My main ones right now that I'm reading at work simultaneously are Capital, Vol II (which I'm about 2/3 through, it's a slog) and Michael Kazin's The Populist Persuasion, which I've almost finished. The latter is an overview (written in the 90s) of numerous "populist" movements that have appeared throughout American history, and both how they are connected and have evolved and diverged. These being: the Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Lincoln and how they were channeled by the later Populists; the capital-P Populists themselves; the AFL and Samuel Gompers; the Temperance and Prohibition movements; the Coughlinites; the CIO and industrial unionist New Dealers; 1940s/50s anticommunist red hunters and Joe McCarthy; the white New Left of the 60s and 70s; Wallace and the white working class of the 60s and 70s; the evolution of the Reagan Revolution coalition; and 90s figures such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot.
I say "simultaneous" because Capital, Vol II is so tedious and boring that I need a break every 100 pages or so and switch. It's probably going to be this way for Capital, Vol III and the Grundrisse as well, and I have to read them at work because I will ignore them at home as I have for almost three years.
For once I'll post my immediate order I'm going through by backlog. I'm planning to dive into a very large suite of American history books, largely placed in chronological order (Populist Persuasion jumped the line because I was slightly more interested in the subject matter at the moment), interspersed with a couple others as spacers. This might take the better part of this entire year (much of last year was primarily spent binging the four Perlstein tomes and Kotkin's Stalin biographies). Here goes, this is a huge list of like 20-25 books:
Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War, by Christopher Clark (Clark is very good, I've read his comprehensive history of Prussia before and it was very good)
Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, by Giovanni Arrighi (I think a lot of people here are aware of Arrighi, who is a very advanced World-Systems theorist heavily influenced by Marxists, he's extremely good and this is the last of his works I need to read)
The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860, by Christopher Clark
The American Road to Capitalism, by Charles Post
Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South, by James Oakes (I've also read James Oakes' The Ruling Race which is a key niche book on understanding how class and social mobility in the South was inextricably bound up with the institution of slavery)
All ten volumes of Marxist historian Philip Foner's History of the Labor Movement in the United States, which chronicles from colonial times to the communist TUUL of the late 1920s (these are interspersed throughout chonologically)
The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, by Alan Trachtenberg
The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, by Richard White (I unfortunately couldn't join Matt in his read-along. I've also read White's Railroaded, where funny enough the guy who is the ancestral founder of the company that employs me is a central character)
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896, by Sven Beckert
For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865, by Robert H Zieger
The Great Crash 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith
The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1946, by George B Tindall (I've read the immediate predecessor in this series by C Vann Woodward, very interesting)
The CIO Challenge to the AFL, by Walter Galenson
Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal, by Kim Phillips-Fein
Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, by Jefferson Cowie
This is only a significant chunk of my existing backlog, which also includes works of political economy, Marxist theory, feminist theory, Chinese history, Cuban history, histories of the American national security state, European history, and fiction. The stacks on my shrinking number of shelves are becoming comical, I'm accumulating more means of self-education faster than I can consume them.
My main ones right now that I'm reading at work simultaneously are Capital, Vol II (which I'm about 2/3 through, it's a slog) and Michael Kazin's The Populist Persuasion, which I've almost finished. The latter is an overview (written in the 90s) of numerous "populist" movements that have appeared throughout American history, and both how they are connected and have evolved and diverged. These being: the Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Lincoln and how they were channeled by the later Populists; the capital-P Populists themselves; the AFL and Samuel Gompers; the Temperance and Prohibition movements; the Coughlinites; the CIO and industrial unionist New Dealers; 1940s/50s anticommunist red hunters and Joe McCarthy; the white New Left of the 60s and 70s; Wallace and the white working class of the 60s and 70s; the evolution of the Reagan Revolution coalition; and 90s figures such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot.
I say "simultaneous" because Capital, Vol II is so tedious and boring that I need a break every 100 pages or so and switch. It's probably going to be this way for Capital, Vol III and the Grundrisse as well, and I have to read them at work because I will ignore them at home as I have for almost three years.
For once I'll post my immediate order I'm going through by backlog. I'm planning to dive into a very large suite of American history books, largely placed in chronological order (Populist Persuasion jumped the line because I was slightly more interested in the subject matter at the moment), interspersed with a couple others as spacers. This might take the better part of this entire year (much of last year was primarily spent binging the four Perlstein tomes and Kotkin's Stalin biographies). Here goes, this is a huge list of like 20-25 books:
This is only a significant chunk of my existing backlog, which also includes works of political economy, Marxist theory, feminist theory, Chinese history, Cuban history, histories of the American national security state, European history, and fiction. The stacks on my shrinking number of shelves are becoming comical, I'm accumulating more means of self-education faster than I can consume them.