All right, so I'm a junior in American High School which is year 12 for your Brits out there. Like most students my age I'm starting to panick about which schools to attend and which majors to take. I think I've come up with some ideas about where I'd like to go either the University of Arkansas, University of Texas at Austin, or University of California-Berkeley. I'm adamant about attending Berkeley but The UoA and UoT-Austin have both mailed me applications for their schools.
So right now, I'm putting that on the back burner and focusing on what I want to major in. I'm thinking of majoring in American History and getting a minor in African-American History. In order for my own edification and for general consultation, do any of you workers and university students recommend any outstanding works in the field of African-American and general American history? Right now I'm reading a book on African American history which I find intersting but it is targeted towards those who do not normally focus on the ins-and-outs of history. I may read The Souls of Black Folk and I have requested There Comes a Time: The Struggle for Civil Rights from my local library.
So right now, I'm putting that on the back burner and focusing on what I want to major in. I'm thinking of majoring in American History and getting a minor in African-American History. In order for my own edification and for general consultation, do any of you workers and university students recommend any outstanding works in the field of African-American and general American history? Right now I'm reading a book on African American history which I find intersting but it is targeted towards those who do not normally focus on the ins-and-outs of history. I may read The Souls of Black Folk and I have requested There Comes a Time: The Struggle for Civil Rights from my local library.
And now for the song of the day,
Did I disappoint you or let you down?
Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown?
'Cause I saw the end before we'd begun,
Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won.
So I took what's mine by eternal right.
Took your soul out into the night.
It may be over but it won't stop there,
I am here for you if you'd only care.
You touched my heart you touched my soul.
You changed my life and all my goals.
And love is blind and that I knew when,
My heart was blinded by you.
Yes, I actually listen to James Blunt.
3 comments:
There is always "The Autobiography of Malcolm X".
Hmmm...those are pretty broad topics... At any rate, I think you'd enjoy "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, written by himself". Get the Richard Allison edition. You might like "White Women, Black Men" by Martha Hodes. "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" is essential. You gotta read "Uncle Tom's Cabin", too. If you want to talk with a professional African-American historian, get in touch with Charles Robinson (http://history.uark.edu/robinson.html). I'm sure he'd be happy to offer you guidance.
My friend Mr. E. Williams...
My name is Tom Joad and I come from Vancouver, Canada. I have been reading your blog, and from the sounds of it, you are a man with a very inquisitive and theoretical mind. Furthermore, you seem to enjoy studying revolutions...revolutions have been my topic of choice all through university and have led me to some incredible conclusions.
I have developed some philosophy on mass movements, and one person in particular who you MUST read is Eric Hoffer. The way you talk about mass movements makes me think you've already read him.
Hoffer is a man who went blind at a young age, and when he regained his sight at 13, he was seized with a rapacious hunger for the written word. He lived as a migratory worker and then a longshoreman in California for the last twenty years of his working life. The man never darkened the door of a school, but he read everything.
Because Hoffer never went to university, he escaped two main problems that come with the institution: 1) he doesn't write like an academic priest, and 2) he doesn't think like an academic priest. You don't get horrible language that no one understands--every thought is 200 or 300 words long.
THE TRUE BELIEVER (Harper and Row, 1951) is one of the most incredible books I've ever read. It compares all revolutions as one and the same and it tries to define the True Believer and why he dominates the early mass movement. It literally changed my life, and it helped to define who I truly am as a person.
I do hope that we can talk, since I badly need a philosophical network of people that think as I do. I run a blog at http://desolationrow.wordpress.com.
What you will find on the blog is lightweight political and cultural banter about modern society. We are writing it to help to get a group of friends thinking. For deeper philosophy, we will have to correspond.
I am very interested to study the relationships and laws between mass movements; the more help I can get the better. If you are interested, please contact me at tom_joad_2001@hotmail.com. Feel free to visit my blog, as I am always checking it.
If you don't decide to contact me, then at the very least, read the True Believer by Eric Hoffer...it will advance your personal studies by about ten years.
I hope to hear from you,
Tom Joad
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