The Joy of History Book Club convenes once a month via Zoom. Each meeting is limited to around 20 people to allow for an intimate, highly interactive, participatory experience. The inaugural series is currently scheduled:
Scroll below to take a look at what we’ll be reading. Purchase the books you want to read from the vendors of your choosing!
Narrated by Irish immigrant, Thomas McNulty, who flees the Great Famine as a teen and enlists in the U.S. Army in the 1850s, fighting in the Indian Wars and the Civil War. A haunting, nuanced, surprising, beautifully crafted, and historically grounded depiction of this fateful period of American history. Winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
Discover the historical roots of race in the United States. Jacobson masterfully traces the story of race through literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history. Winner of the American Political Science Association’s Ralph J. Bunch Award.
Explore a forgotten, erased, and astonishing chapter of the history of the American West where cross-dressing for both men and women was ubiquitous and visible, a powerful way to redefine gender and sexual identities before our modern conceptions of heterosexuality and homosexuality took shape. Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
Learn about the military conquest of the American West, the Indian Wars that lasted for more than three decades after the Civil War. Examine the complex motivations that structured these conflicts and how they violently transformed individual lives and communities. Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History.
Complicate and expand what you know about the legendary Sojourner Truth – in slavery and freedom, as an abolitionist, and as a feminist, in the context of her times and beyond, through this powerful biography.
The series runs on the second Saturdays and second Wednesdays of the month. If you have to miss a meeting for the day you signed up for, recordings of each meeting will be made available (privately) for one week.
You’ll need a public library card that will provide you with free access to Kanopy (for films) and JSTOR (journal articles).