“History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier…History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.” Via Cliopatria, actor, director, and wit Stephen Fry makes a case for studying history.
Tag: History
American Idyll.
By way of Ed Rants, and along with several quality links about early American popular music, Folded Space posts twenty mp3s (in the public domain) of Progressive Era musical hits, including “Come Josephine in my Flying Machine,” “That Haunting Melody,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and “Over There.”
I Think I’ll Call it America.
“From his first day on his own, he was not someone who could be reduced to a type, a symbol, or made to stand for a cause. Against all odds he had in fact achieved what the country promised him: ‘life,’ on his own terms; ‘liberty,’ seized, acted out, taken from him; ‘the pursuit of happiness’ — which, at the end of his life, meant firing a revolver in the air.” In an Independence Day-themed commencement speech reprinted in Salon, rock critic Greil Marcus riffs on the American Dream, using The Sopranos‘ Vito Spatafore and Theodore Rosengarten’s The Life of Nate Shaw as examples. The latter is a favorite book of Columbia’s Eric Foner (although he didn’t list it here), and it seems likely that he (or possibly Marcus’ fellow Dylanologist, Sean Wilentz) was the guy who recommended it.
Hurrah, we are all free now.
A very happy Juneteenth (a.k.a. Emancipation Day, the 141st since its first celebration in Galveston, TX on June 19, 1865) to you and yours.
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Quiet again, I know. More researching and traveling back and forth from home base on this end…still, updates should hopefully resume their normal schedule in short order.
Lion and the Snakes.
Listen up, Cornyn: “There never was a more vicious or insidious doctrine announced for the consideration of a free people than the doctrine that our constitution or any part of it is suspended during a state of war. Our constitution was made for war as well as peace. Equally vicious is the doctrine that you must disregard the guarantees of the constitution and trample upon our civil liberties in order to save the constitution…[W]e can never get anywhere if we resort to the theory that the minority has no rights which the majority is bound to respect or that the constitutional rights of the citizen must give way to some supposed emergency. I think the greatest service the true American can render to the cause of orderly liberty is to demonstrate in this critical situation that we can deal with every confronting situation and meet every emergency without violating or disregarding to the individual citizen any of his rights under our constitution. If we have reached the point where we cannot take care of the situation without resorting to arbitrary methods, to undefined official discretion, then the enemies of this government may well say that our system has proved a failure.” — Sen. William E. Borah, “Letter to Austin Simmons,” January 21, 1920.
Hiram to the DLC.
A word of warning from today’s archival research (re: photocopying binge): “The trouble with the Democrats in California is, first, they have no organization, and secondly, they wish, just as apparently as the Democrats in the East wish in this campaign, to be with exactly the same people with whom the Republicans have been sleeping for many years in the past. Apparently they don’t realize that there is no place for them with those who have been directing our politics, but nevertheless they covet the unique and often disgraceful position we occupy.” — Hiram Johnson, in a letter to Harold Ickes, September 1, 1928.
Creators, Kingfish, and consiglieres.
Some quality historicizing in today’s Washington Post Book World: Michael Kazin reviews Richard White’s new Huey Long biography, H.W. Brand’s looks at Godfrey Hodgson’s new bio of Edward House (right-hand-man to Woodrow Wilson), and novelist David Liss briefly surveys recent works on the Founders.
Swearingen to Progressivism in Two.
“Seth Bullock
Deadwood, S.D.
August 25, 1920 [Almost a year after Bullock’s death]
Dear Sir:
After careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that it is my duty as a believer in the progressive principles it was my privilege to fight for under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, as well as my duty as a citizen, to support the democratic national ticket in this campaign. I have prepared a statement giving some of my reasons for reaching this decision, a copy of which statement I enclose. If you are sufficiently interested to read this and write me, how you, personally, react in the present situation I will be obliged to you.
Harold Ickes“
Ah, the archives are great fun.
Hofstadter’s Political Tradition.
“Like the late John Kenneth Galbraith, Hofstadter has been faulted for leaving behind no coherent ‘school’ of history, no set of disciples. But for a man who once said to Foner, ‘I’m not a teacher, I’m a writer,’ to have tutored such a splendid variety of historians shows that he imbued his students with something more precious than the ability to write history his way. He taught them to write history their way.” On the eve of a new biography of the hallowed Columbia prof, Slate‘s David Greenberg ruminates on Richard Hofstadter.