"Will this be on the test?" Rough Seas Ahead

Randall Stephens

A couple weeks ago, William Pannapacker (going by the pen name Thomas H. Benton), offered up his thoughts on "A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education" in the Chronicle. He is one of the many Cassandras at the Chronicle, lamenting the state of teaching and the desperate situation in the humanities. Though, it seems, many academics do believe such prophecies of doom.

I just came across Pannapacker's essay. For my money, the most depressing bit has to do with "Declining academic engagement."

Pannapacker writes:

Students increasingly are pressured to go to college not because they want to learn (much less become prepared for the duties of citizenship), but because they and their parents believe—perhaps rightly—that not going will exclude them from middle-class jobs. At the same time, much of the academic program, particularly general education, seems disconnected from the practical skills needed to secure those jobs. In order to maintain that Potemkin Village, faculty members and students have entered into a "disengagement compact," in which they place fewer demands on each other so that other interests—research for the professor and social activities for the students—can be pursued with fewer distractions. Professors pretend to teach, students pretend to learn. That results in the cultivation of students' instincts, guided by checklist rubrics, for doing the least amount of work necessary to receive the desired level of distinction, in a context in which the A- is the new C. Even the brightest students have doubts about whether they should work toward genuine accomplishment if they're getting the same A as someone who barely tries.>>>

Yikes. . . . I'm not so sure about the extent of this phenomenon. I think the degree of this decline would be very different depending on the institution. Small colleges with limited resources, directional schools (Southwest Central _______ State University), community colleges, and the like certainly suffer from steep grade inflation and lowered expectations. But I can't imagine that the same could be said of America's premier colleges and universities. So, maybe in the future, as a colleague from another school suggested to me, elite schools will stand as islands of excellence and privilege in a increasingly troubled sea of mediocrity.

A Blast from Our Tech Past

Randall Stephens

Is it true that one-third of the world's population will have watched the royal wedding? Wow. . . (And you thought you could get a break from hearing about THE event of 2011. Nope.)

In the scope of modern history, live broadcasts and

recording technology are such recent developments.

This video from YouTube is an example of primitive video tech. President Eisenhower's 1958 address deals with communication and the challenges of the future. Ironic that he seems to be having such trouble getting just the right words out! (It might count as one of the worst presidential speeches of modern history.) The script takes a decidedly World's Fair tone--the progress rhetoric that will inform amusement parks like Epcot. The World of Tomorrow!!

According to a little history of TV site that the FCC has put together:

In 1956 the Ampex quadruplex videotape replaced the kinescope; making it possible for television programs to be produced anywhere, as well as greatly improving the visual quality on home sets. This physical technology led to a change in organizational technology by allowing high-quality television production to happen away from the New York studios. Ultimately, this led much of the television industry to move to the artistic and technical center of Hollywood with news and business operations remaining on the East Coast.

In 1957 the 1st practical remote control, invented by Robert Adler and called the "Space Commander," was introduced by Zenith. This wireless, ultrasound remote followed and improved upon wired remotes and systems that didn't work well if sunlight shone between the remote and the television.

This "Golden Age" of television also saw the establishment of several significant technological standards. These included the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) standards for black and white (1941) and color television (1953). In 1952 the FCC made a key decision, via what is known as the Sixth Report and Order, to permit UHF broadcasting for the 1st time on 70 new channels (14 to 83). This was an essential decision because the Nation was already running out of channels on VHF (channels 2-13). That decision gave 95% of the U.S. television markets three VHF channels each, establishing a pattern that generally continues today.

Thus the "Golden Age" was a period of intense growth and expansion, introducing many of the television accessories and methods of distribution that we take for granted today. But the revolution – technological and cultural – that television was to introduce to America and the world was just beginning.

To see how this techsplosion would later impact modern families, watch the charming little BBC series Electric Dreams (2009), now airing on PBS. Gotta get back in time, minus the DeLorean: "The Sullivan-Barnes family from Reading are a thoroughly modern family who own the latest in 21st century gadgetry. In a unique experiment they were stripped of all their modern tech and their own home was taken back in time so that they could live with the technology of earlier decades. The family lived a year per day starting in 1970 right up to the year 2000."

The Perspective that History Gives Us

Randall Stephens

I post here a brief talk I gave to history students at our annual Senior Banquet.

“Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

We can hope that today the muse of history is at least a little less infected with the STDs of falsehood. In fact, I think it is much less so. History today is not chained to nationalism, bigotry, and religious zealotry as it was over 150 years ago. And maybe historians now cast a more critical eye on the past.

One thing that good history—the non-infected kind—can do is provide deep insight or perspective on the present. Someone who is informed by history can engagingly read current events, discern the issues that animate contemporary political battles, and see things more clearly through the eyes of history.

Last year, I delivered a little talk at this banquet about how history relates to the life of the mind, how it enriches our intellects and encourages us to better understand our world. This year—a year that has been rocked by traumatic events and social chaos—I’d like to focus on the perspective that history provides for us.

The famous American historian of race and slavery Kenneth Stamp wrote that: “With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.” How might this statement be true? How can our knowledge of the past lead to a better understanding of the present?

Let’s take a few examples from 2010 and 2011.

America’s most violent, memorable conflict, the Civil War, still has us reflecting on the legacy of race and racism. We still wonder how it is that this country holds together. (Eighteenth-century anti-federalists would be shocked that our republic operates as effectively as it does.) We still worry about the enormous political divisions that pit one American against another.

To quote southern novelist William Faulkner’s character Gavin Stevens: “The past is never dead; it’s not even past” (Requiem for a Nun, 1951). This year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, off the coast of Charleston. When we think of that bloody conflict, is it true that the past isn’t dead, that it’s not even past? In some sense . . . yes. Two weeks ago an NPR reporter observed that

It's been nearly 150 years since the war began. But even now, the city of Charleston is still figuring out how to talk about the war and commemorate the anniversary.

Last December in Charleston, there was a re-enactment of that Secession Convention. It was followed by a Secession Ball—billed as "a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink."

Costumed revelers waltzed and sang Dixie. Many South Carolinians were appalled; the NAACP protested outside. . . .

Many people in Charleston talk about using this anniversary to right the wrongs of the Civil War centennial, 50 years ago. Then, it was celebrated as a joyful tribute to South Carolina's Confederate heritage. Now, many remember the 1961 anniversary with embarrassment.

We could go on by looking at the historical parallels of or the differences between contemporary American political battles that have set pro-labor and anti-labor groups against each other and similar struggles from long ago. The political and intellectual fracturing of America, too, could use a historical perspective. (A plug for Historically Speaking here: Read the Daniel Rodgers forum!) Comparisons between our current economic meltdown and the recessions and depressions of yesteryear would also shed light on where we’ve been and maybe tell us something about where we’re headed.

