I like Mary Beard’s TLS blog. But this time I fear she has Gone Too Far. Or, perhaps more likely, she’s pulling our collective leg — though I don’t remember her pulling it in quite this manner before. Even out here at the veriest Edge, the cityscape is clotted with victors’ memories of the War of Eastern Aggression. Just yesterday I was out picknicking with fellow parents of future yuppies at the Black Point Battery; and of course the map is full of streets named for Vicksburg, Grant, Lincoln and the Union. (Not to speak of the Confederate general from Big Sur.)
Need we quote Faulkner again?
Image by Flickr user maduarte used under a Creative Commons license.
The Edge of the American West 
32 comments
October 5, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Vance
Apparently Buchanan Street is named for one John Buchanan, an auctioneer, but I’m not the first to assume it was a tribute the man to whom we owe the Civil War itself. And I liked the way the photo captured our characteristic fog-bleached decrepitude.
October 5, 2009 at 8:55 pm
andrew
Given the names of the streets nearby, I think it’s safe to say that Albany’s Buchanan street is indeed named after the former president.
October 5, 2009 at 8:58 pm
andrew
This intersection, however, seems to have it all.
October 5, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Vance
Yeah, all the same neighbors over on this side too — Jackson, Fillmore, Pierce, Polk (, Webster, Clay, etc.).
October 5, 2009 at 9:41 pm
xaaronx
OT, but I love the Romaji/katakana signage.
October 5, 2009 at 10:15 pm
teofilo
This intersection, however, seems to have it all.
Including the University of Winnipeg, it seems.
October 5, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Vance
I like that too…but it’s more a memento of what the neighborhood was, before about 1942.
I also like the Roman lettering. The newer street signs that are coming in use a less distinctive font.
October 5, 2009 at 10:22 pm
andrew
Including the University of Winnipeg, it seems.
I’m disappointed that the google-provided permalink, which is what that is, could not get its own map correct (probably being on google.ca as the default here threw it off). The search terms work, though, if you press the search button. And then you should get Virginia.
October 5, 2009 at 10:28 pm
teofilo
The search terms work, though, if you press the search button. And then you should get Virginia.
And so I do. Thanks.
October 5, 2009 at 10:30 pm
teofilo
You know what city has great street signs? San Luis Obispo.
October 5, 2009 at 10:49 pm
teofilo
Also.
October 6, 2009 at 1:38 am
DaKooch
SLO is a great town and, I believe, the spiritual home of Lee Mellon.
October 6, 2009 at 5:43 am
Jeremy
I was going to ask what was up with the katakana sign, but the flickr photo says it’s Japantown. Huh.
October 6, 2009 at 5:57 am
oudemia
It’s also fairly odd that she thought Latin was only taught at the secondary level in the US at private schools. (Eh, I guess there really isn’t any reason that she should know, and certainly every American that I know who studied Classics at Cambridge did not go to a public high school.)
October 6, 2009 at 6:01 am
teofilo
Yeah, I thought it was interesting to see a British perspective on the American educational system (and the Civil War). Not quite the interpretation I would have expected.
October 6, 2009 at 6:07 am
max
This post makes me think that Stephen Decatur got a pretty raw deal, all things considered.
max
[‘Ah, well, he was a squid after all.’]
October 6, 2009 at 6:40 am
kid bitzer
note that she said “cares for” rather than “cares about”.
i have to hope that she chose her preposition with care, with care.
lots of people care about the civil war.
to ask who “cares for” it is ambiguous:
who has a taste for it (“i don’t care for sweets”)?
who maintains and attends to it (“we hire people to care for our lawn”)?
i suspect that the second follows more naturally from her earlier comments about how cultivated, kempt, and cult-ified the site is. who maintains all this stuff? yeah, the park service, but: why do we pay them to do it?
note the contrast british battlefields; they aren’t maintained and cared-for. it’s not that no one cares about them.
anyhow–she may have meant the ambiguity. or not. it’s a one liner at the end of a blog post. typically those are more directed towards provoking discussion than towards expressing a clear thought of one’s one. an internet tradition i don’t care for.
October 6, 2009 at 6:47 am
Vance
Fair enough, kb — but would you care to enlarge on that last bit?
Also, of course, the fact that my town is crusted with memorials doesn’t mean that we care for or about all those wars now. It seemed too obvious to mention that the one she picked on is the one we’re patently still fighting.
October 6, 2009 at 7:23 am
Anderson
Wow. Mary Beard needs to visit Alabama.
… I note that John Keegan’s next book is on the American Civil War. Leaving aside that another 10 years of life will probably treat us to Keegan’s study of the Spanish-American War, or perhaps the War of Jenkins’ Ear, I wonder whether he is similarly befuddled as to our war’s continued impact. Surely not.
October 6, 2009 at 7:41 am
john theibault
I posted the following at Mary Beard’s site, but I’ll include it here, where the latter two paragraphs may stimulate some discussion:
The US college prep high school language curriculum only rarely allows for more than one foreign language. I really doubt that many “bright students” in the Philly schools are taking two languages, much less three. Latin is offered in almost all large public high schools where many students apply to college. It goes through waves of popularity because it is often viewed as good preparation for the SAT test, which has a disproportionate impact on college admissions.
