From Roosevelt to Roosevelt

Jonathan Rees

As a good liberal, I’ve always claimed that my favorite President ever is/was Franklin D. Roosevelt.  After all, his legacy STILL defines what liberalism means and what government does down to this day.  However, as I’ve gotten older, my opinion of Franklin Roosevelt has grown steadily worse.  First, there’s how he treated Eleanor.  Second, there’s the fact that the New Deal didn’t go further.  Lastly, like making batches of wine, some bits of the New Deal have aged better than others.

As a historian, I’ve been drawn to an entirely different, somewhat less liberal President—Franklin Roosevelt’s distant relation, Theodore.  Sure, there’s the whole warmonger thing.  That’s not too appealing.  And as a liberal, Teddy’s presidency was not nearly as charged as his unsuccessful campaign’s platform in 1912.  But as a personality, Teddy Roosevelt has every other President beaten hands down (with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, but I’d still give the nod to Teddy there by a smidge).

Let’s look at the biographies.  When I read biographies, the part I usually hate comes right the beginning.  How many historical figures are more interesting in their youth than they are when they’re adults?  If you’ve ever read David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback you’ll know he stopped that book in Roosevelt’s early twenties and it still made me cry.  (I’m not telling why if you don’t already know.  You should read the book.)  I’m not a huge fan of Edmund Morris’ three-part TR biography, but unlike say Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson, where the research is the best trait it’s Morris’ subject that makes all three of those books worth reading.

Mapping the Past Roundup

Maureen McGavin, "Digital project focuses on Lincoln-based sermons," Emory News Center, February 22, 2013

The route of Lincoln's funeral train

A group of graduate students at Emory University specializing in digital research in the humanities have created a new website that uses digital tools to analyze and compare the text of sermons delivered after Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

Their project uses various digital text tools to map geographic and thematic patterns in the collection of 57 sermons, which reside in the Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library of Emory's Robert W. Woodruff Library. The scholars are calling their project "Lincoln Logarithms: Finding Meaning in Sermons" and they hope it will become a model for the next wave of research in the humanities.>>>

Max Fisher, "A surprising map of the world’s national holidays (only two countries have no national day)," Washington Post, February 26, 2013

This map, inspired by a Reddit thread with a similar map, shows the national days of the world’s countries. As you can see, the world is mostly divided between countries that celebrate a national independence day and countries that celebrate a national unification or revolution day. The outliers are a tiny minority, and only two countries have no formal national day at all.>>>

History Conferences at Northumbria University, July 2013

Randall Stephens

The Tyne Bridge

It will be a busy summer at Northumbria University (Newcastle Upon Tyne).  My new colleagues in History and American Studies are bringing two large conferences to the university. Come mid-summer the campus will be abuzz with historians, foreign policy experts, economists, sociologists, and likely more tweed and elbow patches than you can shake a stick at.

First, the university will host the annual meeting of the Historians of Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS).  HOTCUS, according to the organizations website, promotes "scholarship in the field of twentieth century American history. It has strong links with the British Association for American Studies and is the major academic organization for historians of modern America." Professor Wesley Hogan (Virginia State University) will deliver the plenary lecture: "'You Have to Stand Up, You Don't Have to Survive:’ Civil Rights and Memory in the United State." (The proposal deadline has passed, but booking is still open.)

Not long after the HOTCUS meeting, the annual conference of Transatlantic Studies Association (TSA) will convene at Northumbria from 8 - 11 July 2013.  A little more about it:
 

The TSA exists to provide focus for transatlantic area studies and bring together scholars from different disciplines in order to further research and understanding of transatlantic relations. It has strong links with the US Embassy, British Academy, Failte Ireland, and NATO attracting members from North America, Europe, and Asia. The TSA is also the societal body responsible for publishing the Journal of Transatlantic Studies.*

Plenary Speakers will be Donna Alvah (St Lawrence University, New York) and Michael Clarke (RUSI).

The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2013.

Why I Teach Baseball History: A Brief, Self-Serving Manifesto

Chris Beneke

A detail of a print of Union prisoners in a
Confederate camp playing baseball, Salisbury,
N.C., 1863. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Very few people ask me why I teach baseball history. It’s obvious. I love baseball. Lots of students love baseball.

But let me offer another explanation, something out of left field: baseball history is also a really effective way of teaching American history.

Before you sport non-enthusiasts get too worked up, let me dispense with the usual caveats. College-level baseball history students shouldn’t memorize how many American League pennants the Yankees won during the 1950s (8) or the last time the Chicago Cubs were major league champions (1908). It’s unnecessary for them to recall that Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941 or that George Foster led the major leagues with 52 home runs in 1977. They could also receive a fine education in baseball history without knowing that Don Larson pitched the only perfect post-season game in 1956 or that Bob Gibson struck out 17 batters in the opening game of the 1968 World Series.

When Do We Forget?

Eric Schultz

We were sitting round this past Thanksgiving and I asked our assembled crew what day November 22 was, besides Thanksgiving.  Everyone looked stumped.  So I added, “49 years ago?”  One of our 55+ did the math and announced that it was the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.  She remembered the day vividly.

In fact, it was a day that we would never forget.  One, it appears, we are now rapidly forgetting.

Intrigued, I checked data from the US Census Bureau and did some arithmetic, making the assumption that someone would have to have been about 5-years-old at the time (or 54-years-old now) to have a “resonant” living memory of the Kennedy assassination. In big, round numbers, then, the 54+ age demographic represents about 25% of the United States’ 2012 population. 

So, at least one reason we fail to remember the Kennedy assassination is that only 25% of us have any real memory of it.

