You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February, 2008.
Perhaps this is all over the tubes. But it’s the first I’ve seen of it. And I think it’s much more interesting than the one below. Not least because of the subtitles (Vietnamese and English — you’re welcome). Also because it’s a remarkably hard-hitting piece of advocacy art. Obviously, this one is for the Texas market.
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As presented by EotAW, it may seem that the colonial period in North America was nothing but a string of massacres. Well, that’s not true. There were also plagues, whippings, and outright warfare. But then, after the Revolution, everything got better.
Regardless, on this day in 1704, French troops and their Native allies sacked the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, among the most harrowing episodes of Queen Anne’s War. The attackers killed close to 50 villagers and forced those who survived, more than 100 others, to make a forced march to Quebec. Many of the captives were later ransomed or returned to Massachusetts. But several of them, most famously Eunice Williams, chose to live out there lives in Indian country. Williams’s father, Deerfield’s minister, John Williams, published a memoir of the ordeal, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion.
There have been other books about the Deerfield raid and its aftermath. John Demos’s controversial and weird experiment with narrative, The Unredeemed Captive, of course. Also, Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney’s Captors and Captives. And I’m pretty sure that Historiann is working on something as well. But since we’re in front of our computers, I thought I’d draw your attention to this site, which is the best effort I know of to bring a subject so fraught with cultural politics as this one to the interweb. Rather than trying to create a unified narrative of the event and its context, the historians who worked on the site used multiple perspectives to tell the story. The result is pretty impressive, I think. But I’m not sure. Because my judgement is clouded by what I know: the literature on public history and collective memory. So take a look and let me know what you think.
[Update: Historiann comes through with a very interesting reply to this post.]
A few thoughts:
1) The chanting is scary. Really, it scares me. I’m unsettled by it.
2) If Obama’s elected, this video’s existence will cause me to lobby agressively for a special tax bracket for celebrities: 93% of income. That would be a popular measure, I’m pretty sure. And it would guarantee a second term.
3) Once again — just as in the first video — the candidate is much more interesting than the stars are. But this time, Obama doesn’t speak until about the 2:30 mark. That was a bad choice by the producers. At least I think so.
4) This is for Texas? I’m assuming that must be the case.
5) The Dipdive folks should have quit while they were ahead.
[Editor's Note: If you want a better version -- you're a masochist? -- go here.]
The novelist Nicholson Baker writes affectingly about loss here—about, that is to say, lost knowledge; the elimination of entries from Wikipedia.
As I am most fond of Nicholson Baker for his article on fingernail clippers I suppose it should come as no surprise that he loves Wikipedia; as I am secondarily most fond of Nicholson Baker for his article on the evils—evils! I do not use the word lightly—of libraries’ deaccessioning and destroying newspapers (which gave rise to this collection), I suppose it should come as no surprise that he hates the wanton deletion of articles from Wikipedia. After all, newspapers take up a lot of space—you can at least make a case for getting rid of them; Wikipedia articles not so much. Still, people are busily determining what you should not know:
There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples’ work—even to the point of laughing at nonstandard “Engrish.” They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.
In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists—some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the “web-comic articles purge of 2006.” A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: “I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others’ sand castles.” Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: “‘Notability purges’ are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors.” Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: “Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you’ve destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face.”
I once attended a fine after-dinner talk called something like “On the Burning, Sinking, Rending, and Eating of Books,” about all the things we, as a civilization, used to know and now can no longer know. Strange things are done to the historical record in the name of orderliness and conservation of space.
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On this day in 1939, as the world fell apart overseas, an alert editor at the G. & C. Merriam Company in Springfield, Massachusetts noticed an oddity in the company’s flagship dictionary, the New International: a word, on page 771, without an etymology. The culprit, dord, carried a one-word definition: density.
On this day in 1922, the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Leser v. Garnett, ruled that the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enfranchising women, is constitutional. How could it be otherwise?
Well, maybe if you’re an adamantine states’ righter (and, yes, male chauvinist pig) and you don’t think the federal constitution can overrule a state constitution: “The only ground of disqualification alleged was that the applicants for registration were women, whereas the Constitution of Maryland limits the suffrage to men.” In such cases, you might argue that the state legislature cannot vote the ratification of a federal amendment that defies the state constitution, which gives life to the state legislature.
Not so fast, said the Supremes. The state legislature is the state legislature except when the federal Constitution wants it on the phone: “the function of a state Legislature in ratifying a proposed amendment to the federal Constitution, like the function of Congress in proposing the amendment, is a federal function derived from the federal Constitution; and it transcends any limitations sought to be imposed by the people of a state.”
This seems like as good a time as any to show you the below. Enjoy the 70’s ethos, and wonder, is it as inaccurate and in its way as appalling as the “Manifest Destineeee” one? (Hint: consider the line, “not a woman here could vote….”)
