Reading the Past Book Club

Reading the Past offers readers a chance to delve into history. Each month, we’ll read a different work of history, and discuss how the author brought the past to life. We’ll talk narratives, archives and analysis—and assess James Baldwin’s assertion that “history is literally present in all that we do.” This book club is hosted by historian Dr Hollie Pich on the 2nd Wednesday of every month. 

Reading List:

May - Dancing with Strangers by Inga Clendinnen

June: Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Woman's life in Nineteenth-Century Japan, Amy Stanley

July: Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain

August: Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, Christina Thompson

Sept: The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins

Oct: The Whole Picture: The colonial story of art in our museums & why we need to talk about it, Alice Procter

Nov: Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, Phyllis Rose

Dec: The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind it All, Sarah Horowitz

Dr Hollie Pich is a historian of race, gender, and the law in the twentieth-century American South. She is currently working on her first book, Black Memphis: Everyday Citizenship in a Jim Crow City.