I did the same rounded historical math for the sinking of the Titanic, Pearl Harbor, the first moon walk, the Challenger Disaster and 9/11, just to pick a few of our more vivid cultural memories.  I discovered the percentage of the American population with “resonant living memory” in 2012 would be as follows (again, in big, round numbers): 

• Titanic (95 years or older): There are 70 thousand centenarians, so under 1% of the U.S. population remembers. 

• Pearl Harbor (76 years or older): About 7 to 8% of the population remembers. (My dear departed father would have been 79 years old this year, and when he heard on the radio about Pearl Harbor he hid under his bed—6,000 miles from Hawaii.) 

• Moon walk (48 years or older): About 33% of the population remembers. 

• Challenger Disaster (31 year and older): About 45% of the population remembers. 

• 9/11 (16 and older): About 75% of the population remembers.

When Is It Time to Stop Teaching Something?

Jonathan Rees

Those of us who teach the second half of the American survey course face a problem that only recent historians ever seem to face: our period keeps expanding.  Until there’s some kind of mass meeting where all we historians decide to move the dividing line in a two-course US survey sequence from 1865 or 1877 to 1900 or something, what counts as 1877 to the Present will only get larger.  This poses some problems for those of us who’d like to keep our courses current.

When I started teaching during the late-1990s, 1989 (with the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that) was a natural time to stop.  A few years ago, I rearranged my entire survey course in order to make it up to September 11, 2001, without actually covering it as everyone I was teaching still remembered it perfectly.  Well, those days have changed.  Listening to my students talk, I realized it was time to recall the events of that day and at least a few of the ones following it because they were barely cognizant of what was happening at that time yet have been living in its shadow ever since.

Besides needing to make room for the near present, I’ve been trying to update some of my other lectures from further back in light of recent scholarship.  When I first started talking about the 1970s, it was all Watergate all the time.  After all, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened was the first book on that decade to come out after it ended.  Jefferson Cowie has absolutely torpedoed that stereotype forever.  I’ve also tried to include some of the absolutely amazing material that’s been written about the rise of conservatism in recent years by people like Kim Phillips-Fein and Bethany Moreton.

My problem, therefore, has not been what to include in the new lectures I’ve been writing.  My problem has been what to cut out.  Cover new ground in any depth and something has to go.  Since I’ve also tried to redesign my course to include less lecturing, some of these cuts have been quite painful.

For example, I used to work for Stanley Kutler.  If you know Stan, you know that he was the first academic historian to write a book about Watergate.  When you get Stan to talk about Nixon, he won’t stop.  Therefore, I picked up an enormous amount of information about Watergate almost by osmosis.  I’ve cut my Watergate coverage down from a lecture all its own to about ten minutes.  It just doesn’t seem as important as it once did, anyway. 

Another subject from the survey class I used to cover in much greater detail is the New Deal.  That was two lectures:  First New Deal in the first one, Second New Deal in the second.  The Depression got a lecture all its own.  It still does, but I’ve got the New Deal down to one lecture by simply admitting to myself that the long string of Alphabet Soup programs that history teachers have been teaching since about the time that Roosevelt died is actually rather boring.  I now cover the programs that I think were crucial (NIRA, Social Security, NLRA, and a couple of others) and let my students read about most of the rest.

Similarly, I used to have one lecture for the Populists and another lecture for the Progressives.  Maybe that’s because I was taught by so many political historians as an undergraduate and graduate student, but I’d rather be talking about scholarship that dates from after I was born, thank you very much.  If I enjoy it, I think they’ll enjoy it more.  Just because you learned it is no reason that you have to cover the exact same material that your professors did. 

Ultimately, I think the question of coverage is the key here.  As Lendol Calder has been saying for years, our survey courses do not have to turn us all into walking encyclopedias.  (In fact, if we do our jobs right many of your students will come back for more in upper-level courses.)  Since covering everything will get even harder as time marches on, perhaps its best to change your approach before defeat becomes inevitable.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs mostly about technological and academic labor matters at More or Less Bunk, but still writes about history there every once in a while.

Pledging Allegiance to the American Flag

Steven Cromack

Did you ever wonder why children in America pledged allegiance to the American flag?  The story actually begins in Boston.  1892 was the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World.  That year, two Bostonians embarked on a mission to use their paper and the event as an opportunity to put flags in schoolhouses across the country. 

Puck Magazine, 1902.

A Boston businessman by the name of James Upham owned the magazine Youth’ s Companion, which featured serials and other stories for youngsters and families.  At the time, it commanded a circulation of 500,000.  In 1891, Upham began using the magazine to sell American flags to schools. It worked.  By the end of that year, the magazine had sold 25,000 flags.  During the same year, he also petitioned the governing board of the Columbian Exposition for a day to celebrate the founding in schools.   The board agreed that it would be a good idea, provided the federal government would approve it.  Upham then went to Washington to petition Congress and the President.

Because of Upham’s efforts, in July of 1892, President Benjamin Harrison declared that October 21, 1892 would be a national day of celebration:

The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day's demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.

In preparation for the event, Upham hired Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist to write a pledge for the students to recite as part of the October ceremony.  Yes, that’s right, a socialist wrote the Pledge of Allegiance.  In its original form, students were supposed to raise their right arm in the air as a form of salute and recite:
   

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Southington, Connecticut school children
pledging their allegiance to the flag, 1942,
Library of Congress.

After a few short years, many states passed legislation that required students in the public schools to recite the Pledge.  In the wake of World War I, however, and against the backdrop of a rapid influx of immigrants to the United States, many became concerned that America’s heritage and cultural identity were at stake.  In 1923, adults from across the nation converged on Washington D.C. and held the first annual National Flag Convention.   People had become not only concerned about the lack of attention the Pledge was getting, but also, that many immigrants would use the words “my flag” to maintain allegiance to their home flags.  The people at the Convention resolved to amend the Pledge to read:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

A year later, the next Convention added the words “of America.”

