After I identified that “history travel memoir” subgenre, I keep finding more books that fit in it somewhat, and I’m not even looking for them. I’ve been doing some book research that requires looking into some particular places, and that’s set me off onto some rabbit trails, where I read something in one book that intrigues me, so I look for books on that topic, and so forth. So these books here aren’t necessarily things I was reading for research. They may have been on topics I ran across while researching something else. But they’re all fascinating reading.

Shadowlands, by Matthew Green, is about lost British villages. The author travels to these locations and tries to learn about the villages and why they were lost/abandoned. There’s an Iron Age village that was uncovered, a few villages that fell into the sea or were swamped, and even some more modern losses, like areas taken over for military training during WWII or a Welsh village that was destroyed when a river was dammed for a reservoir. I found this to be fascinating reading, but it left me a bit melancholy.

On a similar note (I found it by looking for similar titles in the library’s online catalog) was Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz. This one looks at four major cities that were lost or abandoned along the way, for various reasons. It gets into why and how cities were built and why/how they get abandoned, whether it’s disaster (like Pompeii), social change, or something else. This book is a good resource for worldbuilding because it makes you think about what makes up a city and makes a city work — or not.

Born on a Mountaintop by Bob Thompson was an odd little digression for me. In something else I was reading there was some stuff on the Texas Revolution, which made me realize how little I knew about Texas history, since I was living overseas for the grade in which they teach Texas history in Texas schools. So I looked up other books on the topic and found this one, though it ended up being not quite what I was looking for. It was still fun reading. It’s a biography of Davy Crockett that gets into both the history and the myth. The author travels to locations that were pivotal in Crockett’s life, from his birth to the Alamo, trying to separate the truth from the legends. He also gets into the legends and how they were created and sustained, and then revived by the Disney TV series that created a phenomenon in the 50s. I didn’t know a lot of this information, and it will definitely give me a different perspective the next time I visit San Antonio and the Alamo.

I seem to have unintentionally followed a trend when I pulled Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz off a library shelf because this one also involves a trip to San Antonio. Before he was one of the designers of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted worked as a correspondent for the newspaper that became the New York Times. He was an abolitionist, but not really a radical one, and he had the idea to travel in the south in the years right before the Civil War and talk to people to get a sense of what southerners were really like so maybe they could find common ground and work out their differences (it seems the NYT has been doing the “let’s visit a diner in a red state and talk to voters” thing for more than a century). The author of this book retraced Olmsted’s steps in 2016, doing a similar experiment. The book covers what Olmsted saw and experienced in a place, and then what the author saw and did along the way. He tried to replicate travel the way Olmsted might have, though he drove a car instead of riding on horseback or taking a stagecoach. He started on a train, hitched a ride on a coal barge going down the Ohio River, managed to find a river cruise on the Mississippi that wasn’t too different from what Olmsted experienced, and even took a short excursion by mule in the Texas Hill Country. I found it fascinating reading, since so many of the places he traveled were familiar to me, but I was seeing them through different eyes. It was also kind of depressing because a lot of the attitudes he found weren’t that different from what Olmsted heard. The racism is still pretty virulent, and there’s the sadly familiar issue you find in the south of people who are kind and welcoming but who can also spew some awful hate and paranoia. Unfortunately, I know enough people like the ones he talks to that I know he’s not making it up or exaggerating, and that makes the book a bit depressing, since people haven’t changed that much. It turns out that Olmsted started as a moderate abolitionist, but after traveling in the south he ended up secretly helping support some radical anti-Confederates among the German settlers in the Texas Hill Country. He went from “maybe we can find common ground” to “burn it all down” after seeing slavery in person and meeting southerners.

I’ve turned to reading some fantasy novels after all that non-fiction. I think I had a bit too much of the real world.