Summer Reading Series Week 3

This week we travel from the early part of the nineteenth century right up to twenty-first century topics.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe is the sixth volume in the Oxford History of the United States.

This is one of those books you can’t read while lying in bed because it weighs so much, but if you love history it’s a great read. This is the story of a country on the move. Changes in transportation and technology encourage shifts in population as well as the spread of information. Howe identifies trends and movements that still shape our country today; the power of religion was used to shape American attitudes during this period, just as it does today.

Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin by Janis P. Stout. Texas Tech University Press: Lubbock, TX, 2007.

This book looks at the West at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is a West that the author calls “ungendered.” The opportunities for women artists and writers were greatly expanded in this wide-open space. Two women in particular, authors Willa Cather and Mary Austin, would see the West not as a “rootin’ tootin” raucous place open only to men, but a place of creative freedom for both genders.

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. Times Books: NY, 2007.

In this book you will find the convergence of many ideas, but I like to think that it just takes us into a new frontier – much like Howe and Stout did in their descriptions of the West. Gone are the days of “one place, one thing.” Human beings in the twenty-first century are used to multiple uses and places for any one thing whether it’s a picture or a TV show or a movie. That makes everything “miscellaneous.”

— Katherine M., August 13, 2008, 3:22 p.m.