Alison LaCroix Recommends “Domestic Manners of the Americans” for Project Syndicate

PS Commentators’ Best Reads in 2022

At the end of another tumultuous year, Project Syndicate commentators once again recommend books that stood out from the crowd. Striking an impressive balance across genres, this year’s selection features old but newly relevant gems, political and intellectual history, topical literary fiction, and forward-looking policy advocacy. The breadth of topics, disciplines, and perspectives will, in one way or another, help readers make sense of the present – or perhaps just gain a better understanding of why its passing will not be widely mourned.

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ALISON L. LACROIX

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, Oxford University Press, 1832. Frances Trollope was the mother of the famous nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope, but she first won her own fame with this combination travelogue, political commentary, and sociocultural critique based on her travels in the United States between 1827 and 1831. The book is a lively read, combining tart observations on the uncouth manners of congressmen (“the spitting was incessant”), odes to the forests around New Orleans (“sublime and poetical”), and clear-eyed assessments of antebellum hypocrisy (“They inveigh against the governments of Europe … and then look at them at home; you will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves”).

A dispatch from a distant era of polarization, conflict, and extreme rhetoric, Trollope’s book manages to sound familiar, even current, offering readers insight into, and perspective on, our own political and social ructions.

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