History Carnival 62 on the way

History Carnival 62 will be up tomorrow. Stay tuned!

O'Sullivan Offers a Conservative Case for Obama

For my money, National Review's John O'Sullivan does a better job explaining the historical reasons for electing Obama than do the Historians for Obama. He does so by assuming that a more unified and stable nation is the bedrock on which American conservatism is built and that and Obama Presidency wouldn't be so bad for conservatives.

A political event is in the conservative interest if it strengthens and stabilizes the country. At times that greater strength may be to the disadvantage of the conservative party or come at some (temporary) cost in conservative principles. But when the smoke of battle clears, conservatives will see, sometimes with surprise, that the nation is better for the change from a conservative standpoint....

It is important not to be starry-eyed about the conservative interest. It is rooted in prudence rather than any more idealistic virtue. It is an amoral basis of calculation, sometime allied with justice, sometimes indifferent to it, but always seeking social stability, as my two American examples will demonstrate.

The first one is the abandonment of Reconstruction after the Civil War in order to reintegrate the south into the United States. That object was achieved but at the cost of the U.S. allowing the installation of Jim Crow laws throughout the south....So the rights of black America were sacrificed for 70 years to the object of reintegrating the south in the federal republic. And whatever we may now think of that bargain, its object was achieved....

My second example is the reversal of the first: namely, the civil-rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. It was clear after the Second World War that the post-Reconstruction bargain was now itself unsustainable. Most Americans, including some in the south, recognized that the black Americans who had served alongside them in the Second World War were denied elementary rights in part of the country that they had fought to defend.... Jim Crow was reversed....

What does the conservative interest indicate on this occasion? It seems possible and even likely that a victory by Barack Obama would be the climax of this long policy of fully integrating black and minority America into the nation and putting the querulous politics of race behind us. As I have argued elsewhere, the mere fact of a President Obama would strengthen and stabilize America just as a Polish pope undermined Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Black and minority America would be fully integrated into the nation.... Americans would feel better about themselves and the world would feel very differently about America. The conservative interest, as defined above, would therefore smile upon a vote for Obama.

O'Sullivan also explains that actual political work also needs to be done to elect Republican (and Democratic) legislators who will mitigate against some of the executive tendencies of a President Obama that conservatives will disagree with.

Free JSTOR

Manan Ahmed points to both Danah Boyd's decision to publish in only Open Access Journals and Harvard's decision to require that all scholars affiliated with it allow free publication of their work. Thus inspired, he has decided to instigate a "Free JSTOR" campaign. Why? As Manan writes:

One of my biggest complaint about our academic world is about the inaccessibility of research to anyone without institutional affiliation or a hefty bank account. The impact of which is that, academic work in the humanities remains largely confined to a handful of readers and commentators.

I couldn't agree more. As a non-affiliated, "independent" historian, I can't access JSTOR from home because I can't justify paying the single-user fee. Of course, I can do so from one of the many libraries around, but having to take a trip to the stacks sort of takes the spontaneity out of history blogging. Being able to access them online for free, or even a minimal charge, would certainly be better!

Dark Ages, Shmark Ages / Sidonuis, the first neocon?

That popular conceptions of history tend to lag scholarly thought by a couple decades is nothing new. Witness this article in The Independent, "New light on the Dark Ages: Who are you calling barbaric?". For scholars of the period (late antique/earl MA), the discussion is nothing new and the article mentions Gibbon and alludes to "other interpretations." The re-examination was prompted by a new exhibit at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Italy. Sounds like good stuff. Unfortunately, the author saw fit to characterize the revisionist vs. traditional historiography this way:

But what if the barbarians weren't all that barbaric after all? What if the black/white, good/bad, God's chosen versus axis of evil, neo-conservative type explanation for this historical event is just as much state propaganda as the claim that Saddam Hussein was an hour away from bombarding us all with nuclear missiles?

Pathetic, really. Believe it or not, everything doesn't come back to Bushitler. Does this mean that we can now peg Sidonius Apollinaris as the first neo-con?

Anyway, here's the meat:

... what the new exhibition lays finally to rest is the notion that the barbarians were barbaric. True, they were often blond, worshipped their own gods, lacked cities with sewerage systems, heated floors, bathhouses and aqueducts. Often they were nomads. But the idea that they were in some absolute sense less civilised was Roman state propaganda. Crueller than the Romans? Hardly possible. More violent, more militaristic than the most militaristic state in history? Hard to conceive.

Once one steps back from the paranoid them-and-us, self-and-other way of looking at it, one sees that rather than the cataclysmic end of a great civilisation and its replacement by the forces of darkness, something far more compelling and creative was under way: the creation (as the curators of this exhibition put it) of Europe as we know it, welded together by Christianity, and with deeply rooted memories of Roman heritage which make dramatic returns to our collective consciousness every few hundred years: during the Renaissance, for example.

"The Barbarian kingdoms," writes Jean-Jacques Aillagon in the catalogue, "gradually drew a new political map of Europe, dividing it between the Ostrogoths and the Lombards in Italy, the Franks in western Germany, Belgium and France, the Visigoths in Languedoc, Aquitaine and the Iberian peninsula."

He continues: "If Europe was born in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome, many of its roots also lie in the peoples of the north and east of the European continent." The aim of the exhibition, he writes: "Is to reveal the profound and subtle mix between Graeco-Roman and Germanic roots from which European culture stems."