In 1939, as war raged in Europe and images began to appear of the Hitler salute, the Sons of the American Revolution began pressuring Congress to adopt an official set of flag rules and etiquette for ceremonies.  Outraged by the schools’ compulsory flag salute and pledge recitation some began to challenge its legality.  As a result, the Supreme Court struck down compulsory pledge recitation during the school day in Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940). 

In the wake of Pearl Harbor and American nationalism, Congress responded to public pressure by passing the Flag Code in 1942, changing the salute to a hand over the heart.  As far as flags in the schools were concerned, the Flag Code only mandated the display of the American flag during the school day.  While the Pledge was no longer mandatory, many schools continued to start the day with an optional recitation, keeping in line with an already well-established tradition.  In addition, after Pearl Harbor everyone was proud to pledge allegiance to their flag.

Mr Coffee

Randall Stephens

Americans' taste changes over time, like almost everything else, that is.

Witness the change in diet and the range of good eats available since the 1980s. The food and drink revolution of the 1980s and 1990s even introduced artisan cuisine to the Velveeta cheese belt. In the Midwest microbreweries began to crop up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now most Americans who live near civilization can shop for extra virgin olive oil, goat cheese, and cracked-wheat bread at there local supermarket or by a plate of Rare Ahi Tuna with Wasabi Vinaigrette, garnished with some unidentifiable greenery, at an area bistro.

Long ago, we drank Folgers, Maxwell House, and instant coffee. Now, coffee chains have familiarized Americans with the wonders of Mediterranean, Sumatran, and Kenyan varieties. The rage for the exotic even extends into the bizarre. Several years back the ultra-rare Kopi Luwak made a splash, or should I say, plop.

Before the 1970s most Americans brewed coffee at home with inferior peculators. Enter Samuel Glazer, a founder of the company that rolled out Mr. Coffee in 1972. Glazer passed away earlier in March at the age of 89.

Over at NPR Robert Siegel and Oliver Strand of the NYT discuss the change that the Mr. Coffee drip machine wrought:

STRAND: They realized that there was an appliance that they could make that would produce filter coffee that was much cleaner, much sweeter and, frankly, much tastier than percolator coffee.

SIEGEL: Because that's the way that coffee was brewed on an industrial scale, if you will, for big companies and hotels.

STRAND: Yeah, there were these large batch brewers that were basically enormous versions of what we started to use in our homes; these little countertop plug-in coffee drippers.

SIEGEL: And so, he wasn't the engineer himself but they figured out let's get somebody to make a miniature version of a huge coffee brewer.

We raise our cups of Cà phê sữa đá (iced Vietnamese coffee) to you, Mr. Glazer!

Jesse James and Anwar al-Awlaki

Heather Cox Richardson

There has been a great deal of debate over whether or not it was legal for the Obama administration to order the September 30 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. It seems unlikely to go far in the realm of political discussion, since al-Awlaki was not on American soil, and since few Americans seem to have digested the fact that, although he had a foreign name and was clearly implicated in major terrorist attacks on the United States, al-Awlaki was born in America and was thus an American citizen.

A similar question did, though, roil American politics in the 1880s: should the government be able to order the assassination of an American citizen? Then, unlike now, it was discussed on both sides of the political divide as a principled question of executive power and the rights of citizens.

The targeted citizen, in that case, was Jesse James.

James had fought for the Confederacy as one of Quantrill’s Raiders in Missouri. These men were so hated by the pro-Union Missourians that, when the end of the war permitted most Confederate soldiers to go home in peace, Unionists refused to acknowledge the Raiders as Confederate soldiers. Someone put a bullet in Jesse as he made his way home from the fighting.

For their part, James and his buddies were not cheerfully reconstructed ex-Confederates. They survived by robbing trains, banks, and express companies, all of which were associated after the Civil War with the Republican federal government. But James insisted that he was not a criminal; he had been forced outside the law by the government itself. After the war, ex-Confederate Democrats in Missouri could not vote, sit on juries, work as lawyers, or hold government offices. James maintained that the true perpetrators of the crimes for which he was blamed were Republicans. In his view, state laws barring Democrats from access to legal protection, juries, and offices guaranteed that he could never get a fair hearing. According to a sympathetic biographer (he referred to Jesse as “an angel of light”), their manhood forced men like James to “turn upon that law that hounded them and that society that hunted them, and outrage and defy it.”

Missouri officials had no luck bringing James to justice. Neither did Pinkerton detectives, hired by angry express company owners. (The James Gang robbed stagecoaches, banks, and trains and committing a host of murders along the way.) Finally, in desperation, the Missouri governor, T. T. Crittenden, persuaded a member of James’s own gang to murder him. Bob Ford shot James as he straightened a picture on the wall. When Ford and his brother pled guilty to the murder and were sentenced to death, the governor promptly pardoned them and paid them the bounty he had placed on James’s head.

Predictably, Democrats were outraged by the prospect of an elected Republican official arranging for the murder of a Democrat. But many Republicans were also unsettled. Crittenden had “hired an assassin” as if he were a potentate, one Republican newspaper editor wrote. Popular opinion swung quickly to an acknowledgement that James was a criminal, and even rejoiced that he was out of commission, but rejected entirely the idea that government officials should have the power to ignore legal processes and simply murder their domestic enemies. James’s portrayal as a man persecuted by the government made him a popular hero.

While any parallels should not be pushed too far, James’s situation was not unlike that of al-Awlaki. Both appear to have been criminals who protested a government that would not acknowledge their grievances. At the same time, al-Awlaki’s case raises questions the James case did not, questions, for example, about the nature of war powers during times of undeclared war, and how international terrorism should affect Constitutional rights. These are not unimportant issues. It’s too bad that they will most likely not get the bipartisan public airing they need in the wake of al-Awlaki’s death, the same public debate that followed Jesse James’s assassination.

