This is a harder question than it appears, but I’ll take a stab at it. https://twitter.com/gregggonsalves/status/1247142520024260609

When people ask this question, what they often want (not necessarily @gregggonsalves) is historical analogues. They want to read about the 1918 flu pandemic or the Great Depression or of another time “when we went through this.” Which is fine, but it’s not the best use of history

Historians are good and understanding change over time. Especially for modern US, that often means, “how did we get where we are?” How did we get where we are that a malevolent clown wasted a 70 day head start? How did we get where we are of an unequal, inadequate health system?

How did we get where we are that we are such an unequal country that who is exposed to the virus and who is more likely to have preexisting underlying conditions is so deeply raced and classes?

Those are the questions US history as a field was made to answer! I hope other #twitterstorians will share their favorite books or articles that explain how we got where we are now, but I’ll give a few:

Many of you have heard me praise @LaneWindham’s book before as the best “what happened to the labor movement” book. But it’s also a “what happened to the privatized welfare state” and “what happened to US politics” book. It’s a great way to understand shifting power in the 70s.

As @LaneWindham argues, the postwar settlement was that the social wage (especially health insurance) would be paid by employers. Unions negotiated for it and then other, non-union employers had to match it. But that was mostly for white men, who dominated formal employment.

What happened when others moved into formal employment in the 70s, thanks to equal employment law and the civil rights and feminist movements? Bosses learned how to fight unions, and the whole system crumbled.

Ok. Second thing to read: @hthompsn’s article in the Journal of American History about mass incarceration and how it has shaped US history since the 70s. https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/97/3/703/749784?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Heather argues that behind, or running through, all the themes we see in recent history is the story of mass incarceration. Especially given the way jails are a major part of the current Covid story, understanding incarceration is especially important now.

Because of my own work, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the history of welfare right now, trying to think about why the US system is so stingy. The best place to look to understand that, I think, is Michael Katz’s In the Shadow of the Poor House.

It’s old, but it’s still the textbook I use to teach about how the US welfare system was built (or not built). The obsessions with differentiating between the worthy and unworthy and of trying to avoid giving poor people cash still haunt us and our Covid response.

I hope others will add their favorite 70s-and-later books that also describe the end of the New Deal Order, the rise of the New Right, etc. it’s a growing pile!

Another thing history is good at: helping us to understand how people have dreamed bigger, fought back, tried to build something new. Not as analogues, but to see how it was possible, to get inspiration.

One of my favorite books, @AnneliseOrleck1’s Storming Caesar’s Palace, is about how poor Black women in Las Vegas fought their own war on poverty, how they dreamed of a better system and tried to build it.

Of particular interest is the chapter where they build their own clinic. They are patients and effectively health care workers. How did they build power (and then, how did they end up losing it)?

(I am impatiently waiting for @gabrielwinant’s book on Pittsburgh’s transition from an industrial steel-dominated economy to a post-industrial healthcare-dominated economy, which I think will also be very useful here.)