Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

AMERICANON

Jess McHugh

An Unexpected U.S. History in Thirteen Bestselling Books

This is an in-depth examination of thirteen seemingly innocuous, mega-bestselling reference books, guidebooks, and self-help books that have become blueprints for core American values and shaped the nation's story.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Old Farmer's Almanac, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book: These are a few examples of American "bibles." They are reference books for daily life that ostensibly taught readers one subject, all while instructing them about their role in society and their responsibilities to family and to country. These are dictionaries, school primers, cookbooks, and how-to guides, spanning the full range of America's 245-year history, which sold tens of millions of copies and set out specific archetypes for the ideal American, from the self-made entrepreneur to the devoted homemaker to the humble farmer.

Taken together, these books help us understand how a powerful minority successfully constructed meaning for the majority in times of change or upheaval. AMERICANON looks at how these ubiquitous texts have molded common language, culture, and customs - attempting to impose a single definition of American on a diverse nation.
Deeply researched and gorgeously told, AMERICANON is a brilliant and curious history of American mythmaking. Jess McHugh brings alive a cast of core American figures - Benjamin Franklin, Dale Carnegie, Emily Post, and more - to demystify the origins of the great American fable.

Jess McHugh is a writer and researcher whose work has appeared across a variety of national and international publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Nation, TIME, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The New Republic, New York Magazine's The Cut, Fortune, Village Voice, The Believer, and Lapham's Quarterly, among others. She has reported stories from four continents on a range of cultural and historical topics, from present-day Liverpool punks to the history of 1960s activists in Greenwich Village.

Available products
Book Published 2021-06-01 by Dutton

Comments

Jess McHugh wrote a fascinating original piece on William Holmes McGuffey and his school primers for Washington Post's Retropolis. Read more...

The concept behind Americanon is nothing short of brilliant, and journalist Jess McHugh delivers on her inspired premise with insight and aplomb... McHugh's book is essential reading - illuminating, engaging and absorbing. You'll never look at the dictionary or cookbook on your shelf in quite the same way. Read more...

If you want a surprising book that isn't afraid to sift through the good and the bad to handle the truth effectively, read Americanon. Read more...

(McHugh) provides a clear-eyed and forthright cultural history that critically evaluates our nation's representative texts.

We like to think that culture - be it national or regional - is a reflection of the highest echelons of artistic creation, that we are as worthy of our mythologies as they are of us. This is not the case. As Jess McHugh discovers in this deep dive into thirteen of America's most owned books - from farmer's almanacs to dictionaries to cookbooks to etiquette guides - a nation's story is shaped and told from much humbler texts.

With her usual eye for detail and knack for smart storytelling, Jess McHugh takes a savvy and sensitive look at the 'secret origins' of the books that made and defined us. As McHugh shows, much of our American canon has to do largely with axe-grinding, reputation, redemption, and, often, who is permitted to tell the story - and you won't want to miss a one moment of it.

In an increasingly divided nation, it seems reasonable to ask: What is the glue that holds us together? It may be found here, in these bound pages. Jess McHugh has written an elegant, meticulously-researched and eminently readable history of the books that define us as Americans. For history buffs and book-lovers alike, McHugh offers us a precious gift, a reminder that our many narratives are intertwined and that despite it all they still bind us together.

Journalist McHugh's appealing cultural history dissects the American character through a close examination of 'ordinary, instructional books that average Americans have consulted every day'. Brisk publication histories and author profiles enrich the cultural analysis, which is consistently on-point. This lucid survey entertains and enlightens. Read more...

What Jess McHugh has done with Americanon is draw a distinct, and necessary, line between our culture and our realities. The myths of what America is and what it means to be an American are strange, pernicious, and often inscrutable, but McHugh has managed a truly remarkable thing: finding actual and honest truth in the midst of it all.

Journalist McHugh examines a long bookshelf of didactic books by which Americans have self-educated... A worthy, capably told look at a small canon of works demonstrating how to do well by doing good.

Washington Post ran a fascinating online excerpt from the book about Dale Carnegie, author of the mega-bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People. Read more...

We are what we eat, but we are even more what we read. Jess McHugh paints a rich and colorful portrait of America through the popular stories and reference books woven over decades into our cultural DNA. For book-lovers and historians alike, Americanon is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how famous books are made, and the lives they live long after they're printed.

Chinese (compl.): Domain Publishing ; Chinese (simpl.): Ginkgo (Shanghai)

...Without overdoing it, McHugh clearly delineates how good Americans are - or at least American authors are at giving advice they don't follow. Read more...

With a snappy title and an earnest heart, Americanon, by journalist Jess McHugh, looks at 13 'American bibles'. Eschewing fiction, whose Hucks and Uncle Toms and March sisters might face conflicts all too obviously plucked from the tapestry of American history, the canny and erudite McHugh selects plotless but far better-selling instructional volumes - Webster's Dictionary, for goodness sake! McGuffey Readers! - and shows how these books reveal the inner objectives of striving Americans while at the same time helping their achievement... McHugh adroitly reveals how the DNA of each of these books can still be detected in an America that has in many ways evolved. Read more...

The Los Angeles Review of Books ran an original piece by Jess McHugh: "The Quiet Mysticism of Almanacs." Read more...

What do Ben Franklin and Betty Crocker have in common? They both wanted to teach us how to be American. Jess McHugh's book is a thought-provoking and fun investigation of the subtle agendas behind the principles, recipes and answers of the American nonfiction bestseller list. You'll never look at a self-help book the same way again.