How it works:
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:
- second Saturdays of the month, from 1–3 PM, or
- second Wednesdays from 6–8 PM.
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!
These award-winning selections also include academic history, popular history, and biography.
Wed: Aug 12, 6-8 pm
Days Without End: A Novel
by Sebastian Barry (2016)
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.
Wed: Sept 9, 6-8 pm
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
by Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998)
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.
Wed: Oct 14, 6-8 pm
Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past
by Peter Boag (2011)
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.
Wed: Nov 11, 6-8 pm
The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
by Peter Cozzens (2017)
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.
Wed: Dec 9, 6-8 pm
Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol
by Nell Irvin Painter (1996)
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.
This is a great way to try out The Joy of History Book Club.
It will take you deep inside these topics and themes through multiple perspectives and historical approaches.
Like your own multi-faceted, exclusive course. In addition to the The Joy of History Book club meetings, you can log into a private discussion community where I post interim supplements (extra readings, related art, film, photos, historiography and/or reviews). We can dive deeply and grapple with some of the hard questions between meetings.
You’ll need a public library card that will provide you with free access to Kanopy (for films) and JSTOR (journal articles).
Using the Past to Empower Your Present
