Mode for Caleb

Closing time

2006-08-30T20:41:00.000-04:00

I've decided that it's time for Mode for Caleb to come to an end.

That should come as little surprise to anyone who has stopped by in recent months. This summer my posts dropped precipitously, thanks mainly to the cross-country move. July had one post; June had four paltry ones. I had hoped that I could revive the blog in August, but other time commitments have made it hard even to read blogs, much less to maintain this one.

I have very good reasons to think that this pace would not change anytime in the next several months. In the first place, since I'll be teaching full-time for the first time, I'm eager to focus on my new courses and my new students. And there's another even more exciting and important reason why the blog has been slowing to a halt. In just about eight weeks, my wife and I will become first-time parents. The incredible adventure that parenting promises to be has already begun. And I know the ride will only accelerate once the baby arrives, right around the time I'm grading final exams.

Of course, it's not that blogging necessarily takes up a lot of time; I've always been an infrequent poster by the standards of most bloggers. But psychologically, with parenthood and the new job on the horizon, lately I've been feeling a need to find something to throw overboard, as it were. Blogging isn't easy to cut loose, even temporarily, but of all the things on my plate right now, it's the least difficult to set aside. And instead of turning the blog into a tedious series of silences, it seems to make more sense to stop blogging altogether--writing and reading--until a new kind of normalcy sets in.

But I am not--absolutely not--renouncing blogging altogether. There have been times when I have been tempted to shut down the blog because of blog fatigue. This is not one of those times. There have been other times when, like every junior scholar in the blogosphere, I have wondered about how to weigh the professional risks and rewards of blogging. This is not one of those times. In fact, I agree with Dan Cohen that it's a great time for academics to start blogging.

So I'm certain that my moratorium on blogging will not be indefinite. At the same time, I can't predict right now when it will end. Besides, since the end of this year will find me in such a different place than I was when this blog started, I think it makes sense, whenever I do return, to start a new blog, at another address. Until then, take care and thanks for stopping by. I'm extremely grateful for the exchanges and friendships that Mode for Caleb has made possible for me, and I hope that even an extended sabbatical will not mean that they must come to an end.

History Carnival XXXVII

2006-08-15T14:43:00.000-04:00

Mode for Caleb is pleased to present, for your edification and amusement, the 37th Edition of the World Famous History Carnival, which features the best recent posts from the history blogosphere.

When S. J. Redman reflected on a prescient 1907 article by Franz Boas, Oneman responded at Savage Minds with some further thoughts on the history of museums at the turn of the century.

Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin has been churning out fascinating posts all summer; several of them were nominated, but the most mentioned was "Jesse Jackson Jr.'s Civil War."

This month The Little Professor's Madlibs version of a "First Person" essay was picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Which leaves us to wonder, what is the answer to #8? My cat seems as recalcitrant as ever, so it can't be "B" ... The LP also has an interesting review of William St. Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.

At The Rhine River, Nathanael D. Robinson takes issue with Voltaire's famous quip about the Holy Roman Empire.

At Revise and Dissent, Alun Salt reviews Hugh Bowden's Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle, and draws some interesting comparisons between the role of religion in Athenian politics and modern-day religious fundamentalism.

George McClellan is universally scorned by Civil War historians, yet he was universally loved by his troops. Walking the Berkshires suggests that historians should take the troops' opinions more seriously, if only to better understand McClellan's complex personality. (If this is your first time over at the excellent Walking the Berkshires, the author, Tim Abbott, recommends this post on an anachronistic plant at the Gettysburg battlefield site as one of his finest.)

Tom Hanks is ... James Madison. The American Presidents Blog wonders if it might be coming soon to a theater near you. It's a movie that Ed Darrell would probably be happy to see.

Martin Rundkvist reports on an exhibit of two 17th-century warships in Stockholm, and adds a strange but true tale about a survivor from one of the ship's battles.

Joe Kissell details the quasi-historical silliness that is E Clampus Vitus.

"A Pyramid? In Bosnia?" The title says it all.

The History Carnival is technically meant to spotlight either posts on history, or posts by historians. Derek Catsam's "Long Critique of a Silly Article" gets in primarily thanks to the second category. So does Mark Grimsley's impassioned post on the rights of civilians in wartime: "The Sacred Oath is Shattered."

Sergey Romanov presents more chapters from his ongoing series on what the Soviets knew about Auschwitz--and when--starting with Part IV.

Tim Enloe concludes a series of posts on Protestant historiography.

Ever heard of Anthony Hall, "King" of England? I hadn't either, until Mark Brady filled me in.

Ned Lamont's primary victory over Joe Lieberman takes Jeffrey Kimball back to 1968 ...

Tim Burke, who has been live-blogging his library-cataloging, pauses to ruminate on the importance of reputation capital in the hierarchy of academic norms.

With a name like Drive By Truckers, it's got to be good. Or so says Scott McLemee.

Natalie Bennett takes the blogosphere on a cycle tour of the historic architecture in Hastings, Winchelsea and Rye.

How can you learn more about a local area's history? Diamond Geezer says the signs are all around you.

Roy Booth at Early Modern Whale tours "Another Literary Church."

Finally, a certain beer company believes its namesake to be "Samuel Adams: Brewer Patriot." They won't be happy to learn from J. L. Bell that a more accurate slogan would be, "Samuel Adams: Tax Collector."

Thus concludes the thirty-seventh edition of the History Carnival. Thanks to all who sent nominations. Check back at the Carnival's homepage for information about upcoming editions.

Oasis in the City

2006-08-10T21:37:00.000-04:00

I've apparently arrived in Denver just in time for the only severe heat wave of the year. But the city offers much to compensate for the heat, most of all KUVO, 89.3 FM, the "Jazz Oasis in the City." If you've read even a couple of my paeans to jazz on this blog, you'll understand why I'm thrilled to be able to listen to the station Jazz Times magazine recently named the Major Market Jazz Station of the year. It's rare these days to find a 24/7 jazz radio station on the FM dial, and even rarer to find one that will play A Love Supreme during the afternoon rush hour. Don't expect my radio dial to budge anytime soon.

Speaking of jazz geekery, Doug Ramsey recently linked to a page of rare jazz videos, including a clip of the only known collaboration between Stan Getz and John Coltrane, recorded in 1960. That one's well worth checking out, as is the video of Coltrane's Classic Quartet performing "Vigil" in Belgium in 1965. View those videos in succession and you'll have a ready grasp of how rapidly Coltrane's sound changed in the early 1960s. And as an added bonus, you'll get to see Oscar Peterson bouncin', Stan Getz swingin', McCoy Tyner swayin', and Elvin Jones sweatin'.

Students of history

2006-08-09T20:33:00.000-04:00

At Slate, Fred Kaplan notes that Condoleeza Rice often invokes her status as a "student of history" to evade criticisms about the Bush administration's policies. As I've argued before, Rice is not the only member of the administration who relies on this formula. Both of the president's press secretaries -- as well as the president himself -- have often deferred judgment about the administration's mistakes to some distant day, when future historians will supposedly tell us whether Bush was right or wrong.

Kaplan is right to criticize this maneuver as basically evasive. On a deeper level, though, it's incongruous with other aspects of the Bush administration's worldview. When Rice or Bush defer to historians to judge their present actions, they seem to be endorsing a ramshackle version of epistemological and moral relativism. What seems right now, they seem to be saying, may not seem right later. And implicitly, they are also saying more than that. What seems wrong now may be judged right later, which means that what seems wrong now may actually be right.

It's a species of argument -- a kind of radical historicism about judgments of value -- that you would expect President Bush and his intellectual affiliates to oppose in the culture wars. In fact, while the administration strikes a skeptical historicist pose about its own shortcomings, it simultaneously makes broad claims about the universal birthrights of all peoples in all ages. But if Rice and Bush were aware of the tension between these two lines of argument, they would find themselves in the same kind of philosophical dilemma that has long bedeviled liberal pragmatists like Richard Rorty. The dilemma is this: if the "right" course of action is defined by nothing more than the consensus of a social group in the present, so that normative judgments can always be revised later just by virtue of it being later, then how does one simultaneously affirm certain values as transcendently valuable, no matter where you live or what year it is? Rice and Bush are willing to allow future historians to judge the wisdom of their policies, but they are unwilling to allow future historians to judge the rightness of their ideals. But you can't have it both ways forever: at some point you have to make an argument for why others -- even future historians -- should share your ideals, and by the same token, at some point you have to defend your attempts to realize those ideals. The fact that historians often reevaluate past decisions cannot justify abstention from judgment in the here and now.

Probably, though, I'm reading too much substance into what is basically a form of spin. Still, it's a seductive kind of spin because I think it resonates with the views of many Americans about history. History, in a very common view, "just goes to show you" that "you never know." That's the thesis of many an undergraduate history essay. Once upon a time everyone thought abolitionists were crazy; now they are heroes. Go figure! Once upon a time alchemists were geniuses; now everyone thinks they are crazy. Wild, huh? In other words, the Big Lesson that history teaches is basically banal: things change, time passes, opinions shift. As long as this is the only lesson we're allowed to learn as "students of history," we've really learned nothing except that "you never know." You think I'm crazy now, but maybe one day I'll be considered a genius. You think you're a genius now, but look out! Historians may think you're crazy.

I'm drawing a caricature here, of course. In reality there's something to admire even in this caricature. It's true that history should inspire humility about ourselves and a readiness to admit that our own cherished ideas could prove to be wrong. All critical thinking -- not just history -- ought to cultivate those virtues. But those virtues do not vitiate the critical thinking that brought them to fruition. Recognizing our fallibility as thinkers does not render thinking futile.

I'm afraid, though, that more than one student walks away from contemporary history courses with the opposite impression. Our job as history teachers is, on some level, to impress our students with how different the past was from the present. And we are happy if they also make the leap to realizing that the present will soon be past, and potentially very different from the future. But as a teacher, I will also have failed if students therefore throw their hands in the air as Rice seems to be doing. If it's possible for highly educated people to still believe that being a "student of history" just means "you never know," then in some sense we are failing as teachers of history.

So, in what started off as a piece of political commentary, I'll close by asking for pedagogical suggestions: I think most history teachers are adept at bringing students to a realization of how much things change over time, how different now is from then, and how different the future may be from the now. That's probably the easiest thing for us to do. It's the next step -- teaching students how to use the past to understand or influence the present -- that is harder, pedagogically, to take. But if we're not taking that step, or articulating to our students clearly what we think being a "student of history" is, then we risk creating a future generation of leaders who continue to invoke "history" as little more than a covering exculpation for all their mistakes. So I'll ask you, as someone just beginning a teaching career, do you address the Big Questions about what history teaches in your undergraduate classes? If you do, please share how.

(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)

A Unified Theory of Academic Willpower

2006-08-07T22:24:00.000-04:00

Cordelia Fine, writing for The Australian, shares the secret of her father's success as an academic philosopher. How is he able to sit in his chair and puzzle through that difficult article? Where does he find the strength of will to finish that manuscript? Simple: he indulges his will in every other arena of life.

The secret of his success as an academic, I am now convinced, is to ensure that none of his precious brainpower is wasted on other, less important matters. He feels the urge to sample a delicious luxury chocolate? He pops one in his mouth. Pulling on yesterday's shirt less trouble than finding a clean one? Over his head the stale garment goes. Rather fancies sitting in a comfy armchair instead of taking a brisk jog around the park? Comfy armchair it is. Thanks to its five-star treatment, my father's willpower - rested and restored whenever possible - can take on the search for wisdom with the strength of 10 men.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a chocolate-pecan brownie and a comfy chair calling my name. I could resist, but I need that willpower to write a book review, finish my syllabi, and continue sorting through archive notes from earlier in the summer. And when duty calls in the form of chocolate, I answer. (Hat-tip: AL Daily.)

Call for posts

2006-08-04T00:04:00.000-04:00

Well, now that I'm ensconced in my Colorado digs, perhaps blogging will resume. I can guarantee at least one post in the near future: I'll be hosting the 37th History Carnival here on August 15.

Nominations for the best history posts published between August 1 and August 15 are welcome. You can either fill out the official form, or gmail me at calebmcd. Lately my world is populated more by boxes than by blogs, so please alert me to what I'm missing!

Thanks to those who have already gotten the ball rolling with some early submissions. And if you haven't seen it already (I hadn't until yesterday, when I made my first foray back into the blogsophere after my sojourn through the boxosphere), check out the most recent edition of the Carnival at CLEWS.

Moving haikus

2006-07-13T14:46:00.000-04:00

So how much junk can
A rent truck truck if a truck
Is twenty-two feet?

At the time it seemed
That I needed all these books.
My back disagrees.

John Lennon was wrong:
Happiness is'a warm shredder.
Be gone, wastepaper!

Phone, cable, high-speed:
It's a "bundle" deal because
It costs a bundle.

The cat's view of cars:
Me-ow, me-ow, me-ow-owwwww,
Me-ow, me-ow-owwwww ...

Me-ow, me-ow-owwwww,
Me-ow, me-ow, me-ow-owwwww,
Me-ow, me-ow-owwwww.

Down four flights of stairs,
West for sixteen hundred miles:
Ten days to prepare.

Update, with life-hacks

2006-06-28T11:53:00.000-04:00

Unlike The Great Blog Silence of 2006, my recent lack of posts has not been planned and cannot be traced to a single cause. I've been busy traveling to Denver to find a place to rent (mission thankfully accomplished!). I've been busy visiting some archives around Baltimore that I still want to see before moving 1,700 miles away from them. And right now I'm on vacation, so I'm busy being not busy.

My recent archive trips have gone very well, and I've already spoiled myself by using my new digital camera to take pictures of manuscript documents. I was using a Canon Powershot A620 on a small 12-inch tripod with a panning head. Evan Roberts' tips on amateur digitization for historians proved very useful in this regard. I would add a couple of tips to his list that I stumbled upon through trial and error on my first day of full-time digitization:

1. Take your photographs at the highest possible resolution, especially if you are working with manuscripts. I was tempted to skimp on resolution the first day in order to keep the file sizes down. But this made some of the images essentially useless and over-pixelated when I zoomed in far enough to be able to read them. You can always resize the images to a smaller resolution once you've transcribed the documents at home, so buy a large memory card and max out the image size while you're in the archive.

2. A camera with "remote shooting" capability makes life a lot easier. On my first day in the archive, I found myself getting quite a work out jumping up from my seat for each document in order to frame it in the LCD screen and close the shutter. After that first day, I read a little more about my camera's capabilities online and discovered that it comes packaged with software that allows me to control the camera from my Powerbook. That meant I could stay seated at the table, slide documents under the tripod-mounted camera, frame the image using a viewfinder window on my computer, and then close the shutter using a hotkey on my keyboard. The A620 software is seamless and allows you to control any setting on the camera from the computer. Best of all, it downloads captured images directly to your hard drive using the standard USB cord, bypassing the camera's internal memory card altogether. From the very beginning you can control how the computer will name your files and where it will store them. So if you're in the market for a camera that you want to use in the archives, I'd recommend inquiring about this feature, which seems somewhat rare. (The Canon A610, for instance, doesn't have it, even though the A620 does.)

As long as I'm talking gizmos, I also want to recommend a useful website called Map Builder, which lets you easily create your own annotated Google Map and then display it dynamically on a webpage. I found this extremely useful when I was house-hunting a week and a half ago because my wife was unable to join me in Denver. Map Builder enabled me to "flag" rental properties I was looking at along with links to ads. I was also able to take photos of places, upload them to the web, and include links to the images in the map itself. This made it much easier for my wife and I to discuss the properties at the end of each day, with a color-coded map and all the properties in front of us. A similar map might be useful if you're planning a long distance move and want to keep track of where different houses or apartments are.

The latest on Emma Dunham Kelley Hawkins

2006-06-07T10:32:00.000-04:00

Early in 2005, as you may recall, there was a ripple of press interest in nineteenth-century author Emma Dunham Kelley Hawkins.

For years, Hawkins had been considered an African American author, and her novels were spotlighted in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. But on February 20, 2005, Holly Jackson, a graduate student at Brandeis University, published an article in the Boston Globe revealing that Hawkins never identified herself as an African American, and was consistently identified as white in contemporary census records.

Hawkins' inclusion in the black literary canon now seemed to hinge on a single piece of evidence: a photograph in the frontispiece of her first novel, Megda, in which she appeared to have a dark complexion. Pressured by Jackson's findings, Gates readily conceded that a mistake had apparently been made regarding Hawkins' identity:

Asked for his guess as to why anyone believed that Kelley-Hawkins was black, Gates offered what seems the simplest explanation. ''I think it was the picture," he said. The two novels show the author's shadowy photograph, which could easily be perceived as that of a light-skinned African-American.

''You put that picture up in my barbershop," Gates said, ''and I guarantee the vote would be to make her a sister."

When I posted on the Hawkins story here and here, I received a comment from Katherine Flynn, an independent researcher who reported that she had the goods on Hawkins before Jackson and was proofreading a peer-reviewed article on the subject when the Boston Globe piece came out. (Flynn's work was also cited by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed.) This news made my fellow Cliopatriate Tim Burke "desperate to know what Katherine Flynn's article is going to say when it comes out."

We need wait no longer. Dr. Flynn was kind enough to mail me an offprint of her article, "A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity: Finding Emma Dunham (nee Kelley) Hawkins," which appeared in the March 2006 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Flynn's article is a heroic piece of detective work, which includes all the decisive census data that Jackson cited and much more besides. Flynn has traced more than four generations of Hawkins' family through census, probate, and newspaper records, definitively establishing that there is no evidence to believe that Hawkins ever identified as an African American or had ancestors who did. And in case Professor Gates is still looking for a photograph to test in his "barber shop" experiment, the cover of the Quarterly also features another more light-complexioned photograph of Hawkins in Flynn's possession.

Flynn also includes her painstaking research into the origins of the idea that Hawkins was an African American author, some of which I'll quote below without Flynn's extensive footnotes:

Who first identified Emma as African American and when? The presence of an original copy of Megda in the Schomburg Collection is often noted. [From Flynn's footnote: "The Schomburg Collection was founded by the 1926 donation of the personal collection of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg."]

Flynn was unsatisfied by that answer, not only because Schomburg and other "contemporary black bibliophiles" like Alain Locke never mentioned Hawkins in their writings, but also because there is no conclusive evidence that the original Schomburg donation included Megda. Citing correspondence files from the Schomburg's archive and conversations with archivists, Flynn reports the following:

The Schomburg's oldest extant catalog is dated 1962 with supplements in 1967, 1972 and 1974. Not until the 1975 update, published in 1976, were Megda and Emma Dunham Kelley indexed with the annotation "Negro author."

The Schomburg reported no acquisition record extant for its original copy of Megda, which lacks the distinctive bookplate for Arthur Schomburg's personal collection. The volume bears the bookplate for the "Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture," a name not used until 1972. A bookplate for one of the Schomburg's previous names is not evident.

Emma Kelley is also absent from studies of African American literature through 1948. Her earliest appearance in this context is in the 1955 first edition of the landmark chronology, A Century of Fiction by American Negroes 1853-1952: A Descriptive Bibliography, by Maxwell Whiteman. Whiteman's letters to Schomburg Collection curator Jean Blackwell ask for feedback on an early draft of this book. It is highly likely that it was Whiteman who first assigned Emma Kelley to the African American canon after finding the 1892 edition of Megda in 1953. It may be Whiteman's own copy of Megda that is in the Schomburg Collection today. Whiteman's papers at Temple University are sealed and documents by and about [Jean] Blackwell Hutson yield no further clues.

Although identified as a black author in 1955, Emma's place in the canon was not secure until Megda was accessioned into the Schomburg Collection in 1976. Emma's second novel, Four Girls at Cottage City, was unknown to African American literature studies until its discovery in 1983 by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and ironically it inspired the compilation of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers. To scholars the actual setting of the novel was another coded clue to the black heritage claimed for Emma. Cottage City, on Nantucket [according to an enclosed errata strip, this should read "on Martha's Vineyard"], had been a popular resort for the rising black middle class. That demographic shift did not begin until the 1920s, however, more than thirty years after Kelley wrote her novel.

There you have it. The idea that Hawkins was a black woman can be traced to one Whiteman.

The whole story inspires newfound appreciation for good librarians and archivists, since it shows how damaging an ambiguous accession record can be to scholarship. One mistake is hard to root out of the literature and even harder to root out of popular consciousness. Indeed, despite all the media attention to this story last year, and despite the claim of Brandeis University's PR people that Jackson's work had inspired the removal of Hawkins' work from the Schomburg collection, the mistaken identity of Hawkins lingers on the Internet. Flynn's footnotes also alerted me to the fact that the digital edition of the Schomburg Collection still features The Photograph of Hawkins on its splash page. And the online Collection also still includes Megda. Granted, the webpage reports that the digital collection was copyrighted in 1999, before all this news broke. But it may be time for an update.

(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)

Wherein some advice is offered, and some advice is sought

2006-06-02T15:54:00.000-04:00

1. Advice offered: You should buy your next briefcase from Lands End. About ten (10) years ago I received a Lands End Square Rigger Deluxe Attache as a gift. It proved to be the most rugged bag I had ever used; since the canvas for the bag is actually the same material used in sails, it is entirely waterproof and can take quite a licking. The only part of the bag that succumbed to the beating I gave it was the fabric loop that connects the shoulder strap to the bag. In college, that loop broke off while I was crossing a street with the book-laden bag. But this brings me to the reason why you should buy your next bag from Lands End: when they offer a lifetime guarantee on their products, they mean it. I simply returned my bag in the mail and had it repaired and sent to me quickly by UPS Ground. That repaired loop lasted me about six years, until I broke it again two weeks ago. This time, I was skeptical about the guarantee and called Lands End. But, true to their word, they told me that while they no longer repair luggage, they would accept my old bag for an even exchange with a new one. They weren't lying: after sending them my beat up, ten-year-old, broken bag, a brand spanking new bag arrived today from UPS -- at no charge and with no questions asked. Better yet, the sholder strap loops on the new bag are made of leather, so this one should be even more indestructible than ever.

2. Advice sought: I've recently purchased a new digital camera and have been looking into various online photo servers like Flickr. I like Flickr a lot, but before shelling out $25/year for the "pro" upgrade, I thought I'd ask whether any of you, gentle readers, think that this upgrade is worth the money. I'm also uncertain whether Flickr is the best service for allowing family members and friends to order prints of my pictures. I know Flickr does have an ordering option, but since I've never used it, I'm curious whether it works well.

3. Advice offered and sought: I see I'm not the only one trying to plan a move. As Sameer notes, finding a good rental at a distance is difficult--even more so when you'd prefer a house or duplex for rent over an apartment. (I have nothing against apartments, you understand, but my wife and I would like to close the apartment chapter of our lives if we can.) Like Sameer, I've posted ads on Craigslist and the lesser-known Backpage, but I've also found Rentclicks to be an extremely useful site, particularly for non-apartment rental properties. Setting up email alerts for particular searches is very easy to do, and the individual property pages have handy links to Google Maps and images. (Downloading Google Earth, by the way, has been extremely helpful in researching the move. Not only does it give you satellite images of particular addresses like Google Maps, but it also allows you to see what kinds of stores, parks, restaurants, etc., are nearby, which can be helpful for making sense of a neighborhood. You can also measure distances more easily in Google Earth than you can in Maps.)

I'm a bit more at a loss when it comes to deciding on a moving company. It's pretty clear that hiring professional movers is out of the question for us, but I'm still trying to decide between renting a truck from Penske and hiring a "You Pack, We Move" service like ABF U-Pack or Door-to-Door. I probably wouldn't be considering these latter options at all if I were not so stunned by the high price of rental trucks these days, which is only compounded by the high price of gas. The prices I've been quoted by Penske and U-Haul are over twice as high as the price I paid to rent a truck when I moved to Baltimore. Still, I'm not sure the "you pack" options are worth the hassle, especially since the price difference seems to be marginal unless you're moving a small amount of stuff. Thoughts?

I've discovered, by the way, that where you rent your Penske truck can make a big difference in price. If I rent my truck here in Baltimore, it will cost me upwards of $1600. (If I were renting a truck in College Park, it would cost another $600 more.) But if I'm willing to drive forty-five minutes to York, PA, I can take about $400 off the Baltimore price. If you're willing to veer off the beaten path to pick up your truck, it's worth looking at some of the smaller towns in your area. Mileage on a Penske truck is unlimited and you have eight days to use it, so it won't cost you much to make a short road trip to pick it up.

History links

2006-06-02T15:26:00.000-04:00

The latest edition of the History Carnival, Part I, is up at Aqueduct. Amy Stevens has also posted a list of all the nominations for the Carnival ... perhaps with the unintended effect of shaming those of us who have been derelict in our nominating duties, like yours truly.

J. L. Bell has started a new blog on Boston during the Revolutionary War, which promises "history, analysis, and unabashed gossip" on the subject.

Last night while poking around in Podcasts on iTunes, I discovered a video podcast for "History 7B," the second half of the American history survey at UC-Berkeley. (Subtext: my extremely generous parents bestowed upon me a brand new video iPod for graduation!) Crooked Timber notes the availability of other such podcasts, which come free of charge. Mills at Edwired has already noted the iTunesification of higher education and is blogging the revolution.

The colored expatriates of the American Revolution

2006-05-22T09:06:00.000-04:00

I'm a little behind the curve in linking to this, but Harvard historian Jill Lepore had an interesting review in the New Yorker earlier this month. The two books under review, by Simon Schama and Cassandra Pybus, document the lives of the thousands of enslaved Americans who fled behind British lines during the Revolutionary War. Both books sound well worth the read; I flipped through the Pybus volume at a bookstore recently and would like to read more, especially after Evan's recommendation of Pybus's other work.

An early paragraph in Lepore's review also caught my eye. Lepore argues that those slaves who left American shores with the British "also left American history. Or, rather, they have been left out of it. Theirs is not an undocumented story ... it’s just one that has rarely been told, for a raft of interesting, if opposing, reasons."

Lepore somewhat overstates her historiographical case here. Sylvia Frey's important book on slave resistance during the Revolutionary War is now 15 years old, and the works of Benjamin Quarles and Herbert Aptheker on the same subject are even older. (Judging from my quick scan, Pybus acknowledges this long tradition of scholarship even as she revises earlier estimates about how many slaves escaped to British lines.)

But Lepore's claim is even more of an overstatement if she intended to say that amnesia about those slaves who joined the British had already set in during the Revolutionary generation. The earliest generations of Americans had the stories of those slaves very much in mind. This was because, in the first place, debates about whether American slaveowners would be compensated for their losses during the War loomed large in the early diplomatic history of the United States. But white Americans also lost plenty of sleep in the early nineteenth century because of the example of flight that Revolutionary slaves had set: perennial fears of war with Britain were always compounded in the antebellum period by fears that such a war would inspire a general slave revolt or a sudden surge of runaways. Twenty-first century Americans may forget about the colored expatriates of the American Revolution, but nineteenth-century Americans could not.

But I think what Lepore means is that the story of these expatriates has not, until now, been told in a way that appreciates their dramatic heroism. The reason she gives for this oversight, though, is curious:

A major [reason the expatriates' story has not been told] is that nineteenth-century African-American abolitionists decided that they would do better by telling the story of the many blacks who fought on the patriot side during the Revolution, and had therefore earned for their race the right to freedom and full citizenship and an end to Jim Crow. “Not a few of our fathers suffered and bled” in the cause of American independence, Peter Williams, Jr., declared in a Fourth of July oration in New York in 1830. (Williams’s own father, who had joined American troops in defiance of his Loyalist master, later managed to purchase his freedom and went on to help found the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.) When the Boston abolitionist William Cooper Nell published “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution,” in 1855, Harriet Beecher Stowe supplied an introduction:

"The colored race have been generally considered by their enemies, and sometimes even by their friends, as deficient in energy and courage. Their virtues have been supposed to be principally negative ones. This little collection of interesting incidents, made by a colored man, will redeem the character of the race from this misconception."

Best not to mention those who fled to the British. Having abandoned the United States, they not only were of no use in redeeming “the character of the race”; they had failed to earn the “passport” to citizenship that Nell believed patriot service conferred.

Lepore is right to call attention here to the ways that African American writers often used the patriotic service of black Revolutionary soldiers as arguments for full citizenship. But those arguments should be placed in a larger context. One reason writers like Peter Williams, Jr., needed to stress their loyalty to the United States was because, in the 1820s and 1830s, many ostensibly antislavery Americans were also colonizationists, who wanted to expatriate free African Americans to Liberia or some other distant colony. In the battle with colonizationism, the example of voluntary expatriates during the Revolution was a dangerous card to play. For the same reason, black emigrationists in the 1830s were often excoriated by other African American writers for deserting the pursuit of American citizenship by moving to Africa or elsewhere. (Consider the case of John Brown Russwurm.)

The influence of colonizationism in the early antislavery movement needs to be remembered here, if only because it indicates that African American historians did not make their choices about what to emphasize in a social vacuum. Their polemical choices were constrained in part by the arguments they were arrayed against. If it was "best not to mention those who fled to the British," it was less because writers like Nell thought that such flight disqualified black persons from full American citizenship and more because it might conceivably strengthen the hand of those who wanted to remove all black people from American shores.