Answer below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tim Russert spent a portion of tonight’s debate bringing to life the hateful spam I occasionally get that might as well be titled, “Muslim Obama Will Kill Jews.” And while I agree with all of the prominent (and, as it happens, Jewish) bloggers (here, here, here, and elsewhere for all I know) who are saying that Russert really plumbed the depths with this line of so-called inquiry, the bigger shame was that there were actual issues of interest to American Jews left undiscussed with Obama tonight.
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The picture I would like to show you of George Fredrickson is a picture I don’t have but remember well, a picture I hope some suitably-situated obituarist will retrieve from the original dust-jacket of The Inner Civil War, a picture of a square-jawed George in 1965 with the Kennedy haircut and a straight-stem pipe, looking as if he had just stepped out of the ExComm. That was the George who wanted to punch his weight with the greats, the George who could write
I am convinced that the few who have a genuine interest in ideas and a powerful urge to find meaning and coherence in their experience are able to tell us more about a crisis of values, with its inevitable confusion and ambivalence, than the many who avoid difficult issues and are content to speak in outdated clichés.
His intellectual journey took him far from that statement, which he later said left him feeling “slightly embarrassed,” because he had chosen his “few” without reflecting on their position in an “elitist canon.” He did not make that mistake again. He transformed himself into the major historian of American racial thought with The Black Image in the White Mind. In 1980 he examined the field of comparative history and concluded that it “does not really exist yet.” In 1981 he remedied this defect with his incomparable White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, which he followed in 1995 with Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa.
George was my Doktorvater, as they say; I believe he was the one who taught me the word. In college I took Joel Silbey’s class on the Civil War and Reconstruction, which fit me to read The Inner Civil War and The Arrogance of Race, and with the arrogance of youth I wrote a personal statement saying I wanted to write books like those, and I wished George would please teach me. In the spring of 1991 there was a message on my answering machine from George Fredrickson saying he would do that very thing. It remains one of the greatest honors of my career.
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On this day in 1919, Congress created Grand Canyon National Park. I’m going to save the early history of the Park Service for another day, when it makes a bit more sense and I don’t have this horrible flu.
I know, I know Yglesias to-be-sure’s here, where he says, “TR is a complicated, multi-faceted figure” but he goes on to accept John McCain’s appropriation of TR as a crazy imperialist devoted to unilateral uses of American power. TR wanted to see the Hague Court “greatly increased in power and permanence.” It’s, to say the least, missing the point to call Roosevelt a warmonger.
Which is all a bunch of academic harrumphing about “nuance” and “journalism!” (and pot-kettling, to be sure) and I wouldn’t have said anything—except that just this morning, the kid was also saying “There was, I would note, a similar assassination fad around the turn of the previous century associated with anarchism, but eventually extending out of any particular ideological niche. That’s how William McKinley got killed….” Harrumph. Nuance. Journalism! Bah.
Look, all I’m really saying is, don’t let McCain have Roosevelt. McCain had his chance to be Roosevelt: he did Roosevelt-the-loyalist in 2000, and he could have done Roosevelt-the-bolter in 2004, when he might have created a coalition of the national-security sane. He let it go. Allowing McCain v.2008 to claim Roosevelt is almost as bad as this (upon which those with sensitive dispositions shouldn’t click).
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On this day in 1862, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act, authorizing the Treasury to print $150 million in paper currency — so-called greenbacks. Opponents of the bill, largely Democrats, claimed the law was unconstitutional (”to coin money,” they argued, literally meant making only coins), ungodly (the Almighty had created gold and silver; turning away from those precious metals thus spurned the divine), and impractical (inflation would, in short order, render paper money worthless, throwing the Union economy into an inflationary spiral like that plaguing the Confederacy).
From earlier this month, a picture of Patience with her gift-wrapped library. Do not open until 2011. Which will take, er, patience. Probably also fortitude, but she didn’t show up for the shoot; bad hair day. (Yes, I know you think they’re both male lions. But see here, dear reader. You can’t judge a lion by its hairdo. The world is full of stranger things than are dreamt of in your philosophy.)
Okay, the Clintons are being banished from the Kelman family Hanukkah card list. Race-baiting backfired, accusations of plagiarism came off as a bit silly (since, y’know, Hillary is far guiltier of that “crime” than Obama), so now it’s time to fall back on the War on Terror. The black man can’t be trusted to keep you safe! Because he’s angry! And black! And radical! From Justin Rood’s piece for abc on the Clinton camp’s allegations that Obama is part of the Weather Underground:
The Hillary Clinton campaign pushed to reporters today stories about Barack Obama and his ties to former members of a radical domestic terrorist group…
“Wonder what the Republicans will do with this issue,” mused Clinton spokesman Phil Singer in one e-mail to the media, containing a New York Sun article reporting a $200 contribution from William Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground, to Obama in 2001. (Obama’s ties to the radical group first surfaced last week in a Bloomberg News article.)
In a separate e-mail, Singer forwarded an article from Politico.com reporting on a 1995 event at a private home that brought Obama together with Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, another former member of the radical group.