Larson: "The Politics of History"

This column by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward Larson is pretty much in the Spinning Clio wheelhouse. In it, Larson attempts to answer the question, "Why do conservatives like history more than liberals?":

Liberal Democrats have always looked to the future with hope and embraced marginalized groups. When they look back, even to the deeds of their own former leaders, they see trails of tears like the one over which Andrew Jackson drove out the Cherokee. Blemishes on past presidents, even those who pointed the way toward future progress, tend to stain them wholly for at least some key elements within the Democratic coalition.

In contrast, conservative Republicans look to the past for inspiration but often to the future with trepidation. Originalists at heart, they tend to see only the shining city on a hill of earlier times and not its darker neighborhoods. George Washington's slaves are forgotten along with Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts. For some Republicans, both Lincoln and Robert E. Lee become models of Christian virtue as if they never ordered millions of men into battle against the other.

I'd say that, generally, that's about right. Conservatives believe in preserving the good things from the past and liberals believe in creating good things in the future. Then what happens is too many liberals throw the baby out with the bathwater in the name of "progress" while conservatives don't realize that changing the bath water every now and then is a healthy thing to do.

'Most Famous' Americans?

Ralph Luker points to a USA Today story about the 10 "most famous" Americans according to our high schoolers. According to the piece:

Get a pencil and paper and jot down the 10 most famous Americans in history. No presidents or first ladies allowed.

Who tops your list?

Ask teenagers, and they overwhelmingly choose African-Americans and women, a study shows. It suggests that the "cultural curriculum" that most kids — and by extension, their parents — experience in school increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.

Researchers gave blank paper and pencils to a diverse group of 2,000 high school juniors and seniors in all 50 states and told them: "Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history."

In comments to Ralph's post, Jonathan Dresner makes the point that there is a difference between "most famous" and "most important." Anyway, here's the list:

1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67%
2. Rosa Parks: 60%
3. Harriet Tubman: 44%
4. Susan B. Anthony: 34%
5. Benjamin Franklin: 29%
6. Amelia Earhart: 25%
7. Oprah Winfrey: 22%
8. Marilyn Monroe: 19%
9. Thomas Edison: 18%
10. Albert Einstein: 16%

A few historian's were quoted, too:

Sam Wineburg, the Stanford University education and history professor who led the study along with Chauncey Monte-Sano of the University of Maryland, says the prominence of black Americans signals "a profound change" in how we see history.

"Over the course of about 44 years, we've had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story," Wineburg says.

"There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.

Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey?

She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says. "These are people who have a kind of popularity and recognition because they're distinguished in so many venues."

Joy Hakim, author of A History of US, says taking out the presidents "isn't quite fair" but concedes that the list isn't too shabby.

"I sometimes ask students to imagine themselves in a classroom 500 years from now. What will their teacher say about the 20th century? What were its lasting accomplishments? Of course, we don't know where future historians will focus, but I'm guessing that the civil rights movement and the incredible scientific achievements will be the big stories."

***

Dennis Denenberg, author of 50 American Heroes Every Kid Should Meet, says it's no surprise the civil rights era still resonates. "Since it so redefined America post-World War II, I think educators feel it's truly a story young people need to know about because we're still struggling with it," he says. "The Cold War is over and gone. The civil rights movement is ongoing."

Hakim's point about leaving out the President's is important. There are no deader, whiter men than they and taking them out of the survey doesn't really give us an an idea of how much of our history pedagogy still revolves around them (whether you view that as a positive or a negative).

Finally, one thing that struck me immediately was the timing of the survey. It is Black History Month (and Women's History Month is in March) and we just had MLK day, so I wonder what role the timing of the survey had in the answers given. My guess is current pedagogical practice is such that topics dealing with both "...History Months" are being emphasized about now. (Wow, I got to use "pedagogy" twice in one post!)

UPDATE: Nathanael makes a good point, too:

I would point out that the instruction, “no presidents or first ladies allowed,” undercuts the popularity of many “dead white men.” Indeed, isn’t political power what dead white men are known for? Aren’t social justice and celebrity for the rest?

However, what about Lewis and Clarke? Or Neil Armstrong? Or Mark Twain? There are a lot of white guys who are both famous and not politicians. I also just noticed that the three white guys who made the list were all men of science (Franklin, Edison, Einstein). Is there something to current pedagogy that emphasizes the role of invention and science in US History? Even over, say, exploration?

History Carnival

The 61st History Carnival is up at Historia i Media and covers a lot of fertile ground for history bloggers looking for something to read and blog about!

Also, the rumors are true ... Spinning Clio will be hosting the 62nd edition next month. Submissions welcome! And if you want to host, I'm sure Sharon would love to hear from you!

McCain as Modern Day TR

When he first ran for President in 2000, John McCain overtly compared himself to Teddy Roosevelt. And in that pre-9/11 world, at the "end of history," that comparison seemed to make a lot of sense. For instance, National Review's Rich Lowry wrote about how some believed that the 1990's and 1890's were comparable--particularly The Weekly Standard's David Brooks and William Kristol-- and that, like TR in the Gilded Age, the new millennium may be a fortuitous time for an iconoclast president with a desire to begin initiatives aimed at recapturing a sense of "national greatness". (Lowry believed there was no such need for that at the time. In short, it was time for an manager president--a la Harding--since there was no major event or crisis on hand. If only.)

This time around, McCain hasn't evoked the ghost of TR quite as much, but I think the comparison is still apt. Conservatives, liberals and libertarian's all seem to agree.

Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore in November 2005:

Throughout our chat he has referred to Theodore Roosevelt in almost reverential terms and glows when I ask about him. He calls TR "my hero . . . and one of our greatest presidents," and at one point he excitedly searches through his briefcase and pulls out a book that he is reading on the famously tumultuous election of 1912. That was when TR bolted from the Republican Party (which Mr. McCain concedes was "a mistake") and formed the Bull Moose Party to dethrone William Taft. When I mention TR's trust-busting (which was mostly counterproductive economically), Mr. McCain really comes to life, exultantly points his finger in the air, smiles and cries out: "He called the trusts 'the malefactors of wealth.' "

And in this very moment it becomes clear to me that John McCain aspires to be a modern-day TR. The similarities are unmistakable: Both were war heroes, mavericks within their own party, reformers and defenders of the little guy.

But here in a nutshell lies the danger of the McCain view of the world. Where some see the vast virtue of entrepreneurial wealth-generators and job-producers, he too often sees "robber barons." He seems forever in search of the next Joe Camel, Charles Keating, Ken Lay or Jose Canseco (Mr. McCain has been a prominent crusader against steroids in baseball).

Slate's Jacob Weisberg:

McCain was not always the moderate, tolerant character I'm describing. He was a conservative before he was a liberal before he became a conservative again. McCain began his political career in the 1980s as an untroubled Reagan Republican. His outlook changed drastically, however, after he nearly went down in the Keating Five scandal, for which he blamed both himself and the money-politics system. In the early 1990s, McCain caught the reform bug and became the Senate's foremost advocate of campaign finance reform, as well as an outspoken opponent of corporate welfare and pork-barrel spending. His reform zeal opened the door to other heresies and formed the basis for his presidential run. Part of what was compelling about McCain as a candidate in the 2000 primaries was that he was a politician in genuine flux. On the campaign trail, you could see him losing faith in conservative orthodoxy on issues like poverty, income inequality, health care, and global warming, spurred by encounters with humans in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

This political evolution continued through Bush's first term. McCain rejected the president's fiscal recklessness and tax cuts skewed to the wealthy. He allied himself with Democratic colleagues on a variety of social issues, including HMO reform, environmentalism, and gun control. Democrats implored him to switch teams, as a couple of his advisers, frozen out by the right, actually did. But instead of accepting John Kerry's offer to become his running mate in 2004, McCain embraced Bush's re-election effort, and his searching phase largely came to an end. Since the president's second term began, McCain has been uncharacteristically calculating, building bridges to Bush and the evangelicals and choosing his battles far more selectively. But if you watch closely, you still catch plenty of signals that the old new McCain isn't dead, just hiding out. He continues to take on the president and his own party where it matters to him, on the use of torture in the war on terrorism and on immigration, where he sponsored a bill with Ted Kennedy to allow millions of illegal immigrants become citizens.

I'm not arguing that McCain is a liberal Trojan horse running in the wrong party. If you need to label him, he's a Teddy Roosevelt progressive—militant, crusading, reformist, and hostile to concentrated power. The Bull Moose has temporarily turned into a performing elephant. But the Moose will be back—around March 2008, if everything goes according to plan.

And Reason's Matt Welch:

McCain regards Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as political idols; like them, he never hesitates in asserting that government power should be used to rekindle American (and Republican) pride in government. Unlike most neoconservative intellectuals, however, McCain is intimately familiar with the bluntest edge of state-sponsored force. A McCain presidency would put legislative flesh on David Brooks’ fuzzy pre-9/11 notions of “grand aspiration,” deploying a virtuous federal bureaucracy to purify unclean private transactions from the boardroom to the bedroom. And it would prosecute the nation’s post-9/11 wars with a militaristic zeal this country hasn’t seen in generations.

And some think we have an "imperial president" now? What will a McCain (or Clinton, part deux) bring?

Cult of Personality

I’m every person you need to be
I’m the cult of personality
Look into my eyes, what do you see?
Cult of personality
I know your anger, I know your dreams
I’ve been everything you want to be
I’m the cult of personality

"Cult of Personality" ~ Living Colour {video}

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Faith doesn't just influence me, it really defines me. I don't have to wake up every day wondering, "What do I need to believe."

Let us never sacrifice our principles for any body's politics. Not now. Not ever ... We believe in some things. We stand by those things. We live or die by those things. ~ Mike Huckabee campaign commercial "Believe"

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I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours. ~ Barack Obama Campaign Website

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[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards. ~ Mike Huckabee

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Stopping by a packed Barack Obama rally last night in Rochester, New Hampshire, God-o-Meter noticed that fans standing behind the candidate on stage waved homemade poster board signs proclaiming “In Obama We Trust” and “Believe.” The local activist who introduced Obama said, “What I really like is his ability to uplift people.” And Obama opened his stump speech this way: “Over the next 20 minutes or so, you’re going to see a light shine down the from the ceiling… you’re going to have an epiphany.”

By the end of the evening, many of the rally’s estimated 1,000 attendees did, according to an informal God-o-Meter’s survey. “He’s incredibly exciting and charismatic,” said Elizabeth Brooks, 57. “I believe in what he’s saying.

“We heard Hillary yesterday, and she has the same message,” said Anton Becker, 67, leaving the event with his wife. “But Obama is much more inspirational.”

