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Princeton University Professor and Birmingham-native Imani Perry’s acclaimed book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Harper Collins: 2022) will be the first title in a new yearlong citywide literary program, Birmingham Reads, sponsored by PEN America and its Birmingham chapter, to engage readers through one title relevant to the city and its history. The reading and book club discussion program begins Sept. 2 with a celebratory event at 7 p.m. at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, featuring poetry readings, African drumming, and dancing. The public is invited free of charge.
Learning from Lincoln
Sean Wilentz is a historian of the leftist persuasion and also a principled opponent of the New York Times’s
1619 Project errors, distortions, and lies (my word, not his), now adopted as the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party. The problem is “A matter of facts,” he wrote in The Atlantic. He also signed off on the letter prominent historians sent to the Times challenging the project as ideological rather than historical.
Coincidentally with my own comments this week on Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, Professor Wilentz takes up Lincoln’s case in his New York Review of Books review “Lincoln’s rowdy America” in NYRB’s April 29 issue. Wilentz review David Reynolds’s new book,