Red, White, and Blue Letter Days

Matthew Dennis is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He is the author of the prize-winning book Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America, also from Cornell, and coeditor of Riot and Revelry in Early America.

Dennis explores how various US ethnic groups have identified with Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, Presidents' Day, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Martin Luther King's birthday to express their particular group's distinctiveness.... Distinguished by good writing and extensive research, the resulting book is an informative, readable history that goes beyond mere synthesis to demonstrate relationships between rival partisan causes. Summing Up: Recommended.(Choice) This engaging study deconstructs public commemorations in the United States from the mid-1700s to the present.... His thought-provoking and insightful book should inspire a closer examination of the subject by other scholars.(Virginia Quarterly Review) Dennis reminds readers of the urgent issues at stake when these special times were singled out for inclusion in the American book of days.... Each of the holidays addressed has a history as complex and fraught as the design of the American flag.(American Historical Review) Dennis has produced a valuable contribution to the recent scholarship on festive culture, holidays, and the creation of identity in the United States, and his book should join works by David Waldstriecher, Leigh Schmidt, Mary Ryan, and Len Travers as a standard work in the field.(American Studies) In Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar, Dennis exhibits an outstanding array of American historical background and weaves a complex tapestry of analysis that will appeal to general readers and scholars as well. It is a well-written and ambitious work and would be most appropriate for American culture and American studies courses.(History: Reviews of New Books) Unlike other holiday histories, this one closely addresses the racial, sexual, regional, and sectional differences in perspective that marked and sometimes marred public celebrations.... It's fascinating to read Dennis's account of the controversy surrounding the early celebration of Washington's Birthday, which was regarded by some as an antirepublican cult of personality.(College and Research Library News)