But let’s shift our gaze to world affairs and think of how a historical point of view might inform how we view major events or natural disasters.

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami was unimaginably horrific. No one living in that part of the world had seen anything like it before. But throughout recorded human history natural disasters much like it have changed societies and altered the way men and women live. In fact, the New York Times published a story about stone tablets, some six centuries old, that warned of and recounted the devastation wrought by tsunamis. Among other things, these markers remind us that men and women have been learning from the past and applying those lessons to the present for ages. ("On Stones in Japan, Tsunami Warnings — Aneyoshi Journal," April 21, 2011.) It also humbles us when we view the world from the perspective of the long arc of history. We are not removed from natural and historical processes that have always shaped human life.

Moving across the globe we might think of other ways that our meditation on the past helps us understand the present. . . .

Is Europe in decline, as so many pundits have shouted from the rooftops? Is England in particular on the ropes? Is any of this talk of downward mobility anything new? "The country is used to the idea of national decline" writes Ian Jack in the April 24 issue of Newsweek, "'declinism' became a feature of British historical study many years ago—the U.S. is just now catching up. Public fears over the nation’s capability date back to at least the Boer War." You need to know something about the history of European nations and the long economic development of the West, of course, to make such judgments.

What about the revolutions that are reforming/realigning North African and Middle East nations right now? These seem to have come out of the blue, yet, of course, such political and social upheavals are the result or years of oppression and have a history that is politically complicated and deserving of serious attention. What might we learn about how contemporary revolutions will play out? Certainly we could look at past revolutions in third world nations and former colonies to get a clearer picture.

I conclude by highlighting the words of southern novelist Robert Penn Warren, who remarked with sternness: “The past is always a rebuke to the present.” The past makes us think about larger trends and gives us perspective and a more complete picture. We cannot afford to ignore the nuances and the fascinating point of view that history gives us. Without it we would roam about dazed, amnesiac, and blind to the world around us.

A Bibliovore’s Dilemma

Philip White

Hi, I’m Philip, and I have a problem. No, it’s not my raging caffeine addiction, but rather, an insatiable desire to buy any book of interest that I come across.

I often scorn so-called “shopaholics” who stock their walk-in closets with $200 t-shirts that I suspect are made in the same exploitative overseas factories as bargain bin items at supermarkets; and the techies who drool over the latest 60-inch flatscreen with its “600 Hz Subfield Motion” and “150,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio.” Come on, not even the manufacture knows what the heck such piffle means, much less how those features can justify a two-grand price tag.

And yet, I am starting to become cognizant of my glaring hypocrisy, an epiphany sparked by my recent purchase of two more four-shelf bookcases from a going-out-of-business Borders to supplement my fit-to-burst living room built-ins. I can’t go near my local used book store without popping in, promising myself (and/or my long-suffering wife, who finds her volumes and those of our children crammed into ever-dwindling shelf space) that I’ll just look at the clearance section and its bevy of $2 books that beg for a good home. Sometimes I think I subconsciously choose to run errands in the vicinity just so I can get my weekly “fix.”

And then there’s the web. Performing the physical act of handing over cash or swiping your credit/debit card at the bookstore makes the buying process more tangible, and, or so the theory goes, makes one consider the purchase more carefully. Online, this goes out the window—a few clicks and you’re done. If you’ve already saved your card details on the vendor’s website, it’s even quicker and easier, with even less time to self-question if that $148.15 that’s about to be taken out of your account/put on your next bill is exorbitant or reasonable.

When you write for a living, it’s much easier to answer such a question, whether it arrives before the shelf-straining purchase or later, when you get your next card statement, with a simple justification: “It’s for work.” This particular form of self-deception is at its most acute when you are working on a long feature story or, Lord have mercy, a book. People have asked me “Why don’t you just get books from the library?” I have done that, of course, frantically jotting down notes in time to beat the punitive daily late charges or, for longer passages, using the tech miracle that is Nuance Naturally Speaking to dictate until my voice box feels like it’s been invaded by a couple of enraged porcupines.

But when it comes to a book that you know (or tell yourself you know) that you’ll need large sections for at least one project or, heaven forbid, may actually make time to read for pleasure as well as for research purposes, how can one not plonk down some hard earned cash for it? Now that I’ve forced myself to become more organized, I make sure that book receipts (from brick-and-mortar bookstores) are scanned and e-mail confirmations saved (online retailers) in easily findable files so that come tax time I can list the books as expenses. Again, one more justification: “It’s a tax write off.”

So my questions are twofold: When is it time to draw a line between essential research tools and filler that I’ll use two lines from and never touch again?

Or, should I stop worrying, admit that I’m a fallen, shameless “shopaholic,” with no more self-restraint than the fashionista, gadgeteer, whatever-your-retail-vice-is crowd, and just enjoy my book-collecting “hobby”?

Peppermint and History

Dan Allosso

On Monday, Andrew Sullivan blogged at The Dish about “The Atomic Gardening Society.” After WWII, researchers explored ways to use the new discoveries of atomic energy to improve daily life. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss declared in 1954 that atomic energy would soon produce electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.” And, as Alexander Trevi records in an interview with Paige Johnson, which Sullivan highlights on his blog, national laboratories in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. developed gamma gardens, where they irradiated plants and seeds in an effort to improve flowers and agricultural crops.

One of the results of the gamma garden at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory was a disease-resistant strain of the peppermint plant, Mentha piperita. As Johnson says, commercial peppermint fields were increasingly suffering from Verticillium wilt, a fungal disease that reduces oil yields and ultimately kills the plants. Merritt J. Murray, a researcher for the A.M. Todd Company of Kalamazoo, developed two cultivars of Mitcham, the main commercial variety of peppermint, which were named “Todd’s Mitcham” and “Murray Mitcham.” Nearly all of the peppermint oil that finds its way into such products as chewing gum, toothpaste, mouthwash, and candy comes from these wilt-resistant plants.

It’s tempting to think of these scientific experiments of the 1950s to 1970s as the beginning of technical modifications to our food supply that have culminated in the genetically modified foods (GMOs) now causing public debate. But compared to current transgenic processes that manipulate plants and animals on a gene-by-gene basis, the process used by researchers in the gamma gardens was like stone tools versus scalpels. As Johnson notes, the “exact nature of the genetic changes that cause [Todd’s Mitcham] to be wilt-resistant remain unknown.” Scientists were literally shooting particles at plants and seeds, and then growing them to see what happened.