What's striking, though, is that even with the liabilities that writers like Nell faced, many African American writers did mention those slaves who fled to the British, despite Lepore's claims to the contrary. In fact, even William Cooper Nell, in his famous "Colored Patriots of the American Revolution," mentioned the colored expatriates too. If you scroll down to page 298 of Nell's work, you'll find an extended discussion of the subject:

Many of the slaves who engaged in the battle [of New Orleans, during the War of 1812,] were induced to do so from promises of freedom; but the sequel proved that a false hope had been held out to them, numbers being ordered to the cotton-fields to resume their unrequited toil, for the benefit of those for whom their own lives had been jeoparded on the bloody field of battle. The British took advantage of these violated pledges, and induced many colored Americans, panting for the freedom which, theirs as a birthright, had been confirmed by deeds of valor and patriotism, to accept free homes under the banner of England.

ANTHONY GILL was one of the soldiers remanded to work again for his master, when he was accosted by General Packenham, who, learning that he was a slave, told him to put down his hoe, follow him, and become a free man. He did so; and is now undisputed owner of fifty-two acres of free soil, in St. Johns, N. B. His son resides in Boston, Mass.

This is but one of numerous instances, of which there are abundant testimonies.

"When the British evacuated Charleston, in 1782, (says Ramsay, in his History of South Carolina,) Governor Matthews demanded the restoration of some thousands of negroes who were within their lines. These, however, were but a small part of the whole taken away at the evacuation, but that number is very inconsiderable when compared with the thousands that were lost from the first to the last of the war. It has been computed by good judges, that, between the years 1775 and 1783, the State of South Carolina lost TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND NEGROES." [At least a fifth part of all the slaves in the State at the beginning of the war.]

... And the same candid historian, describing the invasion of next year says:--"The slaves a second time flocked to the British Army."

Dr. Ramsay, being a native and resident of Charleston, enjoyed every facility for ascertaining the facts in the case; but his testimony does not stand alone; Col. Lee, of Virginia, in his "Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department," confirms the statement.

"Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, (says Burke, in his History of Virginia,) after escaping from Williamsburg, in 1775, to a vessel in James River, offered liberty to those slaves who would join him. It appears, from the history, that one hundred of them were soon after enumerated among his forces. How many more joined him does not appear."

Mr. Jefferson, then Secretary of State, in a letter to Hammond, Minister of Great Britain, dated Philadelphia, December 15, 1791, says:--"On withdrawing the troops from New York, a large embarkation of negroes, the property of the inhabitants of the United States, took place. A very great number was carried off in private vessels, without admitting the inspection of the American Commissioners."

... The same important admission was made in debate, on the floor of Congress, 30th March, 1790, some time after the war, by Mr. Burke, a Representative from South Carolina. "There is not a gentleman," said he, "on this floor, who is a stranger to the feeble situation of our State, when we entered into the war to oppose the British power. We were not only without money, without an army or military stores, but were few in number, and likely to be entangled with our domestics, in case the enemy invaded us."

Similar testimony to the weakness engendered by slavery was also borne by Mr. Madison, in debate in Congress. "Every addition," said that distinguished gentleman, "they (Georgia and South Carolina) receive to their number of slaves, tends to weaken them, and render them less capable of self-defence."

These passages from Nell's work do double duty: in the first place, they demonstrate the inability of Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison to elide the flight of slaves to British lines from the historical record, and in the second place, they belie Lepore's claim that Nell thought it best not to even mention the example of these expatriates. As the context around these passages shows, Nell could use their example to the same argumentative ends for which he used the examples of colored patriots: to highlight the hypocrisy of an American nation that claimed to be a land of freedom while also being a land of slavery. Nell also played on popular fears of slave insurrections and slave disloyalty by warning that slavery was a military liability for the Southern states.

To be fair, Lepore is right that these references to the colored expatriates of the American Revolution were probably rarer in the works of black abolitionists than references to the colored patriots. But that discrepancy, I think, deserves some closer examination. To date, historiography on African American abolitionists has tended to erect a false binary: either they claimed the mantle of the American Revolution or they cast it off. The subtler historical story, which still needs to be told, is that black writers alternately identified themselves with the Revolution and rejected it, depending on the argument at hand. David Walker's Appeal, for instance, ends by quoting the Declaration of Independence at length and by staking a claim to its promises. At the same time, though, earlier parts of the Appeal implied that British promises of freedom were more authentic than American ones:

The English are the best friends the coloured people have upon earth. Though they have oppressed us a little and have colonies now in the West Indies, which oppress us sorely.--Yet notwithstanding they (the English) have done one hundred times more for the melioration of our condition, than all the other nations of the earth put together. The blacks cannot but respect the English as a nation, notwithstanding they have treated us a little cruel.

There is no intelligent black man who knows any thing, but esteems a real Englishman, let him see him in what part of the world he will--for they are the greatest benefactors we have upon earth. We have here and there, in other nations, good friends. But as a nation, the English are our friends. (Appeal, p. 47)

So Lepore's review has gotten me thinking. I think we still need a better understanding than we currently have of the way that African American abolitionists thought about the American Revolution. It is clear, at least, that their thinking was not monolithic or unchanging, but was instead complex and flexible. When it suited their purposes to praise the English as their "greatest benefactors," they did so, while they also emphasized their loyalty to America when it served other purposes (like refuting the arguments of colonizationists). At least in many cases, it seems evident that the first loyalty of writers like Walker and Nell was to the "coloured people." And their portrayals of both the patriots and the expatriates of the Revolution were defined, if not always singularly determined, by that priority.

Links

2006-05-17T08:24:00.000-04:00

The latest edition of the History Carnival is up at Airminded. Buckle your seatbelts!

Sepoy has a must-read manifesto for historians at Chapati Mystery. It is an extended riff on an essay by the recently deceased Jaroslav Pelikan, "The Historian as Polyglot" (JSTOR subscription required; the essay appears in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 137 [1993]).

Pelikan argues that "the historian's ability to move back and forth between past and present is analogous to the ability to handle more than one language, and ... the historian needs to be able to speak both 'past-ese' and 'present-ese.'" He then describes the historian as an interpreter, who tries to make the past "intelligible" to a present-day audience, primarily by enabling them to momentarily suspend their disbelief that our ancestors actually believed the things that they did. My own favorite quote from the Pelikan essay:

My own favorite quote from the Pelikan essay:

Almost no one, perhaps, is so completely bilingual or polyglot as to have shed every trace of accent in every language. ... So also ... there will still be a trace, or considerably more than a trace, of present-ese in the way any historian speaks past-ese. Pretending that it is not there is the self-delusion of objectivist historians in the past and in the present; but pretending that it vitiates the entire historical enterprise is the self-delusion of a solipsistic existentialism ... which is so turned in upon itself that it is incapable of suspending disbelief ...

Finally, Scrivener makes a good point about the apparent indifference of many Americans to President Bush's use of the NSA to keep tabs on their phone calls:

Any of the Republicans who're so busy defending the administration on this one and explaining why it's so important for the government to have such completely unchecked power willing to go on record that they believe future Democratic presidents should continue to have the power to spy on every single American citizen, including candidates from the GOP and journalists and CEOs and regular, everyday, law-abiding gun owners?

Snark aside, that's a serious question. It's one thing for the administration's defenders to say, "We don't have anything to hide." But what happens when the executive branch decides to change what it's looking for? Suppose a President decides that domestic gun violence is a threat to national security and starts to indiscriminately gather private phone records to trace networks of gun sales. Then, no doubt, some of the people who currently "have nothing to hide" suddenly would. And that's why this is a matter that should rise above partisan politics. This is why civil liberties have to be a matter of principle and procedural justice -- because administrations come and go, and they each bring their own agendas with them. If that agenda includes a desire to stamp out terrorists or guns or [fill in the blank], that's fine: but let the agenda be debated and executed in public view. If an administration has nothing to hide, it won't be so spooked by the scrutiny of its constituents.

So long, West Wing

2006-05-15T08:28:00.000-04:00

For diehard fans of the series, last night's finale was a bit anticlimactic. Instead of featuring the kind of rapid repartee and thoughtful dialogue that made the show great, the episode mostly featured swelling theme music and lingering close-ups. I'm willing to bet it was one of the shortest screenplays in the history of the series, so sparse was the dialogue.

So let me just get off my chest what every diehard fan of West Wing is thinking this morning: "Boooooooo, NBC. Booooooo. Not only have you pulled the plug on one of the best shows on television; you didn't have the decency to let the show's fans say goodbye." Apparently NBC cancelled plans for a one-hour retrospective because it didn't want to pay the actors to participate. So instead the series finale was preceded by a rerun of the pilot episode. Our local television critic pretty much nailed it: "A rerun is no way to send off a series that has brought such honor to a network for seven years." To add insult to injury, the show was followed by a two-hour season finale to the third-tier Law and Order franchise, Criminal Intent.

I'll miss West Wing, and not just for the usually stated reasons that it elevated the tone of political discourse and wasn't embarrassed by its intelligence. (One of the television reporters portrayed in last night's episode actually used the word "eschew.") I have to say I'll also miss its unabashed utopianism. I'm aware that the show was often criticized for presenting a naively idealistic vision of White House politics and for populating the West Wing with leftist fantasies. (Case in point: in the final episode, as White House staffers are packing up the Oval Office, the camera reveals that President Bartlett has a copy of a book by Michel Foucault on his bookshelf. It's fantastic enough to imagine that a book by a Frenchman would even be on the grounds of the present White House, much less a book in the Oval Office and much less a book by Foucault.)

But we need fantasies. We need utopias to show us what kinds of alternative realities are possible, especially when most of what we get on the airwaves these days falls under the rubric of "reality" television. Survivor island is a paltry substitute for Gonzalo's. Yes, the West Wing writers knew they were idealists, but that's why they didn't have to start every episode with a disclaimer about how the characters and storylines are all fictional, as many episodes of Law and Order do. The writers had no problem with the fact that they were writing fiction, and so they just concentrated on doing a fine job of writing fiction. And at their best, the fictions they constructed helped Americans visualize different possible worlds. Yes, it was utopian for newly elected Democratic President Matthew Santos to offer a cabinet-level position to his opponent, Republican Senator Arnold Vinick. (And yes, it was even more utopian for Vinick to accept.) But that's the function that West Wing served: it articulated the wildest dreams of its audience and then showed how those dreams, if actualized, wouldn't be so bad.

I'm not praising the utopianism of the West Wing just because it happened to be a liberal utopianism. (And to be honest, there were aspects of President Bartlett's presidency with which even a leftist could quibble mightily, especially his Clintonian eagerness to use air strikes to solve international crises.) I'm confident that the show would have served the same important function if the White House had been held by a Democrat for the last six years. And according to this column, the writers were actually planning to elevate Vinick, the John McCain-like Republican candidate, to the presidency if the show had not been cancelled. That would have been a fascinating transition, and I guarantee I would have kept tuning in. Our current political culture suffers not only from a lack of utopianism, but also from the fact that any utopian vision is immediately branded as the fevered dream of a present-day partisan. West Wing, for the most part, gave us well-realized utopias without shoe-horning them into our current political categories.

One of the good pieces of dialogue from last night's episode was between Santos and his wife just after they had attended an Inauguration Day mass. Pictured inside their limousine, Helen Santos turns to the President-Elect and says that the priest was pushing "that swords into ploughshares" thing pretty hard. Without missing a beat, Santos says, "That's what we need," or something to that effect. It might as well have been a bit of dialogue between an NBC executive and a West Wing writer. Utopian visions of swords turning into ploughshares may not sell shares, but they are definitely what we need.

Friday shuffle

2006-05-12T15:10:00.000-04:00

1. "I Want to be Happy," by Monk, from Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins
2. "My Ship," by Roland Kirk, from I Talk to the Spirits
3. "Little One," by Herbie Hancock, from Maiden Voyage
4. "Blues Changes," by Ray Bryant
5. "Summer Night," by Keith Jarrett, from Tokyo '96
6. "Just One of Those Things," by Billie Holiday, from Songs for Distingue Lovers
7. "Equinox," by John Coltrane, from Coltrane's Sound
8. "Mingus Fingus No. 2," by Charles Mingus, from Pre-Bird
9. "Airegin," by Miles Davis, from Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet
10. "My Sin," by Hank Mobley, from The Turnaround

Transnational history posts

2006-05-12T14:32:00.000-04:00

I recently discovered, thanks to my Statcounter, that Mode for Caleb pops up as the top hit for "transnational history" both in Google and in Yahoo. To be honest, I'm a little horrified by the prospect that searchers might stumble over here looking for authoritative ruminations on the subject, especially since the Number One hit was my earliest and sketchiest post on the subject.

This is the way it often happens with blog posts: the ones you hammer out quickly end up rising in the search engines for various reasons, at which point you wish you had spent more time on them in the first place. Supportive as I am of academic blogging, this is one reason why I'm not as keen on blogs as an ultimate replacement for journals, books, and the like. The capital investment required for such traditional publications doesn't automatically or necessarily make them better than the work you can find online, but it certainly makes the production of them more deliberate.

At any rate, in case future surfers come here for information and commentary on transnational history, I thought it would be helpful at least to collect a list of my posts on the subject, partly so that no single one of them is taken as my final word and partly to underline the lengthy stretch of time that separates them. In chronological order, here they are:

September-October 2004
Transnational history
Globalization versus "globalization"

April 2006
Transnational political history
More on transnational history
Avoiding the bends
(Also, see the Cliopatria symposium on transnational history.)

The cult of information

2006-05-12T10:46:00.000-04:00

Most modern Americans place an extraordinary amount of trust in the executive branch to wield an extraordinary amount of power. And in many cases, I suspect, that trust is predicated on a basic presumption: that the government has more information than civilians do, and is therefore in a better position to make informed decisions about national security.

I suspect that Americans have silenced countless niggling doubts about the Bush administration's policies by appealing to that presumption: "I don't really see what Secretary Powell sees in that picture of trailers, but he probably has more information than he's able to share with the public." "Sure, the UN's inspectors haven't found any WMD in Iraq, but the President would not be pushing for war unless he knew something that we don't." "It makes me nervous that people are being held indefinitely at Gauntanamo Bay, but the government has information that points to their guilt." "I'm not worried about my phone being wiretapped because I have nothing to hide, and the government already knows who it needs to listen to."

To be fair, these arguments are not unreasonable on their face. The government does possess information that is not public, and Americans have long grown accustomed to accepting what our early nineteenth-century forbears could never accept: that it is sometimes a good thing for the government to be opaque, that sometimes decision-makers must act on information that cannot be disclosed to people at large. (Try convincing an antebellum Anti-Mason of that.)

But the problem with the above rationalizations starts to show when we learn more about how the government gets its information, when we start to see the sausages being made. For example, we start to find out about wrongful renditions of terrorist suspects that were based on an intelligence official's "hunch" rather than on indisputable information. Even more unsettling, it starts to become clear that even when a government official puts aside her hunches and chooses to act on the information she has, mistakes can still be made: a person is wrongfully arrested, for instance, because his name matches one on a list of terrorist suspects, or because it looks awfully like a name on the list. (Remember this?)

These kinds of revelations not only reveal that the government's decisions are not always made in a context of information surplus. They also expose the fact that information alone does not make fallible human beings somehow infallible. If my wife sends me to the grocery store with a list that includes a request for a frozen Stauffer's macaroni and cheese meal, because said meals are on sale this week, one could reasonably suppose that I am armed with all the information I need to make the correct purchase. Yet I could still come home with the wrong meal if I reached into the freezer case with the sale sign and picked up the "family size" package, instead of the individually sized meal that my wife wanted to take in her lunch to work. (If this story sounds a little too realistic to be a hypothetical scenario, that's because it isn't.) Was I informed? Yes. I was certainly in a better position to purchase what my wife wanted than you would have been if you were told to go into the store without the list I had. But did that information make me infallible? No. At the risk of making a crude analogy, just because the government has a really long list of information, annotated in incredible detail, does not mean they will always grab the right thing when they reach into the freezer.

There is another reason, however, why the "appeal to information" is a flawed justification for some kinds of government behavior. Even if we were to accept that some government actions can be justified on the basis of better information, we can't appeal to the government's superior information to justify the means it uses to gather information. You can't simply dismiss random data mining like the NSA's phone number database by saying that the people behind the program know more than we do, because the data mining is the process by which they come to know more. The government is casting its nets this wide not because it has more information than we do, but precisely because its information is so incomplete.

Likewise, you can't simply justify the indefinite incarceration of Guantanamo inmates by saying that the government has more information, when at the same time the government's defense for their incarceration is that it needs more information. The NSA's mining of phone records, the alleged secret raids into Iran to scout for evidence of WMDs, the CIA's secret rendition of countless suspects--these kinds of things are uncomfortable reminders of the government's own information deficit. Yet I suspect they are routinely, subconsciously justified by the presumption that the government has more information than we do. The reasoning, stripped to its barest logic, starts to look like a paradox: the government can use any means to get information because of the information it has.

All of this reflection has put me in a speculative mood: Why is the popular faith in the government's better "information" so powerful as to be almost incorrigible? Perhaps some answers can be found by thinking about broader cultural trends. The most-watched dramas on TV--C.S.I., Law and Order, 24, etc.--all reinforce the popular idea that the relevant experts have easy access to staggering amounts of information. Hollywood helps us construct our fantasy of the rooms that exist behind the closed doors: in those rooms, we fantasize, there are banks of gleaming computers whose screens practically radiate data. (They never look exactly like our computers, of course; the computers in those rooms are already a generation ahead of the ones we have.) There are tools that allow medical examiners to solve a murder on the merest of forensic clues. When President Bartlett enters the Situation Room and sits down, he is immediately bombarded by a stream of information, by everything he needs to make a decision.

Before you read further, let me remind you that I'm already in a speculative mood. But as long as I'm speculating, I sometimes wonder what future historians will identify as our generation's "cult." The antebellum period had its "cult of domesticity"; the late nineteenth century its "cult of masculinity." The cultural habits and discourses of earlier generations were shot through, we now understand, with hundreds of unspoken rules and assumptions that their contemporaries only dimly perceived.

I wonder if our age is shaped by a similar "cult of information." I wonder if future historians will be more aware than we are of the blindspots that our faith in the seemingly benign power of information produces. Our forbears waxed poetic about the sublime powers of steel and steam, about the progress ushered in by an industrial age. We can see in retrospect, as some visionaries saw at the time, that the Age of Industry (for all its real advances) had its darker aspects. And perhaps, when future historians are trying to understand the justifications that have been offered for the Bush administration's grasp at executive power, they will see those justifications partly as the detritus of our culture's sanguine hopes in the power of Information Technology.

We rave of the power of the Internet to put information at our fingertips, for example, of the ability of computers and reports and new media to surround us in a protective mantle of information. But is there not a dark side to this Information Age? Isn't there a sense in which the culture itself (and not just the Bush administration in particular) is responsible for making access to information seem like a summum bonum, like an end that justifies any means? For all the good that modern empiricism has brought into the world, this is one of its potentially poisoned fruits: the idea that we can ultimately use information to build an impregnable bulwark against error. And when that false idea is joined with our post-industrial faith in technology, the result is a faith that information technology is the surest path to security.

Perhaps the only way to unsettle the "appeal to information" that justifies all kinds of illicit government behavior is to unsettle, more fundamentally, the "appeal to information" itself, which serves in many ways as the defining appeal of our age. In earlier days, conversations could be settled just by appealing to the divine right of kings, or the separate spheres in which men and women belonged. You mentioned certain values--like obedience to established authority, or to the preservation of feminine virtue--and arguments came to an end, not because those values were logically invincible but because they were taken for granted as the ultimate sources from which certain ethical and moral decisions flowed. It was the very ability of these things to serve as conversation stoppers that makes it reasonable for historians to speak of the cult of absolutism or the cult of domesticity.

Are we living in an age when conversations can be similarly settled, just by appealing to the beneficent ideal of total information awareness? And given the incantatory odes that many of us sing to the all-seeing eyes of Google Earth, or the transformative power of RSS, or the keyword revolution, should we be surprised when those same incantations are mouthed, in slightly different forms, to cover a multitude of sins?

Interpreter needed

2006-05-10T12:24:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of Paste Magazine, particularly because of its excellent monthly sampler CDs. Thanks to those CDs, it's easy to be introduced to marvelous music like Neko Case's single, "Star Witness," off of her new album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.

But every so often, one of the Paste reviewers starts speaking in strange tongues. Here, for instance, is William Bowers' review of Case's new album, pulled from the April/May issue:

In the same way Liam Neeson functions in the film world as gravitas-for-hire, the guest list for Neko Case's new album reads like a receipt from the tumbleweed-skiffle department of a Tuscon-area Rent-A-Cred; gracing this project are locals Howe Gelb, and Calexico, plus out-of-towners Kelly Hogan, Dexter Romweber and Garth Hudson, to name a few. Case, of course, still approximates a Northwestern Patsy Cline with a graduate degree, and while the stories she tells are mournful, her delivery remains buoyant. If an odd spiritual ("John Saw That Number") didn't reveal her hand, you couldn't be blamed for thinking Case was working to establish a new kind of magical-realist gospel, or Optimism Gothic. Despite the risk-avoidant, "for-grown-ups" tone of the arrangements, wrenching tunes such as "Dirty Knife" and "Lion's Jaws" easily teleport the listener to a mystical denim prom with a very dusty welcome mat and decorations inspired by an outsider artist's personal, widow-clogged Narnia.

Huh?

Karon on Iran

2006-05-10T09:19:00.000-04:00

I can't remember who it was, but someone in my corner of the blogosphere recently introduced me to Rootless Cosmopolitan, the blog of South African journalist Tony Karon. Over the last week, Karon has had some really interesting commentary on Iran-U.S. relations--here, there, everywhere.

Nineteenth-century American history

2006-05-09T19:18:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been working on planning the courses I'll be teaching in the fall. One of them -- a survey of United States history in the nineteenth century -- has been fun to think about because the periodization of the course is slightly different from the usual U. S. survey.

The bookends for a typical survey course tend to be the Revolution or the colonization of North America, on the one hand, and the Civil War or Reconstruction on the other. You start circa 1600 or circa 1776 and end in 1865 or 1877. That periodization, needless to say, helps select the kinds of themes that come to the fore: the entrenchment and eventual abolition of slavery, the simultaneous growth of nationalism and sectionalism, the transformation of the United States from an agrarian republic into a modern industrial nation, to name only a few. But what themes might come to the fore in a course that confines itself to the nineteenth century? What happens to a nineteenth-century course if you try to span the Civil War Era instead of stopping or beginning with it?

That's the question I've been puzzling over for the past several days, and asking it has been fruitful and fun. Mostly I've been thinking about what the "bookends" for the nineteenth century proper would be if we were to suspend the normal impulse to start with the Revolution and end with the Civil War. Then I've been thinking about how the major themes of a survey course might change if these unconventional bookends were substituted for the usual suspects. Here are the two most intriguing sets of bookends I've come up with:

The Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1898-1913). Starting and ending with these events underlines that the nineteenth century was the greatest period of territorial expansion in American history. In 1800, the total area of the nation amounted to a mere 891,364 square miles. By 1900, the total area had quadrupled to 3,618,770 square miles, and the United States found itself in the possession not only of a continent but of overseas colonies. (See the first table on this very helpful census page.)

The Revolution of 1800 (the election of Thomas Jefferson as president, which sparked the rise of political democratization and the rapid decline of the Federalists and the deferential politics they preferred) and the disfranchisement of African Americans throughout the South by 1900. The line that connects these two dots does not slope as clearly as the one that tracks the territorial growth of the United States. On the one hand, the nineteenth century was a period of revolutionary democratization, first witnessing the triumph of universal white manhood suffrage and then, with the Fifteenth Amendment, the triumph of universal manhood suffrage irrespective of race. (Incidentally, ending a course with 1865 or 1877 would essentially stop the trajectory of democracy's rise there--with its apogee instead of its nadir.) On the other hand, by the end of the century women still lacked equal political rights. The political rights of African Americans in the South had been systematically curtailed after the end of Reconstruction. And the establishment of a white herrenvolk republic in the Jacksonian period had taken place simultaneously with the violent and legal expulsion of Native Americans from the national community--an expulsion that continued to have ramifications well into the fourth quarter of the century.

With these bookends in mind, I've been sketching out a course that would focus on two related themes: (1) the expansion and growth of the American nation-state, and (2) struggles over the expansion and contraction of the national community.

These themes are, of course, intimately related to one another: expansion into the West provoked political debates about whether Native Americans could be assimilated into the nation, and the aggressive expansionism that underwrote the Mexican-American War set in motion the fateful debates about slavery and the political status of African Americans that would result in Civil War. Moreover, it was often the expansion of the territorial nation-state (frequently through military conflicts like the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War) that raised questions for white Americans about whether new populations of people (Mexicans, Filipinos, and Chinese, for instance) could or should be included in the nation. I've been thinking about books to assign that might spotlight the intersections between these two themes, and I've come up with at least four possibilities. (If I choose this particular quartet of books, they would also help bring out a third theme for the course: the relationship between politics and culture.)

Of course, there are major themes in nineteenth-century history not directly addressed by the two narrative foci that I'm thinking of. But many of them can be usefully folded into these larger themes. It's impossible to consider the continental expansion of the United States without considering industrialization and the cultural and political debates they unleashed about urbanization, immigration, and labor. (Consider, for example, the complex relationship between "Free Soil" ideology and "Free Labor" ideology in the antebellum period. And it's also worth noting that industrialization helped mark off the distance between Jeffersonian ideas about expansion and the imperialism of Mahan and Roosevelt at the end of the century: whereas Jefferson saw the Louisiana Purchase as a golden opportunity for the expansion of an agrarian republic, end-of-the-century expansionists had steel and steam-power on the brain.) At the same time, it's impossible to consider industrialization apart from debates about who would be included within the national community. (Consider, for example, the dense relationship between anti-labor views and nativist xenophobia, particularly in the wake of the Haymarket riots, or the roots of the democratizing Populist movement in the social and political dislocations caused by industrialization.)

So I think the major themes that would need to be covered in a nineteenth century course can be dealt with under the rubric of themes I'm describing. The interesting thing about pushing these themes forward is the way it would encourage students (and myself) to think about whether the Civil War was a full-stop caesura in the rhythms of nineteenth-century America. The War was, of course, the major event of the century; the course would not contest that. But it's also worth exploring the things that the War did not permanently change or only changed momentarily (like the political disempowerment of African Americans in the South), the processes that the War accelerated instead of arresting (like industrialization in the North), and the unintended consequences of the War's emancipatory effects (like the mantle of legitimacy it gave to late-nineteenth-century imperialists convinced that American civilization would be a blessing to the benighted world).

Choosing 1800 and 1900 as the rough endpoints for the course is, of course, somewhat arbitrary. Thinking in terms of centuries at all is arbitrary. (I could interpret "century" more loosely and make the course's subject the "long" nineteenth century, from the Revolution to World War I, but that would require my being able to change the 10-week fall quarter into the "long" fall quarter.) But I don't mind students seeing that the periodization of history is open to question, that all historical narratives have to start and stop somewhere even though the processes they narrate spill over the boundaries of the story. (This is a point I've tried to stress before in this first-day exercise.) Ideally, the course could encourage a conversation about whether my "endpoints" are the right ones for the stories we'll be discussing, about what subjects get left out of a narrative organized in this way, and about whether the nineteenth century coheres as a historical period or instead should be carved up into smaller analytical chunks like the early national period, the antebellum period, the postbellum period, and the turn of the century.

Obviously, though, my thoughts about the course are still embryonic (particularly regarding the possible readings) and any feedback would be welcome.

Friday shuffle

2006-05-05T09:13:00.000-04:00

1. "Bud on Bach," by Bud Powell, from Bud!
2. "Off Minor," by Thelonious Monk, from Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane
3. "Stolen Moments," by Oliver Nelson, from The Blues and the Abstract Truth
4. "After the Rain," by Duke Pearson, from Sweet Honey Bee
5. "Walkin' in Music," by Gary Burton, from Next Generation
6. "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square," by Sonny Rollins, from Without a Song
7. "Knives Out," by Brad Mehldau Trio, from Day is Done
8. "Gypsy Blue," by Freddie Hubbard, from Open Sesame
9. "You Stepped Out of a Dream," by Dexter Gordon, from A Swingin' Affair
10. "Mildama," by Clifford Brown and Max Roach, from Brown and Roach, Inc.

Two new-ish albums showed up in this shuffle: Next Generation by Gary Burton and Day is Done by Brad Mehldau. Both are easy to recommend.

Burton is a vibraphonist whose 1998 album, Like Minds, is one of my favorite albums from recent years. That album featured Burton alongside titanic sidemen like Chick Corea and Roy Haynes -- players who needed no introduction. But Next Generation introduces Burton with an extremely young band of players who are just getting started. It's saying a lot, therefore, to say that this album compares in quality with Like Minds.

Brad Mehldau is routinely touted in the jazz media as this generation's Bill Evans or Keith Jarrett. It shouldn't be too much longer before he's simply this generation's Brad Mehldau. One reason he is frequently compared to Evans and Jarrett is his penchant for reinventing popular songs and standards. But whereas Evans and Jarrett liked to mine Broadway and Tin Pan Alley for ballads to jazz up, Mehldau prefers to turn to the repertoire of Radiohead. "Knives Out," the song that appears in this shuffle, is Mehldau's interesting take on one of the creepiest tracks on Radiohead's Amnesiac. On one of his other recent albums -- a solo record made Live in Tokyo -- Mehldau plays an epic version of "Paranoid Android," one of the singles from Radiohead's masterpiece, OK Computer.

Mehldau also likes to cover Nick Drake, but he can handle Gershwin too: the Tokyo album features a Jarrett-esque version of "Someone to Watch Over Me" with a beautiful introduction by Mehldau. Playing around with introductions to standards hearkens back to Bill Evans, whose famous composition, "Peace Piece," started off as an improvised introduction to "Some Other Time."

Argh! Now I've spent half of a post comparing Mehldau to Jarrett and Evans too! Trust me, though: he doesn't need the comparisons to warrant a listen.

History Carnival

2006-05-02T10:35:00.000-04:00

It's hard to believe that the History Carnival is already thirty episodes old. It just keeps getting better, though. Check out the latest Carnival, hosted by Jeremy at Clioweb.

Jazz primer

2006-04-28T11:52:00.000-04:00

A friend recently emailed me to ask about which ten or fifteen jazz albums I would recommend to get his collection started. Actually, he asked me to list "the classics," but if I tried to make a list like that, I'd never finish it. So I'm interpreting the request much more narrowly. Instead of thinking about which albums a collection would have to include, I started to think a bit about which albums I heard early on. If these albums drew me in, then maybe they would work the same way for someone else.

Not necessarily, though. Tastes are different, and I suspect every jazz fan charts a different path into the music. My own entry points clustered around particular decades (the 1950s and the 1960s) and I initially neglected classic big band leaders like Duke Ellington and Count Basie. It also took me a while to branch into more recent artists and more avant-garde music. But I think a lot of people come to jazz through rock-jazz fusion artists like Weather Report or Pat Metheny and then work backwards to the period where I began. Others get introduced to Ellington, Louis Armstrong and the like and work forward to the kinds of albums I've listed below.

Nonetheless, having cleared my throat and aired some qualifiers, here are ten albums that I think serve as a reasonably good Jazz Primer (or at least a reasonably good recollection of some of my earliest finds). It's not a primer in the sense of providing an elementary survey; more of a primer in the sense that it might ignite interest in other albums. (I've cheated a little bit by grafting some of those other albums onto the main ten.) It's lengthy, yes, but let this be a lesson: don't ask a jazz fan to pontificate on jazz unless you want an earful!

At Basin Street / Clifford Brown and Max Roach (Emarcy) - The band that recorded this album (with Brown on trumpet, Roach on drums, and Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone) is a perfect guide to the 1950s, a transitional decade in jazz history. It bridged the genres of bebop and hard bop. In general, the boundaries between "bebop" and "bop" are blurry, but this is an album that at least gives some pretty clear examples from both sides of the divide. For example, if you like tracks such as "What is This Thing Called Love?" and "I'll Remember April," then you're probably going to like classic bepop -- a style pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie that placed a premium on virtuosity, blistering tempos, and technical variations on a standard set of chord changes. On the other hand, tracks like "Step Lightly (Junior's Arrival)" and "Powell's Prances" look ahead to the hard bop of groups like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and artists like Bud Powell (for whom "Powell's Prances" is named). Incidentally, Powell's trio album, The Scene Changes, was also one of my first jazz albums. Hard bop is hard to define: one of those "know it when you hear it" kind of things. Two characteristics leap to mind, though: hard-swinging rhythms (I find myself voluntarily tapping my feet or nodding my head) that often stop and change on a dime, and more complicated harmonies. In other words, groovy.

Saxophone Colossus / Sonny Rollins (Prestige) - An album in the same vein as the first. (Rollins appears on both.) As the title of the album suggests, the man is a giant on tenor saxophone. You can't really go wrong with anything he recorded. (It was hard to choose between this and Freedom Suite, one of the earliest albums I owned.) Rollins is generally renowned for being able to improvise for very long stretches without becoming redundant or losing the melody. "St. Thomas" is also an important track because it mixes Caribbean and Afro-Cuban sounds with traditional jazz instrumentation, thus anticipating Latin Jazz before it had really arrived. (If you like this, you might move on to Joe Henderson's Page One.)

Kind of Blue / Miles Davis (Columbia) - You'll find this album near or at the top of almost every list of Greatest Jazz Albums Ever, but even after listening to it for years, you'll have a hard time quibbling with that choice. It's one of the first widely successful examples of "modal jazz." From what I can gather, with my limited amount of musical training, this means that on each song Miles simply gave his band members a few unconventional chords within which to improvise and set them loose. The result, to an untrained ear like mine, might more appropriately be called "mood-al jazz," since it sets the bar for ambient music and can be a perfect remedy when your mood is "kind of blue." The album also represents a move away from bebop that was fundamentally different from "hard bop." Kind of Blue, in common parlance, is an early example of "post-bop," a style that more radically deconstructs the rhythms and harmonies of swing and bebop music than hard bop did. Whatever you call it, it is luminous, beautiful, and deeply poignant music. (Although Kind of Blue represented a departure for Miles from the band he had been recording with in the early 1950s, the albums produced for Prestige by that earlier quintet are also must haves, especially Relaxin', Workin', and Cookin'. I also highly recommend this box set that collects all of the music recorded for Columbia by Miles and Coltrane together, including Kind of Blue. I would also be deemed a heretic in some circles for saying this, but I think Cannonball Adderley's alto sax fits better on the Kind of Blue session than Coltrane's tenor sax, and Somethin' Else, another collaboration between Adderley and Davis, is something else you should hear.)

Blue Train / John Coltrane (Blue Note) - This is Coltrane's first and only recording as a leader for Blue Note Records (although he appears as a side-man on many other albums for this legendary label). If the Brown / Roach band straddled the bebop and hard bop divide, this is an album that dances around the boundaries between hard bop and "post bop." It is an especially excellent example of Coltrane's early use of a technique he would later become famous (and, to some critics, infamous) for using -- an approach to solo-ing that tried to create cascading "sheets of sound" instead of sticking to a linear melody. Like the best bop albums, Blue Train is drenched in the blues and never stops swinging. [NB: As Dacoit points out in the comments below, I could have listed Coltrane's Giant Steps here instead. Giant Steps was one of several great albums that Coltrane recorded as leader for Atlantic Records, and if you like it, I'd also recommend Coltrane's Sound and Coltrane Plays the Blues.]

Songs for Distingue Lovers / Billie Holiday (Verve) - It's nearly impossible to recommend a single album by Billie Holiday without recommending the whole oeuvre. But if you can find it, this underrated album is as good an introduction as any single CD. It also features musicians like Roy Eldridge and Ben Webster who were the heroes of the swing era before bebop exploded on the scene. So the album is a good way to whet your appetite for classic Ellington and Basie albums. It doesn't really include Bille Holiday's most legendary performances (on songs like "God Bless the Child" and "Strange Fruit"), but there are numerous "greatest hits" albums that collect tracks like these. The best that I've found, if you have the money to spend, is the two-disc Ultimate Billie Holiday Collection, which also includes a DVD of live performances and radio interviews with Lady Day.

Song for My Father / Horace Silver (Blue Note) - Another of the earliest albums I owned, this is a hard bop classic that showcases Joe Henderson on tenor sax. Silver is an infectious pianist, and I could easily have listed his other quintet albums for Blue Note here, especially Blowin' the Blues Away and Finger Poppin'. If you like one of these three albums, you'll like them all.

The Sidewinder / Lee Morgan (Blue Note) - Not generally listed as one of the classic hard bop albums, but it makes the list again because it is one of the earliest jazz albums I owned. Again, it features Joe Henderson (if the title of my blog didn't clue you in, I'm a big fan) and also a young Billy Higgins, one of my favorite drummers. A Blue Note album with Lee Morgan on trumpet is pretty much a safe bet anytime, and if you like this album, then you'll want to start exploring Morgan's larger body of work, along with similar albums recorded by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers(especially The Big Beat and Moanin') or Hank Mobley and Dexter Gordon, each of whom recorded a string of classic bop albums for Blue Note in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sunday at the Village Vanguard / Bill Evans (Riverside) - This is the first half of a two-album recording of a classic live concert by Evans' trio at the Village Vanguard. (The other is the equally excellent Waltz for Debby.) Evans was the moody, melancholy pianist who helped make Kind of Blue a classic (and also contributed to the more obscure but also wonderful Oliver Nelson album, The Blues and the Abstract Truth, which was cast in a similar mold). But in my mind, Evans is at his best in a trio setting, and particular with this trio of Paul Motian on drums and Scott LeFaro on bass. LeFaro was killed in a tragic car accident shortly after this album was made, and IMHO, Evans never found a better trio, although he recorded some excellent albums in the 1970s and 1980s. LeFaro's bass work is sui generis in many ways, and these albums are worth having just to hear his interaction with Evans' piano.

Crescent / John Coltrane (Impulse) - One of the albums recorded by Coltrane with the trinity of McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison -- the Classic Quartet. A Love Supreme is rightly regarded as this group's masterpiece, but I actually like Crescent, which was recorded just before Love Supreme, nearly as much. I heard them in the order they were recorded, and in some ways I also think Crescent is more accessible at first listen then Love Supreme because so many of the tracks are grounded in the blues. The middle three songs alone would stand together as a better album than many other artists could ever hope to record. Coltrane's late body of work, which was inaugurated by his albums with this quartet, is controversial and tends to inspire either love or hate. But Crescent is a good litmus test, I think, for whether you'll be interested in hearing more.

Miles Smiles / Miles Davis (Columbia) - Post-bop par excellence. Davis is generally thought to have recorded with two great quintets -- the one featuring John Coltrane that recorded the albums leading up to Kind of Blue, and the one that recorded this album, with Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams on drums, and Wayne Shorter as tenor saxophonist. The quintet is highly regarded partly because it had, in Hancock and Shorter, two of the most intriguing composers of their generation. The presence of Tony Williams also proved to be fateful for Miles, since Tony's influence interested Miles in the intersection between jazz and rock and roll. Their collaboration paved the way for the next phase of Davis's career, which experimented with electronic instruments and rock-like rhythms. (Exhibit A: In a Silent Way.) Miles Smiles is one of a quartet of albums that really go together: I could just as easily have listed E.S.P., Sorceror or Nefertiti. This band also launched Hancock, Shorter, and Carter into spectacular solo careers. Two of my "what would you take to a desert island?" albums are probably Maiden Voyage by Hancock and Speak No Evil by Shorter.

Well, it's a start, even though I'm horrified by some of the omissions here -- Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk to name only two. But there's much, much more advice for new jazz listeners on this page at All About Jazz. After making my list, I checked it against some of the lists and guides over there and think mine stands up reasonably well.

I'd also add two pieces of buying advice for starting a collection, based on my experience rather than on any expertise. First, one of my surefire habits early on was to acquire albums released in the Rudy Van Gelder Series by Blue Note. (The albums are prominently marked "RVG" on the cover and spine.) Van Gelder was a legendary recording engineer who manned the booth for the label's most famous albums, and this series (which is remastered, very reasonably priced, and often on sale at places like Borders) is a veritable hall of fame. I would recommend, in general, starting with the albums released early in the series, since Blue Note made sure to start with the truly great albums. Lately, they seem to be scraping the back of the vault, and whereas RVG releases used to be marketed as a kind of Blue Ribbon series, now the series includes virtually every re-release by Blue Note. Second, early on I often consulted The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD before buying albums. The authors can be pretty stingy with stars for albums that I love, and they also bestow a lot of praise on some albums that I don't. But in general, their advice can help steer someone just starting a collection, particularly because they mark a handful of especially essential albums with a "crown" symbol. All Music Guide is also generally reliable for jazz reviews.

Happy listening!

The case for abolishing nuclear weapons

2006-04-26T10:35:00.000-04:00

My recent post on abolishing nuclear weapons prompted a long exchange over on Cliopatria with Alan Allport, who convinced me that I needed to make a clearer and more convincing case for the abolitionist position. So here goes.

I start with the premise that the use of a nuclear weapon is never morally justified. Some disagree with that premise, most notably those who believe that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped end World War II and prevented the casualties that would have been suffered by an invasion force in Japan. That justification, however, relies solely on consequentialist moral reasoning -- that the results of an action are the only things that bear on its justification. And at best, consequentialism merely postpones moral deliberation to a later stage (since we would now only find ourselves asking, not which acts are morally good, but which results are). Besides, it is possible to acknowledge that some evils are averted by other evils, without conceding that either evil was morally justified itself.

My premise about nuclear weapons is easy to accept if you already accept the premise that violence is more often unjustified than not. Human societies have not always accepted that premise, but it has been esteemed one of the marks of civilization that we should seek to resolve conflicts peacefully. Even those who stop short of a pacifist position tend to believe that violence must be used as a last resort -- that there is such a thing, for instance, as a just war and an unjust war, or a murder and an act of manslaughter committed in self-defense. We take for granted that violence has to be justified carefully to be tolerable. Moreover, all of our society's justifications for violence depend on the assumption that violence can be controlled and directed, proportionately and precisely, at a particular person or group of people -- the invading army, for instance, or the aggressor who induces our violent act of self-defense.

The use of nuclear weapons, however, could never be justified by the kinds of calculus that justify, say, a defensive war or a citizen arrest, because the violence they unleash is necessarily uncontrolled, disproportionate, and imprecise. A nuclear weapon is incapable of discriminating between combatant or noncombatant (a crucial distinction in any just war theory), as it also incapable of discriminating between guilty or innocent. This is not only because the yield of even a small nuclear weapon is so explosive that it is impossible to direct, but also because the technology itself involves the release of harmful radioactive materials whose patterns of dispersion cannot even be predicted with great accuracy. I believe that the indiscriminate nature of nuclear violence undermines any attempt to justify its use.

To that point can be added other strikes against nuclear weapons. In addition to believing that violence can only be justified when its victim is deemed somehow "deserving," our society tends to believe that even justified violence must stay within limits of scale and kind. We believe, for instance, that certain kinds of punishment are cruel and unusual, and that certain amounts of force are excessive. By any reasonable definition, I believe, a nuclear weapon would have to be classified as a cruel and unusual form of weapon that unleashes excessive amounts of force. Nor is the destructive power of a nuclear weapon limited to the fatalities and casualties it would immediately cause; it also wreaks unjustifiable harm on the ecological landscape, making its use not only homicidal but also indirectly suicidal.

One could argue, of course, that all kinds of military weapons wreak ecological harm, and that war cannot avoid being cruel and unusual, that accepting war means "collateral damage" to civilian and ecological life. Those points are some of the reasons why I incline strongly towards pacifism. But suppose you don't incline the way I do. You still believe that militaries should take steps to minimize such collateral damage. And even from my point of view, with my strong inclination towards pacifism, I can acknowledge with real and sincere gratitude the steps that the U. S. military in particular takes in this regard. I do believe that most commanders in the field try to clear aerial targets of civilians, for instance. And while I am suspicious of claims that evidence of torture at places like Abu Ghraib point simply to a "few bad apples," I also believe that American servicemen and servicewomen are not in the habit of torturing people, since I know some of them personally. A non-pacifist should and does see the honorable restraint shown by soldiers in not torturing combatants or harming civilians as morally praiseworthy. But for that very reason, even a non-pacifist can reject the justified use of nuclear weapons: the casualties such weapons inflict on survivors cannot be described as anything but torturous, and once again, whereas in the case of most weapons, steps might be taken to limit harm to civilians, in the case of nuclear weapons such steps are not only improbable but would also be strategically counterproductive.

If it is impossible for the use of a nuclear weapon ever to be justified, that seems to me a strong prima facie reason for abolishing nuclear weapons. How many other artificial things do we keep around or cover with legal protection even when we know there is no conceivable scenario in which those things could be justifiably used? (Seriously, I tried to think of an example of such a thing and could not.) On the other hand, we routinely pass laws that criminalize the possession of materials (like certain biochemical agents, for instance, or explosive devices, or backyard superconductors) whose imaginable range of justified uses is extremely small. Those considerations, to me, add up to a strong presumption against the very possession of nuclear weapons being morally justified. There may be a moral distinction between the possession and use of nuclear weapons, such that we could describe the user of them as somehow incurring "more guilt" than mere possessors, but this is a slender distinction on which to hang an argument against abolition.

One might draw a less slender distinction between agents who can be trusted with nuclear weapons and those who cannot. Analogously, for example, our society generally recognizes that a person of a certain age and criminal record can be trusted to own a gun, while other persons cannot. But that analogy breaks down in the case of nuclear weapons, because when we speak of those who can be trusted with guns, we mean those who can be trusted only to use the weapon justifiably. And it is because we can imagine such scales of trust that we accept the possession of guns as morally feasible. Those scales of trust, however, depend fundamentally on there being an accepted range of justifications for the use of guns. Since there is no justifiable use for nuclear weapons, what do we mean when we refer to an agent who can be trusted with such weapons? In this case we actually mean those who can be trusted never to use the weapons, not someone who can be trusted to use them "in the right way" or "at the right time," since there is no such way or time.

In addition to the prima facie reasons for abolition, such a step also makes sense in light of principles that, again, we already acknowledge in more quotidian spheres. There is, for example, our sense that a person who endangers a child's well-being is to some extent morally culpable, even if that person does not actually abuse the child. Given the destructive power of nuclear weapons, a power that would be just as destructive if unleashed accidentally as intentionally, I think a case can be made that their mere possession is a culpable form of reckless endangerment.

*

There is a compelling objection, however, to this last conclusion, and a compelling alternative to nuclear abolitionism. One could argue, as Alan has, that (a) whereas nuclear weapons can never be justifiably used, and (b) whereas it is impossible to abolish the technical know-how that makes nuclear weapons possible, therefore (c) the best thing for a state to do is possess a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to their use by other states.

This case was made most forthrightly, of course, by the architects of American and Russian nuclear strategies in the Cold War. The theory is that a balance of nuclear power between two states will prevent either state from launching a nuclear strike. The mutually assured destruction (MAD) that would result from such a strike checks the impulse of either to pull the trigger. Even the proponents of this doctrine have to admit there's a degree of lunacy to it, since it requires both sides to made credible threats that they will do the very thing that their nuclear policy is supposed to prevent -- that is, launch a first strike. The Cuban missile crisis showed just how dangerous and ultimately unsustainable that high-stakes game of "chicken" can be. Nonetheless, the case can be made that in a nuclear age, nuclear policies that take MAD as their starting point are the best we can hope for. If so, building nuclear arsenals is not reckless endangerment, but a rational safeguard. And that possibility has to be taken seriously by the abolitionist, since it also begins with the presumption that the actual use of nuclear weapons is unjustifiable and must be prevented at all costs. As I will argue below, however, I believe a nuclear policy of balancing arsenals is more likely, not less, than abolition to result in their eventual use, especially in our post-Cold War world. (And in making that case, I'll be following closely some of the persuasive arguments for nuclear abolitionism made by Jonathan Schell in his book, The Unconquerable World.)

Before I argue for that conclusion, though, it's worth noting a slightly tangential debate in the discussion over at Cliopatria, where Alan has raised the possibility that nuclear weapons not only act as checks against their own use, but also help to deter nuclear powers from waging conventional wars with each other. Alan writes:

Would a world without nuclear weapons be necessarily 'better' than the one we have? Frightening as the implications of MAD may be, it is arguable that the risk of truly catastrophic retaliation has proven rather more successful in keeping the Great Powers in check than the much lower risk of conventional retaliation ever did. If the A-Bomb had never been invented would the US and the USSR have been as likely to refrain from open warfare during the late 1940s onwards? One might not look back on the Cold War that we actually got with unalloyed nostalgia, yet still accept that there were much less desirable alternative outcomes.

My initial response was that while the Cold War prevented conventional war between the Great Powers, it also facilitated indirect wars between the Powers in places like Vietnam, Korea, and Latin America. (And, I might add here, that in defining the priorities of American and Russian foreign policy for decades, the Cold War also contributed to the world's neglect of regions, like Africa, which were deemed as off the board in the chess game between democracy and communism. I may be going out on a limb here, but I think a fair assessment of the consequences of the Cold War would have to include a wrestling with the genocidal and devastating hot wars that have taken place over the past several decades in places like the Congo and the former Yugoslavia.)

Alan replied that, as bad as these hot wars were, their horror would have paled in comparison to an outright conventional war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Perhaps that is so: debates about counterfactuals know no end. But I'm not sure I see the utility of drawing up a balance sheet of fatalities, with one column for the number of those who died in the "hot" Cold War and with one column for estimates about the number of those who would have died in a war between the Great Powers. For however much the A-bomb contributed to maintaining peace between Russia and the United States, surely all can agree that it was an intolerable kind of peace. It was a peace founded less on true peace -- an absence of conflict combined with friendly cooperation -- than on the cultivation of mass terror. There was a lack of conventional war, yes, but that did not constitute peace. At least, it's not the kind of peace that I want to bequeath to my children as the legacy of this generation.

But let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that a balance of nuclear terror does help prevent both nuclear and conventional wars because it maintains an unstable armistice between nuclear powers. If this line of argument is correct, then doesn't it lead inevitably to the conclusion that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, far from something to be feared, is a positive good? If the Cold War was (in some sense) a success story, then should we encourage the reproduction of its conditions in other conflict situations? Does the possession of nuclear weapons by both India and Pakistan, for instance, prevent war between the two just as it did between Russia and the United States? Instead of making the destruction promised by nuclear weapons less assured, shouldn't we go about making the assured destruction more mutual, so that MAD can do its psychological and political work more effectively?

Jonathan Schell makes the case against this kind of pro-proliferation reasoning more concisely than I could, so I'll simply cite some of his reasons for rejecting it. First, the logic behind creating a "balance of terror" assumes a bipolar, Great Powers world in which we no longer live. It is conceivable, I suppose, for two states to try to match each other in an arms race, but it is hard to imagine how eight or ten or twenty states could calibrate the balance of nuclear power among them so that the doctrine of MAD would be effective. Moreover, it should be underlined that the geographical distance between Russia and the United States was one of the only reasons why MAD made sense to strategists, since it meant that both states could develop "launch on warning" missiles that would activate before a first strike by either arrived. Even then (and, I should add, even now), the amount of warning each state could have was terrifyingly short -- each head of state could count on one hand the number of minutes he had to decide whether to launch after being informed of a first launch. But further proliferation would make even that amount of warning impossible: in the case of India and Pakistan, for instance, a first strike would likely be the only strike, which is perhaps one reason why nuclear weapons on the subcontinent have not perceptibly lessened the likelihood of conventional war.

Encouraging proliferation, thirdly, would make controlling proliferation virtually impossible. If arms control treaties have been difficult to negotiate between the two great powers, negotiating multilateral reduction treaties between multiple powers is nearly inconceivable. The alternatives we have here are not between abolition and a carefully regulated proliferation coupled with the reduction of present arsenals, but between abolition and untrammeled proliferation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the proliferation of more nuclear weapons merely increases the risk of those weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, for whom non-proliferation and reduction treaties mean nothing.

The reality of global terrorism is the most decisive reason why the potential lessons of the Cold War have little, if any, applicability in the twenty-first century. MAD depended not only on the presence of identifiable Great Powers who could stare at each other seriously across the table while also making reduction deals under it. But it hardly needs to be said that the kinds of terrorists who are the most eager to obtain nuclear weapons have no apparent fear of their own destruction. Once you run up against an enemy for whom suicide is not only not an evil, but a consummation devoutly to be wished, the logic of MAD dissolves. Keeping nuclear weapons out of such hands therefore has to be a priority of any foreign policy in the present age, and seriously advocating further proliferation would only undermine that task.

Of course, in that last paragraph I might as well be quoting from a Bush administration official. The Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, perceives the threat of nuclearized terrorists, working in conjunction with nuclearized "rogue states," as the most pressing danger we face. But both administrations have also believed it possible to pursue diplomatic agreement for non-proliferation without embracing nuclear abolitionism, and that is where our views part ways. The Bush administration, in particular, believes that the only way to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons is, ultimately, to launch preemptive, conventional strikes on states close to acquiring them. But that strategy has numerous diplomatic and strategic pitfalls. Diplomatically, it weakens cooperative relationships even with our allies because it asserts our right to military hegemony, exercised unilaterally at moments of our choosing. And it also creates a diplomatic double standard whereby some states are allowed to develop nuclear weapons (indeed, are even, like Pakistan, welcomed into our diplomatic embrace for doing so) while others are denied them, even when they can make a case that possessing them is the only way to offset imbalances of nuclear power with their enemies.

Strategically, preemptive wars also encourage the very thing they are designed to prevent, since they give non-nuclear states an incentive to develop nuclear weapons more quickly and more secretively than before. Despite the administration's spin on Libya's apparent pliability after the fall of Baghdad, the lesson that our enemies learned from the Second Gulf War was that actually possessing weapons of mass destruction is the only way to avoid such invasions. And it is simply not possible to pursue multiple invasions and state-building projects at once, so that we can effectively be sure that we are preempting all our enemies from developing nuclear weapons -- especially since, diplomatically, our aggressive assertion of the right of preemption is causing our enemies to proliferate.

We come again, therefore, to the case for abolishing nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent their proliferation and use. Indeed, the global community has already recognized, in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, that abolition is the other side of non-proliferation. The NPT, which the United States signed but has been interpreting very selectively ever since, included the promise of non-nuclear states not to develop nuclear weapons in exchange for the commitment of nuclear states to disarm. There is no reason why that kind of multilateral, negotiated disarmament treaty, combined with an international inspection regime that would verify the compliance of all parties, might not accomplish abolition -- if, that is, the United States has not already gone so far down the path of preemption (which the NPT acknowledges as a breach of its rules) as to undo the diplomatic work that has already been done.

The primary objection of nuclear states to disarmament is that inspections do not work, that "rogue states" will acquire nuclear weapons anyway and then supply them to terrorists who do not fear to use them. It's worth noting, though, that this objection admits, implicitly, that our own possession of nuclear weapons does not give us any solace any longer. If our fear is that terrorists will acquire nuclear weapons and target us with them, then our fear is based on the knowledge that the doctrine of MAD provides us with no security against stateless enemies. It's hard to see, then, why the fear of terrorists nuclearizing should count as a reason to delay our own disarmament, since that delay is doing nothing to prevent the efforts of our enemies to arm. Moreover, our claim that inspections do not work leaves much to be desired in the way of credibility. Another lesson from Iraq that we seem not to have learned yet is that for all of Saddam's bluffing, the inspection regime did its job well and prevented him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction in secret.

There is, however, a final reason that might be advanced against the abolition of nuclear weapons: that it is chimerical. Now that nuclear power has been discovered, it will be impossible to put the evil genie back in the bottle, and futile to try to do so. As Alan put it in the thread at Cliopatria:

The only end point of disarmament that would really ensure a lasting non-nuclear world would be the destruction of the knowledge of how to build a nuclear device at all. Since that seems to me not simply impractical but logically impossible at this stage then it hardly seems worth arguing about; it's a bit like saying that having discovered the New World the Europeans should have pretended that they didn't know it was there. The A-Bomb is "going to be around" forever whether I or you or anyone else likes it or not. Its existence is not a matter for worthwhile dispute; what is is whether we can create a situation where the likelihood of its use is kept to an absolute minimum.

Much like the argument that a world with the bomb may be better than one without, this argument accomplishes more than it wants to, for if the mere technical knowledge of a nuclear device makes it futile to pursue disarmament, it makes it equally futile to pursue non-proliferation or reduction of any kind. The argument from futility cannot be directed solely at the nuclear abolitionist; it amounts to an argument against action of any kind.

But it also simply doesn't follow that because the knowledge of how to build the "A-Bomb" will always be with us, the "A-Bomb" must therefore always be with us too. If that did follow, then it would be impossible to argue for the abolition of anything -- including slavery, or lynching, or abortion, or capital punishment -- since if something is around to be abolished, that means the knowledge of how to do it will always exist. We can't go back to a time in which the New World was not discovered and then forcibly populated with African slaves, but thankfully we live in a time when slavery has been abolished throughout the New World, even though the knowledge have how it was done is becoming more robust and detailed every day. I hope for a world in which nuclear weapons will be similarly slated for abolition.

Abolition, of course, does not mean extinction. Alan is right that even if all nuclear states fully disarmed -- not just by removing their weapons from deployment but by actually dismantling them -- the possibility of recreating and reassembling nuclear weapons will always remain with us. We cannot go back to a non-nuclear or pre-nuclear world. But, and this is a point that Schell also makes brilliantly, that knowledge itself would serve the same deterrent function that the weapons themselves are alleged to serve by the opponents of abolition. If the fear of MAD prevents nuclear weapons from being used, the same fear would operate (in a post-abolition world) against their redevelopment and redeployment. By abolishing nuclear weapons, we would not be extinguishing the possibility of nuclear weapons but would merely be stepping as far away from the brink as is conceivably possible in a post-Hiroshima world.

