Stranger Things Have Happened

New Rules

2012-01-26T09:00:00.000-08:00

Periodically, when the American federal government undergoes an especially grievous episode of gridlock, incivility, or general craziness, I am prone to wishing we could simply scrap our ancient and seizure-prone federal Constitution and turn Washington, D.C. into a theme park. Reason, however, tells us that just as Nature abhors a vacuum, so would human beings find it difficult simply to raze the American national government without building a replacement – and that nowadays a new federal constitution would be likelier to draw its inspiration from Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins than from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. In the interest of providing an alternative to a Christian Dominionist government, I herewith offer, with tongue somewhat in cheek, my own outline of a replacement constitution. Comments are welcome so long as they amuse me.

Dave’s Constitution:

1. All persons residing in the territory or jurisdiction of the United States are entitled to the equal protection of its laws.

2. All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are U.S. citizens and entitled to the privileges and immunities thereof.

3. Neither the U.S., the states, nor any subordinate jurisdiction may abridge freedom of speech, the press, the rights of peaceable expression and assembly, and the right to petition officials for redress of grievances.

4. Neither the U.S., the states, nor any subordinate jurisdiction may abridge religious freedom or provide any legal or financial support to any religious entity.

5. No American citizen over the age of 18 may be deprived of the right to vote for any reason.

6. Neither the U.S., the states, nor any subordinate jurisdiction may infringe the right of persons to secure enjoyment of their homes, businesses, persons, and possessions.

7. The U.S. government, the states, and all subordinate jurisdictions guarantee the rights of habeas corpus, due process of law for those accused of a crime (including the right to an attorney and compulsory appearances of witnesses), and immunity from cruel and unusual punishment, including the death penalty, "stress positions," and waterboarding. Up yours, Dick Cheney.

8. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall extend to all weapons invented prior to 1791, including smooth-bore, black-powder cannon. Private citizens owning wooden, sail-driven ships of war may not engage in privateering without a Congressional letter of marque and reprisal.

9. The old Ninth Amendment is pretty awesome, so let's keep that.

10. The executive of the United States shall consist of a president, elected by majority vote of the citizens of the United States every four years; a vice-president (ditto), who shall succeed the president in the event of his or her death or resignation; and such subordinate officers as Congress may authorize by law. All will be bound by oath to support this Constitution and faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

11. The vice president, just to clarify, is part of the executive branch. Up yours, Dick Cheney.

12. Any U.S. citizen (born or naturalized) may run for president or vice-president, provided they are at least 35 and have been a resident of the United States for at least 20 years.

13. The president shall have the power to veto federal legislation, but not to alter or amend such legislation.

14. The legislative branch of the U.S. shall consist of a single legislative house, the Congress of People's Deputies. The voters of each electoral district will elect one Deputy every two years, for a two-year term, with vacancies to be supplied by special election. Each Deputy must be a U.S. citizen and at least 30 years of age.

15. The legislature shall have the exclusive right to levy federal taxes, print or coin money, borrow money on the credit of the United States, and declare war. It may approve treaties, Constitutional amendments, or impeach and remove the president by 3/5 vote. It shall have plenary authority to regulate foreign and interstate commerce, up to and including the nationalization of American businesses.

16. It should go without saying, but corporations are not people.

17. The U.S. and state governments will provide free public education and health care to all U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The standard of health care service provided will be no lower than that afforded participants in the Medicare program before it was terminated by President Rand Paul.

18. All federal and state elections shall be publicly financed. No private money may be spent therein, except by George Will, who may spent $5.00. No, not five dollars a year. Five dollars period.

19. The judicial branch of the United States shall consist of a Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress may establish. All federal judges will be elected by the voters of their jurisdiction for a 7-year term, renewable.

20. This Constitution may be amended by a 3/5 vote of the Congress of People's Deputies, with the concurrence of a 3/5 plebiscitary vote of American voters, to be conducted by the states under federal guidelines.

21. The official anthem of the United States will be a mashup of Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” with Notorious B.I.G.’s “Bullshit and Party.” This clause is not subject to the amendatory authority in 20, above.

22. The capital of the United States will be moved to Omaha, Nebraska. The capitol itself, along with the president's mansion and principal executive office buildings, will be located in Carter Lake, Iowa, which, being located wholly within Omaha's boundaries, accurately represents the duality of Man.

23. The official flag of the United States shall be a red banner bearing a portrait of Eugene V. Debs.

24. The official motto of the U.S. will be “Up Yours, Dick Cheney."

Dress to Kill

2012-01-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

Our quote of the week comes from R.R. Palmer's classic study of the Reign of Terror, Twelve Who Ruled, and concerns the 20 special commissioners whom members of the Committee of Public Safety appointed to oversee the political reconstruction (and destruction) of Lyons, after that city rebelled against the Republic:

"The commissioners were apparently in need of clothing, and their wants were not modest. For each one, out of the public funds, were ordered, to be exact: a blue coat with red collar, blue trousers with leather between the legs, breeches of deerskin, an overcoat and leather suitcase, a cocked hat with tricolor plume, a black shoulder-belt, various medals, six shirts, twelve pocket handkerchiefs, muslin for six ordinary cravats, black taffeta for two dress cravats, a tricolored belt, six cotton nightcaps, six pairs of stockings, two pairs of shoes, kid gloves a l'espagnole, boots a l'americaine, bronzed spurs, saddle pistols and a hussar's saber." (Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton UP, 1941/2005), 167.)

Palmer includes these details to make a more entertaining narrative. Modern historians, following the lead of Linda Colley, might pause to consider the social significance of these ad hoc commissioners' wardrobes. The colored coat and trousers, cocked hat, and handkerchiefs were marks of a gentleman (or at least of someone rich enough to afford clothing of high-quality fabric); the spurs, boots, pistols and saber denoted a member of the nobility, or at least one qualified to ride and bear arms; the tricolored belts and plumes symbolized the republic; and the deerskin breeches were fashionable at the time and probably came from North America. The Committee on Public Safety, which dispatched this special commission to Lyons, may have wanted them to appear as modest sans-culottes adorned in virtuous homespun, but the commissioners themselves had other ideas: they wanted to be armed noblemen, ready to ride down their government's enemies. Which indeed they did: the commissioners at Lyons went on to execute over 2,000 people in France's second city. Maybe the "blue trousers with leather between the legs" were chafing them a bit too much.

(The awesome anime painting of Louis Antoine Saint-Just is courtesy of Ysa, from Deviant Art, and is used with permission of the artist. The original image may be found here. Copyright (c) 2008-12 by Ysa.)

Niall Ferguson is Still a Tosser

2012-01-13T20:00:00.000-08:00

After flogging Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson a couple of times last year for various kinds of bad behavior, I made a brief mention of plans to read Prof. Ferguson's macrohistory of Western Europe and how it got to be So Damn Fine, published last year under the modest title Civilization. My loyal readers will either be mildly pleased or politely indifferent to learn that I have now managed to plow through most of the Sexiest Scotsman's opus, and will shortly begin a multipart review in which I explore the strengths (there may be one or two), flaws (and there are at least a few), and amusing factual errors thereof and therein. To start, I have a couple of observations to make about Ferguson's preface and introduction.

First, allow me to draw attention to Our Man Niall's brief summary of other scholarship on the rise of the West. On page 10 he asserts that historians like Jared Diamond and Kenneth Pomeranz have attributed the growth of Western power to simple "good luck," rather than to Western Europeans' superior institutions - in Ferguson's phrase, their "killer apps." The examples he gives of this unlikely "good luck," however, seem like pretty important determinants of European power to your humble narrator, and as Ferguson later reveals some of them seem pretty important to him as well. Surely, Ferguson writes, it was not the "geography or the climate" of Europe that accounted for its rise - except that he later ascribes interstate competition in the West, a key component of Killer App Number One, to Europe's convoluted and knobbly geography. "Did the New World provide Europe with 'ghost acres' that China lacked?" Professor F. then asks, dismissively. Actually, it did; the resources and produce of the Americas - arable land, timber, fish, grains, sugar - were a tremendous boon to Europeans in the early modern period, rescuing them from the Malthusian trap into which they had fallen, while New World gold and silver helped Europe buy its way into the Indian and East Asian trading system. "Was it just sod's law that made China's coal deposits harder to mine and transport than Europeans'?" Dr. Ferguson inquires. Kind of sounds like it to me, actually, and it was Europe's use of cheap coal that touched off its transport and metallurgical revolutions and allowed it finally to pull ahead of China. Qing China certainly had the means to industrialize if it had enjoyed access to so much concentrated energy: the Chinese had had a wood-driven "industrial revolution" in the 11th century, until their foundries ran out of charcoal, and they had invented powered spinning machines and looms as early as the 14th century. In history, stupid contingencies sometimes matter, as Ferguson, a routine practitioner of counterfactual history, should bloody well acknowledge.

My other observation is short and sweet. It is that Ferguson isn't always careful to check his historical facts. Exempli gratia, taken from his preface: "The greatest political artist in American history, Abraham Lincoln, served only one full term in the White House, falling victim to an assassin with a petty grudge just six weeks after his second inaugural" (xxiv). The assassin was John Wilkes Booth, and the "petty grudge" was the "Civil War" - Booth was a Confederate spy and staged his attack on Lincoln as part of a multi-person attack on Union leaders. Perhaps Ferguson was confusing Booth with Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin? I guess all these 19th-century presidents look alike after a while.

(Sources: Gale Stokes: "The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories," American Historical Review [April 2001]: 508-525; Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy [Norton, 2006], 68; Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest [Penguin, 2011], pp. xxiv, 10.)

A Parting Quote for 2011

2011-12-30T17:00:00.000-08:00

"Dresden, royal residence of dukes and kings of Saxony since the Middle Ages, whose Baroque skyline had inspired painters such as Canaletto, where Friedrich Schiller had written 'Ode to Joy' and which Napoleon had seized for his imperial command, greeted the 150 POWs trudging into the city on January 12, 1945, with a billboard proclaiming TRINK COCA-COLA."

From Charles Shields's new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes (New York, 2011), p. 62. The sentence above is a good sample of Shields' prose, which is lively, perceptive, and humorous. The biography as a whole is first-rate, and doesn't pull any punches.

Vonnegut's experiences as a prisoner-of-war, particularly his witnessing the firebombing of Dresden, shaped the author's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. For all that book's strengths (and it is a masterpiece), Vonnegut was a novelist, not a historian, and his account of the Dresden bombing is not the most accurate. His famous summary of the attack, to the effect that it only benefited one person and that person was Vonnegut - and that "one way or another, I made five bucks for every person killed" - is doubly incorrect. The author's sardonic estimate of the profit he made from the dead assumes that 135,000 people died in the attack, an assumption based on David Irving's 1963 book on Dresden. Irving has a habit, shall we say, of playing fast and loose with the truth, and he overstated German casualties by at least 75,000.

Vonnegut's other observation, that he was the only beneficiary of the Dresden raid, is also untrue, though few people know the truth of the matter: that the attack on Dresden saved the city's tiny surviving Jewish population from deportation to the death camps, which was originally scheduled to take place three days after the raid. Among the survivors was Victor Klemperer, whose harrowing diary remains one of the best primary sources on Jews' experiences in Germany during the war.

**

Happy New Year, everyone.

10 Centuries, 10 Links

2011-12-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

1100s: Here's a recent Slate article on the 12th-century Lewis Chessmen. (The shield-chewing berserker rook is probably my favorite, with the pensive queen a close second.)

1200s: A blog entry, lavishly illustrated, on the geological and strategic importance of the town of Stirling during the wars of William Wallace. Look closely enough and you can see a tiny figure of Mel Gibson, mooning his adversaries.

1300s: The 14th-century Arab traveler, Ibn Battuta, who journeyed 75,000 miles during his lifetime, is being honored with a videogame. Apparently, there are zap guns.

1400s: While we're on the subject of guns, want to watch a short video demonstrating the use of the Hussites' early 15th-century handguns, the pistala (pipe gun) and hakovnice (hook gun)? Of course you do. (The clip is about halfway down the page).

1500s: Double-entry bookkeeping was first used in Europe in the 14th century, but the first popular text on the practice, Quaderno doppio col suo giornale, wasn't published until 1540. A webpage from the AMS follows the narrative of this 16th-century textbook and finds that it is still a useful explanation of this accounting practice.

1600s: Sarah Underwood and Kathleen Brown try to guess what the 17th-century Pilgrims must have smelled like at the first Thanksgiving. Best not to read this one before dinner.

1700s: Lynn Hunt, one of the world's experts on the 1789 French Revolution, recommends the five most influential books on the subject. Looks like I'm going to have to read R.R. Palmer's opus fairly soon.

1800s: The U.S. Mint will issue two coins in March 2012 honoring the bicentennial of the War of 1812. The coins will refer to the two images that most Americans associate with the war: the Star-Spangled Banner, and unnamed warships firing desultory broadsides at each other.

1900s: Did the French build a fake Paris during the First World War to fool German aerial bombers? Apparently so.

2000s: And Hungary has apparently decided that the best way to start the second decade of the 21st century is to slide back into fascism...

President Antichrist, Jr.

2011-12-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

Writing in Slate Magazine, Forrest Wickman observed that would-be presidential assassin Oscar Ortega-Hernandez was hardly displaying originality when he called President Obama the "Antichrist." Other adversaries of the 44th president, including his 2008 election opponent John McCain (in a commercial called "The One" that was tailored to fans of the Left Behind novels), have either directly or indirectly called Obama the Antichrist, and a variety of ministers, politicos, and garden-variety crackpots have leveled the charge against 20th-century presidents, including John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. In his wonderful blog Goblinbooks, author Paul Bibeau argues that FDR wasn't the first American chief executive to earn this distinction, noting a famous Punch cartoon that depicted Abraham Lincoln as the "devil's minion," and quoting a Samuel Padover biography of Thomas Jefferson to the effect that many New Englanders regarded Jefferson as Antichrist. Since Padover provides no direct quotes, however, it seems that no-one actually went on record (in a region where record-keeping was obsessive) calling T. J. the Antichrist or Devil. Instead, Jefferson's religious critics seem to have regarded him as another "devil's minion," guilty of moral indecency and religious infidelity.

During the contentious 1800 presidential election, some Federalist editors warned pious New Englanders to "hide their Bibles should Jefferson be elected" (John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson [Oxford UP, 2004], 154), and one overwrought political cartoonist portrayed Jefferson trying to sacrifice the federal Constitution on a Satanic "altar of Gallic despotism" - a reference to the anticlerical, Deistic, and frequently despotic French Republic that Jefferson had supported.* In the cartoon, Jefferson is stopped by a "federal eagle" under the watchful gaze of God Almighty, who appears to have taken the form of a cloud with a giant eye. In reality, neither imaginary eagles nor amorphous deities stopped Jefferson from becoming president, and Jefferson's election apparently did not stop Federalists from calling him an atheist monster.** Somehow, though, the Devil managed to avoid eating the Constitution, and the republic, as it usually does, survived.

* The document near Jefferson's right hand in this cartoon is his famous 1796 letter to Phillip Mazzei, in which he called the Federalists the "Anglican monarchical aristocratical party" (not entirely untrue) and intimated that the very highest Federalist officials, "men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council...have had their heads shorn by the harlot England." (Merrill Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson [Viking Penguin, 1975], 470.) Piled up at the base of the altar, meanwhile, are bags of treasure from various small countries that Revolutionary France has plundered, including the United States.

** This despite Jefferson's well-publicized attendance of at least one church service while in office and his opening of Treasury and War Department offices for religious services (James Hutson, "Thomas Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists: A Controversy Rejoined," William and Mary Quarterly 56 [Oct. 1999], 775-790).

Update, 13 December: The redoubtable Susan Frey has located a political cartoon, "Office Seekers of 1834," portraying Andrew Jackson as the Devil; it may be found here. Since Jackson's critics had already denounced him as a murderer, bigamist, despot, and would-be monarch, we shouldn't be surprised that one of them added "Oh, and he's the Antichrist, too. Just sayin'."

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Douchebag

2011-11-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I took Niall Ferguson to task for an essay, excerpted in part from his book Civilization, that he published in Newsweek, arguing that when empires fell they did so rather suddenly and that the United States might be on the verge of doing so. I asserted both in my comment and title that Ferguson was something of a "dolt," insofar as his essay betrayed considerable ignorance about the way historical events actually happen. I now wish to apologize to my readers for referring to Ferguson as a dolt, which turns out to be an inadequately pejorative epithet. He is, in fact, a douchebag.

I base this judgment on a kerfuffle that has arisen in the London Review of Books, where Pankaj Mishra reviewed Ferguson's Civilization and several of his earlier books in a long review essay ("Watch This Man," 3 Nov. 2011.) Mishra compared Ferguson to Theodore Stoddard, a purveyor of white-supremacist fantasies from the 1920s, and like Ferguson a writer who warned of the decline of the West relative to a vaguely sinister East. While not calling Ferguson a racist, he did accuse him of stoking the "racial anxieties" of the Euro-American elite and of writing at least one "Stoddardesque" book (The Pity of War, 1998) bemoaning the crippling impact of World War One on the British Empire, for which empire he later wrote at least one avowed apologetic, Empire (2003).

