Latest issue of Historically Speaking Now Online

Randall Stephens

The latest issue of HS is now up on the Project Muse site.  It is a longer issue than normal, featuring two forums, five essays, and four interviews.  Readers might be especially interested in our forum on Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), one of the most important history books of the last year.  As Don Yerxa puts it in the intro to the forum: "It has been widely heralded as an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Parker makes the case for a link between climate change and the worldwide catastrophe that occurred 350 years ago. We asked Parker to begin our forum with an account on the book’s long gestation. Then three prominent scholars, Kenneth Pomeranz, J.R. McNeill, and Jack Goldstone, comment on Global Crisis, followed by Parker’s rejoinder."

This issue, as many of our readers know, also marks an important transition for HS.  We are suspending publication for the remainder of 2014 as we forge a more sustainable operational framework. We are hopeful that some very promising developments will enable us to resume publishing a new and improved Historically Speaking in 2015.

TOC, Historically Speaking (November 2013)

"Silver and Segregation"
Wyatt Wells

"Winston Churchill and the Literary History of Politics"
Jonathan Rose

"Winston Churchill and Almighty God"
David Reagles and Timothy Larsen

"Liberal Protestantism in 20th-Century America: An Interview with
David A. Hollinger"
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

"Catastrophe 1914: An Interview with Max Hastings"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Digital versus Printed Historical and Literary Editions: A Forum

"Television Is Not Radio with Pictures"
Holly Cowan Shulman

"Pouring Old Editorial Wine into New Digital Bottles"
Constance Schulz

"The Changing Production and Consumption of Historical and Literary Texts: The View from the Simms Initiatives"
David Moltke-Hansen

"The Invention of the American Meal: An Interview with Abigail Carroll"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Global Crisis: A Forum The Genesis of Global Crisis"
Geoffrey Parker

"Weather, War, and Welfare: Persistence and Change in
Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis"
Kenneth Pomeranz

"Maunder Minimum and Parker Maximum"
J.R. McNeill

"Climate Lessons from History"
Jack A. Goldstone

"Response"
Geoffrey Parker

"A Combat History of the Great War: An Interview with Peter Hart"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Jewish History and Education: A Review Essay"
Philip T. Hoffman

"Töchter of Feminism: Germany and the Modern Woman Artist"
Diane Radycki

Robin Hood and Remote Rule

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

British North America developed from a landscape of religions into a nation of races over the course of the eighteenth century.This process culminated in a hot, locked Philadelphia hall in 1787, but the lessons upon which the drafters drew reached back to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and earlier to Rome.

Americans had, after all, just rejected their inclusion in the British variant. If they failed to grasp the significance of their success, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome, David Hume’s History of England, and the tales of Robin Hood1 served to remind them of the dangers of remote rule.

Early Modern Europe possessed two empires with established Protestant populations inhabiting borders under perpetual threat.The Holy Roman Empire’s borderland Protestants included the Southwestern Germans of Wuerttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate, for whom “cuius regio, eius religio” offered precious little protection from neighboring Catholic armies. The British Empire sent forth Scots to settle among and pacify the Catholics a few leagues away in Northeastern Ireland. These two groups moved away from their fraught locations on Europe’s bloodiest frontiers topopulate the so-called backcountry of eighteenth-century British North America from the Kennebec to the Altamaha.2

When Virtù Courts Virtue

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

I found my way to this topic via a peculiar trajectory that began along the Cam under the tutelage of Quentin Skinner, where the distinction between classical republican virtù and protestant Christian virtue first entered my consciousness.  The hybridized virtù(e) that filled the political treatises of the American Revolution/War for Independence fascinated me but were not the centerpiece of my doctoral research.  When I returned to Jane Austen as my entertainment while my second son nursed, I realized that the hybridization process took place on the pages of Miss Austen’s novels.