Your perspective on the US Civil War reinforces a sense I have had about how to teach World History to US students. The Civil War is absolutely the big thing in the US history survey. And modern US history has to be given strong emphasis in any world history course. Yet it’s easy to teach world history without mentioning the Civil War. If you can get students to understand the paradox of the “most important event” in the history of the “most important country” not being at all important for understanding world history, then it can help shape understanding what the real task of world history is. (Of course, the whole idea of world history may not play in Britain for all I know.)
Gettysburg is distinctive, but has parallels at other civil war battlefields. Antietam is also between Carlisle and Dulles and deserves a visit for its similar memorialization in an even more bucolic setting. I think part of the explanation is that the battlefields recreate a distinctly late-nineteenth century view of commemoration — which explains why there aren’t many comparable sites in Britain. How many important battles were fought on British soil in the second half of the nineteenth century? It’s kind of like the Arminius statue in Germany (and all the Bismarck towers) in monumentality, but also a bit like the military cemeteries of Verdun or Passchendaele in trying to evoke the sacrifice of war in the modern era. What’s distinctive about the US military parks is that the monuments help mark the contours of the actual battle. But Waterloo also has several of the key battle sites marked with monuments.
October 6, 2009 at 7:44 am
Anderson
Shiloh’s the only battlefield I’ve walked over, and it too has monuments from about every state that sent troops. Didn’t realize that was odd however, not having visited any European sites.
Anyone know a book about changing styles of battlefield commemoration, from the “trophies” set up by victors in Thucydides up to the present day?
October 6, 2009 at 8:52 am
Doctor Science
At our local public school in NJ, languages are scheduled so that students can take Latin in addition to a living language, but it’s basically impossible to take more than one living language in school (many students take an “ancestral language” on the weekend: Chinese, Hebrew, Italian, Hindi, etc.). A lot of juniors or seniors take one or two semesters of Latin as SAT prep.
The scuttlebutt right now is that there are more positions for high school Latin teachers in the US than there are people even remotely qualified to fill them, so the job market for Classics majors is actually comparatively strong.
October 6, 2009 at 11:11 am
TF Smith
I’d be interested if historians in the UK see the English Civil War/War of Three Kingdoms as part of a continuum with the American Revolution and the American Civil War – the “Cousin’s wars” concept.
As far as monumental memorial architecture in California goes, there is always the Sloat Memorial at the Presidio in Monterey; this picture doesn’t reall do it justice.
http://www.mtycounty.com/pgs-path/Sloat-Monument.html
Makes an interesting comparison with the memorial for the Argentine conquest of California…
October 6, 2009 at 11:42 am
ben
Who cares for the Great War?
October 6, 2009 at 12:09 pm
DaKooch
. . . and let us not forget NoCal’s contribution to the War for Liberal Democracy http://www.forttejon.org/cal100/ (I think SLO is in SoCal, isn’t it?
October 6, 2009 at 12:15 pm
sburnap
Shouldn’t it actually be ビュカネン? The katakana on that sign appears to say “boo-kya-nan”, not “byu-ka-nen” like I would expect.
October 6, 2009 at 2:06 pm
jacob
Not sure if you did this on purpose, but I liked that you picked a Buchanan street sign, since Beard was writing about a visit to Dickinson College, Buchanan’s alma mater.
October 6, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Vance
No, jacob, pure coincidence. And sburnap, I’m not surprised to hear the City got the katakana wrong. They’re part of the modern-day effort to revive Japantown; it’s impossible, I think, as we see with Little Italy and North Beach, to keep immigrant neighborhoods lively without ongoing immigration.
October 6, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Jeremy
“Shouldn’t it actually be ビュカネン? The katakana on that sign appears to say “boo-kya-nan”, not “byu-ka-nen” like I would expect.”
You’d think, but Japanese has some funny quirks when writing English words in katakana. For example, ‘cabbage’ has the same problem. You’d think it’d just be カベジ ’ka-be-ji’, but it turns out to be キャベツ ’kya-be-tsu’. Why they need that why in there, and why the last syllable is left unvoiced I haven’t figured out.
Often when words are translated, it’s direct, so the first syllable is just ‘bu’. On the other hand, they got the final syllable right with ‘nen’, so who knows. Just another thing that makes the Japanese so mysterious.
October 6, 2009 at 5:42 pm
TF Smith
Fort Tejon is in SoCal; it’s on the Los Angeles County-Kern County line…
All quiet on the Pacific Slope would make a great title for a biography of George Wright:
http://www.militarymuseum.org/HistoryCW.html
There’s some interesting material at the above, both historical, historiographical, and otherwise.
October 6, 2009 at 9:26 pm
fromlaurelstreet
Maybe the katakana is based on a misinterpretation of how a Japanese person reading an unfamiliar English word would think it pronounced.
October 7, 2009 at 2:21 am
rea
You link Faulkner’s famous quote about the past not being dead, but of course, his bit about Gettysburg applies here too:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago…