Richard Polenberg: The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945

After providing a short 35 page summary of the 12 years in 6 chapters the other 200 pages are filled with documents. Every single one of them has a one paragraph long introduction placing it in context. This format was more exciting for me than Schulman’s LBJ book. It reminds me of a user interface/information architect design principle of not separating the pointers from the content in a serial, linear document if possible. That forces the reader to jump back and forth between data and interpretation either in mind or in the text itself. Nowadays that’s too much to ask, because we don’t memorize that much as people used to. So here I get a short intro that explains to me why the following piece is important, where it stands in time. Then it is easier to appreciate them, and I did. The documents are fascinating on several levels. The language used just 60-70 years ago was so different. Not as different though as the mindset. What we, I take for granted now had to be argued for back then. It is possible to detect progress on race, gender, age, human rights, and economic issues. Sometimes I wonder about that, but these set of documents show that the US came a long way. It has more to go though.

• @Amazon