[Many, many, many times over the last year, I’ve wished that more Americans would have the chance to read my writing and learn even a few of the many lessons I believe it offers for us in 2025. So for my annual Wishes for the Holiday Elves series, I wanted to revisit my six books, highlighting something specific from each that I think we could takeaway today. Leading up to a special post on my awesome wife’s Christmastastic new book!]
I won’t lie, I don’t really recognize the Ben who wrote Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature & Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893 (2007). Partly that’s because it was published more than 18 years ago, and largely based on a dissertation finished 20 years ago; but mostly it’s because that Ben wasn’t yet thinking about producing public scholarship, and so it’s by far my most “academic” book, in ways that would make it more difficult for it to speak to broad audiences in 2025. But there’s still a lot in it that I love and would want to share with folks, and that’s especially true of the literary works and authors on whom I focused my analyses. Here are just a handful that are part of that project and that we all should be reading in 2025, with links to posts where I’ve written about them:
Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona(1884)
William Justin Harsha’s Ploughed Under(1881)
Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims(1886)
George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes(1881)
And the dialogic poetry of Sarah Piatt
Next wish tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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