Wrestling with Big Ideas -- A Reading Blitz

My search for "America" begins with a reading blitz to fix the big ideas in mind.

I’ve the Boston core plotted from 1623 onwards, which will stand me in good stead when I navigate back to the "paradise of all those parts," as Captain John Smith called "New England." For the big picture, I need venture far beyond those rocky shores and that time period.

I intentionally picked up the simplest history on my shelves: American Heritage’s 16-volume Illustrated History of the United States. I’m dipping into the 1963 Oxford History of the American People, an equally venerable volume penned by Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison. I have the Annals of America at hand should I want to delve a little deeper at this stage.

Worth nothing that when I began Brazil, one of the first books I read cover to cover was Robert Southey’s massive History of Brazil written in 1810, to this day a remarkable chronicle of the country’s early centuries. All the more amazing for the fact that the poet never set foot in Brazil gleaning his material in the private library of an uncle resident in Portugal for thirty years.

I’ve my revisionist favorites – Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) is indispensable – but for now I want the facts, pure and simple. I’m planning fiction not a history book. What I read is there to fire my imagination and shape the story as I seek it out.

Top of my reading list this week: Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, a very palatable mix of history and Horwitz’s trek on the trail of discoverers, conquerors and settlers who came before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth – from Vikings to Virginia adventurers, from Ponce de Leon of La Florida to Coronado of the Seven Cities of Cibola and Quivira. More than a century of lost endeavors, besides the Vinlanders’ voyages of ages past.

Lost as much as hidden behind American myths. I’ve visited these stories before in my work on Mexico and Florida and marveled at the veil thrown over such stirring events. One answer, of course, lies with the myth-makers themselves be they folksy storytellers or formal frock-coats of an Athens of America fashioning their tale for posterity.