anotheranon | book reports: American history

I just finished American Brutus, a comprehensive, Lincoln Presidential Library-endorsed blow-by blow of the Lincoln assassination plot.

I picked it up from the library on a whim because I'd never read a full accounting before and it really was vivid and riveting. According to the author, Booth was less motivated by personal politics (supported the Confederacy but spent much of the Civil War on tour in both north and south) than by a desire to make a grand gesture against a man he perceived to be a tyrant, fed by years of playing such "heroes" on stage and a need to prove himself a man of action. Booth comes off as both terribly vain and cruelly manipulative, as he convinced most of his co-conspirators that his was a plot to kidnap, not murder. Recommended.

I've just started the daunting Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, intimidating not because it's a bookstop (almost 1000 pages) or because of dense academic prose (it's quite readable) but because it packs so much into each chapter and everything is heavily documented/footnoted. I'd been curious about it for awhile but Sara @ Orcinus' series on it (Intro, Puritans, Cavaliers, and Quakers, so far) cemented my desire to read it, because it provides the historic context for so much of the current American political/cultural scene.

So far I'm only as far as the Puritans and I'm already intrigued. It goes into not only the social and religious reasoning behind the Puritan settlement of New England but other factors like the climate (mmm, prefigures Brian Fagan) and geography (ahh, like Jared Diamond's work). Very promising so far.