Apropos of Ferguson's latest book, Mishra noted that not all of the author's "killer apps" were confined to Western Europe in the early modern era; Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and India all had strong work ethics, abundant trade, and strong consumer economies until 1800. Perhaps more importantly, "killer apps" weren't necessarily the keys to the West's conquest of the "Rest"; in the case of the Americas and Australasia, epidemic diseases and Eurasian livestock were (as Alfred Crosby and Jared Diamond have argued) probably more important than technology and hard work in effecting English and Spanish colonization. And once the West conquered the Rest, its empires left behind a legacy that was ambiguous at best and often ghastly - vide the serial famines and economic devastation that the British left in India, the destruction of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere and the South Pacific, and the mountain of bodies that the Belgians left in the Congo in the early 20th century.

Mishra's review, it is fair to say, is a hostile one. I cannot judge whether it is an accurate treatment of Ferguson's book, not yet* having read Civilization, but I can say that Ferguson has overreacted to it. In the LRB's November 17th issue Mr. F. wrote an angry letter (scroll up to read), claiming Mishra had engaged in "character assassination" by insinuating that Ferguson was a racist, and owed Ferguson a public apology. In his reply, Mishra did not exactly apologize - he said Ferguson was guilty of the same "pathology" that George Orwell diagnosed in James Burnham, power-worship - but he did write that Ferguson was "no racist" and went on to argue Ferguson had misrepresented his review essay.

This was unacceptable to Professor Ferguson, who replied (scroll down) that Mishra's "mealy-mouthed" assertion and the "smear" that followed it vitiated any apologetic intent in Mishra's reply. He closed his second letter by noting that "the freedom of the press does not extend to serious defamation, at best reckless, at worst deliberate and malicious," and upped the ante, demanding apologies from both Mishra and his editor and insinuating that he planned a lawsuit. In his second reply, Mishra noted that Ferguson has long defended "the innate superiority, indeed indispensibility, of Western civilization," and offered the following Ferguson quote (from earlier this year) as evidence:

"The Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don’t know what they were because they didn’t write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don’t think we’d have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we’ve had in North America."

So the subjugation and dispossession of the Apaches and Navajos, and I assume that of many other Native Americans, was justified in Ferguson's view by the great civilization that Anglo-Americans built in their former homeland. I might wonder if Ferguson is aware of the civilizations that some Native North Americans, like the Chaco Canyon peoples (Anasazi) and Mississippians, actually built on this continent prior to European contact, or what the Good Professor would say about the Native peoples, notably the "Civilized Tribes" of the southeastern U.S., who made a concerted effort to "download" Western Europe's "killer apps" in the 19th century and were still squashed by the U.S. government. But I doubt Ferguson gives a damn; he's too busy bursting with anger over an unfavorable book review and preparing to sue the reviewer in the name of freedom of the press.

* I guess I'll have to read it now, and possibly review some of its content. Stay tuned.

[Note: An earlier version of this post erroneously referred to Prof. Ferguson as "Andrew Ferguson." His real, full name is "Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson."]

What I Saw of the 2011 Ethnohistory Conference, Part Two

2011-11-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

Continued from my previous post, here are summaries of or excerpts from nine more papers I attended last month at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory:

Evan Nooe argued that violence, as employed by the Red Stick Creeks in 1812-13, was part of the Creeks' judicial system, and that their targets in the Fort Mims attack of 1813 tended to be white women and children because Creek men were attacking lineages, not individuals.

Elena Vega Olivera revealed that the children's novel Island of the Blue Dolphins was based on the story of a real person – a California Indian woman stranded on San Nicolas Island, who was "rescued" in 1853 and died of illness almost immediately thereafter.

Kristalynn Shefveland reminded her audience that the Chesapeake colonies were major players in the 17th-century Indian slave trade, and observed that the enslavement of Native Americans, particularly children and those convicted of crimes, continued in Virginia well after a 1691 statute banned the practice.

David Silverman argued that if the New England Algonquians had maintained their access to the trading center of Albany, they might have been able to prevail in King Philip's War, but their exclusion therefrom by the Mohawks cut off their supply of powder and ammunition.

Christina Snyder observed that elite Choctaw students at Richard Johnson's Choctaw Academy behaved rather like the sons of white planters, breaking into Johnson's house and holding "drunken orgies" with the (perhaps not-entirely-willing) daughters of Johnson's slave "concubine" Julia Chinn.

Jessica Stern explained something I'd been wondering about for ages – why British trade regulations stipulated that traders in the southeast had do business in Indian towns (answer: so that chiefs could supervise the trade) – and then noted that Indian hunters routinely ignored these regulations.

Carl Strong gave an ill-considered paper about John Collier's efforts to disprove the "Indian-ness" of the Unkechaug and Shinnecock Indians of Long Island and the Lumbees of North Carolina.

John Troutman told the story of Neal "Pappy" McCormick, an Creek musician who led a Hawaiian/hillbilly/gospel band (one of whose performers was Hank Williams, Sr.), and later became an activist for federal recognition of the remaining Georgia Creeks.

And Susan Wade talked about the evolution of maple sugar into a valuable commodity in the Great Lakes Indian trade; the Ojibwe sold this former "starvation food" (Larry Nesper's words) to the American Fur Company, which in turn shipped it by the ton and marketed it in Cleveland, Detroit, and other Great Lakes towns where cane and beet sugar were expensive.

Thanks to all for their presentations, and for making this a stimulating conference.

What I Saw of the 2011 Ethnohistory Conference, Part 1

2011-11-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Annual Meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, a multidisciplinary academic organization dedicated to historical research on indigenous peoples (specializing in the peoples of the Western Hemisphere), took place last month in Pasadena, California. Your humble narrator was privileged to hold a place on this year's program and to present a paper on Chickasaws and commodification, though he was equally privileged to have attended nearly twenty other academic papers on aspects of Native North American history. In this and my next weblog post, I will be providing short summaries of or excerpts from the presentations I heard in Pasadena, beginning with these:

Mikaela Adams, as part of a fascinating comparative study of tribal citizenship in the post-Civil War southeast, noted that Mormon missionaries taught the Catawbas of South Carolina that they could "whiten" themselves by renouncing sin, as their "Lamanite" ancestors had once been white. (By 1900 or so, 80% of Catawbas were Mormons.)

Bill Carter complicated our view of Native Americans’ dependency on European goods by reporting that much of the merchandise requested by Iroquois in the late 18^th century – even those at the Revolutionary-era refugee settlements near Fort Niagara – was “non-utilitarian,” (e.g. jewelry, fancy shirts, tobacco), and thus represented things with which Indians could easily dispense.

Julia Coates ruefully observed that many modern Cherokee Indians view their tribal membership card as merely an access point to services ("What do I get?"), then noted that people who took the Cherokee Nation's 40-hour Cherokee history course tended instead to view that card as a badge of ethnic pride and responsibility.

John Douglass and Steven Hackel described a recently excavated Gabrielino-Tongva site, probably the village of Guaspet, in the marshland near West Los Angeles, noting that the Indians there had family ties with Chumash and Catalina Indians (reflected in baptismal records) and traded with both for Spanish goods like shoes, beads, and copper pots (for drinking chocolate).

Tim Garrison, ably represented by Michael Green, reported on lawyer Elisha Chester's bizarre plan to relocate Cherokees, Choctaws and Creeks to the Columbia River Valley, where they could live without being molested by whites and serve the United States as colonial settlers in a contested region.

Alice Kehoe gave a negative overview of John Collier's Indian policy, codified in the "paternalistic" Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and joined it to a shout-out to Richard Nixon, who stressed Indian autonomy (or some facsimile thereof) during his troubled presidency.

William Kiser discussed the evolution of Navajo pawnshops into large businesses (some occupying 12,000 square feet) with inventories of 60,000 or more items, noted their accession to some Navajo demands (like never selling "dead pawn"), and also noted in passing the high interest rates they charged (30-40% per annum).

Kevin McBride noted that the Pequot Indians had a network of tributaries and trading partners extending from Iroquoia to eastern New England, from whom they acquired goods such as "Mohawk stone" (greywacke) war hammers and Dutch brass kettles (which they cut into arrow points), and to whom, in the latter case, they owed protection, which generated the 1636 attack on Wethersfield which started the Pequot War.

Rowena McClinton, in a tribute session to Theda Perdue, noted that Cherokee women continued to consult conjurors in the 19^th century because conjuring provided Cherokee women w/rituals that reinforced family relationships.

(To be continued...)

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Dolt

2011-11-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

I sometimes envy Niall Ferguson his productivity, but that envy rarely survives contact with the ponderous prose that Ferguson uses in his books and the diaphanous twaddle that appears in his columns. Take his latest essay in Newsweek, “America’s ‘Oh Shit’ Moment.” Let us set aside, for the moment, the most grating element of this column: Ferguson’s determination to seem “cool” by dropping cultural references that are both out of date and irrelevant to his argument. The dorm-room poster to which the title of the essay refers is sufficiently old that I don’t recall ever seeing it in college (and I’m not a young man), and Ferguson’s reference to the hoary Mac-vs.-PC debate isn’t going to win him many new readers among the 17-to-21 set.

Instead, your humble narrator would like to draw attention to the biggest intellectual flaw in Ferguson’s piece: his assertion, buttressed with historical examples, that when great nations fall they fall quickly and catastrophically. Ferguson is fond of disaster scenarios, to the point where they appear to have clouded his judgment. He asserts that Imperial Rome and the Soviet Union are both relevant examples of great empires that fell with great alacrity. Actually, both of these states had been undergoing serious internal problems for decades, if not centuries, before they formally “fell.” Rome experienced a hundred years of civil war, foreign invasion, plague and famine in the 3rd century CE, and entered the 4th century a much diminished empire. However, thanks to reforms by emperors such as Diocletian and Constantine, it was able to survive for nearly two more centuries. The Soviet Union, for its part, had been in serious trouble for almost 30 years before its collapse in 1991. In the early 1960s its industrial sector began to stagnate and its cities began to run out of food; only by selling oil and natural gas and borrowing money was the Politburo able to import enough grain to survive. These stopgaps lasted for about 25 years, and then they failed, and so did the Soviet Union. Final collapse may come quickly, but it is usually preceded by a long and often highly visible period of decline.

Ferguson argues that the United States is coming close to collapse by neglecting the "killer apps" that made the West great. However, some of the evidence he adduces in support of this argument is contradictory or otherwise flawed. He notes that American consumerism is declining and also that Americans don't save enough, which suggests that he thinks we should be both consuming and saving more money. One can't really do both at once, not on the scale needed to resuscitate a stagnant economy. He also infers that the United States runs the risk of falling behind East Asia in public health because the U.S., Japan, and China now all have life expectancies in the 73-83 range. That's good news for China and Japan, but it's relatively easy to raise life expectancy from 43 to 73 (through better nutrition and preventative medicine); it's much harder and more expensive to raise it from 78 to 88. As with other forms of growth, the U.S. is simply running into diminishing returns as its economy and society mature, and so will Japan and China and (eventually) India.

Of Ferguson’s solutions to our collective ills, the less said the better. He seems to favor abolition of public education – or at least the expansion of tax-funded voucher programs – the abolition of “pseudosciences and soft subjects” (like history?) in universities, the elimination of banking regulations, and admonishing Americans to work harder and save more money. The former three projects are beloved of Republican governors and legislators throughout the United States. The last was actually advice that David Halberstam was giving Americans 20 years ago, warning that if we didn’t work harder and save more we would never have an economy as successful as Japan’s. That path didn’t lead Japan anywhere we would care to follow. Perhaps, with 9% unemployment and flat consumer sales, we would actually be better off if everyone in the U.S. worked less and consumed more.

Just as a stopped clock is right at least twice a day, however, Ferguson does have one intelligent thing to say: “We need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden.” I don’t disagree. Americans have gotten a number of good political and economic ideas from abroad, including secret ballots and Social Security. One suspects that Ferguson and I would disagree about what constitutes a good “update” to our national operating system, but let’s give credit where it’s due, especially since so little is due.

Track Repairs Ahead; Expect Delays

2011-11-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

Your humble narrator has spent the last few weeks attending the Southern Historical Association conference in Baltimore and the Ethnohistory conference in Pasadena, and in addition has taken a break from his usual blogging to review the previous 184 entries and to fix or eliminate broken links (of which there are a few). This process being almost over, he expects to return to regular blogging next week, with a summary report of the papers he heard at the Ethnohistory meeting.

Meanwhile, a quote from Michael Lewis's book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (New York, 2011), which is as good as everyone says it is:

“Because Iceland is really just one big family, it’s simply annoying to go around asking Icelanders if they’ve met Björk. Of course they’ve met Björk; who hasn’t met Björk? Who, for that matter, didn’t know Björk when she was two? ‘Yes, I know Björk,’ a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. ‘She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk” (p. 11).

Don't Mess with a Cyborg VP

2011-10-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

I don't usually hold superlative contests for historical figures, so I've never considered (unlike Cracked Magazine) which historical villain was the biggest badass, but one of my former students, Jennifer Roman, tried the following, which I thought my readers would find pretty amusing (as I did):

"I tried this experiment with a fish tank once. I went out and bought five aggressive fish and named them: Adolf Hitler, Andrew Jackson, Dick Cheney, Aaron Burr (for killing Alexander Hamilton), and Osama Bin Laden. Dick Cheney ate them all. Not only that, a friend of mine forgot to give him water while I was away one summer and he still survived in like an inch of dirty water with no food. There's a lesson there but I'm still not sure what it is...other than don't mess with Cheney."

True enough.

Some Good News, For a Change

2011-09-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

With the economies of the industrialized world on the verge of another collapse, the U.S. government increasingly resembling that of the late Weimar Republic, and the worst drought in decades afflicting Texas, central China, and eastern Africa, it's hard to imagine that there's any good news in the world. Late last year, however, fiction writer Charles Stross noted some cause for good cheer, which is worth recalling now:

1. During the first decade of the 21st century, sub-Saharan Africa averaged 5% economic growth every year. The continent still has serious problems, but the standard of living has steadily improved for the majority of its people.

2. Disease and famine are somewhat less serious problems in Africa today than they were ten years ago. Several nations, like Ethiopia, have become much more adept at feeding their populations since the 1980s, despite the aforementioned drought, and the advent of cheap anti-retroviral drugs has converted HIV from an automatic death sentence into a manageable chronic illness for most. Several West African nations (like Ghana) have meanwhile made major strides in eradicating polio and guinea worm.

3. India and China have experienced 10% annual economic growth since the turn of the century. The Indian middle class is now larger than the population of the United States, and China is en route to becoming the world's largest economy within a decade or so. Overall, the percentage of human beings living in abject poverty has fallen by 50% since 2000.

4. Sometime during the first decade of the 21st century, the world passed the threshold referred to by energy analysts as "peak oil" - but it was during that decade that the percentage of human beings worldwide who live in cities passed the 50% mark for the first time in history. Roughly speaking, the second development should help mitigate the second, since city-dwellers are less energy-dependent, per capita, than country-dwellers with the same standard of living.

5. And, while democracy may be on the ropes in the United States, it - or some reasonable facsimile, anyway - seems to be on the march in a place with which one usually does not associate it, namely the Middle East.

Also, there are still puppies.

Quote of the Month

2011-09-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

"Nationalism is the illegitimate marriage of patriotism with a habitual inferiority complex." - John Lukacs, The Legacy of the Second World War (New Haven, 2010), p. 11. Take that, Benedict Anderson!

Dismal, but Free

2011-08-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

Marronage, slaves' practice of running away from their masters and forming autonomous communities in remote areas, has received less attention from U.S. historians than it deserves. In part, this is because the largest and most famous runaway-slave communities in the hemisphere were in Caribbean and Latin American colonies, like Jamaica and Brazil, where planters lacked British North Americans' resources: a white majority population from whom officials could recruit slave patrols, and Native American neighbors willing to work as slave-catchers. Partly, this neglect is due to a lack of records; runaway slaves didn't leave many, and there were no large-scale military operations against maroon communities in the U.S., unless one includes the marginal example of the Seminole Wars.

Some of this neglect may now be ending. One of the largest harbors of maroons in North America, the Great Dismal Swamp, is the subject of an archaeological excavation by a team from American University. African slaves began running away to this immense wetland, situated in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, around 1700, and by mid-century there were a number of small maroon communities on the region's few patches of high ground, whose inhabitants subsisted off of "corn, hogs, and fowls," and probably also the wild cattle that white travelers sometimes spotted in the region. Initially, the runaways received protection from white "borderers," squatters who were themselves taking advantage of the region's disputed political status to avoid eviction, and who received in-kind payment from maroons in exchange for looking the other way. Later, reinforced with African-American slaves who'd run away during the Revolutionary War, the maroons began to protect themselves by intimidating travelers who came too close. By the early 19th century, some were even working as wage laborers for local resource companies, including the contractors who built the Dismal Swamp Canal and thereby brought the region's isolation to an end. (See Isaac Weld, Travels through the States of North America, [2 vols., London, 1807], 1:180; Charles Royster, Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company [New York, 1999], 11-12, 250)

Archaeologist Dan Sayers and his assistants have located the remnants of several likely maroon dwellings in the Dismal Swamp, along with a small selection of material leavings and artifacts - "knife-cut bone," lead shot, and ceramics. Mainly these are very small remnants, suggesting that the locals threw very little away (and had little to throw away). Many of these artifacts show signs of re-use, and were probably originally Native American artifacts that runaways salvaged. Sayers and his team are therefore researching a group of people who lived lives of great privation, but were nonetheless free and able to hold off - or negotiate with - white Virginians and Carolinians who would otherwise have ended their "self-emancipation." (Marion Blackburn, "American Refugees," Archaeology, Sept./Oct. 2011, 49-58, quote p. 50.)

