[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to build on the weekend post on my Dad’s book and highlight a handful of other scholarly books that have been especially meaningful to me. Leading up to a weekend tribute to a scholar I love even more than her book!]
I dedicated a paragraph to John Demos’s groundbreaking narrative history The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994) in this very early Thanksgiving post. I won’t repeat here everything I said there, but I will add this: one of the most complicated and most crucial things I tried to do in the first season of my podcast was to fill in the gaps in the historical record with researched but imaginative narrative storytelling. I was inspired in that work by a number of models, including the more recent book that I’ll highlight in Thursday’s post. But it’s probably no coincidence that Demos’s book was the first I read for my History & Literature Major in college, and thus truly a foundational one for how I approach my interdisciplinary scholarship as well as my cross-cultural themes. Indeed, I would go further—if we’re going to explore such themes in American history, given how often the stories that feature them have been minimized or even silenced by the dominant narratives and power structure, it’s going to require the kinds of storytelling that scholars like Demos have modeled. I’m so glad my academic work really began with this book that I love!
Next Valentine’s read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Scholarly books or voices you love?
Leave a Reply