School’s Back From Summer: Blogging about Teaching

Edward J. Blum

[This is a crosspost from Religion in American History]

Well, it’s about that time, that delightful and dreadful moment when classes begin again. Unless you are privileged to have a sabbatical or be on fellowship (cough, cough, Matt Sutton you lucky duck, cough, cough), the end of August is when the kids come back and time flies away. Alas, school’s back from summer!

This marks the beginning of my second decade of teaching, and I wanted to try something new not just within my classes, but about my classes. So, I’ve decided to start an interactive blog about teaching the United States history survey. I wanted to work through the changes that I’ve made, give my fellow teachers a platform to post and to discuss their teaching strategies, and to give students an opportunity to see behind the process of teaching and to participate in what is taught. I grabbed one of my favorite colleagues and teachers, Kevin Schultz from the University of Illinois, Chicago, author of a great survey textbook, Hist, and author of the tremendous new monograph Tri-Faith America, to help with the endeavor, and away we go. I invite you to join us over there with your own posts, reflections, thoughts, and considerations.

Religious history has been one of the ways my classes have transformed dramatically – not just the religious content of the course, but also the religious composition of the classroom. When I first taught in Kentucky, it seemed everyone knew what the Bible was. I don’t think that’s the case of my San Diego students. All of our classrooms and contents will be distinct, and I hope you’ll make your way to the blog to help me and others to teach better (or at the very least have some zany fun in the process). Like it or not, school’s back from summer.

teachingunitedstateshistory.blogspot.com

Women's Suffrage at 100

Randall Stephens

San Diegans will mark the centennial of women's right to vote in their state with a "Suffrage Parade" on August 28. (On October 10, 1911, an amendment on Rights of Suffrage passed by a popular vote of 125,037 in favor and 121,450 opposed.) Beautiful Balboa Park will set the scene for the gathering, which marks a major milestone for democracy. The march is sponsored by the Women's Museum of California. Organizers encourage participants to don "Suffrage outfits to march across the Laurel Street Bridge in celebration of 100 years of voting rights for California women." I hope it's not too hot for that, but knowing San Diego's predictable weather, I'm pretty sure it will be a great day.

California granted voting rights to women nine years before the nation did with the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." But even in the West, a region that was far ahead on social issues like this, there was considerable debate. It gives us some much needed perspective to consider how fiercely many Americans fought against suffrage. Both sides thought the stakes were extremely high. Why did opponents think women's suffrage was such a bad idea? What was the nature of the debate?

I paste here a selection from Dora Oliphant Coe's September 5, 1911 Los Angeles Times editorial. (The Times was an outspoken conservative paper in the early 20th century.) Notice the arguments against enfranchisement, especially the typical remark about "enslavement." Here Coe is summarizing the arguments of a prominent anti-suffragist:

American Geography and the Missouri River

Heather Cox Richardson

One of the things I insist all my undergraduates learn at the beginning of each of my classes in American history is basic American geography. This sounds terribly basic, I know, but no one ever bothered to teach it to me (or at least, if they did, I wasn’t paying attention), and once I started teaching it, I discovered that no one had ever taught it to most of my students, either.

I don’t do anything fancy. I start with a physical map of North America (with an inset of Hawaii, of course, pointing out the great piece of trivia that, thanks to Hawaii, America has six time zones. Then I tell them that they must know the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, Canada and Mexico, and three mountain ranges: the Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevada. I talk a bit about why each has been important in some major development (using the Donner Party for the Sierra Nevada, to keep them awake). I point out the Great Plains and the Great Basin and explain the low rainfall and high winds that create such distinctive features there, showing some of the scenery from those sections.

But the natural elements on which I spend the most time in my introduction to American geography are the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, and the Missouri River.

The Mississippi is the great artery of what became the United States, and figures prominently in most economic developments until after the Civil War (this is an easy one, since most of them have heard of the Mississippi, and maybe even have read Huckleberry Finn).

Then I turn to the Ohio. No one can understand early American history without understanding the Ohio River, the incredible fertility of the land around it, the determination of Indians to hold it, the line it created between slavery and freedom. (Huck can help here, too, since he and Jim went down the Mississippi River to reach freedom—counterintuitive until I explain they were trying to get down the Mississippi far enough to get up the Ohio.)

Then, balancing the importance of the Ohio on the western side of the Mississippi, there’s the Missouri River. The Missouri gets short shrift in American History texts and courses, it seems to me, and it shouldn’t. It dominates the West as thoroughly as the Ohio dominated the East in an earlier time. Just a few obvious points: It was the Missouri that offered Lewis and Clark a highway to the West Coast at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The land around the upper Missouri has always had some of the best hunting in the country, making it highly prized both by the native people who managed the lands before the coming of easterners, and by the interlopers who started arriving in the 1860s. It was this region, of course, that produced Red Cloud and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, and it was to wrest control of this land that General George A. Custer marched his men to the banks of the Greasy Grass in 1876. Only a few decades later, it was the Missouri River that seemed to offer the answer when the dry plains defeated hopeful western farmers. Fifteen dams now slow the river, creating reservoirs and taming floods to make the upper Northwest more productive and habitable.

And that, of course, is the reason for this post. How many of our students—at least those east of the Mississippi—paid any attention to the historic and terrifying flooding of the Missouri River this spring? A large melting snowpack has combined with torrential rains to create a flooding emergency that rivals Hurricane Katrina. Levies are breaking up and down the river, sending evacuees fleeing as the water covers homes and fields, as well as the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station in Nebraska (which does not appear to be in danger). Reuters is reporting that the floods along the Missouri and the Mississippi have damaged about 2.5 million acres of farmland in the U.S. which seems likely to hurt farm production. It’s probable that this will, in turn, drive up food prices. This is not an unimportant weather event.

