I’ll bet I paid a lot less than Subway did for product placement in this episode.
I want to thank the hit ABC show Nashville for using the cover of Andrew Jackson, Southerner as a prop in the mayor’s office. It would be better if someone on the show were actually reading the book, but I’ll take it.
(Of course, that portrait just happens to be the same one I’m using for my book cover, but one can dream.)
Amazon.com has Andrew Jackson, Southerner listed at a pre-sale price of 29.80. That’s 25% off of the list price of $39.95. I also plan to hold a contest of some sort to give away a handful of signed copies this fall.
The Fall 2013 LSU Press catalog includes Andrew Jackson, Southerner. Here is the description:
Many Americans view Andrew Jackson as a frontiersman who fought duels, killed Indians, and stole another man’s wife. Historians have traditionally presented Jackson as a man who struggled to overcome obstacles and helped create a more democratic United States. In his compelling new biography of Jackson, Mark R. Cheathem argues for a reassessment of these long-held views, suggesting that in fact “Old Hickory” lived as an elite southern gentleman.
Jackson grew up along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, a district tied to Charleston, where the city’s gentry engaged in the transatlantic marketplace. After visiting Charleston, Jackson moved to North Carolina, where he joined various political and kinship networks that provided him with entrée into society. In fact, Cheathem contends, Jackson had already started to assume the characteristics of a southern gentleman by the time he arrived in Middle Tennessee in 1788.
After moving to Nashville, Jackson further ensconced himself in an exclusive social order by marrying the daughter of one of the city’s cofounders, engaging in land speculation, and leading the state militia. According to Cheathem, through these ventures Jackson grew to own multiple plantations and cultivated them with the labor of almost two hundred slaves. His status also enabled him to build a military career focused on eradicating the nation’s enemies, including Indians residing on land desired by white southerners. Jackson’s military success eventually propelled him onto the national political stage in the 1820s, where he won two terms as president. Jackson’s years as chief executive demonstrated the complexity of the system of elite white southern men, as he earned the approval of many white southerners by continuing to pursue Manifest Destiny and opposing the spread of abolitionism, yet earned their ire because of his efforts to fight nullification and the Second Bank of the United States.
By emphasizing Jackson’s southern identity, characterized by violence, honor, kinship, slavery, and Manifest Destiny, Cheathem’s narrative offers a bold new perspective on one of the nineteenth century’s most renowned and controversial presidents.
The cloth (hardback) edition will be published in October and will retail for $39.95, and an e-book edition, almost certainly priced lower, will be available as well.
Research commitments are going to require me to scale back this summer’s casual readings, but I have a short list of childhood favorites that I want to revisit:
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson
On the surface, it looks like a strange list, but I have fond memories of each of these books. When I was a child, my parents bought me a set of books that included all of the above except Pilgrim’s Progress, and I read them multiple times. Bunyan’s book was a required school reading, but I also read it for fun. (Please withhold your groans.)
I’m interested to see how well my memories of them hold up with rereading. If you’re interested in last summer’s reading list, it’s posted here.
It’s time for fall book orders again.
History of the United States I
I’m retooling the survey course over the summer, and I’ll be sure to blog about it at some point. The theme for this course is historical memory.
Gretchen Adams, The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in
Nineteenth-Century America (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010) ISBN
978-0-2260-0543-0
W. Stuart Towns, Enduring Legacy: Rhetoric and Ritual of the Lost Cause (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2012) ISBN 978-0-8173-1752-2
Robert C. Williams, The Historian’s Toolbox, 3rd ed. (M.E. Sharpe, 2011) ISBN 978-0-7656-3327-9
Introduction to Historical Methods
The Tosh book is new for me. While it looks like a light reading load, I am assigning a number of articles as well.
John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 5th ed. (Pearson, 2010) ISBN 978-0-5828-9412-9
Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0-2268-2337-9
African American History
It’s been four years since I last taught African American History. With the exception of Kennedy’s book, these are all new readings for this course.
Taylor Branch, The King Years (Simon & Schuster 2013) ISBN 978-1-4516-7897-0
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard Univ. Press 2013) ISBN 978-0-6740-4555-2
Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Vintage, 2003) ISBN 978-0-3757-1371-2
John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998) ISBN 978-0-5216-2724-5
(Previous entries in this series: Pts. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.)
