bahareads's reviews
1065 reviews

Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal as it developed from the early 20th century through to the beginning of the 21st century. He explores the power and meaning of the most famous southern Indiana episode in a variety of modern contexts.

The structure of the book documents how the tourist industry embrace of Cherokee history in the 1920s and 1930s, to the substantial ware of removal commemoration that developed after WWII to the national campaign to remember the trail of tears that comes to the present day.

Denson argues that memorialising the Cherokee removal is a southern tradition, not a recent innovation. By examining the commemoration of Indian removal, Denson opens new terrain for native American scholarship within southern history. I enjoyed how Denson lets readers know that he wrestled with his own research motivations, and how his research evolved during its process.

A collection of nine stories that are all interconnected. I enjoyed the book overall. I wish some of the short stories were longer than others; some were better than others. The structure of the book makes it an interesting read already but focusing on how the characters were connected was the most entertaining part.

J.M. Johnson examines how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and enact freedom in the Atlantic world. She is very very deliberate with her word choices. She constantly hammers her points throughout the text (specifically - gender, intimacy, and kinship). She does a great job of building her narrative. I enjoyed how she pushed 'imagined geography' beyond the bounds of land or landscapes to the body. She says the body is a geography.

Johnson says her narrative is not not an biography or micro-history, but a history practicing the same muddy freedom the women studied. It is a history of black women who experienced the contours of bondage and freedom as slavery and the slave trade began to unfold.

Her applied theory of null values was fasinating! She says Null values offers opportunity before reading along the bias grain for marking this space of indeterminacy. By identifying archival silences as null values surfaces slave owners and officials as responsible for missing and unacknowledged black life in the archive but resists equating the mission or in-applicable information with black death.

By focusing on how using the rule of intimacy and kinship played out highlights black women's everyday understanding of freedom as centered around safety and security for themselves and their children. It was a great book. I highly highly recommend.

I enjoyed this book a lot! Way more than I assumed I would. The writing is entertaining and it keeps you reading. I read this on audiobook and the narration was amazing. The 'twist' was kind of guessable BUT it did not go how I expected it to.

I HATED Rilla as a teen reading this; but I loved reading about how Rilla matured throughout the book. It was heartbreaker. It was a tear jerker.

I used to love this book, and I still do but it's no longer up there in the rotation in the series. I love all the delighful characters but I wish there was more focus Anne.

Erin Thompson's book examines public monuments. It is a book of stories. It is not a comprehensive survey of American monuments, but covers recent developments in public debates. Thompson says Monuments are powerful sources of inspiration; they do not need to exist forever. They each have their own stories and we need to do are part to uncover the histories of them.

Smashing Statues can be read super-duper quick. Each chapter is short and sweet. Monuments reflect and shape how nations see themselves, and Thompson does a good job of showing that argument. One interesting narrative choice Thompson makes is she inserts her herself into the narrative but always with plural pronouns, never singular.

I listened to this on audiobook, and enjoyed it a LOT. It was so funny. It was also really sad.

Andrea Burns explores the phenomenon of growning African American neighbourhood museums. She says leaders of the Black museum movement were contesting and reinterpreting traditional depictions of African and African American history and culture before mainstream museums acknowledged African American history.

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, Burns shows that the African American museums that emerged challenged and re-created new national memories and identities that incorporated the ideas, events, objects, and places tied to black history. The museums represented alternative or free spaces carved out of cultural landscapes that have consistently marginalised minorities.

All the museums in this study have the same thematic characteristics that impact the development of their institutions and work. They were all (1) all were based in major metropolises, and (2) the black populations in those cities were increasing.

At the conclusion, Burns argues the national African American museum ignited a competitive spark, and local African American museums that have become detached from their community might be invigorated.

I enjoyed the book, but I was not totally convinced with Burns argument.

Jennifer Morgan's work is thick and dense. It is the study of African women enslaved in the early english colonies and the impact of slavery on their lives and their (women's) impact on the development of slavery. Morgan explores the ways that enslaved women lived their lives on the side of slaveowner's visions of themselves as successful White men and shouldered burdens connected but distinct by enslaved men.

This book was tough to get through. Each chapter required a lot of work to read. One of the points I liked from the book is the idea that ravel narratives were used to create race and racial slavery. These porno-tropical writings were used exploit Black women into culturally inferior beings.

Labouring Women rejects isolated categories of identity in an effort to inch to an unstable vision of the past and of the present. She is building on older ideas that demand scholars pay attention to space and time in US Slavery. This book is older; it shows. Morgan does great work but it's a heavy read.