Already, observers are speculating about what this disaster says about the way America has historically approached the taming of the Missouri. The management of water in the West has long been a subject that interests western historians, but seemed to have drifted by most people in the East. And now that debate has sprung pretty dramatically out of the pages of historical journals and into the headlines. This year’s disastrous flooding suggests that American historians might be able to do the country a service by making sure all their students know what the Missouri River is, why it’s been important in the past, and just how vital its management has been, and is still, to the nation today.

More on Our Virginia: Past and Present

Randall Stephens

The new issue of Harper's Magazine includes some of the findings of a "Report on the Review of Virginia’s Textbook Adoption Process, the Virginia Studies Textbook Our Virginia: Past and Present, and Other Selected United States History Textbooks." Heather blogged about the controversy surrounding the adoption of the textbook and some of its pseudohistory here. Now we return to it with more on the text's creative or unknowing anachronisms . . . I didn't see anything in the report about John Quincy Adams being a founding father.

The reviewers of the text included: Christopher Einolf (DePaul University); Mary Miley Theobald (Retired: Virginia Commonwealth University); Brent Tarter (Retired: Library of Virginia); Ronald Heinemann (Retired: Hampden-Sydney College); Lauranett L. Lee (Curator of African American History, Virginia Historical Society).

A note to any future textbook writers out there: Check your sources and then check them again. Or, at least have sources. Don't make things up.

I include below a sampling of the official critique. The items in quotes are from Our Virginia:

“In 1607 Queen Elizabeth sent three ships to found Jamestown, Virginia.” That would have been difficult, since Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and neither she nor her successor, King James, “sent” any ships. They approved when a private company, the Virginia Company, sent ships to Jamestown, and no doubt King James approved when the colonists astutely named the town after him.

“They had been terribly persecuted and had seen friends killed.” I would like to know the source for this statement. I’ve never heard of Pilgrims being killed in England. Mostly they left England because they wanted to get away from the bad influences of the established Anglican Church. The statement seems over-the-top, but I can’t prove or disprove.

“Very few people in colonial America could read . . .” This is a myth. The overwhelming majority of white colonists were literate. In New England, literacy rates were higher than elsewhere because there were more schools and there was an emphasis on learning to read the Bible, but even in Virginia and other Southern colonies, almost all white men and even most white women could read in the eighteenth century. Percentages change over time, always growing larger, but even in the seventeenth century, about 60% of men in Virginia could read and about a quarter of the women. Figures are higher for the northern colonies. At no time in American history did “very few people” know how to read (unless one is talking about African Americans or Native Americans).

“. . . until you realize that it hurt America’s tea makers, whose tea already had a heavy tax.” America didn’t have any tea makers; the climate isn’t suited to growing tea. American had merchants who sold smuggled tea, avoiding the tax. Again, I understand it is hard to explain a complicated issue in simplistic terms, but this treatment of the Tea Act isn’t accurate.

“Washington and French General Lafayette inspect troops before the Battle of Morristown in New Jersey.” First of all, there was no Battle of Morristown. Morristown was where Washington and his troops wintered in 1777 (January 6- May 28). Second, Lafayette was not a general until July 31, 1777 and didn’t even meet George Washington until August 10, 1777, long after Morristown, so they wouldn’t have been reviewing any troops.

“Cyrus McCormick’s young grandson was there on the day the reaper was tested.” (then the book quotes the grandson’s “eyewitness ” account). Since Cyrus McCormick was 22 in 1831 when he first tested his reaper, it is unlikely his grandson was present. The reason this grandson’s account is quoted is to “prove” that a black slave, Jo Anderson, helped invent the reaper. While the slave helped with all the farm work, including building a reaper, he should not be credited as a co-inventor, as some Politically Correct people would like. It is a serious mistake to title this section “Anderson and McCormick’s Reaper.” It was Cyrus McCormick’s reaper. http://www.virginialiving.com/articles/lion-of-the- hour/index.html

“The Quakers, a religious group, believed that all people were created by God.” A rather unnecessary sentence, don’t you think? What religious group does not believe that all people were created by God? It doesn’t say anything about the Quakers’ beliefs. It might be better to note that they were Christian pacifists who believed all people were equal, even women, Indians, and blacks.

“Evenings were spent playing cards or checkers, writing letters to loved ones, reading old worn newspapers, and playing baseball by torchlight.” That would be some trick, playing baseball by torchlight, since you couldn’t see to catch a ball. Torches give off almost no light beyond a few feet from the flame. I have never seen any mention of playing baseball by torchlight.

“Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the South’s largest cities. It was an important railroad hub . . .” Yes, Atlanta was a railroad hub, but it was one of the smaller cities in the South. In the 1860 census, Atlanta ranks 99th among American cities, with a population of 9,000. The South had many, many cities larger than Atlanta, including Baltimore at 212,000, New Orleans at 169,000, Louisville at 68,000, Richmond at 38,000 (25th), etc. Georgia alone had three cities larger than little Atlanta: Savannah, Augusta, and Columbus. http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab09.txt

Map showing Fort Necessity (which is spelled wrong as Neccesity) locates the fort in the wrong state. Fort Necessity is in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. Fort Duquesne is also in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. (The text accurately states that Fort Duquesne is near Pittsburgh, but the map positions it in Ohio.)

St. Louis is always written as St., not Saint.>>>

Had Enough Snow? You're not Alone . . .

Randall Stephens

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. . . Arghhh!!

Does it give us any comfort to know that Americans have been trudging through snow drifts, swearing at Jack Frost, and sinking into a dark cold night of the soul/seasonal depression for decades, even centuries? Probably not. But, if you think that blizzards have a way of shutting things down today . . . imagine what it would have been like before the second industrial revolution and before some clever person attached a shovel to the front of a car. By the 19th century, telegraph lines could report storms in the West before folks felt those in the east. (In 1861 Western Union completed the first transcontinental line, from San Francisco to the East Coast.) But, things were much more messy. What was the world like before Doppler Radar?

