Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
21. The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin.

22. Rebellion at Christiana by Margaret Hope Bacon. I'm not sure where I picked this up, as it's long out of print; probably a library sale, judging by the tape marks on the cover. It discusses an incident that took place in 1850 in which a Maryland slave owner traveled across the border to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in an attempt to reclaim four slaves under the auspices of the Fugitive Slave Act. (There's a somewhat garbled account of the incident here.) Some of the local free and escaped blacks worked together to prevent this, morally if not actively assisted by the abolitionist temperature of the white residents of the county. During a confrontation at the home of William Parker, the slave owner was killed and another man seriously wounded; following the "riot," thirty-six blacks and three white men were charged with treason for preventing the Fugitive Slave Act from being enforced. There's a lot more context in the book, and an account of the trial that followed and the fates of the various participants. Parker and a few others managed to reach Canada, where he became a journalist and activist against slavery and inequality. I always enjoy reading about obscure but significant events like this. The book is a short, fairly quick read, but it draws from Parker's own account and is well sourced.

1. Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution In Music by Marisa Meltzer.

2. The Patriot Witch (Book One of the Traitor to the Crown trilogy) by C.C. Finlay. First of Charlie's three books about witchcraft (I think it's safe to say that it's magic, but in context it's witchcraft) and the American Revolutionary War. Proctor Brown has big ambitions, but they have to do with farming and marrying just slightly above his station, not with revolution and a shadow war between witches, so of course it's the latter that he ends up with. Brown knows little of his own powers, so when he stumbles into the middle of a struggle between British and Colonial magic, he's in completely over his head--this is the sort of story where power without knowledge can get you killed. It's fast-moving, smart, and well-researched; the period details feel genuine, and the historical events are presented with accuracy, as far as I can tell--at least, I was able to answer a question on "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?"* based entirely on what I learned from this book, so I'd say I was learning as I was entertained. Charlie manages to get his characters involved with historical events without making it feel forced, which is saying something.

I liked the Ohio joke, too, Charlie.

*No, I wasn't on the show, I was watching it.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
91. Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 by Duane Schultz.
92. Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith.
93. The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum.
94. The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin.
95. Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith.
96. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin.
97. The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
98. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, translated by Edith Grossman (Re-read).
99. Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

100. Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1863 edited by Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth. The Dakota Wars from thirty-six different viewpoints, representing a fairly wide range of backgrounds; some tribal leaders, some farmers who were largely assimilated into white society, some belligerents in the conflict and some captives. The unifying thread is that all had at least some Dakota ancestry. I should have read this book before I started on the current section of the novel; although much of the information here--including some of the very same excerpts--has been in my other reading, the presentation of it here helped convince me that I was taking an approach that doesn't quite gibe with the reality of the war and its aftermath. There's still not nearly enough information from the perspective of the Mdewakantons themselves, especially the women, but this is one of the best resources I've encountered for information on their society at that time.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.

81. The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864 by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz. You may have heard of the conflict that happened here during the American Civil War; while the men of the First Minnesota were out east fighting for the Union, back at home a two-year drought, the corruption of the frontier Indian agents, and decades of broken treaties and promises resulted in what is variously called the Sioux Uprising or the Dakota War. It wasn't a long war; it began in August and was essentially over by late September. Over three hundred Dakota men were sentenced to die for their involvement; the number was later reduced to 38 by President Lincoln.

Part of what's interesting and tragic about the aftermath of the war is that some 1600 Dakotas were held in Fort Snelling from the fall of 1862 to the spring of 1863. The majority of them were women and children, and the few men who were held there had mostly been either uninvolved in the conflict, or actively worked to protect settlers and/or prevent the war. In fact one of the primary reasons that they were held in a stockade below Fort Snelling was for their own protection, since the whites in the state were so terrified and incensed by what had happened that they took any and all opportunities to retaliate with random mob violence. Monjeau-Marz reprints a first-hand account from one Samuel Brown of how, in transit from the army camp in the western part of the state back to Fort Snelling, the Dakotas were attacked by a mob at Henderson, Minnesota:

[W]e found the streets crowded with an angry and excited populace, cursing, shouting, and crying. Men, women, and children, armed with guns, knives, clubs, and stones, rushed upon the Indians as the [wagon] train was passing by and, before the soldiers could interfere and stop them, succeeded in pulling many of the old men and women, and even children, from the wagons by the hair of the head and beating them, and otherwise inflicting injury upon the helpless and miserable creatures.

