Kidzdoc's Year of Uncertainty, Part 3

Today is July 4th, the semiquincetennial (250th) anniversary of the United States of America, which is a great day to start a new thread. Pictured above is Independence Hall in Center City Philadelphia, located 23 miles NE of my house, where the Declaration of Independence was signed on this date in 1776, and the Constitution of the United States was signed in 1789, both after spirited if not occasionally rancorous debate. In honor of this important but sobering holiday weekend in this bitterly divided country I will mainly read a new book by Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. of Princeton University, which is titled America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. Its main theme is this nation's great contradiction and most shameful legacy, its wish to be a beacon of freedom throughout the world while at the same time being a White republic, where the rights of people of color, particularly enslaved and subsequently freed African Americans but later other people of color, are subjugated so that White supremacy could be practiced throughout the land. The book examines this country's major anniversaries, in 1776, 1826, 1876, 1926, and 1976, and he describes the sorry state of this country under Trump leading up to the 2026 anniverary.

I watched an interview of Dr Glaude by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on its YouTube channel that was filmed earlier this week, and he mentioned an essay in The North American Review from 1926 that was written by the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who protested that they (White Americans) couldn't teach their children what they want, and that immigrants were diluting America, presumably Irish, Italians, Jews, Eastern Europeans and others. It doesn't take much to imagine current White nationalists such as Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth or other high ranking members of the Trump administration, including the President himself, making similar comments, and several of them have done so already.

Currently reading:

Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems by Nikki Giovanni
America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Aside from My Heart, All Is Well by Héctor Abad

Completed books:

January:
1. And Finally: Matters of Life and Death by Henry Marsh
2. I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé
3. Cécé by Emmelie Prophète
4. Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs

February:
5. Everything Inside: Stories by Edwidge Danticat
6. Abscond by Abraham Verghese
7. Breaking Barriers: A Doctor's Journey from Broken Home to Battle-Tested Leader by LeRoy Graham, M.D.
8. A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness
9. We Slaves of Suriname by Anton de Kom

March:
10. Queen by Birgitta Trotzig
11. Lovely One: A Memoir by Ketanji Brown Jackson
12. America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin
13. The Funeral Party by Ludmila Ulitskaya

April:
14. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
15. The Mad by Ignatius T. Mabasa
16. Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir
17. Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli
18. A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America by Trymaine Lee
19. Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha

May:
20. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

June:
21. The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
22. The Devil by Leo Tolstoy
23. Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green