Well, as you may have noticed from my earlier post, it's Archives Month here in the Bluegrass state (as well as the rest of the US of A), and I implored you all to act like it: go forth and celebrate archives in whatever way seems appropriate to you. So you may then be wondering what we here at MM are intending to do to support our own favorite archival repository (the Filson Historical Society). Well, as a new member of the FHS I have the privilege of attending their sponsored lectures, like the one coming up this Thursday: the Gertrude Polk Brown lecture series will feature H.W. Brands, author of the new FDR bio Traitor to His Class: the Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who will discuss the book.
I would be pretty excited about this no matter what, and I know there's plenty of other FDR biographies already out there, but this is a book I'm especially anxious to read for one particular reason: Brands is the first historian to write a book about FDR without actually having lived through his presidency. He has no memories of his own to burden the trip--no nostalgia to squint through, no feelings to filter owing to living through the Great Depression and World War II. It's the first biography about what has been called the most influential presidency of the 20th century written by someone outside the "Greatest Generation," and that seems noteworthy. My FDR knowledge definitely needs bolstering anyway, and what with all the Depression era parallels being drawn to our current-day economic 'sitch and partisan fuss-bucketing about New Deal programs, I think this 900+ page tome will give me (and everyone else who gets through it) an excellent brush-up on my 20th century American history.
So I'll be attending the lecture this Thursday and thinking about other ways to celebrate Archives Month...what will you be doing?
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