But here’s the thing: Rood is a… Wait, what is he? What do you call ‘em? They’re so rare these days, I’ve almost forgotten the name. Oh yeah, he’s an “investigative reporter.” (A TPM alum, right?) And so, rather than allowing this nasty bit of flim-flam to hang in the air, Rood goes on (a bit frostily, it seems to me):
Opting to leave any attacks on the issue to the GOP may be wise, as attacks from Clinton could backfire. In his final day in office, President Clinton pardoned another one-time member of the Weather Underground, Susan L. Rosenberg, after she had served 16 years in prison on federal charges.
It seems that reports that Hillary would lose gracefully, putting party and country over personal ambition, were exaggerated. Or wishful thinking. So: I’m now comfortable saying that I hope she doesn’t win the nomination. And not just because she’ll have to employ dirty tricks in order to do so. But also because I don’t want to vote for her. Under any circumstances. To be clear: I will (Supreme Court) vote for her. But I don’t want to. And please spare me the Republicans-will-dredge-up-all-this-crap-in-the-general-election-so-isn’t-it-better-to-hear-about-it-now? argument. That’s right. They will play dirty. So let them. But no self-respecting Democrat should dignify this nonsense, offering it standing, by using it now. Seriously, the death throes (I hope) of a presidential campaign are really ugly.
[Editor's Note: I saw this story somewhere. But I can't figure out where. So I'll doff my cap later, when I figure it out. In the meantime, sorry I'm so spacey.]
[Update: Vance wins a prize for pointing out that I saw the story at Sadly, No! The whole post is really funny, by the way. And thanks, Vance.]
[Update II: Another prize! Andrew points out that the link I embedded above doesn't match the one that Vance offered in the comments below. Andrew is right! Ari is an idiot! So: here's the correct link. Also: this one isn't as funny.]
Ezra Klein tries to explain the press’s (particularly the boys in the corps) lust for John McCain. I’ll lift a bit of his post rather than paraphrasing his argument:
The qualities we most admire in others are those we don’t have, or fear we don’t have, in ourselves. The press isn’t impressed by smart, cerebral candidates because the press is full of smart, cerebral, people, who sort of believe they are smarter and more cerebral than the politicians they cover. There’s almost a resentment there, and it comes out in the reporting which often tries to show that the reporter is smarter because they can take down the candidate. They can win the debate, poke flaws in the argument, identify inconsistencies.
What very few (male) reporters feel comfortable with is their personal physical courage. Their ability to fare well in a bar fight, or make a credible threat to someone stalking their wife, or endure five years of torture in a Vietnamese prison camp. McCain has something that they don’t understand, and that they want. And it’s one reason they like him. Because not only does he possess those qualities, but he also appears to like them. And that validation from a tough guy is reassuring.
Ezra’s main point jibes with something my colleagues and I talk about often. John McCain’s appeal is rooted in history and gender archetypes: he’s the last American man. In a country in which masculinity is always in crisis — see Eric’s post on historical verities — someone like McCain has incredible appeal. He has a mean streak. He fought in a war. For goodness sakes, he survived torture. All of which makes it okay that he knows next to nothing about domestic policy, is a terribly corrupt hypocrite, and thinks that we don’t currently have nearly enough wars of choice. Because, you know, even in his seventies, he could kick your ass.
[Update: I've pasted in some of Ezra's words to flesh out the post a bit.]
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On this day in 1889, Grover Cleveland signed into law the omnibus admissions bill that brought the Dakotas, Montana, and Washington into the union as states—which might seem unremarkable enough on the face of it, but in fact poses one of the few Genuine Historical Mysteries I have lying around. This is a dissertation waiting to happen, people. Or at least an article. Or else one of you is going to email me to say that someone has already done it, and I will feel I have been ignorant (which is an unpleasant if familiar feeling, trust me, but I’d rather feel I have been ignorant than go on being ignorant).
Before I get into this, if you’re from the Dakotas, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona or Nevada and especially sensitive about how your state became a state, why don’t you accept my happy stativersary wishes and not click on the rest of the post? Mormons, Mormon-haters, racists, Democrats, and Republicans may also be offended. Also, proponents of plural marriage and opponents of polygamy. Probably, also, everyone else. This is a pretty obnoxious blog, isn’t it?
Those of you who venture below the fold have been warned.
As Friday shades into the weekend, please enjoy this stirring tribute to African-American Confederate soldiers. Remember, “black is nothing other than a darker shade of Rebel grey.” Once again, via Kevin at Civil War Memory.
Unless I’m missing something, this is a brilliant blog post. Or, at the very least, it’s Yglesias at his best: reducing an incredibly complex geopolitical issue to a still complex, but more manageable, series of policy options. In this case, he’s turned his gaze on the thorny question of independence for ethnic minority groups, beginning with Kosovo and then pivoting to Israel/Palestine. Oh, and he also bashes Marty Peretz. So: extra credit! Even though I’ve just made an anti-Semite of myself. Anyway, here’s the nut graf of the post (but you should read it in its entirety):
It’s clear, though, that granting Israeli citizenship on terms of equality to residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is incompatible with the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Palestinian independence emerges as a reasonable, practical, and moral alternative. Basically, there are four things you could do with Israel-Palestine. One option is partition and independence. Another option is equal citizenship and the end of Israel. A third option is “transfer” and ethnic cleansing. And a fourth option is apartheid. I wonder which of the alternatives to Palestinian independence Peretz favors?
