Tag: History

Gene Machine.

“The vortex of the late nineteen sixties swallowed up not only Eugene McCarthy. It consumed a whole generation of liberal politicians and radical thinkers and culture heroes, from John Lindsay and Marshall McLuhan to Tom Hayden and Buckminster Fuller — a long list of ‘an idea whose time has come’ types whose time abruptly ran out. The survivors wandered, as McCarthy did, through the decades that followed, caricatures of their former world-historical selves, like old heavyweight champions working as greeters in casinos. You could say that these people failed; but what would success have looked like?” A bit too glib as always, Louis Menand examines Eugene McCarthy (by way of the new biography by Dominic Sandbrook.) I’m not sure if McCarthy is really a very good exemplar of “postwar liberalism,” but this sounds like an interesting read nonetheless. (Via Follow Me Here)

Channeling Taney.

Columbia historian (and one of my interlocuters two weeks hence) Eric Foner takes a gander at William Rehnquist’s new book on the disputed 1877 election, and, aside from the obvious Bush v. Gore overtones, discovers that the Chief Justice’s grasp of history is as backward as his jurisprudence. “The scholarship on which Rehnquist relies is almost entirely out of date and his grasp of the complex issues of the Reconstruction era tenuous…That the Chief Justice of the United States sees national protection of blacks’ rights as a punishment imposed on whites is disheartening.” Hmm…let’s hope Rehnquist doesn’t decide to regale us with his thoughts on Dred Scott anytime in the future.

President’s Day 2004


“As the sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first to be laid aside when those liberties are firmly established.” – George Washington

“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” – Abraham Lincoln

Smothered in History.

Hey y’all. Sorry it’s gotten so quiet in these parts of late…I haven’t fallen into an XBox Live hole, although I’d very much like to. In fact, I’ve actually been putting in 14/15-hour days all week on a freelance project and orals work, and I expect this monster schedule will continue right up until the new semester begins after MLK day. This freelance work is a beast, but fortunately it’s American-history intensive…basically involving composing short essays and links for an online textbook website. So, I may be light on interpretation, but at least I can tell the differences among the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, the Adams-Onis Treaty, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, I know who lost the Battle of New Orleans, who won the Battle of Oriskany, and who died at the Battle of Shiloh, and I’ve even learned a thing or two about random foolios like I.L. Elwood, Ignaz Semmelweis, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges. That’s gotta be good for something, right?

The Limits of Segregation.

“All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches,” decried Strom Thurmond in 1948 as he led the Dixiecrat segregationists out of the Democratic Party. Of course, as always in the Souths Old and New, the bedroom was another matter. To no one in South Carolina’s real surprise, 78-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams announces she is Thurmond’s mixed-race daughter. True to the character and hypocrisy of the Jim Crow South, here is a man who broke the Democratic Party and the filibuster record of the United States Congress trying to deny basic civil rights to his own child. How’s that for “family values?” Unbelievable. Update: Surprise, surprise. The Thurmond family confirms it.

Politics by other means.

Well, due to various other projects — end of term grading, freelance history textbook work, attending multiple job talks for a pending Columbia hire — my online note-taking has fallen even farther behind my orals reading lately. But, the spirit marches on. So, without further ado:

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy.
David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society.

Dust, Discrimination, and Domestic Containment.

Some thanksgiving orals reading, for you and yours…read with lavish amounts of stuffing and cranberry sauce.

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s.