US History 2, Chapter 1

First meeting to discuss Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass. I was much more impressed with the quality of both the writing and the ideas than I had expected to be. We cover most of the first section in this talk and spend some time on the themes of gifts, thankfulness, subjectivity, wild strawberries, and nut trees.

This is the final meeting of the discussion of Adrian John’s book, which we had on August 31st.

The first unit of my Fall 2024 US History 2 course, titled "Capital and Labor".

Primary Source Excerpt

We discuss the first and second chapters of Adrian Johns’ recent book. Some of the topics include the late-19th-century panic over the exhausting effects of “unnatural” reading and neurasthenia, other technologies (of both acquiring knowledge and making notes) and their advantages and disadvantages, saccades and thought, the strange misuse of the incorrect theory or recapitulation, and the general weirdness of how close reading science was to eugenics and social Darwinism.

In this talk we cover the third and fourth chapters of Adrians Johns' book. The things that stood out to me were more about the social importance of reading rather than the research technologies and data collected. There was a profound anxiety that an American public that wasn't literate would not be up to the challenges of the 20th century. There's an explicit connection here to Mortimer Adler's idea of the Great Books helping people prepare to be better citizens, and Johns actually mentions Adler in Chapter 4. To watch a video of this conversation, visit https://open.substack.com/pub/danallosso/p/science-of-reading-meeting-3?r=i937&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

After a couple weeks break while I moved into my apartment in Saint Paul, the Saturday Book Club reconvened to begin discussing Adrian Johns’ 2023 book, The Science of Reading: Information, Media & Mind in Modern America. Although I had originally been a bit skeptical, I’m enjoying this book. We discussed languages and reading, the particularity of the reading experience, a bit of book history, the fact that this was a COVID book, Jacques Barzun, Eric Weinstein, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Kuhn, Michio Kaku, and the problem of creating collegiality in a remote and increasingly asynchronous learning environment.

Our first book club meeting, to discuss David Graeber and David Wengrow's book, The Dawn of Everything, in December 2021.

This is an audio version of the first chapter of my Open Textbook, US History II: Gilded Age to Present. You can read along at https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/ushistory2/chapter/chapter-1/