of a manipulator and a scoundrel, is at least someone you can enjoy reading about.

Finished an interesting (if you are a baseball fan) The Rules of Baseball: An Anecdotal Look at the Rules Of Baseball and How They Came To Be by David Nemec.

Finished reading Trouping: How the Show Came to Town by Philip C. Lewis. It is an anecdotal history of how theatrical roadshows came to be in America from colonial times up till the early part of the twentieth century. It is written in a rather stylish manner and is more of an impressionist work, published in 1977 by an author who knew many of the last participants.

Completed the short monograph Stede Bonnet: Charleston's Gentleman Pirate by Christopher Byrd Downey.

Finished A Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of Cowpens by Lawrence E. Babits. This is an academic study of the battle based on primary sources and frankly was rather a dull read.

11> Sorry about that. It's disappointing to start a book thinking it's going to be an enjoyable reading experience about a topic you are interested in, only to find the book so dry that the please is drained away. Hope the book is better in that regard.

>12 rocketjk: I still got some enjoyment out of it. I'm afraid I'm just getting too old to get the enjoyment out of academic books that I used to.

Completed the Kindle version of Valkyrie: The North American XB-70: The USA's Ill-fated Supersonic Heavy Bomber by Graham M. Simons. Lots of great photographs and illustrations, which unfortunately don't show up very well in the Kindle version.

>13 jztemple: I've been thinking about your comment, here. I'm not sure what you mean specifically by "getting too old," but your remark resonated with me (I'm closing in on 65) and I gave some thought as to why that would be. What I came up with was that as I get older, I think I have less use for, and less interest in, information for its own sake (not to say "no use," but certainly "less") but I still do crave and enjoy good storytelling. So information presented in a straight academic manner is of much less use to me than it used to be when I was younger and it seemed that accumulating knowledge was in and of itself a constructive endeavor. Don't get me wrong. I still like learning new information (and still eagerly seek information about things that are of direct import, such as a certain virus I could name). But now I'm much more interested in the storylines presented in the best of contemporary narrative history, maybe because I'm ever more appreciative of the various levels of context that such books provide.

I don't know. Does that make any sense?

>15 rocketjk: Makes sense to me and is kind of the way I feel too.

Finished The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans by Lawrence N. Powell, a history of the city from its founding late in the 17th Century through the Louisiana Purchase.

Finished reading an excellent Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas by Gregg Cantrell. A more scholarly work but still very readable and well structured. I've always said I read to learn something new each day and I was surprised how little I knew about Austin and pre-independence Texas. Very highly recommended.

Finished the Audible version of John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father's Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial by Dan Abrams. Good book, very interesting detail about the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the subsequent trials. I had listened to Abrams' previous book about Lincoln and enjoyed it, but this one was tougher due to the large number of extensively quoted witnesses. The written book would have probably been a better option.

Also read about halfway through Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage but eventually gave up. I've read other of his books, but this one felt too much like trying to stretch the content to fit the concept. Not a bad book, but I have other books to read and this book just wasn't doing it for me.

Finished reading the Kindle version of Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul by Karen Abbott.

Finished Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky. Not very much fun to read.

Finished listening to the Audible version of Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton. Very interesting and highly recommended.

>22 jztemple: Of course reminding me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPTqrFas9Bo

>23 rocketjk: Yup, I remember that movie too. The book is very good and like all good history books it covers more than just the basics. Towards the end there is an excellent chapter on the economics of the boom and bust and why modern financial historians like Milton Freedman identify the Florida land boom as the trigger for the Great Depression. Normally economics don't make interesting reading for me but I enjoyed the discussion.

Thankfully some of the iconic buildings from the boom are still intact. It made the book more interesting for me when the author would be discussing some fancy home made for some millionaire of the time and I can remember visiting it.

Completed reading The Fetterman Massacre: Fort Phil Kearny and the Battle of the Hundred Slain by Dee Brown on my Kindle. Very well done history focusing on the year 1866 from the start in January when the fort is first ordered to be built to the massacre in December and then the events afterwords. Written in an easy to read style but still a quite detailed history of Fort Phil Kearny and the people involved with it.

Finished the Kindle version of The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel. Very interesting and is recommended if you have an interest in the subject.