Again, I really might be missing something here — I’m pretty stoned on cough medicine today — but I don’t think so. You have to choose from one of the above if you’re Israel. It’s not an easy choice, to be sure, but it’s the choice that’s before you.
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This is Hannah. Well, actually this was Hannah. But before getting to the sad stuff, I want to say what a great dog she was. She was. A great dog. She was so sweet it makes my heart ache to think about her. She allowed the kids to do just about anything to her that they wanted. The baby boy would point at her and say, “dug dug,” and then leap onto her flanks. She always wagged when this happened. I wouldn’t have. I’d have been quite peeved at having the little brute attack me, cackling as he tried to climb up my back to reach my velvet ears. But Hannah always loved all of us more than we had any right to expect. Or, if it wasn’t love, you could have fooled us. Because she was big on the full-body wags.
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Vicksburg, Mississippi, you may know, fell to the Union on July 4, 1863. The Battle of Gettysburg ended the previous day, meaning that, after a long, very hard spring, the North had two great victories back to back. Which was good news for President Lincoln, who, at the time, was dealing with a fatigued homefront that badly needed a morale boost.
Regardless, I’ve always heard that the people of Vicksburg (Vicksburgers? Let’s hope so.) didn’t begin celebrating Independence Day again until the middle of the twentieth century. But it turns out that’s a myth. Or so says Chris Waldrep, whose new book on Vicksburg and collective memory just arrived in my mailbox today. Better still, Waldrep has traced the myth back to its taproot: a bit of promotional flummery in which a National Park Service superintendent made up the story about the Fourth of July in order to generate more tourism at the Vicksburg National Military Park. After checking my lecture notes, I’m relieved to report that I haven’t been passing along the Independence Day myth to my students. But I’m also wondering what stopped me. Surely not good sense or keen intuition.
Thanks to Kevin at Civil War Memory for bringing this to my attention.
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On this day in 1925 The New Yorker first appeared, and every year the magazine’s editors mark the august anniversary by reiterating in appropriate fashion the picture of dandy Eustace Tilley, who graced the first cover. Though he became an institution, Tilley started as a joke, a man self-evidently out of tune with The New Yorker, with America, and indeed with 1925.
If the city’s new voice had a real face it was this one: the tough but humorous map belonging to Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s first editor. He came from Colorado and worked as a reporter and photographer in San Francisco and Atlanta. He spent time also in Panama and, maybe most important, edited the Army’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Which is by way of saying, he knew the West, the South, the new cities, the new army and the new colonies—the ingredients that, when added to an acquaintance with the capital of capital, New York City, would give you an excellent working understanding of modern America.
Fortune gave this account of his virtues:
There are two things that measure Ross’s genius. One was the fact that he never deluded himself on how little he knew—and he learns some things rapidly; the other was his sublime dissatisfaction with everything and everyone as he battered his way to what he was after but did not know how to ask for. He is not a large man, but he is a furious and a mad one. Men left The New Yorker for sanitariums, they had fits on the floor, they wept, they offered to punch his nose (he is terrified of physical violence). But he kept on hiring and firing blindly. By hit or miss he found the individuals who could articulate his ideas—and who could stand the pace of his temperament.
One of the men he might have driven crazy was his big backer, yeast magnate Raoul Fleischmann. But Fleischmann stuck out the flat first years and became a successful publisher by 1927. And the talent accreted with agreeable speed around Ross; within a couple years of starting he had Katharine Angell, James Thurber, and E. B. White. He liked lean, clear writing and disliked dirty jokes. Infamous cover aside, he created an institution that belonged not just to the metropolis but to the nation and indeed the world.
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On this day in 1872, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors. I grew up, for the most part, in Cleveland, Ohio. And my family used to make the seven-hour drive to New York City pretty regularly. Or at least often enough that I learned to love art at the Met. Huh, if that’s not the most pretentious sentence I’ve ever written, I’d like to avoid the one that takes top billing. Even if I turn my head sideways and squint while I read it, the one above makes me sound like an ass. But it’s true.
About two weeks ago, a news producer for one of the television stations in Sacramento called to ask me, “Will Barack Obama be our first black president?” I didn’t write about this at the time, because I was a bit freaked out and didn’t want to make sport of someone I don’t know. But the time has come to tell the story.
I dearly love the TLS. Here is part of a tribute to Rees Davies:
As a memorial to Rees Davies – perhaps the closest rival to Marc Bloch that Britain can claim to have produced, both in terms of scholarly method and of humanity – this book has the added advantage of a postscript from Davies himself, reminiscing about his early failure to obtain a place at Oxford, where the Master of his prospective college questioned him about his Welsh-speaking ancestors and the fairy tales and myths of his home area with all the condescension, Davies tells us, that an anthropologist might have displayed confronted with “a member of the Dinka or the Nuer”. One senses here that the wounds of the greatest historians go deep, and that from them flows much that is best and most humane in their writing. This is historical scholarship at its best.
