How America was shaped

(credit)

Just in time for today's 236th anniversary of American independence, the Library of Congress has opened an exhibition that explores the forging of the culture of the nation.
"Books That Shaped America" will run through September 29 at the library's Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E. For those who can't make it to Washington, the exhibit's list is available online here. The library welcomes comments, and nominations for books to add, here.
The inaugural list, which contains books published as early as 1751 and as recently as 2002, has much merit.
Authors honored include women as well as men, and are not limited to writers of fiction. On the list as well as the novel are the schoolbook and the cookbook, the epic poem and the expedition log, the autobiography and the adventure story.  Even a road atlas.
As a list of what shaped America, though, it has a glaring omission:
Books by non-Americans.

(credit)

Seems unlikely that this is the library's subliminal comment on the American strain of isolationism. It is equally unlikely, though, that the listmakers meant to say that nothing published outside the United States affected the United States. The latter group of books helped Americans, as the Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, "To see oursels as ithers see us!"
A few examples:
► Works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels erected an ideological framework that existed in opposition to, and so helped to etch the identity of, American political economy.
► Not only did litigation over James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) create a legal opening for freer expression within the United States, but the work itself helped American authors to free their own creativity.

(credit)

► For many Americans, The Diary of a Young Girl, as the 1952 U.S. edition was titled, is the touchstone account of the horrors of the Holocaust. It first was published in Dutch, as Het Achterhuis, 2 years after the 1945 death of its author, Anne Frank, at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
Thus even as we celebrate Library of Congress recognition of our favorite books -- including ones by IntLawGrrls foremothers Betty Friedan (Feminine Mystique, 1963) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) -- we look forward to a richer, more global list of books that shaped America.

On June 30

On this day in ...
... 1966 (45 years ago today), as described in a 2003 Time magazine essay by Betty Friedan (below left, an IntLawGrrls foremother), the National Organization for Women emerged in Washington, D.C., as a "furious" response to the "weekend of lip service" that she and other women at a U.S. government-convened 3d National Conference of the Commissions on the Status of Women. (photo credit) Friedan wrote:

The omens were not good. That week President Johnson and Lady Bird invited a few of us to tea at the White House. The President said he wanted to appoint talented women, but the problem was 'finding these women.' ...
... [A]s dignitaries yammered at the podium, I joined other furious women at the two front lunch tables, passing along notes written on napkins. ... I wrote on one napkin that NOW had 'to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society, now ... in fully equal partnership with men.' As people rushed to catch planes, the founding members collected $5 from one another as our charter budget. Anna Roosevelt Halstead, Eleanor's daughter, gave me $10.

(Prior June 30 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Guest Bloggers: Kathleen Doty & Megan Knize

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome 2 new guest bloggers, Kathleen Doty (left) and Megan Knize (right). The problem of counterfeit medicines -- a particular concern in anti-malaria efforts -- and the corresponding lack of legal frameworks to address the issue is the subject of their post above.
Both, I'm proud to say, were my students in intlaw courses at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, last year. (That makes 3 law students who've contributed as guests; the 3d was Deborah Popowski, who wrote on accountability for torture back in December.)
Kathleen is a 3d-year law student at Davis. As coach and oralist on the school's Jessup International Moot Court Team, she was part of the team that, as posted, won the 2008 Pacific Super Region Competition last weekend. She'll be arguing in the Shearman & Sterling International Rounds in Washington D.C. in April 2008. Kathleen is interested in public international law and global health policy. She graduated cum laude from Smith College, where she majored in Latin American Studies and minored in Film Studies. She has traveled extensively in the Hispanic Caribbean and, most notably, studied abroad at La Universidad de la Habana in Cuba. Before entering law school, she worked for Engel Entertainment, where she was a production assistant and sound recordist on adventure, science, and travel documentaries for cable broadcasters.
Megan, also a 3d-year law student at California-Davis, is Editor-in-Chief of the UC Davis Law Review (vol. 41). She's most interested in the intersections of poverty, rurality, and law, and she's spent considerable time living and traveling in Europe and the Middle East. After graduating with honors in American Studies from Stanford University, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Daily, Megan worked for a nonprofit in California’s Central Valley and spent a year teaching English in France. She's also worked for the Centre d’Etude de la Vie Politique Française in Paris and the European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest. While working for that Centre, she organized a research mission to Istanbul; there she interviewed Roma victims of forced eviction. In the fall Megan will start work as an associate at the law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf.
Each dedicates her IntLawGrrls contribution to a transnational foremother. Kathleen's is Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last monarch of Hawai‘i. As for Megan? "In honor of Women’s History Month, I’ll go with Betty Friedan," she says, referring, of course, to the 2d wave feminist and author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), which "detailed the frustrating lives of countless American women who were expected to find fulfillment primarily through the achievements of husbands and children."
Heartfelt welcome!