We already realize that we are too close to the brink, since even the Bush administration holds the belief (despite its contradictory support for the development of "tactical" nuclear weapons) that our nuclear arsenal does not need to be as large as it is to serve its much ballyhooed deterrent purposes. Neither does the arsenal need to be on hair-trigger alert, according to a nuclear posture review drafted by the Department of Defense. But if a nuclear weapons does not need to be on hair-trigger alert to be deterrent, then why does it need to be assembled? And if it does not need to be assembled, why do its parts need to be manufactured? If our goal really is, as Alan says, to keep the likelihood of a nuclear launch to an "absolute minimum," surely abolition is as absolute a minimum as we can conceive.

McLemee does the OAH

2006-04-26T07:28:00.000-04:00

Scott McLemee has a funny and accurate report on the recent annual meeting of the OAH in Washington, D.C. Especially accurate were these paragraphs:

Between sessions, there was time to visit the exhibit hall. It was a chance to gaze upon recent offerings from the university presses. All the while, a small but very persistent voice whispered in my ear. “You don’t need more books,” the voice said. “Where would you put them?”

It sounded a lot like my wife.

Other conference-goers were wandering aisles, men and women of all ages; and some bore expressions suggesting that they, too, received similar wireless transmission from significant others back home. And yet those people picked up the new books, even so. I took courage from their example.

I was fortunate enough to meet Scott when I ran into him briefly at the Hilton. He was on his way to the session on "The Creation of the Christian Right" that he discusses in his column, but he took the time to give me one of his business cards. It reads, "Scott McLemee : Essayist at Large." How cool is that?

The half-way house

2006-04-24T21:13:00.000-04:00

Max M. Kampelman, who served as an arms control diplomat in the Reagan administration, has a guest editorial in the New York Times arguing for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Kampelman makes a strong case for combining realism with idealism, instead of seeing them as mutually exclusive, and he persuasively argues that "the goal of globally eliminating all weapons of mass destruction" needs to be "put back at the top of our [foreign policy] agenda."

Unfortunately, as recent rumors surrounding contingency plans for air strikes on Iran demonstrate, the abolition of nuclear weapons -- including our own -- is not near the top of our agenda. And yet the Iran crisis also demonstrates precisely why it should be. So long as the United States is willing to countenance the military use of nuclear weapons (and the funding of research on nuclear bunker-busters at least shows that we do not discountenance such use), so long will other nations continue to possess an incentive for acquiring them. Our strong condemnations of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in states like Iran, coupled with our implicit threats to stop their proliferation, only convinces non-nuclear states to acquire them more quickly than ever as a deterrent to our acting on such threats. As I've argued before, "rational actors will not tolerate monopolies on asymmetrical power," and today the distribution of nuclear power in the world is radically asymmetrical.

Back in the 1980s, opponents of nuclear weapons sometimes referred to themselves as the "new abolitionist movement." There are plenty of ways in which the movement for the abolition of slavery differs from the movement for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and those differences would probably make any systematic historical comparison between the two spurious. (I hope this post won't be taken for such a comparison.) But at least in some respects, the comparison is apt, particularly when one is focusing on what both movements were up against in the battle for popular opinion.

In both cases, the abolitionists had to deal with a large number of people who were sympathetic to their arguments but not to their prescriptions. In the antebellum period, there were numerous critics of slavery who nonetheless argued only that the institution should not be allowed to expand into states where it did not already exist. There were more still who favored the abolition of the slave trade as a natural way to quash slavery itself, gradually and indirectly. Both of these groups saw the abolitionists -- those who called not just for non-expansion or non-trade, but for immediate emancipation -- as ridiculous fanatics who were endangering Southern men and women by fomenting slave insurrection. To take the power of slaveholding out of the Southerners' hands would dangerously place that power in the hands of so-called savages, who would allegedly terrorize and murder the moment the legal power of masters was surrendered.

But the abolitionists understood what the non-expansionists did not: that so long as the right to hold human beings as property was acknowledged in any part of the Union, those who claimed that right would assert it absolutely. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun argued (logically, if coldly) that if slaves were legitimate forms of property in the South, then it was not clear why Southerners could not carry their property into any new state, just as Northerners were not restricted from expanding their property in cattle or carts into the West. (The famous decision of Judge Roger Taney in the Dred Scott case ratified Calhoun's argument.) Non-expansionists could retort with procedural arguments that Congress had the right to govern in the territories and that compromises had been made (in 1820 and 1850) that forbade slavery in certain territories; they could contest Taney's decision, in other words, as a matter of legal interpretation. But their moral argument against expansion was critically weakened by the fact that they acquiesced to the continuation of slavery at all, no matter how much they bemoaned its evils.

Non-proliferationists can argue, much like non-expansionists did, that nuclear weapons should simply remain in the states where they already are. But unless that argument is coupled with a strong argument for their total abolition -- even here -- we will continue to find ourselves dealing with latter-day Calhouns who claim for their states a sovereign right to possess weapons of mass destruction. Until that argument for total abolition is also made, loudly and clearly, laws for the abolition of trade in nuclear arms will (like the laws for the abolition of the slave trade) continue to be vulnerable to enforcement problems and charges of hypocrisy.

How can we aver that trading nukes is immoral without making the corollary claim that possessing them in the first place is? No more easily than someone who believed that holding human beings as property was immoral could consistently oppose the slave trade without opposing slavery. And how can we claim that those states who presently hold nuclear weapons -- by the mere accident of their historical discovery and development in certain wealthy countries -- have a right to hold them indefinitely, while those states who, by accident of history, are free of nuclear weapons cannot acquire them? No more easily than someone who opposed the proliferation of slaves in the West could support their continued bondage in the South. To be sure, the compromises that prevented slavery from expanding into the West accomplished a great good, just as every successful prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons is good. But as the famous Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips once said, "let us not mistake the half-way house for the end of the journey." Let us not lower our sights from abolition to non-proliferation.

(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)

Avoiding the bends

2006-04-19T14:23:00.000-04:00

[For a complete list of my posts on transnational history, see here.]

Apropos of recent discussions on transnational history, here is an interesting article on the subject by Pierre-Yves Saunier of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Saunier is editor, along with Akira Iriye, of The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, due to appear in 2008. He strikes exactly the right note, I think, in the opening paragraphs of his article, which reports on a conference on transnational history held in Australia a couple of years ago:

The conference, which provided the basis for this review, was an exciting one. While it took place in Canberra (Australia) in September 2004, many of us participants had this euphorising feeling that we were taking part [in] some kind of ‘first’, and that we were able to contribute to shape a yet unmoulded historiographical pattern at a moment when historians begin to embrace a pattern that has been flourishing in other disciplines.[1] That is, indeed, a pleasant feeling to explore dimensions and perspectives without having to care too much for definitions, to venture care freely into fields and questions without respecting our respective subdisciplinary overspecialisations and to breathe the air of debate and discussion without being too much concerned by canons and the usual apparatus of our disciplined behaviours. As divers know, though, euphoria can also be dangerous: historical staggers can lead to a loss of balance and bearings. The most tempting of all those is probably to dismiss comparative, local, world or national histories as obsolete, and to build the fate or transnational history as the good side in a series of dichotomies (up to date/out of date, transnational/local, universal/parochial, relevant/irrelevant). This report, which does not escape those risks, nevertheless proposes some decompression stages to control some of them. Mostly, it will try to put this conference in context, by offering some links to the various proposals that, in different parts of the world, have made similar moves in the direction of a transnational perspective in history.
It is on purpose that the words of ‘a transnational perspective in history’ have just been used. It would have been easier to write ‘in the direction of a transnational history’. But it is not the orientation of this report to suggest that something called ‘transnational history’ should be the next big thing, something that would deserve to be presented as a new paradigm which destiny it is to overturn previous frameworks, an up and coming sub-discipline that would deserve its own institutional space. Rather, it is suggested here that ‘going transnational’ is about adopting a perspective, an angle. Going transnational is not moving to a different field of study, shifting allegiances and references. Rather, it is something that many historians can do to find a way to respond [to] questions that lay unanswered on their working desks [for] a while.

Saunier also argues later in the piece that transnational history, despite the sometimes sweeping pronouncements of its founding manifestoes, actually encourages (in practice) a reflective kind of epistemic humility:

... developing a transnational perspective also brings about a renewed humbleness, that which comes from the sheer sense that one is never able to assemble all the pieces, to pull all the strings, to build the complete line up of skills that are required. And after all, it is logistical common sense to realize that you won't be able to have the time, funding and energy to follow all the trails that are traceable from a transnational point of view. Thus the results of a transnational research may always have to do with a sense of failure and incompleteness: knowing about our limits should save us from disappointment, but also from the ego trips which sometimes push us historians to believe we have written the final and ultimate volume on a subject.

Finally, Saunier makes a good point about the way that historiographical movements are shaped, unavoidably, by institutional and professional structures. Instead of denying that fact, it's best to be aware of it:

... it would be a loss if the transnational angle was developed at the exp[e]nse of the local, national, comparative or world history perspectives. For sure, I also know that the transnational angle will have to make a place of its own in the current institutional structures of history as a trade, a discipline and a market. We have learned enough from the history and sociology of science to know that scientific disputes are also about academic positions, grants, publication opportunities. They are also rooted in the social and cultural trajectories of the protagonists. It is quite unlikely we can escape this. But the history of the social sciences and humanities are also full of so-called 'turns' where the practical opponents to a so-called 'new approach' are forced out on weak scientific grounds, in an exaggerated mutual game of opposition and denigration. I am naive enough, though, to think that one can try to introduce a different perspective without playing the usual academic tricks. It can also be an interesting experience to propose to be different without wanting to be hegemonic.

Read the whole thing.

April 18, 1906

2006-04-18T10:31:00.000-04:00

It happened early in the morning and it lasted two minutes and twenty seconds, as I heard everyone say afterward. My father was sports editor of one of the San Francisco papers. There was a racetrack near our bungalow and stables where my father kept a horse. He said that the night before had been a sultry one and the horses were restless, neighing and stamping in their stalls, becoming increasingly nervous and panicky. The earthquake started with a deep rumbling and the convulsions of the earth started afterward, so that the earth became a sea which rocked our house in a most tumultuous manner. There was a large windmill and water tank in back of the house and I can remember the splashing of the water from the tank on the top of our roof. My father took my brothers from their beds and rushed to the front door, where my mother stood with my sister, whom she had snatched from beside me. I was left in a big brass bed, which rolled back and forth on a polished floor. Whether I realized what was happening I do not know, but I do know that the whole event was confused in my mind with something which might have occurred a few nights earlier, my mother fainting on the floor of my room on her way to the bathroom, and my father carrying her back to bed. The illness of my usually strong and cheerful mother and the earthquake were both part of the world's tragedy to me.

When the earth settled, the house was a shambles, dishes broken all over the floor, books out of their bookcases, chandeliers down, chimneys fallen, the house cracked from roof to ground. But there was no fire in Oakland. The flames and cloud bank of smoke could be seen across the bay and all the next day the refugees poured over by ferry and boat. Idora Park and the racetrack made camping grounds for them. All the neighbors joined my mother in serving the homeless. Every stitch of available clothes was given away. All the day following the disaster there were more tremblings of the earth and there was fear in the air. We had always been considered Easterners by our neighbors and one of them told my other he would rather have San Francisco's earthquakes than our eastern thunder and lightning storms any day!

-- Dorothy Day, from The Long Loneliness, pp. 21-22

What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward. For days, refugees poured out of burning San Francisco and camped in Idora Park and the racetrack in Oakland. People came in their nightclothes; there were newborn babies.

Mother had always complained before about how clannish California people were, how if you were from the East they snubbed you and were loath to make friends. But after the earthquake everyone's heart was enlarged by Christian charity. All the hard crust of worldly reserve and prudence was shed. Each person was a little child in friendliness and warmth. ...

While the crisis lasted, people loved each other. They realized their own helplessness while nature 'travaileth and groaneth.' It was as though they were united in Christian solidarity. It makes one think of how people could, if they would, care for each other in times of stress, unjudgingly, with pity and with love.

-- Dorothy Day, from The Long Way Home, in Selected Writings, pp. 10-11

History links

2006-04-17T16:27:00.000-04:00

Rebecca has a great new edition of the History Carnival up, and Cliopatria is hosting a symposium on transnational history.

More on transnational history

2006-04-14T00:16:00.000-04:00

[For a complete list of my posts on transnational history, see here.]

Transnational history has recently been the subject of some excellent posts by KC Johnson, Rob MacDougall, Eric Rauchway, and Evan Roberts. Since I'm currently out of town, I have not been able to follow the discussion as closely as I would like to. But there is much food for thought in these posts, and there promises to be more in an upcoming symposium on Cliopatria about transnational history.

In the meantime, I do have some cursory thoughts about the posts listed above. First, KC Johnson's post shares Rauchway's initial concern that transnational history is trying to displace political history. Johnson worries that transnational history, as advocated by scholars like Thomas Bender, "represents one way to rationalize the academy’s having driven political, diplomatic, military, and constitutional history out of the discipline." I've already argued that I do not think transnational history is necessarily inimical to political history, but instead is one way of doing political history -- a method that helps answer some, though not all, of the questions political historians ask. But I might add that transnational historians are also far from hostile to political historians within the discipline, nor are they necessarily committed to driving political history out of the academy. On the contrary, some transnational historians criticize community studies and microhistories -- the classic examples of new social and cultural history -- that focus too narrowly on local contexts and subnational historical forces. To that extent, transnational history might also be read as a qualified critique of the ascendancy of new social history and an appeal to bring the state (and the transnational) back into the discipline.

That's not to say, of course, that transnational historians want to drive social history out of the discipline either. As I've said before, I think it's a mistake to read the critical interventions of transnational history as a veiled attempt to vanquish other modes of doing history. And in some contexts, transnational historians can prove to be sympathetic to the insights of social and cultural historians.

For example, Rob's post concludes with the very good point that "when impersonal forces like globalization and trans-nationalism get invoked, it is very easy to lose sight of actual historical actors and actions." Rob worries about transnational historians who betray a certain "fuzziness about actors and actions, power and causation, that is troubling whether or not it is intentional."

That worry is perfectly valid, and it should serve as a caution to transnational historians not to invoke faceless abstractions whenever they find something hard to explain, thus creating a kind of Globalization of the Gaps. At the same time, it's worth noting that this same concern about the "fuzziness" of talking about "impersonal forces" rather than actual persons has often been lobbed into the foxholes of social and cultural historians. What made many historians wary of the new cultural historians who were writing their manifestoes in the 1970s and 1980s was their seeming unconcern for things like causation and explanation, and their apparent satisfaction with historical narratives that simply tried to interpret and understand cultural and social forms, even if that meant eschewing the historian's supposed obligation to trace "change over time."

But as David Hollinger once wrote in a now classic essay on intellectual history, "a truism that seems always in need of repetition is that providing causal explanations is only one of the things historians do." It's also only one of the things that transnational historians do. While we should be on guard against transnational historians who try to answer questions about "influence" simply by gesturing wildly in the direction of "globalization," their gesticulations should not distract us from the other kinds of things that transnational historians might do. One task, for instance, that transnational historians seem to take as their own is to contextualize the history of the United States by setting it alongside the histories of other nation states, in order to show that the United States was not somehow immune from the historical forces -- both personal and impersonal, national and transnational -- that shaped other nation states.

The point of that contextualization, by the way, is not to argue that the United States was no different from other nation states. As Rauchway argues in his latest post, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that in many ways the United States is "peculiar," and studying transnational forces like globalization often simply underlines how peculiar the history of American politics and state-building has been. I don't think transnational historians must necessarily demur. The "American exceptionalism" that transnational historians hope to undermine is not the proposition that the United States is "different" from other nation states. That nation-states are different is a truism; if they were not distinguishable, then there would be no such thing as a "nation-state."

What transnational historians want to contest is the idea that the forces that made the United States distinct from other nations were themselves unique and unconnected to the kinds of forces that shaped the distinct character of other nations. That is the exceptionalism that bothers transnational historians: the idea, as Daniel Rodgers described it in his contribution to this book, that the United States, as a providentially chosen nation, has simply been exempt from the kinds of historical processes that affected other nations, as though Americans simply walked through history on dry ground while the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean rose up like walls around them.

I want to conclude by saying that I do not intend to defend from all criticisms "transnational history" -- a term that is hard to define, much less to defend. I heartily amen what Evan Roberts says in his brilliant post on the life cycles of historical fields, which provides a stadial outline of the phases through which every new movement among historians seems to pass. Evan urges transnational historians to move beyond the "manifesto" phase of its life cycle into the "contributionist" phase. As he puts it, "one way forward for transnational historians is to stop assuming that the transnational was really that important, but set out to 'measure' its influence anyway." That seems exactly right to me. Perhaps necessarily, manifestoes for new historical fields have to deal in abstractions and even in exaggerations, if only to clear institutional and intellectual space for new research projects to fill. But once those projects have begun, the need to wave banners for The New Thing diminishes, and it becomes more important for the new kids on the block to retreat back into the difficult spade work that all historians share in common.

I've found, even in the life cycle of my own research project, that defining it as "transnational history" has become less important to me than simply understanding how transnational networks among abolitionists worked, why they were important to abolitionists, and why debates about slavery in the United States make more sense when these networks are taken into account. It's still important professionally to wear the moniker of a transnational historian, if only because (thanks to the high visibility of manifestoes for the field) that term serves as a convenient and easily recognizable shorthand for the kind of things I'm interested in as a scholar. But I wear the term lightly, and I think most historians should wear their adjectives ("political," "social," "cultural") lightly. That way those terms can be cast off easily when the sources lead them in new directions. For most of my graduate student career, the working subtitle of my dissertation was "Transnational Currents in American Abolitionism." But in the finished project, the subtitle became "Radical American Abolitionists Abroad," and my discussion of transnational history -- which had once occupied many pages of my introduction -- receded into a historiographical footnote. But to follow up on Evan's point, the retirement of a new field's manifestoes to the footnotes is not a bad thing, and may be the best possible thing that can happen to it.

P.S. Eric Rauchway has another post clarifying what he means when he says the United States is exceptional.

Disturbing news

2006-04-08T11:55:00.000-04:00

Trillwing of the Clutter Museum reports some disturbing news. At least one person has found her blog by searching for "caleb mcdaniel's man boobs."

I'm not sure what is most disturbing: that this search results in over 500 hits on Google; that a couple of the hits (though only a couple) seem to refer to me and not some other "Caleb McDaniel"; or that, having run the search, someone actually clicked through to Trillwing's post.

For the record: if anyone comes here looking for my man boobs, move along. These aren't the boobs you're looking for.

Friday shuffle

2006-04-07T23:50:00.000-04:00

This week's Friday Shuffle is dedicated to the memory of Jackie McLean, who died a week ago at the age of 73. (Or 74? Media reports have been curiously divergent on this point.) McLean plays alto sax on all of these tracks.

1. "Francisco," by Jackie McLean, from Capuchin Swing (1960)
2. "Kahlil The Prophet," by Jackie McLean, from Destination Out! (1963)
3. "Nakatini Suite," by Lee Morgan, from Lee-Way (1960)
4. "Enitnerrut," by Jackie McLean, from A Fickle Sonance (1961)
5. "Fidel," by Jackie McLean, from Jackie's Bag (1959)
6. "Cryin' Blues," by Charles Mingus, from Blues and Roots (1959)
7. "I Hear a Rhapsody," by Jackie McLean, from Action (1964)
8. "Omega," by Jackie McLean, from Let Freedom Ring (1962)
9. "Sippin' at Bells," by Sonny Clark, from Cool Struttin' (1958)
10. "Eco," by Jackie McLean, from Right Now! (1965)

Even devoted fans of McLean concede that his tone is not for everyone, as this column by Mark Stryker points out. (Hat tip: Rifftides.) It certainly took me a while to acquire the taste for McLean's slightly sharp sound, which often veers from the tune as if it were, like the title of one of his early Blue Note albums, a "fickle sonance." On his early albums recorded in the heyday of hard bop--albums like Capuchin Swing or Jackie's Bag--this sharpness was not quite as pronounced as it would later become, in part because you're usually too busy tapping your foot and nodding your head during McLean's solos to care how they would stand up to the unforgiving sternness of a tuning fork. Anyone who likes Art Blakey or Lee Morgan or Horace Silver can easily like the Jackie McLean of A Fickle Sonance or Cool Struttin'.

But McLean's later albums, which fused his hard bop instincts with a burgeoning interest in "free jazz," do not always offer you an immediate invitation to tap your toes. And since some of these albums--like Let Freedom Ring and Right Now!--featured McLean as the lone horn with a rhythm section, the listener is forced on every track, for virtually every minute, to confront his cutting sound and his tendency to reach for the highest registers. I have to confess that these albums, and tracks like "Omega" and "Eco," made me distinctly uncomfortable when I first heard them.

But they have grown on me. And far from getting on my nerves, these albums have now gotten deep under my skin. The reason, I think, is that McLean's music is clearly motivated by deep and purposive feeling. I never get the sense, as I do with some "free jazz" musicians, that McLean is running aimlessly up and down his instrument just because he can't decide what he wants to say. Instead, he seemed to value the free expression of free jazz only when he had something to express that could not be said in an orderly, harmonious way. McLean's solos are not exercises in expression for the mere sake of expression (which by definition express nothing). The solos have an object to express; their intent is to communicate. To be sure, it's not music that is always easy to listen to, because of the occasional screeching, the sharpness, the bitterness of the tone. But perhaps listening to McLean is challenging because what he wants to say is not always easy to hear. There should be a place in music for the expression of hard things and hard emotions, and McLean found that place--without, I should add, ever ceasing to swing. Even at his freest and most out of tune, he remains impossible to tune out.

After last Friday's news I've been listening to McLean all week long, and a few days ago I pulled out the liner notes to Let Freedom Ring, which McLean wrote himself. Forms of the word "expression" appear no fewer than half a dozen times in the short notes. The key paragraph, I think, is the following one, when McLean writes:

I feel that emotion has taken an important step in expression on the horn. Emotion has always been present, but today it has a new importance. Toward the end of Lady Day's career, her voice was just a shadow of what it had been, yet she still put a song over; her singing voice was gone, leaving emotion her only tool of expression.

McLean's voice may also be gone now. But as far as I'm concerned, he can still "put a song over." Before you tell me I'm wrong, put on Destination Out! or Action and listen to the emotion. Listen to "Poor Eric," the elegiac second track on the classic Right Now! and try not to be moved.

Proslavery Constitution?

2006-04-06T17:52:00.000-04:00

A debate has recently broken out on H-SHEAR and H-SLAVERY about whether the Constitution is a "proslavery" document. (Click on the links above and scroll down to see the relevant threads.)

It's a perennial debate among historians, just as it was among abolitionists and anti-abolitionists in the early nineteenth century. But it's also a debate that seems to end in stalemate whenever it is argued. Even the late historian Don Fehrenbacher, who criticized historians like Paul Finkelman for arguing that the Constitution was proslavery, ultimately concluded in The Slaveholding Republic that "the case for an antislavery Constitution is just as strong as the case for a proslavery Constitution, but both depend on special pleading that ignores part of the evidence" (p. 46).

There's a lot of truth in that conclusion, but while reading through the posts on H-SHEAR and H-SLAVERY, I began to wonder whether the problem is not so much special pleading as it is imprecision. As some posters pointed out, it's not clear exactly what we are asking when we raise the question of whether the Constitution was "proslavery" or "antislavery." Usually that straightforward question conceals a welter of more particular questions, including but not limited to:

Did the Constitution offer explicit protections to slaveholders?
Did the Constitution deny the federal government the authority to act to abolish or regulate slavery?
Do sections like the "three-fifths" clause legitimate the idea that human beings can be held as property or instead undermine that idea by describing slaves as "persons"?
What were the opinions of the Constitution's framers on the morality of slavery?
How did defenders and critics of the Constitution characterize its posture towards slavery during ratification debates?
Did the large-state and small-state compromises that made the Constitution possible so configure the federal government that slaveholders were virtually guaranteed political dominance in the early republic?
How was the Constitution interpreted and implemented in the decades that followed its ratification?

The answers to some of these questions do not necessarily bear on the answers to others. And very often it seems as though the defenders and critics of the "proslavery" Constitution are not disagreeing directly so much as they are asking different questions. Perhaps both sides would be better served by specifying exactly which of these valid questions they are addressing, instead of asking generally whether the Constitution was "proslavery" or "antislavery."

Another reason for avoiding those general terms, at least in this kind of debate, is that the words "proslavery" and "antislavery" are notoriously thorny. The forms of the words make them seem as though they represent two antithetical positions, but in fact the range of early American opinions about slavery were much more complex and much less bipolar. For example, many articulate eighteenth century Americans declared slavery a moral and political evil (for a variety of reasons that seldom if ever included a belief in the equality of people of color with whites) but also declared that emancipation would be an even greater evil. Yet if being philosophically "antislavery" did not necessarily render someone "pro-abolition," how should we characterize people who believed slavery was unjustifiable but also unalterable? "Proslavery" is too blunt a word for that nuanced position, no matter how indefensible the position is.

Consider also that many Northerners in the early republic who believed slavery was a great moral evil also believed it was unnecessary for the federal government to take action against it because the institution would eventually wither on its own. Were these people "antislavery," because they believed slavery to be wrong, or "proslavery," because they tolerated its existence for the time being? What about those who argued that the federal government should not prevent slavery from expanding into western territories because the diffusion of the slave population would hasten the institution's downfall? Misguided though such a forecast was, how should we characterize those who made it? In such a case, the bare words "antislavery" and "proslavery" may be more confusing than they are clarifying.

There certainly are contexts in which the words "antislavery" and "proslavery" are clarifying and appropriate. Immediatist abolitionists, who believed that slavery was a moral evil and began calling in the 1830s for immediate emancipation, were clearly "antislavery" in every sense of that term. Likewise, there were Southern ideologues in the antebellum period who clearly deserve the moniker "proslavery"--those who argued that slavery was a positive good and opposed any measure to emancipate slaves or limit the legal rights of masters. But such robust defenses of slavery as a necessary good were exceedingly scarce in the 1780s when the Constitution was drafted, and no critic of slavery was calling for an immediate end to slavery even in the North.

Blogging grad students

2006-04-06T14:48:00.000-04:00

My fellow Cliopat, Rebecca Goetz, did a great job explaining the virtues of academic blogging in her Chronicle column last fall. Now she has also been interviewed for a new article on blogging grad students in U.S. News and World Report. And in a post pointing to the article, she reflects a bit on the role that blogging played in her recent (and successful!) search for an academic job. Thanks, Rebecca, for helping to make the world safe for academic bloggers!

Clippings

2006-04-05T23:13:00.000-04:00

"Having a real hero means devoting yourself, subordinating yourself, and that's asking a bit too much of people these days. Devotion isn't trauma, but it does seem a bit severe, a bit medieval. Cult wackos come to mind. Devoted followers are anachronistic in a world made for devoted fans."

-- Thomas de Zengotita, Harper's (December 2004)

"One sermon in support of slavery--one clerical petition in favor of capital punishment--I believe, does more extensive damage to the souls of men, than the writings of a Volney or a Paine, a Voltaire or a Rousseau. For, in spite of the unreasonableness of it, people will judge of the Bible and of religion by the practices of those who profess to be guided by them; and thus it becomes as much the business of those who sincerely desire that mankind should come to experience the blessings of real Christianity, to expose those glaring inconsistencies in its professors, as to contend against the errors of its opponents."

-- British abolitionist Elizabeth Pease (1844)

"The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh."

-- Langston Hughes

"Music makes you hungry for more of it. It never really gives you the whole number. It slaps and it embraces, it slaps and it embraces."

-- Toni Morrison

"National partiality is, of course, what the concept of cosmopolitanism is usually assumed to oppose, and yet the connection between the two is more complicated than this. Nationalism itself has much in common with its putative antithesis, cosmopolitanism: for nationalism, too, exhorts quite a loftily abstract level of allegiance--a vast, encompassing project that extends far beyond ourselves and our families."

-- Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, p. 239

"At best, our understanding of any historical moment is significantly wrong, and this should come as no surprise, since we have little grasp of any present moment. The present is elusive for the same reasons as is the past. There are no true boundaries around it, no limit to the number of factors at work in it."

-- Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam, pp. 4-5

"American Christians can blame secularists for many things but surely not for the trivialization of faith in the modern world: Christians in North America have surpassed all competitors in that booming business. Our patriotism has become a cult of self-worship consecrated by court prophets robed in pinstriped suits. Forgetting the difference between discipleship and patriotism, the God most Americans trust is a simulacrum of the holy and transcendent God, a reification of the American way of life."

-- Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community, p. 7

"The task of the critic is to prevent a shrinking of possible views of the world, to resist any tendency to fix the limits of what can be thought. And so any healthy peace movement will be vigorously productive of songs and stories ..."

-- Rowan Williams

Transnational political history

2006-04-04T07:57:00.000-04:00

[For a complete list of my posts on transnational history, see here.]