The historiography of the American Revolution nearly drowns in examinations of Republican motherhood and patricidal rage. Austen’s heroines need not kill their fathers. They are already dead (Sense & Sensibility) or emasculated by poverty (Pride & Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park), frailty (Emma), and vanity (Persuasion).  It takes little imagination to envision Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Moreland, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot as the republican mothers of a future generation.  In attributes they share much with the ultimate Republican mother as proven in her dual role as the United States’ first wife and mother to (failed) Presidents, Abigail Adams.  They can hold their own in discussions of the lofty but are unafraid to engage in the lowly. Think of Abigail Adams mopping her floors with vinegar while her many children lay sick, and Anne Elliot caring for her injured nephew while his squeamish mother tends to her own nerves not his physical needs.  When the virtùous Captain and Mrs. Wentworth set sail, I suspect their destination is the new republic on the other side of the Atlantic.

Thomas Jefferson obsessed over virtù(e) and corruption in both the public and private spheres.  Jefferson is remembered for his assiduous adherence to the necessity of landholding independence as a prerequisite for political virtù. He never deigned to fight in the colonies-cum-new republic’s wars though famously wrote on the worth of blood spilled for a virtùous cause.   He is also remembered for his utter lapse in private virtue, bedding but never wedding a woman he considered his racial inferior.   Jefferson was a last gasp of  this double standard in the Americas.  The widow’s of New Jersey had already become the first in Atlantic world to cast their votes in a simultaneous demonstration of both their virtù(e)s. 

Finally, I beg leave to indulge in some Whiggish analysis and imagine that William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency would have been very different indeed  had Americans not come to accept Jane Austen’s definition of hybridized virtù(e) and applied it to men and women alike.

____________

Sources: Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters; and Jay Fleigelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims.

Resources for Teaching History

Over the last five years the HS blog has featured a variety of posts on history teaching, curriculum, group assignments, writing, and more.  Interested in creating a class website?  Wondering about how best to encourage students to read?  Need to engage students in a session about history and historiography?  You can find what you're looking for here:

Teaching

Teaching Resources

History Classroom

Writing

Assignments

Plagiarism

Grading

Why Study History

Field Trips

Curriculum

Survey Courses

Recommendation Letters

A Selfie of the YOLO Generation

Steven Cromack

“Selfie” is the 2013 word of the year. In many ways, its definition encapsulates the identity of the generation that made it their own. The Millennials are rising. It is important that our teachers, school

administrators, and college professors understand the students who sit before them in their classrooms. Of course, no generation is uniform. Based on the data, however, many Millennials members agree on certain ideas.

Born between 1982 and 2003, we Millennials grew up in a rapidly changing world, and we were—and are—able to capture every moment of it through MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine. We are called “the Peter Pan” and “Me Generation.” We live by social media and have made it a part of every moment of our lives. According to our elders, we are rude because we cannot look up from our phones; lazy; refuse to grow up; and play too many video games. The Baby Boomers despise our attitudes and insist that because of us the country is going to hell in a hand basket. Our teachers claim that we are a generation of idiots falling behind the rest of the world because of our ability to “txt” and write in single letters—idk—and lament that words like “selfie,” “clutch,” “gucci,” and “swag” have become part of everyday vocabulary.

Roundup: Digging up the Past

.
"Ancient Ancestors Come to Life," National Geographic, January 3, 2014

See our ancient ancestors come to life through paleoartist John Gurche's realistic human likenesses for the Smithsonian's Hall of Human Origins.

"The human story is really nothing short of the story of a little corner of the universe becoming aware of itself," says Gurche.>>>

Louise Iles, "Year in digs: How 2013 looked in archaeology," BBC, December 31, 2013

. . . . This year's research also gave us a glimpse into the private lives of our hominid cousins, reopening debates that might shed light on the evolution of our species.

The first complete Neanderthal genome was published, at the same time showing inbreeding within Neanderthal groups as well as reports of interbreeding between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.>>>

Live-Tweeting #AHA2014

Craig Gallagher

In anticipation of going to my first American Historical Association conference this past weekend in Washington D.C., I sought out a range of senior colleagues who had attended past AHA meetings for advice on what to expect. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate who is about to start writing a dissertation, I was regularly advised that many aspects of the AHA meeting did not yet apply to me, such as the Job Center, where interviews for academic positions are conducted, or the Book Exhibit where publishers meet with scholars and teachers to discuss manuscripts or books for use in the classroom.