The other reason we can’t point to the gamma gardens as the beginning of GMOs, at least in peppermint, is that the Mentha piperita plants the researchers irradiated were already a hybrid that had been carefully nurtured by growers since at least the 1750s. Mentha piperita makes its first recorded appearance in Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum (1753). According to an 1851 history of the English town of Mitcham, titled Mitcham: Its Physic Gardeners and Medicinal Plants, the peppermint plant had been a principal product of the area’s medicinal gardens for about a hundred years. But the original, 1750s Mitcham peppermint itself was a genetically modified, sterile hybrid that could only be propagated by root cuttings.

The sterility of peppermint plants is due to the fact that they are a hybrid of two other Mentha species, water mint (M aquatica) and spearmint (M spicata). While this cross may have originally happened naturally, the resulting plants do not set seeds. They would not have been able to spread across the planet, without the active participation of mint farmers. And peppermint did spread across the globe. Brought to New England during the Colonial period, peppermint was grown, distilled, and sold through an elaborate web of early American commerce. Carried to upstate New York and then Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana by members of the mint-growing families, peppermint became a key crop in southern Michigan and northern Indiana, and later in the river valleys of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and ultimately, India. Along the way, the peppermint plant has changed, due to the year-by-year choices of farmers deciding which roots to save, as well as through the efforts of specialists like Murray.

It’s interesting to speculate about what point we want to start calling a plant product like mint “genetically modified.” It’s also fascinating to think, as we’re brushing our teeth or drinking a cup of mint tea, that the plant whose flavor we’re tasting is basically the same genetic individual as the one planted by Michigan growers in the 1860s, or Massachusetts farmers in the 1810s, or Mitcham “physic gardeners” in the 1750s. For me it cuts to the heart of that interest in continuity and change that makes us historians.

Note: Dan may be slightly obsessed with this subject, as he’s currently writing a dissertation that looks at rural American history through the peppermint oil industry.

Guess Who's Coming to Graduation

Randall Stephens

Last summer Nick Seaton asked in the Guardian: "Should the news that Sex in the City actress Kim Cattrall and Pirates of the Caribbean actor Orlando Bloom have donned funny hats and gowns to collect honorary degrees this week give pause for thought?" Sports heroes, too, had the opportunity to swoosh across stage in billowy regalia. "And yesterday we learned that three golfers – Padraig Harrington, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson – received honorary degrees from, appropriately, the University of St Andrews."

Critics in the academy snap their pencils in disgust. And when politicians and political pundits receive honorary degrees, things can get even more interesting--as when Liberty University bestowed a doctorate on the sage of Fox News and college dropout, Glenn Beck (not really surprising).

Barack Obama gave the commencement speech at Notre Dame in 2009 and received an honorary doctorate in law. Salon's Alex Koppelman reported that the "announcement has turned into a PR nightmare, though, as conservative Catholics are up in arms over the choice and are organizing against it. One local bishop has said he'll boycott commencement in protest, as the president's decision on stem cells means the government is 'supporting direct destruction of innocent human life.' The Cardinal Newman Society claims to have 80,000 signatures on a petition asking the university to rescind the invitation."

History helps put things into perspective. At least former presidents did not raise a fiery complaint against Obama, as far as I know. But that was just what happened when Harvard decided to hand an honorary degree to Old Hickory in 1833. Eleven years earlier the college had given one to Jackson's arch-rival John Quincy Adams--the world traveler and bibliophile, who knew Latin and Greek and studied numerous modern languages. Now Adams could not believe that the same revered institution would tarnish its name and legacy by honoring Jackson, vulgarian in chief. Though Adams was a Harvard overseer, he refused to attend the ceremony for his long-time political foe. How could this beacon of learning "confer her highest literary honor," he fumed, "upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name"? (On the contrasts between these two towering figures, see David Reynolds's excellent Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.) Adams, brooding in Quincy, was not alone in his contempt. There were plenty of Jackson despisers in Massachusetts.

The whole affair made Charles Francis Adams, JQ's son, burn with rage. Charles confided to his diary: Jackson "served his Country no more usefully than a thousand others, but he has the prestige of military glory which dazzles all mortal minds. The art of killing is prized higher than the art of vivifying. My father who was his competitor for the Presidency and a man of incomparably superior character, yet carries with him perpetually a load of unpopularity." Argghhh!!

A political doggerel of the day ran:

John Quincy Adams
Who can write,
Andrew Jackson
Who can fight

And the cycle continues. I'm waiting to hear who will be the lucky recipients of honorary degrees this year. (A famous mime? A skilled puppeteer? Macho Man Randy Savage?) We'll see what kinds of denunciations appear in the press and on the Sunday political chat shows.

Earth Day: Who’s In, and Who’s Out?

Heather Cox Richardson

As anyone who has opened Google today knows, today is Earth Day. Historians can look at Earth Day from a variety of angles: from studying Rachel Carson’s paradigm-changing Silent Spring, which linked the destruction of the osprey population to the degradation of the food chain; to exploring how the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River caught the eye of a reporter; to uncovering the movement culture that nurtured the first Earth Day movements in 1970.

Another important way for historians to think about Earth Day, though, is through the lens of a crucially important article inspired by the increasing environmental awareness of the early 1970s. In 1972, a member of the faculty at the University of Southern California Law Center published an article in the Southern California Law Review titled: “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for National Objects.” In this piece, Christopher D. Stone was, as he put it, “quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.” Natural objects should have “legally recognized worth and dignity in its own right, and not merely to serve as a means to benefit ‘us’ (whoever the contemporary group of rights-holders may be).”

Stone anchored his suggestion in a brief overview of legal history. Societies began with a core group of families or kinship groups, he said. Everyone outside of that group was an outsider: frightening, suspect, alien. No one outside the core group had any rights. Even within a core group, some members had no rights. Children belonged to their fathers. They could be transferred, sold, even killed with impunity. Women, too, belonged to their men.

Gradually, Stone noted, societies began to expand the boundaries of those that enjoyed legal rights. Opponents greeted each expansion with resistance, fear, and ridicule, but gradually people outside that initial core group—men from other tribes, women, and children—won legal protections. In America, that protection eventually included legal standing for non-living entities, too, like corporations and estates.

Stone went on to argue that expanding legal rights to the natural world was not only logical, but also imperative to guarantee that the actual costs of industrial production were borne by the same entities that enjoyed the monetary benefits. More, though, the expansion of rights would herald a revolution in the way humans thought about and interacted with the environment. No longer would it be a resource for human exploitation; it would be an organism of which humans were a part.

