Tag Archives: Reading

December 29, 2025

Finishing my 2025 Books

By daseger

I’m still working on the fall version of my 2025 reading list even as the year draws to a close. I certainly won’t finish it by the end of the year, but I have a LONG break ahead of me as I have a sabbatical for the spring semester! Lots of great books coming out next year (including my own) so I better get going. Next week, I’ll post about Salem’s Centuries as its publication date is January 6 (hoping to change the vibe for that particular date). This is a really good working list of books that I have read, am currently reading (I tend to read books concurrently) and plan to read pretty soon, all of which were published in 2025. In fact the last book is due to be published tomorrow, so I don’t have it in my possession but I pre-ordered it. As usual, this is a nonfiction list; I just don’t read very much fiction so I can’t offer up any kind of a guide to those genres. I read history, history of science, art history, the history of food and drink, folklore, and books about various types of design and architecture. That’s pretty much it. Maybe a bit of politics and popular culture—and media, but the vast number of titles for fiction and self-help books appearing every year seldom catch my attention. So here goes, beginning with books in my period that I felt that I had to read but were nevertheless quite good.

I thought Borman’s book was going to be just a narrative of Elizabeth’s declining years, death, and the succession of James I and VI, and it was that, but it was more too—I learned lots of little things I did not know about these years. Borman is more than a television presenter, clearly: this is a very source-based history, with particular reliance on new revelations about William Camden’s Annales. Just further complexities relating to James for me! I think I have a book on him on many of my book lists here, and as 2025 was the 500th anniversay of his death I had to have one more: Clare Jackson’s Mirror of Great Britian is amazing, one of the best royal biographies I’ve ever read, and that is saying something as James was complex: earnestly Protestant but also a pursuer of pleasure, well-educated but also a true believer in demonic witchcraft, the only contemporary critic of tobacco, the first King of Great Britain. He’s a lot, and Jackson handles both the man and his era really well. Getting away from royalty and this specific era, two other British books which I am kind of reading together, gradually (they are both what I think of as “dipping” books in that you can pick up and dip into them wherever and whenever you like) are all about food and folklore—both just completely entertaining and informative at the same time.

I like to read books that are sweeping in terms of their topics, sweeping over the centuries: a change from most of the academic reading I do which is much more constrained in terms of both topic and time. The very popular genre that I call “commodity history” often includes sweeping titles, but as its title asserts, Jordan Smith’s The Invention of Rum is more narrowly focused on the invention of this “perfect” Atlantic spirit. Another “invention” book (though I really don’t think “design” was invented in the twentieth century but that’s why I want to read The Invention of Design) covers only the twentieth century. A really fascinating book blending history, magic and medicine (one of my favorite combinations), Decoding the Hand covers more ground.

I have my natural, constant interests, but if I’m looking for something new to read the first place I go is to the website Five Books, at which experts recommend five books in their areas of expertise and lots of lists to inspire a wider range of reading. I love this site! One great book that I never would have found on my own came from here: Sara Lodge’s Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, which was on the shortlist for this year’s Wolfson History Prize, awarded annual for both well-researched and accessible (enjoyable!) history writing. This book was definitely both, and a case study in utilizing historical and literary sources.

Finally, three books of a more timely/political nature. The medievalist Patrick Boucheron has written a great book about Political Fictions over time, I am searching for some explanations for/relief from the NOISE that assaults Salem all year long so I purchased Chris Berdick’s well-reviewed Clamor (though I’m sure he will take on all the sirens and jackhammers but not the tour guides), and I think we should always remember January 6 (for more than the publication of Salem’s Centuries) so I’m going to read Nora Neus’s oral history on that day.

5 Comments | tags: Book Lists, books, Commodity History, Food and drink, January 6, Reading, Reading Lists, Tudor-Stuart Britain | posted in books

September 2, 2024

Revolutionary Remembrance

By daseger

Even more so than usual, this Labor Day weekend seemed like the end of summer to me. Actually, not just the end, but the finale. This was quite a productive summer, even though I didn’t really produce anything: there were more edits on Salem’s Centuries and the new experience of working as a guide at Historic New England’s Phillips House, but what I was really focused on was Salem’s experience of the American Revolution. I read really widely on this topic, and learned a lot: I honestly don’t think I’ve read as much history since graduate school. It actually felt like graduate school, but without the pressure. As I say all the time on this blog, I’m not an American historian, so to truly understand historical forces at work at any time in Salem’s history, I have to get up to speed by going through both the classic texts as well as more recent studies. For a topic as big as the AMERICAN REVOLUTION, “background” is going to involve reading a lot of books, and so I did. At the beginning of the summer, all I wanted was to understand Salem’s role as provincial capital during the summer of 1774, but I couldn’t really grasp that without some understanding of the forces (and people!) at play in British America in general and Massachusetts in particular during the period between the close of the Seven Years’ War and the Boston Tea Pary. I would finish one book on this era with the realization that I had to read two or three or four more. I had questions which led to more questions. And it was all so PERSONAL: I had to figure out all the networks as well. My “revolutionary Salem summer” reading project was also personal, but it had public validation: Massachusetts has been in revolution-commemoration mode for a while thanks to the efforts and organzation of Revolution250 so there were regional events all summer long and this is also the bicentennial year of the (General) Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphant return tour of the United States, an anniversary marked by a succession of reenactments in the towns and cities which he visited originally, including Salem this very weekend. For an early modern European historian, this kind of synchronicity seldom happens!