My first AHA, therefore, was largely confined to the scholarly panels (and, I should add as a brief aside, various receptions, where I shamelessly handed out business cards and tried to score five minutes of chat with some of my favorite scholars. I was mostly successful). I attended six different panels over the four days, enjoying some immensely and others not-so-much. On the whole, I was impressed with the range of questions posed by various luminaries in my field, and – especially in the Atlantic History panels I was most interested in – the sweeping state-of-the-field discussions most papers engendered.

Snow Day

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

I am as giddy as a child at the prospect of a snow day. Others fret about climate change when they see -40 windchills on the weather and can’t push the door open into a snowdrift. I think about Laura Ingalls

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Wilder’s memoirs and relish the prospect of stoking the fires of memory and imagination.

Wilder’s books sparked my early interest in the past. Some of Wilder’s tales seemed similar to my own grandmother’s recollections of learning and teaching in a one room school house. My grandmother had a comparatively stable life on a comparatively prosperous farm in Illinois.  Laura followed Pa Ingalls from Wisconsin West in a series of tentative land claims. My mother read the stories aloud at bedtime. My father would pass through and groan every time Pa uprooted his family and chased further west in pursuit of a half-baked dream. I didn’t need the New Yorker to tell me Pa Ingalls was not the saint his daughter imagined him to be.  Even as a child, I couldn’t stomach the television version of Wilder's tales. Michael Landon’s Pa was so angelic that the actor needed no adaptation to his performance when he moved on to play an angel in Highway to Heaven. I craved the bits of terrifying realism that remained in the prose and faded from the screen.

In Praise of (Electronic) Serendipity

Elliot Brandow

Old books smell delicious, apparently like a combination of grass and vanilla. Browsing the stacks offers us a chance not only to enjoy the lovely aroma but also to stumble upon that fragrant book we didn't know existed, or that we wanted, but that is just the one we needed! Ah, serendipity! It

Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

consistently tops, or nearly tops, the list of 20th-century library features we sorrowfully mourn. As we move ever-increasingly toward electronic-focused library collections, it seems we'll have to forgo this feature and pleasure of physical browsing.

Roger Schonfeld recently posed the question in his excellent analysis of the landscape of electronic monographs: "given that there is no hope for many libraries of recreating the single-site book collection for browsing, are there other steps that can be taken to re-establish opportunities for serendipitous discovery in the emerging environment?"

But electronic browsing and stumbling just can't compete with searching, right? The war between a browsable Yahoo Directory and Google Search is long over:  Google won. And library catalog systems and databases have been riding Google's coattails since, emphasizing ever simpler single search boxes, relegating advanced features and browsing to the corners of the screen, or removing them entirely.

Io Saturnalia!—The Roots of Christmas

Steven Cromack

Emperor Constantine I. Detail of the mosaic in Hagia Sophia.

Christmas is a fascinating holiday, and one that has been two thousand years in the making. Christmas today is the confluence of ancient traditions, Constantine Christianity, and American capitalism. The roots of the holiday lie not in the birth of a deity, but with the Roman festival of Saturnalia; it was the

Emperor Constantine who made the day about “Christ’s mass.”

The Punic Wars made some Romans very wealthy and drastically increased the number of slaves. As wealthy tyrants battled for control, many plebeians yearned for equality, identity, as well as an end to envy and despair. Out of their misery came the annual celebration known as Saturnalia. “Io Saturnalia” was a shout that embodied the reign of Saturn, a time during which there were bountiful harvests and universal plenty. The Greek satirist Lucian recorded a conversation between Cronus, known as Saturn by the Romans, and his priest about the holiday celebrated between December 17 and 25:

Drinking and being drunk, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of tremulous hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water—such are the functions over which I preside.

Was Santa White?