Stone’s essay is justly famous in legal and environmental circles, and is well worth discussing for its legal and environmental implications. But is less well known among historians, and this is too bad. His brief overview of the contours of human society and the expansion of rights beautifully anticipated Reconstruction historians’ recent focus on what it means to be an American citizen—who was “in;” who was “out.” (And it is probably no accident that this Reconstruction historian was mesmerized by Stone’s article in college.) It also has anticipated the modern-day debate over the cultural meaning of “birtherism,” which political pundits from both sides of the aisle argue is a way to identify President Obama as “alien,” an “outsider.” The concepts Stone identified are central to historians’ understanding of our past, and of today’s Americans’ understanding of the present.

Earth Day 1970

Randall Stephens

Earth Day is 41 years old! The New York Times reminds us that:

Nearly 20 million Americans attended the first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970, to this day among the most participatory political actions in the nation's history. In the decades since, Earth Day has spread across the globe with thousands of events in more than 180 countries.

In the beginning, the event influenced environmental politics, triggering such national legislation as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. "Earth Day is a commitment to make life better, not just bigger and faster," the organizers of the first celebration wrote in their manifesto. "It is a day to re-examine the ethic of individual progress at mankind's expense."

Watch part one of a 1970 CBS News report on the first Earth Day:

Tocqueville and Beaumont's Roadtrip

Randall Stephens

The June 2011 issue of Historically Speaking will include an interview with Leo Damrosch on his book Tocqueville's Discovery of America (FSG, 2010). It's an insightful, lively work of literary history. It will be out in paperback this summer. I paste here part of my extended review of Tocqueville's Discovery, which appears in the April 18th issue of Christian Century.

To European visitors in the first half of the 19th century, Americans were like their newfangled steamboats: noisy, combustible, always on the move—and dirty. "I hardly know any annoyance so deeply repugnant to English feelings as the incessant, remorseless spitting of Americans," Frances Trollope reported. Riding aboard one of the garish, belching behemoths on the Mississippi, Trollope observed that when Americans were not spitting, they were eating their food too quickly. And after that they picked their teeth with a pocketknife.

Charles Dickens also seemed to hold his nose as he passed through America. "In all modes of travelling, the American customs, with reference to the means of personal cleanliness and wholesome ablution, are extremely negligent and filthy," scowled the English novelist. The Americans he encountered aboard a crowded steamboat were tedious: "There is no diversity of character. They travel about on the same errands, say and do the same things in exactly the same manner, and follow in the same dull cheerless round." . . .

Damrosch is a gifted writer with a flair for vivid, eloquent descriptions. Over a long career in literary studies, he has written on David Hume, Samuel John­son, Alexander Pope and William Blake. His Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Rest­less Genius was a National Book Award finalist. Tocqueville's Discovery of Amer­ica takes him into deeper historical waters. Skillfully weaving in original sources and the words of Americans and of European observers, Damrosch follows Tocqueville and Beaumont from New York to Detroit, from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., asking the reader to share in Tocqueville's discovery of a turbulent, changing society. "What Tocque­­ville eventually created was not an ac­count of 'Americans' as a unique type," writes Damrosch, "but a structural explanation of some profound reasons why democracy, by its very nature, tends to produce certain characteristics in its citizens.">>>

There’s Something to Be Said for Love

Dan Allosso

Archives or online? Thankfully, we can have both. As Heather has mentioned recently, the fact that a lot of archival material is finding its way onto the internet means that it will be more accessible to researchers with families, who can’t spend months away from home. And to people in remote locations, who may have different points of view. And to people who can’t quit their “day job,” but want to learn about a particular aspect of the past. And to amateurs: people who do history for the love of it.

Since we’re talking about archives and amateurs, I thought I should mention an amateur archive that has been invaluable to me, but that may not be well-known to people who haven’t done research in upstate New York. It’s a multi-terabyte database of historical newspapers from New York state, that goes by the unintuitive name “Old Fulton NY Post Cards.” I was told about it by the Records Management Officer in Ontario County. She said, “you’ve searched Fulton already, of course.” And I, of course, said, “what?”

Run by a former IT professional named Tom Tryniski, the site has grown from a small collection of digitized post cards, to a collection of over 15 million newspaper pages, covering 342 newspapers, spanning the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1797-2004). The largest collections are from Onondaga and Cayuga Counties; Oswego County (where Fulton is located) has 25, Oneida 27, and other western counties are well represented. But so is Manhattan, with 17 papers including the New York Sun (1843-1945).

The site is free. On the instruction page, there’s a link to a page where you can donate via Paypal, complete with a snapshot of the website’s staff, which consists of Tom wearing four different costumes. The newspapers have been scanned with “production grade Wicks and Wilson Microfilm scanners,” from films obtained from the State of New York Newspaper Project. The instruction page also announces “More Data Is Added Every Sunday Night,” which based on the volume of material here, must be true.

The interface is whimsical, but the search functions are state-of-the-art and powerful. And you can download the newspaper pages as pdfs. The instruction page describes the use of search terms, wildcards, and more complicated issues like phonic searching, stemming, and variable term weighting. There’s also a graphic, clickable index of newspapers, which can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet complete with date ranges. Old Fulton NY Post Cards is clearly a labor of love. We’re very lucky there are people who love doing this kind of thing, both professionally and also nights and weekends!

The National Park Service Takes an Expansive Look at the Civil War

.
Today's timely guest post comes from Todd Arrington, a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His dissertation looks at Civil War-era Republicans.

Todd Arrington

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War began on April 12 with a ceremony at Fort Sumter National Monument in South Carolina. Fort Sumter was, of course, the site of the war’s first military engagement. Today, the National Park Service (NPS) administers Fort Sumter, along with more than 75 other Civil War-related sites. These locations will all be very busy over the next four years as America commemorates the sesquicentennial of its most traumatic event.

When the nation celebrated the Civil War’s 100th anniversary in 1961-65, visitors to NPS sites like Manassas, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and others learned a great deal about Civil War strategy and tactics. Park Rangers regaled them with tales of forced marches, frontal assaults, and unbelievable acts of valor. However, because “Lost Cause” ideology still dominated popular interpretation of the war, visitors did not learn why Northerners and Southerners had taken up arms in the first place. Difficult conversations about race, slavery, emancipation, and civil rights were taking place in academic circles (and increasingly on the evening news), but the National Park Service did not engage the public on these issues at Civil War battlefields and historic sites.

Over the past decade or so, the NPS has drastically changed how it interprets the Civil War. In 1999, Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., initiated a movement to require the Service to “interpret the unique role that slavery played in the cause of the conflict” at all Civil War sites. Not long after, David W. Blight published his brilliant and influential 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). This volume examines how and why the slavery issue was pushed to the background by postwar Northerners and Southerners alike and makes it clear that a narrative of “soldierly valor” that completely ignored slavery’s role in causing the war dominated Civil War history for decades. This at least partially explains why Rangers at NPS sites were so good at interpreting army maneuvers but completely ignored the issues that led to those very maneuvers ever being necessary.

