Got Tagged? Just say no.

Lauren tagged me.

I ain't doing it, sorry.

Why? Mostly because I'm not going to annoy people based upon some faux impulse to be nice-nice.

No offense intended, btw.

Medieval Hollywood

Well, here's an attempt to jumpstart the History Blogging. It looks like Hollywood is going to be offering a few medieval entertainment vehicles in the upcoming months.

Virgin Territory is a contemporized Decameron. Well, the language and mores are updated, the setting and time--the hills outside of Florence during a plague outbreak--remains the same.

The Last Legion is another attempt at a "historic King Arthur" story. We'll see.

CBS is going to produce a new series called "The Kingdom" about "four guys, one of whom is crowned king and reluctantly takes the throne despite preferring drinking and sex to procession and war." Heh.

I suppose I haven't been thinking historically lately

And that's why the lull. My focus has been on my more local obligations. Ah well, I await Clio to inspire...I'm sure she will.

Secular Tribes Here, Religious Tribes There

Paul Waldman wrote a piece in The Prospect in which--after pondering this study on the tribalization of evangelicals--he wonders if secularists are going to tribalize themselves. This has prompted some discussion by Ross Douthat (who also wrote a piece based on the same study) and the guys at The Corner. First, Waldman:

David Campbell of Notre Dame describes how evangelical voters are affected by the demographic makeup of their environment -- but not in the way you might think. Building on the "racial threat" hypothesis -- which states that as the number of African-Americans in a community increases, the more likely white voters are to support conservative candidates and oppose policies that benefit African-Americans -- Campbell set out to see whether he could identify a similar effect among evangelical voters. It turns out that, even when you control for factors like party identification, the more secular people there were within a county, the more likely that people from evangelical denominations living there would vote Republican.

In other words, the more that evangelicals saw non-religious people around them, the greater the likelihood they'd walk a straight line from the church door to the voting booth and pull the GOP lever.
...

So the question now is whether non-believers will, in large numbers, begin to define themselves as a tribe of their own. In order to do so, they'll have to feel at least some measure of antagonism toward those on the outside. That's what makes a tribe a tribe, after all. (What would Red Sox fandom be without the Yankees, or punk rock without the conformist corporate tools?) But one key question for secular people is who, exactly, the Other is. Is it anyone who is religious? Those who want to convert you to their beliefs? Those who want their beliefs to be enshrined in government policy?

Douthat summarized his take on the matter:

The argument, in short, is that just as the elite-level secularization of the 1960s and '70s (in the intelligentsia, the Courts, and the Democratic Party) produced backlash in the form of the religious right, so now that backlash has bred its own backlash, in the form of a mass secularism whose attitudes toward religion, politics, and church-state separation are more European than anything we've seen before in American political life. This, not the supposed right-wing religious revival that conservatives champion and liberals dread, is the newest new thing in American political life, and the trend that's likely to have the most impact on the culture wars over the next decade or so.

Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and Mark Steyn have all weighed in and Douthat has responded. Read their posts to see the argument over the particulars of how the tug-o-war between secularism and religion has played out over the last 40-odd years.

And then there's this study which indicates that adults who graduated from college during the last 10 years or so are more religious than their non-college educated peers.

Researchers found four-year college students and college graduates are the least likely to curb church attendance, to say religion is less important in their lives, or to completely disassociate from religion. Young adults who do not pursue a college degree are the most likely to abandon their faith.

"Many people assume college is public enemy number one for religion," Mark Regnerus, assistant professor of sociology and author of the book "Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers," said. "But we found young adults who don't experience college are far more likely to turn away from religion."

The evolution of campus culture might explain the surprising results, Regnerus said. As more universities shift attention and resources from liberal arts to professional programs, students are increasingly sheltered from philosophical questions or debates that challenge their beliefs. When they are challenged, they can gain support from campus religious organizations and like-minded peers.

"Religion and spirituality are becoming more accepted in higher education, both in intellectual circles and in campus life," Jeremy Uecker, graduate student and lead author of the study, noted. "Religious students are encountering a much less hostile environment than in years past."

