Rich Mintz  

In this post, Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes a short list of American history titles cited by Professor Ari Kelman of UC Davis (and of the group blog The Edge of the American West) — titles chosen for the “non-expert reader seeking to understand America.”

I want to give my own special shout-out to one of the titles on Kelman’s list:  American Colonies: The Settling of North America by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor.  I read a fair amount of American and European history for pleasure, and this book (which I read in 2005) is certainly the most engaging book of North American history I read during the decade.  In particular, it effectively illustrated for me, as no previous book had done, the extent to which the European settlement of North America was a complex interplay of political and social intrigue between the European settlers and Native American communities (and of American, British, French, Spanish, and Russian colonial interests, and of course the economic interests of large planters and manufacturers) that lasted for well over a century.  From the moment I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down — the narrative of settlement, made up of dozens or hundreds of factions each acting in its own interests, propelled me forward.

The book also includes an annotated bibliography, which I remember aggressively mining at the time for further reading.

Not having used WordPress in almost two years, I’m staggered by the degree to which blog publishing on this platform (along with Twitter integration and a host of plugin features) has become nearly failure-proof.  It was fairly easy before, but the more sophisticated features required (or at least were assisted by) a fair amount of technical background knowledge.  But both on the back-end and the interface side of things, it all seems simpler now… and the full iPhone integration in the WordPress 2 iPhone app only makes it more seamless.

We’re still a bit away from Cory Doctorow’s always-on network-in-our-heads; but with each incremental improvement, we move closer to that point, which I feel certain to see in my lifetime. (How’s that for Omni-quality sci-fi boosterism?)

For the nth time, with the coming of the new year, I’m jumping with both feet back into the world of social media. Twitter, Google Reader, and the iPhone have all been boons — Twitter because it’s reminded me that posts needn’t be long, Google Reader because it’s helped integrate the blogs I read into my daily life, and the iPhone because it seems to make just about anything possible on the fly. We’ll see how well it all hangs together this time… stay tuned!