Congressman Jackson’s initiative and Professor Blight’s book caused a fundamental re-thinking of how the NPS presents the Civil War era’s history to visitors. Today, the agency seems determined to avoid the mistakes of 1961-65. Those interested in the military history of the war still find much to excite them at NPS Civil War sites. However, Park Ranger interpretive programs also now deal with the issues that led to war. In other words, today slavery is openly examined, discussed, and debated at NPS sites. Understanding why the nation went to war with itself—and what the war’s stakes truly were—can only increase visitor appreciation of these sites and, ultimately, the sacrifices made upon those fields.

The NPS has just published a new official commemorative handbook for the 150th anniversary. Titled The Civil War Remembered, the book’s contents page makes it clear that this is not your father’s (or grandfather’s) Civil War history. Noted historians have contributed essays on nearly every aspect of the war itself as well as the pre- and post-war periods. James McPherson provides the Introduction; James Oliver Horton writes on “Confronting Slavery and Revealing the ‘Lost Cause.’” Ira Berlin tackles “Race in the Civil War Era,” while Allen C. Guelzo looks at “Emancipation and the Quest for Freedom.” Essays on the experiences of women, civilians, and the Border States appear. The war’s impact of westward expansion, industry, and economy are explained. Eric Foner contributes on “Reconstruction,” Drew Gilpin Faust on “Death and Dying,” and David W. Blight examines “The Civil War in American Memory.” Those still fascinated by the war’s military history will enjoy “The Military Experience” by Carol Reardon.

By publishing such an eclectic set of essays by noted scholars of the Civil War era, the NPS has demonstrated its commitment to a better understanding of the full scope of the era. This has not been done at the expense of interpreting military history; rather, the agency’s willingness to examine not only how the North and South conducted the war but also its causes only adds to a better public understanding of the war and its complicated legacy.

The Historian as Op-ed Artist: An Interview with Jonathan Zimmerman

Chris Beneke

You may have run across Jonathan Zimmerman’s op-eds on the History News Network or while browsing the editorial pages of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Christian Science Monitor, or USA Today. If there is a definable art to writing an op-ed, this NYU historian has mastered it. Even while serving as department chair and engaging in other academic leadership—Zimmerman recently completed his term as president of the History of Education Society—he manages to write two or three op-eds per month. In all, he has published more than 300 opinion pieces in major newspapers and magazines.

Despite his commitment to the op-ed form, Zimmerman isn’t convinced that an op-ed will change any reader’s particular mind. Yet he believes that it remains a critical democratic exercise. Zimmerman observes that "our history is replete with examples of collective moral progress. And pamphleteers—the op-ed writers of their day—helped speed it along, with the logic and power of their prose."

Recently, Prof. Zimmerman spoke at my home institution, Bentley University. I caught up with him afterward via email to pose a few historically oriented op-ed questions.

Chris Beneke: When you visited Bentley, you made a revealing (and funny) point about not beginning your op-ed: "Scholars have long disagreed . . ." Are there any other practical do’s and don’ts to which historians trying to publish op-eds should pay special attention?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Well, that's the first and most important point: always remember that you are NOT writing for an academic audience. So your readers don't care about debates among professors, unless these debates bear directly on an issue of the day.

And that brings me to my most important suggestion. Whatever you write, you need to link it to what editors call a "news peg"—that is, something that happened VERY recently. In the 24-7 media world, things become yesterday's news—to borrow another cliché—more quickly than you might guess. So if you see something in the paper that you want to write about, you need to write about it as soon as humanly possible

And when you do write, make sure to put the point of the piece—the reason you're writing it—no later than the second or third paragraph.

That's what editors call the "nut graph"—the paragraph that establishes the central claim of the piece. Editors get hundreds of these things per day, so if they don't get to your nut graph right away . . . they'll stop reading.

Beneke: Should a historian only consider topics related to her primary area of research? Will editors be interested in anything else an historian has to say?

Zimmerman: When you write about something in your area of expertise—and when your "slug," or italicized bio, indicates as much—you do have a better chance of getting into print. But I would never advise anyone to restrict their op-eds only to the subjects of their historical research. If you have spent 10 or 20 or 30 years reading and teaching history, you know a huge amount about many, many things—and vastly more than almost everyone else knows about them. I think you have a right and possibly even a duty to share that knowledge with lay audiences.

Beneke: It’s pretty clear that blogging will not advance your career as a historian. What about op-ed writing?

Zimmerman: Well "advance your career" is probably still a stretch. But I will say that it won't inhibit your career, as it might have in the old days.

When I first started out, several senior scholars advised me not to write op-eds: it's a distraction from your "real" work, and it might make you seem flip or facile. I very much doubt that a junior scholar would receive such advice today, because the idea (or ideal) of the "public intellectual" is more deeply inscribed and accepted.

Beneke: Do you think that historians are peculiarly well-equipped to contribute op-eds, or would we be deluding ourselves in believing that?

Zimmerman: I wouldn't be a historian unless I thought the discipline had something very important to contribute to public dialogues. I do not think op-eds are the only way to do that!!! They're just my way. I do think each of us has a responsibility to share what we do with lay audiences. So we should all explore different ways of doing that.

For more on Zimmerman’s approach to the op-ed, click here.

Jane Kamensky on Learning from Fiction

Randall Stephens

Writing history is often a topic of discussion on this blog and animates the pages of Historically Speaking. (See some recent posts on writing here, here, and here.) Have a look at the right hand column on this page. You'll see posts grouped under "How to Write," "Writing History," "Editing," and more.

In that vein, I'm happy to post below a selection from Jane Kamensky's lead essay on writing in the April issue of Historically Speaking. Kamensky provides useful advice on scene setting, prose, and style, drawing on the lessons of fiction. She brings the wisdom of experience. With Jill Lepore, she authored the novel Blindspot (Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2008). Kamensky has also written The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (Viking, 2008), a finalist for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize; and Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Jane Kamensky, "Novelties: A Historian's Field Notes from Fiction," Historically Speaking (April 2011)

Here in the twilight of the Enlightenment, academic historians have fallen in love with how little we can know. Over the last fifty years, people, events, even places in the past have grown more obscure to many of us. Compare a work of history written in 1960 to one published in 2010, and you might wonder whether the mists of time have somehow thickened.

Can aspects of the novelist’s imagination help us to cut through the fog? Two years ago, the historian Jill Lepore and I published a novel we wrote together. Set in Boston in 1764, Blindspot started out as a lark, a gift for a friend. It grew into a project that felt important, even urgent, to us as scholars: a different way of knowing and telling the past. What follows are nine lessons learned in that effort to conjure a known and knowable world: a Then as real as Now, in our minds and on our pages.