~ God-o-Meter blog, 1/8/2008~

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Like Job after losing his camels and acquiring boils, the conservative movement is in distress. Mike Huckabee shreds the compact that has held the movement's two tendencies in sometimes uneasy equipoise. Social conservatives, many of whom share Huckabee's desire to "take back this nation for Christ," have collaborated with limited-government, market-oriented, capitalism-defending conservatives who want to take back the nation for James Madison. Under the doctrine that conservatives call "fusion," each faction has respected the other's agenda. Huckabee aggressively repudiates the Madisonians. ~ George Will

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Obama's victory seemed almost otherworldly -- as if the laws of space and time had been suspended, and a quality as evanescent and fragile as hope had suddenly become real. I am not a religious person, but it was hard not to feel that his triumph vindicated the essence of what I think of as the secular essence of religion, something even nonbelievers can believe in: the possibility of inner transformation. A transformation at once personal and national. ~ Gary Kamiya, Salon

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I think that a better approach ... would be to show more clearly the parallels between the quasi-religious views that lie behind today's progressive agenda and the thinking behind past mistakes. In my view, they are linked by faith in unproven scientific fads, faith in technocratic elites, and faith that those who share progressive ideology have superior wisdom and moral standing that justifies ruling over others. I believe that the best way to insulate oneself against romanticizing the state is to recognize these faiths and their dangers.

Arnold Kling critiques Jonah Goldberg's approach in Goldberg's Liberal Fascism

Britain's Atlantis

I can't help it, I'm a sucker for "lost cities". I'd never heard of Dunwich or that it was once considered a rival to London. Anyway (link updated~thanks Loren)...

Visit Dunwich today and you will encounter a quiet Suffolk coastal village with steeply sloping shingle beaches. From time to time the waves move the pebbles to expose the great black sea defences which lie amid the stones like great beached whales, designed to slow the longshore drift of the beach into the oblivion to which the once great city has been consigned. Today the real Dunwich lies out there beneath the cold grey waters, 50 feet down and perhaps a mile out.

This British Atlantis – with its eight churches, five houses of religious orders, three chapels and two hospitals – is now about to be exposed to human gaze for the first time since the first of a series of great storms and sea surges hit the East Anglian coast in 1286 and began the process of coastal erosion which led to the city's disappearance. For the past 30 years one man, Stuart Bacon, a marine archaeologist and director of the Suffolk Underwater Studies, has dedicated himself to discovering what lies beneath the waves. He has made more than 1,000 dives on the medieval site since 1971 but with limited success. High silt levels in the water mean that visibility is limited to just a few centimetres.

"You can't see," he says. "The water is black because of the sediment in suspension. On very rare occasions visibility can be one to two metres but more usually it is one or two centimetres. You can't read your watch with a lamp on some occasions."

He has explored by touch, with the aid of a map drawn in 1587, which has proved remarkably accurate. But, from May, Mr Bacon will be teaming up with Professor David Sear, of the University of Southampton, and they will bring to bear the latest underwater acoustic imaging technology to reveal the secrets of the past.

Review: Microtrends

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne

“Many of the biggest movements in America today are small—generally hidden from all but the most careful observe.

Microtrends is based on the idea that the most powerful forces in our society are the emerging, counterintuitive trends that are shaping tomorrow right before us.”

It is this philosophy that Mark Penn is currently putting to use as he consults Senator Hillary Clinton during her current presidential campaign. Overall, the trends he spots—and the way he frames them—are interesting, if sometimes to be taken with a grain of salt.

Penn focuses on a variety of groups—single women, “working retired”, lefthanders, vegan children—that run the gamut. Throughout, he explains what he believes businesses (current and potential) and politicians can do with the data he has provided so that they can serve these near invisible, or underserved, populations.

One is tempted to take the trends he writes about and extrapolate (or infer) potential Clinton political tactics during the ongoing Presidential campaign. And Penn’s penchant for referring to President and Senator Clinton throughout the book only adds to this temptation (not to mention the endorsement by the former President).

He also can’t help but let his partisanship show every now and then. In his chapter on “Ardent Amazons”—women who are working in “traditionally” male occupations (firefighters, construction, etc.)—Penn cites a study that shows that women police officers are “substantially less likely than their male counterparts to use, or to be accused of using, excessive force.” In essence, he believes women make these professions kinder and gentler and that is a net “good.” But then he can’t help himself:

Of course, I wouldn’t generalize women’s strengths any more than I would their weaknesses. Sure, it was under America’s first female attorney general, Janet Reno, that the nation’s police forces became focused on “community policing” and preventing crime before it started. On the other hand, the first female national security adviser (and later secretary of state), Condoleeza Rice, helped pave our path to war in Iraq. And first female prime minister Margaret Thatcher deployed the British military more aggressively than any predecessor had in years.

That Penn uses a Democratic Attorney General (Janet Reno) as an example of the “good” and a Republican and a Conservative as the “bad” is one example of his partisanship. For instance, the same point could have been made—and perhaps more concisely--by showing the good and bad in one individual: Janet Reno. After all, wasn’t it she who showed (arguably) excessive force when she ordered the storming of the Branch Davidian compound?

But Penn isn’t always so partisan and there is a lot of data (he provides many of his sources, too) that is useful to anyone of every political or commercial persuasion. In fact, here is a partial list of some of Penn's more compelling points:

- Most parents think they are more strict than other parents. According to Penn, “they have at minimum redefined what strict is, and turned it from a belt on the behind to a swift chat on the chin.”

- “America’s elite—the wealthiest and best educated of our society—have become less interested in America’s economic and strategic challenges than they are in candidate’s personalities….today’s elites are so far removed from the mainstream concerns like health care, college affordability, job loss, and child care that most Americans face….While today’s elites are reading Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, the rest of America is living it. Just as college students have always had views that change when they get out and have life experiences, so today’s elites are like perpetual college students, far removed from the experiences and struggles shaping everyday American life. And so it is a lot easier to spin America’s elites than it is to spin the voters.”

- “While learning disabled kids span the spectrum of family incomes, it is practically a fad in the upper middle class. (Who else, after all, would spend serious time and money to find out why their kids are merely average?)…While regular folks may still see a stigma in kids’ disabilities related in any way to the brain, the affluent wear them like a badge of honor, aggressively explaining why their children undercompete.”