Davies was indeed a deeply humane and decent man, who behaved very kindly to me when I was young and impetuous. Now I am old and impetuous, and he’s gone. Soon the burden of decency to the youth will fall to the likes of me.
But that paragraph is followed immediately by this one:
Nonetheless, even the most spectacular of fireworks displays have their occasional dud rocket, and in this instance there are essays that fail to become airborne. Solipsism is perhaps the greatest potential failing of the professional historian, and in this instance there are two essays (politeness forbids one to name them) which exhibit all the coherence of a madman in a telephone box, scoring rhetorical points off a listener who long ago had the sense to replace the handset.
On this day in 1847, rescuers found the Donner party, trapped high in the Sierras near Truckee Lake. Daniel Rhoads later remembered the scene:
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At sunset, we crossed Truckee Lake on the ice, and came to the spot where, we had been told, we should find the emigrants. We looked all around, but no living thing except ourselves was in sight. We raised a loud hello. And then we saw a woman emerge from a hole in the snow. As we approached her, several others made their appearance, in like manner coming out of the snow. They were gaunt with famine; and I never can forget the horrible, ghastly sight they presented. The first woman spoke in a hollow voice, very much agitated, and said, ‘Are you men from California? Or do you come from heaven?
Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, argues that the shift to contingent faculty isn’t just an economic development but also an attack on academic freedom. It’s an interesting point, and I feel silly that I haven’t considered this before now. At the same time, it’s absurd to me that Nelson allowed himself to be videotaped with his tie looking like that. Honestly, I’m not sure which outrages me more: the tie or the situation surrounding contingent faculty. For the moment, I’m going with the tie, which is both ugly and a huge mess.
Via howtheunversityworks.
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On this day in 1865, William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops, having already made Georgia howl, took the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Given that, and also because it’s President’s Day, it might make sense to consider how close the cult of Abraham Lincoln — of which I am a member in good standing — came to never having been founded. And also, how much our collective memory of Lincoln actually owes to the field tactics, good timing, and daring of William Sherman.
Okay, the NYT article on a “bizarre literary reading” of The Great Gatsby gives me an opportunity to air my own pet and possibly bizarre reading thereof. I’ve asked around and nobody seems to think it’s either been done or is entirely non-credible. I now throw myself on the mercy of the Internets, asking “Isn’t Tom Buchanan afraid that Daisy has black ancestry?”
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I think he is. People act funny at first when I say this because Mia Farrow played Daisy and Mia Farrow is blonde. And isn’t Daisy blonde? No, she’s not: when she gets caught in the rain, “A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek,” and when we read in flashback about Gatsby and Daisy, we hear that “he kissed her dark shining hair.”1
We know that Tom is surprisingly tangled up in the subject of racism—which is to say, it’s surprising that he’s been researching it: “the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.” What book? Tom:
Heather Cox Richardson, author of West from Appomattox, The Death of Reconstruction, and The Greatest Nation of the Earth, as well as all-around brilliant historian and fine human being, writes apropos this discussion and this one:
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By the way, Hannibal Hamlin was on the ticket in 1860 because he was from Maine, and Maine voted before any other state (hence the saying, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”) Lincoln needed the momentum he could get from having a local boy on the ticket in 1860. HH was jettisoned in 1864 to broaden the party into a national concern. Johnson, a border state man who had stayed with the Union, seemed the logical choice.
“Logical” does not in this context mean “good.”
Our various discussions about spit and memory reminded me of my favorite passage on the subject of truth and observation, which I had thought was probably everybody’s favorite, but the Internets wouldn’t yield it up to me in full. So here it is, John Steinbeck from The Log from the Sea of Cortez:
A new kind of adoption in France:
President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday defended a plan to require 10-year-olds to honor child victims of the Holocaust…. “We do not traumatize children by giving them the gift of the memory of the country.” The president wants each child in the last year of French primary school, at about 10 years old, to “adopt” the memory of one of the 11,000 Jewish children in France killed in the Holocaust, learning about the selected child’s background and fate.
Which will encourage religious belief.
Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”
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In a thoughtful and provocative comment below, PorJ discusses politicized memories of the Maine. Well, it just so happens that on this day in 1898, as Silbey has been kind enough to remind us, the Maine exploded and sank in Havana’s harbor.
The Maine was in Cuba in the first place, ostensibly protecting American interests — again, please see Silbey’s post, as he, um, actually knows something about this material — because pro-independence Cubans, rallying around the memory of writer/poet/activist José Marti, were trying to throw off the yoke of Spanish colonial power. Or something. Anyway, a little before 10 pm on February 15, the Maine blew up, killing more than 260 people on board.
We are grateful to again welcome David Silbey, author of The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916, and A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1900. Don’t blame him for the title. Many thanks, David.