[For more on maroons in the Dismal Swamp, see this well-researched essay from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.]

Capitalism Defined, Part VII: The Great-Souled Minority

2011-08-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

When I was in college, twenty years ago, the most influential economist in the United States was probably Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago professor who founded monetarism and revived 19th-century laissez-faire economics. When I was in graduate school, a little over ten years ago, that title had passed to "maestro" Alan Greenspan, the libertarian chairman of the Federal Reserve. Today, it has probably passed to Greenspan's mentor, Ayn Rand (1905-82), who though not a formal economist is probably the most well-known philosopher in the English language. Rand's magnum opus, the 1,100-plus-page brick Atlas Shrugged (1957), has sold an average of 150,000 copies every year since its publication and was cited in a Library of Congress poll as the second-most influential book in readers' lives - right after the Bible. Her earlier novel, The Fountainhead (1943), was only marginally less successful, and both books were later made into movies, something one could not imagine happening with Marx's Grundrisse or Weber's Protestant Ethic. In addition to her literary and financial success, Rand acquired a cult-like following during the 1950s and '60s, and her public lectures, which graced the campuses of numerous universities, were almost invariably packed. Not bad for an obscure Jewish pharmacist's daughter from Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Rand's contribution to the modern American perception, and idealization, of capitalism can be found in her novels and a few short polemical works. In Rand's view, free-market capitalism is the only truly moral economic system in human history. It takes its power from the creative energy of free individuals, who act (in a simile that Rand acquired from from her mentor Isabel Paterson) like dynamos in a vast electrical circuit, producing goods, trading with other creators, and using money to signal their desires objectively around the world. It depends not on idealism or charity, but on human reason, willpower, and selfishness - which Rand defined as "healthy egoism" - to function. According to Rand, capitalism did not require physical coercion, unlike feudalism or socialism, which ultimately needed armed thugs to redistribute property to the undeserving. (Quotes and citations in this and the preceding paragraph are from Anne Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made [New York, 2009], 135, 139-140, 221-222, 286-87.)

Rand's philosophy of capitalism represents a significant, in some cases a radical, break with her predecessors in this series. Where Marx and Polanyi saw free-market capitalism as socially destructive, Rand presented it as the infrastructure of a model and moral society. Where Marx and Schumpeter believed socialism was an inevitable and progressive socio-evolutionary phase, Rand argued that it was a barbaric regression that right-thinking people should abhor. Her views hewed closer to those of Adam Smith and Max Weber, but she lacked Smith's skepticism about the morality of capitalists and Weber's appreciation of their tendency toward sociopathy.

The popularity of Rand's views today is in some ways a function of the wealthy supporters she acquired during and after her life, who established research institutes and college endowments dedicated to advancing the study of her works. In other ways, it's due to the natural appeal of her libertarian ideals to young people; Rand was not only extremely intelligent but devoted to
philosophical consistency, which older and more cynical persons can respect but not easily emulate. (Young people are, I suspect, the bulk of Rand's readers today, and they are certainly the dynamic core of libertarian Ron Paul's political crusade.) Rand's vision of capitalism is probably also appealing to many people who feel alienated from the modern political-economic order in industrialized countries, intimidated (as most of us are) by multi-trillion-dollar public debts and too-big-to-fail banks, and who seek an alternative, however unrealistic.

For there are two big ways in which Rand's vision diverges from the economic reality in which most of us countries reside. One is her assumption that free markets are self- regulating and that self-interest will compel businessmen to be honest. Rand was herself a meticulously honest person, and she probably supposed all rational people - including successful businesspeople - would behave similarly. The idea that a group of coke-addled financial whiz-kids would develop junk-quality real-estate bonds, bundle them into CDOs, bribe ratings agencies into certifying them AAA, and sell them to unsuspecting institutional investors, thereby all but ensuring an eventual crash for the sake of short-term profits, would not have occurred to her. It certainly did not occur to Alan Greenspan, who as head of the Federal Reserve repeatedly refused to exercise regulatory authority over the CDO market earlier in this century, and then professed genuine shock that the market had not regulated itself. (Greenspan made this admission in testimony before a Congressional subcommittee in October 2008. Day late and a dollar short, maestro.) Markets are of course essential to a capitalist economy, but they depend heavily on the mutual trust of the actors therein, and where there are profits to be made from violating that trust, governments must intervene, either in the form of regulatory agencies or civil courts enforcing contracts and tort claims. (In Atlas Shrugged, Rand acknowledged a need for the latter institution, but she and her disciples were fundamentally opposed to the former.)

The other serious flaw in Rand's vision is that she ignores the significant role that the commodification of labor plays in making most workers in a capitalist economy hate their jobs. Field hands, factory workers, clerks, telemarketers and middle managers aren't fountains of dynamic industrial energy, they are cogs in a productive machine that someone else designed. Most working and middle-class people, even if they do their jobs conscientiously, don't define themselves by their jobs; they define themselves by their leisure time, their worldly goods, and their relationships with other people, for which their jobs provide only financial support. That most jobs are unfulfilling is evidenced by the willingness of people like airline pilots and school teachers to take a lower rate of pay than other persons with comparable training in order to have a job that is meaningful or respectable. The income that the great majority of people earn has little to do with their rationality or their will (except for the willpower needed to get out of bed in the morning). It is the product of someone else's reason and will.

I've not found much evidence that Rand cared about this. She was primarily interested in the thinkers and entrepreneurs in society, and believed that the function of hoi polloi was to provide the social infrastructure for the few genuinely creative types - the trelliswork, to borrow a metaphor from her idol Friedrich Nietzsche, on which a few flowering plants could grow and blossom. She found utilitarianism, Mill's doctrine of "the greatest good for the greatest number," repellent, and probably would have thrown up if she had ever seen Spock's dying speech in Star Trek II (which came out just three months after her death). Here is another reason for Rand's appeal: she argues that only a minority of creators and builders matter, and that everyone else is conspiring to tear that great-souled minority down. The second half of this argument, at least, is untrue. The unwashed masses would rather wait patiently for the great ones' own hubris to bring them down, and then watch their self-destruction on the news or VH1.

A Gallinacious Indian Policy

2011-07-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

At the NEH Seminar I attended earlier this summer, my colleagues and I spent part of one morning discussing the shift in U.S. Indian policy from "civilization" (that is, re-educating and assimilating Indian peoples as citizens) to Removal, and identifying the rise of scientific racism as one of the crucial intellectual preconditions for this shift. Those of us who were historians were interested in the origins of this conceptual change; one of our seminar leaders attributed it to the rise of linguistic nationalism in the early 19th century, and your humble narrator suggested that it first manifested itself in Americans' growing repulsion with the idea of intermarriage. Officials from Spain, France, and the United States had in the 18th century promoted Indian-white marriages as the surest way to assimilate Native peoples; in 1786 the Virginia legislature came close to passing a bill that would have paid bounties to interracial couples. By the early 1800s the tide was turning: in 1816 Secretary of War William Crawford felt free to propose Indian-white intermarriage as a federal policy, but just eight years later his political opponents used Crawford's pro-intermarriage speech to help derail his presidential bid. (On this subject see Mary Young, "Racism in Red and Black," Georgia Historical Quarterly 73 [Fall 1989].)

While intellectual change is always a moving target, I'm glad to report that I've found another data point that suggests a growing trend toward anti-Indian "scientific" racism in the early 1820s. In 1819 the U.S. Congress approved the Civilization Act, which provided $10,000 a year for schools for Native Americans. Three years later, in 1822, Thomas Metcalfe of Kentucky offered an amendment to an Indian trade bill that would have eliminated this subsidy. Metcalfe noted, quite reasonably by modern standards, that the recipients of this federal aid were Christian missionaries, and argued that Protestants shouldn't be paying taxes to support Catholic missions and vice-versa. He went on at greater length about the supposed futility of "civilizing" Indians. Drawing on a report by Jedidiah Morse on the United States' Native American peoples, he argued that the Indians who had enjoyed longest exposure to missionaries were also the most degenerate. The Saint Regis Mohawks, for instance, were supposedly "a lazy, dirty and degraded band of savages, unchristian, immoral, and vicious" despite nearly two centuries of Catholic missions. Those who did not enjoy the benefit of missions and schools, Metcalfe continued, said they wished to retain the freedom of their traditional lifeways, not be yoked to the plow. The Congressman closed his remarks with a significant comparison: he compared human beings to turkeys, and asserted that wild turkeys, even when raised alongside the domestic variety, always returned to the wild when they matured. Humans, he concluded, were similarly divided into such irreconcilable varieties, and it was fruitless to try to change them: "I do most sincerely believe that such is the barrier which nature interposes between the two people, together with the powerful force of habit operating upon them, that all our attempts to civilize those Indians who are dispersed and scattered in the wilderness will be fruitless and unavailing...We had much better mind our own business." (Proceedings of 4 May 1822, Annals of Congress, 17th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 1794, 1800.)

Were I an intellectual historian, I would stop and let Mr. Metcalfe's remarks stand on their own. Since I lean more toward political history, I will add that as soon as Metcalfe finished his speech, the House rejected his proposed amendments out of hand, thereby choosing to continue funding the civilization program. (This despite the wave of retrenchment that had been passing through Washington for a year, producing deep cuts in military and Indian-department spending.) Other House members might have agreed with Metcalfe's sentiments, but for the moment they decided to let public money do their talking for them.

What I Wrote to My Congresscritter

2011-07-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, your humble narrator rouses himself from his apolitical torpor and sends a check to an advocacy group, or writes a letter (these days, an email) to his elected representatives. Concerning the danger of a politically-motivated default on the United States' debts, which at the moment appears entirely possible, I wrote my Congressmen the following:

"Dear Congressman Bucshon:

I am writing to express my dismay at your co-sponsorship of the 'Cap, Cut, and Balance' resolution which passed the House of Representatives last week. As a former employee of the Concord Coalition, I share your concern with the United States' budget deficit and your belief that Congress must address this critical problem. However, I also believe that in the short term, our government must pay its debts and meet its other commitments. Since we are currently in a recession and fighting two wars, the federal government must - as George W. Bush observed under similar circumstances ten years ago - run a short-term deficit to pay its bills. By voting to link an increase in the federal debt ceiling to a Constitutional balanced-budget amendment, an amendment which would take months if not years to pass, you effectively declared that you no longer believed it was a priority for the United States to pay its creditors. Should the United States default on its debts, even for a brief period, the results would be catastrophic: bank failures throughout the developed world, a collapse in the value of the dollar, a return to recession in the United States, and a chain reaction of credit downgrades not just for the U.S. government, but for state and local governments as well (including Indiana). I urge you to reconsider your position and vote to approve an increase in the federal debt ceiling prior to the default deadline on August 2nd.

Sincerely Yours,
David Nichols
Terre Haute, Indiana "
(July 24, 2011)

I hope this soon becomes an artifact of an obscure early-21st-century political spat, but given the ideological extremism of the current House Republicans, I fear my mildly-hysterical tone may prove justified. It's always unsettling when one has to invoke George II as an example of moderate statesmanship.

Gallant Trousers, or the Lack Thereof

2011-07-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

In her recent article on the Chickasaw-Creek war of the 1790s ("How the Chickasaws Saved the Cumberland Settlement," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 68 [2009]: 2-20) , Wendy St. Jean noted the close military alliance that grew up between that nation and their white neighbors in the Cumberland settlements (Nashville and environs), which extended to Nashvillians' sending militia and artillery to help defend Chickasaw towns from Creek attack. The alliance had an emotional component, as well: at a July 4th dinner in Nashville, one of the toasts was to "our gallant sans-culotte allies of the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations" (p. 13). The toast was a nice play on words: it referred to the breech cloths and leggings that Chickasaw warriors wore in lieu of knee-breeches (or trousers), and also to western white settlers' sympathies for the more radical and ill-clad elements of the French Revolutionary movement, sympathies which some frontiersmen (in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania) expressed by forming Democratic-Republican societies to support the French Republic. One tends to think of the French Revolution as an Atlantic phenomenon, so I was pleasantly surprised to see pro-Revolutionary sentiments expressed in such remote settlements - and used to refer to people who (in the case of the Chickasaws) were fairly staunch opponents of France for most of the 18th century.

The End of the Holocene

2011-06-24T17:00:00.000-07:00

Last month the Economist ran a cover story, "Welcome to the Anthropocene," discussing the startling idea that humans had so altered the Earth's surface, oceans, and atmosphere that they had actually inaugurated a new geological epoch. We are all familiar with the anthropogenic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but humans have introduced less well-known but no less profound changes to their physical environment: a 20% decrease in the amount of sediment discharged by the world's rivers, for example (thanks to 50,000 or so hydroelectric and flood-control dams), and a 150% increase in the amount of nitrogen transferred from the atmosphere to the soil (thanks to synthetic nitrates). Most of these changes are problematic, but they are all the consequence of creating a world economy and technosphere capable of supporting seven billion human beings. Turning back the clock to a "lower-impact" state - one should perhaps say "to the Holocene" - would require massive depopulation, which only a few idealists publicly favor.

As a historian, I have two questions about the "Anthropocene." First, when did this new geological epoch, if we may call it that, begin? One of the commentators on the Economist's website, "Callisthenes," argues that it may be difficult to identify a starting-point using geological rules, but the list of technologies the article provides allows us to identify some significant dates. The Haber-Bosch process of nitrate synthesis was demonstrated in 1909, the construction of large concrete dams began about 1880, and the takeoff in human CO2 production occurred in the latter half of the 19th century. 1900 would seem to be a good ballpark estimate, but it's fair to say that no-one living at the turn of the twentieth century realized they were bringing the Holocene to a close, just as a fair percentage of humans today would prefer to believe that nothing has changed since the world's creation (in 4004 BC, of course).

My second question is the standard historical significance question: so what? On the time scales most historians work with (a few decades, usually), the inception of a new geological epoch wouldn't seem to leave much of an impact. Taking the past ten thousand years of human history and prehistory as a whole, however, the Economist article suggests an answer to the question "Which was more significant, the Neolithic Revolution [the introduction of human agriculture] or the Industrial Revolution?" Insofar as the Industrial Revolution has reshaped the surface and atmospheric chemistry of the Earth and stamped its geological record, an Earth scientist who accepts the concept of an Anthropocene would argue it was more significant, and that the Neolithic Revolution was primarily important as the precondition for industrialization. Whether historians will be inclined to discuss the matter with their colleagues in the Geology department remains to be seen.

(Above image via oilempire.us.)

An Empire, If You Can Define It

2011-06-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Sydney Freedberg and I recently had an exchange on his website about the definition of the word "empire," and whether it properly applied to the United States. (This was apropos of an interview Sydney did with a Romanian news site on the NATO campaign in Libya.) One can follow the exchange here. Sydney defines an empire as a state with a "politically dominant, culturally distinct group" living in a core territory, and at least one ethnically distinct peripheral group with limited political rights. By this definition, the U.S. was an actual empire from 1898 to 1946, during its period of formal rule over the Philippines and establishment of protectorates over several Caribbean and Central American republics.

I think it's useful to have a limited definition of empire, if only because the term has become so widely and pejoratively used in the early 21st century as to lose its meaning. I would only add two caveats here. The first is that "empire" wasn't always pejorative; during the 18th century, for instance, it could merely mean "a large territorial state." As Peter Onuf points out in Jefferson's Empire (U. of Virginia Press, 2001, pp. 53-79) the first leaders of the American national republic frequently referred to the United States as an "empire." Indeed, Federalists discovered it was more politically useful to call the U.S. an "empire" than a "nation," since the latter implied that they wanted to create a consolidated national government (as their Anti-Federalist critics claimed).

The second caveat is that under Sydney's definition, the interstellar Empire in the original STAR WARS movies wasn't an empire, unless you count the Stormtroopers as the "core" ethnic group. Pretty much everyone else was an oppressed peripheral group. (In the prequel films, there was only one consistently oppressed subject race: the audience.)

The Best-Kept Secret in Chadron, Nebraska

2011-06-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

During the past ten years I've visited three first-rate museums: the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, and the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska. The latter is a compact but richly-endowed and ably-interpreted archive of materials from the North American Indian trade: animal pelts, Indian handicrafts, European trade goods, models of pirogues and trade canoes, and restored 19th-century trading post. I had thought myself an expert, of sorts, on this subject, but I quickly learned that the museum's designers curators had much to teach me. Here are some of my more intriguing findings:

1) Deerskins, which I thought Europeans used primarily for breeches and gloves, could also be used as water-resistant coverings for bags and trunks.