I finished Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist's Fight to Make the Media Look More like America by Dorothy Butler Gilliam. I was about to say that the headline across the top of this important book's front cover says it all: "A memoir by the first black woman reporter at the Washington Post. But, really, that bit of copy, while accurate, only tells part of the story. For while Gilliams was, indeed, when hired in 1961, the first black woman reporter at the Post, the role she has played and the work she has done to advance the cause of black representation both in American's newsrooms and on the pages of those publications, goes far beyond the role that the words "first black woman reporter" convey.

Gilliam's career spans the Civil Rights era of the late 50s and 60s through the Black Power movement and all the way through to the present day. She began her career as a typist for the black weekly, the Louisville Defender in the mid-50s but was soon editing and writing stories. In 1957 she was working for the Tri-State Defender when, at the age of 21, she went to Little Rock to cover the tumultuous, violent, hate-filled proceedings of the attempts to integrate the public schools there. She went to work for the The Washington Post, as mentioned, in 1961, and as a Post reporter went to Oxford, Mississippi, to cover the equally violent and ugly events around James Meredith's attempts to become the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi. She spent several years as a beat reporter in Washington, retired for several years to raise her three daughters and support her husband's growing art career, and then returned to the Post as the editor of the newly expanded and influential Style section that covered a wide range of artistic and cultural issues in the city. And that's the short list of her accomplishments.

There are points at which I thought Gilliam's writing needed more detail and a bit better organization, particularly in the book's first third. But overall, I'll just say that Gilliam is an extremely admirable person, a tough fighter, who is reporting a crucial story.

Finished an interesting Black Powder and Hand Steel: Miners and Machines on the Old Western Frontier by Otis E. Young. The writing was a bit stylized but overall it was a worthwhile read.

Finished The CSS Arkansas: A Confederate Ironclad on Western Waters by Myron J. Smith Jr.. This is a very thorough history of the ironclad, including a background of ironclads in the US Civil War, the story of the development and building of the Arkansas and finally a detailed look at the short but very interesting operational history of the ship. The author has written several other well received history of warships on the western waters in the Civil War. Highly recommended.

I just finished The Arikara War: The First Plains Indian War, 1823 by William R. Nester. The "war" itself was just a single battle and hardly worth a book by itself, but the author had done a very good job in the first 129(!) of this 210 page book of introducing the reader to the origins of the plains Indians, their relationship and the evolution of their trade both between themselves and also with the whites who were entering the region. There is also a good introduction to the shifting control and influence exerted by the Spanish, French, British and American governments over the territories of the lower, middle and upper Missouri regions. Finally there is a good introduction to the fur industry, trapping, trading and transporting from the origins to the final consumers. This would be a good first book for someone who isn't very familiar with these subjects to get a good overview without having to delve into a number of books.

Finished Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April-June 1865 by Noah Andre Trudeau. This book is rather hard to categorize. It looks at the last three months of fighting in the American Civil War, starting with the Union's breakthrough at Petersburg and Richmond and the eventual surrounding and surrender of Lee. It then switches to the fighting in Alabama and North Carolina, the assassination of Lincoln, the capture of Davis, so on and so forth. Rather than a coherence study it relies on many anecdotal first person sources and related vignettes and is rather hard to follow. It is a nice book if you want atmosphere, but doesn't really provide an in-depth look at the subject.

I finished and enjoyed Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War by Tom Wheeler. This was a very interesting trip through the American Civil War with a close focus point of how the use of the telegraph gave Abraham Lincoln the ability both to communicate with far flung generals and gather information about unfolding events in real time. More importantly, due to how new telegraph technology was, Lincoln was the first head of state to have that ability.

This book was first published in 2005, and Wheeler makes effective comparison, as book's title suggests, between the advent of the telegraph and email, making a credible case that the telegraph was actually the much more revolutionary development. Wheeler avers early on that the Congress members of the early 1960s were much more able to conceptualize (and therefore vote funding for) sending a man to the moon that those of the early 1850s were to wrap their brains around the concept of sending electronic pulses long distance across wires.

