Colonial fascination

Sara Donati's Into the Wilderness has got me interested in the Colonial/Revolutionary period of US history so in an uncharacteristic mode, I am reading non-fiction for pleasure. I picked up David McCullough's John Adams at the library this week; he's one of the most accessible historians for those of us who are challenged by dry history writing. And since John and Abigail had such a lively correspondence, much of the book reads like an epistolary novel.

I'm still amazed at the big gaps in my knowledge after so damn much schooling. I wrote my first master's thesis while at UC Davis on some women writers in late 18th C England (Wollstonecraft, early Jane Austin, Sarah Scott, Charlotte Lennox, etc.) but it is amazing how little I know about the history and literature of the same period on the other side of the Atlantic. That's a pretty big gap since the American Revolution and ideas of liberty clearly had an impact on concepts of feminism for the period. I studied French writings and British reactions to the French revolution but not the American stuff. Geographical proximity bias? Genetic bias (with my Brit of a mum)? I can't quite believe my advisors let me get away with such a big gap of knowledge, but I guess that is the difference between an MA and a PhD.

Anyway, so far John Adams is proving to be a very good read and hopefully will tide me over till my copy of the next in the Donati/Wilderness series, Dawn on a Distant Shore, arrives from Amazon.

And since I can't just buy one book at a time (gotta get that super saver shipping, right?), I also decided to splurge and get David Maine's Fallen (in hardback!) and another Dan Zanes CD, Rocket Ship Beach, for my kids (ok, ok, and for me too. I confess that I love his kid music more than a lot of music intended for grown ups.)