2) When Indians bought tobacco from traders, they purchased it in highly-processed units: large spun ropes of "twist" tobacco and pressed bricks of "plug" tobacco, both commonly flavored with spices and molasses.

3) Point blankets, the large, water-resistant woolen blankets sold by the Hudson's Bay Company, whose vertical stripes (or "points") indicated their cost in beaver skins, were commonly sold in pairs. I had no idea why this was so until I actually saw a display of point blankets: each "pair" was actually a single double-sized blanket that storekeepers subsequently cut in half. British weavers supposedly made the blankets this way to minimize export duties on individual items.

4) Indians sometimes wore padlocks as pieces of jewelry, rather than using them as actual locks - a point one might remember when trying to view padlocks as evidence that Indians had abandoned the concept of communal property.

5) By the 19th century, the American fur trade had become not only an extension of the Atlantic economy, but the global economy. Plains Indians bought cowrie shells from the Indian and South Pacific Oceans, to decorate their clothing, and Northwest Indians sometimes bought Chinese camphor-wood boxes or coins ("cash") from European traders. This is a subject that I suspect (or at least hope) will generate a growing amount of research over the next couple of decades.

The Jamestown Conundrum

2011-06-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

Daniel Richter's new book, Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts (Harvard UP, 2011), is in some ways a sequel to his last monograph, Facing East from Indian Country. In that 2001 volume, Richter shifted the spatial alignment of American historiography, replacing westward-facing accounts of European territorial expansion with an eastward-facing narrative of Native American contact and survival. In his new work, the author tries to change the temporal orientation of American history, arguing that since most of that history occurred before 1776, we can quite usefully view the American Revolution as a culminating, rather than inaugural, episode. American history, as Richter presents it, grew like a series of geological or archaeological strata, each laid down by a particular group of Indians or colonists, each providing at least a partial foundation for its successors.

I've not had the chance to read and digest Professor Richter's book in its entirety, but I can attest to the success of its methodology regarding at least one perplexing colonial episode: the unlikely survival of the English colony of Jamestown. The behavior of Jamestown's early settlers was a puzzle to historians when I was in college: instead of planting corn and tending to their own livelihoods, the English colonists spent their time refusing to work and playing bowls on the village green. Following the lead of Edmund Morgan and Francis Jennings, Richter explains this lassitude was a consequence of the settlers' historically-determined expectations: they had come to Virginia not to work but to enrich themselves by exploiting indigenous labor, and justified this exploitation by spreading (in a nominal way) their brand of Christianity, like medieval Crusaders or Spanish conquistadors.

Richter goes on to attribute the colonists' actual survival to the "medieval," or more precisely Mississippian, mindset of the region's paramount Indian chief, Powhatan. Like other great chiefs, Powhatan derived much of his power from his control of trade routes and access to exotic goods, which the English clearly possessed in quantity. Thus, in return for gifts of copper kettles, swords, and other prestige-conveying merchandise, Powhatan proclaimed the English not "strangers...but Powhatans" (p. 125) - simultaneously extending his authority over them - and allowed them to reside on his confederacy's land and trade for food. The seemingly-useless metal smiths who accompanied the early Jamestown voyages became the colony's most important workers, making copper and iron tools to trade to the Powhatans for food. Periodically, during the Anglo-Powhatan wars of 1609-1614 and 1622-32, the English would conduct "harvesting raids" (as Frederick Fausz has termed them) against Powhatan villages for supplies, but otherwise the colony, like its contemporaries at Plymouth and Quebec, survived chiefly through Indian trade until the 1620s. This was not, Richter concludes, the consequence of design so much as an unconscious compromise between English desires to exploit Indian labor and Powhatan desires to acquire rare English goods at the lowest cost.

Whether the English ever invited the Powhatan Indians to play bowls with them, I know not. Perhaps.

Capitalism Defined, Part VI: Schumpeter and the Origins of Socialism

2011-05-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

While Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950) was best known for the term "creative destruction," which he identified as one of the positive features of capitalist economies, that term (which he did not coin) only hints at the subtlety and power of his analysis of capitalism. I have defined capitalism so far in this series as an economic system in which investors commodify economic inputs and mobilize them through markets to generate a financial return on capital investments. Schumpeter's definition of capitalism was much more dynamic: he identified it as "a form or method of economic change" (82), driven by entrepreneurs who in their pursuit of profits invariably and radically transformed farm organization, transportation, materials technology, and living standards.

Schumpeter's initial economic research focused on the origins of business cycles, to which several previous economists had assigned regular periods of various lengths. He was particularly interested in the "long cycles" described by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev, who identified three sequential 55-year-long waves of economic boom and bust that began in 1790 and continued into the twentieth century. Kondratiev didn't specify the causes of these cycles, but Schumpeter argued they were the products of discrete industrial revolutions, caused by entrepreneurs' adoption of new technologies (like spinning jennies) or production of new goods and services (like rail transport). These revolutions produced not only profits for entrepreneurs but "avalanche[s] of consumer goods," which generally increased the purchasing power and improved the living standards of ordinary workers (67-68). Once the new methods of production had spread throughout the economy, however, markets became saturated with new goods and services, and firms which had borrowed heavily to expand or to adopt new technologies went bust. The result was growing unemployment and economic depression, which ended only when a new industrial revolution began and started the next cycle.

While the heroes of Schumpeter's economic narrative were individual entrepreneurs, he observed that it did not take long for the firms these innovators built to turn into monopolistic corporations. Nor did Schumpeter think this was a bad thing. Large corporations tended to be more efficient than small ones, because of their ability to employ economies of scale, and while critics of monopolies argued that they tended to stifle innovation, Schumpeter didn’t believe this was true. In the long term, he admitted, a monopolistic corporation might benefit by inhibiting technological change, thereby conserving its sunk costs in plant and equipment, but most corporations preferred the large short-term profits that came from adopting new technologies and productive techniques – as evidenced by the investments most 20^th-century corporations made in research and development (96-97). Competition between firms thus might diminish over time, but competition between old and new productive methods remained constant.

Like Marx, Schumpeter believed that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, though his explanation of how this occurred was subtler and more sociologically informed than Marx’s. Marx and Engels argued that capitalism would fall when an immiserated global proletariat discovered it had “nothing to lose but their chains.” Schumpeter countered that capitalism would fall when the bourgeoisie discovered they had nothing to fight for. He explained that the chief motives of capitalists were the drive to innovate – either to invent or to adopt others’ inventions – and the desire to accumulate capital. As capitalist economies became more dominated by large, “heavily bureaucratized” firms, however, entrepreneurs would encounter increasing constraints on their ability to innovate (134). Those who prospered would instead be those who could serve as cogs in a corporate machine or, at best, members of a corporate research team. Moreover, ownership of capital property would become less materially satisfying as the means of production came to be dominated by joint-stock companies, whose owners – shareholders – held their property in a highly “dematerialized and defunctionalized” way (142). Anyone who has worked for a large corporation or cast a proxy ballot in a shareholders’ election will recognize the truth of both of these observations. Essentially, Schumpeter concluded, the emergence of monopoly capitalism tended to prepare most people for life in a collectivist state, which offered the same amount of bureaucracy and greater economic security into the bargain.

Schumpeter added that the industrial-era bourgeoisie was a class singularly ill-suited to governance. They viewed the state as an impediment to their goals, and lacked the sense of responsibility that the European aristocracy had developed by the early modern era. At the same time, the bourgeoisie could not function without certain utilities, like roads and military protection, that the state provided, nor could it thrive without the existence of cities, which required considerable organization and political management to thrive. Capitalism, or rather capitalists, thus needed a "classe dirigiste" (136) to manage affairs of state. A.J.P. Taylor, in a quote I mentioned earlier in this blog, would confirm this statement with his observation on the post-Revolutionary French middle class. Schumpeter, who was more interested in the 20th than the 19th century, merely concluded that this was another reason capitalists would eventually give political ground to labor union leaders, urban reformers, democratic politicians, and (to use James Burnham's adjective) "managerial" types. This is largely what did happen in most of the world's industrial countries in the mid-twentieth century, at least until the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1980s.

(Citations above are from Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [New York, 1942].)

Ding Dong

2011-05-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, the death of a prominent world figure calls for mourning; sometimes it calls for sober reflection; and sometimes, on rare occasions, it calls for humor. Last night's assassination of Osama bin Laden is such an occasion. Here is a sampling of Bin Laden jokes I've found online today:

1) It sure seems like Obama’s job as a secret Muslim operative imposing Sharia law on the US just got a whole lot harder.

2) How do we know he’s really dead? I demand to see the long form death certificate!

3) Oh thank goodness! Now the world is safe again, and nothing bad will ever happen.

4) So how did it go down? Some Special Forces guys creep in there and turn off his dialysis machine?

5) Hopefully, he didn’t leave any horcruxes.

6) Good news: bin Laden is dead, bad news: have to hunt down zombie bin Laden now.

7) I was wondering what the hell was going on when I turned on Fox and saw the headlines – ‘Black man assaults, kills elderly senior citizen in his home.'

8) Reagan would have parachuted in and strangled him to death with his own two hands, like a REAL American!

9) Right now Bin Laden is standing in the middle of a convention looking at 72 backpack-wearing, bespectacled Star Trek enthusiasts and thinking...'You gotta be fucking kidding me'.

10) He's not only merely dead, he's really most sincerely dead.

[Sources: Twitter (1), Crooked Timber (2-4, 7), Tumblr (5-6), Friends on Facebook (8-10)]

Capitalism Defined, Part V: Polanyi and the Fictions of Free-Market Societies

2011-04-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

While Max Weber founded what one might call the sociological study of capitalism, the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi was among the first scholars to identify capitalism as a fit subject for anthropological study. Following the lead of Jacob Malinowski (whose study of Trobriand Islanders in the 1920s became a classic) and sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (who developed the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft dichotomy), Polanyi argued that Adam Smith’s economic man, who pursued only profits and personal comforts, was a myth. The primary function of most human economies, Polanyi observed, was to improve participants’ social status and augment their “social assets,” not their store of worldly goods. In pre-state societies like the Trobriand Islanders’, people’s primary economic goals were reciprocity – the symmetrical exchange of goods as gifts, usually in a social context attended by ritual (7-9) – and redistribution, whereby chiefs accumulated goods for the purpose of giving them to followers. The former ethic promoted social cohesion, while the latter produced political hierarchies by tying clients to their chiefly patrons. Neither ethic, though, was typical of capitalist societies; indeed, one later ethnohistorian, Daniel Richter, called redistribution a “kind of upside-down capitalism” because it involved negative accumulation (Ordeal of the Longhouse [Chapel Hill, 1992], p. 22).

More sophisticated state societies, like ancient Greece, medieval Europe, or 18th-century Dahomey, had more complicated economies, but they still weren’t capitalistic. Most produced for household or local consumption, and the trade in which they engaged – which, granted, might be very valuable (like the spice and slave trades) – usually consisted of luxury goods bought and sold by social outsiders or state employees. These societies did employ various kinds of money – beads, cowry shells, gold coins – in trade, but Polanyi argued that they used money as a “semantic system” to represent and discharge particular social obligations, like bride price or fines (190-194). Production, consumption, and trade thus remained thoroughly “embedded” (82) in political or social relationships, and philosophers from these societies, like Aristotle, defined the "good life" as a communal one, where people took pleasure not in material accumulation and consumption but in festivals, theater, political debate, and even battle.

The primary innovation of capitalism, Polanyi argued, was to yank economic inputs out of these social contexts by commodifying them (30-32). The merchants, industrialists, and liberal economists of the 18th and 19th century developed and codified a new set of economic "fiction[s]" (32), like wage labor and free trade, which subordinated previous social relationships to the new imperatives of commodity exchange. They then used the power of the state, first in Britain, later in other countries, to remove all impediments to the commodification and exchange of inputs – passing enclosure laws, creating poorhouses, removing tariffs, and instituting a global gold standard. They thereby created a so-called "self-regulating market," which capitalists and liberal economists believed was natural but was in fact highly artificial and socially destructive. Capitalism, Polanyi argued, created a global wave of ghastliness, knocking down laws, customs, and institutions that might have mitigated its ill effects. 19th-century India saw the destruction of its textile industry and the spread of famine due to rising grain prices; Native North Americans lost their land and went into a steep demographic and cultural decline; and 20th-century African migrant laborers escaped starvation only by losing their homes, families, and culture.

One might argue (as I would) that Polanyi's conclusions are a bit shrill, since he observed in his earlier work that the British developed mechanisms for defending their society against capitalism's evils: trade unions, a protectionist movement, and the creation of a welfare state after 1906. Presumably, other societies injured by capitalism's "self-regulating market" were able to develop their own countermeasures, like the legal defense associations that Plains Indians established to recover some of their lost lands. One might also argue that Polanyi was merely adding another layer of sophistication to Marx's early analysis of the cultural bankruptcy of capitalism. This is in some ways, however, beside the point. Polanyi's real strength lies in his analysis of pre-capitalist economies and his careful differentiation of societies with some of the features of capitalism (like trade and currency) from those that are genuinely capitalistic. In defining a thing, it is helpful to understand what that thing is not; in the case of capitalism, it is very helpful to know that the great majority of human societies have not organized their economies according to its rules.

Quotes from George Dalton, ed., Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Boston, 1968). See also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1944); idem, "Traders and Trade," in Jeremy Sabloff and C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, eds., Ancient Civilization and Trade (Albuquerque, 1975), 133-154.

Quote of the Week

2011-04-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

"In France, the bourgeoisie, after the great Revolution, resorted to every kind of desperate expedient for avoiding responsibility - empire, revived monarchy, sham monarchy, sham empire - until the failure of all left them with no escape from responsibility in the Third Republic, and even that perished from lack of a true governing class." A.J.P. Taylor, in The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918 (new edition, London, 1948), p. 138. I don't think Taylor is entirely fair to the Third Republic, but I suppose it was hard for someone who remembered that republic's last few years (in the 1930s) to credit it with ever having produced responsible legislators or capable leaders.

[Image at right: the coat-of-arms of the aforementioned "sham monarch," Louis-Philippe (1830-48).]

The Arab 1848

2011-04-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Except for a brief period following last month's tsunami and nuclear accident in Japan, the attention of the world media has been focused this year on the revolutions underway in the Arab world. Several online commentators, most notably Tariq Ali and Andrew Sullivan, have tried to make sense of this multinational wave of uprisings by comparing it to the European revolutions of 1848, which had similar goals, spread with equal speed through Europe's cities a century and a half ago, and came – unfortunately for the insurgents – to a bad end. As I think this is actually a pretty fair historical comparison, I present herewith a short summary of the actual 1848 uprisings, which has to date been missing from these commentators' remarks.

Of the 1848 revolutions, one may say that they were caused by poor harvests, unemployment, the dissatisfaction of the educated middle class with repressive monarchical governments, and the related aspiration of romantic nationalists to create unified linguistic nation-states. The first rebellion of the year broke out in January in the Kingdom of Sicily, but the real flashpoint for the continental insurrection was Europe's cultural capital, Paris, where in February urban mobs expelled France's king, Louis-Philippe, and bourgeois legislators proclaimed the Second Republic. News of the French revolution spread quickly, thanks to cheap newspapers and widespread literacy. In Italy, insurgents forced King Charles Albert of Piedmont to grant his subjects a constitution and drove Austrian troops out of Milan; later that year an army organized by Italy's princes besieged Austria's forts in northern Italy. In Germany, liberal reformers convened the Frankfurt Assembly to promote a unified German republic, insurgents expelled the Grand Duke of Baden, crowds seized control of Berlin, and King Wilhelm IV of Prussia felt obliged to issue a constitution creating a Prussian Assembly. In Austria, rebels seized control of Vienna and forced Metternich, symbol of the monarchical restoration of 1815, to flee for his life. The Austrian rebellion ultimately drove King Ferdinand, one of the more comically imbecilic of the Hapsburgs (famous for his demand "I am the emperor and I want dumplings!"), to abdicate in favor of his nephew Franz Joseph. Nationalist uprisings also broke out in Hungary and Romania.

In the shorter term, these revolutions were failures. The new French republic violently suppressed an uprising by Paris workers in June, and in December conservatives and rural voters seeking a restoration of order elected the authoritarian Louis Napoleon as president. He overthrew the republic three years later. The Frankfurt Assembly never obtained any real power and degenerated quickly into a talking-shop. The Austrian monarchy regained control of Vienna and northern Italy, and recaptured Hungary in 1849 with Russian aid. The new Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph, held his throne for another 67 years. The Sicilian and Romanian revolutions were suppressed. Europe's bourgeoisie discovered they hated proletarian radicalism more than authoritarian government, and became more conservative. This is all bad news for the Arab world, if the revolutions that began there this January follow the 1848 model.