It appears as if this study supports the idea of religious tribalization indicated in the study cited by Douthat and Waldman. Further, if a majority of the next generation of college-educated kids is more religious than their peers and if it can be assumed they will comprise the future "leadership class" in the U.S. Does that mean that their secular, college-educated peers will indeed be pushed toward tribalization? Well, I guess we'll see.

Civility in the Commons

While writing about the acute issue of the conservative side of the debate concerning immigration reform, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

The beauty of a democratic system is that it depends on democratic arguments. Even if every partisan is a villain, he has to make his case in a way that will convince people. And it's those arguments we're supposed to be dealing with. It's very easy for me to say that while my opponent may say X that he secretly believes Y because he is a member of a supersecret Satanic cabal or because his fern is speaking to him through his dental fillings. But unless I have proof, debate should be confined to X.

Dale Light adds:

He's right. We should be debating ideas, not attacking people or indulging sick conspiracy fantasies, but increasingly we don't, and it is important that rather than simply denouncing this disturbing tendency, we begin to ask why.

Historically speaking such things are characteristic of people and groups who are, or perceive themselves to be, powerless. It is telling that in these times so many people, of all political stripes, should feel that the powers that be are not only out of touch with, but actively hostile to, the best interests of the American people. In part this would seem to reflect the increasingly undemocratic nature of modern political institutions. In part it derives from the common, and to my mind accurate, perception that the major institutions that emerged in the Twentieth Century to organize our society are increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional and that they function to serve the interests of a narrow segment of our society.

These are things I have been thinking about a lot in recent years and to which I intend to return time and again in this forum. For now it is enough to point out, as Jonah Goldberg has, that a mode of discourse that formerly was a marginal element in our political culture has now become so widespread that it is manifested throughout the political spectrum, and that is something to worry about.

I can't help thinking that the "one bad apple..." canard also applies. The average Jill or Joe sees the "snipe and snark" and gets even more turned off. Then again, it may not be the "snipe and snark" so much as the language used: profanity-for-its-own-sake and the constant issuing of the same hyperbolic cliches (Bush=Hitler, Liberals are Commies, etc.). Responsible and respectable debate doesn't have to be boring, and it doesn't require ad hominem for spice. But I guess that, in a world where everyone is a pundit, the bar gets lowered. Rhetorical levelling, if you will.

Review: The Unknown Gulag

The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements by Lynne Viola
(Oxford University Press).

Lynn Viola is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She specializes in the social and political history of twentieth century Russia and is well-published in this area of study. In The Unknown Gulag, Viola details how Stalin and his cohort planned and executed a policy that resulted in the exile of over 2 million "capitalist peasants"—kulaks—into the first gulags.
Whether planned or not, the release of the book coincides with the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. and Viola does a fine job of portraying one group of those victims: the forgotten kulaks.

Stalin's primary motive for removing the kulaks from villages, she explains, was based on his and the Communist Party's political and ideological goals. Primarily, the Communists believed that the peasants stood in the way of their ideal of agricultural collectivization.

Their desire for collectivization was largely an outgrowth of the failure of past Communist economic policies. In 1927/28, the Party had implemented price controls that artificially held down the price of foodstuffs consumed by industrial workers while at the same time they expected the rural farmers to pay a premium for the goods coming out of the factories. This disregard for the natural self-interest of individual farmers led to unintended consequences. Instead of selling their goods at below market value, the farmers held their goods back or sold them on the private markets. In 1928/29, the Communists responded by implementing various laws and taxes to harass and punish the peasants and to force them to sell their goods to the government--at the government price.

The Communist Party came to believe that the "capitalist peasantry" needed to be removed for the sake of more efficient collectivization. Gradually—often based on whim or prejudice—anyone who was perceived as an obstacle to collectivization was declared a kulak. By 1929/30, collectivization efforts were in full swing and with it de-kulakization. Peasant farmers who didn't move into collective farms had their goods confiscated by "grain requisitioning brigades" composed of "urban communists and industrial workers" whose antipathy towards rural peasants was exploited by Stalin.

The Communist Party perceived issues of socioeconomic stratification through political and ideological lenses. That meant, in practice, that the (broadly defined) political behavior and actions of a peasant were often equally, if not more, important in determining social status than economic position in the village. During the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, almost anyone could be labeled a kulak—the village critic, the outspoken Red army veteran, peasants with large families (and therefore greater land resources), and a host of other village authorities, including priests, church council members, tradesmen, craftsman, byvshye liudi (village notables from the prerevolutionary regime), and even seasonal workers as well as the occasional prosperous peasant. As the state entered into what would be a protracted war with the peasantry, the kulak came to serve as a political metaphor and pejorative for the entire peasantry.

De-kulakization helped Stalin destabilize the traditional village social and political structure by removing leaders and intimidating any peasants left behind. Thus, the Communist party engaged in a "virtual war" that resulted in the destruction of the traditional peasant society that they neither understood nor trusted. In its place, the Communists erected agricultural collectives that would supply the food for the idealized industrial workers who were the true heart of the perpetual Communist revolution.

But what to do with all of the kulaks? G.G. Iagoda's OGPU (secret police) was charged with implementing the policies of that came to be known as de-kulakization. But little thought had been given to how to facilitate the removal of millions of kulaks. Or where to put them.

As a result, Iagoda made it up has he went along. Seeing the increasing disarray in the countryside, Iagoda developed a plan to relocate the kulaks to the Northern Territories, Siberia and elsewhere. Meanwhile, peasant riots broke out and local and regional mismanagement of the policy led to "excesses." Additionally, tensions arose between those territories who sought rid themselves of the kulak problem and those regions that were charged with taking them in. As so often happened, the "perfect" Communist plan somehow failed to materialize in reality.

Despite these problems, the relocation went forward. But a concrete plan was still lacking and kulaks languished in temporary settlements. Eventually, they were moved to remote areas where they began the slow, arduous and uncoordinated process of building permanent special settlements, usually located near prospective labor camps. These families worked together--though they were often separated, too--to scratch out an existence in the remote regions of the Soviet Union.

Such is the lead-in to the heart of Viola's work: the personal stories of those who survived life in these unknown gulags. Viola's work is both a solid institutional and an engaging social history. She accents her intricate sketch of the Soviet bureaucracy with the vivid and often heartbreaking accounts of those who survived the kulak gulags.

In the final analysis, Viola believes that Stalin's de-kulakization policy has been overlooked as a key component of his consolidation of power and that "the peasantry paid the highest price for the Soviet experiment..."

The Soviet superpower was built upon the poverty of the village, artificially fueled by an economy and a society that could not in the end sustain its growth and power. Long before 1991, to those who could see, it was evident that the Soviet Union was a Leviathan in bast shoes. Soviet modernity always remained moored to its agrarian legacy.

Soviet Communism relied on exploiting the common people it claimed it was trying to help. Eventually, the Iron Curtain was drawn and the world saw the fallacy upon which the Soviet utopia had been built. Unfortunately, it was too late to help a lost generation of small farmers.

ADDENDUM: Viola explained her research and previewed her work over at the Oxford University Press blog:

• Part I: Looking for the Kulaks
• Part II: The Central Archives
• Part III: The Provincial Archives
• Part IV: Why did the Soviets Document their Crimes?
• Part V: Another Source: The Survivors’ Testimony

Keeping the Gates at the Medieval Castle

Over at ADM's place, there is a fine discussion concerning academic gatekeeping. I tentatively entered the fray by quibbling with what I inferred to be condescension towards those of us who may not regularly translate texts for ourselves. Yikes! I got smacked around and explained my perspective after the fact (with some help). Ah well. The perils of attempting to scale the ivory tower with only a step ladder...

Ideology and Anglo-Culture

The Kirk Center's most recent University Bookman contains William Anthony Hay's review of J.G.A. Pocock's The Discovery of Islands. Begins Hay:

Each generation revises history to fit its own needs and preoccupations because, while the past itself remains constant, the prism through with it is seen changes. Besides helping people understand their own time, history shapes identity and provides a sense of place. These factors together explain how historiography—the principles, perspectives, and methods behind the writing of history—responds to questions driven by contemporary preoccupations.