We see through Lincoln's telegraphs, all of which are on archive, the poor quality of the Federal commanders over the early years of the war, and Lincoln's frustrations with their dithering and reluctance to go on the offensive. Eventually, Lincoln, who was also receiving telegraphs from post commanders and so knew where enemy forces were and which way they were going, became less and less reluctant to provide strategic recommendations.

Wheeler makes the point that Lincoln's gradual ability to fully master this new communication tool and its functions is one more indication of the president's remarkable character and intelligence. He was learning these things on the fly with--because the technology was so new--no blueprint to follow and nobody to advise him as he learned.

Finished reading Grand Forage 1778: The Battleground Around New York City by Todd W. Braisted. Rather than trying to describe what the book is about, which isn't all that easy, I will link to the Amazon book page which has a good description. I thought that the author accomplished what he sought to achieve with the book, the use of primary sources including a number of quotes was enjoyable without bogging down the work. He included enough background of the other events of 1778 to put the Grand Forage into perspective. Overall it was a good effort, although it was somewhat spoiled by the complete lack of useful maps. There are some period maps included as illustrations, but they are worthless for following the action. Unless you are fairly familiar with northern New Jersey, southern New York and western Connecticut you'll probably need Google maps or a good atlas.

Completed Stephen Watts Kearny: Soldier of the West by Dwight L. Clarke. This is a rather long book and reads like it was published in 1961, which is was. The author goes to quite a length discussing how this source said this and that source said that and who was prejudiced, etc. It can be quite tiring to read at times. However, it is an interesting book and I'd say that the first half at least is well worth the effort.

Finished the Kindle version of Pan Am at War: How the Airline Secretly Helped America Fight World War II by Mark Cotta Vaz. Not all that good a book. Parts of it were well done, like setting up the air routes and Pacific bases, but there was a lot of discussion of corporate maneuvering and who owned how much of such and such a company. And sadly there just wasn't a lot about the actually flying. There was some, but the book doesn't really look at the early seaplanes in any detail. Also there are a significant number of quoted passages from the Pan Am official history that didn't really add much to the book. It's not a bad book by any means, but I found it uninspiring.

Finished Small Arms at Gettysburg: Infantry and Cavalry Weapons in America's Greatest Battle by Joseph G. Bilby. A look at not only the weapons present at the battle, but also includes some representative looks at their uses during the battle. Well written and highly recommended.

>36 jztemple: Dang! You must have a GREAT deal of time to read based on the books you've been posting here. That's a reader's delight, I should think.

>37 Glacierman: I'm retired so when I'm home I read, when I'm at the beach I read and when my wife wants to go shopping I keep the AC running in the car and I sit and... read :)

I finished Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon F. Litwack. About two months ago, my friend Kim Nalley, who is both an internationally know jazz and blues singer and a Ph.D. candidate in history at UC Berkeley, sent around a list of suggested reading about the African American experience and the history of racism in America. I will be going back to that list perhaps every third or fourth book I read until I've worked my way through it.

Checking in at 556 pages, Been in the Storm So Long constitutes a commitment of time and energy, but an extremely worthwhile commitment. I was under the impression that the book would provide an overview of the Reconstruction Era, but in fact Litwack stops right as Radical Reconstruction get going. Instead, the book starts with a description of the conditions endured by the prisoners of slavery as the Civil War neared, continues on to describe conditions and events during the war years, and then covers the first few years after Emancipation. Litwack makes detailed use of letters, diaries, newspaper articles and interviews. He lays on example after example after example of each condition and development he describes. At times it seems like perhaps he's still doing that even after the points been effectively made. However, at all times I felt like the effect created with this tactic was an important one. Because it made each element not just something to be told and then to be moved on from, but instead something to consider over and over again until something like knowledge perhaps had seeped in.

Some of the key historical points, some of which I can say that I knew, perhaps, but often only in a vague manner and are extremely important for every American (at least) to be strongly aware in more detailed ways:

1) Slavery was a horror.

2) The crossing of thousands of escaping slaves across the advancing Union lines and, eventually, into the Union army, was an extremely important factor in the North's military victory.

3) The Southern planter class was determined during and after the war that Emancipation would not in any way mean the end of White supremacy. Acknowledging that slavery was over did not in any way signify to them that Blacks should have any rights whatsoever. That included voting, testifying in court, serving on juries or, in many places, owning land.

