The Books Briefing: Looking Back on Moving Forward

📚 The Fire Is Upon Us, by Nicholas Buccola

Jefferson’s doomed educational experiment

“What [Thomas Jefferson] believed, one day every enlightened person would believe: that republicanism was inherently good, that organized religion should be viewed with skepticism, that Jesus was not divine, that slavery was wrong. Given access to education, people could learn to embrace all these views, thanks to their powers of rationality and openness to new discoveries.”

📚Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor

How black suffragettes subverted the domestic sphere

“[Anna Julia] Cooper’s seminal text, A Voice From the South: By a Black Woman of the South, addressed issues including educational disparities, women’s suffrage, representations of black women in literature, and the pernicious effects of segregation.”

📚 A Voice From the South: By a Black Woman of the South, by Anna Julia Cooper

The “double-consciousness” of black identity

“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.”

📚 An essay from The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois

Balancing the ledger of reparations

“For [W. E. B.] Du Bois, the path to a full liberation included restitution, land redistribution, the guarantee of a quality education, and positive and proactive protections for civil rights for the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Until those goals were achieved, he predicted, black Americans would be consigned to an unsteady state of second-class citizenship that would always tend toward oblivion.”

📚 Black Reconstruction in America, by W. E .B. Du Bois

The Reference Desk

(New York Public Library)

This week’s question comes from Alison: “I am traveling to Taiwan next spring and would appreciate book recommendations to acquaint myself with the country.”

The Stolen Bicycle, by the Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, is a novel about a writer on a journey to find his father’s lost bike, which leads him to wider discoveries about the history of Southeast Asia. Mei-Ling Hopgood’s memoir, Lucky Girl, follows her experience of going back to Taiwan from America to meet her birth parents after they gave her up for adoption when she was a baby. Leona Chen’s poetry collection Book of Cord experiments with form to explore how history and migration shape her Taiwanese American identity.

Write to the Books Briefing team at booksbriefing@theatlantic.com or reply directly to this email with any of your reading-related dilemmas. We might feature one of your questions in a future edition of the Books Briefing and offer a few books or related Atlantic pieces that might help you out.​

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Myles Poydras. The book he’s

rereading is Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

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Myles Poydras is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.