Spot on. Take British History, for example:

The Whig interpretation in Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s nineteenth century History of England and Henrietta Marshall’s children’s book Our Island’s Story describes British history as the progressive movement toward increasing liberty and prosperity. As academic history emerged in Britain under the guidance of scholars like Macaulay’s nephew George Otto Trevelyan, it largely assimilated Whig assumptions to shape public culture into the 1920s. Declining power and a crisis of confidence posed new questions that led British historians to examine the past in different ways. Marxism and social science methodology turned historiography from constitutional history and focused instead on class conflict and social change. Postmodernism reflected the growing hold of expressive individualism from the 1960s with a consequent interest in identity that posed questions about sexuality and ethnic differences. Failure of the post-1945 social democratic consensus during the 1970s followed by Thatcherism further shifted the terms behind historical inquiry.

So, what about Pocock?

Decolonization, renewed interest in histories of component nations within the United Kingdom, and reorientation toward Europe as part of Britain’s membership in the European Union have also influenced historiography, and J. G. A. Pocock’s essays in The Discovery of Islands offer a profound reconceptualization of British history....Pocock argues for a British history that examines relationships within the Atlantic archipelago and its overseas progeny.

This rings familiar--the interpretive frameworks of the Anglosphere and Bernard Bailyn's Atlantic History came to mind. The seeming symbiosis of the latter with Pocock isn't too surprising, given both Bailyn and Pocock found themselves largely on the same side (forgive the implied oversimplification) of the "republican synthesis" debates of the '70's and '80's. This leads to the context that Hay provides concerning Pocock's point of view:

Far from nostalgic pining for a world he admits has been lost, Pocock’s emphasis on the British diaspora follows from his efforts to understand the terms in which people see themselves or what he would call “the nuts and bolts of the mind.” A noted historian of ideas, he pioneered a new approach to intellectual history that viewed texts in the context of their time so as to understand the language contemporaries used to communicate ideas. Instead of great books providing a debate amongst themselves across the ages, key texts could offer insight on how men at a specific point of time saw their world. Pocock’s approach to British history as the story of nations interacting with and occasionally seceding from an imperial state plays this theme from his other work in a different key.

Both Bailyn and Pocock dealt with how ideologies were formed and used to justify the actions of individuals and groups. Bailyn has gone deeper into how Anglo culture and society has been maintained and modified around the Atlantic basin. Pocock has turned his head to Europe.

“Europeanizing” British history involves downplaying the centrality of the state and refocusing relationships toward continental Europe rather than within the British isles or overseas. Deconstructing identities often involves a smug provincialism among elites who cannot see beyond their own times. Pocock warned that demolishing Whig history—even though it brought a deeper understanding of past and present—amounted to a program for “asking the present to live without a past that justifies it.” Much the same could be said of postmodernist enthusiasm for Europe without the compensating benefit of illuminating the past. Indeed, where revisionism opened doors, the politics behind the new historiography of Europe seems eager to close them. Pocock contends that a history of either Britain or Europe must consider how it is a creation of nation-states even before attempting to transcend that framework.

Too often this mistake is made: the present circumstance is taken as a priori. Little thought is given to the political, social or cultural structures or mores that were in place that allowed [insert currently en vogue enlightened state here] to flourish. Pocock is warning that we need to be careful. Finally:

Pocock’s concluding chapters highlight the symbiotic relationship between historiography and politics. History serves a central purpose in public culture, and, consequently, the question of how it is to be written never quite finds a resolution. Each generation rewrites its history to understand its present. Pocock gives a judicious and well-written overview of the process, and his essays leave a sense that the past may not be such a foreign realm as is sometimes thought.

Providence Journal Wins EPPY

And the awards keep coming....

The Providence Journal has won an EPPY in the category of "Best Special Feature in a Web Site - Enterprise, fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors" for it's series "Unrighteous Traffick: Rhode Island's slave history." If you haven't checked it out, do so. It's really well done and shiny and all that.

