What the Well-Dressed Historian Is Reading this Weekend

So, since I actually sat down and wrote something in the chapter and thought deeply about it (which I often avoid because my mind goes on tangents), I'm rewarding myself with a little extra reading-while-I-write for this weekend. So, I went to the back of my closet last night and pulled out several things. And just because I'm smugly confident that y'all are way interested in what I read, I'm making a list.

For the Dissertation:
Ehrenreich- Nickeled and Dimed
Green- The World of the Worker
Foley- White Scourge
Meyerowitz- Not June Cleaver (Dorothy Sue Cobble's Article)
Janiewski- Sisterhood Denied
Sidel- Keeping Women and Children Poor
Kim- Koreans in the Hood
Ignatiev- How the Irish Became White

For Personal Enrichment (I have a grad certificate in Women's Studies and as part of the requirements, I had to take some classes outside history. I chose a social work class, "Women's Issues," an English class, "Feminist Theory and Methodology," and a sociology class, "Special Problems: The Family." I'm finally in the mood to actually engage these texts, as I think some will help with the dissertation and some will help me strengthen my self-definition as a scholar of women's history):
hooks- Killing Rage
Hesse-Biber et al- Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology
Findlen- Listen Up
Kemps & Squires- Feminisms

Just Because I Love It:
Gray-White- Too Heavy A Load

Will I get to all of these this weekend? Probably not, but I did learn a lot about reading quickly and for main points, arguments, place-in-the-historiography, etc., while I was taking my comprehensive exams. And some of these represent my simply revisiting texts for clarity and because I need them right now--actually, all the dissertation list except the Kim book fall in that category. So I probably will get through those. The feminist texts will be an ongoing thing, though I've already gotten back into hooks. And I'm delighted, because in an essay called "Beyond Black Only," she makes the following assertions:

Bonds of solidarity between people of color are continuously ruptured by our complicity with white racism. Similarly, white immigrants to the United States, both past and present, establish their right to citizenship within white supremacist society... through acts of discrimination and assault that register their contempt for and disregard of black people and darker-skinned immigrants. Concurrently, darker-skinned immigrants mimic this racist behavior....

And then she quotes Toni Morrison who says

In race talk, the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. ...A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open.

So, I wasn't totally clueless when I was wondering and wandering in the post below currently above this one. And, while the book is a decade old, and this essay has probably been analyzed and deconstructed and whatever else it is we academics do, at least I found this.

And in my closet. That place keeps my fashionable trendiness and my academic sensibilities on point. ;-p

***UPDATE: Forgot to mention two things that I have read lately that 1) aren't related to the dissertation and 2) I really admired ("enjoyed" doesn't seem the right word, given the subjects) :

Colombus Day Observed 2006

An Angry Loveletter to WhiteSister