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.

Memo to America, Re: Welfare in the Olden Days

Gabriel Loiacono 
 
One evening, chatting with friends from church, one asked me what kind of history I focused on. I told him: the history of welfare in early America.  He said: what welfare in early America?

"The drunkard's progress, or the direct
road to poverty, wretchedness & ruin," 1826.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

I find myself having a conversation like that one more and more these days.  Whether on the left or the right politically, high school grads or Ph.D.s, most Americans I talk to assume that welfare is a creation of the twentieth century: midwifed by Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson.  Those hearty, independent minutemen of the Revolutionary period, they assume, either made the poor find work or relied only on churches for charity. 

Occasionally, this assumption is voiced explicitly in national, political discourse.  For example, in a famous September 12, 2011 Republican Presidential Primary debate, Representative Ron Paul described assistance to the poor in the past thus: “Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.”  Less off-the-cuff, respectable-looking websites will tell you that charity was almost entirely private before FDR, aside from a few dark and dingy poorhouses, which were more effective at driving inmates out than keeping them comfortable.  And it is not only critics of welfare who think this; one can find defenders of welfare describing the U.S.A. as essentially without welfare before FDR.[1]

Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK

Randall Stephens

Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal, Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th

Read the above at the BBC

e future." ("History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian, May 12, 2013).

Here's a brief excerpt:

For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.>>>

What Is History? Letting the Market Decide

Randall Stephens

How do we determine what is worth our attention when it comes to the past?  What events, people, and movements matter most?  What should we pay attention to?

"Caesar Crossing the Rubicon," attributed to Jean Fouquet, ca. 1475

When it comes to questions like these I always think back to E. H. Carr's classic What Is History?. It's a slim book, ideal for an intro to historical methods.  It's Carr's G. M. Trevelyan lectures from 1961 at Cambridge University.  At the outset he quotes C. P. Scott (1846-1932) the famous British journalist, publisher, and politician.  "Facts are sacred, opinion is free," said Scott.  Yet, writes Carr, despite Scott's confident motto:

every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello's characters who said that a fact is like a sack—it won't stand up till you've put something in it. The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all (9).

Teaching History to Undergrads: An Interview with Sam Wineburg

Randall Stephens

Sam Wineburg is a professor in the School of Education at Stanford University and director of the Stanford History Education Group.  He has written and taught widely on historical consciousness, questions of identity and history in recent America, and the uses of the past.  He's the author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001); Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School Classrooms (TC Press, 2011), with Daisy Martin and Chauncey Monte-Sano; and editor of Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (NYU Press, 2000) with Peter N. Stearns and Peter Seixas. (In 2006 Joe Lucas interviewed Wineburg in Historically Speaking.)  

Below I ask Wineburg about one of his courses and the challenges of history education.

Randall Stephens: What made you decide to teach a course on "Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States & the Quest for Historical Truth"?

Sam Wineburg: When I moved to Stanford from the University of Washington in 2002, I began to encounter very bright students in our Masters of Teaching program who were highly critical of their high school history books, but who reserved a sacred place for Zinn's A People's History. It had been years since I read the book, so I went to the bookstore, purchased the latest edition and started to read. The first thing that popped out at me was that despite the fact that the book had been in print for over two decades no new scholarship had been incorporated in Zinn's narrative. Chapters on the Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War and everything prior to 1980 were frozen in amber. It was as if, once you came to your historical conclusions, you never had to rethink your position in light of new scholarship—such as the opening up of the Soviet archives and the light these documents shed on spies in America, or the tell-all exposes of the Emperor Hirohito's inner coterie and how these memoirs changed our ideas about how close (actually, how distant) the Japanese were to surrender before Hiroshima. The more I started to dig the more I started to realize how useful A People's History would be pedagogically, particularly for students who conceptualize the past in stark binaries of true and false. 

Stephens: Why have historians had such varying views of Zinn's bestselling work?

Wineburg: I think most historians agree that the book is pretty weak as a piece of historical scholarship. The most favorable review of the book was by Eric Foner, who when he published his review in 1980, was fairly close to Zinn politically. But even Foner's review spelled out serious reservations. Since then, Michael Kazin, the editor of Dissent and a historian with impeccable leftist credentials, gave A People's History a good thrashing in a review published in 2004. It seems to me that the most ardent fans of the book come not from the community of professional historians, but from the ranks of high school teachers, Hollywood personalities, and Amazon.com reviewers.

