Motley Kamuka

Jan-Margaret Fuller- Women in 19th Century Feb-Emerson-Nature & Self Reliance  March-Narrative of Sojourner Truth & the topic of Abolition April-Frederick Douglass-his 3 autobiographies May-Jones Very & the topics of Mental Illness and Disability June-Julia Ward Howe-The Hermaphrodite (and/or HBStowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and/or LMAlcott’s Long Fatal Love Chase) July-Thoreau-Walden Aug-Elizabeth Peabody-Record of a School (Bronson Alcott’s Temple School) Sept-Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins-Life among the Piutes (ed. by Mary Peabody Mann) Oct-Nathaniel Hawthorne-Mosses from an Old Manse Nov-Thomas Wentworth Higginson-Army Life in a Black Regiment Dec-Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (as much as we can fit in!) I'm so psyched! By March I was having other ideas. Maybe we should have read Frederick Douglass in February and focused women into March, Women's history month. But then I realized there was more of an emphasis on women, because the list was created by a woman--and I g...

I joined a transcendental reading group on Facebook, and I don't know how much I'll read along with the group, but to prepare myself I'm reading American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever. I posted the book to the Transcendental group and they went wild! Supposedly it's historical fiction, or really inaccurate history. Someone contacted Cheever, and she blamed it on research assistants. They wondered how much of it would be corrected in later editions, but nobody knew. So I read this book with a grain of salt! She says they were "seduced by the false authority" of John Brown , so I read a lot of the John Brown. He can be a saint or you can see him as the first person executed for treason in America.  There was a reference to a song about him, and that got me onto the song " Battle Hymn of the Republic " I feel like I'm doing some elementary history class, but I didn't really pay attention in history, or social studies, as they called it when I was ...