Project Announcement: Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States

Hope is hard to come by these days. The pandemic continues to take lives by the thousands, the U.S. political system is (at best) totally broken, Americans left and right hate one another and seem frequently incapable of agreeing on even the most agreeable things, and the various aspects of Civil Rights have not been realized. For many Americans, it all seems…hopeless.

These are the same feelings I’ve experienced since 2016 on an almost daily basis. There’s this never ending sense that we live in a dystopian nightmare for which there is no end in sight. This is not helped by endless news cycles of terror and apathy and political punditry, by our social media cycles of misery, or even at the local level of politics. Hell, my small town made the news for being one of the first cities to vote to ban refugee resettlements.

But is it really that hopeless? Is hope truly dead, or is there a a trend of hope throughout U.S. history that we’re ignoring? I’d like to find out.

Today, I’m announcing a summer mini blog project called “Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States.” The goal of this project is to better understand where we came from, where we went, where we are, and where we are going. To understand what hope means in the United States. Admittedly, I am not a historian and have only loosely studied the history of the country within the history discipline. That doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of our history; it means that like many people who do not study U.S. history on the regular, my understanding of our “story” is incredibly specialized to my own disciplines: postcolonial studies, spatial theory, science fiction, and digital rhetoric. This project will aim to correct that in its own way while helping me find light in the darkness.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll start taking book suggestions and compiling a reading list. This list will focus on general, period-specific histories of the U.S. from its initial foundations (British) to the present. Some critical events will have to be explored directly, such as the Revolutionary War and the Civil Rights Era, but overall, I’m going to focus on general overviews of periods, not specific analyses or interrogations of issues — not because these aren’t important, but because there’s just no way I’ll make it past the colonial period if I do it any other way. I already have specialized knowledge; now, I want to expand that knowledge for a different purpose — to find hope.

For the sake of avoiding punditry in historical writing, I’ll generally lean towards works by trained historians with actual academic credentials and avoid works that are incredibly controversial within the history discipline. The books themselves don’t need to be from academic presses, but I want to avoid distorted narratives and casual historical narratives that are loose with the facts and more interested in telling a story than dealing with reality. I want to find deep dives that also tell the story of this country. I also recognize that this project will only briefly explore some of the issues that impacted the founding and development of this country and likely unintentionally downplay others. To address this, I hope to return to this project with a “Finding Hope in the Gaps of U.S. History” addition.

“Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States” will appear on this blog in a series of observations and semi-reviews. So expect content about all sorts of stuff!

And there you have it. The announcement. If you have book recommendations, drop them in the comments below!