4) The occupying Union forces sympathized much more with the White aspirations listed above than with helping protect ex-slaves from getting cheated out of the wages their former "masters" were now supposed to be paying them or even physical attack and murder at the hands of whites displeased by their behavior in one way or another.

That's a very, very short list of the major issues covered in this fascination and essential history.

Slogged through The Life of Andrew Jackson by Robert V. Remini. This is the one volume condensation of the original two volume work and I guess is sort of considered the standard biography of Jackson, but I found it rather hagiographic to the point of being distracting. I have another Jackson biography by H. W. Brands, maybe I'll give that I try sometime.

Finished a short monograph, Fort Hays: Keeping Peace on the Plains (Kansas Forts Series) by Leo E. Oliva.

>40 jztemple: fyi, your Andrew Jackson touchstone connects to the Marquis James bio of Jackson. I read the James bio earlier this year. That one is not only a hagiography, it even includes a defense of slavery (written in the 1930s)!

>42 rocketjk: Thanks for pointing out the incorrect link, it should be fixed now.

Finished The Other Custers: Tom, Boston, Nevin, and Maggie in the Shadow of George Armstrong Custer by Bill Yenne. Rather interesting look at the lives and careers of the other members of the Custer clan, although George still forms an important part of the story. Recommended.

Completed American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution by A. Roger Ekirch. Very interesting and a subject I knew nothing about.

Completed The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846 by David J. Weber.

Finished American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World by David Baron.

I finished Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon F. Litwack. It took me more than two weeks to read this horrifying, depressing, infuriating and absolutely essential history. Trouble in Mind is a follow-up to Litwack's Been in the Storm So Long, which I read earlier. The first book, Storm, covers the period from the days of slavery through the beginning of Reconstruction. Trouble in Mind covers the period from the end of Reconstruction, when the brief period of black enfranchisement ended as southern states moved to brutally and emphatically reassert White Supremacy throughout the American south, through what is known as the Great Migration, when blacks in great numbers moved north to fill factory jobs that came available during and just after World War I.

I had thought I had an idea of what the term "Jim Crow" represented to the people who lived under the weight of that oppressive system, but it turns out I had only a relatively shallow understanding. It wasn't just a question of separate railroad cars and exclusion from restaurants and stores. It wasn't just being prevented from voting, although many of the problems stemmed from that. It was about vicious, all-pervasive, horrendous oppression. If you were black and you were perceived as getting "above your place," you could have your house burned down and your crops destroyed. You could be run off your land. Or you could be murdered. What did "above your place" mean? If you had raised enough cotton on your land so that you could pay your rent and your bills at the store and still have enough left over to sell a couple of bales at market and keep the money for yourself, that was an offense for which you and your entire family could be, and might well be, murdered. Or if you were able to fix your house up so that it was more presentable that a rundown shack. Or if it was learned you had money in the bank. Or if you questioned the white man who was cheating you out of wages or payment for crops. Or if you were a teacher in a black school. And so on. Black lives, in this time and place, were meant to be, and most often were, unending hours, days and years of drudgery with no chance to improve one's lot in life. There are a lot more details here about this era, the horrors of lynching (often preceded by long hours of torture and frequently accomplished via burning at the stake). These conditions, again, prevailed across the south through World War One, and, of course, beyond.

I finished Bushville Wins!: The Wild Saga of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves and the Screwballs, Sluggers, and Beer Swiggers who Canned the New York Yankees and Changed Baseball by John Klima. This could have been such a fun and enjoyable baseball history to read. The story of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves is indeed an interesting tale, and the players who made up the team are a colorful lot. The story of the team's owner, Lou Perini, having the vision and the guts to move the team from Boston to Milwaukee, and thereby foreshadowing the move of the Giants and Dodgers from New York to California is a significant part of the tale, as well. Also, the city of Milwaukee's acceptance of the team and the town's desire to be considered "major league" rather than "bush" by the rest of the country rings true. The author, John Klima, does a good job of relating the growing tension as the team fights through and ultimately prevails in a tough, multi-team pennant race. And the defeat of the seemingly unbeatable New York Yankees in the World Series that season makes for an exciting finale. Hank Aaron's coming out party to the nation as a true superstar adds to the poignancy of the story.