Heather Cox Richardson

Pundits have sunk their teeth into a fight recently over whether or not Santa was white. After Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly declared Santa’s whiteness was a given, some called up the history of the original St. Nicholas (the patron saint of scholars, as well as children, by the way) to point out that the historical figure was Greek and therefore probably not light-skinned. Others have responded by noting that “Santa” is a universal and timeless figure who should not be bound by any physical characteristics.

But there is a different story worth noting in this odd debate. In fact, America has its own, very specific version of “Santa” who arrived during a particular moment in American history. That moment was the 1880s, a time when the nation appeared to be reaching some kind of healing after the deep wounds of the Civil War.

By the 1880s, Americans North, South, and West, had reached a political equilibrium, and that calm appeared to be driving a healthy economy. Politicians had ceased to fight over reconstruction. Northerners had come to accept that white Democrats would control the South; northern leaders turned to new western territories to make up the electoral votes they needed to continue to hang onto national power.

After a terrible financial crash in 1873, the economy had begun to pick up again by 1878, and by 1880, Americans were feeling flush and optimistic again. They began to celebrate significant events with parties and gifts. Weddings were no longer small affairs in someone’s front parlor; now they were elegant occasions in a decorated church with a reception afterward. For the first time, parents held parties for their child’s birthday, and those invited brought gifts for the guest of honor. Thanksgiving became a major holiday, marked with feasts of turkeys, ducks, or geese.

Ice Boxes vs. Refrigerators

Jonathan Rees

I’ve written previously here about the good and bad sides of suddenly being able to access the world’s biggest libraries through Google Books when you have a research project that you’d like to finish someday. Another Google experiment that debuted while I was working on Refrigeration Nation was Google Ngrams.

Ngrams, if you don’t know about them, chart the frequency of words or phrases as they appeared in volumes scanned by the Google Books project against the years that those books were published. (See Eric Schultz's post from last month.) Yes, it is incredibly easy to lose several hours playing with this research tool. Luckily for me, I already knew what I wanted to chart as soon as I heard of it:

CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

That is the chart for “ice box” vs. “refrigerator.” (For what it’s worth, icebox [one word] looks almost identical.) What I really appreciate about that chart is that it basically illustrates something that my research already told me: before the electric household refrigerator came along, “ice boxes” were called “refrigerators.” Before explaining that statement a little better, let me define terms. While often used interchangeably with the word “refrigerator” by people over sixty, an ice box in the historical sense refers to a box with ice in it designed to keep perishable food fresh. The first ice boxes were made by carpenters in the 1840s, designed to take advantage of something new in American life: the regular household delivery of large blocks of ice that could be obtained daily in large cities and even small ones. Now, instead of going to market every day for your vegetables or fresh meats, consumers could buy for more than one day of meals at once, and keep the extra food in their ice box.

Podcast: David Gleeson on the Irish in the Confederacy

Randall Stephens

In 2013 the University of North Carolina Press published David T. Gleeson's The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America.  It is  a sprawling study that is already receiving high praise from historians and journalists.  In the Boston Globe Michael Kenney writes "As his analysis unfolds, there is much that will surprise, perhaps even unsettle, Boston readers familiar with the abolitionists, the Massachusetts 54th, and the summertime encampments of reenactors. Gleeson looks at the role of Irish-Americans in the Southern debate over slavery, in the Confederate Army, on the homefront, and in the aftermath of the defeat." Over at the Irish Times Myles Dungan seems to agree. "Gleeson goes well beyond the merely anecdotal," says Dungan.   Gleeson conveys "a sense of what it was to be an Irish immigrant in the southern states that formed the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865."

David Gleeson is no stranger to the subject.  He has been writing and teaching on 19th century history, the South, and the Civil War for many years now.  A reader in history at Northumbria University he is the editor of The Irish in the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and the author of The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

In the interview embedded below, I speak with David about researching and writing The Green and the Grey.  David also talks about the role of memory in the post Civil War South and discusses the ways that his work fits into the wider field of southern and Civil War history.

