June Reading List

Here’s my reading list for June. This is last month’s list and you can follow it back from there.

Professional Reading:

1. Cheryl Troupe, Putting Down Roots: Metis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community (University of Manitoba Press, 2025). A pretty good study of the Metís, centering women, work, and food in a pretty detailed ethnographic study. There are better books in this general field of ethnographic history, but you’d be well off reading this.
2. Frederic L. Quivik, Smoke and Tailings: An Environmental History of Butte and Anaconda, Montana, 1880-1930 (University of Nevada Press, 2025). A fine enough older-style discussion of pollution and what it did to the Butte area in its long and famous mining history. It’ll do if you are interested in the topic.
3. Cheryl Redhorse Bennett, Our Fight Has Just Begun: Hate Crimes and Justice in Native America (University of Arizona Press, 2022). When we think of hate crimes in the U.S., we don’t consider hate crimes toward indigenous people nearly often enough. This study looks primarily at killings of Navajos in Farmington, New Mexico and the lack of meaningful response from the white community and it’s an important work.
4. Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Back in the early 21st century, there were huge numbers of microstudies of the Civil War, as historians continued to find new ways to explore the most important event in American history. That led to lots of studies of fairly small topics but which had good value. Campbell’s book is a prime example. After Sherman reached Savannah and started marching north through the Carolinas, how did white southerners respond? The answer is with enormous bitterness and that’s especially true of women. As many historians have now shown, if anything women were more committed to slavery and the war than men. Gender matters and it mattered in the Civil War too and not in the laughable ways second wave feminists used to claim like women are more peaceful and things like that. Nope, it was women who provided the most resistance to Sherman and his men and it was women who laid the groundwork for the massive white resistance during Reconstruction.
5. Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). This is one of the huge number of books about labor and globalization that came out in the early 21st century and I wish that was still the case. It holds up more or less, as well as most books from nearly a quarter century ago do. She looks at labor conflicts on a global scale, showing that capital consistently moves around the globe to solve its labor problems, but that it never does solve those problems. Rather, the struggle for decent conditions just moves into a new realm. That’s true as far as it goes, though it doesn’t much help the workers displaced from their jobs to know this. But Silver isn’t a historian and her concerns are big global trends. That’s fine, though human agency largely disappears from studies like this. Still, it was valuable in 2003 and valuable today.
6. Alice Beban, Unwritten Rule: State-Making through Land Reform in Cambodia (Cornell University Press, 2021). As NGOs poured into Cambodia to assist with the transition to democracy, they brought their own ideas of liberalism with them. This included easily defined property rights. So they pushed the government to engage in land reform. But did this help the poor? The answer is mostly no. Rather, it became another way for the government to steal land. See, when NGOs enter a place, they don’t really understand things such as historical land relations and so, though Beban doesn’t quite argue this, they end up engaging in another form of neoimperialism, as well intentioned as they might be. What she definitely does argue is that these land reforms placed more power in the hands of people with the access and resources to get what they want. Once again, neoliberalism fucked over the global poor.
7. Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2020). This book is way too long, but it is also very, very smart. Beiner looks at the 1798 Irish rebellion in the north. He notes that in fact, there were tons of Protestant support for this. Then it was erased in public memory to the greatest extent possible. He explores this shifting public memory from the moment of the rebellion’s suppression to the present in a context where a lot of Northern Irish do not want to even know anything about solidarity with Catholics, even if it is over 200 years ago. He uses the term “vernacular historiography” as a way of understanding how publics remember or don’t remember in the past and it’s a real useful term. The only problem with this as a book is that Beiner leaves no possible example unexamined and so it goes on like the Troubles. But any historian will be better off considering the methodology of this book.
