I'm curious to learn which books over the course of 2009 that the MyDD readership has read, enjoyed and might recommend.

I generally read two to three books at a time, a habit left over my graduate school days. Currently, I am reading Walter McDougall's Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828, a social history of the American people and the first volume in as yet incomplete trilogy. The second volume is Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 which I suspect will be next up. McDougall, a historian at Penn, attempts to identify the "uniqueness" of the American character. He argues that the creation of the United States is "the central event of the past 400 years." It's a bold thesis and his argument rests on that the United States was not just born of revolution but that it is one. Yet another theme that runs through the book is that while America is not a lie, it is a "disappointment" for though Americans are perhaps "freer" or at least freer to pursue happiness and yet all too often no happier than others and that we are but a restless nation of "hustlers" a group composed of "go-getters and rascals".

I am also reading The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 by Saul Cornell, a historian at Ohio State. I choose to read this book because I want to get at the roots of the Tea Party Movement. Suspicion of centralized authority has a long tradition in the US and the Anti-Federalists of the Founding Era were prolific writers and this volume looks at the various tenets upon which opposition to the Federal Government (and Hamiltonianism) rested. It's a good book for lawyers since increasingly legal scholars and the Supreme Court decisions quote Anti-Federalists like Richard Henry Lee and Elbridge Gerry, to whom we owe gerrymandering. Cornell argues that while the Federalists won the battle for the ratification of the US Constitution, it is the ideas of the Anti-Federalists that continue to define the soul of American politics.

The most recently completed book that I read was Gordon Wood's Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. The book won a Pultizer Prize and explores the character of George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Paine and Aaron Burr. Wood, a historian at Brown, writes with clarity and the book is eminently enjoyable. He praises Washington especially for being conscious that he was setting precedents with almost every move. Wood, rightly I think, views Hamilton as having the deepest legacy of any the Founders. As Ron Chernow has noted, Alexander Hamilton is the "Father of the Federal Government" and his model of a fiscal-military state endures despite the deep aversion to central authority found in our politics. If the Founders were return to observe how we have evolved, Wood argues that only Hamilton would be largely pleased. The other aspect of this book that I enjoyed was Wood's take on the role of the Founders in creating what we today call publick opinion. The Revolution began as a rather aristocratic affair but over the course of 1780s and the 1790s a broader social revolution took place where the vox populi made its presence felt.

Earlier in the year, I had read Wood's newly published Empire of Liberty: The History of the Early Republic 1789-1815 that traced the development of the American institutions we now take for granted but were then nothing but uncertain. He details how Americans went from "subjects to citizens" and how quickly the spread of a political consciousness developed among Americans. Woods recounts the intensely partisan battles of the 1790s, the development of the Federalist program led by Alexander Hamilton and the counter-attack led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who believed that Hamilton's strong central government was a betrayal of the principles of the American Revolution.

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Afghan poet Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, after having been wrongly imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for three years, has been released. Now, he wants his poems back:

The Americans can't return the three years that Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost lost, locked in a cell in Guantánamo Bay. But they could at least give back his poetry.

"Please help," said Dost, who says he penned 25,000 lines of verse during his long imprisonment. "Those words are very precious to me. My interrogators promised I would get them back. Still I have nothing."

 

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