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Armchair Historians

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 12/18/2023 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Monday, December 18, 6pm  

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future.

Colin Woodard is a Maine native and the author of Ocean’s End: Travels Through Endangered Seas. He is a regular contributor to the Christian Science Monitor and the San Francisco Chronicle.

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 01/15/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Monday, January 15, 6pm  

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff

In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; and most recently, The Witches:Salem, 1692.

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 02/19/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Monday, February 19, 6pm  

Saving Yellowstone by Megan Kate Nelson

Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park—one of the most popular of all national parks—but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established. In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of the last unmapped places in the country. The survey’s discoveries led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, which created the first national park in the world.

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She has written about the Civil War, US western history, and American culture for The New York TimesThe Washington PostThe Atlantic, Time, and Smithsonian Magazine. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone, The Three-Cornered WarRuin Nation, and Trembling Earth.

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 03/18/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Monday, March 18, 6pm  

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.

Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today. 

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The author of thirteen books, including the bestsellers On Tyranny and Black Earth, his work has been translated into forty languages. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 04/15/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Monday, April 15, 6pm 

A Conspiracy of Decency by Emmy E. Werner

The people of Denmark managed to save almost their country's entire Jewish population from extinction in a spontaneous act of humanity -- one of the most compelling stories of moral courage in the history of World War II. Drawing on many personal accounts, Emmy Werner tells the story of the rescue of the Danish Jews from the vantage-point of living eyewitnesses- the last survivors of an extraordinary conspiracy of decency that triumphed in the midst of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Emmy E. Werner is a developmental psychologist and research professor at the University of California at Davis. She is the author of many books, including Through the Eyes of Innocents (Westview Press 2000); Reluctant Witnesses (Westview Press, 1998); Pioneer Children on the Journey West (Westview Press 1995).

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 05/20/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225
Monday, May 20, 6pm  

Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Hailed by the New York Times as “the most penetrating, fascinating political biography I have ever read,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s extraordinary and insightful book draws from meticulous research in addition to the author’s time spent working at the White House from 1967 to 1969.  

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a celebrated historian and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, the runaway bestseller Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which was the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s award-winning film Lincoln, and five other critically acclaimed and bestselling books. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 06/17/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225
Monday, June 17, 6pm
 
The Great Influenza by John M. Barry
 
At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.

John M. Barry is the author of four previous books: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed Amer­ica; Power Plays: Politics, Football, and Other Blood Sports; The Transformed Cell: Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer (cowritten with Steven Rosenberg); and The Ambition and the Power: A True Story of Washington. He lives in New Orleans and Wash­ington, D.C.

 

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 07/15/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Monday, July 15, 6pm

Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, "Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild's 'strangers in their own land' and a new elite." Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called "humble and important" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande, Hochschild's book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is one of the most influential sociologists of her generation. She is the author of nine books, including The Second Shift, The Time Bind, The Managed Heart, and The Outsourced Self. Three of her books have been named as New York Times Notable Books of the Year and her work appears in sixteen languages. The winner of the Ulysses Medal as well as Guggenheim and Mellon grants, she lives in Berkeley, California.

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 08/19/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Monday, August 19, 6pm

Myth America by Kevin M. Kruse & Julian E. Zelizer

In Myth America, Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of fellow historians to push back against this misinformation. The contributors debunk narratives that portray the New Deal and Great Society as failures, immigrants as hostile invaders, and feminists as anti-family warriors—among numerous other partisan lies. Based on a firm foundation of historical scholarship, their findings revitalize our understanding of American history.  

Kevin M. Kruse is a professor of history at Princeton University and the editor or author of five books, including White Flight and One Nation Under God. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. 

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and the author and editor of numerous books, most recently Burning Down the House and Abraham Joshua Heschel. He lives in New York City. 

VB Reads...Armchair Historians

Mon, 09/16/2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Village Books
1200 11th St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Monday, September 16, 6pm

Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented Pulitzer Prize-winning account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Following the Emancipation Proclamation, convicts—mostly black men—were “leased” through forced labor camps operated by state and federal governments. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

A native of Leland, Mississippi, Doug Blackmon is the Wall Street Journal's Atlanta Bureau Chief. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and their two children.

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