The Long Storm of 1798, which stretched from Maryland to Maine, dumped about 18 inches on New York City. In Historic Storms of New England (1891), Sidney Perley wrote of that memorable November wintry blast:

The great quantity of snow that fell was unprecedented so early in the winter, and in but few instances had the settlers experienced such a snow storm during any part of the year. The mail carriers, or postboys, as they were called, were obliged to ride through fields for miles at a time, the roads being impassable in all parts of the country. The snow was so deep that in some places where the highways had been shoveled out the banks of snow on both sides of the road were so high that men on horseback could not look over them. Many houses were so deeply buried in the snow that the families which lived in them found it very difficult to make an egress without tunneling through the drifts.

Ninety years later Americans looked out their windows, wide-eyed and anxious about the whiteout that the Blizzard of '88 produced. Temperatures fell well below zero, winds gusted, and cities across the country were brought to a standstill. A reporter at the New Hampshire Sentinel could hardly believe it. "The oldest inhabitants can recollect no such storm as the present," he observed. "It probably never snowed faster in this part of the country than it did from Monday morning until Tuesday morning, almost without interruption. In addition to this the wind blew a gale continuously, and the snow was packed into deep, solid drifts on all sides. . . . Telegraphic communication with Boston was cut off during the afternoon. All wires between Washington and New York were down in the morning, and by noon the wires between New York and Boston were all down."

Then there was the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940. From November 11 to 12 temperatures dove in some parts of the country from the 60s to single digits. The storm stretched from Kansas to Michigan and caused nearly 150 deaths. "In Texas sub-freezing temperature nipped fruit crops," reported Life magazine. The thermometer dipped to 20 degrees below in Belgrade, Montana. "The storms did not spare the great cities of the Midwest. More than 16 inches of snow fell in Minneapolis and piled up in great wind drifts which halted transportation and buried stranded cars. Buildings were unroofed, chimneys toppled and trees uprooted be winds of tornadic force."

The Blizzard of 1978? Some folks have still not warmed up from that one.

So, as you sit through hours of snow snarled traffic jams, put those chains back onto your tires again, and bundle up your kids like Randy in Christmas Story . . . remember that others have gone before you, a great snow-filled cloud of frostbitten witnesses.

American Exceptionalism

Bruce Mazlish

Today's post comes from Bruce Mazlish, professor emeritus of history at MIT. A distinguished historian, he is the author or editor of a variety of books and articles, including: The Global History Reader (Routledge, 2005), ed. by Mazlish and Akira Iriye; The New Global History (Routledge, 2006); and The Uncertain Sciences (Yale, 1998; paper Transaction Press, 2007) .

All peoples think of themselves as special, their way of life as exceptional. The USA certainly thinks of itself as exceptional, elevating the claim to a national shibboleth. This claim guides the country in its thinking and behavior in international affairs. Though all are exceptional, America sees itself as more exceptional than others. The implications of this conviction are profound and fundamental. Inquiry into this belief system, given the power, economic and military of the country, appears necessary.1

Its roots are deep and tangled. In Ian Tyrrell's definition, "The idea of the United States as a unique and indeed superior civilization outside the normal historically determined path of human history lies at the heart of American exceptionalism."2 With this provisional definition, we can proceed to examine the origins of the experience and its phases.

Apparently, one of the earliest formulations comes from a Marxist analysis claiming that America is exceptional in not having a true class system. Hence socialism does not flourish in America as it does elsewhere. This was a theory advanced by Werner Sombart, a Marxist influenced historian. However, before Sombart, Alexis de Tocqueville had used the term "exceptional" in his Democracy in America. One aspect of America for him was that as a nation it had been born in the light of day i.e., its origins not lost in the forests of the past but visible to contemporary observers. Even before the Frenchman's classic analysis, a general European view of the continent stressed both the unparalleled possibility of abundance in the New World as well as its dark barbarianism, seeing them as exceptional. The encounter with the Indians seemed to be unique (very different from that in South America).

The original colonists of New England had faith that the New World was liberated from the dead hand of the past and no longer subject to the strictures of what we would now call historical determinism. It had a special mission, to spread its creed of freedom to the rest of the world (a latent contradiction to exceptionalism?) In the process, the carriers of this creed were experiencing a rebirth. In the view of Richard Slotkin, this belief had a dark side. "The first colonists," he writes, "saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."3

In his article on American exceptionalism, Seymour Martin Lipset quotes G.K. Chesterton to the effect that "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed."4 That creed was to be a light to the world; the nation had a divine mission to spread the blessings of freedom and liberty to the rest of the world (even by violence, if necessary).

Clearly, the concept is a fundamental part of the American belief system. Its implications are extremely important. I want to argue that we must see the concept historically, as a dynamic part of the American experience. In doing so, we can discern two major phases. The first is a more or less benign expression. It has led the US into seeking to support freedom of dissent and human rights in many parts of the world. Alas, the country has been hypocritical in the way it does this. All too often, it says one thing and does another. For example, it proclaims freedom and democracy and then supports autocratic countries such as Saudi Arabia. It behaves occasionally according to a double standard. Opposing torture elsewhere, it has practiced it within its own borders. This becomes increasingly clear as we look at more recent history.

I want to suggest that there are variants on American exceptionalism: benign and malignant. The benign is most marked in the 18th and 19th centuries as America sought to fulfill Winthrop's prophesy of its being a city on a hill that would serve as a light for the rest of mankind. With all its deep-rooted faults at home—slavery being the “blackest”—ranging from its treatment of the Indians to its continental and then overseas imperialism, America, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, the port through which so many of its immigrants arrived, seemed to beckon all peoples to the freedom and liberty of the country. Abroad, it strove to spread its message as widely as possible.