Waiting for the General/ Marquis at a Red, White, and Blue Picnic in Chestnut Street Park—in this last photo, a very chill cat on a leash captured everyone’s attention, especially this regency toddler!

Lafeyette arrived in Salem around 2:00 pm, there were formal welcomes and speeches and a few photo ops, and then he was on his way. This was a busy day for the Marquis/General: it started in Chelsea, and then he visited Marblehead, Salem, Beverly and ended up in Ipswich—just like August 31, 1824. This was a very enjoyable event, co-sponsored by nearly all of the non-witchy nonprofits of Salem: Hamilton Hall, The Salem Athenaeum, The Phillips House, and the Pickering House, as well as Essex Heritage and the Creative Collective, and the colorful assistance of the Danvers Alarm List Company. The 1824 tour of “the Nation’s Guest” was marked by a spirited public exuberance which sustained and even rekindled memories of the American Revolution; let’s hope this Bicentennial tour can do the same! If it does, it will be in large part due to the efforts of the American Friends of Lafayette, an organization which has been cultivating the General’s character and contributions since 1932. Even though it was just one pitstop on a long day for Lafayette in 1824, the preparations in Salem were detailed and complex: you can see John Remond’s catering accounts at the Phillips Library and read all about the lengthy cavalcade here. And Salem was not alone: for comparison’s sake (and to get inspired for this weekend), I went to see the Lexington Historical Society’s small exhibition, “The President and the General,” last week. While some of the exhibits clearly belonged to another time, others clearly have resonance in our own, like the banner that boldly states LIBERTY.

Couldn’t quite capture the T & the Y! An allegorical image of Lafayette returning to France with founding-father protectors; ribbon/sash, invitation, banners from the 1824 tour, Lexington Historical Society.

5 Comments | tags: American Revolution, Commemoration, Labor Day, Lafayette, Local Events, Reading, Reenactments, Remembrance | posted in Culture, History, Salem

August 12, 2024

Nancy Drew & the Peabody Sisters of Salem

By daseger

What do a fictional detective and three very real women of mid-nineteenth century Salem have in common? Well, books have been written about them, and in certain editions of these books there are silhouette endpapers. That’s it, that’s the post. Well not really, there’s a bit more I want to say but mostly I want to show. When I was a girl my very favorite books after my Black Beauty and Little House on the Prairie phases were Nancy Drew mysteries. I had a whole bunch and always wanted more. Most of my Nancy Drews were later editions—1960s and 1970s I think—and they weren’t great- looking books to tell you the truth. Nancy was on the cover, in whatever setting she was dealing with in that volume, and inside were some boring oval portraits. So I didn’t really think about the books at all, just Nancy. Then someone gave me an older book, it must have been one of the first editions of the series, and inside were these amazing endpapers of orange silhouettes! I remember distinctly thinking at the time, wow, older is better, older is (more vivid, more creative, more rare, more CRAFTED) better. So then I wanted more older Nancy Drews, of course, Nancy Drew BOOKS, not just Nancy Drews. I had also become more concious of what a book was as an object, or I should say simply conscious. So I sought out the orange silhouette endpapers (and found some more red than orange), then black ones, which came a bit later, and then finally “the diggger” depictions which are not quite silhouettes but still cool.

My Nancy Drew endpaper obsession continued on for quite some time, but I progressed to other books, including Louise Hall Tharp’s Peabody Sisters of Salem, about Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody of Salem, who had interesting Salem childhoods with their teacher parents and led quite engaging adult lives.. Elizabeth was an early childhood education pioneer and Transcendentalist, Mary was also very focused on educational reform, and wrote several books, though she is perhaps best known as the second wife of the “father of public education” Horace Mann. Sophia was an artist before her marriage to her fellow Salemite Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Sophia always seemed like the least interesting of the three sisters to me, but as she was married to Hawthorne she gets more attention). A more scholarly book on the Peabody sisters was published by Megan Marshall in 2005, but my heart belongs to the Tharp book, which I read and reread as a teenager. I was captivated by her ability to capture the sisters’ world (s), and I’ve always had a rather undistinguished copy in my bedside bookshelf. But last month, I came across a special sleeved 1980 Book of the Month Club/The American Past edition online, and promptly purchased it (books in sleeves are always a treat). When it arrived, I was thrilled to see its beautiful Salem-silhouette cover, but inside, a big surprise: endpaper silhouettes of the entire Peabody family! Apparently these are from a selection of “Dr. Nathaniel Peabody & Family. Profiles drawn from life Nov. 8, 1835” in the collection of the former Essex Institute/current Peabody Essex Museum. I just love them: a special summer surprise.