Words, Words, Words

After really being drawn in for the first hundred pages or so I've been slogging through this lately. It's a combination of having less reading time recently and perhaps a natural loss of momentum in a book this long, especially nonfiction. The first chapters resemble what the title literally means and match what I knew of "new historicism." Namely it tries to tell the story of people, and peoples. The tribes native to America in their first encounters with Europeans; Africans, how they were brought here and the lives they faced; and the less known of the settlers, the indentured servants, the debtors, the laborers.

I am reminded what someone said about a story they said on twitter, that it wasn't the whole story but the part we don't hear enough about. Seems pretty accurate for this.

I will say, after the Civil War we have moved almost exclusively into class struggles. There is little about the waves of immigrants except as providing member for a certain union, and feminism and civil rights are written mostly in how they intersect with unions and socialism. It's still good history, but it is a different history than we started on and that may be part of what has slowed me down.