Though proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine, thus announcing its dominion over both the North and South continents, along with its existing appropriation of the name "America" for itself, the nation exhibited a mix of isolationism and participation in international affairs. The benign aspect would appear especially after WW II, when America was in the foremost rank of those seeking to establish institutions and codes that would seek to punish not only war crimes but also crimes against humanity. The UN, with America providing a home for it in New York City, in 1948 issued a Declaration of Human Rights. A few years earlier in the Nuremberg trials the US was among the foremost in seeking justice on an international scale. The Yugoslav and Rwanda trials following confirmed this trend, culminating in the International Criminal Court. Elsewhere I have called this a "Judicial Revolution."5 Here was reached the sticking point for the US. It became increasingly clear, especially in the Bush administration, that America was not prepared to be held to the same justice and laws that it had so prominently helped establish.

Now emerged the malignant side of American exceptionalism. It served as one of the banners under which the US felt that it was exempt from conforming to international law except where and when it suited its own purposes. President Obama rightly takes exception to this assertion—America is a nation like all others, and subject to the same laws of history and judgment—and has been roundly criticized by Tea Party members for this statement of equality. Frequently invoked in the present, Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are reported as "denouncing Obama for denying 'American exceptionalism.'"6

There are many founding myths in America. In its malignant form, that of American exceptionalism is one of the most potently damaging, to America itself and to the world. It is time that it is dug up by the roots and placed in the trash bin. We can do this easily on the computer; it is time that we matched this action in our minds as well.

___________

1. The literature on "American exceptionalism" is extremely full. Rather than trying to list various titles, I refer the reader to that rubric in Google, where numerous examples are given.

2. Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism and Uneven Global Integration: Resistance to the Global Society," in The Paradox of a Global USA, ed. by Bruce Mazlish, Nayan Chanda, and Kenneth Weisbrode (Stanford, 2007).

3. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan, 1973), 5.

4. Quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, "American Exceptionalism," Washington Post, 1991.

5 . See Bruce Mazlish, The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era (Palgrave, 2009), especially Chapter 4.

6. Quoted in Thomas Friedman, "From WikiChina," New York Times, November 30, 2010.

Reading Primary Sources: Bank Notes

Dan Allosso

We don’t think much about our money. We may worry about how much of it we need; but we’re not concerned about what it looks like or where it came from. Rarely do we remember that this is a modern phenomenon. Until the Civil War, Americans were very aware of the origin and relative safety of their money.

The best money in early nineteenth-century America was gold, but there was a limit to how much of it you could conveniently carry. And there wasn’t enough of it to go around, especially in towns and villages far from financial centers like New York and Philadelphia. So local people exchanged promissory notes that were basically IOUs stating, for example, that Miller Jones owed Farmer Smith $50 for his wheat harvest, payable sixty days after Smith delivered the bushels of grain to the mill. If Farmer Smith needed to pay someone else sooner than sixty days, he had several options. He could write his own promissory notes (if people trusted him), endorse the Miller Jones’s note to a third party (if people trusted Miller Jones), or take Jones’s note to the bank for cash. The banker would exchange the note for cash, at a “discount” representing interest for the sixty days he would have to hold Jones’s note before he could redeem it. The “cash” the banker would give Farmer Smith could include gold coins if Smith insisted on it, but if the banker had his way it would be—and this is where it gets interesting—bank notes.

Bank notes were initially just like promissory notes, except that they were issued by the bank. They were usually written to a named recipient for a specific amount. But they were much more easy to endorse to a second party, because in most cases everyone knew and trusted the bank. Over time, banks were able not only to write a lot of these types of notes, but to begin writing general notes for smaller denominations, that were immediately payable to anyone “on sight.” Of course the details of how this developed varied from place to place, but these small denomination sight notes became “circulating currency,” or what we think of as money.

When banks gained the ability to issue their own notes, they basically began creating money. In many states, there were laws requiring the bankers to invest in a state insurance fund, or to deposit securities (government bonds or mortgages) with the state comptroller in order to issue notes, but very rarely was there a substantial specie requirement. In other words, the money these state banks printed was usually backed by something other than piles of gold in the vaults of the banks, because there were no piles of gold.

Confidence in the banker issuing a note was crucial to the note’s acceptance. This confidence was naturally greater in states that had a “safety fund” or that required securities to back note issues. Everyone knew that there was never enough gold at the bank to pay all the notes. The expectation was rather that there would be enough to conduct regular business, and pay the notes brought in for redemption on any given day, rather than all the notes outstanding. This differential between everyday redemptions and all the notes outstanding was all-important: this was how the bank literally made money.

The money-making ability of the local bank was not only profitable for the banker, but was essential to the community. Without the money printed by local banks, farmers and millers would have had a much more difficult time doing their business. Especially in remote areas, which was where most of the farm products destined for city dinner tables were grown. Most of the “real money” (that is, gold) was hoarded in the big eastern cities, or after Andrew Jackson’s 1837 Specie Circular was used to buy land at the frontier Land Offices. Very little was available in the settled farmlands that made up the middle of the country. Local banks provided the cash and credit that allowed farmers to plant, tend, and harvest their crops, at a time when 90 percent of Americans were farmers.

