I finished Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation last night and really enjoyed it. She is pretty liberal politically and can't resist sending some jabs in President Bush's direction every now and again but I knew that before I started so none of it surprised me much. I was okay with it because when you buy one of her books you know that you are not getting a neutral response to history but her very personal response. In that respect she is a bit different from Paul Collins as he is more inclined to keep his opinions on current events to himself, although he will happily go on about the guys he's researching. I imagine it would be hard to write a book about presidential assassinations without commenting on modern presidents though especially when Vowell writes about the similarities between the world under McKinley and George W. But regardles of how you feel about Iraq (or anything else happening these days), this is a great book for history buffs.
A lot of people don't know this about me but I taught American History to soldiers and dependents stationed at Ft Wainwright in Fairbanks for five years. I started out as a horrible teacher - I was convinced that everything I had learned in college was critical to these guys and they needed to know names, dates, battles - the whole nine yards, and be tested on it constantly. It took me a couple of years to settle down to the business of actually teaching my students - or learning how to listen to them and their needs and make them excited about history. Most of my students were active duty, they were all races and from a lot of foreign countries and they really couldn't give a shit about the Pilgrims or what exactly happened at the Battle of Saratoga. I did cover that stuff, but I ended up expanding the discussion on WWI and Korea and the modern conflicts - they wanted to know why Somalia happened and Rwanda and the Balkans and why certain countries hated us. (I never had a single student who knew whey there were two Koreas.) They had a very big stake in what was going on in the world and that had much more interest for them then the Sons of Liberty dumping tea in Boston Harbor. So I shifted my perspective on history, changed how I thought students should learn and spent a lot of time talking about current hotspots and then looking backward to see what the relationship had been between the US and these areas in the past. I also showed the beginning of the X-Men when we talked about Joe McCarthy and the Communist witch hunts in the 1950s and part of Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country (the part at the beginning with Spock's speech) when we talked about the fall of the Soviet Union and the impact of the Cold War. I showed clips from Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi so my white students could understand what all of my black students always seemed to know - that the Civil Rights Movement was the most important thing to ever happen in this country (I would love to be teaching right now so we could compare to the situation in Paris.)
Basically, I learned to make history interesting for the people who were there to learn it, and I think that is what Vowell (and Collins) do so brilliantly. I love these books because I'm a history buff, but I recommend these books because I know that other people will love them too. It's easy to make history boring - I fell asleep in enough classes to know this better than most. You have to work very hard to keep everyone engaged in this subject - to keep it relevant to people who are not historians. Vowell and Collins are right on with their writing styles and I now have every book each of them have written, which makes me very happy indeed!
Indigo Girls on deck - it seemed appropriate to play their live version of "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."