- “Unlike Mr. Cleaver of Leave It to Beaver, who got great respect, today’s Dad gets none. It is almost as though marketers see today’s society as an Amazon tribe, where women make all the decisions and men just go along for the ride….Men are spending more time with the kids, but neither Madison Avenue nor the media has picked up on it, and the potential of Daddy-and-me relationships remains untapped.”

- Grown ups are playing more video games and watching more cartoons.

- While the stereotype is that most home-schoolers are fundamentalist Christians, that is changing.

- More people are attending college—and more are dropping out, which is a waste of both current financial resources and potential earnings.

There is a lot more about which Penn has interesting and important things to say. Whether you ultimately agree with him or not, he gets the conversation started. Just remember, he's currently flacking for Senator Hillary Clinton, so have your salt shaker with you.

One reason why I left the AHA

Michael Bowen:

As a national organization and the most powerful entity in the historical job market, the AHA has done surprisingly little to help the newest members of their profession. On the whole, historians pride themselves on their concern for social justice. In 2005, for example, the Organization of American Historians uprooted its annual conference and moved it to another city in a show of solidarity with hotel workers. When it comes to the plight of the discipline’s own working class, the unemployed job seeker, this compassion and concern is absent. In its place is an annual report from the AHA talking about how good it is for some. For others, there isn’t much the AHA can do. I find this lack of action, especially when compared to what is normally shown for the less fortunate, disheartening.

Or they waste time passing meaningless and ideologically driven resolutions about the Iraq war and such. Anyway, if you're a job-seeking historian, read the rest.

Review: A Slave No More

A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation by David W. Blight

A Slave No More is many books in one. The heart and soul of the work are the never-before-published emancipation narratives written by Wallace Turnage and John Washington. Blight provides historical context by matching their individual stories to the Civil War time line an compares them to other emancipation narratives. In essence, Blight provides the historical body for the Turnage and Washington stories.

In the first two chapters, he provides the historical context and his analysis of Washington and Turnage narratives, respectively. His discussion of the different nature, tone and goals of antebellum and post-bellum emancipation narratives is important.

Antebellum slave narratives tended to conform to certain structures and conventions. Given the depth of racism in the era, rooted in assumptions of black illiteracy and deviance, pre-1860 ex-slave autobiographers had to demonstrate their humanity and veracity. They had to prove their identity and their reliability as first-person witnesses among a people so often defined outside the human family of letters….Most narratives were cast as contests between good and evil, moving through countless examples of cruelty toward slaves and ending in a story of escape. Many are essentially spiritual autobiographies, journeys from sinfulness and ignorance to righteousness and knowledge. On one level, antebellum slave narratives were effective abolitionist propaganda, condemnations of slavery in story form.

Post-emancipation slave narratives, however, changed in content and form. They still tend to be spiritual autobiographies, often by former bondsmen turned clergymen, and they were written in the mode of “from slave cabin to the pulpit.” But postslavery narratives are more practical and less romantic, more about a rise to success for the individual and progress for the race as a whole….It is not so much the memory of slavery that matters in the bulk of the postwar genre, but how slavery was overcome by a narrator who competed and won his place in an ever-evolving and more hopeful present. Slavery is now a useable past in the age of Progress and Capital….Antebellum narratives are saturated with the oppressive nature of slavery and a world shadowed by the past. Postbellum narratives reflect backward only enough to cast off the past, exalt the present and forge a future.

According to Blight, the Washington and Turnage narratives are unique because they exhibit qualities of both ante- and postbellum types.

In the third chapter, Blight describes how used various resources rediscover Washington and Turnage’s past. It is a good object lesson to future historians as to the twists and turns—some frustrating, some unexpected--that research can take. In chapter four, Blight tackles the larger historiographical question of emancipation and whether it was bottom-up or top-down. It was both:

Emancipation in America was a revolution from the bottom up that required power and authority from the top down to give it public gravity and make it secure. Freedom, as Lincoln said, was something given and preserved, but it also, as he himself well understood had to be taken and endured. And it ultimately was fostered by war and engineered by armies.

In this chapter, he also charts the origin of the “faithful slave” myth and the important part it played in the “Lost Cause” narrative that arose in the postbellum south.

The final two chapters are the emancipation narratives themselves. Both writers apologized for their poor writing skills, yet, while they did write simply, they also wrote engaging and sometimes eloquent prose. In addition for having a talent for description, both were skilled at using humor (sometimes dry) and irony to make their point. For instance, Turnage, in explaining--upon overhearing that he was due a whipping from an overseer--decided not to wait around, so he “got over the fence to see what would be the result.” That’s one way of explaining that he ran away!

In sum, whereas Blight--as he describes--may believe that he was simply in the right place at the right time to have had these works fall into his lap, he has done a magnificent job of presenting the Turnage and Washington stories within their proper historical context. This is a valuable work of history.

