Eric Foner and Taylor Branch (and Dennis Banks)

The third volume of Taylor Branch's monumental history, At Canaan's edge : America in the King years, 1965-68, has just come out, to good reviews (and received a lot of coverage over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend.) Another book new this winter which is of great interest to readers of modern American history is reconstruction scholar Eric Foner's Forever free : the story of emancipation and reconstruction. It contains a number of photo essays which are in effect a parallel text, a small book contained within the larger.

Though the catalog's subject headings sometimes look uninviting, using them to wander the library's collection really gives you the experience of serendipity that people often think was lost when the old catalog cards went away. If you begin clicking on the subject headings of one of the books just mentioned, you soon find yourself led in surprising directions. Take United States - Race Relations, sort with the most recent on top, and you find yourself on the first screen with as many titles about Native Americans as about African-Americans. Civil Rights Movements United States History 20th Century turns up, among other titles, Francisco Rosales' Chicano! : the history of the Mexican American civil rights movement. Or you might keep running into Dennis Banks' memoir, Ojibwa warrior : Dennis Banks and the rise of the American Indian Movement. Click. Click. A new book from UNM Press, Unaffected by the Gospel : Osage resistance to the Christian invasion (1673-1906) : a cultural victory by Willard Hughes Rollings. Clickety clikety. Tijerina's autobiography. Click.