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By Bill Altreuter

I've been reading "A New Literary History of America" the anthology of essays edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, and finding it the perfect thing for picking up and dipping into, which is what I mostly do, or reading for a stretch, which I do when I get a chance. I can't read a book like this-- or a magazine, for that matter-- unless I go straight through, so by "dipping in" what I mean is reading the next essay in line then putting it down. Something that none of the reviews I saw before I got the book mentioned is that although the roster of contributors is a formidable mix of scholars and popular writers, the author of each essay is not given until the end of the piece. This lends an interesting continuity to reading the book, since it is the editors' vision that seems the most apparent. The essays are not long-- five pages is a long one, so far-- but they are dense, and I find that I come away from each having learned something new. Columbus' first voyage was five weeks long, Stephen Foster was born on the same July 4th that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died. It has the first coherent explanation for why the New World was named for Amerigo Vespucci that I've ever seen. There are larger themes as well: America really does have religion deeply embedded in its founding; slavery was recognized as a profound moral problem from the earliest days; notwithstanding the Euro-centric racism of the Puritans (and of the Spanish) the essential personhood of the native population was always recognized; the humanity of African-descended chattel slaves presented greater difficulties-- that sort of thing. It is fun to find out more about the Hudson River School of art; the essay on the Haitian revolution was serendipitously timely.

The question of what it is to be American is an important one, I think, and I think it is something that can only be reflected upon properly by constantly refreshing what we think we know about our shared history. The death of Howard Zinn should remind us of that.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on January 29, 2010 (boomark / email).