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It really should have been a conspiracy. The timing was simply too perfect for it to be anything else. When the armored cruiser Maine blew up in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 260 American sailors, it came at such a dramatic moment that it had to have been a deliberate act: sabotage, attack, conspiracy. An accident would have been so deflating.
The Maine had sailed to Havana Bay as a symbolic assertion of American influence. The fighting between Cuban insurrectos and the Spanish crown had been ugly and President William McKinley thought that sending a thoroughly modern embodiment of American might to the island would protect the interests of the United States. Instead, it provoked a war.
The response within the United States to the ship’s explosion was immediate and angry. No one doubted that the Spanish had blown it up somehow. Few stopped to consider that the last thing the Spanish would want to do was provoke the United States to intervene in a civil war that Spain was already losing. The Spanish had done it, and the Spanish must pay. “This means war,” exclaimed the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who quickly set his papers to foment militarism. However yellow the journalism Hearst and his colleagues practiced, Americans were more than willing to go along with it.
McKinley appointed a court of naval inquiry, ostensibly to investigate, but also to give him time to consider. Passions ran too high. When Wall Street slid on the prospect of war, a newspaper article, in a remarkable display of public venom, referred to the financial community as the “colossal and aggregate Benedict Arnold of the Union and the syndicated Judas Iscariot of humanity.” The naval inquiry reported back that the ship had been blown up by person or persons unknown and McKinley sent a message to Congress recommending that the United States intervene in Cuba. The Spanish-American War was about to start, a war between an ancient empire, living off past glories, and a new and thrusting power.
More than a hundred years later, it looks as though the reality of the sinking was indeed deflatingly prosaic. Investigation in a less fevered time and place suggests that the Maine blew up because of a build-up of gas in a coal bunker. Improperly vented, such gas could ignite with explosive force. Most tellingly, the external armor plates of the ship were bowed outward, not inward as they should have been for an external explosion.
But perhaps not so prosaic after all, as it suggests that going to war over mistaken perceptions is not so rare in American history. The Spanish had nothing to do with the Maine; the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11. Neither fact saved either from war with the United States.
W00t! W00t! </fanboy>
Ahem, let me compose myself.
Nah: w00t! Dear every American academic who was a child in the early 1980s, your role model is back…. <goes to dig out hat>
from movies.yahoo.com posted with vodpod
via Yglesias.
Apparently, this is from the Emmy-nominated Palestinian children’s show, “Pioneers of Tomorrow.” I say “apparently,” because I’m not sure that I can believe this clip is real. First, it seems to allude to key scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But not in a good way. And, as anyone can tell you, the humorists in Hamas are far subtler than this clip suggets, particularly when dealing with Crusades comedy. Second, I don’t know if the title of the YouTube will come through, so I’ll just note that it’s “Martyred Mouse and Killer Bee Replaced by Jew Eating Bunny.” Which raises another question about this clip’s authenticity: isn’t “Jew Eating” a compound adjective in this case? Shouldn’t it be “Jew-Eating”? Third, and finally, I’m really not spoofing the revolutionary struggle of the Palestinian people. But I am making fun of the idea of Jew-eating bunnies. Because everyone knows that bunnies don’t eat Jews; my people are far too gristly to make for good eating. Bunnies prefer meals of carrots and lettuce washed down with the blood of Christian children.
The New York Times says on this day in 1903 the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor was established. Dullsville, right? Wrong! Here are three exciting things you can say about it next time you get the chance — say, at a quiet moment during your Valentine’s Day evening:
1. It represented a victory for Theodore Roosevelt’s particular style of leadership — using press coverage to pressure Congress. While McKinley had begun to use the press in a modern way — issuing press releases to try to control coverage and so forth — Roosevelt did it much better, largely because reporters did not drop dead of boredom when he opened his mouth. Roosevelt also wasn’t above a deft bit of — spin? fibbing? — as previously discussed on this blog.
2. It represented a position on antitrust somewhere between the unashamedly pro-corporate wing of the Republican Party, as represented by e.g. Nelson Aldrich, and the populist wing of the Democratic Party. By lodging investigatory and subpoena powers in an executive bureaucracy, Roosevelt was able to go after trusts he thought were misbehaving and leave alone those he thought were fairly tame. This discretion represented a prima facie fudge (that’s technical legalese, special for CharleyCarp) of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which forbade “every combination” in restraint of trade. But as was typical of Roosevelt, there was a good deal of constructive bluster and a bit less actual prosecution. Remind me to tell you about Justice Holmes and the Northern Securities case come March 14.
3. If you squint just right at the provisions to collect and publicize information about corporate accounting, coupled with Roosevelt’s annoyance at stock-watering, you can see the beginnings of the Securities and Exchange Commission, there. Which reminds me of the pre-Security Analysis career of David Dodd, but we can’t do all our “this day” material at once, can we? Another time.
When I used to teach a course on the history of 1960s at my old job, I always asked students how many of them believed that anti-war protesters had spat upon Vietnam veterans when the latter returned home from tours of duty. The point was to introduce the idea that politics underlies collective memory and mythology.