I saw an enraged white woman rush up to one of the wagons and snatch a nursing babe from its mother's breast and dash it violently upon the ground. The soldiers instantly seized her and led, or rather, dragged the woman away and restored the papoose to its mother, limp and almost dead. Although the child was not killed outright, it died a few hours later. After the body was quietly laid away in the crotch of a tree a few miles below Henderson and not far from Faxon.

Without question, atrocities had taken place on both sides, but this account of the treatment of the unarmed and defeated Dakota dependents--the warriors had either fled or were transported separately--chills me. And this was only the beginning of the diaspora; at Fort Snelling the Dakotas were besieged by epidemics of measles and diphtheria, mistreatment by soldiers and townsfolk, and generally treated like exhibits for curious whites who were permitted to visit the stockade almost at will. Monjeau-Marz exhaustively chronicles all of this, with an emphasis on hard data from army records and primary sources, but she stops short of chronicling the journey to Crow Creek Reservation which took place in the spring and summer of 1863. This is a valuable book, although I dearly wish there was an Index in it.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
31. Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley.
32. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.
33. Justice League of America, Volume 2 by Gardner Fox, Mike Sekowsky, et al.
34. Killer Princesses by Gail Simone and Lea Hernandez.
35. Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, Volume 1 by Michael Chabon, Kevin McCarthy, Glen David Gold, Howard Chaykin, Bill Sienkewicz, etc.
36. Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn by Robert Holdstock.

37. Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of A.D. 800 by Jeff Sypeck. A while back I tweeted about wanting a book comparing the reigns of Charlemagne (I like to refer to him as Charlie-Man) and Harun al-Rashid; this is about the closest I was able to find. It's entertaining enough, and I'd be thrilled to see the period it covers turned into an HBO series à la Rome, but I do wish it were a little meatier and focused. Doubtless this is, at least in part, a function of the lack of good sources. My favorite bits, unsurprisingly, center around the delegation of Lantfrid, Sigimund, and Isaac from Aachen to Baghdad; only Isaac survived the journey, and he returned with the gift of Abul Abaz*, an Asian elephant given by Harun to Charlemagne (during his lifetime, everybody just called him Karl). There's also an attempt to assassinate a pope and the blinding of the Byzantine emperor by his mother. History, man; if it wasn't happening a thousand years ago, you'd be protesting it.

* According to Sypeck, the name means variously "father of the Abbasids," "elephant of the Abbasids," or "father of wrinkles."

I'd heard about Swede Hollow for years before I ever knew what it was, and I'd never been there until yesterday, when I rode my bike through downtown to where Payne Avenue runs into 7th Street. It's a wooded ravine on the East Side, cut through the bluffs by Phalen Creek. Back in the 1850's it was settled by Swedish immigrants, hence the name. (Originally it was "Svenska Dalen.") They built shacks along the creek and lived in what I suppose could be called congenial squalor. The name stuck even after the population there became largely Italian, and later Mexican.

What's striking about the hollow is how secluded it is, even now; the sounds of traffic from nearby 7th Street and I-94 are largely muffled by the depth and vegetation. It would be easy to live there and believe the outside world didn't exist--almost as easy as it would be for the rest of the world (well, St. Paul, and specifically the then-prosperous neighborhood of Dayton's Bluff nearby) to pretend that there weren't desperately poor people living down in the Hollow.

There's not a single historical marker in the "Historic Forest"--even the sign I photographed was hidden at a side entrance to the trail. I saw no signs of the homes that were burned away in the 1950's, only an egret and a few ducks, and a tiny congregation having some sort of service up near the Hamm's Brewery. But there was a moment, as I stood near the Creek taking pictures, when I got chills. As I've been studying the history of my city I've begun seeing parts of it in four dimensions; the streets and buildings and neighborhoods that used to be, superimposed on what is now. And while I couldn't see the shacks that used to line the creek (or the outhouses that used to sit suspended above it), the reality struck me hard that people really lived here, and not only are they gone, but so is any trace that they were ever here. I suppose that will be the fate of all of us, but it's rarely been driven home to me in such a way.

To see more (not that there is much to see besides water and trees) check out my set at Flickr.