George Washington Gets a 360

Eric Schultz

The annual review can be an uncomfortable event, but a 360-Degree Performance Review (the “360”) is one of the more harrowing proceedings that can befall a professional, business or academic. In a 360 you are asked to grade yourself against a series of attributes, everything from ethics to leadership to

Gilbert Stuart's 1797 portrait of George Washington

listening skills and coaching. Then, everyone in your “ecosystem” gets a crack at you, sometimes anonymously. This means your boss, often your boss’s boss or peers, your own peers and subordinates, and then some sampling of customers and vendors. Scores are averaged, and then you’re ready (or not) to talk with your boss about why you think your “collaboration with others” is an “8” while the 360 consensus shows it’s a “4.”

A good 360—and there is such a thing, when done well—will reinforce your positives and give you additional incentive to fix the things you generally knew were broken anyway. A traumatic 360, however, can disclose huge “holes” in your game, which quite often turn out to be the very things that are keeping you from being effective, or promoted. 360s are not done every year but, like a colonoscopy (not to put too fine a point on it), are appropriate for the occasional gut-check.

A month ago I was asked to meet with a group of senior executives who were about to receive the results of their first 360. This was a strong group who already knew themselves well, but there couldn’t help but be some anxiety. I was asked to talk specifically about my experiences with the tool—I’d been through a few—and try to put the practice in context as just another device that managers use to improve. My 360s were traumatic but positive: I learned that I never shined my shoes (at one extreme), that I was perceived as giving up too quickly on managers who failed (a gaping blind-spot in my game that I tried hard to repair), and that I should “be myself, but not too much myself”—the best piece of advice I ever got, and one I occasionally impart to others.

Why Were Tariffs Politically Important in Late 19th-Century America?

Heather Cox Richardson

After the Civil War, new industries brought Americans not just new products, but also more spending money and leisure time than any generation had ever had before. Far flung railroad, oil, and steel

President Grover Cleveland humiliated by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act.

operations, along with those of every other business, needed middle managers who could oversee production and sales and then report back to business owners. These new “white collar” workers had steady incomes and free time. They bought nice clothing and novels, and went to the theater; their wives played lawn tennis and their children had ice cream to eat and toys to play with at newfangled parties given just for them on their birthday.

Big business brought comfort and entertainment to many Americans, but it also brought grinding poverty to many others. Workers sweating near factory furnaces and entrepreneurs forced out of markets by monopolists resented the power of industrialists. By 1880 they focused their anger on the fact that American industry held its extraordinary position because it was protected by a law that kept foreign goods out of America. That law was called a tariff.

Tariffs were essentially taxes on products coming into America. They meant that foreign goods could not compete with American products because, no matter how cheaply they could be produced, the addition of tariff fees to their selling costs would make them more expensive than American goods. Since American producers did not have to worry about foreign competition, the leaders in an industry could work together and set whatever prices they wished.

Noblewomen in the Wars of the Roses: Turning Fortune’s Wheel

[This originally appeared on Lauren Johnson's blog on October 21, 2013]

Lauren Johnson

Much has been written about the violence of the Wars of the Roses. Civil conflicts inevitably leave a deeper scar than international ones, and this 15th-century combat has lived on in collective memory.

Anne of York and her second husband, Thomas St. Leger.

However, until recently, one group whose fortunes were  closely affected by the Wars has been overlooked: the noblewomen involved. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of medieval history will know why this is. Chroniclers write about the public deeds of noblemen, surviving records document the actions and decisions of that group because they were the ones who attended Parliament and fought in battles. Finding information about women – even the richest, most influential women – is hard work. And it is only with the increasing interest in social and gender history in the late 20th century that the difficult sleuthing necessary to unravel the lives of women was undertaken in earnest.

