[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 wrote a good bit about why I was so influenced by Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993) as part of this early blog post. I then returned to Takaki’s book last September to put it in conversation with a recent scholarly read that hit me just as hard, Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2024). My experience reading Blackhawk’s book reminded me that I still have a great deal to learn about American history, and particularly the histories of non-white Americans that (as I discussed in a different context in yesterday’s post) remain so often frustratingly under-remembered in our collective narratives. But a key starting point is knowing what we don’t know, or rather (and more importantly) beginning to learn all the things we haven’t learned. There have been lots of steps along the way of that process for me, but I’m not sure any one of them was more foundational than reading Takaki’s book. I would still recommend it to everyone as fervently as Will Hunting does Howard Zinn’s People’s History (which is still well worth checking out too of course!), and that makes A Different Mirror most definitely a book I love.
Next Valentine’s read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Scholarly books or voices you love?
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