This post marks some important changes in The Notebook. From here on out, we’ll be doubling our blog output, posting twice per week instead of once. We’ll also be adding different kinds of posts. Where, in the past, we have written primarily about our programs and, sometimes, about our people, we are broadening our scope. We aim to write about books, literature, higher education, business, culture and literacy, as we believe these interests intersect with our mission to bring more books to more people. Ultimately, we aspire to create good, thoughtful and thought-provoking posts.
This is the first in an ongoing series, “Required Reading,” through which we’ll talk about what has captured our attention lately on and outside the web.
Happy Fourth of July Weekend! We hope you have time for fireworks and food, family and friends, and that you manage to sneak in some time for reading, too.
Ever since I read Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, I’ve been fascinated by our nation’s many untold and under-told stories. (Jane was, of course, Benjamin Franklin’s younger sister.) Lepore describes Jane’s life as “a quiet story of a quiet life of quiet sorrow and quieter beauty,” one that is also a “history of books and papers, a history of reading and writing, a history from reformation to revolution, a history of history.” Pair it with Abigail Adams’ letters to her husband, John Adams. On the subject of American Independence, Abigail Adams writes “May the foundation of our new constitution, be justice, Truth and Righteousness. Like the wise Mans [sic] house may it be founded upon those Rocks and then neither storms or tempests will overthrow it.”
In the wake of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting, Capria has been reflecting on Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America be America Again.” She writes “I find this poem to be very powerful in terms of calling out and owning our past as a nation, but also holding onto hope that we can make America better and truer to the ideals we profess. I am always looking for things to read that hold ideals in tension – the reality of what is broken or lost with the hope of restoration and rebirth.”
Jessica just finished Franklin Toker’s Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kaufman and America’s Most Extraordinary House. She visited Fallingwater this past April and bought a copy there. She says, “It’s long (496 pages!) and masterfully researched, but it’s also lively and conversational. Toker rewrites the history of the home and places it within 1930s Pittsburgh and American history. He explains the complex Kaufman family politics and Kaufman’s alienation from elite society in Pittsburgh, despite his considerable financial success. Toker recognizes E.J. Kaufman as a collaborator with Wright and other modernist architects, a legacy that had been downplayed by Kaufman’s son as he sought to secure his own reputation in relation to Fallingwater. It’s a fabulous social and cultural history of architecture and taught me so much about a building I had already come to love.”
Elsewhere on the web:
LitHub has an excerpt of Helen Thorpe’s Soldier Girls, a recent work of nonfiction exploring life women’s lives in the military.
At the New York Public Library Blog, Mark Boonshoft writes about The Olive Branch Petition and the Declaration of Independence. You can also read about the Library’s early manuscripts digitization project!
Open Culture hosts A Firework’s Point of View (video).
Connie Holland, of the National Museum of American History, writes about patriotic music, radio programming and July 4, 1928.
The History Chicks chat about Sybil Ludington, a female Paul Revere.
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with French Novels, 1887, The Robert Holmes à Court Collection, Perth [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons
