The Missing Piece Of A Puzzle

I have added another book to my recommended reading list [stderr] Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. In the last few months, I have gone backward and forward through it, trying to make sense of how the facts it exposes fit with my historical understanding.

If you pay any attention to US history, you know that slavery and racism are one of the supporting institutions that have defined and shaped the United States. You cannot understand the United States without understanding slavery and racism. But, that understanding has always felt incomplete, to me; I knew there was more. Obviously, there are details, but what is the big picture?

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Revisionist History

The term “revisionist history” is one I don’t like. Yes, there are revisionist histories that try to – for example – argue that the holocaust didn’t happen, but those are just outright misrepresentation, rather than actually revising how we see some historical event or period. Revision may entail completely re-assessing something we thought we understood, based on new facts.

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Mind. Blown.

In one of the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcasts, they briefly mentioned a book by Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes. [I guess the publishers are not Bob Dylan fans] Several of the doctors said they thought it was great, or it was on their reading list, so I added it to mine.

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More Blitzed: Opium

I’ve become fond of having an audiobook going while I work. It seems to help me focus, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense (I’d expect it to be distracting!) but it’s a great way to absorb new information. Perhaps it’s just a side-effect of how I work nowadays, but if I sit down and open a book, it usually turns into a nap pretty quickly.

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