How about some library history?

#The Library: A World History by James W.P. Campbell, photographs by Will Pryce, 2013

This should be more accurately retitled: “The Library Building: A Worldish History.” Decent Western library architecture history cunningly masked as shallow, borderline-porn coverage of Beauty and the Beast-style European libraries. Coverage of Asian libraries is also very strong, though the other 4 library-enriched continents can pretty much go hang. Libraries of Timbuktu, despite their fame, not mentioned. Not pretty enough to stand up to sun-flooded dusty bookstacks porn shots I suppose…

Most of the book is focused on Classical period libraries through the early 20th century, and then a few extreme or interesting examples of late 20th and early 21st century library design, such as the Beinecke library. Actually the main problem with the book is that it is overall focused on the extreme of library design, and not the humble. There are a lot of giant monastery libraries, grand royal libraries, giant private university libraries, etc. Yet there was not a single Carnegie library in the book. Not one. I’ll let you take a guess which type of library had more impact on the world.

Towards the end of the book I finally figured out what I was finding so strangely unsettling about reading this, despite all the pretty -- almost all the libraries were photographed empty. No people. Just books. Just shelves and books and books on shelves. Absolutely terrifying, these pristine patronless libraries. You’ll lose your funding!! But empty, soulless, and ultimately, not what the library (or library design after the 18th century) is about at all.

#Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library by Wayne Weigand, 2015

I am not at all sure who this book is for, after reading it. When you pick up a “people’s history” of something you automatically assume you’re in for popular-level social history, but this is decidedly not that. It was hard to read, not in the usual academic way where big words are deployed in gigantic strung out sentences, but instead it’s hard to read because facts bombard you in an uncreatively flat strict chronological structure, written with as much flavor and panache as a Harbor Freight catalog, until you decide going to bed early was a good idea after all. I think it would have been improved by a more topical organization, evolving stances on pleasure reading, evolving stances on non-majority voices in the library, evolution in library space design and use, etc. etc. in addition to an injection of some style.

Then again he occasionally cracks off a really smart observation - like that using the library is usually a child’s first assumption of civic responsibility, you take an item of public property and agree to care for it for a small amount of time - and you’re mostly glad you kept reading. His critical coverage of the library profession’s complicity with Jim Crow (especially ALA’s complicity and lack of support for librarians punished for integration efforts) is also especially welcome.

As an overall tenor to the book the author takes a pretty hard-line librarians vs. users angle, which is strange and doesn’t really work for me. Librarians are the enemy of The People, librarians censored people's access to fiction and put sex ed books on the restricted shelf, or we defy community standards and circulate Playboy to children. He vacillates between pro-censorship and anti-censorship, where he’s anti through the 50s but pro after that… Whatever. But, okay today there’s really two basic types of librarians - the non-using sort, the sort who seem like they’d be just as happy working at the Gap, and the second, who got a job at the library because getting paid to come to the library regularly cuts down on a major weekly errand. Librarians do typically use the library. To exclude us entirely from the users doesn’t jive. (Perhaps Wayne is the Gap-type.) He also has a loosely anti-woman-librarians angle going on, which I would have thought you couldn’t get away with after the 90s, but maybe the axe has swung back by now.

The biggest question you’re left with is - are librarians not people too? Are we not members of our communities and sharing the same common moral standards? Are we not part of “the people’s history” of our institutions?

In general I think he let a lot of his professional feelings get in the way of doing history - this man HAAATES Judy Krug. Hates her. And that’s fair, she’s a controversial figure, her legacy is mixed to be generous, but $10 in library fines says he has a dart board in his office with her picture where he’s drawn on a witch hat and blacked out a few teeth. Calm down dude, lady’s dead, and she lost CIPA big time anyway.

Very strange treatment of library history. Can’t believe I waited 5 weeks on the hold list for a copy of this from my public library! I could have been reading something much more wholesome, like those Playboys in the children’s department.

The great and powerful Amazon AI recently recommended a few new books for me. Since I am a not even in recovery book addict I am strictly moderating my purchasing, and the local library cannot help with these volumes. I would appreciate any input on these books before I add more to the overflowing shelves. Does anyone have any input, positive or negative, on the following titles...

• Bowes Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (not yet released, but wanted to give others a head's up because it looks cool)

• Lipman The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast

• McDonnell Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America

• Newell Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery

I've been reading Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, I've always been interested in the entirety of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

I have read a great deal about the U.S. program but have not come across anything that covers the Soviet Union/Russian nuclear weapons program in anywhere near the same depth as the American, are there any good books that I'm missing?

I'm rereading Marjoleine Kars' Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina for a class, and I have Larry Anderson's Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail on my coffee table for fun later.

My Ph.D. advisor has informed me that I will have to expand my field a bit. My work has primarily been in 20th U.S. Women's Military History, but I am now adding 19th century military history as well, beginning with women and gender during the Civil War. I have already started a reading list (and gotten started on the actual reading), but if anyone could add any suggestions, I'd love it. List at the moment:

• Attie, Jeanie. Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

• Blanton, De An. They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

• Giesberg, Judith. Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

• Clinton, Catherine, and Nina Silber, eds. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

• Leonard, Elizabeth D. Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1994.

• Schultz, Jane A. Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

• Silber, Nina. Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005.

• Whites, LeeAnn, and Alecia P. Long. Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the Civil War. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.

What are some good English translations of credible primary Roman historians? Anthologies or not. Id like to start a little reference library.

I've been reading Gary B. Nash's The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (which my local library had misfiled in the 309s instead of the 709s).

Anyway, he posits an interesting question about democracy. When we talk about what democracy means, it's been my experience that we generally refer to enfranchisement (i.e. how many people can vote in elections). Nash makes a point that this can be misleading.

In talking about late 17th century Boston he mentions that almost 70% of the male population in the period 1690-1700 were eligible to vote. That's a somewhat astonishing number in my view--I would've thought it closer to 40% or 50%. But Nash goes on to argue that we can't conclude from this that Boston was democratic in any essential way, not when social structures and class was so important to daily life, and not when the important offices were generally held by the same families year after year after year (and Gordon Wood also talks about the near-hereditary nature of some of the local elected offices in Radicalism of the American Revolution).

I thought it was an interesting argument to make.