"Sons of Providence" Wins Washington Book Prize

Charles Rappleye's Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution , which I've discussed before, has won the George Washington Book Prize, given to the best book written about the era of the Founding Fathers. In addition to the "prestige," Rappley receives $50,000. That's pretty sweet. The other finalists were A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation by Catherine Allgor and In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery and the Making of a Nation by François Furstenberg.

National Maritime Day

As a former merchant mariner (KP, '91), I'd be remiss if I didn't take note that today is National Maritime Day. Here's the President's 2007 National Maritime Day proclamation and a link to USMM.org, a great spot to read up on the contributions made by the U.S. Merchant Marine during war time. Fair winds and calm seas...

Hamburger's "Separation of Church and State"

The latest University Bookman contains a review of Philip Hamburger's Separation of Church and State", which delves into this "stubborn ideology". Hamburger recounts the evolution of the "wall" argument, hitting all of the appropriate touchstones. But then there's this:

In fact, it was not until the 1840s that the idea of separation of church and state really began to gain wide acceptance, as native born Protestants, alarmed by increasing numbers of Catholic immigrants, and viewing the Catholic Church as an obscurantist, authoritarian institution that, ruled by a foreign prince, exercised a kind of mind control over its members, embraced separation of church and state as a way of limiting the grave threat they believed Catholicism posed to American freedom....Nativist Protestants used the idea of separation of church and state to restrict the influence of Catholic clergy in politics and to eliminate public support for Catholic education.

Particularly notable in this regard was the school question, where nativist legislatures, seeking to make the public or common school an agent of both Americanization and Protestant evangelization—the two were closely linked in their minds—promoted common schools in which a non-denominational Protestantism was taught, the (Protestant) King James version of the bible was regularly read, and textbooks filled with anti-Catholic propaganda were used, even as they refused public support for “sectarian” Catholic schools because such support would allegedly violate the separation of church and state. Nativists could hold these contradictory positions because...they did not think of themselves as part of a structured, hierarchical church; accordingly, as they saw matters, supporting a non-denominationally Protestant public school system while denying funds to Catholic schools on separationist grounds made sense because what they sought was the separation of church from state, not of (the Protestant) religion from government.

...recognizing that the Constitution did not actually mandate separation, nativists began in the 1870s to propose constitutional amendments intended to make separation the law of the land and to preclude any possibility of public funding for “sectarian,” that is, Catholic schools, while leaving the non-denominational Protestant public school system fully intact... Yet, ironically, while nativists recognized that the First Amendment did not in fact separate church and state, they do not seem to have recognized that the logic of separation, strictly applied, would require the secularization of the public schools...

Ah yes, unintended consequences...

Pawtucket "Officially" Historic

Now downtown Pawtucket, Rhode Island is more than just of old buildings. It's officially a bunch of old, "historical" buildings.

Downtown Pawtucket has been named to the National Register of Historic Places, the R.I. Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission announced today.

“The architectural and civic character of Downtown Pawtucket is preserved in this collection of solid historic buildings,” Edward F. Sanderson, the commission’s executive director, said in a statement. “Downtown’s historic core is important to Pawtucket’s heritage, and these structures are a resource for attracting new investment and revitalization.”

The district comprises 50 buildings on about 14 acres of land in the city’s central business district, two blocks to the west of the Blackstone River. “With its collection of architecturally significant banks, shops, offices and civic buildings, the Downtown Pawtucket Historic District represents the city’s growth as a prosperous industrial city between the Civil War and World War I,” the Preservation & Heritage Commission said in its announcement.

...the Blackstone’s 30-foot drop at Pawtucket Falls had made the region a magnet for early industrial efforts including Slater Mill, and the booming manufacturing economy attracted housing, institutional and civic buildings and commercial development.

The 1870s through 1890s, the state Preservation & Heritage Commission said, saw the replacement of horse-drawn streetcars with a street railway system, the advent of public utilities and the beginnings of a new central business district where small wood-frame shops and houses gave way to masonry structures up to five stories tall.

“The Downtown Pawtucket Historic District encompasses examples of all of these building types,” the commission said.