A couple of months ago Eric Rauchway had a very interesting post, both at his own blog and at POTUS, on transnational history. Unfortunately, it appeared while I was in the thick of my Great Blog Silence, so I've only just had a chance in the last couple of days to read the post with care.

Rauchway's post cautions against the idea that transnational history somehow supplants the need for good political history. On the contrary, the more interested historians become in the historical processes that have made globalization possible, the more imperative it will become to focus on political history. "Political history," he says, "is all over the essential stuff of globalization." In the first part of his post, Rauchway shows that he means this literally: if we take the "stuff" of globalization to be the technologies that make long-distance travel and communication possible, then we can't take for granted how that "stuff" came to be. And very often the technological innovations that helped stitch the histories of distant nations together were enabled or inhibited by national politics. Using transatlantic cables as his primary example, Rauchway shows convincingly that "virtual reality depends on real reality. It runs over wires. Those wires get spooled, strung, sunk, and kept safe from cutting owing to political decisions."

Rauchway points to immigration policy as another example of why transnational historians cannot do without political history. As entranced as transnational historians may be with the border crossings and diasporic identities of migrant peoples, the movement of those people does not take place in a political vacuum. Immigration and the politics of immigration exist in an almost dialectical relationship: the "dislocation" of immigration sparks "discontent"; that discontent is voiced politically in struggles over immigration policy; that policy often reacts against the forces of globalization; and in the end, politics thus shapes the course of globalization. Historiographically, as much as politically, the fact of immigration shows that the nation-state is not dead yet, and that politics in a national context still deserve the attention even of the most transnational historians.

Although Rauchway uses some of my own definitions of transnational history as a springboard for his argument, I can't find much of anything in his post with which to disagree. As I remarked in my earlier post, transnational historians are often afflicted by the fact that there are more manifestoes for transnational history than there are actual examples of it, which sometimes means that transnational historians get stuck being asked to defend manifestoes that are, by their nature, often hyperbolic and excessively polemical. Some manifestoes for transnational history, for example, over-reach by making it sound as though the nation-state itself is unimportant or obsolescent to properly transnational historians. And Rauchway is absolutely right to react against that kind of claim. No transnational historian is worth his or her salt who does not concede that nation-states must be reckoned with by historians of the modern world, globalization notwithstanding. By the same token, I hold no brief for transnational historians who would argue that political history is bunkum.

It may even be misleading to speak of "transnational history" because that phrase seems to denote a field that stands in contradistinction to "political history" or "social history." It's better to think of transnational history as a posture or a methodological intervention that urges us to do political history and social history (and cultural history and intellectual history and so on) in a certain way. So a transnational historian would not disagree with Rauchway that politics is all over the stuff of globalization. But they would insist, conversely, that the forces of globalization (or, less anachronistically, the transnational circulation of people, goods, and ideas) are all over the stuff of politics.

Maybe it would be best here to move out of the realm of manifesto and into the realm of actual examples of transnational history. Take, for instance, Rauchway's point about immigration policy--that it shows why we can't understand "transnationalism without understanding the political processes that permit and promote it, that shape what kind of globalization we get and how long we get it for." Transnational historians of immigration would not disagree with that, I think, but they would want to add, in turn, that immigration policies and patterns of enforcement are not unaffected by transnationalism itself. For example, Madeline Hsu's book, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, shows how Taishanese immigrants to California in the late 19th and early 20th centuries used transnational kinship networks to effectively limit the "ability of nation-states to control migration." If I'm remembering the book correctly, Hsu shows how, by circulating coded guidebooks and magazines back to friends and family in China, immigrants found ways to circumvent the seemingly impermeable Chinese Exclusion Laws by instructing other would-be immigrants about how to answer successfully the questions of immigration officials.

Hsu is not saying that exclusion laws and the political processes that made them are irrelevant to the history of Chinese immigration; what she is saying is that the power of those laws and political processes was to some extent attenuated by transnational networks themselves. The lesson here is not that transnational historians can do without political history, but that political historians also cannot take for granted the effectiveness of laws and policies to control and regulate transnational forces like immigration.

Another good example of that same lesson can be found in the most recent issue of the Journal of American History, which features an article by Thomas A. Guglielmo on Mexican and Mexican American activists in Texas during World War II. (A personal or institutional subscription to the History Cooperative is required to view the article.) Guglielmo shows how some very "high" politics--including the Good Neighbor Policy of the United States that tried to create a united South American and North American front against European fascism--created opportunities on the ground in Texas for Mexicans and Mexican Americans to lobby for anti-discrimination laws and civil rights protections in the state legislature. But he also shows how those political struggles were shaped by transnational networks of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Some of the lobbying organizations that pressed for liberalized laws in Texas were based in Mexico. And the signal success of these activists occurred when Mexican groups, working with Mexican Americans, pressured Mexico to hold back migrant workers from Texas cotton fields if Austin refusedd to heed the demands of activists for civil rights.

Guglielmo's piece is another good example of how transnational political history might be done. At its best, such transnational history would be very sensitive to the power of nation-states and the importance of policy, but would also attune us to the ways that nation-states and national policies are themselves criss-crossed by transnational networks of people, goods, and ideas that often crucially affect the politics of nations.

(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)

Jackie McLean, 1932-2006

2006-04-01T15:13:00.000-05:00

"Jackie McLean has been an enduring force in jazz since the early 50s, and a distinguished educator since 1968. Long the possessor of one of the most recognizable alto saxophone sounds and styles, from the moment one hears that yearning, searching, slightly acidic alto tone one knows that Jackie McLean is in the house and that one is in store for some truly no-nonsense music-making." -- Don Berryman

Jazz alto saxophonist Jackie McLean dies at 73.

Hat-tip: Tim Niland

Friday shuffle

2006-03-31T17:26:00.000-05:00

Been a long time since I've done one of these, so here goes:

1. "You've Got Her in Your Pocket," by The White Stripes, from Elephant
2. "Ants Marching" (live), by Dave Matthews Band, from Remember Two Things
3. "Come Down In Time," by Elton John, from Tumbleweed Connection
4. "So Much," by The Sundays, from Static and Silence
5. "Gravity," by Alison Krauss & Union Station, from Lonely Runs Both Ways
6. "End of the Day," by Beck, from Sea Change
7. "The Golden Dream," by Erin McKeown, from We Will Become Like Birds
8. "Kamera," by Wilco, from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
9. "Black Cadillac," by Roseanne Cash, from Black Cadillac
10. "Big Yellow Taxi," by Joni Mitchell, from Miles of Aisles [Live]

On nations and immigrants

2006-03-31T13:46:00.000-05:00

It may become apparent quickly that I've been watching too many reruns of The West Wing. Nonetheless, this is how it seems to me today: Immigration is a policy issue that proves just how salient the nation-state remains, even in our putatively global age. Not all, of course, see it that way. Some would argue that the global migration of millions of people is steadily eroding the sovereignty of nation-states, who are ill-equipped to stop or control such massive diasporas. And some would argue that since we are therefore entering a postnational age in which transnational flows of people, capital, and goods will displace the power of the modern state, we should also cease to be so concerned with the rights that inhere in being a "citizen" of a nation. Instead, according to this view, we should become more concerned with the rights that inhere in being a member of the human species. We should view individuals first and foremost as citizens of the world, not as citizens of a particular nation-state.

But as recent debates over illegal immigration have shown, we still live in a world where human rights are most likely to be secured by the granting of citizenship rights--or, conversely, a world in which human rights are often most threatened by the denial of civil rights. It's of little value to declare an illegal immigrant in Los Angeles a citizen of the world when Congress is threatening to make that same immigrant a felon for failing to become a citizen of the United States and is threatening, moreover, to prosecute its own citizens for aiding a certain class of non-citizens. The salient issue here is whether one belongs to a particular national community or not. And in this context, if you want to protect a person's human rights, you had best argue, not for the irrelevance of national citizenship altogether, but rather for an expanded and flexible definition of the national community that finds a place for illegal immigrants under the legal umbrella of the United States.

In short, notwithstanding the myriad forces of globalization, the distribution of civil rights in a democratic nation-state is one of the primary places where the rubber meets the road for a believer in the value of human rights. Put it this way: if you want, in the immediate short term, to defend the right of a Californian to give wages to an undocumented worker trying to feed an impoverished family of four, which is your best practical move? To appeal to the United Nations for the recognition of that right? Or to argue for laws within the United States that will protect that right? If the answer seems obvious, then it is also obvious that the idea of national citizenship has not gone the way of the dinosaurs yet. Whatever its shortcomings, the nation still plays a powerful mediating role in relationships between people.

If determining the contours of national communities still matters, even in a world criss-crossed by diasporic migrations, then there is still a place in the liberal universe for a certain kind of nationalism. On most days, I'm divided within myself on this point, but recent debates over illegal immigration highlight for me why I don't want to let go entirely of the idea that American nationalism can be a pragmatic good. It may strike many opponents of the House Republicans' immigration plan that American nationalism is precisely the problem with their rhetoric and their proposals: it's nationalism that underwrites the poisonous sneers about unassimilated Mexicans; nationalism that stirs up xenophobic fears about immigrants; nationalism that serves as a mask for a deeper racism that dares not speak its name. To be sure, nationalism does often do those things; it never is and never has been an unqualified good. But insofar as nations still matter, it is a mistake to conclude that nationalism is always an unqualified evil. Instead, it seems to me, the better thing to do is to articulate and then defend to the utmost a kind of nationalism that is humble rather than chauvinistic and hospitable rather than xenophobic.

We need not to dismiss the value of nationalism, but instead to detail and celebrate a vision of the nation that strives to become progressively more and more inclusive, a nation that strains itself to what seems like the breaking point to accommodate new compatriots. What if our nationalism trumpeted the virtues of this kind of nation: a nation that shoulders mutual burdens and sacrifices collectively, not for the sake of putting boots on foreign ground in order to "spread democracy," but instead for the sake of realizing and advertising democratic ideals in the way we treat the foreigners who put their boots on our ground.

The rhetoric of one side of the immigration debates says that we cannot afford to have 11 million illegal immigrants because immigrant abuses of the "welfare state" will bankrupt us. But let's be clear about what's bankrupting us right now: it's not that we're giving away oodles of medicine, money, and tuition waivers to the poor among us. What's straining our coffers to the breaking point is not the "welfare state," but the warring state, whose costs now annually dwarf the costs of our increasingly anemic social welfare programs. If we want to make room for illegal immigrants in our economy and in the welfare state, the obvious first step is not to remove people from our country but to remove ourselves from other people's countries.

Why should we move over so that 11 million uninvited guests can sit down at the table? For the same reason that President Bush argues we should be in Iraq or Afghanistan. Because as a nation we are committed to the idea that all men are created equal, entitled by inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Republicans and their critics need not differ on that essentially nationalistic point. The crucial divide between Right and Left need not be, as is so often assumed, that the one stands for patriotism and the other stands for rootless cosmopolitanism and anti-Americanism. Rather, the crucial divide comes from a difference of opinion on the best way of marshaling our limited national resources to realize the ideals to which we are committed as a nation. Some say we should wield our power to demolish governments and create new ones dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal, to expand the boundaries of our ideological influence in the world. I say we should wield our power, instead, to push our principles to their farthest conceivable limits here. We can first demonstrate our commitment to the equality of all men and women by treating equally all those men and women who fall within the purview of our national sovereignty, even as we continue to declare that the principle itself is not limited by that purview.

Notice that what I'm not questioning here is that the United States is a great nation and can be an even greater one. I'm not denying, as critics of our military ventures abroad often are accused of doing, that the aspirations of the United States are in many ways admirable, or that in many ways they express the common aspirations of all human beings for freedom from tyranny, human dignity, and personal security. I'm not, in other words, pooh-poohing nationalism itself but instead urging the channeling of such nationalist feelings in other directions. I do not want to be mistaken for claiming (and I don't think frequent readers will mistake me for claiming) that the United States is a perfect representative of the ideals it claims to represent. Far from it. Its history is a record of democratic successes overshadowed by horrible failures. But because getting our national ideals right still matters so insistently to real people living within our borders, our task should be to move ourselves more and more from under the shadow of our failures, to redeem our checkered past--if such a thing is possible--by reaching for a charitable future. And to do that, cultivating a sense of togetherness as a national community can be a boon rather than a bane.

This is a point similar to the one that historian David Hollinger made in his 1995 book, Postethnic America, a slim volume reissued in 2000 that still has much to say to us in 2006. Although his primary interlocutors were defenders of multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s, Hollinger was also trying to stake out a qualified sense in which nationalism and the nation are worth saving and savoring. For him, the primary challenge we face as a national community is in trying to answer the question of how wide we should draw the circle of the "we," and our highest challenge as a nation is to draw that circle as widely as possible without demanding that everyone within it surrender their affiliation with smaller ethnic, cultural, religious, or linguistic groups. In an eloquent postscript to the 2000 edition of the book, Hollinger defended the value of a "national solidarity tight enough to mobilize action on common challenges and loose enough to militate against a replay of the chauvinisms of the past." While decrying a kind of American exceptionalism that exempts the United States from the common bar of nations, or that envelops all of the nation's actions in a mantle of schmaltz and self-congratulation, Hollinger nonetheless argued that "the United States now finds itself in a position to develop and act upon a cultural image as a national solidarity committed--but often failing--to incorporate individuals from a great variety of communities of descent, on equal but not homogeneous terms, into a society with democratic aspirations inherited largely from England."

As Hollinger immediately states, "there is much more to the United States than this," and historical narratives of the nation can find nearly infinite ways of complicating that one-sentence summary. But if we had to stake the flag to one sentence, there are worse ones available. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this is the nation we are proud of and the nation that we want to improve: a nation that tries to incorporate as many different individuals as possible into a democratic society without forcing those individuals into a stultifying homogeneity. If that's our job as a nation (and certainly it's not our job alone; we are a nation among nations aspiring to democracy, not the nation chosen above all nations to achieve it), then perhaps we should see the fact of 11 million unincorporated individuals in our midst not as our greatest problem, but as our greatest opportunity.

Slightly edited at 8:31 p.m.

Google Reader

2006-03-28T19:19:00.000-05:00

As fate would have it, my first week of life after the defense ended with more of a whimper than a bang. I've been battling some kind of flu bug since Saturday, so blogging and most other waking activities have been on hold.

When I have managed to stagger from the couch to the computer, I've been giving Google Reader a try, thanks to Wilson's recommendation. I had been using Bloglines to receive RSS feeds, but lately I've found it to be very buggy. I like Google Reader so far, especially because it lists individual items in the sidebar, rather than simply listing feeds. It also makes it really easy to highlight particular posts and then publish them in my sidebar here. So now you should find a short list of things I've recently read over there to the left.

Some old canards

2006-03-25T12:47:00.000-05:00

I've heard some strong arguments against pacifism before, but I didn't find many of them in Cal Thomas's recent diatribe against Christian Peacemaker Teams. (Found via Jesus Politics.) Instead, in a week when CPT members are rejoicing over the return of three hostages from Iraq, what Thomas offers are mainly some old canards about pacifists that I don't find very convincing:

Strange thing about these peace movements: They rarely mobilize to oppose the killing, torture and imprisonment practiced by dictators. It is only when their own country attempts to end the oppression that the activists become active against America, not the initiators of evil. ...

Perhaps if Christian Peacemaker Teams had gone to Iraq during Saddam Hussein's murderous regime, or to China while Mao Tse-tung was slaughtering millions, or to Moscow while Josef Stalin practiced genocide on his people, or to any number of other capitals of carnage, they might be taken more seriously, though under those regimes they might have disappeared much quicker.

Pacifism, at least as professed by CPT members, holds that violence in all cases is an unjustifiable evil. So by definition a pacifist would denounce Saddam Hussein, Mao Tse-tung, and Josef Stalin as readily as any purveyor of violence. Disagree with that position if you like, but you can't argue that such absolute pacifists are too discriminating in their denunciations of murder and war. You would have a hard time finding a CPT member, I think, who would try to defend the brutality of Stalin or Mao, or who would argue that non-violent intervention in their regimes was not necessary.

Since CPT was founded in 1984, Thomas has set up a pretty impossible standard for judging the organization's seriousness if he wants to see evidence that they stood up to Stalin or Mao. I suppose Thomas has a better case for arguing that CPT members should have gone to Iraq to stand up to Hussein. It is worth noting, at least, that CPT delegates arrived in Iraq in October 2002, before the U.S.-led invasion. I don't know about CPT's activities in Iraq before then; I know about as much about the organization as you can find out from recent news items. But my object here is not to defend CPT in particular, but to question the underlying argument that Thomas is making about "these peace movements." His argument seems to be: Why are you pacifists always picking on us? Dictator X or Terrorist Y is violent too. Why not denounce their actions as well?

Pacifists do denounce the actions of Dictator X and Terrorist Y. A principled pacifist makes no exceptions for violence of any kind. On the contrary, it's the non-pacifist who has to give some account of why only some violence is justified, and why some evil dictators can be allowed to stand--even to be supported--while others must be toppled immediately. It's the non-pacifist, particularly one who believes in the Bush administration's doctrine of preemptive war, who has to explain why we make war on particular "capitals of carnage" and not on others.

I can oversimplify my point this way: If there were as many dedicated CPT members as there are soldiers in the world, I have little doubt they would be in the Sudan as well as Iraq, in China as well as Gaza. At least nothing about their principles would inhibit such a program of standing up for peace in every context. But an American advocate of preemptive war, for whom violence is sometimes justified, does have to give a rationale for being in Iraq instead of Sudan, particularly since the resources to which the United States has access are exponentially greater than those of CPT teams. If the United States government was willing to apply the doctrine of preemptive war consistently in every country where there is a murderous regime, then its principles would be easier to take seriously too.

There are good arguments that might be made to explain why certain regimes are more in need of violent overthrow than others. And there are compelling arguments against pacifism that stress the moral difference between, say, the unintentional killing of innocents and their intentional execution. (Although as I've said before, I have some doubts about those arguments too.) But Thomas doesn't make these arguments, and critics of pacifism seldom do. The easier response is to say, as Thomas does, that a pacifist is merely accommodating evil, whereas an advocate of war is doing something about it:

Peace, like happiness, is a byproduct, not a goal that can be unilaterally attained. Peace happens when evil is vanquished. ...

Peace "activism" may make its practitioners feel good or validate their belief that they are doing the will of God, but evil cannot be accommodated. Evil must be defeated if peace on Earth is to exist. That Mr. Fox and his colleagues could not, or would not, see this is most tragic of all.

As David Miller, a former CPT member, points out in response to Thomas, pacifists do not disagree with the end of vanquishing evil. They simply disagree that violence and evil can be vanquished with violence and evil. Pacifists, as Miller says, are not "blind idealists." They realize the risks that they are taking by "getting in the way" of violence and have few illusions that peace will always vanquish evil. Surely it's more illusory to think, as Thomas appears to, that evil can be "defeated" finally by the exercise of force. The more likely byproduct of force, it seems to me, has usually been not the vanquishing of evil, but rather its displacement into other contexts and modes. You set out to vanquish evil in Bosnia and find it cropping up in Rwanda. You set out to vanquish evil in Iraq and find it spreading in Africa. You set out to vanquish evil in Afghanistan and find it raising its ugly head in your own jails. It is certainly arguable that force has sometimes contained or diminished force, at least temporarily. But if Thomas's critique of pacifism is that force is justified because it can actually obliterate evil altogether, then he is setting an impossible standard not just for CPT, but also for himself.

The non-defensive defense

2006-03-23T21:13:00.000-05:00

The first week after the defense has been great: I flew home to visit family for a few days, read from this, this, and this, watched old West Wing episodes on DVD, wandered aimlessly through some bookstores, and played online chess. Sure, there have been a few fleeting moments of phantom dissertation pain, of knowing that the appendage is gone but feeling like it is still there. And there are still a few typos to fix and lines to add before turning in the final copy of the dissertation to the binder. But there is life after the defense, and it is sweet.

Even the defense, though, was more sweet than bitter, and in comments below, the Academic Coach asks why. She writes:

I'd love to hear more about why the defense was so rewarding. So many students I work with are worried about the defense when it is so often an opportunity to hear seasoned opinions about how to shape the diss into good articles or a marketable book.

I certainly felt my share of anxiety before the defense. I had to be regularly reminded by my advisor (and, Lord knows, by my wife) that a little trepidation was normal. But I'm fortunate to be in a program that already views the defense less as an ordeal by fire and more as "an opportunity to hear seasoned opinions" from senior scholars about my ongoing work. In fact, the dissertation guidelines published by the University begin by saying that although the dissertation is "the culmination of the graduate degree," it is only the "beginning of one's scholarly work," a dialectic synthesis that I've tried to wrap my head around before. One reason the defense was so rewarding was because my committee members clearly agreed with those guidelines. They were genuinely interested in constructive criticism, and their graciousness had little to do with me.

I do think, however, that it helped for me to come to the defense with the same view of the dissertation as both a culmination and a beginning. In my very brief opening comments, I described the dissertation as a "freeze frame" in a still developing project. And instead of summarizing the dissertation, I tried to suggest what I saw as the most likely trajectory of the project after the defense, noting the points where I felt like more research and reflection would be needed. In other words, I tried to invite "seasoned opinions" and indicate my openness to them.

There is a thin line between giving a defense and being defensive. Giving a defense means explaining how you came to take up a particular position. But defensiveness gives the impression that you refuse to abandon that position or to move onto a better one. As much as possible, I tried to avoid giving that impression and instead focused on making my decisions about the dissertation intelligible to the committee. On the advice of my advisor, I also made some opening comments about the history of the project, which helped me answer some more particular questions during the defense itself. For instance, at the very beginning I tried to note which of the dissertation's themes and arguments were of the most recent vintage and how they had gradually come to the fore, because explaining the provenance of your arguments usually makes clear which parts of them are still provisional. It helped me to explain that the dissertation had proceeded through two distinct phases in which I had framed the central questions of the thesis quite differently, because sometimes an argument or a citation that raised questions for the committee turned out to be an artifact of an earlier question I had been asking that had been submerged in later drafts. Most of all, explaining the history of the project helped underline the sense in which it was a work still in movement, which in turn helped me resist the temptation to be defensive when I was asked a challenging question.

That's not to say that every challenging question could be explained away with a simple "I wrote that back before I realized X." Some of the questions were really difficult: that's why they still call it a defense. After all, if defending a dissertation is different from being defensive about it, one still cannot simply concede every point. Defensiveness is an easy position to fall into, but so is surrender. There were enough eyewitnesses on hand who could tell you that from time to time I fell into both traps. But when the defense was going well, I think it was when the discussion managed to steer between those extremes. I also think the Academic Coach is right to imply (as I think she is doing) that much of that depended on perception: perhaps because I was anxious, I spent a lot of time trying to convince myself to see the defense as a workshop instead of an inquisition, and perhaps perceiving it that way helped make it that way.

I certainly think this holds true for most of the other defenses and seminars I've seen: if the candidate presents the work as both defensible and revisable, then the committee or the audience is most likely to be positive and constructive. The only times I've ever seen the claws really come out in an academic setting have been when presenters brooked no dissent, admitted no mistakes, or acted as though the work had sprung fully formed from their heads. Having performed scholarly work themselves, most academic audiences have a hard time taking such seamless presentations seriously and promptly set about trying to find as many seams in the work as they can.

I came, I saw, I finished!

2006-03-17T17:18:00.000-05:00

Well, it's official. I'm going to have to change my "About Me" page to reflect this happy news: as of today, I am no longer a graduate student. The defense turned out to be a great intellectual experience, thanks to my gracious and extremely helpful committee members. And hard as it is to believe, the long road to the Ph.D. has actually come to an end!

That's not the only big change coming to the "about" page. I'm also excited to report that this fall I will be starting as an assistant professor of history at the University of Denver. To land a job in a department with such welcoming colleagues and such enthusiastic students was much more than I had a right to expect, and I can't wait to get started.

For now, though, it's time to exhale. Thanks to all of you who stopped by in the last couple of weeks with good wishes! Hopefully this means the Great Blog Silence can also finally come to an end!

Jazz geek-out

2006-03-16T20:13:00.000-05:00

Before 2005 becomes too much of a distant memory, I have been wanting to mention what a bumper year it was for jazz fans. As numerous columnists noted, the three best releases of the year were all classic albums recorded decades ago, only to be lost in various vaults until 2005.

The critics' consensus favorite for the year was a 1957 recording at Carnegie Hall by a legendary quartet led by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. Before this release, jazz fans and musicologists had only a handful of tracks to document this collaboration, even though the band was universally seen as a turning point in the careers of both Monk and Coltrane. If you don't believe in serendipity, try this one on for size: the Monk-Coltrane record was unearthed when an archivist at the Library of Congress just happened to find it sitting in a nondescript box deep in bowels of the Library. It was a little bit more serendipitous when a couple of Bedouin shepherds threw a rock into a random cave and discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, but only a little. To diehard historians of jazz, finding this recording has been like finding a Q text for the Gospel of John.

The two other jazz discoveries from 2005 don't justify quite as much hyperbole, but they were archaeological gems in their own right. Here was Fred Kaplan's summary over at Slate:

It's a mere, if wondrous, coincidence that those three recordings of yore were all discovered this year. And they are discoveries; nobody had even known they existed. Dizzy Gillespie-Charlie Parker, New York, Town Hall, June 22, 1945 (Uptown Jazz), recorded shortly after the two fathers of be-bop formed their quintet with Max Roach on drums, is as electrifying as anything they would set down ever again. Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note), made in November 1957 shortly before that group broke up, finds Monk playing his most archly elegant piano and Coltrane his most relaxed yet searching tenor sax. John Coltrane's One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note (Impulse!), recorded in the spring of 1965, in a Manhattan club that Trane used as a sort of workshop, captures his great quartet streaking on the knife-edge between structure and freedom.

All three of these albums have gotten a lot of play chez McDaniel during the Great Blog Silence. Aside from The Historic Significance of all three, all of them go far towards proving the dictum that the best jazz albums are live jazz albums, a point that Fred Kaplan made at length in another column.

Kaplan's column had to do mainly with the musical value of live albums, but one of the things that makes a live jazz album great for me is the audience. I love the ambient noise of a jazz club or concert hall. To me, the tinkling of glasses heard on Sunday at the Village Vanguard is as important to the album as Scott LeFaro or Paul Motian, just as this other Vanguard classic simply would not be the same without Sonny Rollins' witty exchange with the audience about whether "Old Devil Moon" was from the score of Finian's Rainbow or Kiss Me, Kate.

It occurs to me that my jazz geekiness and my history geekiness are related here: I get jazzed by the radical uniqueness of historical moments. And nothing underlines the irreproducible quality of a musical performance more than the interjection of an audience: even if a band could get together again and copy its own improvisation, note for note, it could never get back the ca-ching of the cash register that often interrupts the Miles Davis Quintet at the Plugged Nickel, or the patron who was indignantly shushing a fellow patron during Wayne Shorter's solo on "Yesterdays." So here's a shout out to the shouting, hooting, and hollering on the The In Crowd. I applaud you, anonymous person on The Out of Towners who accidentally clapped during a particularly quiet solo by Jack DeJohnette: you deserved to be listed in the credits. To the audiences on Without a Song and Live at the House of Tribes: without you, they wouldn't have been the "Best Albums of 2005 Actually Recorded in This Millennium."

Now, I don't want to make it sound like mere antiquarianism is the reason why live albums are so important to jazz fans. Another reason has to do with the fact that jazz fans of my generation have usually exposed themselves to the great artists of the past haphazardly and episodically. We weren't there to hear the successive transformations of the music as they actually happened. Geoff Dyer makes this point brilliantly in the critical essay that concludes But Beautiful, his entrancing book on jazz:

Jorge Luis Borges has pointed out that Ulysses now seems to come--because we encounter it first--before The Odyssey, and in exactly the same way Miles comes before Armstrong, Coltrane before Hawkins. Typically, the person coming to jazz plunges in somewhere (Kind of Blue is a frequent starting point but for many it will, increasingly, be John Zorn or Courtney Pine) and then goes both forward and back. This is a shame since jazz is best appreciated chronologically (Parker seems less startling when we come to him via the screams of Pharoah Sanders). More generally, even if we have never actually heard their records, we hear Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, and Bud Powell in almost every piece of jazz we come across. When we do get around to listening to Bud Powell it is difficult to see what is so special about him: he sounds like any other pianist (though really what we mean is that every other pianist sounds like Bud Powell).

The listening itinerary that Dyer describes matches my own experience. I think my first jazz album was either Kind of Blue or Crescent, two very different places to jump into the river. But for a young listener like me, one of the things a live album can do is help to recuperate a sense of what was "startling" in someone like Parker or Coltrane. Here again, the audience adds to the value of the piece. On the best kinds of live album, you can hear the listeners reacting to the newness of the music. On the Town Hall recording of Dizzy and Parker released last year, you can sense the audience's enthusiasm for what was then a very new band gradually rising over the course of the concert. When the crowd gives a polite welcome to a young Max Roach on drums, but roars for the already familiar favorite Sidney Catlett, you immediately grasp how new this band was and how relatively obscure its now legendary members were. Likewise, when Coltrane unleashes a sprawling fifteen minute solo to kick off One Up, One Down, you can hear the palpable incredulity in the announcer's voice when he returns to give the next number.