Mmmmm, Nothing Better Than Medieval Sugar Chicken

File under *yech*:

What is most striking about Medieval cooking instructions is the often massive use of sugar in what seems to be otherwise savory dishes. An example from Le Ménagier de Paris, French recipes from the 14th century reads, “Take capons or chickens killed the appropriate length of time before…cook them in pork fat with water and wine. When they are through cooking take them out. Take almonds, peel and pound them and add some of the cooking stock from the chicken…Strain the almond stock mixture. Then take pared or peeled white ginger and grains of paradise moistened as above, and put the mixture through a fine strainer. Mix with the almond milk. And if it is not thick enough, add starch or boiled rice. Add a little verjuice and put in a great deal of white sugar…”

While a modern-day cook might easily accept almond as a typical Medieval means of thickening sauces, the “great deal of sugar” might cause some hesitation. In Libro di Cucina from the 14th century Italy, a recipe that uses four chickens calls for a pound and a half of sugar, and in Viandier de Guillaume Tirel from the 15th century France, a dish with one suckling pig requires a pound of sugar. Sugar was used not only as an ingredient to be melted within a dish—it was often also sprinkled on top of the finished dish. A 16th century French court physician remarked that they use at least as much sugar as salt. Plantina in late 15th century Italy declared that sugar could spoil no dish.

Persians learned about sugar cane and sugar-making technology from Indians in the sixth century. Using sugar in dishes was considered a great sign of wealth and prestige. Arabs, who conquered Persia in the seventh century, spread sugar cane as they conquered Northern Africa, Sicily, and Spain. Western Europeans were introduced to sugar through the Venetian sugar trade. It was used to coat bitter medicine in order to make swallowing easier. Indeed, sugar was considered medicinal in its own right, as well.

Physicians followed the teachings of Galienus (2nd century CE), who thought of one’s health in terms of the balance of the four humors: hot, cold, dry, and wet. Food was one means to achieve the balance, and different foods were thought to have some of these four qualities. Sugar was considered to encourage warmth and moisture in the body, the ideal Gallenic state, and was therefore highly regarded. On a more practical level, a sweet taste was necessary to counter the strong acidity of verjus (juice of unripe grapes), another common ingredient of the Medieval period.

While the amount of sugar in Medieval dishes surely strikes a modern cook (or diner) as excessive, it may be worth noting that at this time in early history (and well into the 17th century), the distinctions between “savory” and “sweet”, and that between “main course” and “dessert”, were non-existent.

OK, so I understand why they did it...but this just about kills the "authenticity" of the food at the local "Renaissance Fair" or the Medieval Times banquet, doesn't it?

2007 Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging

The 2007 Cliopatria Award winners have been announced:

Best Group Blog: In the Middle

Best Individual Blog: Civil War Memory

Best New Blog: Religion in American History

Best Post: Timothy Burke, "Knowledge is Inconvenient," Cliopatria, 27 September

Best Series of Posts: Errol Morris, "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?" Zoom, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, 25 September, 4 October, and 23 October.

Best Writer: Caleb Crain, Steamboats are Ruining Everything

Congrats!!!

Review: Barbarism & Civilization

Barbarism & Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time by Bernard Wasserstein

Wasserstein is the Harriet and Ulrich Meyer Professor of History at the University of Chicago and has many works--both fiction and non--to his credit. He opens his survey of 20th century Europe with a quote from Walter Benjamin: "There is no document of civilization...that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism." Wasserstein continues:

During the past century Europe was the scene of some of the most savage episodes of collective violence in the recorded history of the human species. Yet the same period has also seen incontestable improvements in many aspects of the life of most inhabitants of the continent: human life has been extended, on average, by more than half; standards of living have increased dramatically; illiteracy has been all but eliminated; women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals have advanced closer to equality of respect and opportunity.

Wasserstein has set himself the task of describing these improvements amidst a century of war and strife. His 20th century begins in 1914, on the eve of the Great War, and he sets the stage by explaining that there are two ways of looking at Europe in that year: backwards to a time of peace, prosperity and stability or "forwards and see the early tremors of social and international upheaval--the beginning of the end of the Eurocentric world." As he points out, the logic of the former approach is that "contemporaries could look back much more easily than they could see ahead." And what they saw was pretty positive, but under the veneer, trouble was brewing.

The veneer included the emergence of a middle-class, the bourgeoisie, as well as of the intellectual classes. Yet, this was also the time of the rise of the trade union. Together, forces converged and the raising of class consciousness led to “class conflict” and the emergence of various ideological movements such as Marxism and various socialist derivatives. But Europe's coming discord lay not in ideology--not yet.

The root of European disorder in 1914 was not…class, but ethnicity. Solidarities and antagonisms based on ethnicity, for reasons that lie buried in human hearts, answer to some of the most deeply rooted and instinctive social feelings of our species. European history in our time shows how futile it is to ignore them.

This is an argument that, for me, immediately called to mind Patrick Geary’s thesis in his Myth of Nations, but others have made the same observation. It is only one lesson learned (if not heeded) in the aftermath of the Great War. Another would be that conflict “inevitably increased the power of central governments, civil liberties, and diminished the ability of parliaments, courts, or public opinion to check the authority of governments and armed forces.” Still other lessons were better remembered and put to use in WWII such as the theory of “total war” involving both the military and the civilian population.

Wasserstein’s telling of the post WWI European revolutions is compelling and informative. (As a European history naïf, I was unaware that the U.S. had sent troops to help bolster the anti-Bolshevik forces). His explanation of how the Bolshevik’s won is a good example of his ability to synthesize and summarize a bit of military history for the layman:

In the Civil War the Bolsheviks had virtually the whole world and a largepart of the former Russian Empire ranged against them. Yet they won. The primary reason was the disunity of their enemies, who shared neither common aims nor a common strategy. Unlike their enemies, the Bolsheviks enjoyed the advantage of holding the centre and consequently of relatively secure internal lines of communication. They controlled the bulk of the population and of war industry.

In detailing the post-war peace process, Wasserstein returns to his cassus belli nationalism informed by ethnicity:

The diplomacy of the peacemakers, clothed in the garb of national self-determination and peaceful resolution of disputes, was sullied at several points by the crude imposition of national interests and by acquiescence in the use of force. The illusion was nevertheless created of a new order in which righteousness would reign supreme.

