Last year I read a book called
American Nations, which argued that there are 11 different regional cultures in North America. The book had a bibliography of other relevant works. I recently read one of those other works:
Deep South by Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner.
This book was interesting on a couple levels, so I'll just say a few words about it (forgive the length of this post!). I thought this book would be a history of the Deep South; it's not. It's a seriously well-researched anthropological study of the city/county area of Natchez, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow era. The research was done circa 1935 and the book published in 1941. It's a lot of information at 500+ pages, but is a complete portrait of that society at that time. The authors cover everything from the characteristics of each social class in the white/black class/caste structure, to details of cotton production under the sharecropping system, to living standard of black sharecroppers, ending with a devastating chapter on blacks' treatment in the court system.
The book makes clear that this is a society that had not significantly evolved at all in the 70 years between the end of the Civil War and 1935, in terms of attitudes toward blacks and their social position.
A notable aspect of the book was the cool, detached tone of the writing. The authors report much information that is quite disturbing--yet the tone remains scholarly, with not the slightest trace of judgment. The strikingly dispassionate tone--plus the great level of detail and quotes offered--was so interesting that I found myself wondering, Who wrote this book?
So I did a bit of searching online. I found that the lead author,
Allison Davis, was a renowned scholar who was the first African-American to hold a full faculty position at a white university in the U.S. (University of Chicago). He was a graduate of a Washington D.C. segregated high school who did undergrad study at Williams and graduate work at Harvard. In addition to his work studying racism in the South, he was among the first scholars to study & question cultural bias in standardized intelligence tests. Davis was joined in his field work on this book by his wife, fellow African-American scholar Elizabeth Stubbs Davis. The Davises are pictured
here (scroll down for photo). Elizabeth did much of the interviewing work with black women in Natchez. Considering the racism the Davises undoubtedly faced in their own lives, it seems doubly impressive how rigorous, academic, and dispassionate their work on this book was. These two must have been an extraordinary couple!
An interesting side note: The Davises had 2 sons, both of whom are now prominent lawyers. The first son,
Allison S. Davis, founded the civil rights law firm where
Barack Obama worked before going into politics. The second son,
Gordon J. Davis, has served in many civic leadership positions in New York City.
To contrast what the Davises accomplished, against the attitudes expressed by the white people in this book toward their racial group, is ironic, to say the very least.
, and probably of limited interest to most, but I just finished A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. This book looks at how the government responded to food deprivation during the Great Depression, in its relief programs and nutritional advice.
Thanks for the recommendation.
): The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm. This book was originally published around 1990, and it's not really about Plath so much, as it is about her husband Ted Hughes, his sister, and the other biographers who have written about Plath, especially Anne Stevenson. It's kind of an odd book, I wouldn't really recommend it except to Plath aficionados. The most interesting aspect of it is Malcolm's detailed descriptions of, and quotes from, the Hugheses, Stevenson, and others who knew Plath and/or have written about her. (Malcolm met and corresponded with many of them.)
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stories. She's clearly had therapy and attended many AA meetings in recent years, so there's a lot of "my messed-up childhood made me an adult idiot who hid from all her problems" discussion, but my--the Go-Gos were aptly named.
