http://www.danallosso.com/index.htmlwords, words, wordsendan@allosso.netCopyright 2009 Dan Allosso2013-04-24T17:16:11-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:26:17 -0500dan@allosso.netReading Blog2013-04-24T17:16:11-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4331b668a80da723952669dfc504bb0d-228.html#unique-entry-id-228http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4331b668a80da723952669dfc504bb0d-228.html#unique-entry-id-228I’m going back to a book I found really exciting in grad school, to see if it has anything to tell me about how to do free thought history. ... I was struck, both when researching/writing An Infidel Body-Snatcher, and in the way feminist secularists have responded to it, how closely tied the women’s movement and freethought ave been throughout the period (late 18th to early 20th centuries in the Atlantic world) I’ve been studying. So I thought it would be interesting to see if Scott’s groundbreaking arguments about gender could tell me anything that would help me historicize secularism. One of the things that impressed me most about Gender and the Politics of History was the idea Scott introduced in the first few pages, that a big part of her project is challenging “the reliability of terms that have been taken as self-evident by historicizing them” (6). The meanings of everyday concepts have “the appearance of fixity” and are often taken unconsciously as “normative definition[s]…used to justify oppression” (4, 5). The everyday concepts she was concerned with were gender identities — I want to use the same approach to find the ways religion (and particularly irreligion) have been excluded from the analysis of social change over time that we call history. ...This is a fancy way of saying that reducing complex reality to simple binary pairs oversimplifies the elements at either pole of the opposition, and hides interactions and relationships between the polar elements that may actually be keys to understanding them. ...Politics “sets and enforces priorities, represses some subjects in the name of the greater importance of others, naturalizes certain categories and disqualifies others” (9). ... Certainly politics (defined as power relationships imposed to benefit one group at the expense of others) can set these agendas, but other factors can as well. Abstractions and “culture” are part of the way people relate to the world, and there’s a slippery slope separating the idea that culture is “constructed” for the benefit of a ruling class, from full-on conspiracy theory. ... I’m a bit surprised that Scott wasn’t more interested in the ways this knowledge was institutionalized and transmitted. Religion, for example, is remarkably absent from a book concerned with the misrepresentation of gender in western culture. ...Feminist historians were in a position to do this with respect to “gendered” history, since the normative definitions used to justify oppression were all imposed by men. But standing outside the religious frame, I’m amazed how little Scott had to say about religion’s role in the construction of gender. ... The other section that could have included a discussion of religion — where a treatment of religion would have been a no-brainer, does not. ...But failing to deal with the fact that most of the people she’s writing about were notorious freethinkers is a problem. “Tom” Paine, Richard Carlile, and the female volunteers who were arrested when they kept Carlile’s (freethought) bookshop open, were all “infidels,” and their radical (and feminist) agenda was informed by their secularism. Scott didn’t just “repress” their identities, she redrew them “in the name of the greater importance” of her gender argument (77-9). Interestingly, in doing so she leaned on Barbara Taylor’s book on the intersection of radicalism and feminism, Eve and the New Jerusalem, which also (incredibly) manages to sideline secular radicals in a story focused on the ultimate secular radical, Robert Owen. Now it’s entirely possible that Scott and Taylor just didn’t think organized religion has been subjugating women for the last few millennia. ... Later, she attributed the fact that gender “seems so unambiguous to ordinary people” to the “repressive function of civilization” as described by Sigmund Freud a century ago (202-3). I think you’re asking for trouble when you apply insights from an outside field to history, if they’re ideas most experts in that field think are out of date. But more important, I think the argument that gender has been confused and women repressed (clearly it has and they have) needs to be supported by a discussion of the actual, historical means of that repression on actual people rather than on Freud’s theories of the unconscious. ...The fact that historians like Scott have had other priorities, and that others like Taylor have been unable to see the picture because they were standing inside the religious frame, means there are still histories for me to write. The thing I’ll need to remember is that it takes more than theories “to detect some logic…underlying the varied manifestations of human behavior” (202). The way to mitigate the fact that “history, through its practices, produces (rather than gathers or reflects) knowledge about the past,” I think, is to talk about actual people and events, rather than about abstractions (9). I’m unsatisfied with a history where the “objects of study are…epistemological phenomena, which include economics, industrialization, relations of production, factories, families, classes, genders, collective action, and political ideas, as well as one’s own interpretive categories” (5). Abstractions are great, and we need to understand how they are constructed by people in relationship with cultures. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2013-04-08T18:03:35-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/09d33b4d848977e4038fa4750d034fa7-227.html#unique-entry-id-227http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/09d33b4d848977e4038fa4750d034fa7-227.html#unique-entry-id-227dan@allosso.netReading Blog2013-03-26T08:59:04-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6735df2796e82f0964900b9d28ff045f-226.html#unique-entry-id-226http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6735df2796e82f0964900b9d28ff045f-226.html#unique-entry-id-226dan@allosso.netReading Blog2013-03-14T10:32:53-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c5ef31ccf93dc4ea3da0492a397cd2c1-225.html#unique-entry-id-225http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c5ef31ccf93dc4ea3da0492a397cd2c1-225.html#unique-entry-id-225dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-12-11T11:34:07-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f04b51254d75f4491f06a2afb5793e2f-224.html#unique-entry-id-224http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f04b51254d75f4491f06a2afb5793e2f-224.html#unique-entry-id-224dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-12-06T15:38:59-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/eb75d726db2908059bdc695ecaad343c-223.html#unique-entry-id-223http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/eb75d726db2908059bdc695ecaad343c-223.html#unique-entry-id-223dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-10-17T15:32:00-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/beee864a6aecf876029f03228fa11954-222.html#unique-entry-id-222http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/beee864a6aecf876029f03228fa11954-222.html#unique-entry-id-222dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-10-05T17:04:10-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b94509734b3ad092563b9d85fe0b7eaa-221.html#unique-entry-id-221http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b94509734b3ad092563b9d85fe0b7eaa-221.html#unique-entry-id-221dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-09-28T12:28:54-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/edfd54bae9024a1264f1fd75a04e5388-220.html#unique-entry-id-220http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/edfd54bae9024a1264f1fd75a04e5388-220.html#unique-entry-id-220Gene Logsdon is described on Wikipedia as “An American Man of Letters,” which seems to be accurate, since he has written dozens of non-fiction books and a handful of novels since the seventies. He’s about eighty years old, so he can write about his personal memories of many of the momentous changes in rural life in the last half century (and he can also get away with saying things like “Nothing is more overrated than sex and nothing so underrated as a good healthy bowel movement”)(I’m going to quote without giving page numbers, because the Kindle version of this book wasn’t paginated). Holy Shit, Logsdon’s 2010 book about manure and compost is based on his conviction that soil fertility is the key to human survival. He says it very clearly in the introduction: “My bias— it will be called bias anyway— is that only on smaller, decentralized farms and gardens can food and manure be managed in a truly economical way. Only if populations of animals and humans are spread out over the land will we be able to survive.” This is not unlike the position taken by many of the other Chelsea Green authors, the difference is that Logsdon is an old guy who has been thinking and writing about these ideas for almost five decades. ...Of course, the situation in the ancient world may have been much different: they were not able to make up for used-up or eroded fertility with chemical fertilizers. ... Another way of looking at it is their problems were not exacerbated by reliance on chemical fertilizers, and they still failed. Logsdon observes that many ancient civilizations failed after depending on a mono-crop (ironically, often maize), and then points out that we don’t understand how serious our situation is: “A society so utterly urbanized as ours may not want to face up to what that means, but the end of cheap chemical fertilizer would be almost as earth-shaking as a nuclear bomb explosion.” ...Southern Michigan, denuded of fertility by continued wheat growing, discovered a route to prosperity through the mutton finishing lot and farmers in that state now feed sheep and lambs regardless of the cost, to get a supply of manure.” ... As chemicals become more expensive, he says “People could raise their own meat, milk, and eggs almost for free by buying feed for their animals with the proceeds from selling the manure.” ... The same oil crunch that is going to make chemicals outrageously pricey is going to make it impossible to transport compost from where it’s produced to where people might pay big bucks for it. ...Other books Logsdon mentions are Morrison’s Feeds and Feeding, 1915, and Alva Agee’s 1912 Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement, which Logsdon says “basically announced the arrival of the manure pack.” … I really need to go through all these books and put together a booklist of old sources that are available free online! Most of the rest of Logsdon’s book is devoted to descriptions of manure handling strategies for different types of animals, including humans. It’s interesting, looking at farm manure not as a nuisance by-product that needs to be dealt with, but as a central product of animal agriculture. Barns, Logsdon remarks at one point, “should have been designed for making and preserving manure of high fertility value and for ease of handling.” Maybe in the future they will be, at least among small farmers who read books like this one. There’s also an interesting discussion of the differences between thermophilic composting, which is familiar to most gardeners, and the slow composting of the deep manure pack in animal stalls. I’ll need to spend some more time thinking about this – already we have about three or four potentially different things going on outside: a pack of horse manure we inherited from the previous owners, a pack we’re building under the sheep, goats, and chickens, a garden-variety compost pile, and a worm farm. Clearly I have more reading to do on this topic, as well as a good deal of experimenting! And just when you think the whole thing is based on old, folksy wisdom from the depression era, Logsdon rolls out scientific research done by Harry Hoitink and his students at Ohio State University about the disease-suppressing qualities of composted manure. “We now know,” Logsdon quotes Hoitink, “what the genes are in plants that mediate the natural systemic, induced resistance in plants by active composts. ...Finally, Logsdon points out the possibly surprising fact that unlike what we were taught for so many years in Ag. ... For example, Logsdon says “An up-to-date, 5,000-acre corn and soybean farm needed a corn price of around $ 3.86 a bushel to break even in 2009, economists at the University of Illinois said recently. ... Yet anyone with 40 acres of land— and it need not be an Amish farmer either— can plant it to corn and net at least $ 2 a bushel at a $ 4 selling price, using hand, horse, or small tractor power. At 150 bushels per acre, he or she could net $ 12,000 for their labor on 40 acres, a tidy little income for spare-time work, especially in these times of serious unemployment.” And that’s corn – there are any number of more profitable alternatives for small farmers these days. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-09-05T15:45:09-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c45e7cc882fe845e9284a3415180f12c-219.html#unique-entry-id-219http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c45e7cc882fe845e9284a3415180f12c-219.html#unique-entry-id-219In the preface to his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben admits “It’s true that we’ve lost that fight, insofar as our goal was to preserve the world we were born into” (p. xv). ... So “we’ll need to figure out what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societies and civilizations”(p. xiv). As you might expect, the first part of this book, where McKibben explains how the old world has been destroyed, is much more detailed than the second part, where he offers some suggestions on how we might move forward. The scientific consensus is alarming: “We now know that the climate doesn’t have to warm any more for Greenland to continue losing ice,” says a climatologist from the University of Ohio (pp. ... There’s a “50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which backs up on the Colorado River behind Hoover Dam, could run dry by 2021 (When that happens, as the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority put it, ‘you cut off supply to the fifth largest economy in the world,’ spread across the American West (p. ... And “glaciers could disappear from the central and eastern Himalayas as early as 2035, including the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the dry-season water to the Ganges River. That would leave 407 million people looking for a new source of drinking and irrigation water” (p. ...The oceans are “more acid than anytime in the last eight hundred thousand years, and at current rates by 2050 it will be more corrosive than anytime in the past 20 million years (p. ... If I recall, that’s where pretty much all the ocean’s remaining biodiversity is. McKibben is famous as the man behind 350.org, but even in 2009 as he was writing this he said “we’re already past 350—way past it. ... Forget the grandkids; it turns out this was a problem for our parents…the last time we had carbon levels this high: sea levels rose one hundred feet or more, and temperatures rose as much as ten degrees” (pp. ... And contrary to what others are claiming, McKibben quotes scientists who believe “changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped” (p. ...“One barrel of oil yields as much energy as twenty-five thousand hours of human manual labor—more than a decade of human labor per barrel. The average American uses twenty-five barrels each year, which is like finding three hundred years of free labor annually” (p. ...Already, as only the earliest changes were beginning to be noticed, the World Bank announced “1.4 billion people, it found, lived below the poverty line, 430 million more than previously estimated. ... No wonder “The U.S. military… costs more than the armies of the next forty-five nations combined; the Pentagon accounts for 48 percent of the world’s total military spending” (pp. ... According to Nobel winner Steven Chu, “the rapid melt of the Sierra snowpack means ‘we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California…I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going’ ” (p. ... “And if our societies start to tank, we’ll be in worse shape than those who came before,” McKibben warns. “For one thing, our crisis is global, so there’s no place to flee. For another, most of us don’t know how to do very much—in your standard collapse scenario, it’s nice to know how to grow wheat” (pp. ...First, we have to stop looking to idiots like Larry Summers, “treasury secretary under President Clinton, now Obama’s chief economic adviser: ‘There are no . . . limits to the carrying capacity of the earth.’ ” (p. ... And Jerry Falwell: “I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We’ll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn’t returned” (p. ... And Barack Obama: “speaking about the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks… ‘We don’t want to make the best the enemy of the good.’ ” (p. ...But really, it’s a little hard to see how McKibben navigates from this to a very short description of localism and community-building ending with a retelling of the 350.org event in October 2009. Maybe he wouldn’t have been allowed to publish the book if he had suggested what the world is going to look like. Better to leave to the imaginations of the reader what he means by “dispersed and localized societies that can survive the damage we can no longer prevent” (p. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-07-29T16:03:40-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/81e4255857332b9fb8061d9d79661886-218.html#unique-entry-id-218http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/81e4255857332b9fb8061d9d79661886-218.html#unique-entry-id-218In his introduction to Joel Salatin’s recent book Folks, This Ain’t Normal, Allan Nation says Salatin pulls no punches, which “completely discombobulates” audiences who expect a slow-local food advocate to be a leftist hippie. In this book, Salatin proudly displays his religiosity, his social conservatism, and his political libertarianism — so much so, in fact, that these elements threaten to distract the reader from his central point. That point is that a food system dominated by multinational corporations, in which local production is seen as eccentric and local markets are discouraged by heavy-handed regulation, is fundamentally abnormal and in the long run, suicidal. ...The book is really a series of essays that all circle around this central theme. Some of them are excellent, and would probably work well as free-standing articles or as chapters to read in a class (Environmental History, for instance). ... It begins with a discussion of firewood that dwells on the physical details and shows an intimate knowledge of the subject drawn from a lifetime of experience, and then continues to a discussion of freedom, responsibility, and growing up on a farm. And it provides this point, for grounding the discussion: “As recently as 1946, nearly 50 percent of all produce grown in America came out of backyard gardens” (p. ...In the next chapter, Salatin says “No long-term example exists in which tillage is sustainable. ... This is an interesting claim, and it may well have an element of truth to it; but it (and the chapter) seems motivated by Salatin’s desire to debunk the vegetarians who argue against meat (especially beef) production and consumption. ... And he makes a series of points I agree with: CAFOs suck, and the fact “That a large percentage of landfilled material is animal-edible food waste” really should “strike us as criminal.” ... They go hungry due to lack of distribution” (32); which suggests that we could feed as many people animal protein as we could feed vegetable protein, if we could just get the system right. Salatin believes the whole world can be fed on meat, if we would just go back to pasturage rather than grain-feeding. Whether this is true or not, he’s clearly right that a lot of the marginal land that’s in crop production would be more sustainable as rangeland. Talking about local food production, Salatin points out that it takes fifteen calories to get a calorie of food onto the average American table, and four of those calories are transportation (67). And he points out that the key to local food viability is “a seasonal eating commitment” (68). “Unless and until the East and North step up to their bioregional responsibilities,” he continues, “California will be unable to feed itself” (69) But again, “half of all the food fit for human consumption never gets eaten,” because of long-distance transport and warehousing. ... And then there’s the frivolous use of resources instead of farming: “America has thirty-five million acres of lawn and thirty-six million acres devoted to housing and feeding recreational horses, and that doesn’t even count golf courses,” Salatin says (76). ...He has some very interesting things to say about the Progressive Era and its effect on farming, and also about writers like Edward Faulkner (Plowman’s Folly, 1943) and Newman Turner (Fertility Farming, 1951) who argued against the agro-industrial model right from the start. ...Salatin says “By denying the herbivores access to a paddock until the grass has rested enough to go through that middle rapid growth period of the S curve, we metabolize far more sunlight into biomass than would otherwise occur…And if every farm and ranch that has cows in the United States would practice this biomimicry, in fewer than ten years we would sequester all the atmospheric carbon generated since the beginning of the industrial age. For more information, visit Holistic Management International and Carbon Farmers of America—two groups doing the empirical analysis and demonstrating the efficacy of these principles” (195-196). ...So Salatin makes a bunch of really good points, which for me are slightly marred by the number of times he says “Jesus never said” this or that. And I got the point about the food police without needing to read quite so much about how Salatin and his friends have been inconvenienced by the USDA and FDA. And calling Abraham Lincoln “an idiotic dreamer” is going a bit far beyond what was needed to make his point. ... And when he goes after “the tax-and-spend crowd [who] dishonor hardworking Americans” and “government manipulation of the housing market, by demanding that high-risk loans be made to unqualified people,” Salatin is exposing his dependence on the Fox echo-chamber for his perspective on recent events. Again, how the editors thought these passages were a good way to advance his theme is just beyond me. Maybe Salatin has become to big a celebrity on the speaking circuit, to the point where he thinks he’s got something to say on any topic, not just the ones where he has a lifetime of experience and a thorough command of all the details. The excesses he allows himself in this book detract from its force, but Folks, This Ain’t Normal is still an important contribution to the slow-local food cause. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-07-04T10:38:10-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/782169d3f6c2f4fd73eb7ac2244e214c-217.html#unique-entry-id-217http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/782169d3f6c2f4fd73eb7ac2244e214c-217.html#unique-entry-id-217dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-06-13T09:56:11-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3f8241fdf1df18714d9801a48652863b-216.html#unique-entry-id-216http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3f8241fdf1df18714d9801a48652863b-216.html#unique-entry-id-216I’ve started re-reading Daniel T. Rodgers’ Age of Fracture.  I glanced at it in the final run-up to my PhD comps, but it didn’t make much of an impression.  Then Jane Kamensky mentioned it during her closing talk at The Historical Society’s recent conference, and I thought I ought to pick it up again.    This closer reading led me to a couple of thoughts.  First, that there’s probably a whole lot more in many of those books we powered through in grad school; it’s probably worth revisiting some of them and digesting them slowly.  Second, what doesn’t seem relevant when you’re under the gun and trying to absorb the historiography of a field may be really useful when you’re thinking about teaching or writing – especially for the public. ...I’ve only scratched the surface of Age of Fracture so far, but it strikes me as a very interesting attempt to argue a complicated point for a more-or-less general audience.  This fascinates me, since I think historians really need to help us all understand how we got to where we are today.  I hope to pick up some ideas about how to do this, especially about where the boundary is between assertion and explication: how much of an argument you can carry with an authoritative voice and how much you need to demonstrate with evidence and analysis.  At one point, for example, Rodgers says, “What precipitates breaks and interruptions in social argument are not raw changes in social experience, which never translate automatically into mind. What matters are the processes by which the flux and tensions of experience are shaped into mental frames and pictures that, in the end, come to seem themselves natural and inevitable: ingrained in the very logic of things” (Kindle Locations 125-127).  This is an interesting claim; very close to the idea I just found in Giambattista Vico’s New Science (another book I picked up as a result of the conference), “Every epoch,” Vico wrote, “is dominated by a ‘spirit’, a genius, of its own. Novelty, like beauty, recommends certain faults which, after fashion changes, become glaringly apparent. Writers, wishing to reap a profit from their studies, follow the trend of their time” (quoted in Anthony Grafton’s Introduction).  It’s a provocative idea, and it obviously has a lineage – but is it true?  And can it be used to explain social change over time? Another thing Rodgers does, in the early pages of Age of Fracture, is to provide a schematic for a “historiography” of the field of Economics.  Beginning with Alfred Marshall (Principles of Economics, 1890), Rodgers traces the development of economic thinking (and college economic teaching) through Paul Samuelson (Economics, 1948), and then into the variety of competing interpretations resulting from the failure of macro-economic prediction in the 1970s and 80s.  Along the way, Rodgers mentions many of the relevant texts in this development: popular texts such as Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom as well as academic titles like Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost” and Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law.  It would be interesting to organize a syllabus around these titles, and read them one after another.  In addition to tracing the development of economic theory, the themes of such a class might be to examine whether theory or contingency really moved society, and more importantly to test the point made above by Rodgers and Vico: to see if the explanations offered by economists in their historical moments contain “faults which, after fashion changes, become glaringly apparent.”   ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-06-07T14:08:04-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/34dc8a45ac1861aa855f161a6d8b86e4-215.html#unique-entry-id-215http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/34dc8a45ac1861aa855f161a6d8b86e4-215.html#unique-entry-id-215http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/23f1984701c667926de5a567cc52de49-214.html#unique-entry-id-214dan@allosso.netReading Blog2008-12-29T13:35:47-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/91087b806149e1109d14a07a81d8f4e3-213.html#unique-entry-id-213http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/91087b806149e1109d14a07a81d8f4e3-213.html#unique-entry-id-213dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-05-03T11:05:14-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/be372eef2759a5df32d4326b4cced44f-212.html#unique-entry-id-212http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/be372eef2759a5df32d4326b4cced44f-212.html#unique-entry-id-212Eli Pariser (of MoveOn.org, which I dimly recall was a relevant site when Bush II was on the throne, but seems to have lost some luster since Obama turned out to be Bush III) writes about the way the internet is becoming personalized, and how that distorts our view of reality. ... But that may be just because they’re increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click”(p. ... Not only do vendors like Amazon and Netflix use your purchase history to try to predict what you might want to buy next (which seems legitimate, and no more than an on-the-ball shopkeeper in the bricks and mortar days would do), but increasingly info you don’t know is being collected about you is in play in ways you don’t realize. In commerce this info is gathered by “data companies like BlueKai and Acxiom, [which has] accumulated an average of 1,500 pieces of data on each person on its database—which includes 96 percent of Americans” (p. ... Credit card companies have been profiling us based on what we buy for decades, now cellphones can report on where you go, too. ...The filter bubble is Pariser’s name for the feedback loop of information that surrounds us, as even Google searches we believe to be unbiased are increasingly tailored to our personal profiles. Although he admits we’ve always selected media that appeals to our interests and preconceptions (hence the echo-chamber cable news channels), Pariser says the filter bubble is different in three ways. ... Each personal news feed or search is tailored specifically to you, so you’re no longer even part of a narrow affinity group. ... Google doesn’t tell you who it thinks you are or why it’s showing you the results you’re seeing. You don’t know if its assumptions about you are right or wrong—and you might not even know it’s making assumptions about you in the first place” (p. ... Finally, Pariser says while the viewers of politically slanted media are (presumably) aware there are a range of options and that they’ve chosen one of them, as the filter bubble gives us more and more seemingly objective positive reinforcement in our preferences and prejudices, we begin to believe the world is like us. Because even web searches from commercial sites like Google are increasingly tailored to each user’s profile, Pariser says we are less likely to be exposed to a rich variety of ideas. Politically, this would tend to make us even more obnoxiously American than we already are. But he also claims that it will hinder creativity by promoting a more passive style of info gathering, and by narrowing what he calls “the solution horizon, the limit of the conceptual area that we’re operating in” (p. ... It’s hard to be outside the box, Pariser believes, if the box is narrow and invisible. If innovation comes from the juxtaposition of unrelated ideas and from some type of creative cross-pollenization that happens when people expose themselves to unfamiliar stimuli, then we could be headed toward a generation of accountants. And this change has been noticed even by some techies: “The shift from exploration and discovery to the intent-based search of today was inconceivable,”Pariser quotes an unnamed Yahoo editor lamenting (p. ...Some of the comparisons Pariser makes between Google (which profiles you based on your click history) and Facebook (which profiles you based on what you share) are less heavy than his argument above. ... But the point is still worth remembering, “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold” (p. ... Overall, though, I think Pariser overstates the danger of the filter bubble because just like the techno-evangelists he criticizes, he overestimates the importance of the technology. ... The problem, which Pariser gets close to and then misses, is that we’re training a generation of people not to be creative. 36 hours a week the average American spends watching TV. ...The only people I want to have my personal info less than salesmen are bureaucrats. ... RFIDS cost about a nickel apiece, and it’s been nearly 15 years since I sat in a presentation by a semiconductor manufacturer’s rep (I think from National Semi) who talked about all the ways they were thinking of deploying them. ...Remember that everything you post to any website you don’t personally own probably becomes someone else’s property, and that the stuff you post on your own site can be copied and saved by anybody. ... And from the network perspective, it’s never been easier for regular people to communicate, and it doesn’t have to be through the commercial web. WIMAX base stations are cheap, and can connect entire towns and cities into networks that don’t depend on the AT&Ts and Time Warner Cables of the world. Those networks won’t have Netflix or YouTube on them (or much porn, either), but if that’s all we’re really looking for, then it’s already too late. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-04-04T19:06:56-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a9590760f39630d207dc7f0062ab3163-211.html#unique-entry-id-211http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a9590760f39630d207dc7f0062ab3163-211.html#unique-entry-id-211I’ve been listening to Stephen King talk about writing, on the way to work this week. I skimmed this book really quickly a year or so ago in a writing class. It seemed interesting at the time, but I was a busy grad student and I didn’t have the time to really sit down and pay the attention it deserved. So I downloaded the audiobook from Audible a couple of weeks ago. It’s been a couple months since I’ve listened to a book on my commute -- lately it’s been mostly Dr. Who soundtrack music. I didn’t read the fine print when I bought the audio, so I was pleasantly surprised when the reader turned out to be Stephen King himself. The autobiographical parts were much more interesting to me, hearing King tell the story, than they had been when I’d read/skimmed them. And it struck me that part of the job I need to do when I write about the past is to take advantage of the natural interest people seem to have in looking behind the curtains of life in different times and places. So I got to think about setting my scenes a bit. Then I got to the part about writing. King begins with the idea that the communication between writer and reader is telepathy. Along the way he says he’s sitting in his sending place and the reader is sitting in his/her receiving place. He says, this could be your comfy chair, or your bed, or you could be in your car. And at this point, I had this fun (not eerie, but fun) feeling that he was talking to me! Then he said some additional things about rabbits and cages and rough comparisons that also seemed to be directly related to some things I’ve been thinking about the degree of detail to put into setting and historical context in the biography I’m working on. It was a cool moment. On the way home, King had a lot more very sensible things to say about writing. People who want to write should get this audio and listen to it over and over, until it really sinks in. I’m going to. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-03-17T17:24:53-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8d4494e5f31d57c10f2627ff3312c73a-210.html#unique-entry-id-210http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8d4494e5f31d57c10f2627ff3312c73a-210.html#unique-entry-id-210dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-02-04T08:59:06-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0822a6851cbdda4ef76c47c640c6afc7-209.html#unique-entry-id-209http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0822a6851cbdda4ef76c47c640c6afc7-209.html#unique-entry-id-209Harvey Ussery, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, 2011. A very nicely put together book, by Chelsea Green Publishing in White River Junction VT. I’ve been buying most everything in Kindle format lately, but this was only available the old-fashioned way. It took a little longer to read, but the layout and illustrations make the time sacrifice and extra cost worthwhile. Ussery provides a wide range of information, from the basic (why don’t you need a rooster to get eggs from your hens?) to the fine points of different breeding techniques (the “old farmer’s method” and spiral matings seem like the most interesting, and the idea of creating crosses to reflect local conditions and your personal preferences seemed like an invitation to a fun and magical realm). The focus is on a holistic -- almost permaculture -- approach to homesteading that integrates the chickens in a bigger plant/animal farm picture. Joel Salatin is apparently a friend and neighbor of Ussery, and writes the forward for this book (which came out only a couple of days before his latest, which I’m reading now). If you’re thinking of raising chickens (and we are), this is the place to start. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-02-03T07:56:00-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/84cf28a0c4bb7d97821b8020c6c740b1-208.html#unique-entry-id-208http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/84cf28a0c4bb7d97821b8020c6c740b1-208.html#unique-entry-id-208Come and get it, home-schoolers! ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-02-02T17:59:37-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0b66e7b86e6b3b51d34ce563947c5698-207.html#unique-entry-id-207http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0b66e7b86e6b3b51d34ce563947c5698-207.html#unique-entry-id-207dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-01-29T11:09:15-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b3554c6552c81b27ebb393c4b28ecafe-206.html#unique-entry-id-206http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b3554c6552c81b27ebb393c4b28ecafe-206.html#unique-entry-id-206dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-01-27T19:24:30-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2c11a9cad23a170b97fa4039ebab5d58-205.html#unique-entry-id-205http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2c11a9cad23a170b97fa4039ebab5d58-205.html#unique-entry-id-205dan@allosso.netReading Blog2012-01-04T17:05:42-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1ad3141d52e68def6362cfb221bf53b5-204.html#unique-entry-id-204http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1ad3141d52e68def6362cfb221bf53b5-204.html#unique-entry-id-204http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/60b0172b57a47848333029b40131ff3c-203.html#unique-entry-id-203http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/187b76f320f8bf595e323070d70bb880-202.html#unique-entry-id-202http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/248eea58dd4276685755d9af92c7a6b7-201.html#unique-entry-id-201Cory Doctorow, Context, 2011 Cory Doctorow is the guy behind Boing Boing. He is also the author of several sci-fi and Young Adult sci-fi titles, including Little Brother (2008), which I’ve just begun reading. This is a volume of short essays that originally appeared as editorials in periodicals like the Guardian, but they’re thematically related and repeat several important themes like Doctorow’s concerns about net neutrality and copyright in interesting and useful ways. One of the most interesting articles was called “Nature’s Daredevils,” and was about writing sci-fi for the YA audience. Although science fiction has always appealed to teen boys, since I was a young fan it could be argued that the genre “grew up” and that authors like Stephenson, Gibson, and Sterling appealed to at least a slightly wider audience. But the old-fashioned sci-fi I grew up with didn’t really have the self-consciousness about being “YA” in the way that term is now understood. Doctorow says “YA SF is gigantic and invisible.” ... YA bestsellers are moving ten times the books of comparable “adult” sci-fi. Although YA titles are not taken seriously (yet?) by Hugo and other award committees, they have a wide range of advocates out in the reading world, including teachers, YA librarians, and a big group of genre activists and specialized reviewers. ...Unlike adult SF (which now means “speculative fiction” as well as good old sci-fi) Doctorow says kids “read to find out how the world works…[and] use books as markers of their social identity” (Kindle Locations 302-305). The “consequentiality” of writing for young adults is very satisfying, says Doctorow. “Adolescence is a series of brave, irreversible decisions,” Doctorow says, quoting another YA author. Young adults “live in a world characterized by intense drama, by choices wise and foolish and always brave. This is a book-plotter’s dream. Once you realize that your characters are living in this state of heightened consequence, every plot-point acquires moment and import that keeps the pages turning. ... And not only for the SF writer. ... Maybe especially for the historian, talking to young people about actions and consequences in the past. How much more powerful might some of these stories be, when kids realize that they actually happened. People actually did this stuff, it didn’t just come out of some novelist’s imagination. So it’s really possible… The more classic Doctorow articles deal with “intellectual property,” copyright, and new media in interesting and creative ways. For example: “people,” Doctorow says, “who’ve ‘had their property stolen’ are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than ‘industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated,’” and this gives giant media corporations an opportunity to mount an elaborate false-flag operation over copyrights to distract us from their ongoing attempts to privatize the web. ... And along the way I took down a half dozen names and titles to go out and find, expanding the link-tree. So it was a really useful anthology. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-12-19T11:34:16-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1b3726e3b45602e69de5abb59f1d8d78-200.html#unique-entry-id-200http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1b3726e3b45602e69de5abb59f1d8d78-200.html#unique-entry-id-200I’m reading James Gleick’s The Information. Gleick is brilliant in the way he writes about complex technical stuff in basic, easy-to-follow English. But I’m getting hung up on the passages about Bertrand Russell’s Paradox: “S is the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.” Gleick says “the enabling factor seemed to be the peculiar recursion within the offending statement: the idea of sets belonging to sets. In the same way,” Gleick continues, “the liar paradox relies on statements about statements. “‘This statement is false’ is meta-language: language about language.” ... The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Kindle Location 3217). ...In the first place, the enabling error in Russell’s Paradox seems to me to be the idea of non-recursion. That a set (all the hairs on my head) would not include itself (all the hairs on my head). ... The only way I can see any meaning in the idea that there is a set that does not include itself is if there’s some difference between “all the hairs on my head” and “the set of all the hairs on my head.” It’s as if something was added to all the hairs on my head by making them a set. So that’s the error, as I see it. Thinking that the mental act of making a set changed the reality of the objects grouped. ... A set of all the positive integers would have to contain all the positive integers. One of its subsets would have to be “the set of all the positive integers,” that is, itself. ... It’s not a paradox, it’s just a statement that doesn’t signify anything, because “the set of all sets that are not members of themselves” is empty. It’s empty in the real world, and it ought to be empty by definition in the world of logic. ...Words are not true or false, they’re signs. What they say can be true or false. The words in the sentence “this statement is false,” are empty. It would make as much sense to say “this statement is blue.” But I think Gleick is right to include this material in a book about the evolution of information theory. Because there is an issue about signal and content. ... Later, when he relates information to entropy and says that a string of 1,000 random digits contains more information than the equivalent encoded English text (say, lines of Shakespeare), he’s again highlighting the difference between information and meaning. In a sense, although he doesn’t say this, we add meaning by decreasing information content. ... More on this (and the rest of the book) later.]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-12-12T12:24:20-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8267dc75f35d2a6fe9620deddb30cc13-199.html#unique-entry-id-199http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8267dc75f35d2a6fe9620deddb30cc13-199.html#unique-entry-id-199Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, 2011 This is a really interesting book, from the guy who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats (which I haven’t read yet). Ronson tells a series of stories about his experiences over the past several years, which he weaves into an exploration of the place occupied by mental illness in our society. Ronson writes about an institutionalized “patient” who claims to have faked insanity to avoid a prison sentence, about scientologists campaigning against psychiatry, and about Bob Hare, the inventor of the 20-point checklist for diagnosing psychopaths. Along the way, Ronson reveals his growing realization that he and other journalists and media producers are complicit in the perpetuation of a madness industry that has gained incredible power and produced incredible fortunes over the last couple of decades. The madness of the madness-spotters is funny and scary at the same time. I actually bought the Audible audio version of this first, and then picked up the Kindle version so I could highlight and comment. Ronson reads the book himself, which I think is brilliant, especially given the conversational tone and the ironically self-deprecating way he makes some of his most important points. One of these points is that it’s rarely a question of someone else doing something, while we stand by innocently observing. ... Wall Streeters went on a rampage of cost-cutting that reduced workforces — that is, closed factories and bankrupted towns across America — Ronson describes it this way: “It was like in the Coliseum. ... So who really is the villain? Is it the one who’s making the cuts? Is it the analysts who are touting it? Is it the pension funds and the mutual funds who are buying?” “Of course that was all twelve years ago now,” I said. ... And it’s not just in the U.S. ... The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (pp. ...He concludes that passage by observing (and my Kindle informs me this has been highlighted 197 times so far): “If you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. ... It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring” (p. ...Along the way, Ronson uncovers some really important stuff. ... Allen Frances, the editor of the diagnostic manual DSM-IV, that “There’s a societal push for conformity in all ways,” he said. “There’s less tolerance of difference…It’s very easy to set off a false epidemic in psychiatry…And we inadvertently contributed to three that are ongoing now.” ...This “societal push for conformity” is why it’s important for me to complete my writing about nonconformists in history. ... Another quotable bit (with 251 highlighters to date, according to Kindle): “Serial killers ruin families.” ... 112) Whether you call them psychopaths or vampire squids, he’s got a point. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-12-11T14:03:36-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/12e8ab77c112a7a059438d7e9c466a1f-198.html#unique-entry-id-198http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/12e8ab77c112a7a059438d7e9c466a1f-198.html#unique-entry-id-198Neal Stephenson, REAMDE, 2011 This is a thriller, which Stephenson says has no supernatural or fantastical elements in it at all. He says he tried to make the characters interesting, so it was more than just a bunch of people running around shooting. But really, there’s an awful lot of running around and shooting. Several times, I felt like I was reading a Ludlum novel. Which is okay, but not normally why I rush right out and buy Stephenson’s books whenever a new one comes out. Along the way, though, there is a little bit of interesting technology — or at least a view into the multiplayer game world for those of us who don’t normally hang out there. The gold-farming aspects are also interesting, and a lot more might be done with them, from the perspective of colonialism, hacker disruption, etc. Didn’t Cory Doctorow just write about this too? There are also interesting moments when Stephenson seems to be talking about things within the plot, but might also be talking about writing. For example: “What they considered normal. ... If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away.” Yeah, this could be about the terrorists in the story, but it could also be about writing stories. ...I just copied that from my Kindle for Mac screen and pasted it into Scrivener. ...“Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). ...Here’s another one that seems to be about the multiplayer game-world in the story, but could as easily be about the story-world of a novel: say Lord of the Rings — since that’s one Stephenson refers to regularly in his stories: “The people who called themselves Evil weren’t really doing evil stuff, and the people who called themselves Good were no better. It’s not like the Good people were, for example, sacrificing points in the game world so that they could take the time to help little old ladies across the street.” “We didn’t give them the opportunity to help little old ladies across the street,” Richard said. “Exactly, we set them certain tasks or quests that had the ‘Good’ label slapped on them; but, art direction aside, they were indiscernible from ‘Evil’ tasks.” (Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). ...Stephenson also invokes the maxim hinted at repeatedly in the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs: “As hire As, and Bs hire Cs,” (p. ... And, as a treat to his fans, he throws in this: “The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.” (p. ... I suspect that’s a reference to Hiro Protagonist’s virtual office in Snow Crash, which along with Gordon R. Dickson’s Final Encyclopedia is my idea of the ultimate data interface. ... More on that subject and why Tinderbox doesn’t meet the need, soon. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-12-10T17:40:23-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4f94d2a0f0da8590ce52c5a305143296-197.html#unique-entry-id-197http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4f94d2a0f0da8590ce52c5a305143296-197.html#unique-entry-id-197dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-12-09T11:01:49-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/71c8b570502f198fb5b969852f606b5a-196.html#unique-entry-id-196http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/71c8b570502f198fb5b969852f606b5a-196.html#unique-entry-id-196Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 2011 (click image to see it on Amazon) Isaacson is probably lucky that Steve Jobs did not have a chance to read his biography. Jobs comes off as a spoiled Californian hippy-wannabe who pretty regularly cries to get his way. Maybe the real Jobs was as un-selfaware as he’s portrayed, but it’s not the impression you get when watching things like the joint interview Jobs and Bill Gates did with Mossberg in 2007. I think in spite of his protestations regarding Steve Jobs’ brilliance, Isaacson probably focuses too much on Jobs petty flaws, and misses some of the really big, historic business issues that are much more important parts of the Steve Jobs story than his personal hygiene and relationships with ex-girlfriends. I’ve never read anything by Isaacson before, but he ran CNN, didn’t he? So he can’t be as naive about business as he pretends to be. He relates a story about Steve telling Obama that Apple employs over 700,000 factory workers in China. Apple would really like to build factories in America, Steve tells the President, but he can’t find the 30,000 engineers needed to supervise those assembly lines. So Obama tells his staff that this education gap needs to be addressed ASAP. ... It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Apple can’t find 700,000 Americans willing to work for ten dollars a day and live in dormitories where they put up chain link outside the windows to stop you from jumping out and killing yourself? Similarly, Isaacson comes back again and again to the closed-versus-open systems argument, without ever really getting the point. The Microsoft DOS and Windows-based “IBM compatible” clone world created a global economy that would never have existed if Apple and its closed system had won. Don’t get me wrong: I bought my first Macintosh in 1984 and I’m typing on one now. But let’s be real. Thousands of companies, millions of jobs would never have existed. And if you listen carefully to the Mossberg interview, Steve Jobs knew this. So, thank you, Microsoft. Maybe the situation is different today. Isaacson implies that the Apple-Microsoft war has been replaced by an Apple-Google war over basically the same issues. However, I was struck by a little detail I’m sure Isaacson missed, which Steve would never have approved. At the end of the book (at least in the Kindle version — it may be elsewhere in the print version), there are a series of Diana Walker photos, and the final one is this 2004 portrait. This is the very last thing you see, after reading six hundred pages. Look what’s sitting on the big box under the brick archway at the far left. Then read Wired’s cover story last month. I’m just sayin’… ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-12-09T10:22:37-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/45b49ac1c854ff2d34602c587b4c28ca-195.html#unique-entry-id-195http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/45b49ac1c854ff2d34602c587b4c28ca-195.html#unique-entry-id-195dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-11-16T11:14:06-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/77a08698ae887ef89d4d0a022d64162b-194.html#unique-entry-id-194http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/77a08698ae887ef89d4d0a022d64162b-194.html#unique-entry-id-194Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, 2006 (click image to see it on Amazon) Piven asks, “given the power inequalities of American life and the extent to which electoral-representative arrangements are twisted by those inequalities, how does egalitarian reform ever occur in the United States?” The answer, she suggests, is that “the rare intervals of nonincremental democratic reforms are responses to the rise of disruptive protest movements, and the distinctive kind of power that those movements wield.” (18) Regular people, she concludes, “exercise power…mainly [and later she leans toward only] at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and…disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed.” (1) The “electoral norms” and institutions of American government have developed layers “walling off…crucial parts of government from exposure to the electorate.” So it is “precisely at the moments when people act outside of the electoral norms that electoral-representative procedures are more likely to realize their democratic potential.” (2) This seems like an elaborate and excessively-hedged way of saying that American politics is designed for the benefit of elites, and that under normal operations, what we think of as democracy actually tends to erode the rights and privileges of the working and middle classes, for the benefit of the rich. In fact, she argues in chapter six that “the slow and steady workings of normal politics are more likely to wear away the reforms won during those moments of crisis than they are to enlarge upon them.” (18) That’s a provocative, interesting argument: that we don’t really have a democracy — we have a plutocracy that is regularly attacked by the underclasses and forced to make concessions in order to get them to go back to work, keep spending, etc. So why am I not happier with this book? Maybe because, once she articulates this idea [albeit more tentatively than I summarized it], Piven misses the opportunity to give us some really stirring history to back it up. The history she does provide is mechanical and almost entirely based on secondary sources. But who cares about the opinions of the Tillys, or even E.P. Thompson, on these issues? For example, she quotes Edmund Morgan’s conclusion that “It seems unlikely that the political, social, and cultural changes wrought in the name of equality since 1776 could have occurred under British rule. It was the founders that made them possible by defying the king and creating a republic.” (54) But in this context, Morgan’s statement seems like little more than standard American exceptionalism, when Piven’s thesis might actually be used to suggest that once the dust settled [had the dust been allowed to settle] on colonial complaints, the “standard” operations of our social and political institutions would probably have resulted in just the tame and watered-down democracy we ultimately got. Although maybe with less imperialism and manifest destiny, like Canada. The thesis is interesting, though — and especially so at a time when the Wall Street occupiers are being thrown out of the park. It would be really interesting to look at the development of American institutions in this light (which of course, some historians have been doing for decades) in a survey class, where we could look at Federalist #10 with these questions in mind. We could even frame the issue in a discussion about why she wrote the book in 2006 and whether the Bush-era rhetoric holds up under Obama. What was it he campaigned on? Oh yeah: Change.]