8. Allyson Brantley, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). The definitive book on the Coors boycott, highly recommended for that famous incident among a certain generation of liberals, the same generation who actually wanted to drink Coors, the mania for which is one of the strangest things about that very odd decade known as the 1970s. So read this if you have any interest in that topic.
9. David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2012). Before Trump, scholars of conservatism were determined to make liberals Take Conservatives Seriously. So they wrote a lot of books like this. This is a short 6-chapter set of biographies of the core figures in the rise of conservatism to that time, from Robert Taft to George W. Bush. It downplays the revanchist racial and social policies at the core of all of this, largely claiming that these people weren’t really racist but simply had to work with racists, if uncomfortably, in order to fulfill their political needs. They were concerned primarily about order, which is Farber’s core argument here. Liberals–and nearly all of these historians are liberals personally–misunderstood and overstated what these conservatives were about. And then Trump happened and it was indeed about a racialized fascism and they are all as awful as liberals said. Sure, some of the leaders–Bush very much included, Bill Kristol, George Will–were horrified enough to move away from Trump, but the actual reason conservatism rose, which is the desire of voters, not political leaders or intellectuals, were and are all in on everything Trump offers. So yeah, doesn’t age well. There’s also the problem when historians get too close to the present (labor historians are really guilty of this) which is projecting onto the future. Farber doesn’t go too far down this road and hedges his bets, but he falls on the side that maybe, as of his writing, the modern conservative movement is over and Americans have moved on to different concerns. Of course, by 2012, with the rise of the Tea Party, this was obviously incorrect. I don’t blame him here–it’s very tempting to do this at the end of a book. It just proved very not true.
10. Robert Michael Morrissey, People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America (University of Washington Press, 2022). Other than the Beiner, this is perhaps the smartest book I read this month. Morrissey looks at the Fox Wars of the 1730s on the borders of the Great Plains and eastern woodlands as battles over an expanding bison range. The bison were moving east in these years and ran up against tribes very ready to go to the war over access to this new resource. So this is a biohistory, looking at the intersection of the tallgrass prairies, the bison, the growing market economy spurred by French colonizers (where most of the sources come from), and the various tribes and their histories with each other. This shows how indigenous people were conscious actors fighting for what they wanted in an economy and a landscape of warfare. It is also kind of an ideal environmental hsitory, at least for the type of EH that is focused on the scientific side of study. It doesn’t have to be and I’ve always been a lot more interested personally in the political/cultural side of the field, but for a lot of environmental historians, the study needs to be rooted in the land and its biota and this is a good example of how to do this.
11. Dale Kretz, Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen’s Bureau (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). As Kretz points out, most of the discussion of the Freedmen’s Bureau is about individual freedom in the face of white hatred after the Civil War. That’s fine, but he correctly points out that it’s probably more valuable to think about this as the first time black people could make claims on the state. And since there were fights for soldiers’ pensions for many decades after the Freedmen’s Bureau premature end, these claims continued for a very long time, into the twentieth century. Like with the Bureau itself, the state really didn’t want to provide that support for freed slaves, even if they then fought for the Union in the war and as this entered into the Progressive Era, it got even worse. Yet these claims were real and sometimes successful and started a long history of forcing a recalcitrant state to recognize them.
12. Caitlin Keliaa, Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women’s Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program (University of Washington Press, 2024). In the 30s, there was a significant program out of the Bay Area to take Native women and place them in white homes, mostly as domestic labor. Unsurprisingly, this went very badly for a lot of young women. In this valuable study, Keilaa tells this story that I at least didn’t really know and shows how indigenous women resisted this form of the cultural and labor domination they faced.

