What We Are Reading Today: American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism

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Updated 27 September 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism

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Author: Keidrick Roy

Though the US has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many 19th-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.
American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past.

Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst—and transformed the nation’s founding liberal tradition.

 


Book Review: ‘The Wisdom of the Romantics’ by Michael K. Kellogg

Book Review: ‘The Wisdom of the Romantics’ by Michael K. Kellogg
Updated 1 min 20 sec ago
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Book Review: ‘The Wisdom of the Romantics’ by Michael K. Kellogg

Book Review: ‘The Wisdom of the Romantics’ by Michael K. Kellogg

Due for publication by the imprint Prometheus in May 2025 and now available for preorder, “The Wisdom of the Romantics” by Michael K. Kellogg explores the complexities and contradictions of the artistic and intellectual movement Romanticism.

Kellogg, a philosopher and author of several books on intellectual history, including “The Wisdom of the Renaissance,” “The Wisdom of the Middle Ages,” and “The Greek Search for Wisdom,” delves into how Romanticism emphasized “sensibility, inspiration, individual freedom, emotional intensity, introspection, sincerity, and heightened imagination,” in reaction to the “over-reliance on reason” during the Enlightenment period.

Kellogg highlights the contradictions within Romanticism itself, noting that it “is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art’s sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.” These attributes, Kellogg argues, were fully embraced by the Romantics, in contrast to the rationalists who rejected them.

Romanticism, which lasted between 1780 and 1850, emerged as a reaction against the Enlightenment’s rigid focus on reason and the Industrial Revolution’s emphasis on progress and rationality. It flourished across literature, art, music and philosophy, embracing intense emotion and highly individual expression. It romanticized the very notion of romanticism.

Kellogg also slips into the world of words from a range of writers that fit that timeframe, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Honore de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Hegel, and William Wordsworth to Jane Austen. He argues that Romanticism is a “highly subjective enterprise,” where defining it is not about finding a fixed definition but about embracing its contradictions and diversity.

The book is slightly dense; it feels drawn from a college mandatory reading list. At the same time, it is witty and playful. It almost requires the reader to also be a dreamer and a romantic to enjoy the writing of this era — and about this era.

In addition to writing several books, Kellogg is a founding and managing partner at the law firm Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, PLLC. He also holds degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard Law School, proving that he is, in fact, the perfect person to merge logic and heart within a book — and, dare I declare, a true Romantic. 


What We Are Reading Today: When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black

What We Are Reading Today: When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black
Updated 05 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black

What We Are Reading Today: When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black

Riley Black’s “When the Earth Was Green” brings readers back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded.

Black guides readers along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.


What We Are Reading Today: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer

What We Are Reading Today: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer
Updated 04 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer

What We Are Reading Today: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer

In “Air-Borne,” Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery.

Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on COVID and other threats to global health, Zimmer leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes — as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind.


What We Are Reading Today: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

What We Are Reading Today: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Updated 03 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

What We Are Reading Today: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

The book offers a devastating story of war through the eyes of a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah tells how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and became a soldier.

The book focuses on like what war is like through the eyes of a child soldier, and how does one become a killer?

The book offers a first-person account from someone who came through “this hell” and survived.

This is an extraordinary and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.


What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of International Order by Glenda Sluga

What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of International Order by Glenda Sluga
Updated 02 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of International Order by Glenda Sluga

What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of International Order by Glenda Sluga

In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe.

This new coalition planted the seeds for today’s international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center.