“North of Exchange Street stand three wood-frame residences that predate Pawtucket’s urban boom: two Italianate-style cottages on Grant Street and a Second Empire-style house on Montgomery Street.

“Fine examples of commercial buildings include the Late Victorian-style Beswick Building (1891) and the massive Summer Street Stables (1892) with its terracotta plaque containing the biblical verse, ‘How Do The Beasts Groan.’

“Municipal and institutional buildings like the Deborah Cook Sayles Memorial Library (1899-1902, designed by the Boston firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson) and the Colonial Revival-style Pawtucket Boys Club (1902) embody the wealth and civic ambitions of this maturing city.”

Hazards of Late Antique/Germanic History--Don't just guess!

From Martin at Aardvarchaeology (this is all him, so don't be confused by formatting):

The concept of an Old Norse religion (as it has been used by e.g. Karl Hauck and Lotte Hedeager) is useless. Such a non-codified, orally performed and transmitted body of mythology and liturgy cannot be coherent across time nor space. So all statements about Old Norse religion must be qualified with two questions: Where? When? And when things don't add up, this is only to be expected.

Think about it. Even heavily codified religions, such as Judaism or Christianity, aren't coherent.

This skepticism of monolithic coherent entities in societies of the past and present is actually a post-modernist viewpoint, and to my mind a valuable one. Unlike real po-mos, however, I don't draw the conclusion that anything goes in interpretation. Quite the contrary, I find it a strong argument to drop all discussion of anything not strongly anchored in source material. Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber darf man ganz bestimmt schweigen, po-mo Dummköpfe.

This reminds me of something I wrote the other day in a letter to a charming Aard regular:

"The problem is often called 'essentialism', as I think you may have seen in my review of Herschend's The Idea of the Good. The argument presupposes that there's this huge block north of the Imperial border called Germanic Society, that this block has the same essence from the border to the North Cape, and that when the block changes, all of it changes at the same time, in the same way. All this is in my opinion a) pure speculation, b) very, very unlikely."

Review: English History Made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable

English History made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable by Lacey Baldwin Smith (Academy Chicago Publishers).

Smith is Professor Emeritus of History at Northwestern University and has written a number of books centering around the history of Great Britain. English History not being my bailiwick, I'd never read anything by him before. After reading his recent work, however, that will change.

Smith opens his book by noting that “history is not what happened in the past, but what today is worth remembering about the past.” Setting aside the historiographical discussion that such a comment can engender, he has written a fine work of history. Smith hits the high--and low--points of English History (note, it's "English" and not "British"-- Smith explains the difference) in a conversational and engaging way. It's as if you're your history professor's office hours were held at a kegger. In short, Smith injects a little humor and verve into his narrative, which is complemented by some very funny illustrations from Punch.

As a medievalist--and if historians are considered "dry," medievalists are downright parched--I found his take on the early medieval period in English history refreshing and funny. For instance, while describing how the Angles and Saxons came and conquered Celto-Roman Britain:

The invaders proceeded over the years to divide Britain among themselves. The Saxons in the area of London broke up into the east, south and west Saxons--Essex, Sussex and Wessex. The urge to box the compass generated the splendid, but also apocryphal, story of a north Saxon kingdom called Nosex which naturally died out very rapidly, but doubtless inspired one of Britain's longest running plays: No Sex Please, We're British.

Keeping with a theme, Smith also explains the English resurgence after the Plague by explaining that "somewhere around 1485, the English started having more and better sex...rising from two to four million by 1600." He also takes the opportunity to weave in a zinger or two when he can. For instance, this observation about Elizabethan society:

The family, over which the father was supreme, was seen as the Kingdom writ small. In learning obedience to and respect for their parents, Tudor children learned deference to authority on every level of society. Thus the inferior bowed to all forms of superiority, the freshman stepping aside for the senior, the bachelor of arts for the master of arts, the master of arts for the doctor of divinity or civil law, and all six for the professor, a way of life that high-ranking academics today regret has disappeared.

