My reading on the emergence of white American identity in the colonial period and the Revolutionary War has been going very well. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but admittedly only with the help of high-end binoculars. What I do have now is a list of books and journal articles I need to read to close out this particular portion of my project. I’ve reached the point in the reading where the footnotes in the books all start pointing in the same direction, which is a good place to be. I imagine that writing is still several months off.
This plateau has allowed me to take a bit of a detour. While I’m digesting the details of so much history, I’ve been reading Reinhold Niebuhr, Patrick Deneen, Solzhenitsyn, and even Benjamin Constant, whose work I discovered in a bookstore window. It’s all very liberating stuff that helps me clarify hunches I’ve had since I was a teenager. I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of liberty while taking walks, sitting at our favorite cafes, and, of course, wiping my hands a lot with those little sanitizing towelettes. Many things are starting to make sense.