Well, if after reading all of that, you still actually want to read some more about jazz, you are a reader after my own heart. Here's some other good stuff I've noted recently: The New York Times had a great interview with drummer Roy Haynes, who, by the way, recorded one of my favorite live trio albums in 2000. (Hat tip: Tim Niland.) Also in the Times, Ben Ratliff wrote a provocative column about the induction of Miles Davis into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And don't miss the response to the column by the members of The Bad Plus.

And yes, for those of you who are wondering, writing this post was a therapeutic way to keep the nerves down for tomorrow's Big Defense.

Worth reading

2006-03-15T14:35:00.000-05:00

Rob has the newest edition of the History Carnival at History:Other. And Kevin points out that Mark Grimsley has started a new group blog for Civil War historians called Civil Warriors.

Reason to wince

2006-03-15T07:38:00.000-05:00

Annie Proulx is, er, not happy about the fact that Crash beat out Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture at the Oscars. (Via A&L Daily.) Of the two movies, I've only seen Crash, so I can't speak to the merits of the judges' decision. But I had a hard time finding Proulx's "rant" (her word, not mine) credible once she wrote this:

And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.

There's the promised reason to wince: the suggestion that racism and the aftermath of slavery are "old news," as passé as Puritans and silverites. (One wonders, by the way, whether the public shaming of sinners or the dangers of free-wielding market capitalism are really old news either.) I have very little sympathy for the kind of argument that goes "your cause had its day in the sun, now it's time for mine." Often you hear this kind of rhetoric on the Right: witness the statements of Bush administration officials after Hurricane Katrina that racism was a troubled part of our history, statements which struck me as attempts to downplay Bush's handling of the New Orleans crisis as a peccadillo compared to the sins of the fathers.

But as Proulx demonstrates, you often also hear the whispered insinuation that we should just move on from the Left, although for a different reason. Progressives can sometimes fall prey to a rhetoric that serializes progress: first we dealt with slavery, then we dealt with racism, then we dealt with male chauvinism, now we deal with homophobia. That kind of point, even if made in jest, is usually ill-considered. It imagines that progress is a zero-sum game, that we can't deal with all of these evils at the same time, and it implies that old wounds are fully closed and no longer in need of our attention. The minute we begin to talk as if the principles of justice and equal treatment fall in and out of fashion like Oscar dresses or movies, we've begun to lose sight of the scope of those principles, not to mention the breathtaking amount of work that still needs to be done, on numerous fronts, to secure them.

But maybe I'm making too much of a rant. I do think Proulx makes a good point when she talks about the preference that Oscar voters tend to have for "mimicry, the conversion of a film actor into the spittin' image of a once-living celeb." I agree with her that it's worth honoring actors who invent characters with nothing but the raw material of words on a page. But to be fair, the Academy did honor such actors by choosing Crash, which has one of the best and most convincing ensemble casts I've ever seen, and which also has a subplot about a television producer who has an eye-opening collision with the entertainment world's demand for mimicry.

Guelzo on Lincoln

2006-03-13T10:25:00.000-05:00

Well, the dissertation has been out of my hands for about a week now, and while waiting for D-Day I've been enjoying some time to read non-dissertation books, including the latest gem in John Mortimer's crown. Last week I also finally had a chance to read Allen Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, which has been on my to-do list for a long while. It did not disappoint.

Although it presents itself primarily as an "intellectual biography" or even a religious life of Lincoln, Redeemer President is also a serviceable one-volume biography that rivals David Donald's Lincoln for its scope and readability. Unfortunately, Guelzo's book sacrifices bibliographic notes for the sake of readability (a trade-off that is becoming increasingly and lamentably common in the publishing world). But the book's luminous and captivating prose (aside from a noticeable overuse of the word "quondam"; Google counts three instances but I'm willing to swear there were more) is not something to be lightly overlooked.

Three more specific things struck me about the book. The first was Guelzo's artful defense of the Very Idea of an "intellectual" biography of a man who was, above all, an antebellum politician. In making that defense, Guelzo also implicitly argues that intellectual histories of the antebellum period can be written--that it was not, as traditionally assumed, merely an era of ideology or practical politics, but also an era in which extremely abstract questions of theology and philosophy mattered to ordinary people:

We are too numbed [says Guelzo] by fanfares for the Common Man, by Ralph Waldo Emerson's sniffling laments about the absence of American scholars, by Hollywood glorifications of sharp-shooting hillbillies in coonskin caps, to hear the frantic solemnity with which the most isolated patriarch on the most godforsaken acre of wiregrass would sit up all the night alongside a wandering evangelist to discuss the intricacies of predestination and free will ... (p. 21).

I'm sympathetic to this recuperation of the vibrant intellectual lives of antebellum Americans who are traditionally seen as non-intellectuals or (notoriously) as anti-intellectual. That view often stems from an ahistorical equation of intellectualism with secularism, so that the arcane debates between traveling evangelists and isolated patriarchs are simply dismissed as unworthy of exposition. I've noted before how often radical abolitionists like Garrison are dismissed as anti-political, and in the same way, Garrisonians are often seen as nothing more than propagandists whose ideas were the products of a tangled mysticism or were simply tossed about like chaff in the winds of popular opinion, or whose intellectual lives--such as they were--merely served as projections of their own tortured personalities. As Guelzo notes, the cult of personality surrounding Lincoln often obscures the complexity of his thought, and similar complexities are often missed in the thinking of antebellum reformers. Orderly, systematic, consistent thinkers, the abolitionists were not. But thinkers--serious ones--they were. Their "minds" are therefore worthy of subtle description, even if or especially because they lacked consistency, which, to quote another of Emerson's "sniffling laments," is the hobgoblin of small minds.

The second thing that struck me about the book was Guelzo's convincing depiction of Lincoln's worldview as a kind of "Calvinized deism" (p. 447). If that phrase seems oxymoronic, one of the virtues of Guelzo's book is to show how such a position was intelligible for Victorian skeptics like Lincoln. (Without using that phrase, James Turner has also sensitively portrayed the tenacity of Calivinist modes of thinking even in the minds of nineteenth-century non-believers.) Thanks to the arguments of Paine-ite skeptics, Lincoln early in his life lost any abiding belief in organized religion or the God of the Old School Presbyterian churches that Lincoln's family attended. Instead, he adopted a view of the Divine Being as a distant designer, revealed in the world only through the mechanical and deterministic operations of natural law. The loss of his faith, as Guelzo shows, was never an easy pill for Lincoln to swallow. And from the Calvinism of his youth he also retained a latent belief in the inscrutability of divine providence--a belief that deepened and rose to the surface during the Civil War--and a prominent sense of his own worthlessness and humiliating insignificance. When Lincoln did vacillate in his skepticism and turn towards a belief in God, it was always a chastened belief in an impersonal and impassive God the Father. Lincoln never seemed able to believe in a redemptive personal Savior.

In a brilliant argument that unfolds gradually--sometimes too gradually--over the course of the book, Guelzo argues that Lincoln's finest political virtues, best expressed in his famous promise of "malice toward none" and "charity for all," stemmed from his Calvinized deism. The rationale for charity, in Lincoln's mind, was not the evangelical sentimentalism of so many of his contemporaries, but rather his belief in an overweening determinism that made malice toward any as foolish as kicking a rock for stubbing your toe. I'm oversimplifying Guelzo's argument and Lincoln's philosophy here, but this insight opens up an avenue for thinking about another cultural and intellectual strain in antebellum America--besides evangelicalism--that amplified the growth of philanthropic sentiment. Traditionally, the rise of such philanthropy is credited almost wholly to the rejection of Old School Calvinism by the revivalists of the Second Great Awakening, and to the evangelical doctrine that individual people were perfectible and could shape their own destinies. But Guelzo shows convincingly how, in Lincoln's case, the conviction that people could not shape their own destinies could also support the Whiggish moralism and humanitarianism that underwrote much of the Republican Party's rhetoric. (Working farther backwards in time, it's worth noting that for a Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards, a view of human beings as hopelessly depraved was wholly compatible with a belief that universal benevolence was required of every believer and that self-interest was a base motive for behavior. Although it's heuristically useful to contrast Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" with the revivalism of Charles Finney, it risks erecting a schematic distinction between the two that makes Edwards into a spokesperson for malice toward all and charity for none, which he was not.)

To be sure, the Second Great Awakening's vindication of "free will" had much more to do with the explosion of philanthropic organizations and moralizing politics in the early nineteenth century than maverick positions like Lincoln's "Calivinized deism." But for just that reason, historians tend to overlook how nineteenth-century philosophies of determinism, born either of skepticism, Calivinism, or some hybrid of both, could also motivate philanthropic action. Aside from Lincoln, a good example of this is the "necessitarianism" that drove Owenite socialists into utopian communities in Britain and America during the early 1800s. Gregory Claeys has argued that Robert Owen's belief that individual character was formed wholly by "circumstances," rather than choice, was a critical component of the Owenites' movement culture, and helped communities survive internal differences and personality conflicts. If circumstances made the man, why feel malice toward any man? The unfortunate were to be pitied and uplifed more than blamed--but Owenites could reach that conclusion in common with an evangelical Christian without also adopting the latter's view of free will. (Guelzo, by the way, gives tantalizing notice on pp. 35-36 that before Lincoln's family to Illinois, they lived in close proximity to the short-lived New Harmony community in Indiana, which was founded by Owen the "quondam industrialist." He quotes a contemporary who remembered the adolescent Lincoln reading copies of Owenite newspapers.)

The final thing that struck me about Guelzo's book is connected with the second. Given the fact that Lincoln's selective appropriation of Calvinism and deism was so complicated, and given the fact that his own personal faith was far from conventionally Christian, Guelzo's book serves as another warning against the distressingly common practice of trying to prove that the United States is a Christian nation by appealing to the appearance of words like "God" and "providence" in the speeches of Great Americans like Lincoln. Those words do not always mean what you think they mean, whether in the writings of Jefferson or Lincoln. Still, Guelzo's book also shows, through a densely layered account of American Whiggish thought, the origins of this compulsion to claim Christianity as the nation's founding religion and to wrap the nation's heroes in the mantle of faith. Lincoln's assassinated body had not grown cold before Easter sermons across the country were trying to convert him in death into the Bible-believing born-again Christian that he never was in life. And there's an implicit lesson there, Guelzo seems to be saying, to similar attempts today. According to him, the very virtues that the believers in a "Christian nation" would want to praise in Lincoln--his humility, his moral uprightness, his honesty, his perseverance under trial, his submission to an inscrutable Divine will--were the products not of a conventional Christian faith but of a peculiarly nineteenth-century amalgam of unorthodox skepticism and Calvinistic sensibilities.

Of course, the practical fruits of Lincoln's Calvinized deism are not arguments in favor of its truth, anymore than proving that Lincoln was a closet evangelical Christian would, by itself, be an argument in favor of the truth of Christianity. What Guelzo's book teaches us is the peril of trying to settle debates about religion in the public sphere by appeal to iconic figures in the past, while also showing us the rich historical rewards to be had by situating nineteenth-century thinkers like Lincoln squarely within their historical context. But if appeals to Lincoln's faith do not settle debates about religion and public life in the present, Guelzo's portrayal of Lincoln does perhaps show that vibrant public discussions of abstract theological and philosophical ideas do not necessarily impoverish public life or evince an anti-intellectual posture. This may not be a Christian nation, but it is a nation in which debates about Christianity and religion have been central to public life. That doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon.

The Great Blog Silence of 2006

2006-02-24T09:38:00.000-05:00

I'm putting up this post so that when this loooooong hiatus eventually ends, and I want to talk about things that were going on in the interim, I'll have something to link to. There are good things to report and many things worth posting, but right now finishing up the dissertation is occupying my time to the exclusion of everything else. I anticipate that the Great Blog Silence will end sometime shortly after March 17: D-Day.

Two snow poems

2006-02-13T13:38:00.000-05:00

"Dust of Snow"
by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Untitled, from Given: Poems
By Wendell Berry

When we convene again
to understand the world,
the first speaker will again
point silently out the window
at the hillside in its season,
sunlit, under the snow,
and we will nod silently,
and silently stand and go.

Technology and war

2006-01-30T23:27:00.000-05:00

On Page 97 of The Origins of War Prevention, a history of the British peace movement from 1730 to the outbreak of the Crimean War, Martin Ceadel makes the good point that technological progress has often been a double-edged sword in debates about war.

On the one hand, peace advocates have long pointed to the technological trappings of "globalization" as evidence that the world is becoming more interdependent and therefore more pacific. Early nineteenth-century pacifists like Elihu Burritt pointed to ocean steamships, telegraphs, and railroads as indisputable evidence that war was on its way out. On the other hand, defenders of war pointed to the same innovations as proof of the need for greater military preparedness. Steamships and railroads gave enemy nations a dangerous material advantage, which could only be reduced by turning these new technologies into the service of war. Ceadel offers a quotation from Richard Cobden, the advocate of trade and international arbitration, that captures this irony succinctly:

There is so much cant about the tendency of railways, steam-boats, and electric telegraphs, to unite France and England in bonds of peace uttered by those who are heard, in almost the same breath, advocating greater preparations against war and invasion, that I feel some hesitation in joining such a discordant chorus.

I suspect some future historian will find our own paeans to the Internet as a harbinger of globalization similarly "discordant." Here you have a person who argues that computers and laptops are drawing the globe into one world. There you have a person who argues that these same technologies place us in more danger because they can be used so easily by terrorists. The Internet would like to make the world to sing in perfect harmony ... except that it's also the place where pictures of hostages are posted and terrorist attacks are planned.

As a result, the very things that are supposed to be bringing us closer together--say, airplanes and cell phones--also function in political discourse as justifications for greater militarization and state consolidation, since now that any terrorist can use a plane or a cell phone as a weapon, we must supposedly devise new means of combat and arm ourselves for a new kind of war. Cobden was right, I think, to be suspicious of the claim that technological innovation tips the scales between war and peace one way or the other, even though (ironically) he certainly helped contribute to our contemporary sense that free trade and the shrinking of distances between countries are inherently liberalizing and pacifying forces.

Clippings

2006-01-27T12:20:00.000-05:00

"Admittedly, the economic needs of a society are bound to be reflected to some rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools. But, even so, there must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds, or by teenagers, for that matter, than concerns about 'successful global competition.' Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself."

-- Jonathan Kozol (source)

"Nothing is more shameful for a man than to found his title to esteem, not on his own merits, but on the fame of his ancestors. The glory of the Fathers is doubtless to their children a most precious treasure; but to enjoy it without transmitting it to the next generation, and without adding to it yourselves, this is the height of imbecility."

-- Charles Sumner, "The True Grandeur of Nations" (1845)

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. ... Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become."

-- James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time

"There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity--the Great Depression, the Second World War, vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, 'Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.'"

-- Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without a Country

"Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."

-- Wendell Berry

Defining politics

2006-01-27T00:15:00.000-05:00

I have been unable to keep up with blogs for the past couple of weeks, but I did notice an interesting discussion over at Cliopatria about what we mean by "political history." As Tim Burke's post suggests, defining "political history" raises the more basic question of how we define "political." That's a problem I have been mulling recently, although for narrower reasons than the ones raised in the Cliopatria debate.

In modern historiography on the American antislavery movement--my primary field of study--it is conventional to divide abolitionists into two broad categories: abolitionists who were "political" and abolitionists who were not. In making that distinction, historians mean that there were some antebellum abolitionists who were willing to roll up their sleeves and engage in formal "politics," whether by organizing antislavery parties, running candidates for local and national office, or forging cross-party coalitions. On the other hand, some abolitionists refused even to vote. For a variety of reasons, acolytes of William Lloyd Garrison believed that such formal participation in politics was sinful or unprincipled. As a result, radical Garrisonians are generally seen as the apolitical antitheses of abolitionists who joined the Liberty Party, the Free Soil movement, or the Republican Party.

Distinguishing Garrisonians from "political abolitionists" usually works as a heuristic device: historians need broad terms whose meanings can be at least temporarily bracketed, or else our subjects of discussion will always be moving targets. But debates among antislavery scholars still break out over just who counts as a "political" abolitionist and who counts as a "radical" abolitionist. (A really interesting debate along these lines took place on the H-SHEAR discussion list in November. Click here, scroll down to the bottom, and work up.) And sometimes it's important to point out how arbitrary and potentially misleading a designation like "political" can be.

For example, the dichotomy I have outlined above depends on defining a "political" strategy solely on the basis of whether it is an "electoral" strategy to win votes, gain office, and thereby shape policy. By this standard, to be sure, Garrisonians were not "political," since they would not vote or join parties. But why should the concept of "politics" be restricted to "electoral politics"?

That's one of the questions that animates Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet, which won a bucket full of awards in 2004, and which I finally had a chance to read last month. One of Hahn's central--and most provocative--points is that enslaved and recently emancipated people in the South "constituted themselves as political actors" and created a "distinctive African-American politics," and that they did so long before being declared legally free or obtaining the right to vote (p. 1). To call people who lacked legal citizenship "political" actors, Hahn argues, requires "a broad understanding of politics and the political ... that encompasses collective struggles for what might be termed socially meaningful power" (p. 3). This broad understanding does not exclude the traditional definition of the political arena as having to do with the electoral arena; Hahn's book follows his "political actors" from slavery through emancipation and into partisan politics during Reconstruction, so he does not mean to diminish the importance of electoral politics by arguing for the existence of what he calls "slave politics" (p. 3). But Hahn does argue that viewing "slaves, who had no standing in the official arenas of civil and political society, as nonpolitical, prepolitical, or protopolitical" prevents historians from understanding the kinds of political choices that freedpeople made once they were enfranchised and endowed with citizenship rights. The transition from slavery to freedom did not transform formerly apolitical slaves into political agents, but rather transposed struggles over power from one political arena into another.

It isn't possible to do justice to Hahn's broad understanding of politics here, but the main thing I want to point out is this: his broadening of the term "politics" is made possible by the fact that his subjects--enslaved people--had no access no electoral power. By definition, to call them "political" required shaking free of the idea that all politics are formal, electoral politics. And once free of that restrictive idea, Hahn is actually able to shed more light on the twists and turns of formal, electoral politics. As Hahn writes, the nature of his subject required him to "think much more deeply about the nature of politics and political practice, about how unfranchised and disfranchised people might conduct politics" (p. 2). The disfranchisement of his subjects required him to displace the centrality of "the vote" from his definition of politics.

But all of this prompted a (still poorly formed) question in my mind about the abolitionists: Why does the broadening of "politics" to include activities other than voting have to be limited to histories of the "disfranchised" or the "unfranchised"? Why can't we use Hahn's same basic insight to consider those abolitionists who voluntarily refused the franchise as fully political actors, not as "nonpolitical, prepolitical, or protopolitical"? And might that recasting of "politics" help us explain "antebellum politics" better, just as Hahn used his broadened understanding of politics to better explain the formal political history of Reconstruction?

If the answer is that non-voting abolitionists were not "political" because they could have voted but didn't, we are essentially reinstating the centrality of "voting" to politics and reading the unfranchised back out of our definition of "politics." If historical subjects can be fully "political actors" even though legally excluded from formal arenas of politics, then we should also be able to consider historical subjects who withdraw from electoral politics as "political actors," even though they are not legally required to do so.

In this post I can't fully develop why I think it might be useful to see Garrisonians as "political" abolitionists, too, even if they were "political" in a different sense from Liberty Party members and voting abolitionists. That's something I want to develop further in my own thinking about the Garrisonians. But it could be that the fruits of such a redefinition would be similar to the fruits of Hahn's approach--a richer explanation of formal political events that pivots on the complex relationship between political arenas.

To be sure, if we tried to think about Garrisonians as "political actors" as seriously as Hahn has thought about slaves and freedpeople as "political actors," we might still end up concluding that Garrisonians, unlike Hahn's subjects, had little impact on the twists and turns of formal politics. But at least that conclusion would be a synthetic proposition, rather than a tautological conclusion forced on us by an anemic definition of "politics." To presume, by definition, that Garrisonians had no impact on the political history of the Civil War era because they did not vote would be to make the same mistake as presuming that, by definition, slaves had no impact on the political history of the Civil War era because they did not vote--a presumption that Hahn has soundly challenged.

This post, I guess, is a long and round-about way of agreeing with something that I heard James Brewer Stewart say in his presidential address at the annual meeting of SHEAR this past summer. Stewart pointed out that historians of the antebellum period who consider themselves "political" historians rarely engage with those who consider themselves historians of abolitionism and reform, or vice versa. Michael F. Holt's recent brief book of the coming of the Civil War, for example, presents itself as a case for why a "dismissive view of political history is egregiously wrongheaded" (p. xii). But it, in turn, takes a dismissive view of the influence of abolitionists on politics. The book contains not a single reference to William Lloyd Garrison. It would be one thing if this sharp separation of "political history" from any history that would include Garrison was the result of a carefully reasoned case that Garrisonians had no influence on the actions of formal politicians. But I suspect the separation can be traced instead to an a priori distinction between "political" and "non-political" that settles arbitrarily on "electoral" activity as the defining feature of all "political" arenas.

I don't mean to single Holt out here; abolitionist historians are often guilty of taking for granted the same kind of definition, and then allowing it to constrict the kinds of questions they ask about the political history of the antebellum period. The lesson of all this musing, at least to me, is to aspire to a flexible and expansive definition of politics (a la Hahn) that would somehow be able to place Garrisonian abolitionists and Liberty Party operatives within the same frame of reference. The political actions of both might be better illumined by an analysis of the relationship between their different spheres of action. In other words, defining politics broadly might help us understand politics (as narrowly and traditionally defined) better.

It's important to end on that note, given the fact that I started by linking to that debate over at Cliopatria. Sometimes it seems like the defenders of traditional "political history" think any attempt to shift attention from electoral politics or redefine "politics" to include actors "from below" is a threat to or lack of respect for traditional political history. Take Holt, for instance. In the preface to the aforementioned book, he writes that

among my fellow academic historians ... American political history has become an object of scorn. Eager to celebrate the "agency" of those without formal governmental power, they denigrate the significance of past public policies, deny that everyday Americans paid serious attention to politics, and deride historical analysis of the actions of governmental officeholders as decidedly old hat, elitist, and inconsequential compared with more faddish interests in seemingly any group except the white male politicians who exercised formal political power in our past.

I know there is a long history of professional politics (!) that stands behind a paragraph like this, and which causes Holt to identify certain analytical concepts like "agency" with "faddish" interests. No doubt there have been some historians in the past who have "deride[d]" analysis of "white male politicians" or looked down their noses at historians of "formal political power." But books like Hahn's make me hopeful that we can begin to forget those old wounds. If "American political history" has been made an "object of scorn" by some in the past, the solution now is not to dig deeper trenches between "political history" and the history of "those without formal governmental power." Instead, the solution is to begin to put those two histories together, as I think Hahn has done and as I think historians of abolitionism should begin to do.

And as historians begin to move towards a consensus that that is the solution to the slights (real or perceived) that "political historians" have received in the past, hopefully we will also approach a point where the celebration of the political "agency" of actors like slaves or Garrisonians does not immediately send a signal of scorn for the importance of "formal" political actors. As Hahn shows so well, expanding the definition of politics can actually be seen as an expansion of the hegemony of "political history," newly defined, rather than as an attempt to reduce its importance or deride its practicioners.

More than one dream

2006-01-16T13:34:00.000-05:00

"Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Along with this has grown an inordinate worship of bigness. ... Not a few men, who cherish lofty and noble ideals, hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different. Many sincere white people in the South privately oppose segregation and discrimination, but they are apprehensive lest they by publicly condemned. Millions of citizens are deeply disturbed that the military-industrial complex too often shapes national policy, but they do not want to be considered unpatriotic. Countless loyal Americans honestly feel that a world body such as the United Nations should include even Red China, but they fear being called Communist sympathizers. A legion of thoughtful persons recognizes that traditional capitalism must continually undergo change if our great national wealth is to be more equitably distributed, but they are afraid their criticisms will make them seem un-American. ... How few people have the audacity to express publicly their convictions, and how many have allowed themselves to be 'astronomically intimidated'!

"Blind conformity makes us so suspicious of an individual who insists on saying what he really believes that we recklessly threaten his civil liberties. If a man, who believes vigorously in peace, is foolish enough to carry a sign in a public demonstration, or if a Southern white person, believing in the American dream of the dignity and worth of human personality, dares to invite a Negro into his home and join with him in his struggle for freedom, he is liable to be summoned before some legislative investigative body. He most certainly is a Communist if he espouses the cause of human brotherhood!

"Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.' To the conformist and the shapers of the conformist mentality, this must surely sound like a most dangerous and radical doctrine. Have we permitted the lamp of independent thought and individualism to become so dim that were Jefferson to write and live by these words today we would find cause to harass and investigate him? If Americans permit thought-control, business-control, and freedom-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of facism [sic]."

-- Martin Luther King Jr., in "Transformed Nonconformist," Strength to Love, pp. 23-24.

Fun with maps

2006-01-16T01:45:00.000-05:00

If you have not seen the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection before, that's a problem you need to fix. I have just recently become aware of it myself, and I have been finding it very useful.

The collection contains high-resolution images of maps from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they are beautifully rendered, yet surprisingly easy to download and view. After searching for maps by country, province, or keyword, you can zoom in and out on particular areas, see detailed information about the original publication of the map, and save selections to your computer. (The maps are all provided under a Creative Commons license. You can read more about Rumsey and the collection in the July 2003 issue of Common-Place.)

Be warned that this is where the post begins to get nerdy. [Ed.--Wasn't it already nerdy? Yes, but I am about to kick things up to another notch of nerdiness.] Having ready access to 19c maps has recently helped me to visually track the European travels of one of the characters in my dissertation, Henry Clarke Wright. (The proto-blogger?) In the 1840s Wright spent several years in Europe, lecturing on abolitionism, "non-resistance," and free trade. Most of his time was spent in the British Isles, but in 1844 he spent about seven months on the continent.

Wright's visit was supposed to be recuperative. After coming down with a cough on the lecture circuit in Ireland, his friends there convinced him to travel to Graefenberg in Austrian Silesia, where an obscure farmer named Vincent Priessnitz had established a hydropathic "water cure" spa. A typical day of the "cure" involved a quick succession of hot and cold immersion baths, after which patients often wrapped themselves in towels that had been buried in the snow overnight. After six months of that, Wright headed back to London via Austria, Prussia, Switzerland, and Belgium.

Along the way, in addition to touring Waterloo with a veteran of the battle and haranguing locals of various nationalities for their submission to Old World tyranny, Wright bumped into two of Metternich's children with their tutor on a Danube steamboat and heard a performance by Johann Strauss. All of this was reported--at great length--in Wright's dispatches to the Boston Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery newspaper. (You can read more about the very eccentric Wright in Lewis Perry's 1980 biography.)

The Rumsey collection made it very easy for me to trace Wright's route both to and from Graefenberg. Although I have not yet been able to locate Graefenberg itself on a map, several of the maps in the Rumsey collection included many small stops mentioned in Wright's journals and letters, along with markings for contemporary roads. I do know that Graefenberg was about 70 miles south of Breslau. Wikipedia says it is present-day Jeseník.

Below is a full color clipping I took from an 1842 map by John Arrowsmith, followed by a black and white copy with my marking of Wright's circuit, which took him through Berlin, Olmutz, Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Zurich, Geneva, Cologne, Aix la Chapelle, Brussels, and Ostend.

Click on the maps to enlarge them. And remember that there are many more where these came from here.

New digital history blog

2006-01-12T20:55:00.000-05:00

There's a new blog called Digital History Hacks that has been started by William J. Turkel, a colleague of Rob's at the University of Western Ontario.* The blog is off to a great start with this post, which makes the case for teaching young historians to use the Internet properly, critically, and to their advantage. I've posted before on the promise and peril of using keyword searches for historical research, but I'm looking forward to more posts from Dr. Turkel on these subjects. (Thanks to ClioWeb for the tip. I also discovered a lot of new blogs thanks to ClioWeb's recent link to staff blogs at the CHNM.)

I especially like Turkel's suggestion that most historians, whether they realize it or not, are adept at "spidering" and "scraping." It would demystify what search engines do if historians were to realize that we do the same kinds of processes all the time (by following footnotes, for instance). It's not that searching online represents a leap in kind from the type of research we already do, it simply makes that research more efficient, accessible, and speedy. I also think Turkel raises some interesting pedagogical possibilities: could it be that before long, the facility of our students with search engines will make it easier for us to teach them that "following footnotes" is kind of like "spidering," instead of the other way around?

Speaking of pedagogical possibilities, Turkel also points to this very helpful guide on "How to Read a Book" by Paul Edwards, which does a much better job at what I was trying to do in my post on How to Skim.

* By the way, Rob's taking nominations for the next History Carnival.

Back home

2006-01-10T06:55:00.000-05:00

I've returned from Philadelphia, where I was unable to attend this, but where it was great to meet people! Congratulations, too, to the well-deserving winners of the Cliopatria Awards.