Indeed! But Smith's work isn't all wit and snark. He gives very concise and readable accounts of historical events and explains how one affected the other (eg; the reign of James I and the Glorious Revolution or the evolution of Parliament). Though there are chronological demarcations in the narrative, a narrative it is, not a patched together pop-encyclopedia of sequential--though disconnected--events. Smith does a fine job of moving the story of English history along in a coherent and entertaining way.

Smith concludes the book with an extended treatment of the British royalty--"The Royal Soap Opera." He covers the breadth of the more personal shenanigans of English royalty, plumbing the depths and climbing the peaks, and shows that royal peccadilloes are a constant. Commenting on the leveling of the contemporary Royal Family, he offers that "what is eating at the soul of Kingship is not moral outrage, but boredom." Like the rest of the entertainment industry, if the progeny of Elizabeth II don't give the press enough scandalous fodder, what is left?

Overall, I found that Smith's English History lived up to the rest of it's title, especially the Pleasurable part. Go out and get it--you'll learn something between chuckles.

Southern Conservative History: It's not all Black and White?

The points made by Donald T. Critchlow in "What’s Wrong with the New Conservative History?" were:

First, I do not believe enough attention has been given to framing the history of conservatism more broadly within the context of modern liberalism. Second, we need to stop seeing the rightward shift in the electorate in the late twentieth century as simply a racial backlash. Both points suggest that many historians working in this field simply are not getting the full story.

Well, maybe they are:

...new wave of historians, many of them young, believe that one cannot understand today’s housing, schooling, economic development or political patterns without understanding the mostly apolitical white Southerners of that era. None of these scholars play down the inbred racism of the region, but they argue that the focus on race can obscure broader economic and demographic changes, like the dizzying corporate growth, the migration of white Northerners to the South and the shifting emphasis on class interests after legal segregation ended.

Critchlow and the "new wave of historians" point to the suburbanization of southern whites as a key factor in understanding the spread of Republican conservatism in the south.

Matthew D. Lassiter was motivated to research his own Southern roots. He found a gap between the history he had learned in school and his experience growing up in its wake in Sandy Springs, a white, middle-class suburb of Atlanta. “I was trying to find my own people, my parents and grandparents,” said Mr. Lassiter, 36, who wrote “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South” (Princeton) published last year. “There were a few white Southerners who were liberals, a larger number throwing the rocks with the rioters and the vast group in the middle were left out of the story.”

As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he taught undergraduates and assigned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.”

Mr. Lassiter, who now teaches history at the University of Michigan, said: “Who are these moderates? They don’t seem to be participating, yet they’re completely complicit in the system of Jim Crow.”

Mr. Lassiter’s book looks at how the federal government subsidized white flight to the suburbs, where middle-class whites could embrace colorblind values but still maintain all-white enclaves and schools. “When you look at suburbs and middle class, then you start getting a national story,” he said. “White suburbs outside Charlotte are reacting the same as white suburbs outside Los Angeles or in New Jersey.”

Kevin M. Kruse, who grew up in Nashville and now teaches at Princeton University, focuses more on rank-and-file segregationists than moderates. In his 2005 book, “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism” (Princeton), he argues that in moving to the suburbs, “white Southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery, and instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism.”

Hitchens on Jefferson and the Pirates

Christopher Hitchens has written a good piece on Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates. I've spent some time on the Barbary Pirates myself and there are a few things in the Hitchen's piece with which I'd quibble, but not right now. Here's the important point:

Perhaps above all, though, the Barbary Wars gave Americans an inkling of the fact that they were, and always would be, bound up with global affairs. Providence might have seemed to grant them a haven guarded by two oceans, but if they wanted to be anything more than the Chile of North America—a long littoral ribbon caught between the mountains and the sea—they would have to prepare for a maritime struggle as well as a campaign to redeem the unexplored landmass to their west. The U.S. Navy’s Mediterranean squadron has, in one form or another, been on patrol ever since.

And then, finally, there is principle. It would be simplistic to say that something innate in America made it incompatible with slavery and tyranny. But would it be too much to claim that many Americans saw a radical incompatibility between the Barbary system and their own? And is it not pleasant when the interests of free trade and human emancipation can coincide?