1. Face It

Most historians suffer from prosopagnosia: face blindness. My co-author and I had written a goodly number of pages when it dawned on us that we had yet to tell our readers what our two first-person narrators looked like. In a novel that is, in large measure, about seeing, such description seemed a matter of duty. Our readers, not to mention our narrators themselves, needed to know how tall Fanny and Jamie stood, the color of their hair, the cut of their proverbial jibs.

How tough could such an accounting be? This was fiction, after all; we answered only to our characters. But confronted with this delectable task, we promptly choked. Their eyes, how they twinkled; their dimples, how merry: it seemed we had naught but rank cliché at our fingertips.

How do you take stock of a human face? Every time you walk in to a bus, a bar, or a classroom, you take people’s mettle visually, instantly, almost without thinking. But the sheer narrative terror of that moment made me realize that, as historians, we seldom confront the embodied nature of past individuals. We’re capable of writing the history of the self, or the history of the body, or even the history of sexuality, without crafting characters capable of staring back at us, as a good portrait does.

Writers of fiction give their characters faces and yea, even bodies, in a variety of ways. Consider this description, so thorough and meticulous that it bends in spots toward inventory:

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt—ready with a text if abbots flounder. . . . [H]e is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.1

Cromwell, of course, is a character from history and from fiction, in this case Hilary Mantel’s magnificent novel, Wolf Hall. Her description begins with a physical body, and a face, courtesy of Hans Holbein’s 1533 portrait. But then she peers through the eyes to the soul, as if she knows the guy, and her reader should, too.

Can historians do anything quite so wonderful? We don’t know the inner life of our subjects the way a novelist can know her characters. After all, a writer of fiction invents the soul whose windows the eyes become. Mantel’s Cromwell isn’t, can’t, and shouldn’t be history’s Cromwell. Thomas Cromwell merely lived; Mantel’s Cromwell soars. Yet almost every line in her description can be fully sourced: to the portrait, to Cromwell’s letters, to contemporaneous descriptions of the man. At bottom, Mantel’s path to knowing Cromwell isn’t all that different from a scholar’s. The magic comes in the author’s moral confidence in what she’s got—and then, of course, in the telling. Biographers, who live a long time with their subjects, offer readers hard-won, hard-working encapsulations of character all the time. Historians, trained to concentrate on the background at the expense of the figure in the portrait, do so less often than we might.

Of course, those who study remoter pasts and less celebrated people rarely even know what their subjects looked like. Yet no matter how obscure the actors, they had eyes and mouths, expressions and gestures that quickened the pulse of loved ones and triggered the loathing of enemies. Even when we cannot see the people we write about—perhaps especially then—we’d do well to remember that they weren’t made of paper, and didn’t pass their fleeting lives in acid-free boxes within temperature-controlled archives. They lived behind faces and within bodies, in heat and in cold, pleasure and pain, experiencing the present from the inside out. Their present became our past, and we’re stuck working from the outside in, from the page to the person. That’s no excuse for confusing the journey with the destination.

2. Taste It

The challenge of “facing” our subjects represents the merest tip of a vast and complex phenomenological iceberg. As a sometime novelist, I spent a lot of time presumptuously tasting, hearing, smelling, seeing, and feeling on my characters’ behalf. Since Blindspot is set in the sweltering summer of 1764, that wasn’t always pleasant.

The novelist is not alone here. In the last two decades the “history of the senses,” pioneered by scholars including Michael Baxandall and John Berger (sight), Alain Corbin (smell), and Richard Rath and Mark Smith (sound), among others, has become a flourishing subfield.2 I admire this work a great deal. But for all its sophistication, the history of the senses is as remote from sensorily rich history as the history of the body is from embodied history.

Because they create rather than discover a world, writers of fiction constantly index and mobilize the senses. Think of Proust’s madeleine, surely the most famous cookie in literature, whose lime-scented crumbs set off a four-page-long reverie that begins in Swann’s aunt’s kitchen and spreads to encompass “the whole of Combray, and its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid . . . town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”3

In nonfiction writing it can be no coincidence that some of the best sensoryladen storytelling comes from authors not burdened by Ph.D.s. Consider two examples, each describing the day-to-day operations of the print trades in the 18th century. The first comes from a superb work of academic history, Jeffrey L. Pasley’s The Tyranny of Printers:

Though printing had its cerebral and prestigious aspects, it was still a dirty, smelly, physically demanding job. One of the first chores that would be delegated to a young apprentice printer was preparing the sheepskin balls used to ink the type. The skins were soaked in urine, stamped on daily for added softness, and finally wrung out by hand. The work got harder from there, and only a little more pleasant. Supplies of ink were often scarce in America, so printers frequently had to make it on site, by boiling lampblack (soot) in varnish (linseed oil and rosin). If the printing-office staff survived the noxious fumes and fire hazards of making ink, their persons and equipment nevertheless spent much of the workday covered in the stuff.4

This is lucid, economical writing, pointed toward a set of important questions about the role of printers in the emergent public sphere of the early United States.

Now compare Pasley’s to this description, by the journalist Adam Hochschild, of James Phillips’s London print shop, hard by the Bank of England, where a crucial meeting of Granville Sharp’s antislavery society took place in May, 1787:

Type would be sitting in slanted wooden trays with compartments for the different letters; the compositors who lined it up into rows, letter by letter, would be working, as the day ended, by the light of tallow candles whose smoke, over the decades, would blacken the ceiling. . . . Around the sides of the room, stacks of dried sheets, the latest antislavery book or Quaker tract, would await folding and binding. And finally, the most distinctive thing about an eighteenth-century print shop was its smell. To ink the type as it sat on the bed of the press, printers used a wool-stuffed leather pad with a wooden handle. Because of its high ammonia content, the most convenient solvent to rinse off the ink residue that built up on these pads was printers’ urine. The pads were soaked in buckets of this, then strewn on the slightly sloping floor, where printers stepped on them as they worked, to wring them out and let the liquid drain away.5

Though the two passages rely on some of the same sources, Hochschild’s version owes as much to Dickens as to Pasley. It is specific and transporting rather than generic and distancing. Key differences reside in the sensory details: one paragraph, three senses. Sight: the blackened ceilings, the smoking tallow candles. Touch: compositors’ fingers flying over cast-iron type, the heft and texture of the wooden-handled pads, the disequilibrium of standing on that sloping floor. And of course smell: the close shop on a warm spring night reeking of piss as well as Enlightenment ideals.