I might as well predict now that things will be slow around this blog for the next several months, at least until I defend my dissertation in late March. That prediction can't come as a surprise to anyone who has visited this space in the last several months either. I have several ideas for posts, and it usually helps me work more effectively when I'm writing here occasionally, so I will not be entirely absent. But I also realize I need to conserve and focus my intellectual energy on the home stretch of my program.

Light blogging

2006-01-04T20:04:00.000-05:00

Blogging has been light again, both because I just returned Monday from about ten days of holiday travels and because I'm preparing to leave tomorrow for the Annual Meeting of the AHA in Philadelphia. (See here for information about meet-ups with history bloggers.) In lieu of a more substantive post, though, here are two must-reads:

First, on a serious note, Kwame Anthony Appiah's eloquent and thought-provoking essay on cosmopolitanism in the Times magazine. I'm looking forward to Appiah's new book, out later this month.(Via Ralph.)

Second, on a less serious note, this. (Thanks, Tony.)

Sidebar blandishment

2005-12-21T00:12:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned earlier, I have been compiling a page of history links for my department, and I have been using del.icio.us to do it. Now I have also added a Link Roll in my sidebar, which will display the most recent ten links added to the del.icio.us page.

Speaking of del.icio.us, it seems to be up and running well now, despite its recent outage. I have noticed some problems when I try to select a group of links by using more than two tags, but presumably that's because they are still working on "tag intersections." I've also recently downloaded the Firefox extension for del.icio.us and it is well worth the nothing you pay for it. Works great and has some unexpectedly convenient features. (The same could be said of Firefox, of course.)

Precedents and presidents

2005-12-20T15:56:00.000-05:00

Here come the analogies between President Bush's authorization of domestic spying and President Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. (Via Civil War Memory.) The analogy has been considered before, of course, but I expect to hear it more in the coming days.

Presumably a defender of President Bush's illicit extension of executive power would argue thusly: Lincoln did it first, and he's a great president who saved the Union. He understood that law in wartime was different from law in peacetime. President Bush understands that too. Ergo, if this President plays a little fast and loose with the law, history will still judge him to be a great President, because he is defending the security of the country against all enemies. His critics are simply the liberal equivalent of Civil-War Copperheads. And so on.

The soundness of such arguments really depends on the validity of two separate arguments. The first is the argument that the two cases at hand really are parallel. If they are, then the second question is whether the actions of each President were justified. One can't argue for President Bush's action by simple appeal to President Lincoln, on the grounds that Lincoln could do no wrong. Precedent can be of some use in determining what is right and wrong, but it cannot be the only consideration. Some of the blogs I read have pointed out that the President is not a king. Their point is that presidents do not have the unchecked power of a king, but it could also be pointed out that leaders in a democratic society do not have the same untrammeled claim on the past that kings do. At least, that's what Thomas Paine, that inveterate critic of executive power, argued in The Rights of Man,

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.

This is not to say that the past is of no use to the present generation, but you don't have to agree with Paine entirely to be suspicious of appeals to the authority of the past, simply because it is The Past.

As to whether or not the two cases are precisely parallel, I'm not sure. As The Mahablog points out, whatever one thinks about Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, he did it in public view instead of behind closed doors. On the other hand, it's a discomfiting fact that Lincoln's arguments in favor of his civil rights policy sounded broadly similar to the ones that President Bush might make. In the past few days I just happened to be reading the portion of James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom that deals with this issue. According to Lincoln, says McPherson,

the whole country was a war zone and military arrests in areas far from the fighting front were justified. Civil courts were "utterly incompetent" to deal with such a massive threat to the nation's life. This was precisely the contingency that framers of the Constitution foresaw when they authorized suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in cases of rebellion or invasion. With a homely but effective metaphor, Lincoln affirmed that he could no more believe that the necessary curtailment of civil liberties in wartime would establish precedents fatal to liberty in peacetime "than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life." (p. 598-599)

One could defend Lincoln's argument from hasty equations with Bush's argument by pointing out two crucial facts. First, Lincoln emphasized the temporary nature of his policies, whereas I think you will search in vain to find President Bush and his supporters excusing his policy by describing it as temporary. You will find President Bush saying that these are anomalous times that call for special methods, that we are fighting a new war. But you will be hard pressed to find any clear statement about when--if ever--these anomalous times will end. The "war on terror," unlike Lincoln's war for the restoration of the Union, still has no clearly articulated ending. Second, Lincoln seemed to recognize that what he was doing was decidedly unpleasant, and something which clearly indicated that the nation was in a period of sickness rather than health. President Bush, on the other hand, sounds as though he thinks that the leaks about the NSA program are more shameful and unsavory than the program itself. As Tim Burke says, it would at least be nice to see some Lincolnian "gravity and weariness" on the faces of this administration's boosters, some hint of the "haunted conscience" that clearly plagued Lincoln every minute he was in the White House.

But however we might try to extenuate Lincoln's remarks, it's hard not to admit that there are at least some similarities here. Both presidents clearly believed that the Constitution gave them the power to identify a threat to the nation's security and then curtail civil rights as a way of curtailing that threat. Both thought that extraordinary times called for extraordinary measures. But for that reason, one of the things that is most enervating about the President's rhetoric is the constant reminder that we live in a new world, that this is a new war, that we need different thinking to meet a threat unlike any we have ever faced before.

Yet if we really are in a different age, where is the truly "different thinking"? For all the talk about a new war, which supposedly makes everything different, the President's strategies and rationales turn out to be old hat. Gathering executive power in order to gather intelligence and act with speed and awesome force: it's nothing that every war president there ever was has not already thought of. We do need some truly different thinking, because in so many ways we are still in the grips of the ages: still believing that coercion can bring us liberty, still believing that war can bring us peace, still believing that shocking and awing our enemies will make them release the stranglehold of fear they have on us, still believing that forcing ourselves to retch will eventually make the body politic well. And we still believe that we, alone among all the generations that preceded us, are the first to have discovered that these paradoxical beliefs are actually true, despite all the evidence to the contrary that our predecessors have provided us.

When I hear it said that a new world was born on 9/11, and then hear that claim used to defend a continuation of the patterns of violence and coercion that predated that day by millennia, I'm reminded of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said in response to Black Power activists impressed by Frantz Fanon's exhortations to "turn over a new leaf" and "set afoot a new man" by taking up arms in anticolonial struggle:

These are brave and challenging words: I am happy that young black men and women are quoting them. But the problem is that Fanon and those who quote his words are seeking "to work out new concepts" and "set afoot a new man" with a willingness to imitate old copies of violence. Is there not a basic contradiction here? ...

Humanity is waiting for something other than blind imitation of the past. If we want truly to advance a step further, if we want to turn over a new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must begin to turn mankind away from the long and desolate night of violence. (Testament of Hope, p. 596-597)

I don't profess to know exactly how we might turn over such a truly new leaf, but at least we might start by declaring our intent to abide by our own rules, even in wartime. For it is that determination, rather than the decision to suspend the law for the sake of security, that would constitute truly "different" thinking.

(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)

Freudian slip?

2005-12-20T10:56:00.000-05:00

Was this just a slip of the tongue in President Bush's press conference yesterday?

In a nation that once lived by the whims of a brutal dictator, the Iraqi people now enjoy constitutionally protected freedoms, and their leaders now derive their powers from the consent of the government [sic].

I'm hoping this was just a slip of the tongue, and not of the Freudian variety. If it was not, I recommend a re-reading of this: "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

UPDATE: Maybe I should have made the title of this post plural:

Let me give you an example about my concerns about letting the enemy know what may or may not be happening. In the late 1990s, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And then the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak. And guess what happened? Saddam -- Osama bin Laden changed his behavior.

History Carnival

2005-12-15T13:20:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Dresner has posted the last History Carnival of 2005, and it's a good one. Recently I have not been very good about promoting the Carnival--a bimonthly collection of links from the history blogsophere--but Sharon Howard and Jonathan himself deserve three cheers and more for getting the Carnival going and sustaining it over the past year. You can read past iterations at the Carnival's website.

UPDATE: Also check out the latest Teaching Carnival over at New Kid on the Hallway.

Conference paper update

2005-12-13T14:10:00.000-05:00

Thanks to some suggestions I received from readers of my previous post, I've revised the opening paragraphs of my conference paper. I took a hatchet to the first couple of paragraphs so I could get to Irish Repeal more quickly. To do so I've sacrificed the "two questions" way of framing the paper, and I'm not sure whether I've also sacrificed any "performative gloss."

In 1842, Garrisonian abolitionists, who took their name from the fiery editor of the Boston Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, began to call publicly for the dissolution of the United States. The Union, they had concluded, was a sword and a shield for slavery; the Constitution was a proslavery instrument; and as long as Northerners stayed in a Union that contained slaveholders, they would bear guilt for America’s national sin. In a letter to the Liberator in April 1842, abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright summed up the new Garrisonian view: “we ought to have laid before the slaveholders, long ago, this alternative. You must abolish slavery, or we shall dissolve the Union.” In reality, the Garrisonians had laid that alternative before the South before, but it was not until the spring of 1842 that the Liberator began to propose disunionism as the “one standard” for dividing “genuine friends of liberty” from false ones. And it was not until two years later, in 1844, that the Garrisonian American Anti-Slavery Society adopted as its motto: “No Union with Slaveholders!” [1]

Meanwhile, during the same years in which the Garrisonians began calling for disunion, Irish reformers on the other side of the Atlantic were beginning to call for an end to a different union. In 1842 and 1843, early Irish nationalists known as Repealers were agitating for a repeal of the Act of Union of 1800, which disbanded Dublin’s independent Parliament in the wake of the Irish Rebellions of 1798 and united Ireland with Scotland and England under one Parliament in London. Forty years after this Union, Daniel O’Connell, a prominent British abolitionist who first earned international fame in the 1820s as the champion of Catholic emancipation, began to mobilize a movement for its repeal. In 1843, which O’Connell dubbed the “Repeal Year,” Irish Repealers held numerous “monster meetings” demanding the repeal of the union and the restoration of the eighteenth-century Irish Parliament. Across the ocean, their demands were echoed by the growing numbers of Irish immigrants in the United States, who began in 1840 to form Repeal societies of their own. [2]

What should we make of the fact that Garrison began to call for the dissolution of the Union at the same time that O’Connell was calling for the repeal of the Act of Union? Was it mere coincidence that the appeals of O’Connell and Garrison for disunion were so similar and simultaneous? This morning I want to suggest that it was not. In fact, I want to suggest that the Garrisonians explicitly saw Repeal as a model for their movement. In 1843, Edmund Quincy, a staunch Garrisonian, said in a guest editorial for the Liberator that abolition and Repeal were “precisely analogous in principle.” Quincy exaggerated when he said the analogy was precise: the two repeals were actually very different. But between 1842 and 1844 Garrisonians often described themselves as American analogues for Repealers, and even referred to the issue of disunion as the “great question of a repeal of the Union,” a phrase that deliberately echoed calls for Repeal in Ireland. I believe that paying attention to those echoes can help us understand disunionism better. Towards the end of my talk, I will even suggest that seeing Garrisonians in transnational perspective can illuminate aspects of their thought that might otherwise be obscured by a focus on the history of the United States. [3]

I'd still welcome your comments on which opening you prefer; the reason I'm focusing so much on the introduction is because those are the moments when the audience is most likely to be, er, awake, and I'd like to keep it that way if I can. Part of that, I know, will depend on the rest of the talk, which is nearly complete.

NOTES

[1] Henry Clarke Wright, “The Only Alternative—Dissolution of the Union, or the Abolition of Slavery,” Liberator, 29 April 1842; “The Annual Meeting at New-York,” Liberator, 22 April 1842. For protests from other abolitionists about Garrison’s apparent call for a disunion litmus test, see James S. Gibbons, “The Dissolution of the Union,” Liberator, 13 May 1842.

[2] On the Union of 1800 and its aftermath, see the various essays collected in Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan, eds., Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001). On O’Connell’s early career before the Repeal movement, see On O’Connell’s early career, see Oliver MacDonagh, The Hereditary Bondsman: Daniel O’Connell, 1775-1829 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988); Wendy Hinde, Catholic Emancipation: A Shake to Men’s Minds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). See also T. Desmond Williams, “O’Connell’s Impact on Europe,” in Kevin B. Nowlan and Maurice R. O’Connell, eds., Daniel O’Connell: Portrait of a Radical (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 100-106; K. Theodore Hoppen, “Riding a Tiger: Daniel O’Connell, Reform, and Popular Politics in Ireland, 1800-1847,” Proceedings of the British Academy 100 (1999), 121-143.

[3] “The Irish Repeal Movement,” Liberator, 8 September 1843; WLG to George W. Benson, 13 May 1842, Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (6 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971-1981), 3:74.

History links

2005-12-12T21:19:00.000-05:00

Over the last month I've been assembling history-related links for the Department of History at JHU. The Department wants to provide a page on its website with Links of Interest to historians.

Obviously, it will not be exhaustive, but ideally it will provide a good springboard page for historians in our particular department. That's why my first collection method was to email department members asking for pages that they use regularly. I have not yet visited all of the sites I was referred to, but I've got a working collection that I've been supplementing with my own finds when I have the time.

Right now I'm collecting the links on a del.icio.us page, which allows me to organize the links with tags. (I don't know how I would even begin to organize them otherwise, without making an unmanageably long list on which sites would appear in multiple categories.) If you have suggestions for sites I'm overlooking, please pass them along. You can tell by scanning the geographical tags to the right that I could use some help filling out certain fields.

Many of these links may not be new to you, but here are several pages that I've found recently that have been very helpful:

Digital Images Online at the Yale Beinecke Library: This searchable database contains over 70,000 prints, photographs, and other visual images. The search engine, I've found, is amazingly precise and user-friendly for an image database.

American Political Prints, 1766-1876: Provided some good fodder for classroom discussion in my U.S. survey course. For example.

Secession Era Editorials at Furman University: I went looking for a site like this after reading about a teaching exercise that James Horton uses: "I break the class up into regional groups, New England, Mid-Atlantic and Southern. Each group then reads newspapers from their respective region for news coverage of the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry. Students debate the raid using the information that they find in their regional newspapers. It quickly becomes clear that the newspaper accounts differ considerably. We then discuss the ways that newspaper accounts shaped public opinion and how the newspaper accounts were shaped by regional attitudes especially those concerning slavery."

I did something similar by using editorials on Harpers Ferry drawn from the Furman website. First, I distributed different editorials to pairs of students, but concealed the title and location of the newspaper. I then asked them to answer a series of questions about their editorial (Who was involved in the raid? Who or what is to blame for the violence? What are the lessons to be learned from Harpers Ferry? etc.). Finally, I asked students to go around the room comparing notes with other pairs, and to stick together with groups that seemed to have similar answers to the document questions. Once they were sorted into groups, I revealed the titles of the newspapers, along with their locations and partisan affiliations, and we were able to analyze the patterns of agreement that emerged. It became a little chaotic towards the end with students moving around and the class period about to end. But I think better time management on my part could make a second trial of this exercise better.

Politicians and historians

2005-12-12T19:16:00.000-05:00

Over at Cliopatria, Manan Ahmed asks why President Bush is "continuously comparing Iraqis to America's founders." I'm not sure I have an easy answer, but the question does bring to mind some thoughts I've been having about the way the Bush administration uses history in general.

President Bush and his spokespersons have a habit of saying that historians will be the best judges of their present actions. But they almost always add that, for this very reason, we should not judge those actions now. The historian is to the Bush administration as the kick returner is to the football team. Historians are the ones you punt to for analysis of your decisions or policy judgments.

Viz., Scott McClellan:

... historians are going to look back and make judgments in terms of the decisions that were made in the aftermath of going into Iraq. ... as Senator Lieberman said that we've made mistakes, and [the President] said he's right. And so, yes. I mean, but in terms of making judgments about what those are, I don't think you can judge that at this time. Historians over time will be able to look back and make judgments about the decisions-- [Reporter: "in acknowledging and agreeing with Senator Lieberman, what mistakes do you believe this administration has made?"] Again, we'll let the historians look back and make those judgments. I don't think you can do it in the current time. This is something that will be looked back over the course of history.

Viz., Ari Fleischer:

I think you're going to find the historians, legal scholars will have differing conclusions about these matters. But the conclusion the President reaches is that Iraq's failure to disarm presents a threat to the people of the United States and, therefore, he is prepared to use force.

Viz., President Bush:

I have made a lot of decisions -- some of them little, like appointments to board you've never heard of, and some of them big. And in a war, there's a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say, you shouldn't have done that, you shouldn't have made that decision. And I'll take responsibility for them. I'm human.

Viz., President Bush:

... you know the interesting thing about Presidents and Prime Ministers is you're never going to be around to judge history, judge the true merit of the history, of the decisions you make. Short-term history is -- it's hard to call it unobjective. It's very subjective, I guess, is the best way to put it. After all, the person who has written the history hasn't had a chance to see the full effects of the decision-making.

And in my case, most of the short-term historians probably aren't that thrilled with me being President in the first place, which might color the short-term history. (Laughter.) But my only point is, I think a President must not try to write the legacy of every moment. The President just does what he thinks is right, and try to explain as clearly as I can -- part of the purpose of my visit to your great country is to use the opportunities I've had to speak directly -- like I'm doing right now -- to people about why I made the decisions I made.

Viz., Ari Fleischer, on why the fall of Baghdad is "historic":

I think historians will make judgments about what today means. But today certainly marks a wonderful day for the Iraqi people as they pursue the freedom to which they are entitled.

And, of course, President Bush's famous reply to the question of whether he had made any mistakes in his first administration:

I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. (Laughter.) John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet.

Perhaps as an historian, I shouldn't complain too much about these deferrals to history. After all, they invest a great amount of cultural authority in my guild: according to the Bush administration, we historians are the ones who will settle all the scores, figure out where mistakes were made, assess blame and praise. There is even something Gadamerian about the Bush administration's view that understanding can only come as a result of the passage of time, that temporal distance from the original event is not an impediment to the interpretation of the past but an aid to it.

But the problem with that view is that it refuses judgment in the present. We cannot judge until later. [ed.--How much later?] The later the better. Indeed, once President Bush punts to historians to judge his present actions, he can always reply to criticism by saying the day for judgment has not yet come. If, for instance, historians venture to remark on the start of the Iraq war, he can dismiss historians as "revisionists" or argue that we are still in the "short-term." "I don't worry about our standing in history," he told one audience in 2002. "Plus, I know most historians didn't vote for me, so they're probably going to write something ugly anyway. (Laughter and applause.)" Historians can judge, but only future historians--historians who had no connection with the present. A generation must pass before a generation's sins can be accounted for.

President Bush ends up damning historians with high praise. On the one hand, they are described as the highly respected arbitrators of all the decisions he makes. But on the other hand, their day for judging him is always about to arrive while never yet arriving. The President's rhetoric leaves everything for the historians to decide, without actually giving historians anything they can do, since they can always be dismissed as not distant or detached enough to judge his policies. In the end, his policies remain safely beyond the pale of judgement, whether now or in the forseeable future.

To circle back to Manan's question, I think the President's frequent analogies between Iraqis and America's founders convey a respect for history that also ends up being illusory. Look closely at what President Bush said about the Founding in today's speech:

The eight years from the end of the Revolutionary War to the election of a constitutional government were a time of disorder and upheaval. There were uprisings, with mobs attacking courthouses and government buildings. There was a planned military coup that was defused only by the personal intervention of General Washington. In 1783, Congress was chased from this city by angry veterans demanding back-pay, and they stayed on the run for six months. There were tensions between the mercantile North and the agricultural South that threatened to break apart our young republic. And there were British loyalists who were opposed to independence and had to be reconciled with America's new democracy.

Our founders faced many difficult challenges -- they made mistakes, they learned from their experiences, and they adjusted their approach. Our nation's first effort at governing -- a governing charter, the Articles of Confederation, failed. It took years of debate and compromise before we ratified our Constitution and inaugurated our first president. It took a four-year civil war, and a century of struggle after that, before the promise of our Declaration was extended to all Americans.

It is important to keep this history in mind as we look at the progress of freedom and democracy in Iraq. No nation in history has made the transition to a free society without facing challenges, setbacks, and false starts. The past two-and-a-half years have been a period of difficult struggle in Iraq, yet they've also been a time of great hope and achievement for the Iraqi people.

What is the lesson that we learn from history? That chaos and disorder happen, that leaders make mistakes, that politicians face challenges and setbacks. But all of these points have the same rhetorical effect as punting to historians: they all draw, as their lesson, that we cannot judge mistakes and setbacks in the present, because in the future they could turn out to be the storm before the calm. How will we know which are the truly devastating mistakes and which are the growing pains? We won't, we can't, until some indefinite "later." It took "a century" for the Founders' heirs to smooth out their wrinkles, so, by implication, it could take a century before we can judge the President's mistakes. The appeal to American history, like the appeal to future historians, ends up being nothing but a prima facie vote of confidence in the status quo.

Perhaps the patterns I have pointed out in the Bush administration's rhetoric on history are not unique to this White House. I suspect that at one time or another, the nebulous idea of "future historians" has provided most politicians with a way to redirect criticisms of their policies. When described by politicians, perhaps history always suffers. But I think it's worth making a distinction between "politicized" history that actually uses historical evidence and reasoning to judge the present (which is how Fred Siegel at Slate classifies Sean Wilentz's recent book), and a political use of history that actually makes it and its practitioners useless as commentators on the present. It's one thing to flatten history into a comment on the mistakes of a sitting president; it's another thing to flatter history in order to dismiss any comment on those mistakes.

Conference paper

2005-12-06T21:47:00.000-05:00

Today I've been working on a draft of the paper I will be presenting next month at the Annual Meeting of the AHA. Here's the panel: Transnational Histories of the American Civil War Era. And here's the proposal for my paper that I submitted, along with my fellow panelists, to the Program Committee back in February. It slipped under the 250-word limit at 248:

In 1842, William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery Boston abolitionist, began to call for the dissolution of the United States, a nation hopelessly corrupted by slavery. In 1844, the American Anti-Slavery Society adopted the principle of “no union with slaveholders” as its motto. In 1861, the union would be dissolved, but not in the way that Garrisonians had desired.

Garrison’s disunionism can be placed in a national tradition of secessionist thought that culminated in civil war, but Garrisonian thinking about disunion also had transnational sources. Calls for disunion were influenced by the language of Daniel O’Connell’s transatlantic movement for Irish Repeal, which peaked in 1843. The coincidence of the Repeal campaign with the appearance of Garrisonian disunionism was not accidental. In the early 1840s, many Garrisonians forged personal ties with a coterie of Irish reformers, some of whom, like Dublin merchant James Haughton, were devoted Repealers. They advocated a “repeal of the union” that joined Ireland to the United Kingdom, while Garrison called for a “repeal of the union” between North and South. In 1842, he declared himself “both an Irish Repealer and an American Repealer,” and Wendell Phillips, another Garrisonian, referred to disunionism as “our repeal” in private correspondence.

Historians cannot understand the timing and texture of Garrisonians’ disunionism without understanding their ties with Irish reformers. Likewise, even the quintessentially American question of whether divided houses can stand was part of wider transatlantic debates in the early nineteenth century, which included Irish Repealers, European liberals, and American abolitionists.

Since submitting that proposal, I've completed the chapter of my dissertation on which it was based. So I'm now paring down a 51-page chapter into an 11- to 12-page (double-spaced) paper, which means throwing many of the chapter's branches into the fire. In the process I've been acutely conscious of Timothy Burke's prophetic denunciations of AHA conference panels:

The formal session is a kind of loathsome ritual of humanities and social science academia, a lacerating gesture of masochism. Three, sometimes four, panelists read dully through a pre-written paper. Every once in a great while, one of them has actually written a shorter version of the paper designed to be read aloud, that has some vague hint of a performative gloss to it. Mostly though presenters just put red lines through paragraphs they want to skip, rush through the end, make amendations on the fly, read prose intended for formal publication.

"Lacerating gesture of masochism." Ouch. That sounds like it would hurt. I'd prefer to give the paper some kind of "performative gloss." So while I do have the chapter file open in another window as I write, I'm starting the draft of the talk from scratch. Here are the opening paragraphs of my current "talk" draft:

In 1842, Garrisonian abolitionists, who took their name from the fiery editor of the Boston Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, began to call publicly for the dissolution of the United States. The Union, they concluded, was nothing but a sword and a shield for slavery; the Constitution was a proslavery instrument. And as long as Northerners remained in a Union that contained slaveholders, warned Garrison and his supporters, they would bear guilt for the national sin of slavery. Coming out of the Union was the only way to stay innocent and the only way to abolish slavery. In a letter to the Liberator in April 1842, radical abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright summed up this view: “We ought to have laid before the slaveholders, long ago, this alternative. You must abolish slavery, or we shall dissolve the Union.” [1]

In reality, Garrisonians had laid that alternative before the South before, but it was not until the spring of 1842 that the Liberator began to propose disunionism as the “one standard” for dividing “genuine friends of liberty” from false ones. The week before printing Wright’s letter, William Lloyd Garrison proposed that disunion be made the first order of business at the next meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In May, he began printing a new slogan in capital letters above his editorials, calling for “A REPEAL OF THE UNION BETWEEN NORTHERN LIBERTY AND SOUTHERN SLAVERY.” Two years later, Garrisonians officially endorsed a more concise motto: “No Union with Slaveholders!” And for the rest of the antebellum period, until the firing of shots on Fort Sumter in 1861 actually did dissolve the Union, disunionism would be the Garrisonians’ calling card. [2]

In this talk I want to raise two questions about disunionism and then suggest how taking a transnational perspective on the era of the American Civil War might help us answer them. The first question I want to ask is about timing. Portents of disunion predated Garrisonians’ adoption of the slogan, “No Union with Slaveholders,” but why was it not until 1842 that Garrisonians began making that demand their rallying cry? Part of the answer is that the outlook for abolition looked especially grim in 1842: President John Tyler seemed to support plans for the annexation of Texas as a slave state; Northern Congressmen were bound by a “gag rule” that banned antislavery petitions from the floor of Congress; in January, Southerners called for the censure of John Quincy Adams, who spent his post-presidential career as a Massachusetts Congressman flaunting the gag rule, and the next month, the Supreme Court ruled, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that slaveholders had a constitutional right to capture fugitive slaves in the North. Later in 1842, Philadelphia erupted in a bloody race riot, after which the black abolitionist Robert Purvis said that he saw “nothing redeeming, nothing hopeful” in recent events. “Despair black as the pall of Death hangs over us.” [3]

To Garrisonians, despairing times called for a desperate measures: disunion. But their critics, both at the time and since, have tended to view disunionism as a flight from reason into fancy. The second question I want to raise is about this interpretation of disunionism. What did Garrisonians intend, what did they mean, when they called for disunion? Answers to that question have tended to be seen through the distorting lenses ground by Garrison’s critics, who were and continue to be legion. Many abolitionists in 1842 were beginning to organize antislavery third parties and to build political coalitions among Northern voters disaffected by the power of proslavery factions in their parties. [4] These political abolitionists believed that the usurpations of the “Slave Power” could best be resisted at the polls and on the hustings. They were therefore fiercely critical of the disunionists, for whom one of the first ways to withdraw from the guilty Union was to abstain from voting. Political abolitionists said such “no-voting” advice was absurd, and many historians have murmured “amen.” Disunionism is still often seen as a priggish and self-centered agenda, which Garrisonians adopted simply for the sake of keeping their hands clean, while political abolitionists are praised for rolling up their sleeves and actually making political gains.

This critical portrait of disunionists often implies that they were essentially no different from Southern secessionists: both were good at throwing tantrums, but bad at proposing real solutions. That comparison is too much of a caricature, but it is not entirely unfair: disunionism can and should be seen as part of a long American tradition of states threatening to take their electoral votes and go home when they found out that they could not play well with other states. Yet disunionism was not merely one more chapter in an exclusively American history of secessionist thought. In the next several minutes I want to suggest that the Garrisonians had another, more immediate model for disunionism, which they found not by looking southward to Southern fire-eaters, but by looking eastward across the Atlantic, where in the 1840s Irish nationalists led by Daniel O’Connell were agitating for political independence from England. Seeing O’Connell’s movement as a model for disunionism, rather than Jefferson Davis’s, helps us answer why Garrisonians became disunionists when they did—thus shedding light on the timing question—and it also suggests a more nuanced interpretation of disunionism. Comparing disunionism to Irish Repeal, I will argue, helps us to see that Garrisonians viewed disunionism as a serious strategy for ending slavery, not just as an attempt to preserve their purity.

And on it goes. My concerns at this stage are two-fold: I may be taking too long to get to the "Irish Repeal" punchline, although from here on out the paper turns decisively towards a discussion of how Garrisonians learned and thought about Irish Repeal, and why they viewed disunionism as a similar movement.