THS Blog on NPR

Jonathan Rees

The other morning I was just biding my time, reading a biography of Margaret Sanger and enjoying summer vacation when I got an e-mail from an NPR producer.  They read my last post for the HS blog and wanted me to come on Talk of the Nation to discuss it.  I did.

It's the last segment of Monday's show.  The callers got me started on another hobby horse of mine: teaching without a textbook. 

Here's a little from that Talk of the Nation piece:

In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.

But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"

Read on or listen to the rest at NPR>>>

The Malleability of “the Law”

Steven Cromack

Are Supreme Court decisions important? Most intellectuals, lawyers, teachers, professors, and anyone with an eighth grade education would exasperatedly answer, “Of course! What a stupid question.” The Supreme Court hands down “The Law of the Land.” In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), the Supreme Court fueled the tension between North and South over the fugitive slave law. The decision Minor v. Happersett (1875) posited that women are citizens, but citizenship does not mean suffrage. Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954) declared segregation in American public schools unconstitutional. Finally, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010) opened the floodgates for political contributions and significantly changed the nature of American politics. These cases have an important impact on our society—increasing tension (and even war) between the branches, parties, regions, and social classes—or, have they?

The fundamental question lurking below the surface is: Are these decisions truly that significant in themselves, or is their significance historically constructed? In other words, are Supreme Court decisions an end in themselves, or are they a means to an end crafted not by the Court, but by historians, lawyers, academics, or historical figures seeking to advance their own agendas? In studying the “history” of such decisions, and how intellectuals and public figures use them for their own purposes, one arrives at the uncomfortable notion that the law is malleable for those who choose to pursue a political agenda.

2003 was the bicentennial of Marbury v. Madison (1803), the fundamental Supreme Court case that set in motion “judicial review” and established the legitimacy of the Court. Or so Constitutional Scholars tell us. In an article titled “The Rhetorical Uses of Marbury v. Madison: The Emergence of a ‘Great Case,’” the Dean of William and Mary and Professor of Law, Davison Davis tracked the evolution of the decision and pointed out that “between 1803 and 1887, the Court never once cited Marbury for the proposition of judicial review (376).” How is it that such a “landmark case” was not mentioned or invoked by the nineteenth-century Court?

Davis contended that when the Court struck down the income tax as unconstitutional in Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust Co. (1895), only then did defenders of the Court’s decision make Marbury relevant. Davis wrote, “In the struggle to defend the Court’s actions, judicial review enthusiasts elevated the Marbury decision—and Chief Justice Marshall—to icon status to fend off attacks that the Court had acted in an unwarranted fashion (377).” Davis then goes on to outline how politicians, populists, and other figures trashed the Court’s decision, and also how the Warren Court used Marbury as a shield against segregationists and as a sword to assert its power (409). Thus, the Marbury decision was not an end in itself, but a means to end.

It is common knowledge that the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision espoused the “separate, but equal” doctrine. American history textbooks, law books, and historians overwhelmingly cite it as a landmark decision. On May 19, 1896, the day following the decision, The New York Times, the nation’s leading paper, reported of this monumental case, “No. 210 Homer Adolph Plessy vs. J.H. Ferguson, Judge & c- In error to the Supreme Court of Louisiana. Judgment affirmed, with costs.” For those living at the time, the Plessy decision was not that important. The South did not use the Court’s decision to implement Jim Crow. Nor did the decision legalize the Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow came long before the 1896 decision. The New York Times did not mention the case again until the 1950s, when Brown v. the Board of Education (1954) was making its way through the courts.

If one examines the history and evolution of a Supreme Court decision, one finds that decisions in themselves are not ends, but instead, a means to an end for others not on the Court. This is evident in examining the context of our major court cases and tracking their usage across time. Historians, from generation to generation, construct, tear down, and then reconstruct a narrative. While “deconstruction” has had its moment in the sun, it nevertheless has some validity for history: the narrative changes from generation to generation with those who interpret the past. If history is malleable, then the law is malleable, and that is a scary concept.