And yet, I can't really recommend this book, even to avid baseball fans. Because, unfortunately, the book was in large part ruined for me by Klima's overwrought style and scattershot use of cliche and word-salad sentences. I began tripping over Klima's shoddy writing at about the one-quarter mark in the book and the pot holes began showing up four or five to the page thereafter. It's really too bad. With some attentive editing, this could have been an excellent baseball history.

I finished Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin. This is a fascinating and comprehensive history of the Black Panther Party, which rose quickly to assume a place at the vanguard of the Revolutionary/New Left movement in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The authors provide a very readable and detailed account of the cultural/historic factors and personalities, both inside and outside the party itself, that created the Panthers' philosophy, quick rise, widespread influence, and steady disintegration. This book illuminates a crucial period in African American history and American history more generally. Highly recommended.

Currently reading Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom by Robert C. Williams and listening to The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip by Jeff Guin.

I finished What I Think by Adlai Stevenson. The book was not written as history, but certainly has considerable historical interest to us today. This is a collection of speeches and print articles delivered/written by Stevenson between his two runs for president in 1952 and 1956, both of which he lost to Dwight Eisenhower. Stevenson was an intellectual and a proud liberal, the former quality perhaps serving as an impediment to winning over the American electorate. His writing was certainly thought-provoking and offers a very interesting window into Democratic thought circa 1955. For one thing, we learn that the negative tactics of the Republican Party are older than we might today suppose. In the mid-1950s, Stevenson was of course concerned greatly with the Cold War and the campaign of ideas against Communist Russia and China for the friendship of newly independent countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Also, the possibilities for atomic warfare weigh heavily in his thinking. He is at his most impressive when he speaks of the changes being wrought on society by technology:

"Indeed, it seems that at mid-twentieth century, mass manipulation is a greater danger to the individual than was economic exploitation in the nineteenth center; that we are in greater danger of becoming robots than slaves. Surely it is part of the challenge of this next quarter-century that industry and government and the society they both support must find new and better ways of restoring scope to that strange eccentric, the individual. . . . But we shall have to learn the art of coexistence with many strange things in the future, some of them perhaps even stranger than Communism. Technology, while adding daily to our physical ease, throws daily another loop of fine wire around our souls. It contributes hugely to our mobility, which we must not confuse with freedom. The extensions of our senses, which we find so fascinating, are not adding to the discrimination of our minds."

Overall I found this collection a very interesting look into the issues and concerns of the day as seen by one the country's leading liberal Democrats. It has made me think about going in search of an Stevenson biography.

I finished Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis. Davis provides a very effective history of the first half century of the Womens' Movement. Its earliest days, the movement's strongest activists often made common cause with, and in fact intersected with, the Abolitionist Movement. But after Emancipation, the movements diverged, especially when Reconstruction collapsed and Blacks became disenfranchised. Many leaders of the Women's Movement were not in favor of the 15th Amendment, for example, which assured Blacks the legal right to vote. These leaders felt that Blacks as a group should not receive the vote before women did. Soon, strains of racist ideology were creeping into the rhetoric of important Women's Suffrage leaders.

Davis also describes the early Women's Voting Rights movement as essentially middle- and upper-class. Not only did they shy away from supporting Black rights, they also made relatively little common cause with immigrant and other working class women crowded into tenements and sweatshops, much less with poor Black women toiling in Southern cotton fields and sugar plantations. Davis also examines the rise and pervasiveness of lynching and rape in the Jim Crow South, and the ways in which anti-lynching laws became a core goal of Black Women's groups in the North. Most white organizers, on the other hand, kept such issues at arms' length.

Davis' writing is clear and well-organized. I learned a lot, and I do recommend the book.

Finished Florida in the Spanish-American War by Joe Knetsch and Nick Wynne. A relatively short book, which despite its title is probably only half about the activies in Florida during this time, the rest being about the lead up to the war. Still, there is some interesting information about the camps set up around the state for the departing troops and the conditions encountered in the overcrowded city of Tampa which was the main departure point. There is also a good discussion of the impact of the immigration of Cubans into the Sunshine State prior to the war.