Mary Beard recently explained how her most recent book cover design evolved. My experiences have been a little bit different. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had great designers at LSU Press. Amanda McDonald Scallon designed the cover of Old Hickory’s Nephew (OHN), which I think brilliantly captured how Jackson haunted Donelson for his entire life. I gave no input about how the cover should be designed. For the Andrew Jackson, Southerner cover, I suggested the portrait that graces the front but gave no other direction.
For the most part, academic publishers want to be left alone when it comes to design. They have marketing specialists who know what they’re doing when it comes to creating a book cover that will sell. It behooves authors to remember that fact. At the same time, my impression and experience is that it’s okay to indicate preferences for things. For example, with OHN, I told LSU Press that I didn’t like a certain bland book design that I had seen on their books. This time around, I suggested the portrait that they decided to use, but I understood that it was only a preference and that their designer had the final approval on whether to use it.
One other important thing to remember: If you want to use a certain image on the book jacket, understand that the image owner will not only have to grant you permission but will also likely require a rights fee or some other kind of compensation. Thankfully, The Hermitage owns the Jackson portrait for the forthcoming biography, and they were willing to allow its use (as they did for those on the OHN cover) for reasonable compensation.
I’m pleased to present the cover of my forthcoming book, Andrew Jackson, Southerner, due to be published in October.
I could not be happier with the work that LSU Press has done on designing the covers of this book and my first, Old Hickory’s Nephew.
(Previous entries in this series: Pts. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.)
You might be asking why I’m talking about the doldrums that set in following submission of the manuscript now instead of after its publication. From my experience, the real emotional letdown occurs once the manuscript is submitted to the editor for copy-editing. There is nothing yet tangible to point out to family and friends or to include in annual faculty activity reports.
I don’t know how others deal with this emotional gap, but here are a few things that I’ve done.
The bottom line: Stay active in some way, whether mentally or physically. That’s good advice to follow all of the time, but I think academic writers, who can become obsessive, need reminding sometimes.
Pt. 10 is here.
Time once again to post next semester’s readings. I’m doing things a bit differently with my two introductory survey courses. I chose a theme for all of the readings, with the purpose of having the students write a paper that ties all three books together in an end-of-the-semester paper.
Early U.S.
The theme for this course is, obviously, slavery.
Gary Kornblith, Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776-1821 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009) ISBN 978-0-7425-5096-4
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Dover, 2000) ISBN 978-0-4864-1143-9
Peter H. Wood, Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) ISBN 978-0-1951-5823-6
Modern U.S.
The theme for this course is the search for perfection within U.S. society.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (Bedford/St, Martin’s, 1995) ISBN 978-0-312-10591-4
Van Gosse, The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975 (Bedford/St, Martin’s, 2005) ISBN 978-0-312-13397-9
Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012) ISBN 978-0-1999-2906-1
Southern U.S. History
William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) ISBN 978-0-1951-5629-4
Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988) ISBN 978-0-8078-4227-0
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001) ISBN 978-0-6740-0539-6
Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979) ISBN 978-0-2265-1002-6
Last week, Historiann (Ann M. Little) posted a three-part interview with esteemed historian Mary Beth Norton. You should read all three parts, especially if you are interested in the development of women’s history as a field.
Two things jumped out at me from the final interview installment. The first was Norton’s advice not to commit oneself to writing a trilogy, as she did with Founding Mothers and Fathers, Separated by Their Sex, and Liberty’s Daughters. As Jacksonian historians know, that’s sound advice. Many of us (or maybe it was just me) were disappointed that Charles Sellers never wrote the third volume of his Polk biography.
The other piece of Norton’s interview that stood out was her explanation of the differences between university presses and trade publishers. She highlighted two drawbacks to publishing with a trade house. The first is the lack of outside peer review. The second was one I had never heard before: academic titles tend to go out of print more quickly than they do at university presses. The difference, she observed, is that trade presses want to make a profit and don’t have the economic incentive to keep an academic title in print if it doesn’t continue to sell. University presses, on the other hand, are able to keep titles in print longer because part of their mission is to provide access to knowledge. While they certainly like to turn a profit, that is not the impetus for their existence.*
Even though she didn’t make my list of most influential historians, I’ve enjoyed Norton’s work for a long time. Liberty’s Daughters was the first scholarly work on women’s history that I read, and it has stayed with me.
* Unless you’re the University of Missouri and have some hare-brained idea about making your university press a vanity press. For how well that idea went over with scholars, visit this page.
