Book Club

If you are interested in history – whether it is local, regional, or national history – the Center has an exciting and fun activity. The SCHRC is hosting a book club that will have historical themes.

Book club is now held at the Research Center, 518 Water Street.

The next book selection is The Cause (2021) by Joseph J. Ellis. The book club will meet on Wednesday, January 21, from 1 to 2:30 pm at the Research Center.

For Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause marks the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era, completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers. Here Ellis, countering popular histories that romanticize the “Spirit of ’76,” demonstrates through “evocative profiles of British loyalists, slaves, Native Americans and soldiers uncertain of what was being founded” (Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune) that the rebels fought not for a nation but under the mantle of “The Cause,” a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle all but destined to give rise to the warring factions of later American history. Combining action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause “deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America’s trajectory” (Richard Stengel, New York Times Book Review), forcing us to finally reconsider the story we have long told ourselves about our origins―as a people, and as a nation.