A little while ago I said to you all,
you’re looking around the political scene today, thinking, who looks a bit like Richard Nixon
If it were me, here is where I would look.
My esteemed colleague, Alan Taylor, would like to know why Republican senators are carrying water for Roger Clemens. So he asked me to ask you. Does anyone know? Campaign contributions? Past favors to highly placed GOP candidates? They love drug-abusing megalomaniacs?
And while we’re on the subject, I’m also interested in what makes a successful power pitcher so delusional that he thinks, “I know, I’m going to bring my high heat to the U.S. Congress. I’ll prove my innocence by blustering my way through a hearing on the Hill.” I mean, I understand that athletes are treated like gods, and that Clemens is a man of epic competitive drive and ego, but please.
On this day in 1940, the New York Times printed this picture of Franklin Roosevelt paying tribute to Abraham Lincoln, doing that “standing up” thing he only did on really important occasions. Below, in comments, I asked if Ari were really sure that Lincoln, and not Roosevelt, rates as America’s greatest president. (What I really said was, doesn’t saving Western civilization rate higher than saving the Union? Which Ari said was racist. But as Homer would say, he’s a greasy thug.)
Ari replied by saying, many another plausible president would have squandered the Union in the 1860s, but not Lincoln: could I say the same about Roosevelt — that another plausible president would not have done as well as he?
On this day in 1981, a series of explosions rocked Louisville, Kentucky. The explosions happened because the Ralston-Purina Corporation had been dumping hexane, which it used for processing soybeans, into the city’s sewers. More than two miles of Louisville’s main sewer line blew up, and many homes and businesses also suffered severe damage. Only the early hour — around 5 AM — at which the sewers ignited prevented the loss of life.
Now, here’s the thing: my first love — or maybe she was my second; it depends how one counts — was from Louisville. And when I initially visisted her home to meet her family, which is a story unto itself, the only thing that I knew about Louisville was that it hosted some kind of famous horse race and a university with a really good basketball team. And also: that the city had blown up a few years earlier. So I spent the weekend, when I wasn’t talking about Denny Crum or Pervis Ellison, asking everybody I met about the sewer explosions, as though the survivors had somehow weathered an ordeal like the great San Francisco earthquake or the Battle of Britain, an event that had emblazoned itself into the community’s sense of itself. I got a lot of odd looks, to be honest. But finally, around the hundredth time I asked, my first love’s grandmother looked at me, sort of pissed, and said: “It sounded like the sewers were blowing up. Okay? Bam. And then bam-bam. And then bam again. And a bunch more just like that. Get it?” I didn’t respond, but remember wanting to ask: “Are you sure it wasn’t more like boom?”
Do you hear any audience response at all when Spitzer delivers his pro-Clinton spiel? Contrast the response to Norton’s mention of Obama. This is the same show, so as far as I can tell, the same audience. There’s something — generational? demographic? — happening here.
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On this day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Sinking Spring Farm, Kentucky. More than a century later, on this day in 1914, long after he had served as this country’s greatest president and had been killed for his trouble, laborers began building the memorial that would honor him.
The Lincoln Memorial is effective not only due to its graceful neo-classical architecture and its massive scale. Its interior is 99 feet high; Daniel Chester French’s statue of Abe seated is just under 20 feet tall. Nor even because of some of the gimmicks that its designer, Henry Bacon, included in its construction. Its 36 doric columns represent the 36 states of the Union at the time of Lincoln’s death; the names of the 48 states that were part of the nation when workers completed the Greek temple on the Potomac are carved on the outside of its walls. No, the real power of the memorial comes from the words of the man whose life it recalls.
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If you haven’t already done so, take a look at the work Nick Beaudrot has been doing on mapping the primary results. And now, in addition to his maps and analysis of voting patters, Nick’s got haikus. Here he is on California (above):
Humboldt? Santa Cruz?
Pot smokers for Obama!
Hill big in LA.
Awesome!
The Brennan Center at NYU’s School of Law posits the following scenario:
It’s the morning after the election. The president-elect calls you up and says, “You know, after this grueling, absurd campaign, I now see that the state of our democracy is something we have to grapple with right away. What should I do?”
The responses, offered by a cavalcade of stars — E.L. Doctorow, Bill Bradley, Dahlia Lithwick, Hendrik Hertzberg, Heather Gerken, and many others — are, for the most part, predictable. But still very interesting. See what you think.
[Editor's Note: A reader pointed me to the above and mentioned that she first found this at Ezra Klein's site. Thanks for the tips, people. We appreciate it.]
If you haven’t already seen this, you should.
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Steamboats were the antebellum era’s Internet. (Now that’s what the kids down in the copy room call a lede — well, maybe not.) I mention this because, on this day in 1809, Robert Fulton patented his design for a steam-powered watercraft. Fulton, renowned as one of the great inventors of his age, then turned his attention to his real passion: becoming fabulously wealthy.
Robert Fulton neither invented nor perfected the steamboat. The former story is one marked by industrial espionage and fierce international competition, and so remains somewhat shrouded by secrecy. The latter tale is even murkier, a narrative so diffuse as to defy comprehension. Western entrepreneurs spent years improving steamboats, trying to wrest more profitability — through increased speed and cargo capacity — from them while attending to their unfortunate tendency to explode without warning. Despite their best efforts, though, the region’s lay engineers never worked out the lingering design kinks. The boats blew up, scattering burning merchandise and broken bodies into the rivers they plied, until they largely fell into disservice at the end of the nineteenth century. Not, incidentally, because of their combustibility, but because other transportation technologies, especially railroads, supplanted them.
But all of that wanders too far afield from our precious lede. Fulton, when he sought his patent, had tested his steamboat, the Clermont, on the Hudson River, in New York. But he believed that his invention would prove most useful on the 15,000 navigable miles of the Mississippi River system, a web of waterways stretching from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Two years later, with partners Robert Livingston (of Louisiana Purchase fame) and Nicholas Roosevelt (Teddy’s grand-uncle), Fulton brought another steamboat prototype to the Mississippi River, making the trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. The era of steam had begun in the West. Sort of.
I often hear Paul Krugman deserves the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and I believe it. I know to a moral certainty he knows more about international trade — nay, about all economics, micro- macro- and in-between — than I do. But I’m firmly persuaded Paul Krugman wouldn’t know Richard Nixon if the zombified corpse of the thirty-seventh president up and bit Krugman right in his endowed chair.
Dude, campaign for Clinton all you like, I don’t care — I think academics are citizens, and get to have political positions. Tell me Obama’s health plan isn’t as good as Clinton’s, and I’ll read what you have to say — I gather there’s a real debate there about the effect of mandates, and David Cutler disagrees with you; okay.
But let’s talk about Richard Nixon, who embraced warrantless wiretapping, who prolonged and expanded wars in the name of peace, whose administration aimed specifically to crack the American electorate into bits in the hope of picking up just enough pieces in its paws to slouch toward electoral victory. Richard Nixon, who said, break into the Brookings Institution — no, who said “I want it implemented on a thievery basis [which is a phrase so awesome I giggle and goggle every time I read it]. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” Richard Nixon, who told his men to stonewall a criminal investigation, whose men wanted to use “the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
So seriously, you’re looking around the political scene today, thinking, who looks a bit like Richard Nixon, and you think — yeah! it’s Barack Obama’s supporters!
Let me tell you, sir, about Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon who thought the Africans — the black ones, he was specific — were just out of the trees, really. Richard Nixon whose worst sin was thinking that everyone was as crazy and vindictive and morality-free as he was.
If you want to find Richard Nixon’s political heirs, there are better places in American public life to look than Obamaland.
Often is the question asked, what do academics do all day, given that they teach three to fifteen hours a week on average. Of course, part of the answer is “research.” But that’s only on a good day. Because also there is committee work, administration, education of graduate students, refereeing of journal articles, refereeing of book manuscripts, reviewing of books, writing of letters of reference, reading of applications for graduate school, refereeing of tenure cases, judging books/articles for prizes, applying for grants, judging applications for grants, peer-reviewing the research of colleagues, peer-reviewing the teaching of colleagues, applying for promotion/tenure, judging applications for promotion/tenure, preparing for accreditation/evaluation, conducting accreditation/evaluation, giving talks, attending talks…. and that’s not to mention the aerial photography.
Which is not to complain, so much as to say it’s a lot like many another job: it’ll expand to fill the space you give it.
So a few years back I got some fine advice: say no to bad stuff, stuff you won’t like or that you don’t need to do. And I started doing that, and that was a good thing. For a while.
Then this year, I found something new: there were things that, taken in isolation, looked like things I should do. But when I said yes to everything that looked in isolation like something I should do, I was doing too many things. Apparently, too many good things can add up to a bad bunch of things.
Which leads me to believe that now I must start saying no to perfectly good things. Unless there is some magic way to stop them adding up to a bunch of bad things.
On this day in 1676, warriors from the Nashaway tribe, part of the Wampanoag Nation, sacked Lancaster, Massachusetts, killing the town’s adult males and taking captive its women and children. Mary Rowlandson was among those captured, and she chronicled her ordeal in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, a narrative extraordinary for its author’s unshakable faith and profound hatred of Indians.
The attack was part of Metcom’s War — named for the Wampanoag sachem also known as King Philip — among the bloodiest conflicts, proportionaly speaking, in American history. The war started in the summer of 1675, after Massachusetts authorities hanged three Wampanoag Indians. The three men had allegedly murdered a collaborator and informant, a convert to Chritianity, who had passed information from within the Wampanoag Nation to colonial officials. Following the hanging, a group of Pokanoket warriors destroyed the settlement of Swansea. Colonists retaliated. The violence then spun out of control, lasting two more years.
Before I go to sleep, I should note that today is Corrupt Bargain Day, a Kelman family holdiay that really should be exported to the nation at large. On this day in