This Month's Acquisitions

In the tradition of The Little Professor, I inaugurate "This Month's Acquisitions." She actually does "This Week's Acquisitions," but I am too poor to do that. In fact, if some of my acquisitions seem incredibly basic or out of date, if they illicit "you don't already have that" responses, that would be because I've been poor for so long that I've had to rely on a library for most of my reading because I needed the money for stuff like, you know, groceries and electricity and such. Fortunately, I generally had easy access to an academic library. Not so much anymore with this community college teaching. So, now I must purchase. At least I'm not as poor as I was during some of those years so that, in spite of purchases, I still come out ahead.

Here they are, in no discernible order except as they are stacked on my desk:

1. Isenberg, Nancy. Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. New York: Viking, 2007. I've already started this one and -- damn! -- it is fantastic!
2. Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday. New York: Random House, 1996. Read this years ago, loved it, and wanted a copy for the bits about class and about the abolition movement.
3. Lohman, Christoph, ed. and trans. Radical Passions: Ottilie Assing's Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass. New York: Lang, 1999. Getting to the actual repositories will not be so much of a problem as translating the letters. Who knew you would need German to study Douglass? So, this will have to suffice until I find something better.
4. Malz, Earl M. Fugitive Slave On Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010. For review. That's not unethical to say, is it?
5. Barker, Gordon S. The Imperfect Revolution: Anthony Burns and the Landscape of Race in Antebellum America. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2010. Also for review. I stopped trying to review books for a while because I had a difficult time overcoming my own Angel in the House -- the one Virginia Woolf wrote about as hanging over her shoulder saying "who are you, you pretender, thinking you can evaluate someone else's work in print?" I thought it was bad karma, too. Now, I don't mind so much.
6. Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009. This one I need more for Anna Murray than her husband. So little exists on free black women in urban areas, much less in Baltimore, that I may have to write a whole article on that alone before I can deal with Anna Murray's life before Frederick Bailey entered the scene.