FICTION/LITERARY NON-FICTION–kind of thought I’d read more in South America, but if anything I am busier than usual when I travel in cities. Lot to check out after all.

1. Bill Buford, Heat. I remember really enjoy Buford’s New Yorker articles on his transition in learning how to become a chef after working for the magazine. The book came out in 2006. I had long wanted to read it and finally did. And…..I had completely forgotten that half of this book is about Mario Batali. And given that Batali turned out to be a total creep, that made reading the book mighty different. So look, Buford’s journey and engagement with Tuscan food is fascinating. It’s very much of its age in what it is interested in, but the early 2000s were an important time in American food culture and this is a good artifact of that. It holds up. Now, the Batali stuff. The thing is–Batali is obviously a creep on the page. He’s a massive, unbelievable level drunk. In fact, I’m surprised he’s still alive based on the descriptions of his bacchanalian parties. That he’s handsy is about the least surprising thing I’ve ever heard after reading this. There is so much boundary crossing in his kitchens and he promoted a culture that totally allowed and encouraged it. What Batali was not was a screamer, so he comes across good that way. But it’s like Woody Allen–we all knew that he was a scumbag for decades before he was finally banished from respectability. I’m sure Batali legit believes he did nothing wrong. Quite a bit of the MeToo movement was about changes in society more than changes in male behavior and men like Batali who had crossed the line for decades with no consequences but did not consider themselves assaulters found themselves now well on the other side of said line. So there’s a lot of chew on here.
2. Leone Ross, Popisho. The reviews loved this book by Ross, a Jamaican author, about an unnamed fantastical Caribbean island where everyone has a magic power unique to themselves and strange things happen, around two lost lovers, one the island’s lead cook whose wife has committed suicide and the other, a healer whose husband has cheated on her and is lost. They find each other and whatnot and that’s fine. But Ross doesn’t just lean into the magical realism, she throws the kitchen sink in. Characters have lungs on the outside of their bodies, people get drunk on butterflies and stoned on moths, the right characters die in colorful ways just at the right time, etc. It all gets very silly. People liked it, I think in part, because sex is so central here and in a wide variety of ways and different kinds of sex. And because it’s lightly fun. But I found it very, very silly. Personally, I think it’s good to dislike a book every now and again that is highly loved by readers, not because it’s good to not like this or that book but to remember that you are an independent reader with independent ideas. If I connect this to other authors I really dislike–Richard Powers and Francis Spufford come to mind–what ties them together in my head is a total lack of subtlety in their writing and storytelling and a tendency to leave no possibility unturned when creating their worlds that end up looking like silly cliches or parodies of people can do this much better. So yeah, I did not like this.
3. Lucinda Williams, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You. Musician memoirs are a very mixed bag and range from terrible (Kim Gordon) to pretty damn insightful (Carrie Brownstein) to largely pointless (Margo Price) to kinda weird but worthy (Bob Dylan). Lucinda’s is more a solid effort, worthy for fans. She and the scene she came of age in is certainly interesting enough. She has a few good stories, though she sometimes softsells some stuff around her myriad bad relationships and how they impacted her albums. She does not softsell how record labels had no idea what to do with her for so long. What I found interesting personally is how she so intentionally changed her sound after Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which also happens to be her last good album so I guess that choice was in fact a conscious decision to do something entirely different. Wish it was better but at least it’s her vision. Notably, she rushes through most of the 21st century, filled with really forgettable albums. She finished this before her stroke that took away her ability to play guitar but she keeps on truckin and probably will til the day she dies.
4. Colm Tóibín, Bad Blood: A Walk along the Irish Border. This book is out of print and dated in some ways but this 1987 travel narrative of the new beloved Tóibín walking the roads of the border between Ireland and Northern Island still has a lot of value as a document of the incredible tensions of that place and time. He’s such a fantastic writer as well and a good ability to talk to folks on both sides of the line, though more Catholics than Protestant since he’s a Catholic boy. What a depressing spot on the map in the 80s.
5. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods. Dunbar’s 1902 novel is arguably the first major black novel in American literature. It follows the story of a southern family, loyal to their ex-masters since the war. The father is falsely accused of theft and imprisoned. The family, thrown out, move to New York where Bad Things Happen. Dunbar died of tuberculosis a few years later and one wonders what he would have written in the 20s had he lived, but it was lauded at the time, with William Dean Howells especially giving it his seal of approval and he was the top critic of the day. It’s pretty unsparing toward whites, though compared to later novels about black America, underdeveloped. Its historical importance can’t be overstated and it’s also short, so you can feel good about yourself for reading a still underrated American classic in a couple of hours.

This is your monthly book thread.