These sensory details give Hochschild’s scene volume. But they do more than that. The sight, feel, and smell of the shop impart a frisson of opposites —these are “unlikely surroundings,” as Hochschild puts it, for a key moment in the transformation of humanitarian thought. Then, quickly, we’re on to the substance of that meeting, an intellectual history drawn from tract literature. Sensory does not mean sensational. read more>>>

Archives and History: Notes from the New England Archivists Conference

Dana Goblaskas

Archives and history have always been fields that are closely intertwined; without archives, historians would suffer a loss of many valuable primary sources, and without a sense of history, archivists would have no context in which to place their collections. Without history, frankly, archivists would be out of a job.

Or would they?

The idea of a divide between the disciplines of archives and history may seem unimaginable to many involved in those fields, but according to James O’Toole, the Charles I. Clough Millennium Chair in History at Boston College, a split may already be forming.

This “archival divide” was mentioned a few times during the recent spring conference of the New England Archivists, held at Brown University, April 1-2. One of Saturday morning’s first sessions, titled “Is Archival Education Preparing Tomorrow’s Archivists?” featured a lively discussion (as lively as a room full of archivists can be at 9 am, anyway) about how the field is changing and how education is changing in response. To sum up: as records shift from paper to electronic formats, archival education is beginning to stress competence in digital preservation, database management, and knowledge of web architecture and social media. Some members of the profession are concerned that a rift is growing between students interested in the digital realm of archives and those more attracted to the “analog” side of things—the manuscripts, photographs, and other ephemera that spring to mind when one thinks about an archive.

After an hour’s worth of conversation about how to bridge that gap between digital and analog spheres, O’Toole—formerly a professor of archival studies at UMass Boston—broached the question: Where does history fit into all of this? Based on what had been covered in the session so far, it seemed like the whole idea of history was taking a backseat to the new technical aspects of the profession. O’Toole expressed concern that archival educators may be growing so obsessed with teaching new technologies that they’re no longer placing emphasis on understanding historical context.

Silence filled the room as veteran and fledgling archivists alike reflected on what this observation could mean for the future of the profession. Maybe it was just me, but there seemed to be a very faint sense of panic in the air, especially when another session attendee wondered aloud what would happen in twenty years when many “classically trained” archivists retire, leaving the young technical turks in charge.

Before any lurking sense of doom could take over, a voice from the back of the room spoke up, identifying herself as a student enrolled in the library science and history dual-degree Master’s program at Simmons College. With several fellow students beside her nodding in agreement, she explained that there’s no need to panic quite yet; there are still some archivists-in-training who feel that history is hugely important, not only in order to have an understanding of context, but also to know how to conduct historical research, which has the added bonus of helping archivists better understand and assist researchers.

Though this enthusiastic Simmons student helped to quell the panic a little bit, O’Toole’s point is still a distressing one. Later that day, at the conference’s closing plenary session, he discussed how some archival neighbors, such as historians, aren’t “in the neighborhood” anymore, and how the profession needs to hold on to its roots as it explores new and exciting technologies. I certainly hope the educators in the crowd—and the mentors, students, and others working in the field—heard his message. The digital vs. analog divide may be more popular in archival discussions these days, but the sneakier split growing between archives and history may be the one that proves deadly to the profession if left unchecked.

A Personal Reaction to Arizona’s New Campus Carry Measure

Heather Cox Richardson

Last week, the Arizona legislature passed a bill permitting students to carry guns on public thoroughfares through state college and university campuses. This was a pared down version of a measure permitting guns in buildings, which was too extreme even for Arizona. Supporters of campus carry, though, suggest that yesterday’s measure will make the next step—that of making guns legal everywhere on campus—easier to achieve. They argue that the only way to stop violence on campus once and for all is to make sure everyone is armed for self-protection.

There has been much ink spilled over whether or not guns stop crime, and I don’t aim to revisit those debates here. I would like, though, to deal with one aspect of the campus carry argument that I have never seen addressed. It is to me one of the most significant.

This measure is a blow to female historians in the academy.

We don’t talk about it a lot in mixed company, but women, especially young petite women, face a particular problem in a history classroom far more often than male professors usually do. Female professors routinely have to assert their authority over young men and women whose pre-collegiate life has left them unaccustomed to treating women as authority figures. In history courses, it has been my experience that classes are often skewed toward men; in the more popular subjects like the Civil War, the class may be overwhelmingly male. Every semester, I have at least one student who refuses to accept that he must complete assignments for a female professor, or that he might earn anything less than an “A” in my class regardless of whether or not he does the work.

It’s not just me. Female TAs, especially petite ones, face a constant battle. Over the years, I have fielded complaints that students are in the class of a “dumb” female instructor when they could have the “smart” male TAs instead. I have had to transfer students out of the sections of female TAs because they heckled the instructor incessantly and refused to accept any grade other than an “A”. (At that particular university it was almost impossible to get a student removed from a course.) This phenomenon is frequent enough that I finally began as a matter of routine to give my female TAs tips on how to maintain control of a classroom that contains hostile male students, and to remind my male TAs to work visibly with their female colleagues to reinforce for the students that they stand together.

Unhappy young men, convinced that their female instructor is ruining their future with a low grade, can turn vicious. Over the years, I’ve dealt with crazy rants, threats, and a student who ambushed my every turn over a period of weeks, and I am neither petite nor a pushover. I can think of three times in my 23-year academic career in which I would have been afraid for my life if I had suspected that the hostile student confronting me carried a gun. Let me be clear: these were not your run-of-the-mill angry students disappointed in a grade; these were irrational young men convinced that some stupid woman who had no rightful place in a university and who had no rightful authority over them was destroying their future.

And the members of the Arizona legislature want to let those men carry guns?

With a campus carry law, female history professors become a special kind of sitting duck. I am comfortable with guns themselves—and am actually a big proponent of hunting—but my comfort with weapons stops dead when they come onto campus in the hands of young men who don’t believe in the crazy idea that women can legitimately be history professors.

Forum on Daniel Rodgers's Age of Fracture in April Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

Over at the U.S. Intellectual History blog there's been a lively discussion and debate generated by Daniel Rodgers's new book Age of Fracture. We add a little to that here with a selection from the forum on the book in the new issue of Historically Speaking. (View the full April 2011 issue on Project Muse. Use your college, university, or library connection for full access.)