There was, however, brighter historical news in the long term. Few of Europe's monarchs could ignore the crowds that besieged the continent's principal cities and drove their royal kinsmen from their thrones, and many decided that the best way to prevent future revolution was to grant at limited concessions to the more moderate protestors – usually a constitution and an elected parliament. These concessions prevented uprisings from occurring in Denmark and the Netherlands, and pacified insurgents in Prussia and Piedmont. Several Arab monarchs, including the kings of Morocco and Jordan, appear to be following this example (consciously or not) in 2011. None of the rest of Europe's monarchical governments felt they could ever again afford to ignore the popular will in their countries; gone forever were the days when, as in 1814-15, the princes of Europe could trade people like commodities at the conference table. Louis Napoleon, after his coup d'etat, felt the need to legitimize his rule with popular plebiscites, while Austria's emperor eventually (after losing northern Italy in the wars of the Risorgimento) granted limited autonomy within the empire to Hungary. Admittedly, there is another, darker solution that some governments devised to the problem of popular restiveness post-1848: uniting people through warfare, either foreign adventures (as with Louis Napoleon's new French Empire) or wars of national unity (as with Prussia in Germany and Piedmont in Italy). Let us hope the successors to the Arab 1848 resist the temptation to follow this particular example.

(My principal sources for the above are Michael Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution [New York, 2009] and the first chapter of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Capital [New York, 1975]; for a short introduction to the subject, see this article by Kurt Anderson.)

Where They Are Now

2011-04-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

To mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War, USA Today ran a cover story this weekend on the descendants of some of the principal leaders of that conflict. Who would have guessed that Robert E. Lee V would be a football coach, J.E.B. Stuart V an orthopedic surgeon, and Stonewall Jackson's great-great-grandson a song-writer? Someone with more imagination than your humble narrator, certainly.

I also wouldn't have guessed that there were still 100 living children of Civil War veterans, but I shouldn't be surprised; some veterans of that war married late and had children in their 70s. These included my own great-grandfather, Willes Bruce (no relation to Bruce Willis), who, according to my sister Corinna's research, was 72 when our grandfather Jack was born. Willes was from Tennessee and was supposedly an officer in the Confederate army. He was born in 1829, when Andrew Jackson was president and work had just started on the United States' first railroad; his son died in 1979, 150 years and 32 presidents later, and nearly ten years after the first Moon landing.

Capitalism Defined, Part IV: You Say Ascetic, I Say Sociopath

2011-03-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Marx never doubted that capitalism was a social system, but he also argued that the material imperatives of capitalist societies were what really shaped their cultures and social institutions. Governments, laws, customs, and beliefs were all superstructures that the bourgeoisie had built atop the foundation of a capitalist economy. Twenty years after Marx's death, however, another German social scientist, Max Weber, reversed this equation. Defining capitalists as seekers after "forever renewed profit by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise" (p. 18), and agreeing with Marx that capitalism could not exist without free labor (because one could not fully monetize and rationalize unfree labor), Weber diverged from his predecessor in asking whence these driven capitalists and their willing workers came, and finding the answer not in their material circumstances but their cultural values. Capitalism, Weber argued, wasn't the product of commerce, mechanization, or corporate organization. It originated instead in a "social ethic" (54), the belief that one's earthly labor constituted a spiritual calling and that one had a religious duty to perform it well.

The capitalist, in Weber's view (expressed in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [Prentice-Hall, 1904/1977), revolutionized the world economy not with his techniques but with this ethic, which drove him to hard labor, "rigor[ous]...supervision" of his employees, and unrelenting maximization of output and profits (67-68). Weber tracked this ethic to the "Calvinistic diaspora" (43), particularly early modern Holland, England, and New England, the latter of which produced one of the world's first bourgeois ethicists, Benjamin Franklin, before it produced a capitalist economy. Calvinists, Weber observed, believed that mankind was totally depraved and helpless in God's eyes, and this belief endowed them with "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness" (104), unknown to Catholics and Lutherans. Unable to assuage this loneliness and anxiety through prayer or good works - neither of which Calvinists believed could help them achieve divine grace - Calvinists threw themselves instead into "intense worldly activity" (112). By the 17th century, Calvinist/Puritan theologians like Richard Baxter were arguing that constant labor was the Christian's primary duty, and that wasting time and losing opportunities to make profits were actually sinful, the former because it made one lose opportunities to advance God's work, the latter because it wasted the resources God wished to put into one's stewardship (157-58, 162-63).

The Calvinist's quest for self-perfection through work and material acquisition swiftly turned into a quest for continual and systematic increases in economic output, and the economies of nations with a large Calvinist population soon turned into productivity engines, emphasizing continual growth in profits and output at the expense of wages, consumption, or any of the ordinary pleasures of living. Indeed, since the Calvinist/Puritan's greatest earthly duty was to his work and "his possessions, to which he subordinate[d] himself as an obedient steward" (170), his work and wealth became more important, and one might say more holy, than any of the people involved in producing that wealth. The Protestant capitalist wasn't afraid of amassing possessions and growing rich; so long as he re-invested rather than consumed his wealth it would not block his entry into heaven. Nor was he opposed to inequalities of wealth, since these were ordained by God. Nor did he feel any obligation to pay his employees a decent wage, since if they were fellow Calvinists they would feel their work was its own reward, and if they weren't then they were sinners who would only work if goaded to it by the threat of starvation.

To this author, and I suspect to some of his readers, these seem like the personality traits of a borderline sociopath: ridden by anxiety, unable to feel contentment (at least not for long), and uninterested in the fate of others. Weber had no wish to condemn early capitalists for these traits, but his plumbing of the capitalist psyche revealed a type not terribly different from the bourgeois "eunuchs" found in Marx's early essays. There was, however, one feature of Protestant capitalism that could meliorate its more pathological features: the concept of stewardship. The religious capitalist who believed that he held his property and profits in trust for the Almighty was theoretically less likely to consider them his personal reward for his efforts and more likely to view them as communal assets that he should spend for a greater good - reinvesting them in the economy or spending them on charitable and educational enterprises. This was the attitude of Andrew Carnegie, who while treating his workers like dogs spent millions of dollars on ways to "help the aspiring to rise" libraries, museums, parks, and educational endowments. The robber baron who, after years of cutting throats and sweating his employees, finally curled up on his accumulated treasures like Smaug the Dragon, had no place in this moral scheme, though one suspects Ayn Rand and her followers would regard him as a laudable human being, Carnegie as a moralizing sap, and Weber as a bore.

Pacific Interlude

2011-03-14T13:08:00.000-07:00

Two quick historical notes from the Pacific coast of North America:

First, an article in Science (summarized in the March 8, 2011 issue of the New York Times) reports on archaeological findings at three 12,000-year-old sites on the Channel Islands of California. The sites contained numerous shaped, "delicate" projectile points, used for a variety of marine-oriented subsistence activities: catching fish and shellfish and hunting seals and waterfowl. The most interesting feature of the sites was their age: they were contemporaneous with the Clovis culture, and provide further evidence that some of the earliest human settlers of the Americas were mariners who migrated into the hemisphere via the Pacific Coast.

Second, via Newshoggers.com, an interesting observation about historical earthquakes in the Pacific. I found it neat that one can so precisely date a major earthquake off the Oregon coast in the era before European contact, based on the simple combination of radiocarbon dating of destroyed trees and plant life, and the known impact date of a tsunami that crossed the Pacific and hit Japan the following day (27 January 1700). I must confess I also didn't know how recently Mount Hood had erupted: there was apparently a major eruption in 1805, right before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Columbia Valley.

Capitalism Defined, Part III: Tales of Rage and (False) Hope

2011-03-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

A lifetime separated Smith's Wealth of Nations from Karl Marx's earliest major writings, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The two authors' views were also a world apart. Smith wrote in defense of an economic order that was still in its infancy, and a class that was still struggling for dominance against landed nobles and monopolists. Marx wrote after the new capitalist order had spread across half of Europe, and after its immiserating effects were becoming clear, at least in the new industrial cities of Britain, France, and Germany. Thus, where Smith was merely critical of merchants and manufacturers, Marx wrote of them with barely suppressed rage. His anger abated over time, as he and his colleague, Friedrich Engels, began to identify a revolutionary alternative to bourgeois rule and developed the belief that this alternative would inevitably triumph.

For Marx, as for Smith, capital was definable in terms of things - provisions, raw materials, tools, and machines - that one could use to produce new goods. Unlike Smith, Marx argued that there was a deeper and more important definition of capital, as "accumulated labor," and in particular accumulated wage labor (Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts, 98). Capital could not exist without wage labor because capitalism was essentially a social relationship, in which the bourgeoisie used capital and commerce to commodify people and goods and convert them into interchangeable "exchange values." Over time, capital could only reproduce itself by radically restructuring prior social relationships, eliminating independent craftsmen and petty-bourgeois shopkeepers and turning workers into a vast, de-skilled industrial army - the proletariat. (Wage Labor & Capital, 207-08, 210-11)

Adam Smith had suggested in Wealth of Nations that employers drove down wages whenever they could, but he also insisted that mechanization, the division of labor, and capital accumulation would ultimately lead to greater employment and rising prosperity. Marx strenuously disagreed. The division of labor, he argued, destroyed the value of craftsmen's skills and created a market for unskilled workers, who were easier to hire and fire. Meanwhile, the greater productivity offered by machinery allowed capitalists to lay off workers when competition and falling profits obliged them to do so. Capital accumulation and industrialization thus created "powerful industrial armies" whose generals, paradoxically, won their battles by cashiering their own men. These new armies could, however, ultimately rebel against their generals, once they discovered their common interest: eliminating the state system and the capitalist cash nexus that kept them in bondage. In their most famous pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels predicted that this rebellion would inevitably occur, after the proletariat discovered its potential strength and that they had "nothing to lose but their chains."

Much popular criticism of Marx today focuses on the failure of the communist states he inspired to deliver a classless, a more humane, or even a better way of life to their people. Instead, their command economies and elimination of "bourgeois" civil liberties gave their leaders power that (to paraphrase George Orwell) the most despotic pre-modern emperors could scarcely imagine. Marx was more successful as an analyst of capitalism. With the benefit of decades of hindsight, Marx was able to observe that industrial capitalism had a historical momentum that its creators could not easily control, and which led capitalist societies in directions they didn't want to go: toward depressions, mass unemployment, and organized labor unrest. He believed that these crises would inevitably destroy capitalism; the bourgeoisie could delay them by opening new foreign markets and discovering new, cheap sources of raw materials overseas, but they could not ultimately prevent an immiserated, trans-national proletariat from seizing its destiny.

We might in closing note that capitalists who had read Marx could and did find ways to prevent this final crisis from occurring. These included the creation of social insurance programs (by Wilhelmine Germany, British Liberals, and Progressives in the U.S.), the use of Keynesian government spending to counteract business cycles, and the taming of Labor by incorporating large labor unions into national economic planning. These mechanisms, coupled with a fair amount of old-fashioned political repression, kept Marxian communism out of most of the world's industrial states in the 20th century. They are techniques that, since 1991, American and European capitalists have been trying hard to unlearn. More the fools.

[All citations above are to The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York, 1978), second edition.]

Capitalism Defined, Part II: In the Beginning Was Adam

2011-02-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

Inevitably, any study of capitalism must pay homage to Adam Smith, the reclusive Scottish academic who founded the modern study of economics. Smith was a moral philosopher before he became an economist, and one can divide his writings on early capitalist societies, published in 1776 as The Wealth of Nations, into descriptive observations and normative judgments. This has been true of much economic writing ever since.

Smith was somewhat vague about the definition of capital, because he was reluctant to identify it with any particular substance (such as gold or silver). Rather, he identified capital by its purpose: either to buy goods (food, raw materials, textiles) for resale, or to improve land or purchase machinery and "instruments of trade" (Book II, Chapter 1). The former he identified as "circulating" and the latter as "fixed" capital. Circulating capital mainly generated profits for merchants, fixed capital for masters and landlords.

Smith made it clear (or as clear as he could in a diffuse, rambling, 1000-plus-page brick of a book) that he viewed the owners of capital as the wellsprings of wealth and productivity. They increased the productivity of land through improvements like fertilizer and better breeds of livestock; they increased the output of manufacturing establishments with machinery and the division of labor; and they provided an incentive for both forms of improvement by fostering commerce. The limit on a country's industry, Smith asserted, is "what the capital of the society can employ" (Book IV, Chapter 2). Small wonder he has so long enjoyed a good reputation with entrepreneurs, dividend-drawers, and hack writers for the Cato Institute.

I digress. It's also important to note that Wealth of Nations wasn't a billet doux to the capitalist class. Smith had normative judgments to pass against them, as well as their antagonists. True, in Books I and V Smith famously argued for limited government intervention in the economy. Governments should, he said, lift existing controls on the circulation of labor and capital, and stop chartering monopolistic corporations that restricted competition. However, he also noted that merchants and masters were themselves frequently responsible for stifling economic productivity and general welfare. Merchants artificially raised prices by keeping smaller market towns ignorant of the existence of competitors, and by withholding goods from the market. Masters, meanwhile, were in "tacit but constant and uniform combination" (Book I, Chapter 8) to hold down wages and thereby maximize profits. The former tactics injured consumers, the latter workers, whom Smith insisted were entitled to fair compensation. Low wages injured productivity, since ill-fed workers had less energy, and inhibited family formation and demographic growth, which Smith regarded as social goods.

Unfortunately, Smith observed, wages and profits tended to move in opposite directions, except in "new colonies" where resources were ample and labor scarce. And since people were primarily motivated, in Smith's worldview, by self-interest, there was little one could do to convince capitalists to pay a just wage*, since this would injure their profits. Removing government controls on the movement and employment of labor was Smith's only solution to this problem: if workers could more easily enter skilled trades and leave their home parishes in search of employment, their bargaining power would increase. Otherwise, Smith had no ready solution to one of the central problems of capitalism: the tendency of capitalists to pile up money at the expense of their employees. In his remarks on the inverse relationship of wages to profits, Smith even prefigured the central argument of Thomas Malthus, who wrote that human populations tended to outgrow their food supply unless curtailed by disaster or dearth, and David Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages. Both of these ideas would, in turn, strongly influence the subject of my next entry in this series, Karl Marx. (Dum dum dum!)

(Above image courtesy of http://www.magixl.com/cliparts/)

* Henry Ford's observation that well-paid workers became well-heeled customers was still 150 years away.

Thanks to My Commenters

2011-02-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of this weblog, I'd like to express my appreciation of my readers, and particularly those who took the time to comment on my posts:

Mssr. Deaf Dionysus (1.28.11)
Susan M. Frey (1.19.11)
Ian Kammann (10.24.10)
Anonymous (9.9.10)
Elena O'Malley (11.18.09, 6.23.09, 12.27.08, 9.17.08, 5.10.08, 3.26.08)
Kristen Robinson (11.18.09)
Todd Jeffcoat (9.7.09)
Ryan (8.12.09)
Cathy Kammer (12.04.08, 6.8.08, 4.22.08)
Clare Sammells (12.4.08)
Chantal Hachem (8.18.08, 8.9.08, 7.28.08)
Patrick Nichols (4.27.07, 4.20.07)
Robert Bricken (4.20.07)
Yvonne Aburrow (2.21.06)

Your observations have improved this blog's content, and your interest has helped sustain it through sixty months and more than 150 posts. Please accept my thanks.

A Curricular Proposal

2011-02-11T10:45:00.000-08:00

In his recent book on the Mexican War, A Glorious Defeat (Hill & Wang, 2007), Timothy Henderson observed that colonial Mexico was a deeply segregated society: whites virtually monopolized the priesthood, public offices, and professions, while the province's Indian majority had its own separate councils, law courts, and taxes. Mixed-race people, or castas, were denied a secure position in either of these two racial worlds, and while one of Mexico's universities, the Colegio de San Juan de Letran, was open to them, it was a third-rate school whose "meager curriculum included courses in how to beg for alms" (p. 9). It occurred to me, though, that given the stagnant economy in the modern United States and the limited job market facing recent college grads, such classes might prove welcome additions to the curricula of some smaller American universities. Perhaps the subject would become popular enough to justify graduate seminars in begging and special training in mendicancy for soon-to-be-cashiered faculty. Just a thought.

Capitalism Defined, Part I: The People Who Have All Our Money

2011-02-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

In starting this series, I think it best to prepare a short, introductory definition of capitalism, though I must confess I am magnetically drawn to Kurt Vonnegut's example: "Whatever the people who have all our money, good or bad, drunk or sober, are doing today." One might also be tempted to consult that Cadillac of reference works, the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines capitalism as "A system which favours the existence of capitalists." I think everyone can agree that this isn't very helpful, though the OED is also kind enough to trace the first appearance of the word in English to a novel by William Thackeray.

James Fulcher offers more useful information in his book Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2004). Fulcher doesn't give a quick-and-dirty definition of capitalism (which helps confirm my suspicion that one doesn't exist), but he does identify the following core features of a capitalist economy:

1) Individuals can freely invest money "to make [more] money" (14). This is the base definition of capital: money that makes more money.

