[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 this weekend tribute to a scholar I love even more than her book!]
As you would expect, I’ve dedicated a few posts already to my amazing wife Vaughn Joy: this one on the many layers to her public scholarly Film Studying; this one sharing one of her wonderful Review Roulette newsletters, on the early Sidney Poitier film No Way Out (1950); and, most relevantly to this week’s series, this one on her newly published (then-forthcoming) book Selling Out Santa: Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy (2025). There’s a lot I love about Selling Out Santa, including its balance of textual close readings and interdisciplinary AmericanStudies analyses (a balance I strive for in all of my work and have never seen achieved more successfully than in Vaughn’s book) and its truly bravura last chapter which features some stunning materials from the Frank Capra archives at Wesleyan University (put in conversation with other Capra texts and one by a fellow you might also have heard of named Walt Disney) that you have to read about for yourself. But what I love most is that I know that it’s just the tip of the iceberg for Vaughn’s writing, work, and career, and you know I’ll share here all that upcoming work I’ll love from the woman I love!
Anti-favorites series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Scholarly books or voices you love?
PPS. Gonna add a few crowd-sourced responses here:
In response to Monday’s post on Samuel Eliot Morrison’s Two-Ocean War, Bluesky user Colin shares this Naval History Magazine article on his WWII story. And he adds, “Also, I knew Morison’s grandson, Samuel Loring Morison, who for a number of years tried to get his grandfather’s wartime diary published, but it never happened as far as I know before he passed away. I believe the diary is at the Harvard Library.”
And Daniel Marcus adds, “The work inspired the production of Victory at Sea by one of Morrison’s assistants, a documentary TV series on the Pacific sea battles, which became the most-screened series on American television for a decade or more.”
Other favorite scholarly books:
Phil Feller writes, “I’ve loved Philip Ethington’s The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900, so much so that I emailed him two Thanksgivings ago to let him know. I’ve found his concepts of romantic republicanism and republican liberalism quite eye-opening.”
And Richard C. Keller shares three books: Elizabeth O’Brien’s Surgery & Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940; Catherine Mas’s Culture in the Clinic: Miami & the Making of Modern Medicine; and his colleague Pablo F. Gómez’s Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade & the Invention of Modern Corporeality.
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