The Answer to Politicians Banning Books Is Citizens Looking Between The Covers

Join me in the 2023 AHA Summer Reading Challenge

I took Memorial Day weekend off, and it appears I am getting a slow start to the week. But here’s a beginning of summer post for you. If you know someone else who might want to join in the fun of reading like we were kids again, please:

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For the second year in a row, the American Historical Association is issuing its summer reading challenge (click the link, and there is a version for kids too.) You play it like a bingo game or tic-tac-toe: all you have to do is read three books and fill three consecutive spaces in the months of June, July, and August.

But I decided to set myself a more ambitious challenge since I have piles of unread books, some of which I must read for a current project I am working on: I am going to hit all nine categories (I did have to order a graphic history and a young adult book, but that’s all. And I decided to pick the books in advance! So they are (imagining that the top left square is one and the bottom right is 9):

1. Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and Dawud Anyabwile, Victory. Stand! Raising My Fist for Justice (Norton Young Readers, 2022).

2. Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (Oxford University Press, 2017).

3. David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson, The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History (Ten Speed Press, 2021).

4. Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2021).

5. Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press, 2016).

6. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War and the Making of a New Left (Verso, 1993).

7. Tiya Miles, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts (Random House, new edition 2023).

8. Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein, The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story (One World, 2021).

9. Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick, Cornell: A History, 1940-2015 (Cornell University Press, 2014)

You can play too! Make your own list, and we will check back in at the end of the summer to see how it went!

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Short takes:

• Department of No Comment. As everyone knows by now, Tara Reade, who accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her before the 2020 election, has defected to Moscow and plans to apply for Russian citizenship. Understandably, this raises the question of whether Reade was a Russian asset all along. I want to point out that The Intercept, which pushed this story long after most media outlets found it not credible, has remained silent as of late today. Similarly, podcaster Katie Halper, who broke the story by interviewing Reade on her show and insisted that skeptics (and Reade’s story, shall we say, “evolved”) were shills for the Democratic Party, has not even acknowledged that Reade has flown the coop. (May 31, 2023)

• Unforced Error, Coach. Over 200 military promotions have been stalled because Senator Tommy “Coach” Tuberville of Alabama wants the Department of Defense to grant leave and pay travel costs for service members who need to leave the state where they are stationed to access abortion. Now, the national security staffer who recommended that idea to Tuberville is out of a job. “Tuberville’s tactic, which he began using in March, has drawn the ire of the Pentagon and Democratic Senate leaders,” writes the Washington Post’s John Wagner, while “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has called Tuberville’s blockade “a clear risk to U.S. military readiness.” (May 31, 2021)

• Department of Republicanomics. At the Portland Press Herald, economist Susan Feiner breaks down the national debt for you. There’s no such thing as “your share” of the national debt, as the GOP would have you believe. Instead, “for every debt, there is an equal, offsetting asset.” In the case of mortgage debt, the asset is your house, and in the case of the national debt, the assets are financial instruments that allow others to invest in the economy. “So the $32 trillion of national debt is matched exactly by $32 trillion of assets,” Feiner writes. “Those assets are the various government bonds that are bought and sold on open markets every single day. Why do virtually all other nations, banks, corporations, insurance companies, billionaires, and pension funds hold U.S. government debt? Because until the current MAGA hysteria over the debt ceiling (and the prior Republican meltdown in 2011), those financial instruments – U.S. government bonds – were considered the absolutely safest asset in the whole world.” That’s the fire that the Freedom Caucus is playing with, readers. (May 27, 2023)