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Smithsonian Scholars Pick Their Favorite Books of 2020
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In the December 3, 2020, issue of SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, Beth Py-Lieberman reported on new books that Smithsonian scholars felt would focus on events of the times. I have listed many of these recommended books.
The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
Recommended by Orlando Serrano, youth and teacher program manager at the National Museum of American History
The preeminent Harvard historian Walter Johnson is best known for award-winning academic monographs like Soul by Soul: Life Inside an Antebellum Slave Market and River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Mississippi Valley’s Cotton Kingdom. In his new book, Johnson focuses his keen analysis on a city close to his own hometown of Columbia, Missouri, to trace the U.S. histories of Native American removal, expanding empire, enslavement and the St. Louis freedom movements to tell a tale that is simultaneously deeply local and widely national. Beginning with the imperial dreams of William Clark and ending with the protests and freedom movements of organizers in Ferguson, Johnson encapsulates America’s dreams and contradictions.
Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa
Recommended by Stephanie Stebich, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery
Once you see the work of Ruth Asawa, you are certain to never forget it and to want to search for more opportunities to encounter her ethereal aerial sculptures. I first fell in love with her intricate sculptures at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and then drank in her work more recently at the Art Institute of Chicago. Biographer Marilyn Chase fascinates readers with the varied chapters of Asawa’s engrossing life including her adolescence spent in a Japanese internment camp, her work as an art teacher, her role in a multiracial family raising six children, her friendships with artists like photographer Imogen Cunningham and her reverence for Mexican basket makers, who provided the inspiration for her unique wire sculptures.
Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America
Recommended by Ryan Lintelman, curator in the division of cultural and community life at the National Museum of American History
At a time when children’s television meant vacuous fantasy playhouses, slapstick puppet theaters and boisterous peanut galleries all designed to help sell toys and sugary cereals to kids and their parents, a few visionary educators, performers and producers began to think that television could do more for children. In David Kamp’s compelling popular history of the late-60s and 1970s children’s television revolution, we learn how the creators of “Sesame Street,” “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Zoom” crafted revolutionary programs that changed the face of the genre and influenced a generation of Americans. Informed by research, Fred Rogers and the Children’s Television Workshop set out to prove that television could be used to teach social skills and encourage emotional development and to help close the racial and economic achievement gap. Kamp’s engaging history of the heady and provocative golden age of educational entertainment casts these beloved series in a new light—including the groundbreaking decision to set “Sesame Street” in a racially-diverse city neighborhood amidst white flight and urban decay. The book also speaks to our educational present, when screens have never been more important to helping children learn.
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
Recommended by Kirk Johnson, director of the National Museum of Natural History
This exquisitely illustrated volume by senior curator Eleanor Jones Harvey is the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name that was scheduled to open at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on March 15, the day after the Smithsonian Institution closed all of its museums and the National Zoo due to Covid-19. The show—which opened in September before being shuttered again in November after local and national cases surged—is a gorgeous array of original art and artifact that documents the prodigious impact the influential naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt had on our young Nation. It even includes the original skeleton of the first mastodon ever found in North America (on loan from a museum in Darmstadt, Germany). The book is as beautiful as the exhibition and it builds a compelling case that Humboldt inspired James Smithson down a thought path that ended up becoming the Smithsonian Institution. You can learn a lot about America from this book.
In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What To Do About It
Recommended by James Deutsch, curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
What I often hear from those who are experiencing homelessness is a plea to be recognized as human. “What bothers me are the passersby who act like they’re on a separate pecking order,” Chris Shaw told me. Shaw had experienced homelessness for a time after his parents died. “They lower their shoulders, they put their heads down, and they charge past me as if I’m invisible.” In this insightful new book, authors Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri clarify the human dimensions of homelessness and what the United States—with all of its resources—should do about this national problem, which has grown even worse with the economic crisis of 2020.
The U.S. Antifascism Reader
Recommended by Theodore S. Gonzalves, curator in the division of cultural and community life at the National Museum of American History
Sometime between the first U.S. pandemic-related lockdowns in March and the two major political party conventions held in August, my pre-bedtime ritual of catching up on the day’s headlines turned into doomscrolling. To get a handle on my blood pressure, I did two things. First, I switched to looking at videos of puppies and sea otters. Second, I started leafing through Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials’ well-timed anthology with selections that take the reader from the 1930s to the present, highlighting the prominent voices of American activism such as the historian W. E. B. Du Bois along with the less widely-known such as the Asian American civil rights attorney Penny Nakatsu. The editors remind us of the long historical arc towards an understanding of our current moment. They close their introduction with a challenge: Who will get organized first?
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Recommended by Adriel Luis, curator of digital and emerging practice at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center
Cathy Park Hong is well aware that writing about racial identity can be a tricky and lonely road, yet she invites the challenge through a collection of essays that are accessible and enthralling. Much of the power of Minor Feelings is explained in its title—it gives voice to the experiences and observations of Asian American life that often go unspoken and unexplored. Hong’s lyrical yet cutting prose transports the reader into intimate memories about family, friendships and coming of age; so much so that her shame, inadequacies and rage are your own. Hong lifts the veil and points at the invisible, hard to explain complexities and contradictions that pervade the life of being Asian in America.
Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001
Recommended by Kevin Strait, curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Cultural historian Kyle Riismandel explores what happened when suburban homeowners raised with visions of “Leave it to Beaver” and Levittown dancing in their heads found themselves living instead in Love Canal and facing The Decline of Western Civilization. Imperiled by everything from nuclear power plants and kidnappers to Dungeons & Dragons and Marilyn Manson, suburbanites legitimately believed that nothing less than home and family were at stake, responding to these new dangers by regulating these spaces and reinforcing nostalgic visions of the “traditional” family in ways that actually increased their powerful influence. Riismandel’s work is a meaningful contribution to the ever-expanding field of urban studies, providing a deep dive into the history of the modern suburbs and their integral role in shaping the political landscape of American culture.
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils
Recommended by Nick Pyenson, research geologist and curator of fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History
We’re told that the human fingerprint on the world is unmistakable, but we’re rarely told just how long-lasting it will be. The award-winning author David Farrier gives us a sense of that answer by examining the geologic fates of our roads, plastics, cityscapes and excavations as a future ghost story. This narrative connects the sprawling origins of the stuff in our lives to their longevities at hundreds, thousands and even millions of years forward. The most severe legacies are the sickness countries—perpetually poisoned places named after the uranium mines in the Northern Territory of Australia—which we have generated from our atomic questing. By mining, building and detonating fissile materials all around the world, Farrier grapples with solutions that “bury the idea that we are an unprecedented threat to the future.” Farrier’s terrific writing matches hard fact with metaphors pulled from mythology, Ben Okri’s parable of a famished road, and even Italo Calvino’s many permutations of a city. Eerie as it is to contemplate a world without us, Farrier’s foretelling is well worth the time.
One Life
Recommended by Sherri Sheu, fellow, National Museum of American History
One of the defining images from the 2019 Women’s World Cup is of the purple-haired, openly gay Megan Rapinoe standing in the corner of the pitch, arms spread wide after she scored a goal that put the U.S. team ahead of host nation France. Before the World Cup, Rapinoe was best known as the only white athlete to kneel in solidarity with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Her new book traces how she become an outspoken social activist, advocating for everything from equal pay for women to racial equality to gay rights to prison reform. Hers is a bigger story of political awakening for the micro-generation of older millennials who came of age just as marriage equality began gaining traction; who saw the birth of social media; who lived through the beginnings of the opioid crisis; who witnessed Ferguson on their screens. One Life shows how someone from a conservative, relatively apolitical background found an intersectional path to fight injustice.
The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild
Recommended by Cat Kutz, communications manager with Smithsonian Conservation Commons and Earth Optimism
Dubbed a “love letter to the planet,” this book from National Geographic explorer-in-residence and founder of the Pristine Seas project, Enric Sala, is a moving and well-informed read for anyone curious about how and why we should save the planet and its innumerable biodiversity. From understanding the implications of species extinctions to factoring in the economic impacts of an increasingly uninhabitable world, Sala offers a well-traveled road map. Although at the surface, the overwhelming message is that we quite frankly will all perish without Mother Earth’s protective swaddle, there’s no lack of optimism for strides in conservation and our future as a species.
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Recommended by Kimberly Probolus, fellow at the National Museum of American History
Scholars in carceral studies, art history and ethnic studies will appreciate art historian Nicole Fleetwood’s innovative methodology, arguments and interventions, but her ambitious book is also accessible to a popular audience. Fleetwood deftly weaves personal narrative together with nuanced readings of artworks created by incarcerated people in order to illustrate how, in her own words, “art in prison is a practice of survival, an aesthetic journey that documents time in captivity, a mode of connecting with others.” While the incarcerated artists she profiles create new worlds and fashion themselves in spite of their dehumanizing conditions, Fleetwood is also realistic about the limitations of her study. Art in prisons cannot, she notes “resolve the injustices rooted in the carceral system.” Nevertheless, she models how creative expression can build the coalitions necessary for imagining and realizing a more just society.
Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
Recommended by Christopher Wilson, director of Experience Design at the National Museum of American History
Soon after arriving at the Smithsonian, I began working on a commemorative event on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I chose to focus on the stories of women like Johnnie Carr, Juanita Abernathy, JoAnn Robinson, Minnie McCants Harris and others who were essential in driving and sustaining this revolutionary movement even as their stories were overlooked. The timely new work from historian Martha S. Jones is the perfect book and story for America in 2020 as we rightly reexamine and revise, not history, but memory. With brilliant and passionate storytelling, Jones’ sweeping narrative reminds us that black women have been an essential part of the work to expand democracy and to force the United States to become a truly great nation. And it’s been a choice we’ve made not to remember that. Her research and writing provide admonition that to expand our memory of the past is, in fact, a laudable and necessary effort if we want to better understand and navigate the present to create a better future.