Thus was the League of Nations born and the world fooled itself into thinking there could be everlasting peace. Meanwhile, Nazism and Fascism rose. Fascism, writes Wasserstein, was:

...a primitive rationalization of gangsterism rather than a political philosophy in the conventional sense….Yet Fascism was vastly appealing to many. It promised to cut through the hypocrisy of the Giolittian spoils system, to restore order to society and the economy, to recreate the glory of the Roman Empire.

He has harsher words for Hitler’s Nazism

His movement was a revolt of the gutter, of losers who felt that, through no fault of their own, they had been thrown aside by respectable society and were determined to rise up and wreak their revenge. Apart from ill-defined dreams of racial domination, Hitler’s politics were inspired by no social vision. On the contrary, underlying his thought and actions was a barely hidden sociopathy: ‘What is stable’, he said, ‘is emotion, hatred.’ Hitler claimed to offer the German people a restoration of their national self-respect.

Wasserstein also compares Nazism with Communism and makes an interesting differentiation.

[Nazism] was an attempt to seize history by the collar and frog-march it in a direction determined primarily by the selfish interests and obsessive beliefs of those in power…[Communism‘s] claim, derived from Marx, [was] to be able to discern and to accelerate the underlying motive forces of history.

He also offers critical insight into the post-WWII mindset of those who survived. To wit, not only America has come to believe in a "greatest generation."

Each country, each national group, each political party fashioned its own version of the war and , as time went on, burnished remembrance and amnesia into self-serving myth. For some peoples, such as Serbs and Jews, a narrative of victimhood was a potion that came to serve as justification for resurgent nationalism. For the British, the lone struggle of 1940-1, the heroism of the few in the Battle of Britain and the many in the Blitz, reinvigorated national self-consciousness. For the French, the petty day-to-day accommodations that most had made with the occupier were overshadowed by the legend of resistance, that the Vichy regime had been made in France and supported, at least, initially, by the great majority of the French people.

For Germans the chief components of wartime memory were the agonies of the eastern front, the terror of Allied carpet-bombing of German cities, and the flight of civilian population from the path of the Russian army in East Prussia and elsewhere in the east…. From 1947 onwards the Cold War rendered the earlier struggle of the German army against Bolshevism somehow respectable. Military service on the eastern fron became a virtual badge of honour with all responsibility for the attendant atrocities against prisoners of war and civilians shunted onto the shoulders of the disbanded police state apparatus….For many Germans the terrible losses from Allied bombings of German cities somehow canceled out the crimes committed by the Nazis.

No country involved escaped the temptation to privilege “preferred memory” over history.

Wasserstein continues into the Cold War, which looms large in the second half of the century. But he also discusses post-WWII social and cultural changes spurred by both the memory of the conflict as well as the the re-drawing of national borders and the displacement of various peoples in its aftermath. He also explains why post-war Europe was fertile ground for the development of the welfare state.

Government spending everywhere had reached unprecedented levels during the war….High taxation, rationing, and government controls during the war had inured the possessing classes to a much greater degree of state control of the economy and society. Common sacrifice of soldiers and civilians of all classes had prepared minds for the application of egalitarian policies in the period of reconstruction. The warfare state…shaped the welfare state.

Wasserstein continues along, detailing the ebb and flow of the Cold War, de-colonization and the gradual movement towards European unity. (Of the last, an interesting counterpoint is the example of Belgium, which even now is experiencing tension based on the ethnically halved population of Flemish and Walloons.) The European youth uprisings of the '60s and the economic downturn of the 1970s culminated in the rise of neo-liberalism in Europe and the application of “Chicago school” economic theories here and there, particularly in Western Europe.

He continues until 2004, hitting all of the major touchstones. His final chapter offers a comparison between now and 1914.

Before 1914 undemocratic regimes interfered in the lives of the majority of ordinary people far less than the most liberal European governments of the new millennium. This was the paradox of the contemporary liberal state: it intruded in many unprecedented ways into the private sphere; yet liberty of the individual, measured by most reasonable criteria, had enormously increased in Europe by 2005 by comparison with 1914.

Two competing tendencies emerge from the dislocations of the pst century: on the one hand a growth of ruthlessness, manifested in wartime atrocities, criminality, and heightened racial hatreds; on the other, a growth of tenderness, exemplified in changed attitudes to the treatment of the mentally ill, the disabled, prisoners, children, and animals.

Barbarism and Civilization, indeed. But, pace Mark Steyn, demography is working against Europe and their ability to keep up the level of social welfare “civilization” to which they’ve become accustomed. The population is getting older and there are fewer young people (working fewer hours) to support them. And the short term solution of importing masses of immigrants, segregated from the rest of each particular nation’s mainstream culture, may have a higher cost in the long run. Ethnic-based nationalism is more dangerous when you are relying heavily upon a segregated “other” to maintain your way of life. Europe has to come up with a new way of dealing with this reality. But will it be a barbaric or a civilized method?

Wasserstein notes that throughout Europe, religion’s importance has drastically reduced. And he asks, “What could replace religion as a source of values?” Unfortunately, nothing has taken its place. And though “a variety of doctrines, mainly re-treads of old ideas” have been tried, “None, however, provided the scaffolding for an alternative social morality that could satisfy a majority in society.” Wasserstein’s final sentence gives us a depressing summary of the past century.

Evil stalked the earth in this era, moving men’s minds, ruling their actions, and begetting the lies, greed, deceit, and cruelty that are the stuff of the history of Europe in our time.

