In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy Book

I have a passion for United States history; I would have to in order to achieve my goal of reading a biography on every U.S. President. I often think nonfiction works are riveting when others would find them unreadably boring. I see rich context and I love understanding the background of each person and the role it plays in their decision making process, but others see nothing more than an encyclopedia that should be used as a reference, but not continuous reading. The book they are imagining is this book; "The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison."

It's important to note that the authors never set out to write a full-fledged biography. They gave a brief summary of his life and lead-up to the presidency, but the main intention was a detailed analysis of Benjamin Harrison's Presidential Administration. Authors Homer E. Socolofsky and Allan B. Spetter decided to break up the book into sections (Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Travel, etc) rather than by chronology, and they cover an impressive range of issues throughout; however, these two facts combined with very dry writing styles yielded something that reads more like a dictionary than a readable work of nonfiction. There are certainly points of this work that piqued my interest, including Harrison's role in the passing of the Sherman Anti-Trust act, the rapid industrialization of America in the 1890's, the buildup of the U.S. Navy, and Harrison's appointment of Henry Billings Brown to the Supreme Court (Brown wrote the decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson which established court backing of 'separate but equal' segregation laws). The issue with this work is that those points of interest are inherent to the presidency of Harrison, not the writing of the authors. In fact, they do little more than introduce you to these points in much the same way I am here, where the introduction is nice but the juicy detail should be found elsewhere.

This work was never going to be a thriller or even a traditional biography, but I expected much more. Overall, it took me almost an entire calendar year to read because I could not motivate myself to pick it up and work my way through the dry pages. And while the authors certainly deserve more credit for the historical content than I am giving them, what they set out to do just does not mesh with my preferences for a readable historical work.