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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Thirding Battle Cry of Freedom. It's a very good one-volume overview of the Civil War and the events that led up to it. Which is basically define American history between 1789 and 1877. At least.
Also has a musical
adaptation.![]()
To me American history doesn't really get interesting until the Mexican-American War. That war, coupled with the partisanship between North and South (Fugitive Slave, Bleeding Kansas, John Brown, Harriet Tubman) and the Civil War and Reconstruction to me is most interesting. And its a real shame that the Mexican-American War is so under-represented in popular culture.
But before that, it's a bit of a bore especially compared to the exciting stuff happening in France, Haiti and South America in the 1790s.
That's why I find Founders chic
so bizarre. There's this weird need to make them out to be "cool" when those guys didn't want to be cool and were proud of their total lack of cool. The Hamilton musical is an extreme manifestation of that but its not the only example. The really cool people were in France or in Haiti or in Guadaloupe...people like Toussaint Louverture, Louis Delgres, Robespierre, Saint-Just.
One movie I recommend is Jefferson in Paris with Nick Nolte. It's about Thomas Jefferson's time as ambassador in Paris in the early years before the French Revolution and the first few years. It deals with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings...ahem...romance and its incredibly allusive film about the American Revolution, its failures and its limitations.
But there are actually not many movies about the American Revolution, not many decent ones at any rate.
edited 28th Nov '16 5:37:17 PM by JulianLapostat
But it's got the Spanish American War, Reconstruction, the end of the Indian Wars, the Panic of 1873, the beginning of the Philippine-American War, the continuation of industrialization and the benefits and drawbacks of it, America becoming the world's largest economy, the real life tragedy of Ulysses S Grant, etc.
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."The Gilded Age is interesting because this is when America starts having good novelists and writers. So it's interesting to place there. And it coincided with the expansion of the West and probably made it happen. I don't think it's terribly interesting myself but its got its moments.
To me the really interesting part, after the Civil War period is the 1918-1975 or so . This "short 20th Century" is pretty much the golden age of America in my view.
edited 28th Nov '16 5:52:27 PM by JulianLapostat
Thanks everybody, really. I picked up Battlecry for Freedom because that looks kickass, though I'm still on the fence about Give me Liberty. I'll probably pick it up, but it looks to only spend 20 or so pages on the Revolutionary War and the events surrounding it, and other than the Civil War era, that's the period of American history that I'm most interested in. There's enough material in there to make a long-running television series if somebody wanted to, much less just 20 pages. I was thinking about checking out John Adams, and maybe I'll still get it later, but it looks like that books focuses, well, on John Adams, instead of the big picture, which is what I'd want to start with. Anyone got any suggestions?
EDIT: Uh, nevermind Give me Liberty; that sucker's $26 bucks on Amazon, and I ain't made out of money. Eh, maybe I'll still get it when I get another job...
EDIT: Uh, nevermind the nevermind.
Got it for 99 cents on HPB. Need to use that more often...
edited 28th Nov '16 6:16:08 PM by kkhohoho
"Founders chic" - I'm not sure it's so much about making them cool as making them relatable and human. There's two extremes of misconceptions about the founders, one that near deifies them and one that dismisses them as "dead rich, elitist white guys". I'd like to think works in this vein help with both.
Concerning the American Dream:
I rather like John Oliver's take on it (mentioned in the Last Week Tonight with John Oliver segment on Income Inequality):
‘Yup, I can clearly see this game is rigged, which is what is going to make it so sweet when I win this thing!’”
edited 28th Nov '16 6:33:07 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised

I'll again toss in Founding Brothers for digging into the personalities and conflicts of the Founding Fathers.