Posts tagged "history"

A History of America, from Memory, pt I.

I’ve never studied American history, but I’ve accumulated a bit of knowledge about what went on in this country’s past here and there. So, with two glasses of wine in me, let’s see how much I can tell you.

Read More

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America history
Jul 03

Bibliography.

jonathanbogart replied to your post: A History of America, from Memory, pt I.

I took two courses in Early American history less than a year ago and I couldn’t have done much better.

natepatrin replied to your post: A History of America, from Memory, pt I.

Now it’s my turn as an American to do a history of Australia from memory: 17something, I think: prison colony late 1970s: Mad Max, Radio Birdman

Well, I must admit I had the advantage of being tutored by The Simpsons and Alvin and the Chipmunks as a child.

Nate, I probably couldn’t do much better than your effort. Except I’d at least tack on Kylie Minogue at the end!

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Question Time America history television The Simpsons music
Jul 03

(via unburyingthelead, andrewfmorrison) These are hardly comments to be held in ironic opposition. The Douglass quote is from his address to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, on July 5th, 1852. (Douglass would not speak on the Fourth.) His speech is an astounding feat of oratory, and though it is long, if you’ve never read it in full, you should now. It would be very disappointing to have such a considered argument reduced to cherry-picked quotes. That said, I will ignore my own caution and post a portion from toward the end of the speech: Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done.  Douglass’s speech, known commonly as What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, is an excoriating rebuke of American claims for their nation of being a haven of liberty. His audience was a group of abolitionists, but he does not spare them from his condemnation; the address refers throughout to “your” Fourth of July, accentuating Douglass’s lack of citizenship and his people’s lack of personhood. He describes vividly, and at length, the horrors of slavery, and denounces a nation that would allow such a practice to endure within its borders. But he also praises the Founding Fathers and the ideals upon which they founded the nation, and exhorts America to stay true to its ideals.  I like this part, near the beginning of his address: But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. It’s a clear reminder of the need for moral bravery in the fight upon which the nation was then on the brink — though at that time it was only a fight of ideas, not yet of armies. And it is a worthy reminder of what is right about America, and about Americans. America believes itself to be worthy of its inheritance; it believes it can side with right against wrong, weak against strong, oppressed against oppressor. It doesn’t always do so, but it has no doubt that it is in its national capacity to make the choice for right. That belief won’t achieve much on its own, but that belief is still nonetheless a very important thing! Douglass, I think, is an example of so much of what is right about America. He was a man born into slavery, but who freed himself, educated himself, built himself into one of the most impressive thinkers in his country’s history, and, as an abolitionist, helped to free others like him who had been born into slavery. He knew where America was wrong but he understood how America can be right, and worked to make it so. I’ll disregard the “greatest country on earth” rhetoric in the picture above; I have my own country, and I have some pretty strong feelings for it, as well. But America? America is a laudable nation, and the words of men like Frederick Douglass are evidence of that, not an argument against it.

(via unburyingthelead, andrewfmorrison)

These are hardly comments to be held in ironic opposition. The Douglass quote is from his address to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, on July 5th, 1852. (Douglass would not speak on the Fourth.) His speech is an astounding feat of oratory, and though it is long, if you’ve never read it in full, you should now. It would be very disappointing to have such a considered argument reduced to cherry-picked quotes.

That said, I will ignore my own caution and post a portion from toward the end of the speech:

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. 

Douglass’s speech, known commonly as What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, is an excoriating rebuke of American claims for their nation of being a haven of liberty. His audience was a group of abolitionists, but he does not spare them from his condemnation; the address refers throughout to “your” Fourth of July, accentuating Douglass’s lack of citizenship and his people’s lack of personhood. He describes vividly, and at length, the horrors of slavery, and denounces a nation that would allow such a practice to endure within its borders. But he also praises the Founding Fathers and the ideals upon which they founded the nation, and exhorts America to stay true to its ideals. 

I like this part, near the beginning of his address:

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.

It’s a clear reminder of the need for moral bravery in the fight upon which the nation was then on the brink — though at that time it was only a fight of ideas, not yet of armies. And it is a worthy reminder of what is right about America, and about Americans. America believes itself to be worthy of its inheritance; it believes it can side with right against wrong, weak against strong, oppressed against oppressor. It doesn’t always do so, but it has no doubt that it is in its national capacity to make the choice for right. That belief won’t achieve much on its own, but that belief is still nonetheless a very important thing!

Douglass, I think, is an example of so much of what is right about America. He was a man born into slavery, but who freed himself, educated himself, built himself into one of the most impressive thinkers in his country’s history, and, as an abolitionist, helped to free others like him who had been born into slavery. He knew where America was wrong but he understood how America can be right, and worked to make it so.

I’ll disregard the “greatest country on earth” rhetoric in the picture above; I have my own country, and I have some pretty strong feelings for it, as well. But America? America is a laudable nation, and the words of men like Frederick Douglass are evidence of that, not an argument against it.

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America history holidays
Jul 04

Lisa: I still don’t believe all the founding fathers were Stonecutters.

Homer: That’s because you trust your stupid schoolbooks. Here’s what really happened at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Cut to signing:

Washington: And a nation is born. Now let us party like ‘twas 1799!

Small kegs are rolled in; two men chug.

All: Quaff! Quaff! Quaff! Quaff!

A man lights a match and spits beer at it; the flame ignites another man’s wig.

Owner: Please, sir! You’re destroying my establishment.

Man: We just created the greatest democracy on earth, you low-life commoner!

In the present:

Homer: You want to see how Davy Crockett really died at the Alamo? You must be eighteen!

1
The Simpsons television advertising America history
Jul 08

Booker T. Washington was already a celebrity—a self-made man, and the spokesman for black America—when he arrived at the White House on October 16, 1901, for a dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. They had plenty to talk about: Washington was a great orator and conversationalist, and he had become one of the President’s most valued advisers. But, almost before the plates were cleared, the form of this meeting had overshadowed its content. Washington had earned his reputation as a racial moderate by assuring white people that he wouldn’t press for social equality, but this dinner looked an awful lot like a strike against segregation; the reported presence of the President’s glamorous seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice, intensified the scandal. Southern newspapers raised the alarm; the Memphis Scimitar announced, with impressive certainty, that the dinner was “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.”

Both men survived the evening, but it was not soon forgotten. In his third autobiography, “My Larger Education,” Washington tells of a railway trip he took through Florida sometime later. At a stop near Gainesville, a white farmer shook his hand, exclaiming, “You are the greatest man in this country!” Washington demurred and suggested that Roosevelt was the greatest American, but the farmer was having none of it. With “considerable emphasis,” he said, “I used to think that Roosevelt was a great man until he ate dinner with you. That settled him for me.”

Kelefa Sanneh, “The Wizard,” The New Yorker, Feb 2, 2009
America history The South politics
Aug 02

But what reverberated most was a simile he had used before, one that linked the reality of segregation to the dream of black advancement. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” he said. He was rewarded with applause, hurrahs, and women’s handkerchiefs, and the speech soon passed into legend. Like any great orator, Washington made people cheer for themselves: white listeners could celebrate their own open-mindedness, and also black acquiescence to segregation; black listeners could celebrate the promise of “progress,” and also the not insignificant fact that throngs of white people were cheering a black man.

Ibid.

I’m sure you’ve heard a million times before from me about how great I think Kelefa Sanneh is, but I marvel at the way he can casually drop such brilliantly insightful comments as these into what reads as straight-up narrative. Sanneh also has a knack for elegantly-constructed, symmetrical, Austen-like phrasing; see, for instance, how much he packs into these two sentences, and how subtly and precisely he sketches his criticism:

Norrell concludes, rather too triumphantly, that creeping black disenfranchisement “did not defeat Booker Washington.” True enough, but the reverse is equally true, and somewhat more important.

I’d be lying if I said I’d never tried to do this in my own writing. (Theft is inspiration, and I’ve lost count of how often I’ve thieved this trick poorly.) We know about standing on the shoulders of giants but sometimes it’s tough just to clamber your way up their shirt sleeves.

America politics history The South writing
Aug 02

Real Slytherin thinking in American history.

  • Tour Guide: The enemy surrounded the fort and said that if the captain was sent out the rest would be spared.
  • Bart: What did they do?
  • Tour Guide: They sent him out!
  • Bart: Was he killed?
  • Tour Guide: And how! That's why they call it Fort Sensible.
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The Simpsons television books Harry Potter America history
Oct 06

Libertarianism gets caricatured as the weird, Magic-card-collecting, twelve-sided-die-wielding outcast of American political philosophy. Yet there’s no idea more fundamental to our country’s history. Every political group claims the Founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them. (Though some Founders, like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to centralize power.) All the government-run trappings that came after—the Fed, highways, public schools, a $1.5 trillion-a-year entitlement system— were arguably departures from our country’s hard libertarian core.

Christopher Beam “The Trouble With Liberty,” New York Magazine, December 26, 2010

(Cross-posted at the USSC)

Beam’s article draws the right conclusion in the end — libertarianism as a political philosophy is unrealistic and its proponents are self-defeating — but in getting there he makes some significant errors and repeats a few myths that cannot withstand scrutiny. I’ve quoted the most egregious above.

It is comforting to libertarians to think that even though their ideas are confined to the margins of American politics, the Founding Fathers would also have clutched copies of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, if only such tomes had been written during their time. The idea of America having its origins in libertarianism flatters the proponents of that philosophy that theirs is the purest manifestation of freedom, and that their country is indeed headed away from liberty and on the road to… well, what Hayek said.

But it’s just not true. The American War of Independence was at heart a war for democracy and republicanism — the “overweening government power” the revolution was fought against was a non-representative monarchy, something to which both liberals and conservatives can be safely said to oppose. Public schools and highways were neither here nor there, and the split within the new American republic was between Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. That is, state government and federal governments. An opposition to government itself didn’t enter into it.

Take the Constitution. Far from being an anti-government document, it was one explicitly concerned with enhancing and defining government power. It was ratified in 1788, after the new republic had tried and failed to govern itself with the far more libertarian Articles of Confederation. These established a congress, but no presidency or court system, and gave the government no way to raise funds for itself. Under the Articles, the new nation almost fell apart, and it was for this reason the Founders called a convention and undertook the decidedly un-libertarian practice of strengthening the government.

If any document could be said to be a libertarian one, it was the ten amendments to that constitution that quickly followed its ratification: the Bill of Rights. But even this, with its protections against federal intrusion for free speech and fair trials, was as liberal as it is libertarian. And remember, the quarrel in doctrine during this period was among Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Many of the state governments the Anti-Federalists wished to see empowered had decidedly anti-libertarian ideals, like a commitment to slavery, or laws regulating free speech. The Anti-Federalists’ opposition to a strong federal government was not the opposition to government as espoused by modern libertarians.

It is certainly true that the United States has had a historical fondness for individualism, and libertarians would like to think that equates to an alignment with their philosophy. But American individualism expresses itself as an opposition to all sources of power including some that libertarians have no problem with, such as social or corporate power. (And at the same time, that individualism is often countered by the opposing American tradition of cultural puritanism.) Libertarianism is an American phenomenon, but it is one arising in the 20th century, not the 18th, and should be understood as such.

UPDATE: 

While posting a link to this post on Twitter, I discovered John Veccione posted on the same subject at FrumForum:

In fact, this assertion confuses constitutionalists with libertarians. George Washington belonged to the Established Church (Episcopalian) of the State of Virginia; he also was the chief vindicator of national power in the new republic. Thomas Jefferson determined to wage war by simply denying foreigners the right to trade with the U.S. So did Madison. What libertarian has ever thought the government could cut off trade between free individuals? Further, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine supported the French Revolution. That revolution denied there was anything the state could not do in the name of the people. Jefferson never repudiated his support for that tyranny and Thomas Paine was only slightly more dismissive even after it nearly killed him. Of all the Founders, Patrick Henry is closest to the libertarian beau ideal. He was against the king, against the Constitution and against the French Revolution all of which he saw as an assault on traditional liberties. But for all of the Virginians, I leave aside the issue of slavery entirely.

3
America politics history ussc
Dec 28

black culture and history books.

douglasmartini:

It’s a shame that people have to be reminded that black history is indeed American history, and it’s an even bigger shame that, without it, things like the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement would probably just be interesting footnotes between the history books’ Abraham Lincoln chapter and its Ronald Reagan chapter. Important movements like hip-hop are culturally relevant because hip-hop shoved its way into the fucking door (and, more cynically but also true: because it’s a multi-million-dollar industry), but we still feel the need to tuck Donald Goines— a black author just as immensely talented as authors from his era— away in the “African-American fiction” section.

I hope you will click through and read the entirety of Martin Douglas’s post, because it is vital and worthy of your time. I’ve excerpted this bit because though I can’t usefully opine on much of what he’s talking about, I can tell you about this part.

I do not know how anyone can understand American history if they do not understand black history. I say this as someone who has real life academic credentials in understanding America: You need to know black history if you want to know America. It’s not that it’s nice to know that stuff because it reflects the diversity of the country; it’s that this story is at the heart of everything, and is entirely indivisible from America.

Anyways, go read the rest of Martin’s post.

57
America history race
Feb 13


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