However, for every man directly involved in the Wars of the Roses there were numerous female relatives who were not only themselves affected by the conflict, but played an active part in it. Before you think I’ve gone too far, I’m not suggesting there were vast swathes of pseudo-Amazons marauding around 15th-century England. Women did not fight in the Wars, as far as anyone has discovered. Even Margaret of Anjou, who was the leader of the Lancastrian resistance from 1461-1471, never raised a lance. But perhaps our obsession with the bloodiness of this conflict, with the horror of violence on English soil, has blinded us to the essential work of women in this period. That is understandable. After all, attainder law and enfeoffment are definitely not as "sexy" topics as beheadings and battles. How can the ancient countess of Oxford, struggling to resist attempts to steal her estate by writing letters and employing lawyers, compare with the exploits of her son – leaping from castles to escape imprisonment and laying siege to St. Michael’s Mount? But the activities of noblewomen in this conflict were not considered inconsequential at the time. On the contrary, efforts to claw lands back to one’s family by battling through the law courts or pleading with prominent powerholders were deemed essential to those involved, and at a time when many men found themselves on the wrong side of the law or battlefield, and thus lost their authority (or their life), it fell to their wives and mothers to try to save their estates.

Life Is a Verb

Steven Cromack

The study of antiquity in American schools is superficial, lackluster, and in a state of asphyxia. State curriculum frameworks have all but stripped the histories of ancient Greece and Rome of depth, meaning,

Ancient bust of Seneca.

and relevancy. Ancient Greece was more than the origin of democracy, more than a group of city-states, and stood for more than a mythology. Rome was not just an empire, and it offered the world more than the concept of a senate. At the heart of these cultures was the idea that life is a verb, something that humans must do; something they must will into their world.

Greek democracy failed miserably. The other city-states quivered under the threat of Athens and her oppressive empire. Furthermore, the Greeks often envisaged humans caught in a double-bind, ensnared in webs of conflicting moral obligations between their relations and the meddling gods. As a result, the Greeks thought themselves to be better off dead than living. “For man the best thing is never to be born, never to look upon the sun’s rays,” bemoaned Theognis of Megara. “That the best thing for a man is not to be born, and if already born, to die as soon as possible,” bewailed Silenus.
 

The Passing of Michael Kammen

Randall Stephens

Michael Kammen

It is with heavy hearts that historians, former students, and others are reporting on the death of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen.  He leaves an enormous legacy as an inspiring teacher, mentor, and scholar.

H. Roger Segelken of the Cornell Chronicle writes that Kammen focused "his scholarship at first on the colonial period of American history."  He then "broadened his scope to include legal, cultural and social issues of American history in the 19th and 20th centuries." Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991), says Segelken, "helped to create the field of memory studies."  (See a short biography of Kammen here.)

Indeed, Kammen won high praise as a writer. In a New York Times review of Mystic Chords of Memory Thomas Fleming conceded that "not everyone will agree with all his conclusions, but they are presented with superlative style laced with refreshing wit and a refusal to tolerate the occasional fools and scoundrels who populate this patriot's game." (Thomas Fleming, "The Past Is What Catches Up With Us," New York Times, January 12, 1992, BR11.)

Listen More; Judge Less: Lessons from Jim Grossman

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

Thanks to a series of Teagle Teaching Workshops at Northwestern, the executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, gave a lecture on “Historical Thinking and Public Culture.” Much of what he said hearkened to conversations I had at the Historical Society’s 2012 conference "Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils." As Jim said, we know people like history. The History Channel, thousands of reenactors, and millions of genealogists indicate a thirst for knowledge of the past. Derision of such historical fancy keeps doctoral candidates clothed in a veil of superiority while their bank balances dwindle. Grossman suggested a revolutionary shift in academic historical thought: dispense with the patronizing judgment and listen to what people want to learn.

The lesson holds for the undergraduate classroom. Faculty ask one another, “what are you teaching?” Grossman suggests we end the obsession with our own performances at the front of class and focus upon what the students at the back learned. While teaching and learning have a symbiotic relationship, the shift of emphasis from professor to listener signals a broader embrace of history’s public value. The nuances of Foucauldian analysis may help the professor frame his or her argument, but if every iPhone in the lecture hall sends out a frantic  “wtf?” we have lost the pedagogical point.

Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions

[We repost this piece by Eric Schultz, which originally appeared on November 19, 2013.]
Eric B. Schultz

Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked

the holidays.

I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.

Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.