What Else I’ve Been Doing
'Fear No Pharaoh' in paperback! Recent writings—on Father Coughlin, Zohran Mamdani, the Border Patrol! Breaking trail!
Imagine my delight when I opened last weekend’s New York Times Book Review and found Fear No Pharaoh in “Paperback Row,” a list of three books recently out in softcover. I hadn’t known it would be there. The surprise triggered one of those out-of-time moments you read about in Proust, the fleeting thrill of communication with an earlier self who once pined, painfully, to someday have just such an experience. I looked up from the paper, listened to the birds, my kids in the yard, squinted at the sun-drenched mountain, and soaked it in.
All of which is to melodramatically say: my book is out in paperback! Pick up a copy! They are handsome things, with a rough-textured cover that I think is supposed to give readers a sense of the gritty texture of my historical reconstructions? Something like that. If you’ve had the thought that someone you know might want to read a book about American Jews arguing over matters of race and justice and equality, oppression and liberation and the perpetuation of world-historical traumas, but one in which the dreaded Z-word is not mentioned once (okay, once)—you can now share my book with them in a slightly less expensive format! Buy it at your local bookstore or at bookshop.org.
Most of my time these days is devoted to working on my book about the role(s) Canada has played in American history. I’m enjoying that work even more than I had suspected I would over the many years I had the project in mind. Obviously, current events have made the story even more relevant than expected, which helps in drawing out resonances between past and present. I’ve never been inclined to offer teases of my work, glimpses of surprising research finds—I’m pitiful at showmanship. TRUE NORTH. Out in 2028, or thereabouts.
I also, as you may or may not know, write two monthly columns about history. One is for The Nation, “Our Back Pages,” which digs around in the magazine’s archives for older pieces that speak to issues of our time. I’ve recently written about the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, about a long-shot left-populist running for mayor of New York (Fiorello LaGuardia), the military-industrial-complex origins of artificial intelligence, the history of food stamps, the radicalization (and racialization) of the US Border Patrol, the tortured history of US involvement in Venezuela, and the late Jesse Jackson’s influence on the Democratic Party. My most recent column drew on certain resemblances between Tucker Carlson and a pseudo-populist broadcaster of the distant past, Father Charles Coughlin. Here’s some from that piece:
I also write “Backstory,” a history column for Hudson Valley magazine, which gives me free rein to explore any aspect of my adopted region’s history. (“Backstory,” “Our Back Pages,” Think Back—don’t think I haven’t noticed…) I often use the column as an excuse to pay “site visits,” as I call these childless daytime excursions to interesting places or museums I’ve wanted to check out. This year I’ve focused every few columns on local angles to the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, with one piece on the early construction of forts to protect the river-passage through the Hudson Highlands, and another on General Richard Montgomery, one of the first Revolutionary martyrs, who died on New Year’s Eve in 1775 while trying to conquer Quebec. I especially enjoyed the site visit for a piece on the all-important Verplanck’s Point ferry crossing just south of Peekskill:
Other pieces have looked at Baxtertown, a long-disappeared village not far from my house where fugitive slaves built a remote backwoods community; a German-born hermit who lived in the Westchester woods; the surprising Catskills origins of the song “Guantanamera”; a long-lost mineral springs near Albany; a rare, foldable map of the Hudson River from the 1840s; the painter Thomas Cole’s first visit to the Hudson Valley; and a new book about the Bear Mountain Bridge.
I also contribute other pieces to the magazine that are just regular shoe-leather journalism, not necessarily about history. (This is the closest I have to a day job.) I often find that the less I know in advance about the topic of the assignment, the more I enjoy working on it. That was certainly true of this piece about an adaptive skiing school in the Catskills, which gives people with physical and cognitive disabilities the chance to experience a sense of freedom and accomplishment while hitting the slopes. I also wrote about the Byrdcliffe artists’ colony in Woodstock; change and continuity along three Main Streets in the valley; and the special homemade quality of college radio stations in the age of the algorithm and AI.
And, of course, I make this podcast. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. There will be a new episode next week—one of my favorite conversations yet—and many interesting and hopefully relevant ones ahead. Thank you so much if you have taken out a paid subscription to support my work. It means a great deal to me.
Now, apropos nothing, here’s a picture of my first-ever outing in snowshoes—on Mount Beacon, in late February, when I had the great pleasure of breaking trail after one of those two-foot dumps of snow.