On the one hand, part of me likes setting the talk up this way, by giving the audience a couple of questions to frame my argument. And another advantage of starting this way is that it makes clear right away what the stakes of "transnational perspectives" on the Civil War Era might be: I don't just want to point out that Garrisonians corresponded with Irish Repealers, and end with nothing more than "Isn't that cool?" Rather, I want to suggest right away--even at the risk of overstating things--that a transnational angle on the origins of disunionism helps us understand those origins differently. The disadvantage of starting this way, though, is that the above introduction amounts to 3 pages, or a fourth of the total draft. That may be too much to invest in an introduction. If you have suggestions, I'd welcome any observational reports about the current thickness of the glaze covering your eyes. (Hey, better to have you be bored at the draft stage than to have me "lacerate" the panel's IRL audience. You could have clicked away, but they might be trapped in a chair next to the wall.)

If you're interested in Irish Repeal, which I get into after the above excerpt, here's the Wikipedia entry. There's also a concise biography of O'Connell here.

Here's also an interesting contemporary print by Edward Clay. It portrays a Garrison-like figure on the far right supporting O'Connell, who was a staunch abolitionist. Clay portrays Garrison as an opponent of Repeal because he wants to imply that Garrison is a puppet of English abolitionists. But in actuality, American Garrisonians usually did support for Repeal, and by 1842 they were in rather bad odor with mainstream English abolitionists. A good place to start reading about Garrisonian relations with Irish Repealers and O'Connell is the first chapter of Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White.

Notes:

[1] Henry Clarke Wright, “The Only Alternative—Dissolution of the Union, or the Abolition of Slavery,” Liberator, 29 April 1842.

[2] “The Annual Meeting at New-York,” Liberator, 22 April 1842. For the disunion slogan, see Liberator, 20 May 1842.

[3] Robert Purvis to Henry Clarke Wright, 22 August 1842, in C. Peter Ripley, ed., Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 62. On Tyler’s presidency, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 120-126. On discontent with the “gag rule” and the attempted censure of Adams, see Lynn H. Parsons, “Censuring Old Man Eloquent: Foreign Policy and Disunion, 1842,” Capitol Studies 3 (1975), 89-106; James M. McPherson, “The Fight Against the Gag Rule: Joshua Leavitt and Antislavery Insurgency in the Whig Party, 1839-1842,” Journal of Negro History 48, no. 3 (July 1963), 177-195. On Prigg v. Pennsylvania, see Paul Finkelman, “Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Northern State Courts: Anti-Slavery Use of a Pro-Slavery Decision,” Civil War History 25, no. 1 (1979), 5-35; Eric W. Plaag, “‘Let the Constitution Perish’: Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Joseph Story, and the Flawed Doctrine of Historical Necessity,” Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 3 (2004), 76-101; Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 219-225.

[4] See James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 97-126; Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980).

"The only history class they will ever take"

2005-12-02T21:11:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I discovered a page at the History Matters site promising to reveal Secrets of Great History Teachers. It's a very interesting page of interviews with distinguished historian teachers, with a range of examples from both secondary and postgraduate schools. While browsing them I was struck by the following paragraph in an interview with Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of American history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign:

My first year at the University of Illinois when I was teaching the survey, I was called in by our most distinguished U.S. historian. I am sure he meant well, but he informed me that there were many problems with my teaching ... he thought my biggest problem was that I was confusing the students by discussing how different historians thought differently about issues. “This is the only history course that most of these students will ever take,” he told me, "and they need to know the facts." I disagreed. If this is the only history course students ever take, it was all the more important that they know that historians disagree over what the facts are as well as over interpretations. I still believe that.

"This is the only history course that most of these students will ever take." That platitude, or should I say that attitude, bugs me, even though I often repeat it to myself when struggling to make decisions about what to include on a syllabus or in a lecture. I think that many history teachers take for granted what Burton's colleague did: that we have one shot at reaching the students in our classes before they throw history on the dustbin forever. And maybe that's why we agonize about how much to cover in a course. It is because we believe, at some basic level, that this course is the only chance we have to teach students the history of the United States, or the history of Western Civilization, or the history of (gulp) the world.

Set aside for the moment the question of how statistically sound the assumption is. It seems like common sense, but I'm sure that at specific institutions and in specific survey courses, the generalization probably is not as iron-clad as it sounds. Implicit in the assumption of Burton's colleague is another presumption--that our undergraduate history students are just less interested in taking history classes than other classes--that is probably even harder to substantiate statistically. Some rough-and-ready figures in this Perspectives article suggest that national average enrollment in undergraduate history courses has been increasing in recent years, even if only marginally.

But even if it could be statistically proven, in any given course, that the majority of our students will never take another history class, I think it helps our teaching very little to know this. For one thing, it bespeaks a certain fatalistic pessimism, a world-weary attitude that students don't care about history and won't care to know more. If history teachers think that about their students, it's bound to come across to those students in their teaching. And if we convey to our students a pessimism about their interest in history, our Cassandra-like prophecies about the ahistorical wasteland of their futures will likely become self-fulfilling. Why should they take other history courses if they can sense our fear that they won't? Shouldn't our goal as teachers be to inspire students to take more history courses, rather than to assume from the beginning that they will not?

To be sure, many students will not take other history courses, despite our best efforts to encourage them to do so. Certain majors require undergraduates to run through so many rigorous paces that they won't have time in their schedules for other history classes, even if they want to take them. Even so, the fact that a student may take only one history class does not mean that they will never have another encounter with history. Indeed, if we cannot ensure that students will seek out other history courses, we can and should be conveying to students that knowledge of the past is important enough for them to seek out in whatever way they can. Suppose it is the only history class they will ever take: that does not mean the assigned reading has to be the only history book they ever pick up.

Charming idealism, some might say. Perhaps. But let's imagine the worst-case scenario: that the majority of our students, despite our enthusiasm and encouragement, will never take another history class, never enter a museum, never read another book or article about history, never watch a history documentary, never see a historical film or read a historical novel. (The scenario is ludicrous, if you put it that way. But so-called "realism" often turns out, on closer inspection, to be less realistic than idealism.) Even if that dismal scenario were to come true, it would not settle a single question about how to teach a history course. It would establish that those questions were incredibly important, that they deserve our serious thought and careful attention. But the fact that a history course may be the only exposure to history a student has entails nothing whatsoever about what that course should include or how it should be taught.

That's not what Burton's anonymous colleague concluded, of course. For him, the likelihood that his students would never take another history course made it imperative to pass along "facts" and downplay scholarly disagreement. But those pedagogical choices are not at all implicit in the bare fact that this is "the only history class they will ever take." And to be fair, Burton's counter-argument is no more valid than his colleague's: it is not "all the more important" that students learn about disagreements between historians if this is the only history class they will ever take. It is either more important that they learn about differing interpretations, or it is more important that they learn "facts." Whether this will be a student's only history course does not help a teacher decide on the relative importance of those two pedagogical strategies.

It is common for people to confuse the value of a particular decision with the values they will use to make that decision. Tourists tell themselves that this is the only time they will visit Rome, so they have to see the Coliseum. But in fact, nothing about this being their only time in Rome makes the value of seeing the Coliseum appreciably higher. The tourist's sense that his time in a city is limited sharpens the importance of making considered, rather than casual, decisions about what to see. But it doesn't actually help him make choices about what to see. He believes that his sense of urgency is directly informing his decisions about what to include in an itinerary, but that's what we might call a "logical illusion." To give another example, suppose I am visiting a restaurant that I know I will not visit again. That makes me study the menu with special care, but it doesn't at all help me decide what to order. (Least of all does it mean that it would be more rational for me to order everything on the menu rather than only one thing. That would probably lessen the pleasurableness of my one visit.)

The truth is that when I am deciding what to order at the restaurant, or what to see in Rome, or what to include on a syllabus or in a lecture, my awareness that the decision is momentous does not actually help me make a decision. Retrospectively, I may think that it does, by telling myself that I saw the Coliseum because it was the most important thing to see, or ordered the caviar because it was the chef's specialty. But really what I'm doing is trying to reassure myself that my decision about what was most important to see, or eat, or teach was the right one. In reality, I made those decisions based on some other logic that may not even be perceptible to me. I had some way of ordering the values of different possible choices, but nothing about the fact that I could make a limited number of choices actually helped me order them. (If you disagree, consider that every choice we make occurs within a context of limited possible choices, since we are temporal and mortal beings. Does a knowledge of your ultimate end really help you decide what to have for breakfast?)

By my lights, at least, the historian's platitude that "this is the only history class our students will ever take" is nothing but a pedagogical red herring. It settles nothing in debates over what to teach or how to teach it. Those debates have to be settled by appeal to some other standard of adjudication, especially since (to make an obvious point that really makes this whole post superfluous) in a debate like the one between Burton and his colleague, either side can appeal to the fact that he only gets one chance with his students. Neither interlocutor gains the upper hand by pointing out a bare fact, if indeed it is one. I could just as easily win an argument over what to teach my students by pointing out that semesters come to an end. Well, yes, but how does that fact speak at all to the question of what to do with a semester?

(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)

Guess that year!

2005-11-30T22:01:00.000-05:00

It's time for an exciting round of ... "Guess that year!" Your task is to read the following statements, all made by Senators and Representatives on the floor of Congress, and then decide whether each statement was made in 1848, during debates over a war being fought in Mexico, or in 2005, during debates over a war being fought in Iraq. Answers can be found below, so don't peek until you have guessed your years!

1. "The President himself ... [has] attempted to argue every silent vote given in favor of supplies for the war into an approval of his conduct in the commencement of it, and of his mode of prosecuting the war."

2. "One of the things that I am so desperately worried about is whether the people in this body and in this Republic truly understand what we are facing, not only as a Nation, but as ... [a] Civilization. ... We truly are at war, and to undermine the sacrifice and blood-bought advancement of our valiant American soldiers ... is unconscionable. A nation divided against itself simply cannot stand ... And those of us in this body, along with all Americans, must unite."

3. "The only way we can lose ... is if we defeat ourselves, if we refuse to stay the course. The path to progress is slow and steady. It has milestones, but it does not have timelines. We must remain behind our troops. Over [???] years ago, our Founding Fathers began the great American experiment. They set out to create a government defined by its commitment to liberty and freedom. ... I will continue to support those [who] stay the course ..."

4. "[This war] was the policy of our Government, not simply of [the President], but of the entire Government. ... And we cannot recede from that policy."

5. "... the war would have long since been brought to a close but for the divisions at home. ... We all know the effects of these party conflicts on the enemy, who is led to reflect on the consequence of this disunion ... [which is] weakening and distracting our efforts ..."

6. "Mr. Speaker, the American people want this Congress to debate the war. ... We should have had a debate before we entered into this war. Instead, we rushed into it. ... Rather than engaging in a debate, what we hear from the other side ... [are] those who claim [the critics of the war] are somehow being unpatriotic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Dissent in the face of policies that you disagree with is patriotism. To remain silent as you see this country going down the wrong path is not patriotism, it is moral cowardice."

7. "[The President's speech] declared that we were to prosecute [the war] more vigorously, until at last it ... told us that the continued successes of our arms may fail to secure a satisfactory peace, and perhaps we may ... [convince the population of the country] to throw off their rulers and adopt our Government. And then it concludes that we may fail in this, and goes back to the old thing, and recommends a vigorous prosecution of the war, which it was just admitted might fail to secure the end desired. ... [The President] took up one suggestion, and tried to argue us into it, but argued himself out of it; he then took up another, and went through the same process, and returned to the first. ..."

8. "The President accuses his critics of rewriting the history of this war. Nonsense. The history of this war was clearly enunciated by this administration and is available for all to reread. The President, the Vice President, and their top advisers repeatedly presented their rationales for this war and predicted its outcomes, and they were repeatedly wrong. ... I say that with sorrow because when the President of the United States is wrong, all Americans suffer the consequences."

Scroll down for answers ...

ANSWERS:

1. 1848! Rep. Abraham Lincoln (Ill.), Cong. Globe, 30th, 1st Session, p. 154

2. 2005! Rep. Trent Franks (Ariz.), House of Representatives, November 18, 2005.

3. 2005! Sen. Ted Stevens (Ark.), Senate, November 17, 2005.

4. 1848! Rep. Alexander Sims (S.C.), Cong. Globe, 30th, 1st Session, p. 347.

5. 1848! Rep. Hopkins Turney (Tenn.), Cong. Globe, 30th, 1st Session, p. 343.

6. 2005! Rep. James McGovern (Mass.), House of Representatives, November 18, 2005.

7. 1848! Rep. Abraham Lincoln (Ill.), Cong. Globe, 30th, 1st Session, p. 156.

8. 2005! Sen. Mark Dayton (Minn.), Senate, November 14, 2005.

Quotes were taken either from the Congressional Globe, or from the Congressional Record. Unfortunately, the latter does not seem to support permalinks.

Checked out

2005-11-27T16:20:00.000-05:00

It finally happened. I attempted to recall a book from the library that was checked out to me.

As an inveterate book hoarder, I had been warned that this would happen. And now the day has come. Here is the complete email I received from the circulation staff:

Dear Borrower: [Read: Dear Dummy:]

"Constant Turmoil..." is already on loan to you.

That sentence itself reads like a weirdly appropriate fortune cookie message, since the days lately have been filled with nearly "constant turmoil," or, more accurately, constant busyness. I've been checked out from this blog for longer than I intended to be, but forgetting that I had already checked out a book is as good an indication as any that things have been hectic lately. (In my defense, I had checked out the book by requesting that it be sent to my departmental mailbox, which I have not checked in several days. Still, I'm sure the person who wrote this email is having a good laugh at my expense. I know I did.)

More on grading

2005-10-25T11:19:00.000-04:00

S. L. Kim has an A-worthy post at Printculture on how grading affects classroom dynamics:

Last week, I returned the first batch of essays to my students, giving them their first grade in my class (and since they’re all freshmen, possibly their first grade in college). I dread that moment in the semester when the honeymoon period comes to an end. Before that first grade, everything is potential and possibility. We have animated discussions in class; everyone’s on board with arguable thesis statements and the importance of analyzing evidence; everyone’s eager to impress me and each other. The stories with which we begin are enigmatic, ripe for interpretation. Even when they write their descriptive drafts with messy structures and undigested examples, they get ample feedback from me and we meet for a one-on-one conference, so it’s kind of like a do-over. The time between the draft and the final version seems to stretch out into the bright future of promised happy endings.

When the grades—mostly B’s and C’s—are handed out, when the coaching ends and the judging happens, there’s a distinct change in our relationship. Precisely because of the extensive coaching that precedes the judging, the shift is painfully palpable. There’s no teaching assistant to blame, no big lecture hall of 200 students to serve as a buffer; if the students can’t hide, neither can I. On the day I hand them the papers, I have to brace myself for that inevitable loss of innocence. It can be a difficult process of adjusting to new expectations, especially for students who have been so praised and rewarded for their efforts. But as much as I wish the honeymoon could last, I know the grades mark a necessary transition. The real learning can’t begin until the grade concretizes the stakes and gives them a measure of the distance they must travel. Still, I hate it when it happens right in front of me—I want students to leave as soon as I give them their essays, but some of them always linger and do the flip then and there, scanning the stapled sheet at the back for that letter, and then struggling to keep their poker faces and avoid eye contact. The suspense is too much, the knowledge can be crushing.

Read the whole thing.

Mechanics of trust

2005-10-23T19:35:00.000-04:00

The British sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued that one of the consequences of modernity has been a change in how human beings assess the trustworthiness of strangers.

Modernity, Giddens argues, disembeds social relationships from local contexts. We are brought into contact with "strangers" on a more regular basis than inhabitants of premodern societies were. That means that premodern means of determining whether a person is "trustworthy" are generally less helpful to modern people. In premodern societies, you could manage personal risks by placing trust in people whom you knew personally, through kinship networks (real or fictive) or the ties of local communities. But as moderns we are regularly forced to entrust our personal and financial security to people with whom we have fleeting, if any, face-to-face contact.

For example, you see the pilot of the plane once, and probably when you get off the plane. You hear his or her disembodied voice drily announcing information about the weather and ETA. You have probably never met the pilot and probably never will again. But you manage the risks of flying by placing your trust in this essentially faceless pilot, and you are right to do so. That doesn't mean you necessarily banish anxiety, but you are able to operate practically in spite of that anxiety in a way that premoderns may not have been able to, at least not with the same degree of ease. The reason why is because you have a peculiarly modern trust in abstract systems of professionalization and expertise, which you trust have trained the pilot well. You begin to gain this facility for trusting abstract systems through a variety of means of socialization, including the "hidden curriculum" of formal education. In school you not only receive packets of information, but you learn how to pay deference to education itself, as a process that divides "experts" in particular fields from non-experts and entitles the experts to your trust--even when your face-to-face contact with the expert is temporary, irregular, or perhaps absent altogether.

Think what you will of Giddens' theory: I'm always slightly uncomfortable with sweeping yet specific generalizations about the divide between "premodernity" and "modernity." But Giddens' argument that modernity has displaced trust from relationships requiring "facework" to "faceless" systems of credentiality seems to me to have prima facie plausibility whenever I go to the car mechanic, as I did last Friday. When I go to a garage I am acutely aware of my status as a Lay person, capital-L. That's not to say I know nothing about cars, but I know close enough to nothing that I become acutely aware of the fact that I am at the mercy of a stranger, known to me only in his social role as trained car expert.

Clearly I'm not alone in feeling this sense of risk when I approach a car mechanic. On Thursday, I was browsing user ratings of mechanics in my area at the Car Talk website, and found that the Number One concern of users who had made comments on the site was with the mechanic's honesty, even more so than competence. Our trust in the abstract systems of expertise is so finely honed that we take the competence of mechanics for granted: it's their personal integrity that still stands under the shadow of our skepticism, since we don't know them in most cases as personal friends. But it's a quintessentially modern thing to do, Giddens would say, what I was doing on the Car Talk site: First, I've been socialized to trust two faceless voices I hear on the radio every Saturday, conditioned to trust their expertise by their association with a particular abstract institution. So much so that I consult a website visited by other listeners like myself, who are also faceless and known only by a numerical handle, but whom I trust to direct me to particular trustworthy mechanics. What I'm doing here, of course, is still trying to mitigate faceless trust with some indirect "face-to-face" trust. I'm trying to hear from people who have had contact with the experts who are still strangers to me. Giddens's point is not that moderns do away with facework altogether, but we have learned practical ways of combining the two mechanisms of trust.

All of which is just a pedantic preface to this quotidian story: My muffler seemed broken, so I took it to the shop. I received a free estimate of $550. I called another shop down the street and spoke to someone over the phone to get a second quote: $420. I called the first shop back to tell him that I had found a significantly lower price, and to ask if he could come down off his estimate. He told me he could shave the price to $490. I told him I would have to hang up and talk it over with my wife, which made him quickly adjust to $470. He said the price was higher because his shop uses better, guaranteed parts. (Who am I to know if that's true? He's the expert!) In the end, I decided to leave the car at the first shop, which did the job for $470. Now the muffler seems to be in working order, with my pocket less empty than it could have been, and I am able to slide, like a good modern, back into my socialized routines. All's well that ends well. (Or perhaps, in the case of this post, all's well that ends!)

Blogger backlinks

2005-10-22T17:17:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Technorati, I recently discovered that my Common-Place article on blogging was noticed earlier this month by the official Blogger Buzz blog. That was cool, but even cooler was that this led me to discover another post on the Blogger blog on "backlinks," the newest nifty tool to help us loyal Blogspot users catch up with our Movable Type and Wordpress peers. By enabling "backlinks," you can have something similar to "trackbacks" in the comments sections of your posts. See an example at the bottom of my recent post on skimming books.

Backlinks are similar to trackbacks but not identical. With trackbacks, users themselves can ping your blog to let you know that it has been noticed elsewhere. Backlinks just runs a search for the post on Google's BlogSearch engine and returns the results. That means you have to wait until the BlogSearch robot indexes your post before "backlinks" will appear. Still, having the backlinks is an improvement over just posting a link to Technorati search results for a particular post, because "backlinks" (like "trackbacks") actually show readers--on the post page itself--that there are references to a particular post out there in the blogosphere. As Julie points out in a recent post at No Fancy Name, with Technorati you actually have to click through a link to discover, in many cases, that a given post has no links referring back to it.

At any rate, I've enabled "backlinks" to give them a whirl. Comments on this new feature from Blogger welcome.

Cliopatria symposium

2005-10-21T14:09:00.000-04:00

Cliopatria is holding a symposium on Sean Wilentz's recent article, "Bush's Ancestors."

Baltimore perk

2005-10-18T22:41:00.000-04:00

One of the many nice things about being a historian in Baltimore is getting to spend an afternoon working in this library:

Click the picture to enlarge it.

Carnivals

2005-10-16T20:43:00.000-04:00

New editions of the Teaching Carnival and the History Carnival are up, at Scribbling Woman and Acephalous, respectively. Check them out!

Grading papers

2005-10-14T15:14:00.000-04:00

The approach of the second Teaching Carnival has called forth a spate of interesting posts on grading essays from GZombie, New Kid on the Hallway, and ADM at Blogenspiel.

I find these kinds of posts very helpful since I'm still learning my way around the classroom and experimenting with different means of student assessment. And I'm glad the academic blogosphere provides these kinds of exchanges between teachers at different institutions. My sense is that academics are much more open to discussing their research with other scholars than they are to discussing their teaching with other teachers. Academic life is organized around intellectual exchanges in public--whether in seminars at individual departments or in reports in professional journals and at conferences. We routinely let each other into our archives, studies, and conference rooms. But letting other teachers into our classrooms, literally and figuratively, is still something that I think doesn't happen often enough.

So, about grading. During the 2004-2005 academic year, I taught two courses--a freshman seminar and an upper-level seminar--in which the writing assignments were very different. In the freshman seminar, students worked throughout the semester on an original, biographical research paper about an African American abolitionist of their choice. I devoted two class periods to talking about the paper: in one of them, I invited a librarian to talk to students about the library's resources, and in another, I talked about the research and writing process, using as an exmple some research I had recently done for an entry in the African American National Biography. The upper-level seminar, on the other hand, was an intensive reading seminar, meeting only once a week, and students wrote three short papers over the course of the semester. I distributed prompts at the very beginning of the course, and on one of the papers, I gave students a choice of three prompts.

My experiences in running the two courses confirmed what I already suspected: I prefer assigning a series of short papers, and that's what I'm doing this semester. With the short papers, I made marginal notations on the paper itself and then typed out detailed comments (no more than a page) that spoke to the paper's strengths and weaknesses as a whole. These extensive comments on Paper #1 (hopefully) help students write Paper #2 and also make clear what I'm looking for as I'm reading the papers. By Paper #3, that should be even clearer to students. Since, however, I basically used my comments on Paper #1 as the major means of writing instruction for the course, I also weighted the grades for the papers so that they become progressively more valuable over the course of the semester.

In the freshman seminar, though, since the research paper was a cumulative writing assignment for the course, I distributed a rubric in advance. (PDF.) The rubric assigns numerical values to particular aspects of the paper, but it also uses a series of qualitative questions for each aspect. These questions let students know what I'm asking myself as I'm evaluating the paper. And the numbers also correspond to qualitative terms like "excellent" and "fair." To be sure, assigning numbers to essays may not be the ideal way to assess writing. (See this post from June at Scrivenings for a good discussion on this point.) But I think rubrics can be devised that combine qualitative measures with some fairly specific and non-arbitrary numbers. And as with the papers in the other class, I was still able to give students a typed-out page of comments in conjunction with the rubric.

Because the rubric was distributed beforehand, I had no complaints about grades from students after the paper. In the upper-level seminar, however, in which I just assigned letter grades to the papers along with my comments, I did have some complaints. Nonetheless, I feel like the "series of short papers" better served students, and communicated to them that I was a reader of their papers who happened to be the grader, whereas the idea that I am approaching papers with rubric in hand makes students think of me first and foremost as the grader. I realize there's no way around that: students know I'm handing out grades, and that's always going to be on their minds. But if I want my students to learn to write by thinking more generally about the audiences for their writing, then I want, as much as possible, to model for them what an engaged reader of their papers has to say about them. If they internalize that model, then they are more likely to become good readers of their own work. It doesn't help them, in the long run, to be good "graders" of their own work by stamping a rubric over their writing.

Nonetheless, both systems have their advantages. I think the rubric worked especially well for a freshman seminar; many of the students were taking their first history class and writing their first paper, and for them, perhaps, prose comments on their paper might not have been as useful as a holistic rubric. In upper-level classes, though, I think the rubric may have less usefulness, since advanced undergraduates ought to be moving as quickly as possible towards writing practices in which they imagine themselves as communicators with an engaged reader, rather than as trainees working for a grade.

Tag: teaching-carnival

Giving

2005-10-10T18:19:00.000-04:00

More of our fellow citizens of the world are again suffering, this time in South Asia. To echo AKMA, Sepoy, and others, it is our duty now to give what we can and mourn with the grieving.

With hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, mudslides in Guatemala, earthquakes and tsunamis in South Asia, and ongoing humanitarian crises in Africa, aid organizations this year are likely to be stretched to their limit. All the more reason for us to stretch ourselves a little more in our giving. Along with many other aid organizations, Oxfam is rushing blankets and tents to Pakistan and accepting donations to its Global Emergencies Fund.

Friday jazz shuffle

2005-10-07T10:56:00.000-04:00

1. "My Funny Valentine," by Miles Davis, from Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet
2. "The Spinx," by Ornette Coleman, from Something Else!!!!
3. "Something Sweet, Something Tender," by Eric Dolphy, from Out to Lunch
4. "Funky Mama," by Lou Donaldson, from The Natural Soul
5. "All Blues," by Miles Davis, from Kind of Blue
6. "Ghetto Lights," by Bobby Hutcherson, from Dialogue
7. "Some Other Spring," by Roy Haynes, from Out of the Afternoon
8. "Spiral," by John Coltrane, from Giant Steps
9. "Here Come de Honey Man," by Miles Davis/Gil Evans, from Porgy and Bess
10. "The Eternal Triangle," by Dizzy Gillespie, from Sonny Side Up

Not a bad shuffle at all. After it ended I listened to the rest of Sonny Side Up, which is a fantastic album featuring, alongside Dizzy, Sonny Rollins and Sonny Stitt. (Hence the album's title.) It features a gently swinging version of "On the Sunny Side of the Street" on which Dizzy supplies some improvised vocals. I dare you not to smile while listening to that track. And I double-dog dare you to sit still while listening to the blistering second track, "The Eternal Triangle."

Tags: fridayshuffle, random10

Geeky interludes

2005-10-07T08:40:00.000-04:00

First, an antiquarian geeky interlude. Yesterday, I received through inter-library loan an 1886 biography of Richard Allen, one of the characters in my dissertation. Allen was an obscure Dublin Quaker and textile merchant who was active in movements for temperance, peace, and the abolition of slavery. Allen and his circle of other radical Dublin abolitionists were dubbed in the Irish press as "anti-everythingarians." Those "anti-everythingarians" were close friends with the coterie of American abolitionists who were followers of William Lloyd Garrison, which is why Allen's in my dissertation.

Now the geeky antiquarian part. (What, you thought that was it?) While reading the biography I discovered for the first time that during Allen's 1883 tour of the United States, which took him to Chicago, Memphis, and a performance by the Jubilee Singers from Fisk University, he also visited Baltimore, where I currently reside, and toured the campus of The Johns Hopkins University, where I currently study. The antiquarian in me thinks it's cool that years ago, one of the most obscure characters in my dissertation just so happened to traverse the same space that I know occupy all the time. What are the odds?

Now for some general geekiness: Today's the day.

I shall now resume my posture of scholarly detachment and seriousness.

Mode for Caleb

Closing time

History Carnival XXXVII

Oasis in the City

Students of history

A Unified Theory of Academic Willpower

Call for posts

Moving haikus

Update, with life-hacks

The latest on Emma Dunham Kelley Hawkins

Wherein some advice is offered, and some advice is sought

History links

More links

The colored expatriates of the American Revolution

Links

So long, West Wing

Friday shuffle

Transnational history posts

The cult of information

Interpreter needed

Karon on Iran

Nineteenth-century American history

Friday shuffle

History Carnival

Jazz primer

The case for abolishing nuclear weapons

McLemee does the OAH

The half-way house

Avoiding the bends

April 18, 1906

History links

More on transnational history

Disturbing news

Friday shuffle

Proslavery Constitution?

Blogging grad students

Clippings

Transnational political history

Jackie McLean, 1932-2006

Friday shuffle

On nations and immigrants

Google Reader

Some old canards

The non-defensive defense

I came, I saw, I finished!

Jazz geek-out

Worth reading

Reason to wince

Guelzo on Lincoln

The Great Blog Silence of 2006

Two snow poems

Technology and war

Clippings

Defining politics

More than one dream

Fun with maps

New digital history blog

Back home

Light blogging

Sidebar blandishment

Precedents and presidents

Freudian slip?

History Carnival

Conference paper update

History links

Politicians and historians

Conference paper

"The only history class they will ever take"

Guess that year!

Checked out

More on grading

Mechanics of trust

Blogger backlinks

Cliopatria symposium

Baltimore perk

Carnivals

Grading papers

Giving

Friday jazz shuffle

Geeky interludes