1a) The existence of capital, needless to say, presupposes the existence of money: a commodity (gold, bills of exchange, cowrie shells, Flanian pobble beads) which serves as a readily convertible
medium of economic exchange.

2) Less obviously, investors can freely convert other assets into capital. This means one can freely sell land and labor (14).

3) A correlate of 1 and 2, above, is that labor and capital must be mobile, and applicable to whatever enterprises will generate the highest profits (18).

4) Finally, the prices of land, labor, and capital are set in competitive markets, whose fluctuations can be managed - and exploited - by financiers and speculators (ibid).

Fulcher suggests that capitalism will only emerge in countries where there are limited opportunities to enrich oneself through plunder or government largesse, which is why it originated in marginal places - the tiny city-states of Italy, the water-logged Netherlands, the cold and rather poor kingdom of England - rather than expansive or strongly-governed ones, like 16th-century Spain or early modern China (37). It would therefore have been unlikely to emerge among the subject of my research, the Chickasaws, in the 18th century, since they derived much of their wealth from plunder (slaves in the early 1700s, captured European goods thereafter) and, by the end of the century, subsidies from the British government and the United States.

As for the implications of the rest of Fulcher's summary, I shall have more to say in later installments, where I also plan to look at the development of capitalism as a concept from the 18th to the 20th century.

So, Yeah, Capitalism

2011-01-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

For my forthcoming research project on the economic culture of the Chickasaw Indians, I am trying to determine the extent to which that nation had developed a capitalist economy by the time of Removal (the late 1830s). The problem, of course, is that there is no simple, universally-accepted definition of capitalism. Does it refer simply to a market economy? A society that respects private property rights? A wage-labor economy? Widespread entrepreneurial activity? Devotion, avant la lettre, to the ideals of Ayn Rand? All of the above? I cannot say I have given the matter much thought since graduate school. Apparently, the time has come to do so. Therefore, I will shortly embark on a series of blog entries that will endeavor to define "capitalism," by looking at some of the principal social scientists who tried to do the same (Smith, Marx, Weber, Polanyi), along with several historians who have studied its early American variant (Allan Kulikoff, Joyce Appleby, Gordon Wood, and others). My findings will not be as rigorously presented as they would be in an academic article, but I hope my readers will find them edifying, or at least not too much of a death march.

A Pretty Safe Job, Actually

2011-01-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

In her New York Times article "When Congress Was Armed and Dangerous," Prof. Joanne Freeman of Yale University notes that the violent American political culture of the current (Tea Party) era has a clear antebellum precedent. In the mid-nineteenth century, Freeman writes, it was increasingly common for Congressmen to carry weapons with them in public and in the halls of Congress, and in at least two cases in the 1850s a legislator either drew a gun on a colleague or thrashed a Senator to unconsciousness.

On closer examination, however, the political violence of the 1830s, '40s and '50s appears to have been mostly rhetorical, a display of violent masculinity that probably impressed the voters but didn't actually threaten more than a few Senators and Congressmen. Indeed, it's rather surprising how few of the 10,000-plus men and women who served in the American Congress since 1789 actually died of non-natural causes while in office. Congress.org reports that 50 or so serving Congressmen and Senators died in vehicle crashes or killed themselves, and only ten were victims of homicide. Of those ten, three died in duels, one (Senator Baker of Oregon) died in the Civil War at Ball's Bluff, one was shot "by an insane son," one was shot by religious cultists and Kool-Aid connoisseurs, and four (two Senators, Long and Kennedy, and two Congressmen) were assassinated. In noting this, I don't mean to imply that Americans are peaceful, just that we prefer to direct violence against people who are weak (like the reporters mentioned in Freeman's essay) or belong to racial minorities (Chinese immigrants, African-American freemen and slaves, Native Americans). Generally, Congressmen and Senators haven't met either of these specifications. While saying so will bring no comfort to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her family, it's a pretty safe job.

What Militarism Looks Like

2010-12-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

Some years ago, at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Memphis, Wendy St. Jean argued that the Chickasaw Indians of the American southeast became in the 18th century a militarized society - an assertion which prompted Alan Gallay to ask "What is militarism?" It's a question that St. Jean took a while to answer, and one which stumped me. I filed the query away in my memory, until it was recalled to me six years later by an article in the August 2, 2010 issue of Time, on the military junta in Burma.

The article's author, Hannah Beech, notes that during the junta's half-century rule, it has fashioned itself both into Burma's leading political caste and its socioeconomic elite. Burma's Defense Services Academy in Pyin U Lwin (formerly the British outpost of Maymyo) identifies its students as "the triumphant elite of the future," and a rejected applicant told Beech that one attended the Academy not to serve the public but to "become . . . rich and powerful." The country's armed forces have for twenty years systematically enriched themselves from the sale of Burma's "gas, oil, timber, [and] gems" to foreign companies, then spent the proceeds on luxurious mansions, spa visits, Buddhist pagodas, and "vanity projects" like the new national capital at Naypyidaw. It's tempting to say that the junta has squandered their nation's resources, but actually everything they've done with their billions has rational purpose behind it: to display and secure their personal and cultural power. The new capital, which is isolated and heavily guarded, ensures the regime's personal security; the lavish mansions and nightclubbing display officers' social supremacy; the pagodas, inscribed with the names of their patrons, serve (if George Orwell is to be believed) to prevent the builders' earthly crimes from following them into the next life. Some of the generals' profits go to consolidating their own power, by enlarging and arming Burma's military forces (currently 470,000 strong). Meanwhile, per capita GDP in Burma is around $400 per year, a third of the country's 50 million people live on "less than $15 per month," tens of thousands of non-Burmese people like the Karens have been driven from their homes, and civil liberties are ruthlessly and thoroughly suppressed by law. (On these subjects see Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell in Burma [Penguin, 2004].)

It's difficult to see much similarity between 21st-century Burma and the early 18th-century Chickasaws. True, the Carolina trader and official Thomas Nairne did note in 1708 that the rise of the Indian slave trade had given considerable economic and political power to the Chickasaws' war captains, to the extent that its civil chiefs' authority had "dwindled away to nothing" and the nation's paramount chief had become a warrior himself. Nairne also observed that the Chickasaws were almost continually raiding their Indian neighbors for captives, making war the nation's dominant economic activity. (See Alexander Moore, ed., Nairne's Muskhogean Journals [University of Mississippi Press, 1988], quote p. 39.) At the risk of seeming pedantic, however, let me argue that there is a difference between a society that is militarized (like the Chickasaws) and one that is militaristic. The latter sets off the military as a separate ruling caste and confines membership in that group to a favored few; in Myanmar, the military is literally "set off" from the rest of the population in a fortified capital complex. Among the Chickasaws, by contrast, entry into the warrior class was fairly easy - one needed to perform some military exploit (like taking a captive or scalp) and to win adoption by a patron from the "ruling families," but Thomas Nairne suggests (p. 43) that men who fulfilled the former criterion generally acquired a patron. Moreover, every young warrior could aspire to material wealth and political status if they were successful in warfare. Only membership in the (declining) chief class was restricted by birth. The only marginalized group among the Chickasaws was women, who, while they continued to raise the Chickasaws' crops and play minor roles in warfare and in the tribe's political succession, were cut off from the tribe's principal source of new wealth (slave-catching). In sum, the 18th-century Chickasaws, while they were warlike, were not "militaristic" because they didn't have a true warrior elite.

Still, the adjective "militaristic" seems likely to become standard for the early modern Chickasaws, as Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Shuck-Hall use it in their recent books on the early southeast and the early Chickasaws (Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, 2009, and From Chicaza to Chickasaw, 2010). I'll maintain the semantic distinction as long as I find it useful, though.

[The photo above, of the Water Fountain Garden in Naypyidaw, is by DiverDave and is available under a Creative Commons license.]

Delaware: Still Evil

2010-12-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

Delaware may have redeemed its poor reputation slightly on Election Day, when its voters declined to send Buddhist witch Christine O'Donnell to the Senate, but the state is back in many Americans' bad graces thanks to its virtual blockade of Interstate 95. Renovations to Delaware's toll plaza, which already charges one of the highest tolls on the East Coast ($4 each way), have closed most of the crowded highway's lanes during the busy holiday travel season, leading to "10-mile backups" on Thanksgiving weekend and potentially greater jams during the Christmas holiday. The plaza's renovations should, however, justify all these headaches, as they are rumored to include a special negative-toll lane for corporate vehicles and a flogging lane for the poor.

Wednesday Would Appear to be War Day at STHH

2010-12-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

A quick round-up of war-history news from various sources:

The American Civil War:

Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, in response to the Sons of Confederate Veterans' plans to celebrate the sesquicentennial of secession, the motives that impelled the secessionists to act (hint: it wasn't to protest high tariffs). Coates updates his post here, noting that the state historians of Georgia, at least, are taking pains to explain that secessionism was all about protecting slavery. His closing two paragraphs, though, make it clear that he regards the Lost Cause as pure evil, and I think he's right to do so.

World War Two:

Richard Evans trashes Timothy Snyder's new book, Bloodlands (a preview of which I critiqued on this here website last November). The review is subscription-only, but the letters critiquing the review are worth reading. A summary of Evans' review can be found here. Of Snyder's book, which I recently finished, I can say that it is well written, richly detailed, and almost unbearably grim. Snyder's description of the 1932-34 famine in Ukraine, to take one example, reminded me of nothing so much as Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

World War Three:

Newly-released papers from the National Security Archives at George Washington University reveal the U.S. Air Force's secret strategy for defending the United States from Russian aircraft: blowing them up in the air with small nuclear bombs. If I read the article correctly, the Air Force in the 1950s and '60s deployed 3000-4000 air-to-air missiles tipped with nuclear warheads, to be fired at Soviet bombers by U.S.-based interceptors. The Army and Air Force also deployed 3000 surface-to-air missiles carrying nukes with up to 22 kilotons' yield. Thus, in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, the United States' own armed forces were authorized to explode about 6,000 nuclear warheads in the skies over North America. Sweet.

(The photo above, incidentally, is of "Miss BOMARC," a 1958 beauty contest winner, from the National Museum of the American Air Force. She's pictured next to the Air Force's BOMARC surface-to-air missile, of which she appears justly proud.)

World War Whatever:

In Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has just deployed an infantry weapon, the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, that can hit people hiding behind walls. The phrase "Take cover!" may soon become obsolete.

Your Inner Light Has Already Burned Out

2010-11-24T17:00:00.000-08:00

There's been a mild kerfuffle* in the wake of Ed Dante's essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on his career as a paper-writer for college and graduate students. Most of us in academe are naturally dismayed at Dante's reminder of the vast extent of plagiarism among our students, and I was also surprised to learn how many divinity, education, and nursing students made it to their graduate degrees with the help of a ghostwriter. (How did they afford those $2,000 thesis chapters, I wonder?**) What particularly struck me, though, was the author's confidence that he had somehow kept his own inner purity and righteousness throughout the experience. It was not his own choice, Dante argues, but a corrupt academic system that valued grades over actual competency that drove him into his morally questionable career. He is merely a product of the "desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created." Despite working for ten years as a hired liar for plagiarizing students, he believes that he retains the soul of an honest artist. This is implicit in Dante's statement that he plans to retire from the racket and do something more worthwhile with the rest of his life. Hogwash. Dante obviously gets a charge from the life he leads - the full professional dance card, the tight deadlines, the thrill of deceiving burnt-out professors, the bittersweet satisfaction of helping desperate, subliterate students - and he almost certainly wouldn't be able to obtain equivalent satisfaction from doing something else. Moreover, a decade of doing intentionally rushed and subpar work for others cannot have left Dante well-prepared to do his own writing, something that will require creativity and contemplation. These are two talents he has either crushed or allowed to wither. I suspect he'll be back at his old racket, or one very similar to it, soon enough. As a certain twentieth-century English essayist wrote, "Once a whore, always a whore***."

* The story has, as of this writing, generated over 500 comments on the Chronicle's website.
** Though if you're spending $10,000+ a year to earn a graduate degree, an extra $2,000 to finish that degree probably doesn't seem like a big additional expense, particularly if you'll recoup the "investment" later in a higher salary.
***Apologies to my readers who are actually legitimate sex workers. I mean no offense.

Chaco Choco

2010-11-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

I had long assumed that chocolate, while indigenous to the Western Hemisphere, was unknown north of the Rio Grande until European colonists introduced it in the 17th century. Recently, however, University of New Mexico archaeologist Patricia Crown determined that the Anasazi culture of pre-Columbian New Mexico had access to cacao beans, which they obtained in trade - along with silver ornaments and scarlet macaws - from Mesoamerica. Examining a store of cylindrical pottery jars that Neil Judd and others found at the Anasazi city of Pueblo Bonito, in Chaco Canyon, Professor Crown realized they were similar to jars the Mayans had used to store cacao, and sent potsherds from these jars to W. Jeffrey Hurst at the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition. Hurst found that the shards contained traces of theobromine, a caffeine-like alkaloid found in only one Mesoamerican cultivar: cacao. Similar tests had found evidence of cacao throughout Central America, including the site of Pueblo Escondido (western Honduras), where University of Pennsylvania archaeologists found theobromine on a pottery bottle spout dated to 1150 BCE. The Chaco Canyon cacao evidence, dated to sometime after 1000 CE, extends the range for chocolate consumption and trading 1,200 miles north of the bean's cultivation limit. Crown believes cacao was an elite commodity in Pueblo Bonito, given that the jars which held it were concentrated in a few caches, and speculates that access to Mesoamerican "prestige goods" like chocolate and silver might have accounted for Pueblo Bonito's growth into a major social and political center. (Blake Edgar, "The Power of Chocolate," Archaeology, November/December 2010, pp. 20-25.) Life is usually more interesting when one's old assumptions are proven wrong.

We Have a Werewolf Congress

2010-11-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

Of yesterday's Democratic debacle*, I can only repeat what H.L. Mencken wrote of the American way of government many decades ago: "Democracy is the theory that the common man knows what he wants and deserves to get it good and hard."

My views are otherwise similar to those of Lee Papa, whose commentary can be found at his website.

* I believe more U.S. House seats changed parties in this election than any other since 1948.

Nourishment Spiritual and Temporal

2010-10-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

While we're on the subject of Mary Rowlandson:

I recently asked my U.S. History survey classes to read most of Rowlandson's captivity narrative, and to check whether any of them had actually done the reading, I asked which book of the Bible Rowlandson most frequently cited in her memoir. (Mrs. Rowlandson wrote that one of her captors gave her a Bible he'd plundered from an English settlement, and that it provided her with much spiritual solace during her ordeal.) The correct answer was Psalms - 15 citations in all. In the process of determining the answer, I calculated that there were 42 direct quotes or paraphrases of Judeo-Christian scripture in "The Sovereignty and Goodness of God," as follows:

Psalms: 15
Isaiah: 5
Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Job, Luke, Micah, I Samuel: 2 each
Corinthians, Exodus, Genesis, Hebrews, Hezekiah, Judges, II Kings, Proverbs, II Samuel, II Thessalonians: 1 each

That most of Rowlandson's citations (all but five, by my count) were from the Old Testament need not surprise us. Quite apart from its length relative to the New Testament, the first part of the Bible impressed the Puritans because they saw themselves as the new Children of Israel, to the extent that they described their relationship with God as a covenant, viewed their American settlements as a new Zion, and modeled their first law code after passages from Exodus.

While noting Mary Rowlandson's dependence on the Bible for spiritual sustenance, I suspect my students were more impressed with, or at least moved by, her description of the earthly foodstuffs she and her half-starved Indian captors ate (or choked down). These included tree bark broth, horse liver, peas, cornmeal mush, acorns, horse's guts, chestnuts, bear meat, biscuits, and horse's leg broth. "Many times," Rowlandson wrote in her memoir, "they would eat that that a hog or a dog would hardly touch," and she herself recalled that "now that was savory to me that one would think...[would] turn the stomach of a brute creature." Hunger is the best sauce.

Cloudy, with a Chance of Essays

2010-10-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

The Worldle site has been up for over a year, but not being one of the Internet cognoscenti I only found out about it this weekend. (Hat-tip: a la Rob.) I've been experimenting with custom word-clouds ever since; the one below is of the first substantive entry in this blog, "Undaunted Puppy-Flinging," which I posted nearly five years ago. One could easily tell that the post was about Lewis and Clark, but more about Meriwether than William, viz:

The other word-cloud posted here is of Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and Goodness of God, which recounts her captivity by Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians during King Phillip's War (1675-76). That Rowlandson and her captors were often on the move one can readily infer from three of the most common words in the narrative: "went," "go," and "came."

I expect I'll be posting more of these in future blog entries. For now, though, here's my Worldle gallery, including a word cloud of the tenth Federalist essay.