Quick Spot the Russian Submarine!

Can you find the Russian Submarine in this picture?


Yup....it's under water! But it wasn't until the recent storm that hit Providence, RI this past week. Here's what the Juliett 484 looks like:


Here's the story:

“The Russian Sunken Sub Museum” is how engineer Damon Ise answered the phone this morning.

Yes, sometime in the evening, the listing submarine laid over on its side and sank, Ise said.

All that’s visible is the submarine’s periscope, sticking up out of the water at an angle, a radio antenna and one of the sub’s orange life buoys, Ise said.

“One of those [buoys] is bouncing and dancing on the surface, and then there’s just a trail of bubbles coming from the front,” he said. “It’s very sad.”

No fuel is leaking from the vessel, Ise said, and crews are working already on a salvage plan with a professional from New York.

Exactly what shape that salvage plan would take is, well, murky at this point, museum officials said today.

The vessel, berthed at Collier Point Park, had been battered by the storm that hit the region early this week. It had been restored as a floating museum after being bought in 2002.

By midday, TV crews and other members of the press joined several Coast Guard officers and staff of the submarine museum at the small, windswept park overlooking Providence Harbor.

Lines ran along the dock, down to the sub, holding it in place on the bottom. The antenna, and a small, pipelike-protusion stuck up from the relatively calm surface of the water.

Off in the distance, only one other vessel could be scene, a tanker.

Nearby, a sign for Cardi's Furniture -- featuring the three Cardi brothers in sailor suits – urged visitors to follow safety tips, some of which were painfully obvious today:

"Be sure to use caution when in the sub" and "Appropriate footwear required; decks may be slippery."

At least they're keeping a sense of humor about it all!

Holy Historiographical Changes, Batman!

Very interesting:

...a new approach [of examining the origin and relationship of the three synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Luke and Mark]... has been proposed by Richard Bauckham, a scholar who already has an impressive record of research into Christian origins. In a previous book – Gospel Women (2002) – he was able to show, by a close study of personal names both in our texts and in the records of Palestinian culture, that a particular group of individuals in the New Testament, and their relationships with one another, have a striking internal consistency with regard to names and provenance and also reflect accurately the naming and family connections that were customary in their culture. In the face of such evidence, it is hard to believe either that these names could have been fabricated or that there was any serious loss of accuracy in remembering and recording them by the time the Gospels came to be written. In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Bauckham continues his investigation into named individuals, and shows that the same conclusion holds for all. We have every reason, therefore, to assume a faithful and unbroken link between the original witnesses of Jesus’ life and death and the record of these things in the Gospels.

Following this clue, Bauckham then suggests we should take seriously the testimony of two second-century churchmen, Papias and Irenaeus – the first of whom has usually been dismissed by scholars as unreliable. Carefully examining the relevant texts – including the famous statement of Papias that Mark’s Gospel is derived from anecdotes heard from St Peter – Bauckham concludes that these writers gave absolute priority to eyewitness accounts of Jesus, many of which are likely to have been given by his closest followers; indeed, he argues that the fact that some minor characters in the Gospels are named, while others remain anonymous, strongly suggests that it was the named ones who were consulted for their personal recollections and that the Gospel writers, or those whom they consulted, were drawing on first-hand evidence that was inherently reliable and consistent, though with the inevitable variations and slight lapses which attend the exercise of memory in any age or culture – hence both the close similarities and the sporadic divergences exhibited by the Synoptic Gospels.

{via A&L Daily}

Do non-European Cultures have a "Medieval" Period?

I have a daily Google alert for the word "medieval". Today it included a link to a Princeton University Symposium on Medieval Japanese art. That got me thinking: is it really correct to associate the word medieval--which describes the time between classical European history and the Renaissance (roughly)--to a concurrent time period in a non-European culture or society's history? I suppose it's more correct than alluding to the same period in Japanese history as the "Middle Ages", but then again, the term "medieval" is essentially a synonym for "middle ages." So how has it come to pass that we refer to a Japanese Medieval period which may or not have truly been "in the middle" of anything? Is it a relic of Eurocentricity?