In that light, and keeping in mind the moral vacuum Wasserstein previously described, Europe seems ill-prepared to deal with the myriad problems it faces in a civilized manner. I hope he’s wrong.

All in all, B&C is a thick, weighty read with an important thesis. Wasserstein is a skilled synthesizer and a fluid writer and presents his topics in an engaging, if sometimes workmanlike, style. Barbarism and Civilization is a solid and insightful recounting of Europe's past century.

Historical Premature Ejac---er---speculation

Hey, I know he's a favorite whipping boy of a good many in the historical "profession." But this observation by Victor Davis Hanson is a truism, like it or not (via Dale Light).

Critics are not allowed to stop history at a convenient point — at Abu Ghraib, the pull-back from Fallujah, or the bombing of the dome at Samara — and then pass final judgment whenever they wish. If Lincoln had quit after Cold Harbor, Wilson after the German Spring offensive of 1918, or Roosevelt after the fall of the Philippines, then their presidencies would have failed and the U.S. today would be a far weaker — or perhaps nonexistent — country.

History instead will assess Iraq when it ends. {emphasis added}

When historians pass judgment on contemporary or ongoing historical moments, isn't there a temptation to shape the narrative so that it continues to fit their prediction? Remember when George W. Bush was picked as the worst president ever? Or how about Harry Truman? Time and considered evaluation--some would even call it revisionism!--have a way of changing the contemporary conventional wisdom into the opposite.

If John Adams Practifed YouTube Politics...

....would it be something like this?





H/T NLT

"What Hath God Wrought"

The Oxford History of The United States has a new volume, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe. I have great respect for Howe's work (I've mentioned him in the past) and look forward to reading the book. Here's a teaser from an NRO interview:

JOHN J. MILLER: Why did you choose the text of Samuel F. B. Morse’s first telegraphic message as the title for your book?

DANIEL WALKER HOWE: The quotation “What Hath God Wrought” works well for me in three ways. In the first place it calls attention to the dramatic technological changes characteristic of the years between 1815 and 1848, revolutionizing communication and transportation. In the second place, this quotation from the Bible (Numbers 23:23) illustrates the importance of religion in the history of the period. And in the third place, it calls attention to the idea that in rising to transcontinental power, the United States was fulfilling a divine providential destiny, a self-image that America shared with ancient Israel, to which the phrase originally applied.

I already like the triple-threat, er,-themed approach. Now all I have to do is clear my desk of about 5 other books I need to read and review!

Historians for JFK...I mean, Obama

Historians for Obama has been formed to, well, support Barack Obama for President (h/t Ralph Luker). Scott Jaschick has more.

...in a move that is unusually early and specific, a group of prominent historians on Monday issued a joint endorsement of Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency. The endorsement, released through the History News Network, was organized by Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University, and Ralph E. Luker, a historian who is one of the leaders of the popular history blog Cliopatria. The scholars who signed included two past presidents of the American Historical Association — Joyce Appleby of the University of California at Los Angeles and James McPherson of Princeton University — and many other A-list scholars in the field.

Officials of the AHA (which was not a party to the endorsement) and several other long-time observers of the discipline said that they could not think of a comparable example of historians collectively taking a stand in a political race in this way.

It turns out that about half of the historians approached by Kazin and Luker signed on. The other half abstained or were supporting other candidates like Edwards and Clinton. Some historians even thought Obama was too "Republican." No Republicans were mentioned as having the support of any of the historians who declined.

That's surprising.

According to Jaschick, Kazin said "while he and other scholars felt an obligation as 'scholar/citizens' to speak out, they did not want to imply that historians are uniquely qualified to pick a president." Sounds like a little bit of false modesty: why call the group "Historians for Obama" unless you're trying to cast a certain air of expertise about your whole endorsement. Not a big deal, really.

In reading the HfO statement, it seemed to me that they believe in the power of Obama's personality above all else. His domestic agenda seems of the typical, mainstream liberal variety and his foreign policy agenda seems both naive and overly-idealistic (for instance, they reference his idea to abolish nuclear weapons). No matter. To these historians, he's JFK: The Sequel.

But it is his qualities of mind and temperament that really separate Obama from the rest of the pack. He is a gifted writer and orator who speaks forcefully but without animus. Not since John F. Kennedy has a Democrat candidate for president showed the same combination of charisma and thoughtfulness - or provided Americans with a symbolic opportunity to break with a tradition of bigotry older than the nation itself. Like Kennedy, he also inspires young people who see him as a great exception in a political world that seems mired in cynicism and corruption.

Presumably, Obama's power of personality will be enough to both abolish nuclear weapons ("Wait 'til the Chinese and Russians meet him, they won't be able to resist!"). If only.

But to be fair, the desire for the HfO to see the qualities of a past (beloved) champion (JFK) isn't unique: the GOP has been trying to find "the next Reagan" since he left office. Ideologues of all stripes have their own pantheon of personalities and it's only natural to try to recapture what--to our own minds--seemed to work before. But I think history shows that past performance of one individual doesn't predict the future performance of another--even if they seem so similar to our (rose-colored) eyes.

But maybe I'm just a cynical GenXer. This is just my opinion, anyhow, and the HfO are entitled to theirs.

Finally, I think I see what's really going on here. Oprah Winfrey is a high-profile Obama supporter and--through her "book club"--she can single-handedly vault a book into bestseller status. This is nothing more than a clever network marketing campaign on the part of these historians. Watch for a deluge of scholarly history tomes getting recommendations from Oprah in the coming months. It's a conspiracy based on self-interest and materialistic gain, I tells ya!