How America was shaped

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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.

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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.

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► 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.

Guest Blogger: CarrieLyn Donigan Guymon

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome CarrieLyn Donigan Guymon (left) as today's guest blogger.
CarrieLyn, who's been an adjunct Professor of Law at San Francisco's Golden Gate University Law School, served in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State from 2003 to 2008. Initially she practiced in its Office of International Claims and Investment Disputes. Eventually she moved to its Office of Nonproliferation and Verification, where she served as counsel to the Joint Compliance and Inspection Commission, established under the 1st Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, START.
A graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, CarrieLyn clerked in the Western District of Virginia. From 1999 to 2003, she litigated international trade, antitrust, and class action cases in the Washington, D.C., office of O’Melveny & Myers.
CarrieLyn's scholarship focuses on nonproliferation issues as well as international arbitration and investment issues. Her guest post below treats the 1st set of issues -- extremely timely given that leaders will convene Monday at U.N. Headquarters in New York for a month-long Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's slated to lead the U.S. delegation, while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's to lead the Iran delegation.) Specifically, CarriLyn's post evaluates the New START treaty that, as we've posted, has just been signed by the Presidents of the United States and Russia.
As her transnational foremother, CarrieLyn chooses Rachel Carson (below right), the scientist whose book on the effects of pesticides, Silent Spring (1962), was a pathbreaker in environmental awareness and regulation. (photo credit)
CarrieLyn writes:

Her writing revolutionized society. Her work not only served the greater good, but it also supported her widowed mother, and then two orphaned nieces who came to live with them, and later her niece’s orphaned son, whom she adopted. I remember selecting Rachel Carson as the subject of a school assignment at a very early age, when I was excited to find a great woman to write about.

Heartfelt welcome!

On September 27

On this day in ...

... 1962, the publishing house of Houghtom Mifflin issued Silent Spring, a book that a Time cover story credited with "Breaking the Silence on DDT." Preceding publication of the work by biologist Rachel Carson had been excerpts in the New Yorker; her allegations that DDT and other pesticides were being overused to the point that they had become "Elixirs of Death" had so disturbed chemical manufacturers that they threatened to sue to block publication of the book. In Time's words:

When the book appeared, industry critics assailed 'the hysterical woman,' but it became an instant best seller with lasting impact. It spurred the banning of DDT
in the U.S., the passage of major environmental laws and eventually a global treaty to phase out 12 pesticides known as 'the dirty dozen.'

Carson died from breast cancer 2 years after publication and well before adoption of the treaty mentioned above, the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. A 2007 National Public Radio broadcast, marking the centenary of her birth, detailed how, decades after Silent Spring appeared, Carson's "work continues to stir up controversy on Capitol Hill." (credit for Book-of-the-Month Club edition, including approving "report" on the book by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas)

(Prior September 27 posts are here and here.)

On May 27

On this day in ...
... 1907, Rachel Carson (right) was born "in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania." Inheriting from her mother "a life-long love of nature," she studied after college at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, and in 1932 received a master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University. As a writer on nature and wildlife she "rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service" in 1936. She is best know for her book Silent Spring (1962), which took on agribusiness and the government in exposing how the use of synthetic-chemical pesticides harmed the natural environment. Carson died from breast cancer in 1964.
... 1996, in Moscow, Russian President Boris Yeltsin entered a ceasefire agreement with Chechnya's rebel leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. The accord was intended to bring an end to 17 months of fighting in the southwestern province of the Russian Federation. But "sporadic violence continues" to this day.