“This book is nothing like the history textbooks I grew up with. It’s visual, it’s handwritten, it jumps around in time. It’s an attempt at a new way of seeing history - placing movements and events and people from across time in conversation with one another in a way that, I hope, offers some insight into who we are as a country, and who we have the power to become.”
That’s a passage from the preface to Ariel Aberg-Riger’s history book America Redux: Visual Stories From our Dynamic History. On a background of photos, maps and color, Aberg-Riger writes about 21 events or aspects of our country’s history beginning with the Daughters of the Confederacy and ending with a group called the Young Lords who set out to make a better world by cleaning up garbage.
Other chapters focus on immigration policies, toxic pollution, housing, the annexation of Hawaii, Japanese internment, and farm workers striking for better work conditions.
As the author wrote, this is a very different way to think about our nation’s history. Reading it will only take a few hours, but it will stay with you for a long time. She includes a bibliography at the back of the book for those subjects you will feel compelled to read more about. In her afterword, she talks about using a labyrinth as a way to look back and ahead. She says, “We can’t change the past. But we can live in relationship with it in a way that informs and energizes our present. We are walking through history all the time, and it is up to us to keep circling, to keep engaging, to keep reaching for the heart of things.”
If you’re looking for a book that will cause you to truly think about our nation’s history and how we can do better, then you must read America Redux by Ariel Aberg-Riger.