Constitutional Idolatry

2010-09-29T16:30:00.000-07:00

Since its inception in the spring of 2009, the conservative Tea Party movement has generated a torrent of online articles and blog entries - possibly a sentence of text for each of its actual members. Until quite recently, though, I've seen little (virtual) ink spilled on the Tea Partiers' interpretation of the historical era that inspired them, or on their somewhat idolatrous - not to say illiterate - attitude toward the culminating document of that era, the U.S. Constitution. Now, however, several authors and essayists have taken up those subjects. Award-winning historian Jill Lepore has a new book out on the Tea Party movement and the American Revolution, The Whites of Their Eyes, which wryly observes that in "the American political tradition, nothing trumps the Revolution" (p. 14), but notes that those who currently make use of it for political ends have no actual interest in history. History may be summarized as "change through time," and the Tea Partiers don't wish to acknowledge any lapse of time between the Revolutionary Golden Age and our descent into the Dark Age of Obaman Socialism. (The introduction and first chapter of Lepore's book, incidentally, are available in PDF form at the Princeton University Press website linked above.)

Meanwhile, Harvard Law professor Michael Klarman and Economist columnist "Lexington" (alias Peter David) have commented on the Tea Partiers' ahistorical worship of the U.S. Constitution, which the TPers alternately deploy as a political talisman and as an imaginary key to the secrets of the Founding Fathers (and thus to the legitimate origins of the republic). Klarman calls this sort of attitude "Constitutional idolatry," and observes that the original U.S. Constitution contains several provisions that made sense to the Framers, but which modern Americans find repugnant (e.g. its support for slavery and the slave trade) or indefensible (e.g. parity in the Senate, the provision that the president must be a "natural-born citizen"). We might also note, as Woody Holton discovered while polling his students at the University of Richmond, that most modern Americans, when they think of the U.S. Constitution, prefer to associate that document more with the protection of legal, civil and voting rights than with the structure of the federal government. In other words, Americans put more emphasis on the amendments than on the main body of the Constitution. (See Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution [New York, 2007], ix-x.)

Finally, journalist and prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow noted, in a somewhat less acidic op-ed piece for the New York Times, that the Founding Fathers were themselves a pretty disputatious lot, and that several of the first leaders of the federal republic, notably Washington and Hamilton, took an "expansive view of the Constitution" at odds with the modern Tea Partiers' strict-constructionism. Just what you'd expect a font of liberal socialist treason like the Times to print, of course.

Apologies to Tonning

2010-09-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

Last year, in my scintillating three-part essay on the Embargo of 1807-09, I wrote dismissively of American commerce with the Danish port of Tonning (or "Tonningen," as my source spelled it), asserting that American merchants falsely listed it as their destination in order to secure clearance for voyages to more lucrative ports in Britain or French-occupied Europe. I have since learned that there was actually quite a bit of American trade with Tonning between 1808 and 1810: 100 ships from the United States dropped anchor there in 1809, drawn there by Tonning's proximity to the French-occupied port of Hamburg. Between the end of the Revolutionary War and the start of the Napoleonic Wars, American merchants had developed a strong presence in Hamburg, where they sold American cotton, tobacco, and rice, as well as Caribbean sugar and tobacco. Hamburg was attractive to U.S. merchants partly because of its population of English-speaking traders - Napoleon would derisively call it "cette ville Anglaise" - and partly because of its accessibility, via the Elbe and associated canals, to the rest of Germany. In 1804, however, a British blockade closed the Elbe to unlicensed shipping, and three years later French occupation authorities began harassing American merchants in the city, suspecting they were actually British smugglers violating the Berlin and Milan decrees. Eager to continue trading with Germany, American merchants began looking for holes in Napoleon's Continental System, and in 1808 they found one in Tonning, located about 25 miles north of the Elbe and 60 miles from Hamburg. By the next year Americans were smuggling sugar and tobacco across the Danish border from Tonning to Hamburg, though they had to pay increasingly heavy bribes to French customs officials to do so. In 1810 a French crackdown on American goods and English-speaking traders in northern German ports effectively closed this "loophole." (See Sam Mustafa, Merchants and Migrations: Germans and Americans in Connection, 1776-1835 [Aldershot, UK, 2001], 119, 126, 206-09; J.J. Oddy, European Commerce, Shewing New and Secure Channels of Trade with the Continent of Europe [2 vols., Philadelphia, 1807] 2:139, 142.)

In any event, I won't be running down small nineteenth-century Danish ports again any time soon.

Beware: Bibulous Boas on Board

2010-08-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

In the annals of failed military expeditions, the voyage of Imperial Russia's Baltic Fleet to the Pacific during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) has few peers. As Gavin Wrightman recounts in The Industrial Revolutionaries (New York, 2007), the fleet got off to a uniquely bad start when several of the ships therein somehow mistook English fishing boats in the North Sea for Japanese torpedo boats (no, I'm not making that up) and opened fire, killing two and wounding six. Russian diplomats agreed to pay reparations to the British government, but the Baltic Fleet's fortunes did not subsequently improve. Both Britain and France refused to supply the ships with fuel (which they had to obtain from German collier vessels en route), one of the ships severed a French submarine telegraph cable in Tangier, a number of crewmen died of heatstroke while loading coal off the African coast, and storms battered one squadron as it rounded the Cape of Good Hope. To lighten the gloomy mood, some of the Russians took shore leave during stops in Africa and "acquired a menagerie of exotic animals including a boa constrictor which apparently developed a taste for vodka" (p. 349). Russian sailors' interest in exotic pets was one they shared with naval officers in the contemporary British Navy, whose shipboard companions included baboons and at least one elephant.

Finally, after seven months of struggle, the Russian fleet reached the Straits of Tsushima, a few days from its destination of Vladivostok. There, on 27 May 1905, the exhausted officers and crew ran into a Japanese fleet under Admiral Heihachiro Togo, and suffered one of the most decisive defeats in naval history. Togo enjoyed several advantages over his opponents: his men were rested, his ships had a functional wireless telegraph system, and his fleet included several dozen deadly torpedo boats, which he deployed to good effect. In just 24 hours of fighting the Japanese navy virtually annihilated the Baltic Fleet, sinking or disabling 34 of 48 ships and inflicting over 10,000 casualties on the Russians. Alas, Weightman is silent on the fate of the boa constrictor. I fear the worst.

Founderbrau

2010-08-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

While Scottish and German brewers fight to see who can produce the most potent beer in the world, a microbrewery in Philadelphia is reviving some of the gentler, but still distinctive, potables of the American past. Yards Brewing Company has launched its series of "Ales of the Revolution" with George Washington's Tavern Porter, a 14-proof brew inspired by one of Washington's own recipes. The Washington Post described the beverage as a mixture of "sharper, coffeelike flavors" and "residual sweetness," the latter flavor resulting from the molasses infused into each barrel.

Beer, of course, has been an important drink since the development of agriculture 11,000 years ago, but in late-colonial British North America it usually took a back seat to harder alcoholic beverages. The Anglophone elite preferred imported heavy wines, like port and Madeira, while farmers and laborers enjoyed hard cider and spiritous liquors, particularly rum distilled from West Indies molasses. David McCullough noted in 1776 that the early Continental Army consumed a prodigious amount of ordinary rum, plus cherry rum and flip (a "mixture of liquor, beer, and sugar" [29-30]), while their commander purchased "cider, brandy, and rum by the gallon" (42). I suspect, though, that if they'd had access to 110-proof beer they would have consumed it by preference, whether or not the bottles were stuffed into the carcasses of squirrels and stoats.

What I Saw of the SHEAR Convention (2010)

2010-08-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

This year's meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic attracted 400 people, about 40% of the society's membership – a remarkable achievement, given the economic slump and the meeting's isolated location (Rochester, NY). I did a fair amount of agreeable socializing at the conference, and attended a baker's dozen of papers, of which some of the highlights follow:

Michael Oberg, in "The Many Worlds of Eleazer Williams" (read by Daniel Richter), briefly recounted the life of Reverend Williams, a grandson of Indian captive Eunice Williams who became an Episcopal missionary to the Oneidas. Of particular interest was Williams' "discovery," in the 1840s, that he was the dauphin – the long-lost son of Louis XVI of France, supposedly spirited away to Canada in infancy to protect him from the Jacobins. Of equal interest was the investigation of Williams' claim by two Philadelphia phrenologists, who concluded that Williams was actually an Indian (despite his white ancestry) and couldn't be the Bourbon heir.

The United States' early relations with East Asia received considerable attention this year. Kim Todt, in "'Merchants Have No Country:' The Early Republic and the Importance of its Dutch Trading Partners," observed that the governor of Dutch Batavia (modern Jakarta) actively promoted American trade with the Dutch East Indies, and that the U.S. Navy was sending frigates to Batavia by the 1820s. SHEAR President Rosemarie Zagarri, in her presidential address ("The Significance of the 'Global Turn' for the Early American Republic"), pointed out that the British East India Company welcomed U.S. merchants to India in the 1780s, even before Jay's Treaty allowed them to operate there legally. There were forty American ships in the India trade by 1789, and Jacob Crowinshield of Salem brought the first elephant to the United States shortly thereafter. Dale Norwood noted, in "Fear of a British Planet: American Anxiety about British Hegemony and the First U.S. Mission to China," that Americans took an active interest in the First Opium War, a conflict described in American newspaper editorials, church magazines, even children's magazines – one of which featured a fictitious child asking her father if the evil British would kill Americans if they didn't buy British opium.

At the last session of the conference, Rob Harper (in "The Powerful Weakness of the Frontier State: Manipulative Mobilization and the 1786 Clark-Logan Expedition") told a great deal about the Logan expedition of 1786 that I didn't know, mentioning the raid's unpopularity among Kentuckians (who were reluctant to contribute supplies and manpower) and noting that its chief purpose was not revenge but the seizure of Indian captives who could be traded for white captives. In the same session Robert Owens showed his good sense and taste by mentioning recent scholarship by yours truly in his paper "Vigilante for Peace: James Robertson and the Curious Case of Lame Will."

Finally, I enjoyed the privilege of having breakfast with past SHEAR president Alan Taylor, and learned from him of his forthcoming book, The Civil War of 1812, which ought to prove thought-provoking reading on the eve of that conflict's bicentennial.

Noble Ideas and Petty Grievances

2010-07-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

For those of us who think the Declaration of Independence is just a tad too long (that includes nearly anyone who's read more than a few of Jefferson's obscure, even nit-picky indictments of George III), Slate Magazine is pleased to offer several translations of the founding American document into Twitter form. The winning entry in their contest was "Bye, George, we've got it" (just 25 characters, you'll note), but I will confess I preferred their third runner-up:

We seek independence based on noble and universal ideas combined with petty and one-sided grievances

and their first runner-up:

Our Rights from Creator (h/t @JLocke). Life, Liberty, PoH FTW! Your transgressions = FAIL. GTFO, @GeorgeIII. -HANCOCK et al.

Reflections on the Fourth of July

2010-07-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

For those of you who missed it last year, here is a thought-provoking Independence-Day editorial, "Life, Liberty, and Benign Monarchy" (New York Times, 2 July 2009), by Professor Kathleen DuVal of the University of North Carolina, reflecting on Native American political authority and the attractiveness of Spanish paternalism to American settlers and slaves.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

No Mustard with Them Taters

2010-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

It is rare, in my research, to encounter primary narratives that evoke a visceral reaction, and such occasions are all the more memorable for it. I still recall the discomfort I felt twelve years ago when I read a letter by Northwest Territorial Governor Arthur St. Clair, explaining that he could not attend an Indian council because he had fallen hard on the pommel of his saddle and "ruptured [his] private parts most dreadfully." I had a similarly immediate, though more muted, response to an entry I read a few months ago in British fur trader George Nelson's memoirs. While traveling to an Indian hunting camp on the Kettle River, in northern Minnesota, Nelson and his partners joined an Ojibwa party for a meal. One of the Ojibwas was a woman whose young child was suffering from loose bowels. "The little black devil was running about the lodge squettering out yellow stuff like mustard; she [the mother] scolded & laying the brat on her lap opened the cheeks & with the back of her knife scraped off the stuff." She then released the child, washed her hands in the cooking kettle, wiped off the knife, and resumed cutting meat with it. After that Nelson found he didn't have much of an appetite. (My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804, ed. Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck [Saint Paul, 2002], 65-66.)

Nelson later recorded this anecdote to illustrate, I think, the "savage" Indians' tolerance for filth and disease. In reflecting on it, I have come to the conclusion that the Ojibwa mother in Nelson's story was instead expressing a rather common maternal belief - that her child's exudations couldn't really harm anyone, since they hadn't harmed her - coupled with sufficient exhaustion to wear down any scruples she might have had about her guests' dining experience. The tired and overworked cooks in George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, one might well note, prepared food in even more squalid conditions than Nelson's hosts, and received greater compensation for it.

Also, "squettering" is an awesome word.

Oh, Those Wacky Professor Types

2010-06-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

I recently received the following "candidate statement" for an officerial election for one of my professional organizations. Personal details have been redacted to protect the guilty, the innocent, and the just plain crazy:

"Comrades. At 8:45 am on June 21, 2010, I will be dragged into criminal municipal court by the [University] Administration's gestapo goons on the charge of harassing (by a reply email) one of the deans of the ag school.

"I will be jailed and exposed to inmate stooges infected with AIDS who are instructed to assault and bugger me to infect me with HIV.

"I have had two heart attacks and will probably not survive this arrest and jail time.

"But, I will die knowing I defended your rights...I will die knowing I defended your rights to organize, to protest injustice and to protect academic freedom. Yet, not one official of [the Local Chapter of the Professional Organization] has offered to help or witness this show trial. The [Chapter] has completely capitulated to the [University] administration. They are the administration's willing partner in the suppression of academic rights and freedom of speech... One union official was even given a free trip to England while in a real estate partnership with a [University] vice president.

"A known alcoholic [University] dean is now arresting faculty who have protested his secret sale of [University] land to private real estate developers. His peculation is being supported by politicians in [the University's state] who will also profit from one more real estate scam to be financed with faculty pension money, subprime mortgages and specious sales.

"Like Zev Jabotinsky, who warned his brethren of their liquidation, I, too, warn you of the coming liquidation. However, as Marx has said 'History repeats itself once as tragedy and once as farce'. The future liquidation of the [Professional Organization] will be that farce unless you fight now. Stand up to your Nazi-trained university administration.

"Long live the union and the memory of those who died for our right to organize!

"If elected I will serve my union from jail, in the tradition of Joe Hill.

"And don't waste time mourning, organize!

"You are all invited to my show trial in [University town's] municipal criminal court..."

While I agree with some of my correspondent's sentiments, I think he either needs to A) get a proper sense of perspective, or B) remember to take his medication. Or both. Regrettably, there are rather a lot of college professors who routinely fail to do either.

Finally: what Nazi-affiliated organizations offer professional training to college administrators? I imagine that, if they exist, their services are much in demand.

Retrospective Review: Pox Americana (Part Two)

2010-06-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

(Continued from earlier post:)

The epidemic in the east, for all its gruesome qualities, was mild in comparison to the outbreak that appeared in Mexico City in August 1779 and spread throughout the hemisphere. Fenn doesn't speculate whether there was any connection between the Mexican smallpox epidemic and the British North American one, though New Orleans, where there were a number of American rebels trading throughout the war and where smallpox broke out in late 1778, may well have been a junction between the two. What is certain is that "arrival in Mexico City was key to [the virus's subsequent] success" (142). From thence it could be spread by a large transient population of workers, farmers, and other travelers, down to the coasts and up the caminos reals, throughout Spanish America and into the trading networks of its aboriginal neighbors.

Expanding northward from Mexico City, smallpox reached the Spanish borderland colonies of New Mexico and Texas by early 1781. The disease claimed 46,000 lives within the boundaries of modern Mexico, and killed at least 5,000 mission Indians in New Mexico and Texas. Sometime in 1780 or '81, smallpox broke out among the horse-mounted expansionists of the vast Comanche nation, who probably contracted it from the mission-dwelling Lipan Apaches of western Texas. The Comanches then spread the disease throughout the Great Plains, where it had a particularly fatal impact on the agricultural tribes of the Upper Missouri River.

The most geographically significant victims of the smallpox were the Shoshones, who carried the variola virus into Canada – and thus to the trading network of the Hudson Bay Company, thereby killing thousands of Cree and Chipewyans – and down the Columbia River to the Pacific Northwest. While exact numbers are impossible to come by, Fenn thinks smallpox killed about 60,000 Native Americans north of Mexico.

Altogether, 130,000 North Americans died of smallpox between 1775 and 1782. Only 10% of them, however, were Anglo-Americans, which helps explain why this episode is so obscure in U.S. historiography, preoccupied as U.S. historians are with the American Revolution. Beyond the limits of the Thirteen Colonies, however, the epidemic was vastly important: it led to a marked decline in marriage ages in New Spain (as Mexicans tried to replace their population losses), compelled the now-diminished Comanche "empire" to make peace with Spain, and allowed the Sioux to supplant the Mandans and the Blackfeet the Shoshones as the premier hunters and traders of their respective homelands. Throughout Indian country, Fenn concludes, smallpox was a "virus of empire" (275).

One point that Fenn does not make as pointedly as she might, and which is particularly useful to students of colonial America, is that the pattern of variola's spread reveals a great deal about transportation and trade in early America. In British North America, smallpox moved by water from seaport to seaport, then spread slowly inland – except in the case of Canada, where the disease moved fairly quickly up the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes. In Spanish America, smallpox spread rapidly north and south from Mexico City, and was carried almost to the Arctic Circle by horse-borne Indian nomads and their trading partners. Fenn's book thus helps confirm and extend April Hatfield's observation (in Atlantic Virginia [2004]) that the British American colonies were more like an archipelago of outposts than a continuous area of settlement, and that the most extensive networks of human contact within the continent were Native American ones. It also reminds us that epidemic disease was - and remains today - one of the most unfortunate side-effects of improvements in trade and communications; the parts of North America that had the best roads or the most mobile populations were also the regions most susceptible to smallpox, while the more isolated settlements of British North America were most effectively able to control the disease.

Retrospective Review: Pox Americana (Part One)

2010-06-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

The American smallpox epidemic of 1775-82, one of the most widespread outbreaks of that disease in recorded history, remained an obscure episode for more than two centuries after its subsidence. In 2001, Elizabeth Fenn, then of George Washington University (now at Duke), finally brought this event to a large readership with her deeply-researched, engagingly-written book Pox Americana. Dr. Fenn's book received a fair amount of publicity when it was published, owing to its appearance in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and the October 2001 anthrax scare. I recently reread Pox Americana, to see how well it holds up now that the initial publicity has faded - and in light of nearly ten years of subsequent scholarship. The short answer is that it's even better than I remembered the first time. Over the next entry or two, I'll be reviewing Pox Americana, analyzing its findings, and suggesting why the plague at the center of Fenn's book, which spread from Hudson Bay to Peru and killed over 100,000 people, remained obscure for so many years.

Smallpox was a relentless and terrifying killer in the early modern period, and one which apparently grew in virulence between 1500 and 1800. It was particularly dangerous to isolated rural populations - like most of the white settlers in North America - and to populations with homogeneous immune systems, like American Indians. In the disease's early stages, those infected with smallpox suffered from aches, fever, and anxiety; as the disease progressed, its victims broke out in hundreds of oozing sores concentrated on the hands, feet, and face. The sores could lead to dehydration (if they appeared in the throat) or blindness; if they flowed together, they doubled the victim's chances of dying; and they almost invariably left disfiguring scars, whose only benefit was that they branded the survivor as permanently immune. There was no way to cure smallpox in the eighteenth century, and only two ways to fight its spread: quarantine and inoculation. Since inoculation actually gave inoculees a mild version of the disease and rendered them temporarily infectious, it was a controversial procedure and usually only available to the wealthy.

When the epidemic of Fenn's subtitle first broke out in the Atlantic seaboard cities of Boston, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Charleston (1775-79), Americans' first impulse was to quarantine the infected areas through controls on public movement, particularly the movement of soldiers. This quickly proved impossible, given the cycling of volunteers in and out of the Continental Army and the movement of refugees to or from areas under rebel control. As a result the disease spread from its coastal enclaves into the hinterland, though it raged with greatest virulence on the coast, on British prison ships and in encampments of black Loyalist refugees - runaway slaves who sought freedom with British but often (in about 5,500 cases, Fenn estimates) found death instead.

As the smallpox death toll slowly grew, some white Americans came to believe that the British Army was using the disease as a weapon of war, dispatching sick Loyalist refugees to infect rebel-controlled areas. Fenn thinks this accusation was true; she presents evidence that at least one British commander, late in the war, sent infected runaway slaves into rebel lines to spread the disease to his enemies. That smallpox was so great a threat to American military effectiveness that the British tried to use it as a weapon helps explain George Washington's crucial decision of 1777 to inoculate all soldiers in the Continental Army against the disease (92-98). Fenn argued that this was "among [Washington's] most important decisions of the war" (134) and helped secure the rebels' eventual victory.

(To be continued...)

Living in the Valley of Death

2010-05-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

The rather lurid title of this post refers not to my own status, but rather to the conference presentation I've spent a good part of the past few weeks researching, writing, and delivering. For the benefit of those of my readers who were unable to attend the Filson Historical Society's public history conference on Native American history earlier this month, and to hear my lecture on "Native American Subsistence and Commerce in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley," I've posted my lecture notes on Google Documents. Comments, criticism, or unadulterated praise are all welcome.

Founders Round-Up

2010-04-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

It seems that Thomas Jefferson has catalogued his personal library on LibraryThing, complete with 'reviews' extracted from his correspondence.

There's a hip-hop video on YouTube (actually from WhiteHouse.gov, but YouTube is trendier) on the early life of Alexander Hamilton - about a year old now, but still worth watching.

John Quincy Adams has a Twitter feed, derived from his diary entries for 1810.

And there's a new strategy game in the works, Founding Fathers, about the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Once known primarily as political wonks, the Founders are fast becoming Web 2.0 and boardgame geeks.

You Mean They Ate Each Other Up?

2010-04-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

Probably not, Danny! An archaeological team investigating the winter camp of the Donner Party subjected the bones that the settlers discarded to intense microscopic scrutiny and determined that none of them were from human beings. Instead, the survivors ate cattle which died of starvation, horses brought by one of the relief parties, deer (which they were able to hunt despite 30 feet of snow), and one family's pet dog. They also tried to preserve "civilized" decorum during the winter; their midden includes pieces of slate, used for children's school lessons, and of chinaware, used for their meager meals of boot-and-bone soup. The survivors themselves denied that they had resorted to cannibalism, and no-one was ever able to prove the charge. The conventional story of the Donner Party, however appealing it may be (even to the extent of inspiring an excellent Western/horror movie), appears, like so much of the West's history, to have been a myth.

Historical Humor: A Small Example

2010-04-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

For a change of pace I decided to wear my Declaration of Independence tie - a red silk tie bearing the facsimile signatures of the members of the Continental Congress - to school today. In my upper-level Colonial History class, one of my students, after asking me what was on my tie, said - completely deadpan - "It must have taken you a while to collect all those signatures." I'm not used to my students making good jokes, but it's a pleasant surprise when they do.

The Return of Fred the Sheep

2010-03-24T17:00:00.000-07:00

A follow-up, courtesy of my friend Carl Anderson, to a story I mentioned last year: working from a proposal by Professor Michael Drout, engineers at Northwestern University have developed a prototype machine capable of extracting sheep DNA from medieval parchment. If researchers then succeed in developing a chemical process that allows them to analyze and classify the extracted genetic material, it will be possible to identify the date and perhaps also the geographical provenance of undated medieval manuscripts.

Northwestern engineering students are also working on a super-hard "dragonslayer" sword, which should make it easier for the school to deal with Chicago's persistent dragon problem.

Statecraft as Mortal Combat

2010-03-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

On December 30, 1800, Emperor Paul of Russia made the following announcement in his court's official newspaper: "His Majesty . . . perceiving that the European powers cannot come to an accommodation, and wishing to put an end to the war which has raged fourteen years*, has conceived the idea of appointing a place to which he will invite the other potentates to engage together with himself in single combat on lists which shall be marked at; for which purpose they shall bring with them, to act as their esquires, umpires, and heralds, their most enlightened ministers and able generals, as Thugut, Pitt, and Bernstorff."

Quoted in Edward Emerson's History of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1902), p. 79. Emerson views this invitation as evidence that Paul's mind had come unhinged, a conclusion also reached by the emperor's inner circle, whose members assassinated him early the following year. From our perspective in the early twenty-first century, though, the idea of resolving international disputes through "single combat" between state leaders, rather than through bloody wars with millions of casualties, seems rather more sane. I suspect it would have been amusing, at least, to view a joust or duel between Tallyrand and Pitt the Younger.

* Paul was doubtless mashing together the Wars of the First and Second Coalitions (1792-1802) with the Russo-Turkish War of 1787-89.

Chickasaw Archery

2010-03-10T12:30:00.000-08:00

I'm in the early stages of researching a book on the economic history of the Chickasaws, a small but strategically-important southeastern Indian nation that in the 19th century would become one of the Five Civilized Tribes. In the course of re-reading Charles Hudson's description of the 16th-century Chicazas (the principal ancestors of the Chickasaws) in his 1997 book Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun (U. of Georgia Press), I came across this account of Chickasaw archers' military prowess: when the Chicazas attacked De Soto's men in the winter of 1541, they succeeded in killing nearly 60 horses, twelve of which they shot through the heart. The horse of hidalgo Juan Diaz was supposedly killed by an arrow that entered its shoulder, went through the entire body, and "protrud[ed] on the opposite side the length of four fingers" (p. 269). Another died after two arrows entered its heart from two different directions.

Hudson bases this chapter on 16th-century accounts of the Soto expedition, chiefly the narrative of the Gentleman of Elvas. I must say I find this account of Chickasaw archers' virtuosity somewhat difficult to believe - their arrows would have had to have been of the same strength as medieval longbowmen's arrows in order to have that degree of penetrating power. It doesn't surprise me, though, that they would consider the Spaniards' animals important targets, since horses gave Europeans a military advantage nearly as important as that provided by their firearms and steel weapons.

Enemies Foreign and Domestic

2010-02-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

I didn't mean to turn February into Adam Zamoyski month here at Stranger Things Have Happened, but I wanted to share one last anecdote from his very entertaining (and thought-provoking) book on the Congress of Vienna, Rites of Peace (NY, 2007):

When Napoleon Bonaparte died on St. Helena, in May of 1821, the nation which had fought hardest to defeat and exile him, Great Britain, was preoccupied with the coronation of King George IV and his struggle to exclude his estranged wife Caroline from the ceremony. Supposedly, when a messenger brought George the news that "Your greatest enemy [i.e., Napoleon] is dead," he replied "No! By God! Is she?" (p. 561)

I guess that's funnier if you've watched A Royal Scandal.

A Hard World for Little Republics

2010-02-14T11:11:00.000-08:00

It's not easy being a small nation in a world of aggressive Great Powers. Consider the experience of diplomats from the short-lived Italian republic of Lucca, who in the spring of 1814 petitioned Emperor Francis of Austria for "the restoration of their independence." Francis replied - in Italian, graciously enough - "Tutti hanno fame, anch'io voglio mangiare, emmeglio che io vi mangi che se fosse un altro," which translates as "Everyone is hungry, and I need to eat too, and it is better I should eat you than another." (Adam Zamoyski, The Rites of Peace [New York, 2007], 234.)

I'll have to remember that line the next time I play Diplomacy.

If I Were the Emperor Napoleon

2010-02-05T04:00:00.000-08:00

"In his place, I would take ship, and I would go to seek fortune in America and I would live there very peacefully in the forests and the deserts. The fruit of the coconut tree would nourish me, and water clearer than crystal would refresh my burning blood and my burnt-out brain. I would hunt monkeys in the woods, I would reflect on my past greatness and would try to console myself for my present misfortune as best I could. That is what I would do if I were the Emperor Napoleon." Marie Metternich, in a letter to her father, 27 January 1814, quoted in Adam Zamoyski, The Rites of Peace (HarperCollins, 2007), p. 151.

Town versus Gown

2010-01-20T17:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks to riotous students, expansionist campus developers, and professors mowing their lawns at 11:30 on Tuesday mornings, relations between modern American universities and their host communities are rarely tranquil. Things have been worse in earlier days and other lands, of course. At the Historiann weblog, commenter Indyanna recalls an "early modern town-gown ruckus" in Oxford, England, in 1717, caused by George I's decision to garrison a regiment of soldiers in that town for the winter. "When the probably-mainly-Jacobite students refused to illuminate their windows to celebrate the King’s birthday, some tipsy soldiers smashed the windows in question. Next thing, the whole town was in arms and on fire. The House of Lords had to intervene to sort things out, the regiment got sent to Minorca, and its aging Colonel was packed off back to Dublin in retirement." Bad news for the colonel and the town, but perhaps not such bad consequences for the window-smashing soldiers - Minorca doesn't sound like a hardship post.

The Indian College Discovered?

2009-12-22T07:15:00.000-08:00

Via the History News Network: archaeologists have discovered the probable location of Harvard's Indian College, the first school for Native Americans in British North America. The specific find was a trench containing brick, tile, and stone, likely the foundation of one of the school's walls. The trench also contained ceramic remains and some pieces of type from Massachusetts Bay's first printing press, also housed at the College - perhaps the same press used to print John Eliot's Wampanoag translation of the Bible.

As Harvard's own webpage on the Indian College makes clear, the institution was (like Dartmouth College a century later) a fundraising device designed to pry money out of the evangelizing New England Company. The principal residents of the brick College building were white students, and only a few of the seven Algonquian Indians who attended Harvard in the 17th century resided there. Most of these students, incidentally, came to bad ends: three died before graduating and one, John Sassamon, was murdered in 1675, setting off the chain of events that led to King Philip's War.

The Pilgrims' Menu

2009-11-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

As someone not fond of turkey I am attracted to the story that the Plymouth Separatists (a.k.a. Pilgrims) did not consume turkey during their first thanksgiving feast. However, after a little source reading I'm inclined to think they probably did. William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation, said nothing about the "first Thanksgiving," but noted that after their first harvest (Fall, 1621) the Plymouth settlers had a "good store" of cod and other fish, ample wild water fowl, a fair amount of cornmeal, and "great store of wild Turkies." (One can find these quotes on p. 162 of this online edition.) So, yes, the Pilgrims probably did eat turkey at their first harvest feast, along with duck, cod, and cornbread.

There was no cranberry sauce, though - they didn't know cranberries were edible. It would have been handy if they did, since so many of them had died of scurvy the previous winter.

For more Thanksgiving myth-debunking, see this classic article from the History News Network. And for insight on what They're Teaching These Kids Today about Thanksgiving, check here.

(My thanks to Elena O'Malley for asking me this question several months ago, thus inspiring me to do the research well in advance of the holiday.)

Strange Bedfellows

2009-11-18T20:00:00.000-08:00

Among the most recent purchasers of my book (Red Gentlemen and White Savages) are two institutions that probably don't often appear together in the same context: the Canadian Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs, and Liberty University, which was founded by Jerry Falwell. It comforts me to know that if evangelical Dominionists and Canadian bureaucrats are ever trapped together on a desert island, they'll have at least one thing in common that they can discuss.

The Killing Ground

2009-11-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most interesting, if grimmest, historical essay I've read online this year is Timothy Snyder's "Holocaust: The Ignored Reality," which appeared in the July 16 issue of the New York Review of Books. Snyder reminds his readers of an often-overlooked aspect of the Holocaust: its victims were primarily Eastern European. About 70% of the Jews killed by the Nazis came from Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states; most of the rest came from Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. As Hannah Arendt once noted, national identity was supremely important for European Jews in the Nazi empire; if one was German or Polish one's chances of survival were close to zero, while French and Danish Jews had survival rates in the 75-100% range.

The Holocaust, Snyder argues, wasn't just an ethnic and religious genocide: it was also a regional crime, conducted in the chaotic and disgoverned eastern European borderland between two of the twentieth century's greatest tyrannies, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Moreover, it was only the largest and most efficient of the mass-murder operations that these two totalitarian states conducted in the region. "When one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century," he writes "one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal* size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state." Referring to the second group as "civilian" is a stretch: most of its constituents were captured Red Army soldiers whom the Nazis deliberately starved to death in POW camps. The rest were Soviet civilians who died in the siege of Leningrad, or guerrillas and innocent bystanders killed in anti-partisan actions in Belarus and Yugoslavia. It's clear, though, that the Nazis fully intended to kill the Soviet citizens whom they starved to death, and that they planned to murder far more in this fashion - about 50 million Slavs, actually - as part of their Generalplan Ost for the colonization of the conquered Soviet Union.

Hunger, Snyder continues, wasn't merely used as a weapon by the Nazis; Stalinist Russia used planned famines to kill 3 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s, and may have deliberately starved another 1 million Kazakhs. In addition, the Soviet security police (NKVD) executed another 700,000 Soviet citizens during the purges of 1937-38, most of them well-to-do peasants (kulaks) or members of suspect national minorities. Most of these killings shared a feature in common with the Nazis' mass murders: the Soviet government undertook them in pursuit of economic goals, in their case the collectivization of agriculture (whereas the Nazis' economic goal was the creation of an agrarian colony in eastern Europe). "Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe...What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic development. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning." Such schemes of development through mass killing, Snyder concludes, are inevitable whenever human beings are treated as means to an end, rather than individual ends in themselves.

One needs to add a strong caveat here, which is that the Nazis' mass murder of the Jews proceeded without such an obvious economic motive. While many non-Jewish Germans benefited from the Third Reich's confiscation and redistribution of murdered Jews' property (see Goertz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries for details), this was an afterthought; the fundamental purpose of the Holocaust was to destroy an entire people, without regard for economic consequences. One of my professors in college characterized the Holocaust as sui generis, noting that efforts to compare it to other genocides only underscored its unique qualities. I'm not entirely convinced that's true, but it's clear to me that despite the intellectual attractions of Snyder's linkage of political economy with mass murder, his thesis is one of many that can't adequately explain the Nazis' war on European Jews.

* Very roughly. The Nazis killed six million Jews and five million non-Jewish civilians; the Soviet government killed (excluding, as Snyder does, prisoners who died in the gulags) four million Europeans and one million Kazakhs.