AMERICA IN AN AGE OF FRACTURE: A FORUM

Historians and other observers of postwar America note the dramatic social and political changes underway since the 1960s. It was, as Daniel Rodgers puts it, an age marked by discontinuity, shifting party allegiances, and social fracture. An intellectual and cultural historian, Daniel Rodgers is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, including: The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1978), winner of the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize; Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics (Basic Books, 1987); and Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard University Press, 1998), which won the American Historical Association’s Beer Prize and the Organization of American Historians’s Hawley Prize. His latest book, The Age of Fracture (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), argues that in the 1970s Americans began to think of the country in terms of choice-making individuals rather than as a society shaped by classes, interests, and norms. Historically Speaking asked Bruce Schulman, Melani McAlister, Michael Kimmage, and Donald Critchlow to comment on Rodgers’s short essay about this shift in American thought. Their comments are followed by Rodgers’s response. (Citations of Rodgers’s book are in parentheses.)

Daniel Rodgers, "Age of Fracture," Historically Speaking (April 2011)

The history of the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century seems to constitute, at first glance, a maze of paradoxes. It was the age of Reagan, conservative partisans said at the time: a moment of deep political reversal. Peggy Noonan, one of the most gifted of Reagan’s speechwriters, joined the White House staff to be present at “the Reagan revolution.”1 Political managers dreamed of a realignment election that would change the very frame of partisan politics, and political scientists pored over election results to see if they could discern that one had occurred. A sense of the world as shifting rapidly beneath one’s feet was widespread, but, for all of Reagan’s symbolic prominence, the notion of a clear political watershed turned out to be an illusion.

Party allegiances shifted dramatically in the last quarter of the century, particularly among white southern voters; a new and highly energized conservative political movement came into being; but the realignment election that would give the Republican Party a permanent majority failed to occur. Closely fought elections, divided governance, and an increasingly divided electorate have marked the last three decades’ politics, not a new consensus. Even Reagan himself, Noonan wistfully admitted, “wasn’t a revolutionary; he wasn’t a missile drawn to the heat of a new idea.”2 The battles over taxes and regulation that Reagan’s election precipitated represented no revolutionary break with history. Even the “culture wars” and their partisan mobilization of religious loyalties replayed long-standing strains in 20th-century American politics.

A stronger argument for discontinuity can be made for the structures of the late 20th-century economy. The global economic crisis of the 1970s with which the era began, buffeted by oil price shocks and inflation, was a prelude to wide-ranging transformations in the domestic and global economies. Squeezed by new cost pressures, compromises between labor and management unraveled. Union membership spiraled precipitously downward. Manufacture went global in search of cheaper labor. Finance capitalism emerged out of the crisis stronger than ever before, fueled by new and more exotic investment instruments and new investor ambitions for corporate restructuring. The derogatory “age of greed” label reflects a simplistic reading of the moral tone of the era, but the phrase had its structural basis, as David Harvey and others have argued, in the collapse of the Fordist economy of the middle years of the century.3

And yet the age of materialism, global markets, ascendant financial capitalism, new political ambitions, and an intensely politicized punditry was also, and in many ways more fundamentally, a period of deep transformations in social thought. It was here, on the terrain in which Noonan thought her hero Reagan to have been least adept, that the discontinuities of the era were most pronounced. A whole vocabulary of concepts that had once seemed the common sense of social thought weakened and new languages took their place. The age of Reagan, the “age of greed,” was simultaneously, and more importantly, an age of transformation in ideas.

“A war of ideas,” conservatives often called it, but it was much less structured by partisan polarities than has often been understood. Ideas flowed quickly into politics through more aggressively partisan think tanks and more aggressively partisan funders of books and university research. But ideas simultaneously slipped across the political blocs, often incongruously and unpredictably. Deregulation was a radical project before it became a conservative one. The first practical school voucher proposals were the work of liberal social scientists. Libertarian ideas infiltrated social thought, leaving a trail across both Left and Right. >>> read on

See also the four comments and Rodgers's response:

Bruce Schulman, "Daniel Rodgers's (New) Consensus History"

Melani McAlister, "Popular Media in an Age of Fracture"

Michael Kimmage, "A Response to Age of Fracture"

Donald T. Critchlow, "On a Darkling Plain"

Daniel Rodgers, "A New Consensus?"

Historians as Public Intellectuals

Randall Stephens

Our first session of the Second Annual Conference on Public Intellectuals (James Hall, Harvard) dealt with a theme that would interest readers of this blog. Thanks are due to all those who took part. Historian Larry Friedman (Harvard's Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative) deserves special thanks for making this and last year's conference so productive.

9:00 - 12:00pm: Panel 1: HISTORIANS AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS
James Hall 1305

Chair: Jill Lepore (Harvard University)

Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Johns Hopkins University), “C. Vann Woodward and W.J. Cash: Similarities and Contrasts”

Joyce Antler (Brandeis University), “Gerda Lerner, Citizen-Scholar: ‘Why What We Do with History Matters’”

Ray Arsenault (University of South Florida), “The Freedom Writer: John Hope Franklin as a Public Intellectual”

The three presenters spanned the career's of historians who wrote and spoke to a large public. All had a very interesting, complex relationship with the American past, and, even had a moralist tone to some of their work. Jill Lepore (Harvard) offered comments before our general discussion. Lepore wondered about how the public reacted to each historian and how they encountered opposition. All of these figures spoke to a large audience and, at times, faced opponents. Gerda Lener, said Antler, encountered Nazi and anti-communist hostility in Europe and America. Wyatt-Brown mentioned that W. J. Cash, not long before his suicide, had a deep sense of persecution, largely imagined, which had spun off into delusion. Arsenault pointed out that there was less persecution in Franklin's case. Though Franklin long resented the exclusion and discrimination he faced in his early years. Bill Clinton eulogized Franklin at his funeral, said Arsenault, as: "a genius in being a passionate rationalist, an angry happy man, a happy angry man."

Like John Hope Franklin, Lerner, Woodward, and Cash all struggled with the burdens of the past and understood history in light of present divisive political and identity struggles. How does a public intellectual historian relate the past to the present?

Hence, there was a brief discussion after the presentations about how each of these dealt with a usable past. Most know, for instance, that Woodward, Franklin, and Lerner had an enormous influence on the field and well beyond it. C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow (as I mentioned on this blog not long ago) powerfully affected Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. Gerda Lerner established the first Women's Studies program in the country and served as a role model for thousands of scholars in history and the humanities. And John Hope Franklin turned the public's attention to some of the most desperate moments in American history. Does advocacy history differ from the history written by the deeply committed historicist? The audience and participants considered the work of Howard Zinn and other historian-activists in light of that question.

Like the other panels at this small conference (really like the best kind of grad seminar in its freewheeling discussions) wonderfully illuminated the role of the public intellectual. Later panels on race, religion, the cosmopolitan generation, and a discussion with Robert Jay Lifton further plumbed the areas where scholars interact with a larger public. (Keep an eye out for Lifton's memoir, which he spoke about, due out in June. It will be well worth reading!)