All this changed during the Civil War. The Lincoln administration first issued their own notes, called Greenbacks because they were printed with green ink, to help pay for the war. Between 1863 and 1865, Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase, led a campaign to centralize control of American banking by creating a system of national banks and by taxing the notes of local banks, to make them too expensive to use relative to the new national notes. Chase and his supporters claimed that local banks were unsafe, and that the extreme variety of notes floating around in the economy (it has been claimed there were over 9,000 different types in circulation in the early 1860s) provided too much opportunity for counterfeiters. While both of these arguments were valid up to a point, Chase’s solution wasn’t the only possible response. Our current system of national currency was not inevitable; by nationalizing the power to make money, Chase added a nearly immeasurable new source of revenue for the central government. This aspect of the change to national notes has gone largely unrecognized, and we now treat our national currency as a completely natural and inevitable part of our national economy--except in a few places like far western Massachusetts, where local people have taken advantage of changes and loopholes in the banking laws, to once again begin making their own money.

Poltical Assassination and Motivation

Randall Stephens

On November 23, 1963 the New York Times announced "Leftist Accused: Figure in a Pro-Castro Group is Charged--Policeman Slain." Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Bureau, Dallas Police Department, linked Lee Harvey Oswald to the left-wing "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Such connections proved more complicated than originally imagined. Oswald lied and was, by any account, a shiftless loser. Journalists and commentators grasped for a motive in the chaotic hours and days after President Kennedy's assassination. Texas, and Dallas in particular, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy feeling and theories of a right-wing plot circulated widely. (Replace Texas then with Arizona now and some striking similarities in public discussion are apparent. Tea Partiers and John Birchers . . . anti-immigration and anti-communism . . .)

There was, in fact, enough hard-right political terrorism in the South to make such views seem credible enough. The Klan harassed and threatened civil rights workers and dynamited churches and schools. Pundits called Birmingham "Bombingham." In rare cases, gunmen assassinated black leaders and activists. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 created a political firestorm and produced innumerable theories as Kennedy's murder had less than five years before. After King's death in Memphis riots erupted across the country's cities and conspiracy theories of Klan involvement and a government assassin gripped the imagination of Americans roiled by the events of a turbulent year. Writing in Life magazine in June 1968 Paul O'Neil observed, "No real criminal organization conspired with [James Earl] Ray," King's alleged killer. Ray was, in O'Neil's words, like Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, prone to bizarre fantasies and unreal self conceptions.

Medical professionals, journalists, and the general public have often questioned an assassin's sanity. And the current debate over the political motivations of Gabrielle Giffords' mentally unstable shooter parallel related events in history.

Was Leon Czolgosz, who shot and killed President McKinley nearly 110 years ago, insane? The American establishment, observes Eric Rauchway in Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), could not "admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate" (x).

What of America's most infamous assassin? "One is naturally tempted to ask whether John Wilkes Booth, son of the 'Mad Tragedian,' might have been found insane under existing laws," writes Michael W. Kauffman in American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2005), 353. Wilkes's brother thought madness ran through the male portion of the family. But, in this case, notions of melancholy and madness were closely linked. And diagnosing someone from the the remove of nearly 150 years would certainly be difficult.

Historians often ask why people do the things they do. Is it trickier to answer that question about current figures than about those from ages past? Figuring out the motivations of men and women from long ago, like judging why an unstable young Arizona man went on a shooting spree, can be a tough game. David Hackett Fischer explored motivation in his controversial, argumentative Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970):

Historians have often used motivational explanations in their work. Almost always, they have used them badly. Problems of motive in academic historiography tend to be hopelessly mired in a sort of simple-minded moralizing which is equally objectionable from an ethical and an empirical point of view. Lord Rosebery once remarked that what the English people really wished to know about Napoleon was whether he was a good man. The same purpose often prevails among professional scholars who are unable to distinguish motivational psychology from moral philosophy, and even unwilling to admit that there can be a distinction at all. Moreover, many scholars tend to find flat, monistic answers to complex motivational problems, which further falsifies their interpretations (187).

But that won't keep Americans from wondering, speculating, and trying to make some sense out of seemingly senseless acts of violence, past or present.

Americanisms, Britishisms, and History

Randall Stephens

I approve Jefferson's word 'belittle' and hope it will be incorporated into our American Dictionaries—We ought to have an American Dictionary: after which I should be willing to lay a tax of an eagle a volume upon all English Dictionaries that should ever be imported. -John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 1812

Jan Freeman recently wrote about British vs. American usage in the Boston Globe. "Just last month," she noted, "the Guardian’s David Marsh devoted his Mind Your Language blog to readers’ complaints about 'ugly Americanisms.' 'Recent examples include pony up, mojo, sledding, duke it out, brownstones and suck,' said one correspondent." I'd throw in dude as well.

Over at the Daily Mail, others complained about creeping Americanisms like "autopsy for post-mortem; burglarized instead of burgled; filling out forms instead of filling them in; fries for chips; chips for crisps; and food to go as opposed to take away." A tetchy lot, that.

It goes both ways, says Freeman. "Some Americans, it’s true, dislike some Britishisms — go missing and gobsmacked leap to mind—but few complainers, in my experience, object to (or even recognize) these terms as British. It’s their novelty or illogic or 'ugliness,' not their origin, that annoys."

I like Americanisms. I'll never say that so and so went "in hospital." I'll probably also never utter phrases like: "He’s doing my head in, he is"; "Know what I mean?"; or "Take a pew."

All this talk about British and American usage made me reach for my old worn copy of Americanisms: A Dictionary of Selected Americanisms on Historical Principles, edited by Mitford Mathews (Chicago, 1951, 1966). Language tells us something about the patchwork, polyglot quality of American history. America's peculiar words also shed light on westward expansion, national conflicts, political struggles, subcultures, and pastimes. (An interesting history class exercise might involve compiling a long list of words that are commonly used in the United States, which first appeared in dictionaries in the 19th century. Students could then track down the origins of the words.)

Mathews' dictionary includes Africanisms like "tabby," and a range of Native American and Mexican American words: tamale, incommunicado, schenectady, scuppaug . . .

Here's a collection of interesting entries.

Now I just have to figure out how to slip "skunkery" into a casual conversation with a Brit.