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-11-12T09:20:41-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/86e7adfceed3524c83af3d7c10b2f1ca-193.html#unique-entry-id-193http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/86e7adfceed3524c83af3d7c10b2f1ca-193.html#unique-entry-id-193dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-10-12T09:01:39-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d0444399cf663df5a2dd85ce28d20aa2-192.html#unique-entry-id-192http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d0444399cf663df5a2dd85ce28d20aa2-192.html#unique-entry-id-192dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-10-06T09:00:56-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a66403176133bc6e77e0d170767fa203-191.html#unique-entry-id-191http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a66403176133bc6e77e0d170767fa203-191.html#unique-entry-id-191dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-10-05T08:59:54-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/331e945bca8a73139d9385f379d73bee-190.html#unique-entry-id-190http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/331e945bca8a73139d9385f379d73bee-190.html#unique-entry-id-190dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-10-03T08:59:00-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a72494435594ae98230b3628fc78df06-189.html#unique-entry-id-189http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a72494435594ae98230b3628fc78df06-189.html#unique-entry-id-189dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-10-01T08:57:57-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b282b90c4e1db1650f46a0ba044f110b-188.html#unique-entry-id-188http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b282b90c4e1db1650f46a0ba044f110b-188.html#unique-entry-id-188dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-09-30T08:57:23-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9a29626062dbc2471f4231d45b25c2f6-187.html#unique-entry-id-187http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9a29626062dbc2471f4231d45b25c2f6-187.html#unique-entry-id-187dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-09-29T08:56:33-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/13771f0beff75f797f7fa199dd1fbc22-186.html#unique-entry-id-186http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/13771f0beff75f797f7fa199dd1fbc22-186.html#unique-entry-id-186dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-09-28T08:55:25-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/27fb809f5bfed5f831f4b6238d18a29b-185.html#unique-entry-id-185http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/27fb809f5bfed5f831f4b6238d18a29b-185.html#unique-entry-id-185dan@allosso.netFreethinkers2011-09-27T08:51:16-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36dc789f1a2c361e430e38b772eb132a-184.html#unique-entry-id-184http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36dc789f1a2c361e430e38b772eb132a-184.html#unique-entry-id-184dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-09-23T09:26:45-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6026936b207ba09ac004bad861167000-183.html#unique-entry-id-183http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6026936b207ba09ac004bad861167000-183.html#unique-entry-id-183Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies, by Matthew Parker, 2011. I’ve listened to the first half of the audible audiobook version of this, on my drives to and from work. ... And some of my guys begin their American careers in the “West India Trade,” out of Middletown CT, so I thought I might pick up some data or ideas. And I’ve learned a lot about the chronology of Caribbean settlement, the development of the sugar industry, and even the growth of buccaneering and piracy (which sheds an interesting light on Christopher Hill’s articles about the New Model Army and pirates). ...The book opens with a description of the voyage to the Indies, from the perspective of a more-or-less common person who wrote a memoir. But the story moves quickly to the people who’d be central in any traditional political/military history from the last century. The first half, at least, is a pretty standard history in that sense: the main action involves the building of the British sugar empire in Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica. There are several people the story revolves around for a while: James Drax, his son Henry, Peter Beckford, Christopher Codrington. They all seem like very interesting characters, but Parker doesn’t give them much room to move around in. For the most part, the story moves quickly from battle to battle, recounting the major events that shaped the development of the British West Indies. ...Although the Spanish and French are present as antagonists, there’s very little said about their activities or points of view. Even where a description of their efforts at cultivating sugar could have helped contextualize the scope and style of British sugar production, it’s largely missing. As is any discussion or the demand side or the cultural impact of sugar, beyond a few lines describing changes in per capita consumption over time. I’m not sure if I’m going to listen to the second, eight-hour half of this audiobook. I’d really like to know whether he gets around to the impact of sugar and the Caribbean on the development of New England. ... These are really interesting characters, and I think it would be a really interesting (and difficult) project, to try to render them completely. Parker sort-of shies away from mentioning slavery and general debauchery when he’s talking about his “heroes” in the story. Not that he tries to whitewash them — they’re not even really “heroes” in the standard sense: they’re just the central characters of a chapter or two, that the story hangs on or close to. But it would be interesting to dig deeper into some of these guys, and see them more completely. Slavery is clearly one of the big elephants in the room, but probably not the only one. The younger Christopher Codrington was a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, who hung around with the lights of London. But he was also a bloodthirsty sod who joined William III’s army in the Netherlands just for the joy of battle. These guys are very complicated, and I would have been really interested in seeing deeper into their complex, self-contradictory personalities. ...The scope of Parker’s story precludes there being one character who could carry it — but maybe a family could have done the job. In my story, I’m also covering too much time to write it as one person’s story, so I’m trying to write it as the story of three families. What techniques can I use to foreground the personal stories of my characters, without losing the historical context and the narrative thread? Personal motivations, even personal quirks and idiosyncrasies, might shed a different light on the story and on the times. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-09-21T08:55:35-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1d4e55a538b95b282e4496f39a786aae-182.html#unique-entry-id-182http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1d4e55a538b95b282e4496f39a786aae-182.html#unique-entry-id-182dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-08-06T14:47:54-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1f40ee2b6565a75caa95e2ecad3cbe46-181.html#unique-entry-id-181http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1f40ee2b6565a75caa95e2ecad3cbe46-181.html#unique-entry-id-181dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-08-05T12:40:58-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/765716ca204e2bf8b06725776c410f97-180.html#unique-entry-id-180http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/765716ca204e2bf8b06725776c410f97-180.html#unique-entry-id-180dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-08-04T13:34:18-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/04368208f4010801d545bf19955e0ab1-179.html#unique-entry-id-179http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/04368208f4010801d545bf19955e0ab1-179.html#unique-entry-id-179dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-07-12T10:23:42-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/960cad4e839aa583502fcca3399b6bc7-178.html#unique-entry-id-178http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/960cad4e839aa583502fcca3399b6bc7-178.html#unique-entry-id-178dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-06-08T16:26:30-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e24c72f9bec834be3640909d54aba744-177.html#unique-entry-id-177http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e24c72f9bec834be3640909d54aba744-177.html#unique-entry-id-177dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-06-07T10:33:44-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/61533aee41bac5b92ef88d433986a3b7-176.html#unique-entry-id-176http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/61533aee41bac5b92ef88d433986a3b7-176.html#unique-entry-id-176Actually, this book is really about high school history textbooks, and only peripherally about things teachers say to students. ... Interestingly, he found that even when textbook authors were well-known for holding much more sophisticated opinions, and writing about them in historical monographs; when they turned their hands to the textbook something happened. ...The omniscient narrator’s voice in the textbook insulates students from the actual (and much more powerful and interesting) voices of people in history. The reason the failures of these textbooks is important, Loewen continues, is that five sixths of all Americans never take a course in history beyond high school. So, most of us in America are not being exposed to the latest work by historians aiming to set the record straight or qualify older interpretations. This might come as a shock to many historians, and it certainly should have an impact on where we choose to spend our efforts when communicating with the public. Loewen’s first chapter deals with the process of heroification, which he says is like calcification in that it makes the characters unreal and therefor useless and irrelevant. ... Loewen says that stories celebrating Helen Keller’s struggle to learn to speak have deliberately ignored what she said when she actually achieved her goal. This is especially ironic, because Keller came to believe that she was in fact very lucky to have been born into a family that had the means to care for her and give her the opportunity to learn. ... This is much more interesting than the bland image of her that comes down to us from the textbooks. ...The 1914 invasion of Mexico, he says, is portrayed as a step Woodrow Wilson was uneasy about taking, even though the record shows he pushed it through an unwilling Congress, against the wishes of most Americans. Now clearly, there’s room for argument whether “most Americans” were for or against this invasion; the point is, the textbooks give us no space to argue, because they present this as a fact that is beyond interpretation. Frequently, Loewen says, textbooks give Wilson credit for ordering troops out of Mexico, while ignoring the fact that he’s also the guy who ordered them in. ...None of them credit Wilson with segregating the federal government, and one actually creates a “happy ending,” in which “the forces of segregation” were finally beaten back by the end of Wilson’s administration. ... Concealing the racism of the leadership, Loewen continues, makes the upsurge of racist violence and Klan activity in the 1920s incomprehensible; so that too must be written out of the story. Along the way, we lose an opportunity to learn something about the relationship between leaders and followers in American culture. ...The textbooks largely portray it as the nation’s “fatigue” with Progressivism, however, because they won’t say anything against the heroified Wilson. ... Ironically, the issues that are left muddled for students were quite clear for Helen Keller, who called Wilson “The Greatest Disappointment the World has Known.” Loewen’s argument about heroes is that a lifelike representation of these people that exposed their humanity would actually give students realistic models to emulate. The inhuman perfection of the textbooks’ heroes makes them too distant, and works against the idea that the students can ever have a significant role in their society. Instead, we get a series of discoverers’ names to memorize, from Eric the Red to Neil Armstrong — and we’re asked to remember them not because of the social impact of their discoveries, but because they were white. After giving us a line-by-line debunking of the Columbus myth, Loewen suggests that these fabulous additions (the storms, the near mutiny) are not trivial. ...But he suggests an interesting way to look at the American response to the Haitian revolution: whether the President owned slaves. ... Now, you could argue that there were political changes or other factors involved…if you were in a position to argue at all. ...“There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the major houses told Loewen: “sex, religion, and social class.” ... The effect of not acknowledging class differences in history, Loewen says, is to reinforce the idea that anyone can rise in this “Land of Opportunity,” and if people don’t, it’s their own fault. ...One of the most ironic comparisons Loewen makes, is between After the Fact, Davidson & Lytle’s book about the work of academic historians (assigned in many grad surveys), and Davidson’s The American Nation. All of the complexity, interpretation, and interest is washed away, Loewen says; leaving a dry recital of facts no better than any of the others. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-06-02T14:51:38-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3d682f4db35f0d807ead34bc3348d7d4-175.html#unique-entry-id-175http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3d682f4db35f0d807ead34bc3348d7d4-175.html#unique-entry-id-175dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-06-01T09:36:33-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/69413970e768af30d945e6ea1bb15031-174.html#unique-entry-id-174http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/69413970e768af30d945e6ea1bb15031-174.html#unique-entry-id-174dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-05-31T08:31:19-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5ef30130a21692a757b8349382e94f77-173.html#unique-entry-id-173http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5ef30130a21692a757b8349382e94f77-173.html#unique-entry-id-173Larry Schweikart, 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School), 2009 This book is Larry Schweikart’s version of Lies My Teacher Told Me (which I’ve also been listening to and will have something to say about very soon). I have no doubt there are left-leaning distortions in many textbooks, just as there are right-leaning ones. But this book seems to be focused on providing talking points for opponents of the “liberal elite.” I’ve only listened to the first few minutes of this, but my initial impression is that Schweikart is trying to paint college textbooks as irredeemably biased and slanted toward the left, while very carefully trying to hide his own biases and unexamined assumptions. For example, in the introduction Schweikart argues, “the very focus on ‘everyday life’ defeats the purpose of history, for no book can accurately reflect the daily experiences of even a few thousand people, let alone millions, even more so over hundreds of years. By its very definition, history must always deal with those events and people who affected the greatest number over time–and that means discussing George Washington and Robert E Lee, not their slaves; Andrew Carnegie, not his steelworkers; and Dwight Eisenhower, not the suburban housewives of Levittown. Heroes, by definition, do what others cannot and do not do–they lift everyone up.” This is an example of the approach, I think: make a seemingly reasonable statement, and hope people don’t think too hard about it. If people thought about Schweikart’s argument, they might wonder whether it’s relevant to the rise of men like George Washington and Robert E Lee, that they stood on the backs of slaves? They might wonder what Schweikart means, when he says these men do things that others cannot do? And when he says, “they lift everyone up,” isn’t he saying that the slaves aren’t part of “everyone?” Can a legitimate historian get away with statements like that, in this day and age? I’ll probably have a lot more to say about this, as I listen to the 48 Liberal lies Schweikart is going to debunk. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-05-20T15:08:40-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b72b2bc85d20c9ce6398b13d217fe8a1-172.html#unique-entry-id-172http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b72b2bc85d20c9ce6398b13d217fe8a1-172.html#unique-entry-id-172dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-05-18T08:04:33-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36f3936e552962246e10223b87abf11e-171.html#unique-entry-id-171http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36f3936e552962246e10223b87abf11e-171.html#unique-entry-id-171dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-05-14T09:39:34-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/667d9dd5ffdb2bab76cc851fd2cdbc57-170.html#unique-entry-id-170http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/667d9dd5ffdb2bab76cc851fd2cdbc57-170.html#unique-entry-id-170dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-05-13T12:29:35-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3f935cd8060663ee88d40a3f35bedeab-169.html#unique-entry-id-169http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3f935cd8060663ee88d40a3f35bedeab-169.html#unique-entry-id-169dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-05-11T14:25:21-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/94a6696800c08577e4f41a747b4bce67-168.html#unique-entry-id-168http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/94a6696800c08577e4f41a747b4bce67-168.html#unique-entry-id-168I know, this was published in 2004, so why am I only getting to it now? ...The basic question behind What’s the Matter with Kansas, that frames the introduction, is this liberal astonishment: how can anyone who’s ever worked for someone else vote Republican? But the problem with the liberals is, they can ask a question like this with a straight face. To explain this situation, Frank says, maybe they were pushed by Bill Clinton and his patently insincere concern and his contempt for anyone who was not Ivy League. I think he’s onto something here, but again, this is still just the rhetorical veneer. Maybe regular people see through a lot of the BS and posturing, and know these guys are doing nothing for them in Washington. So the key, Frank says, is that cultural anger is marshalled by the Repubs, to achieve economic ends. That basically, modern ultra-conservatism is a propaganda move on the part of corporations and their cronies in government, to distract their constituents from the real issues, and wave the red sheet in front of the bull. These hot-button issues have little or nothing to do with the interests and goals of the corporations — but then again, they have little or nothing to do with the economic needs or interests of the people, either. ...Will HCR be able to show that the Repubs have ever been about anything else? When Richard John discussed the telegraph monopolists and their opponents, he said Tammany Hall used the anti-monopoly issue as a way of mobilizing people and gaining supporters, even though the politicians really were only interested in power — and that people realized this. Puck Magazine published editorial cartoons with regular folks standing between the Tammany politicos and the spider of Jay Gould’s monopoly, with nowhere to turn. So how widespread was this understanding that the “issues” of the day were merely opportunities for politicians to differentiate themselves from each other? “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.” ...So his thesis about class is that the Repubs have redefined it, so that class is not based on economic or even power differences, but on “authenticity.” John Kerry’s wealth makes him an elitist because he’s a snob, and George W. ... It’s pathetic that people are taken in by this, but equally sad that anyone would attempt to defend John Kerry. ...All claims from the right, Frank says, arise from a sense (or at least a pose) of victimhood. Okay, but don’t all claims in American politics arise from a sense of victimhood? ... Are all these political fights really about seeing who gets to wear the label of the “true victims of America?” One of the points of these cultural battles, Frank says, is that they can never be won. The leaders have chosen causes that are lost, because they’re the gift that keeps on giving. ... This is the lesson of the 2008 election — “Hope” and “Change” will hurt Obama in the long run. ... After all, the politicians who fail to deliver can be cast aside and replaced by others. This isn’t a program for the benefit of politicians, it’s a program for the corporations. Frank suggests comparing the rhetoric of the rabid conservatives with 1930s communist writer Mike Gold’s language, which might be fun to do at some point. The difference, he suggests, is that once you drain the economics out of these arguments, you have very little explanatory power left. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-03-23T11:28:52-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7fea009ceb9c1726e8f513d1795235a8-167.html#unique-entry-id-167http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7fea009ceb9c1726e8f513d1795235a8-167.html#unique-entry-id-167dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-03-17T05:21:20-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c3d6196c573f1ff7502809ae55c673b2-166.html#unique-entry-id-166http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c3d6196c573f1ff7502809ae55c673b2-166.html#unique-entry-id-166dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-03-02T10:04:03-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5b352f05d463e8a202457db0c5eff490-165.html#unique-entry-id-165http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5b352f05d463e8a202457db0c5eff490-165.html#unique-entry-id-165Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998 “Nomads and pastoralists…hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states,” says Scott. (1998, 1) Premodern states, Scott continues, had great difficulty “seeing” their people, and this interfered with “the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.” (2) Efforts to render populations more “legible” included “processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the invention of freehold tenure…language and legal discourse.” These “simplification” practices of early modern states, Scott says, paved the way for “huge development fiascoes” of the modern era like China’s Great Leap Forward. (which killed at least 45 million people, 3) These modern-day state disasters, Scott says, rest on four elements: the administrative ordering of nature and society, a high-modernist ideology that puts undue confidence in technicians’ ability to reorganize the world through top-down planning, an authoritarian state that can enforce the technicians’ plans, and a prostrate population that cannot resist these plans. ...“Designed or planned social order,” Scott reminds us, “is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. ... (6) This is such a rich analogy—I can think of a dozen ways to use it in domestic history. ...To support his point, Scott describes early modern forests, modern city-builders, Bolsheviks, African villages, and modern agriculture. Comparing modern monoculture to shifting and polycultural farming styles, Scott calls attention to the difference between experimental results and real-world results. He describes the “Blind Spots,” “Weak Peripheral Vision,” and “Shortsightedness” of industrial agriculture, as well as the fact that “Some Yields are More Equal than Others.” ...(309) Interestingly, Scott says that many early technocrats, including Frederick Taylor, were aware that “under scientific management…the managers assume…the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen…” (Taylor, quoted in Marglin, Dominating Knowledge, 336) The objective, from the manager’s perspective, is to eliminate the possibility of a work-to-rule strike by owning all the knowledge. ...The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, 2009 In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott continues this story, from the perspective of the “runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.” (2009, ix) “Civilizational discourses,” Scott points out, “never entertain the possibility of people voluntarily going over to the barbarians,” and often even have difficulty understanding why the outsiders resist their civilizing influences. ...The region Scott looks at in this book is called the Zomia, which is a new name for all the territory above 300 meters in southeast Asia. It covers 2.5 million square kilometers and includes about 100 million people from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. The common feature of all these people is that they are relatively out-of-reach of the nation-states that nominally include them in their territories. And that the authorities of these nation-states consider them upland barbarians. ...In fact, they are better understood as post-irrigated rice, postsedentary, postsubject, and perhaps even postliterate. They represent, in the longue durée, a reactive and purposeful statelessness of peoples who have adapted to a world of states while remaining outside their firm grasp.” (337) This is really interesting to me, in the context of people who choose to live far from the centers of power, in modern America. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-02-15T14:53:18-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3597389e464d74319672ce42a9ead112-164.html#unique-entry-id-164http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3597389e464d74319672ce42a9ead112-164.html#unique-entry-id-164dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-02-17T12:49:16-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2ea9ea29b4a03d8d26886cba0973d51f-163.html#unique-entry-id-163http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2ea9ea29b4a03d8d26886cba0973d51f-163.html#unique-entry-id-163dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-02-10T14:17:51-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ca14dd69cda6874f7e204cbf57202ca5-162.html#unique-entry-id-162http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ca14dd69cda6874f7e204cbf57202ca5-162.html#unique-entry-id-162dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-31T14:05:10-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/76e8eb57eca81c23058518546ba1350b-161.html#unique-entry-id-161http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/76e8eb57eca81c23058518546ba1350b-161.html#unique-entry-id-161Walter LaFeber The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 1963 Interesting, given LaFeber’s reputation as a critic of American Empire, that he refaces this book by saying “I have been profoundly impressed with the statesmen of these decades…I found both the policymakers and the businessmen of this era to be responsible, conscientious men who accepted the economic and social realities of their day, understood domestic and foreign problems, debated issues vigorously, and especially were unafraid to strike out on new and uncharted paths in order to create what they sincerely hoped would be a better nation and a better world.” (ix) This sincere appreciation on LaFeber’s part for the people whose decisions he will be criticizing so thoroughly, suggests his story is much more subtle than the standard good guys vs. bad guys approach taken in many texts (especially by critics of the establishment). Similarly, LaFeber begins his first chapter by debunking the myth of antebellum isolation. “Between 1850 and 1873,” he says, “despite an almost nonexistent export trade during the Civil War, exports averaged $274,000,000 annually; the yearly average during the 1838-1849 period had been only $116,000,000.” (1-2) So while it is true, LaFeber admits, that “until the 1890’s the vast Atlantic sheltered America from many European problems,” the fact that we were not drawn into European wars does not mean that many Americans (especially businessmen and financiers) were not intimately connected with the continent. These connections had important implications in politics and diplomacy, as the twentieth century began. LaFeber says William Henry Seward “deserves to be remembered as the greatest Secretary of State in American history after his beloved Adams. This is so partially because of his astute diplomacy, which kept European powers out of the Civil War, but also because his vision of empire dominated American policy for the next century.” (25) “Grant, Hamilton Fish, William M. Evarts, James G. Blaine, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, and Thomas F. Bayard assume secondary roles,” LaFeber says. (24) He notes also that Seward suggested “Mexico City was an excellent site for the future capital of the American empire.” (28) Seward also predicted that “Russia and the United States may remain good friends until, each having made a circuit of half the globe in opposite directions, they meet and greet each other in the region where civilization first began.” (30) LaFeber’s point is, that American empire was seen by everyone as an inevitable result of the economic changes of the late nineteenth century. There was very little pressure to “occupy every piece of available land in the Pacific,” but there was also a general understanding that “Latin -American and Asian markets were vitally important to “the expansive American industrial complex.” (416) The machine, late-nineteenth century policy-makers seem to have realized, bedded to be constantly fed with new markets. The growth economy had begun. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-02-07T13:52:08-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a58b723f6a94824974f282cc108d1a0c-160.html#unique-entry-id-160http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a58b723f6a94824974f282cc108d1a0c-160.html#unique-entry-id-160Vaclav Smil Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production 2001 Smil identifies the nitrogen-fixing technology of the Haber-Bosch process (invented by Fritz Haber and brought up to commercial scale by Carl Bosch) as the single most important invention of the modern age. Without nitrogen fertilizers provided by the process, he says, the world population would not have been able to grow from the roughly 1.6 billion level of 1900 to the current 6 billion. Only in the postscript does Smil mention that Haber also oversaw the German Chemical Warfare Service. Ten days after Haber supervised the first German gas attack at Ypres (4-22-1915), his wife Clara shot herself through the heart with his army revolver. A scientist herself, she left behind not only Haber but their thirteen year old son, Hermann. “By the war’s end,” Smil says, the casualties of gas warfare amounted to about 1.3 million.” (227) Although it might be going a little too far to place the nitrogen-fixation process alongside the invention of chlorine gas; from a planetary perspective, the resulting population bomb has been problematic, to say the least. And there is a certain similarity in the instrumentality involved, it seems to me. I can’t help wondering what the history of the 20th and 21st centuries would have looked like, without Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation… ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-02-07T11:23:02-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8159828bf5162d49dc701bac246c2ff2-159.html#unique-entry-id-159http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8159828bf5162d49dc701bac246c2ff2-159.html#unique-entry-id-159Kenneth Pomeranz The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy 2000 Pomeranz de-centers Europe, in part by emphasizing “reciprocal comparisons between parts of Europe and parts of China, India and so on that seem…to have been similarly positioned within their continental worlds.” (10) The use of nations as the basis of analysis makes little sense, he suggests, when China was as large and populous as Europe, and the Yangzi Delta was equivalent in many ways to England. (13) “Our perception of an interacting system from which one part benefited more than others,” Pomeranz says, “does not in itself justify calling that part the ‘center’ and assuming that it is the unshaped shaper of everything else. We will see, instead, vectors of influence moving in various directions.” (10) Pomeranz suggests that the timely discovery of America by Europeans provided them an opportunity to avoid moving onto the type of labor-intensive, land-scarce economic path taken by India and China. The discovery of coal was the other major element of the divergence, although in a very interesting aside, Pomeranz calls attention to the influence of the addictive New World stimulants sugar, tobacco, cocoa, and coffee, which along with tea became early mainstays of a mass consumer market. (281) Overall, he concludes that “forces outside the market and conjunctures beyond Europe deserve a central place in explaining why western Europe’s otherwise largely unexceptional core achieved unique breakthroughs and wound up as the privileged center of the nineteenth century’s new world economy.” (297) ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-02-05T20:36:31-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0b1a49a6bf74ab6cbdd9b6cbb54f2c0c-158.html#unique-entry-id-158http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0b1a49a6bf74ab6cbdd9b6cbb54f2c0c-158.html#unique-entry-id-158dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-27T10:45:10-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/228c3854957b3cd8d219004d83a7611e-157.html#unique-entry-id-157http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/228c3854957b3cd8d219004d83a7611e-157.html#unique-entry-id-157dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-22T15:15:10-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a305eb48541a6822afd50132722b8623-156.html#unique-entry-id-156http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a305eb48541a6822afd50132722b8623-156.html#unique-entry-id-156dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-21T10:42:29-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/26f9f8e66340cf4ced13fcc870f85923-155.html#unique-entry-id-155http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/26f9f8e66340cf4ced13fcc870f85923-155.html#unique-entry-id-155http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0978a2e22da362f0d7d2de7a34484d54-154.html#unique-entry-id-154http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9fa214f37d341343f5455a589f122160-153.html#unique-entry-id-153dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-17T15:12:43-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f460d3259afe10ecc9249e47515c1fb8-152.html#unique-entry-id-152http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f460d3259afe10ecc9249e47515c1fb8-152.html#unique-entry-id-152dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-13T15:50:48-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7b0f062f5341003030b5474bfacc24a8-151.html#unique-entry-id-151http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7b0f062f5341003030b5474bfacc24a8-151.html#unique-entry-id-151http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/42e17e814f16dc32836f1fc45affae39-150.html#unique-entry-id-150Theodore Steinberg Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England 1991 This was Steinberg’s dissertation; his advisors were David Fischer, Morton Horwitz, and Donald Worster. Steinberg’s thesis is that “industrial capitalism is not only and economic system, but a system of ecological relations as well.” (11) This idea goes beyond the obvious (but important) recognition that environment constrains social and economic choices, towards a more subtle discussion of how “the natural world came to represent new sources of energy and raw materials…perceived more and more as a set of inputs.” Steinberg mentions Cronon and Merchant in this context, but the thrust of his argument develops Horwitz’s theme of “an instrumental conception” of both resources and “law that sanctioned the maximization of economic growth.” (16) A critical issue in Horwitz, which Steinberg picks up, is that this sneaky institutionalization of common law and the attitudes toward ownership and the public and private sectors that spring from it has distributional consequences. So the point is not only that over time it became “commonly assumed, even expected, that water should be tapped, controlled, and dominated in the name of progress,” but that the rewards of this control legitimately belong to the few, to the exclusion of the many. Steinberg’s narrative of the beginning of textile milling in Massachusetts calls attention not only to the contested nature of all the changes the mills tried to make to the flow and control of rivers like the Charles, but also to how much these changes owed not to free competition in the market, but to government interference through the courts. Despite the regular complaints of area farmers, by 1795 people in the Charles valley believed “their natural rights stolen from them, and their best property at the mercy of one or two Millers, still the luck favorites & likely to remain, so long as the rage for Factory at every place, whether others sink or swim, continues the rage of Government.” (37) Along the way, Steinberg’s story brushes up against several interesting people (Nathaniel Ames, Robert Owen, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens), whose personal reactions to what they saw in the Charles and Merrimack valleys would have added an interesting dimension to the account. Steinberg continues the story with accounts of the Boston Associates’ campaign to control Lake Winnepissiogee, the destruction of fisheries and the capitalists’ attempt to reintroduce and manage what was formerly a common good, and the problem of industrial and urban pollution in the rivers controlled by the industrialists. Each of these topics have been expanded by others, along the lines Steinberg suggests. The only flaw in the book, for me, is the Thoreau-ian wrapper Steinberg adds at the beginning and end. Clearly Thoreau would have been horrified by what he saw, but I don’t think Steinberg makes a strong case that Thoreau represents any type of viable alternative. At the end, Steinberg admits that “greater command over…nature in general, had its positive points.” But, he concludes, “this aggressive, manipulative posture toward the natural world [is] a problem that penetrates to the core of modern American culture.” (271) This conclusion steps beyond the scope of the book, and although Steinberg may have felt that it was implied by his approach, it is not a natural end to the story and requires either a leap of faith or a prior agreement and understanding that makes the book’s very valuable argument irrelevant. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-11T15:08:12-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e3e4c70b0f78d3538f69ac37081ef373-149.html#unique-entry-id-149http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e3e4c70b0f78d3538f69ac37081ef373-149.html#unique-entry-id-149John Thompson Closing the Frontier: Radical Response in Oklahoma, 1889-1923 1986 Thompson was apparently motivated to write this history of his home state by the discovery that riots his grandmother remembered from her youth “did not coincide with the history textbooks.” (xii) Thompson begins with Webb’s Great Frontier, which he says was “inextricably bound” with corporate capitalism. (3) Sweeping Braudel, Wallerstein, Turner, Billington, Gates, and Bogue into the net as elaborators (albeit sometimes unconsciously) of the Great Frontier thesis, Thompson claims the speed of development in search of quick profits was the key to disaster in Oklahoma, both in the arid west and the more industrial east. Thompson’s claim is interesting, because he extends it beyond simple land speculation and oil development. Competition among speculators and developers, he says, “prompted bribery and fraud and helped corrupt the political and judicial institutions of new societies.” (5) It is not the freeholder or small-time bandit who really benefited from the lawlessness that lasted until statehood in 1907, Thompson says, but large-scale capitalists from the east. They were able to operate without checks during the territorial stage, and once they seized control of state government, they institutionalized their dominance. The result has been hidden by Dust Bowl histories, which blame Oklahoma’s 440,000 migrant refugees on ecological disaster. Thompson says “Despite the common misconception that Oklahomans were ‘dusted out and tractored out,’ an estimated 97 percent of the net population loss occurred in the eastern half of the state, which was not crippled by dust and underwent almost no farm mechanization. These migrants were instead dislocated by landlords, merchants, and bankers.” (218) Populism, Socialism, and Neopopulism were much more prevalent, and developed to a much higher degree of sophistication in Oklahoma, Thompson says, due to the confluence of pioneer values of “individualism, cooperation, and democracy,” and the abuses heaped on the Oklahoma poor by capitalists. (8) “In 1904, Standard Oil controlled 84 percent of the nation’s oil production,” and much of that oil came from its Oklahoma subsidiary, Prairie Oil and Gas. (64) Possibly the bigger point, which is not evident here because there is no antebellum counterpoint, is that this is the end of the frontier period, and the conditions are very much different from those encountered by migrants at the beginning a century earlier. Again (I keep coming back to this), I think the big change is in capital and credit consolidation under Lincoln. “From 1925 to 1930 the driest county in the state averaged more than nineteen inches of rain a year.” (217) This goes a long way to explaining why credulous people from elsewhere believed they could make a go there. It doesn’t explain why the rest of Oklahoma society let it happen, though. Thompson says the downfall of the socialists in Oklahoma was the Russian revolution: “The flexibility that had been the strength of the old Socialist party was replaced by the dogmatism of the new Communist party.” (221) This is an interesting idea in the larger national context, but I’m not sure it’s a satisfying answer locally. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-08T09:39:22-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/82262104024f22c5bea900ec6584da2d-148.html#unique-entry-id-148http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/82262104024f22c5bea900ec6584da2d-148.html#unique-entry-id-148dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-10T19:49:39-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e22f612adeeaa9563408d2c23967f959-147.html#unique-entry-id-147http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e22f612adeeaa9563408d2c23967f959-147.html#unique-entry-id-147Donald Worster Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the american West 1985 Worster draws heavily on Wittfogel’s idea of the hydraulic society, to argue that despite American myth, the western states really grew as a result of “authority and restraint, of class and exploitation, and ultimately of imperial power.” (4) In the process of harnessing nature in the form of water, to raise cities and farmlands where local conditions would not allow them to be, Americans created in the West “a culture and society built on, and absolutely dependent on, a sharply alienating, intensely managerial relationship with nature.” (5) This culture “was increasingly a coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise.” (7) But the public or private nature of ownership isn’t the main issue, because even in Wittfogel’s ancient examples (Egypt, China) a society that centralizes to conquer nature finds itself organized around “the qualities of concentrated wealth, technical virtuosity, discipline, hard work, popular acquiescence, a feeling of resignation and necessity…[not] what Thoreau conceived as freedom.” This organizing thought of Rivers is both its best and worst feature. Worster points the reader toward important questions about the nature of societies that live far from a natural equilibrium with their environments — and the majority of 21st century communities increasingly fit that mold. The west may have been an early example, but eastern cities like New York, Detroit, and Miami live just as far from nature as does Los Angeles. Even with respect to water, as illustrated by the 1930s construction of the Quabbin reservoir, to supply Boston’s taps. But the best solution Worster offers to the region’s overpopulation and political centralization is “redesigning the West as a network of more or less discrete, self-contained watershed settlements” where people could live a quieter, less acquisitive lifestyle. (333) So, while Worster provides a valuable introduction to the idea that “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument,” the task of figuring out what to do about that (or even what history might suggest) falls to others. (Quoting C. S. Lewis, 50) ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-10T19:42:26-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/01734f4855b06487dc7f69f9d4f6de42-146.html#unique-entry-id-146http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/01734f4855b06487dc7f69f9d4f6de42-146.html#unique-entry-id-146dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-10T19:40:28-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6fe77a9d237864978f65e5c99560a7f5-145.html#unique-entry-id-145http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6fe77a9d237864978f65e5c99560a7f5-145.html#unique-entry-id-145http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1fe0b5a3bd0dfe0e9a7ceb554a3e7afd-144.html#unique-entry-id-144http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/57b28b8fa6333d9692b3c10833afc073-143.html#unique-entry-id-143dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-05T20:38:52-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36eb68738d324ee1defe3fc9a34e847b-142.html#unique-entry-id-142http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36eb68738d324ee1defe3fc9a34e847b-142.html#unique-entry-id-142http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f4d44b79fca78cb3a92ab660ce3f4433-141.html#unique-entry-id-141dan@allosso.netReading Blog2011-01-03T19:29:00-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c0f0c960ab2ec5a97d55a9e70479f9dd-140.html#unique-entry-id-140http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c0f0c960ab2ec5a97d55a9e70479f9dd-140.html#unique-entry-id-140dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-30T21:56:27-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/01d8efe62a68e6959845dea72479d726-137.html#unique-entry-id-137http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/01d8efe62a68e6959845dea72479d726-137.html#unique-entry-id-137dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-29T21:54:46-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/07401d1e92e4ee0561359dd2348056c4-136.html#unique-entry-id-136http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/07401d1e92e4ee0561359dd2348056c4-136.html#unique-entry-id-136Bray Hammond Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War 1957 This is the text that economic historians complain is the only thing most mainstream historians have ever read about banking. Hammond focuses on Andrew Jackson’s bank war and specie circular, which he blames for the Panic of 1837. The Second Bank, he says, was a prototype of central banking, which regulated credit and kept the state banks honest. Jacksonians used the rhetoric of agrarianism, Hammond says, to break up the central bank for their own political gain: “The Jacksonians were unconventional and skillful in politics. In their assault on the Bank they united five important elements, which, incongruities notwithstanding, comprised an effective combination. These were Wall Street’s jealousy of Chestnut Street, the business man’s dislike of the federal Bank’s restraint upon bank credit, the politician’s resentment at the Bank’s interference in states’ rights, popular identification of the Bank with the aristocracy of business, and the direction of agrarian antipathy away from banks in general to the federal Bank in particular.” (329) The effect of Jackson’s policies was that “it left the poor agrarian as poor as he had been before and it left the money power possessed of more money and more power than ever.” Since these were the results of the policy, shouldn’t we investigate whether the winners were in any way behind the policy? ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-28T21:52:28-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/354dd8410581d34ee434eaf139467b80-135.html#unique-entry-id-135http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/354dd8410581d34ee434eaf139467b80-135.html#unique-entry-id-135dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-28T21:52:32-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dd4ed0ce2785ec087f2044db30ce6e75-134.html#unique-entry-id-134http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dd4ed0ce2785ec087f2044db30ce6e75-134.html#unique-entry-id-134dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-24T18:13:10-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0d74479ac13f02054f0829e802ec3f1f-133.html#unique-entry-id-133http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0d74479ac13f02054f0829e802ec3f1f-133.html#unique-entry-id-133dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-24T12:50:43-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/62e359d2a846bf21ef0ffbda6f9e32eb-132.html#unique-entry-id-132http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/62e359d2a846bf21ef0ffbda6f9e32eb-132.html#unique-entry-id-132dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-23T12:16:20-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ebf4a67e81a2f151a1ae5b615a335b17-131.html#unique-entry-id-131http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ebf4a67e81a2f151a1ae5b615a335b17-131.html#unique-entry-id-131dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-22T12:45:49-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8a077a893bfa92e21565251bf32144b2-130.html#unique-entry-id-130http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8a077a893bfa92e21565251bf32144b2-130.html#unique-entry-id-130dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-20T14:00:07-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/cd4eabe9923d07d1f672cf8e099eeb31-129.html#unique-entry-id-129http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/cd4eabe9923d07d1f672cf8e099eeb31-129.html#unique-entry-id-129http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d4768a5bbd5cfd5180eade58ab2ab513-128.html#unique-entry-id-128Ian Tyrell Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970 2005 It was probably unfair of me to read this book immediately after Novick. It’s a much dryer study, with much less personal detail. Tyrell focuses mainly on the official life of the AHA, which makes this much less interesting for me. But a few things did stick out, like the “rapid rise of agricultural history, with the formation of the Agricultural History Society under AHA auspices in 1919 and a specialized journal in 1927.” (31) Tyrell connects the advancing fortunes of ag. history with a Progressive interest in country life, which seems reasonable, but probably bears repeating just because it is so obvious. Another area Tyrell calls attention to, that I should look deeper into, is the influence of book clubs on American readers. By the late 1920s, he says there were nine major American book clubs, led by the Book-of-the-Month Club (1926) and the Literary Guild (1927), “serving over 100,000 readers each by the 1930s.” (45) Tyrell also mentions the History Book Club -- it might be interesting to look at its history and the books it promoted over the years. See also, American Heritage, ed. Bruce Catton, Henry Pringle, and Mark Sullivan, whose multi-volume Our Times was said by Nevins to have “probably done more to interest people in American history than anything else written in our generation.” (49) Marquis James won the 1937 Pulitzer for a study of Andrew Jackson (I should review award lists, too), and Harpers editor Frederick Allen wrote Only Yesterday. Carl Sandburg wrote extensively on Lincoln, and newspaperman Walter Millis wrote Road to War: America, 1914-1917. Then of course, there’s Claude Bowen. Popular history has its downside, too. Yale professor Allen Johnson said “there is little point in writing history that will not be read.” (57) He edited the fifty-volume Chronicles of America series, which Publishers Weekly claimed sold “tens of thousands” in the 1920s by “intensive subscription sale.” (57) Tyrell also says Charles and Mary Beards’ Rise of American Civilization (1927) and America in Midpassage (1939) “served a generation as textbooks in colleges and high schools.” (61) I wonder how long the use of the Beards’ texts in schools continued, after they began to lose their preeminence in professional circles? ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-19T21:08:55-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a48ec05ad4df777ace65e8c2ac4e0471-127.html#unique-entry-id-127http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a48ec05ad4df777ace65e8c2ac4e0471-127.html#unique-entry-id-127dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-17T18:50:19-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e5840492a1ba24580ecc62413d2bda8b-126.html#unique-entry-id-126http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e5840492a1ba24580ecc62413d2bda8b-126.html#unique-entry-id-126dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-11T07:17:29-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/57a73a63fb68fec9f115e9a013387409-123.html#unique-entry-id-123http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/57a73a63fb68fec9f115e9a013387409-123.html#unique-entry-id-123http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/655aa3227d15b3328239dbb1cd197e32-122.html#unique-entry-id-122Stewart H. Holbrook Lost Men of American History 1947 In a short introduction, Allan Nevins says: “There is always danger that the story of the nation, at least in its briefer versions, will become conventionalized... And [Holbrook] also touches on a deeper question. The United States is a great mass democracy, where equality of opportunity is emphasized;...have we not made a little too much of the very great men, the primary figures; and too little of the serried ranks of talent and achievement just behind them, the host of men whose labors were the main element in progress?” ...In his own note to the reader, Holbrook says “I believe that men, even one man or one woman, often have had immense effect in slowing or hastening the forces that are said to make history... Many just such men and women have been slighted or wholly ignored in our history books. They are in large part the people I want to tell about.” So it begins. The book is filled with interesting material. For example, “The log cabin’s first appearance in North America was in 1638, when members of the Swedish West India Company [who knew there was such a thing!] set up a trading post and village on the shore of Delaware Bay.” (4) This is not the Scandinavians’ only appearance. Holbrook later tells the story of novelist Fredrika Bremer, who went back home to tell the Swedes about Minnesota, and Reinert Reiersen, whose 1844 book The Pathfinder for Norwegian Emigrants in the United North American States and Texas “was a classic of its genre.” (201-3) Holbrook covers a wide range of people and topics, including to my great surprise Abner Kneeland and Dr. Charles Knowlton (whose name gets by his copy editor as “Thomas” later in the book, 126-7, 312). Really interesting stuff, a lot of which could stand to be taken up by a guy like me -- some of which I’m already working on. But enough about that, for now! Holbrook was an interesting guy -- may be a subject in his own right. His “lowbrow history” certainly anticipates my ideas of about the history of regular people, for regular people. I’m happy I had the idea on my own, before I heard of Holbrook. I’m also happy he had it, because I’m looking forward to reading more and seeing where he took it. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-12-01T21:09:45-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4645caf7a5acb38b67b61140986b28a2-121.html#unique-entry-id-121http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4645caf7a5acb38b67b61140986b28a2-121.html#unique-entry-id-121http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/be144f718edc71f3e736ac73ec81d3bd-120.html#unique-entry-id-120http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5221aa6b0fcc82bfafa470de4acc2f29-119.html#unique-entry-id-119dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-11-29T17:45:49-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f329f719e1be064cf71ea83d94a67648-118.html#unique-entry-id-118http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f329f719e1be064cf71ea83d94a67648-118.html#unique-entry-id-118dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-11-29T17:45:19-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/25756e4effdd3996926f93491ab94282-117.html#unique-entry-id-117http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/25756e4effdd3996926f93491ab94282-117.html#unique-entry-id-117dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-11-21T14:52:47-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/437e297d5a4ec5085d32b287a2d76d43-116.html#unique-entry-id-116http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/437e297d5a4ec5085d32b287a2d76d43-116.html#unique-entry-id-116http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4e93882b33d05f3b5287c1288d2648bf-115.html#unique-entry-id-115http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4552968dea9b6c5e153e15ce795b5488-114.html#unique-entry-id-114Alfred W. ...The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 ...This is another one of those books that must be read. And even after 38 years, there’s a lot of good stuff in it. The thesis is summed up in the title, which has entered the language as a short-hand descriptor for the idea that “the most important changes brought about by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature,” even if not all the people who use the term agree with Crosby that the interaction of the old world and the new “has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool.” (xiv, 219) Crosby’s narrative sets the scene by comparing the old world and the new, to show the biological contrasts between them. He traces European conquest, and the diseases that spread with (and sometimes ahead of) conquistadors and settlers. Crosby then describes the (mostly plant) species that were brought from the Americas to the old world, and the (mostly animal) species the Spanish brought to the new (interestingly, he says most of the really significant species were introduced by the Spanish by 1500, long before North American settlement was begun. ... After devoting a full chapter to the controversy over the origin of syphilis, Crosby concludes with a look at how American food crops enabled population growth in both Europe and Asia (and continue to, to the present day). Some of the interesting items along the way include Crosby’s brief discussion of the possible influence of the new world on tradition and religious authority in the old. “Christian and Aristotelian” belief systems, he says, “proved too cramped to accomodate the New World...men of the Columbian generation discovered that ‘Ptolomeus, and others knewe not the halfe.’” (9) Crosby says an argument about “multiple creations” was carried on in Europe until 1859, when Darwin finally laid it to rest, “while also knocking loose a large part of the foundation of traditional Judaism and Christianity.” (14) Crosby’s discussion of the extinction event that wiped out American megafauna has probably been eclipsed by more recent scientific findings, just as his discussion of the worldwide distribution of blood-types has been overtaken by DNA analysis, but in their day they were great examples of interdisciplinary thinking. Many of the details Crosby includes are startling. Cotton Mather’s description of the 1616-17 epidemic that wiped out most of the Massachusetts Indians as a Providential clearing of the woods “of those pernicious creatures, to make room for better growth,” confirms my impression of the Puritan leader. (41) The idea that “a million Indians lived on Santo Domingo when the Europeans arrived,” and that they were reduced by 1548 to 500, is something you really have to sit with for a while and think about. (45) The “population of central Mexican dropped from about 25 million on the eve of conquest to 16.8 million a decade later.” (53) That doesn’t seem as bad, until it sinks in that it means one out of every three people was dead, in just ten years. Makes all the recent movies about plagues and human apocalypse seem like so many nightmares of a guilty white American conscience. I didn’t know that when Columbus returned, he brought “seventeen ships, 1,200 men, and seeds and cuttings for the planting of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, salad greens, grape vines, sugar cane, and fruit stones for the founding of orchards.” (67) And it never occurred to me that some new world species, like the white potato, found their way to places like New England via Europe (brought “by the Scotch-Irish...in 1718.” 66) Other interesting details: “the banana, brought from the Canaries in 1516.” (68) “Cattle...first brought to Mexico for breeding purposes in 1521.” (87) But by 1614, “the residents of Santiago [Chile] possessed 39,250 head,” (91) as well as 623,825 sheep. (94) I also didn’t know, but should have guessed after reading about De Soto’s expedition through Florida, that when Pizarro crossed the Andes into Peru in 1540, he brought over 2,000 pigs with him. (79) Somebody should write a history of the conquest that focuses on what it must have been like, moving conquistadors and their pigs through the wild Americas.]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-11-16T15:17:59-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1d8e0e8eff1862bba26d0b9cc1704056-113.html#unique-entry-id-113http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1d8e0e8eff1862bba26d0b9cc1704056-113.html#unique-entry-id-113http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1952d44f23bd7d08730b8a1de611e3ec-112.html#unique-entry-id-112http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e9797ace0a2140eac7bf36cebaa00600-111.html#unique-entry-id-111dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-11-15T13:22:59-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/193530869bdccfaeac133861a17b5df5-110.html#unique-entry-id-110http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/193530869bdccfaeac133861a17b5df5-110.html#unique-entry-id-110http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/129396b89c338d1d3d3e1b82202b5d2d-109.html#unique-entry-id-109dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-11-03T21:22:44-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9e79799b63c4b32b5c3ffec93cc73c5d-108.html#unique-entry-id-108http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9e79799b63c4b32b5c3ffec93cc73c5d-108.html#unique-entry-id-108http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/764664bb410964a4be6e1bed7a8b18f5-107.html#unique-entry-id-107http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/07fe18a691b893d59c2117d29c7b8b37-105.html#unique-entry-id-105http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2ae27b15ed11ce1e059d812ef60941d2-104.html#unique-entry-id-104http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c846e866ece3d731b9497e56f7029a1b-103.html#unique-entry-id-103Richard Hofstadter The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R. ...Introducing his subject in 1955, Hofstadter says, “Our conception of Populism and Progressivism has...been intimately bound up with the new Deal experience” (4). While he admits it would have been impossible “without the impetus given by certain social grievances,” Hofstadter prefers to separate out a more-or-less cultural spirit of progressivism, which he says was “not nearly so much the movement of any social class,” as “a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation” (5). ... Because by distinguishing a generalized, apolitical spirit of improvement called progressivism, he can cut its ties with the Populist political movement that proceeded it. And the Populist Party, in Hofstadter’s judgment, is at best anachronistic and backward-looking, and at worst a haven for racist, xenophobic kooks. But this separation leads to a paradox Hofstadter recognizes as “One of the more ironic problems confronting reformers...that the very activities they pursued in attempting to defend or restore the individualistic values they admired brought them closer to the techniques of organization they feared” (7). Hofstadter wants to separate the Populist and Progressive movements, because he “found much that was retrograde and delusive, a little that was vicious, and a good deal that was comic” in populism, and he wanted to purge those elements from progressivism (11). Populism leads, he says, to “the cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time,” and he wants progressivism to lead somewhere purer, nobler, and more useful in the present day (15). The problem is, Hofstadter’s definitions and the bundles of ideas he calls liberalism and conservatism are presentist (in 1955), and his concerns are very much those of his own day. “The United States,” he famously begins Chapter One, “was born in the country and has moved to the city” (23). It’s a mistake, then, to project contemporary, urban ideas back onto the radical farmers of the Gilded Age. The “continued coexistence of reformism and reaction” and the contradiction of “liberal totalitarianism” might look substantially different, if viewed from a 19th century, rural point of view (20). And on some level, Hofstadter is clearly aware of this. He reminds us that “in origin the agrarian myth was not a popular but a literary idea, a preoccupation of the upper classes” (25). Hofstadter concludes too readily, I think, that farmers took on the Jeffersonian agrarian myth -- which he admits was a political device, “the basis of a strategy of continental development” (29). That this led to a political rhetoric of “producers,” and later of “an innocent and victimized populace” does not prove that this was the way most rural people really thought of themselves and their world (35). I think Hofstadter loses sight of the “most characteristic thinking” of the “ordinary culture” he wanted to find (6). There are lots of great details in the book, that I’d like to learn more about. I didn’t know that “In 1914, Canadian officials estimated that 925,000 Americans had moved...to the lands of Alberta and Saskatchewan” (53). Didn’t know that Ignatius Donnelly’s book Caesar’s Column was one of the most widely read books of the 1890s (67). These are both interesting facts, and I think they both complicate Hofstadter’s claim that because of the agrarian myth, the “utopia of the Populists was in the past,” and country people really wanted to “restore the conditions prevailing before the development of industrialism and the commercialization of agriculture” (62). I guess the interpretation hangs on which conditions they wanted to reverse. When Hofstadter calls attention to Populists‘ use of the Jacksonian slogan “Equal Rights for All, Special Privileges for None,” I think he hits the nail on the head, and simultaneously undermines his argument. Maybe the core of the issue is an even earlier misinterpretation by John Hicks, who characterized populism as “the last phase of a long and...losing struggle...to save agricultural America from the devouring jaws of industrial America” (quoting The Populist Revolt, 237, 94). What if the populists weren’t objecting so much to the changes that were happening in modernizing America (as Postel says), but to who benefited from them, and how power was being misused to achieve those results. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-10-27T18:02:05-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ba226e55ef5ac8d22f874bc72e56ec2f-102.html#unique-entry-id-102http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ba226e55ef5ac8d22f874bc72e56ec2f-102.html#unique-entry-id-102http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b3cb9e92b184586b2f80fb92a163a5e2-101.html#unique-entry-id-101dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-10-27T14:26:33-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/424f46175346f08ea792f3dcc114a75a-100.html#unique-entry-id-100http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/424f46175346f08ea792f3dcc114a75a-100.html#unique-entry-id-100http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/157451b3d242543b0c4944fb9027e239-99.html#unique-entry-id-99Howard R. Lamar The Trader on the American Frontier: Myth’s Victim 1977 In this short book (53 pages), Lamar challenges not only the American stereotype of frontier traders as “despicable characters cavorting with Indians,” but the east-to-west determinism of the Turner thesis. (16) There is a “trader’s point of view” that we know little about; “indeed, a trader’s world that lasted from 1600 to 1850” in the west. “In re-examining the main determinants of frontier history,” Lamar says, “we have neglected a dual tradition of trade and mercantile capitalism by overstressing the mythic figures of explorers, pioneers, and settlers.” (17) One of the elements that Lamar finds in native/native and native/white trade from very early, possibly pre-Columbian times is trade in human captives. Lamar contrasts this to familiar Southern slavery, suggesting it was more like ancient European slavery, where “captives were incorporated into households and often became a part of the tribe or nation that had captured them.” (19) A more interesting point, for me, is Lamar’s claim that “the Plains tribes traded with whites from 1700 to 1850 without a notable deterioration of their culture and strength except by disease after the smallpox epidemics of 1837.” (21) So rather than the west we’ve associated since Turner with “anarchic freedom, virginity, and democracy,” Lamar shows us a west filled with widespread, elaborate trade networks, and even some bondage. (26) We should make maps, Lamar suggests, that show “prehistoric Indian trade centers and routes, and then depict the Spanish, the French, the British, and the American ones.” (28) “The most successful trading post in the history of the United States,” he says, was St. Louis (1764), “located almost on the site of one of the most elaborate and densely populated prehistoric Indian trading centers in the continental United States: Cahokia Mound.” (30) And we should understand, Lamar says, the bicultural, multi-generational, familial nature of the North American fur trade. Stretching from Canada to Mexico, west of settled America, this forgotten phase of history lasted nearly twice as long as the more familiar period that followed it. There are probably some great stories in it, in addition to the opportunity to see different relationships among places and people that cast doubt on the inevitability of the outcome. One of the people it would be fun to look into someday is Charles A. Siringo, “Cowboy Detective,” who denounced his employer in a pamphlet called Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism, 1915. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-10-14T13:24:49-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0f2cd37d39ce16f841df15be04fc5601-98.html#unique-entry-id-98http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0f2cd37d39ce16f841df15be04fc5601-98.html#unique-entry-id-98http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f81f6765013eff51a2c9b786c871b1fa-97.html#unique-entry-id-97http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/892013bd0a36469359cda72693bd5834-96.html#unique-entry-id-96http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f79cbb133e35f7dd577d33c7938d6a0e-95.html#unique-entry-id-95http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/181b8b4f35a2fe9eafdca38e9e721983-94.html#unique-entry-id-94http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b379527ebbe49d60fe9c1c0402e4b570-93.html#unique-entry-id-93dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-09-30T20:49:00-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c71d7223cf9f315e4b6d73aa227e14de-92.html#unique-entry-id-92http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c71d7223cf9f315e4b6d73aa227e14de-92.html#unique-entry-id-92Alan Trachtenberg The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age ...About equal parts polemic and accessible undergraduate summary of the Gilded Age. Trachtenberg begins with Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s observation that “We have no word to express government by monied corporations.” (3) His claim is that the “deepest changes” and the “deepest resistances” to “these decades of swift and thorough industrialization and urbanization lay at the level of culture, difficult for contemporaries to recognize, and baffling for historians.” (7) The book is organized thematically, as a “dialectic between mind and world, culture and society.” (8) Like other “cultural” books on my reading list (The Country and the City, Virgin Land, The Machine in the Garden), Trachtenberg’s account left me wondering exactly who he was talking about. Along the way he mentions a wide variety of titles that are probably some of the key windows into the contemporary culture. I found myself wanting to know just how popular they were. Who read these books, and what other books were they reading at the same time (or instead of these)? Texts to check out: Alger, Ragged Dick, 1867 Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1867 Twain, Roughing It, 1871 Gilpin, The Mission of the North American People, 1873 George, Progress and Poverty, 1883 Beard, American Nervousness, 1884 ...Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, 1899 Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 1889 ...Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier” 1893 Wyckoff, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality: The West, 1899 Wister, The Virginian, 1902 Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 1911 So I thought it might be a good idea at some point to find a list of American bestsellers, by year, for the entire nineteenth century -- if such a thing exists. I was also reminded -- I’m not completely sure why -- to look again at the Arts and Crafts movement, as a cultural response to this modernity, back towards an older (or forward towards a new) simpler agrarianism. Should probably look at Lovett again sometime soon. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-09-29T20:44:36-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/23a161b99f79cf0bf980634b68eb1225-91.html#unique-entry-id-91http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/23a161b99f79cf0bf980634b68eb1225-91.html#unique-entry-id-91http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6d06e487c7114f6cb329f2b362fd6633-90.html#unique-entry-id-90http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1821f09e9f8da22b6f04ee7504a09ac4-89.html#unique-entry-id-89dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-09-11T16:07:13-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e9cd96e5f2592f04e743659db236e9ba-88.html#unique-entry-id-88http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e9cd96e5f2592f04e743659db236e9ba-88.html#unique-entry-id-88http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/05ef9ad7881976267c4b29231c5f0aca-87.html#unique-entry-id-87http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ccc3504b7194db60537bea7fbdf9c56d-86.html#unique-entry-id-86http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dc78fc399667ae2639ce43c68b062c42-85.html#unique-entry-id-85http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e4b10f840dd85f1150e625fc0e07ae5d-84.html#unique-entry-id-84dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-09-01T11:06:07-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/13d2a838717f5d5056228a60864d375e-83.html#unique-entry-id-83http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/13d2a838717f5d5056228a60864d375e-83.html#unique-entry-id-83http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/bf230ee9c66316be2858ee07268fc5b1-82.html#unique-entry-id-82dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-08-23T15:01:38-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6a277523a3a8bccb84bcb004f0148af5-81.html#unique-entry-id-81http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6a277523a3a8bccb84bcb004f0148af5-81.html#unique-entry-id-81Paul L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War, 1987. Huston examines the economic events leading up to the Crisis in a very cursory fashion, then spends a fair amount of time discussing political and press reaction to it. This leads him to some conclusions about the role of the Crisis in foregrounding some economic issues in the sectional debate that led to the Civil War, although Huston is quick to qualify these claims and place them in a generalized “blame-everything-on-slavery” context. Interestingly, he misses the point that Republicans may have used this blaming technique as a way not only of focusing attention on issues they wanted to address, but as a way of diverting attention away from issues they wanted to ignore. The Lynn strikes, for example, were recast (by Greeley and others) as an opportunity for western expansion that (darn those southerners!) was imperiled by expansion of the slave southwest. Republican “labor policy,” the idea that low wages were due to the “degradation of labor,” diverted attention to the specific abuses of (rich Republican) capitalists, as well as to systemic problems caused by the growth of corporate (as opposed to small-producer) capitalism. The irony is, early Republicans had warned of this, but had been pushed to the sidelines. Huston’s conclusion is that "Economic issues did not have to play a role in the election of 1860. By their own intransigence,” he says, “Democrats allowed Republicans to take advantage of the economic questions that the Panic had reinvigorated." (266) Did they? Or does his story suggest that these economic policies were not hard-wired into either party's DNA, but were arrived at contingently and maybe a little opportunistically? One thing that does come out clearly, is the sectional nature of the Panic of 1857. It had a much less lasting impact on the South and the Northeast than it did on the West. This is interesting, for my work. Also, the really clear causal role of wheat exports on the Crisis, and the impact of the Crimean War on overproduction and then collapse in the West, is helpful. I wonder how the rebound in grain shipments to Europe ("in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1859, the United States exported 3,002,000 bushels of wheat; in fiscal year 1860 the total was 4,155,000; but in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1861, the amount grew to 31,238,000." 214) effected Western politics and the 1860 elections? ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-08-22T18:24:21-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1287a94a01fb3ed95e5cb30ece7fd400-80.html#unique-entry-id-80http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1287a94a01fb3ed95e5cb30ece7fd400-80.html#unique-entry-id-80dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-08-18T13:02:13-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5396ba970bb8323097f0552015e660b7-79.html#unique-entry-id-79http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5396ba970bb8323097f0552015e660b7-79.html#unique-entry-id-79dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-08-18T10:49:26-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/97759815a1bb5be2f4fb42eadadd3d32-78.html#unique-entry-id-78http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/97759815a1bb5be2f4fb42eadadd3d32-78.html#unique-entry-id-78dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-07-09T17:23:30-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3f8cc0423dabe9c350001c8fc078235b-77.html#unique-entry-id-77http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3f8cc0423dabe9c350001c8fc078235b-77.html#unique-entry-id-77dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-07-10T17:22:08-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/afd8e2ca39accbe2419cf9cc6266fccd-76.html#unique-entry-id-76http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/afd8e2ca39accbe2419cf9cc6266fccd-76.html#unique-entry-id-76dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-07-11T17:20:23-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1996af0af1a5105dd3e290fa370938af-75.html#unique-entry-id-75http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1996af0af1a5105dd3e290fa370938af-75.html#unique-entry-id-75Glenn Porter and Harold C. Livesay Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing 1971 Their thesis is that “Changes in distribution played at least as important a role in the story of our economic past as did changes in production.” (1) No one who’s studied the history of transportation would think this point needed to be made again -- but apparently the shelves of business historians are “groaning with the weight of volumes dealing with...manufactured goods.” This is interesting, although of limited use to me, because they specifically exclude ag. products from their study. Even so, their finding that “the all-purpose merchant...was the key man in the American economy in 1815...the channel through which agricultural products flowed to market, and he supplied manufactured goods and imported raw materials to city craftsmen and country storekeepers.” (15-16) And, for my purposes, he supplied country manufactures to the urban and international markets. They briefly mention drug jobbers, who “depended on extensive trade with the interior to provide a wide market area with a sufficient volume of trade to insure success.” (29) These jobbers began as general merchants, in Porter and Livesay’s model, and then specialized in response to increasing volumes and competitive pressures. The jobber “had to maintain a large inventory of goods...[and] be prepared to ship goods in small lots on short notice” and extend credit to their rural retailers. “Storekeepers...relied on their suppliers to act as bankers and urban agents for them.” (29) And, because the majority of drugs initially came from England, drug jobbers usually had extensive foreign connections. Porter and Livesay say merchants were much more successful than manufacturers in obtaining bank credit in the early nineteenth century, because “merchants usually were the banks. An analysis of the directors and officers of the banks of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in 1840, 1850, and 1860 reveals that more than two-thirds of the officials were or had been merchants.” (72) This was probably even more the rule in smaller communities, where merchants would have been the main investors as well as the main customers of local banks. The merchant’s value as a financial expert declined during and after the Civil War,” the authors say. The proliferation of greenbacks allowed a “switch from credit to cash [that] virtually eliminated the merchant’s role as credit consultant and guarantor of payment.” (129) “The financing of transactions became the province of specialized agencies that evolved from private banks and brokerage houses... In 1850 it would have been difficult to find a producer not dependent on his distributors for capital; sixty years later one declared, ‘the manufacturer who needs the jobber as a commercial banker is a weak manufacturer.’” (129-30) I think the point they miss, is that there wasn’t a hard border between manufacturing and merchandizing. Like the brothers whose papers I’ve been reading, many of these early manufacturers were also merchants...and bankers.]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-07-12T17:17:56-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d81e265b75cccca910ceadc21f52e979-74.html#unique-entry-id-74http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d81e265b75cccca910ceadc21f52e979-74.html#unique-entry-id-74dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-07-13T16:13:59-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/25919f7bbfe366caf99743a8ee268971-73.html#unique-entry-id-73http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/25919f7bbfe366caf99743a8ee268971-73.html#unique-entry-id-73Rowena Olegario A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business 2006 “In a circular dated 1858, the Mercantile Agency...estimated that 157,394 village and country stores owed an average of $14,500 each to city jobbers, an aggregate value of nearly $2.3 billion. The amount of trade done on credit could be several times the capital resources of a business.” (26) “The conventional wisdom found its way into Walden (1854) when, criticizing the heavy mortgages under which most farmers labored, Thoreau declared that ‘what has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers.’” (37) The Mercantile Agency “relied on a network of ‘correspondents,’ including sheriffs, merchants, postmasters, and bank cashiers for its information. Attorneys, however, made up the bulk...” (49) “As capitalist values spread in the United States and more people became drawn into the credit economy, outward appearance, or ‘reputation,’ took on extraordinary significance. So, too, did the anxiety that appearances could be manipulated: ‘Reputation, rather than character--to seem, rather than to be,’ fumed the Daily Illinois State Journal in 1856, ‘has become the ultimate aim of too many in all departments of business and professional life.’” (80) ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-07-13T17:12:17-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c29d4d7f557b360513e14ddcdfb293a0-72.html#unique-entry-id-72http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c29d4d7f557b360513e14ddcdfb293a0-72.html#unique-entry-id-72http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7dbd00f2bf0fd581e9ae23a21f21580d-71.html#unique-entry-id-71dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-07-06T15:53:31-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/35bb2d212e0a0128ad6a18c1b7f378ab-70.html#unique-entry-id-70http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/35bb2d212e0a0128ad6a18c1b7f378ab-70.html#unique-entry-id-70http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/50a4bebe8ffbacdc45e18c2801d75b24-69.html#unique-entry-id-69http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2e90714dfd4ce4bd6e8158c819016a0d-68.html#unique-entry-id-68dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-06-09T13:48:47-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3332efcbae06fa0a826b6d2095e085e4-67.html#unique-entry-id-67http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3332efcbae06fa0a826b6d2095e085e4-67.html#unique-entry-id-67dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-06-04T11:27:04-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/74aaf3b9eebad95288479480ee4d0f27-66.html#unique-entry-id-66http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/74aaf3b9eebad95288479480ee4d0f27-66.html#unique-entry-id-66dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-06-03T11:18:53-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d0fd022a5c0ac44b03c270e0ab1d7c0e-65.html#unique-entry-id-65http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d0fd022a5c0ac44b03c270e0ab1d7c0e-65.html#unique-entry-id-65dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-06-09T10:42:01-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7762f780a2db33faa1e0feb76650fa60-64.html#unique-entry-id-64http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7762f780a2db33faa1e0feb76650fa60-64.html#unique-entry-id-64dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-06-02T20:51:32-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/74ae9c1f2da962967c2952bc3e1b464b-63.html#unique-entry-id-63http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/74ae9c1f2da962967c2952bc3e1b464b-63.html#unique-entry-id-63dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-06-01T17:51:37-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/aeead267df6430ee56a61ba0ffce2839-62.html#unique-entry-id-62http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/aeead267df6430ee56a61ba0ffce2839-62.html#unique-entry-id-62http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/75e6dc0e3579d3fd194287cb0562ef36-61.html#unique-entry-id-61dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-05-29T15:03:57-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f7b6fb3ecc1fe9d962f3229e316c7464-60.html#unique-entry-id-60http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f7b6fb3ecc1fe9d962f3229e316c7464-60.html#unique-entry-id-60dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-05-28T06:10:50-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0fd0afdeeb61bca468098e64a635a8aa-59.html#unique-entry-id-59http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0fd0afdeeb61bca468098e64a635a8aa-59.html#unique-entry-id-59http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2a690e869a48d9d0d00f3901b3eb9360-58.html#unique-entry-id-58dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-05-17T20:23:29-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0205f346d564a8823c5eb91b3d66976d-57.html#unique-entry-id-57http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0205f346d564a8823c5eb91b3d66976d-57.html#unique-entry-id-57dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-05-06T20:19:45-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a96f856eb36fbd0ca45d87bd215eca69-56.html#unique-entry-id-56http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a96f856eb36fbd0ca45d87bd215eca69-56.html#unique-entry-id-56dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-05-05T18:49:37-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/06e708e014082d33c7bf9bf799bc9b35-54.html#unique-entry-id-54http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/06e708e014082d33c7bf9bf799bc9b35-54.html#unique-entry-id-54dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-05-03T20:27:43-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6f329aa5ba318ed809ac9ee46fc76ec9-53.html#unique-entry-id-53http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6f329aa5ba318ed809ac9ee46fc76ec9-53.html#unique-entry-id-53dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-05-03T20:19:39-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/316f34ea3f37452cf1c7a2f448ffd46f-52.html#unique-entry-id-52http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/316f34ea3f37452cf1c7a2f448ffd46f-52.html#unique-entry-id-52dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-04-21T21:26:15-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8a5454f519db143f092a7b8305bf42cb-51.html#unique-entry-id-51http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8a5454f519db143f092a7b8305bf42cb-51.html#unique-entry-id-51dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-03-27T14:00:19-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0a48e8ec110c08ea10d23e8068746fc2-50.html#unique-entry-id-50http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0a48e8ec110c08ea10d23e8068746fc2-50.html#unique-entry-id-50http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/86a2dbc4db4fe9cddce490d058a8bc25-49.html#unique-entry-id-49dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-02-25T09:18:17-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/94a45e1d237b021bf1bfddaa8e5526c7-48.html#unique-entry-id-48http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/94a45e1d237b021bf1bfddaa8e5526c7-48.html#unique-entry-id-48dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-02-24T18:33:48-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8b62e696cf5dfa69ed476da4c72ac6e2-47.html#unique-entry-id-47http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8b62e696cf5dfa69ed476da4c72ac6e2-47.html#unique-entry-id-47dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-02-14T21:15:14-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5484d970c22b250bc8e7467de2162268-46.html#unique-entry-id-46http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5484d970c22b250bc8e7467de2162268-46.html#unique-entry-id-46dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-02-09T11:44:08-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c6d65f40258fcf2667f46163b5f1b042-45.html#unique-entry-id-45http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c6d65f40258fcf2667f46163b5f1b042-45.html#unique-entry-id-45dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-02-02T13:04:22-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c1c56b3defb0c2b5fde43efe5c06f75d-44.html#unique-entry-id-44http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c1c56b3defb0c2b5fde43efe5c06f75d-44.html#unique-entry-id-44http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d6a2ad3c12d8e40aec766f4d3da821be-43.html#unique-entry-id-43dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-01-28T16:02:05-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/84e7b6918eae285bb63d4887b68e6cb8-42.html#unique-entry-id-42http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/84e7b6918eae285bb63d4887b68e6cb8-42.html#unique-entry-id-42http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b8fdb29f5882d0d01f5107e551a24271-41.html#unique-entry-id-41dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-01-22T12:29:04-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/48a606444aea9db2f733758fe03318eb-40.html#unique-entry-id-40http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/48a606444aea9db2f733758fe03318eb-40.html#unique-entry-id-40dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-01-21T11:39:46-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/475d47da14e7516277b60a6ce2636aa8-39.html#unique-entry-id-39http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/475d47da14e7516277b60a6ce2636aa8-39.html#unique-entry-id-39dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-01-12T16:38:49-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/33ce64f80ca19b8cf9c5acef45bd8ad4-38.html#unique-entry-id-38http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/33ce64f80ca19b8cf9c5acef45bd8ad4-38.html#unique-entry-id-38dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-01-08T18:05:17-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36c02dfc85beb52f5a9470e7144a9168-37.html#unique-entry-id-37http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36c02dfc85beb52f5a9470e7144a9168-37.html#unique-entry-id-37dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-01-06T17:11:44-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dab981e9a9b9bf316e877cf52c7a4f2f-36.html#unique-entry-id-36http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dab981e9a9b9bf316e877cf52c7a4f2f-36.html#unique-entry-id-36dan@allosso.netReading Blog2010-01-05T18:05:35-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ca0ec5f87dd56fe1971c579dfa6ba472-35.html#unique-entry-id-35http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ca0ec5f87dd56fe1971c579dfa6ba472-35.html#unique-entry-id-35http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/eb81dad26113eacd181aeb548f64f413-33.html#unique-entry-id-33dan@allosso.netReading Blog2009-12-23T10:01:09-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/892dea060ae7d9889fd73f35c29118a3-32.html#unique-entry-id-32http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/892dea060ae7d9889fd73f35c29118a3-32.html#unique-entry-id-32http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a14e1b207a7c8710af6ce224b2ce61d0-31.html#unique-entry-id-31dan@allosso.netReading Blog2009-11-24T17:34:08-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/554e65e5677643121e3fa4cfb3c830fa-30.html#unique-entry-id-30http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/554e65e5677643121e3fa4cfb3c830fa-30.html#unique-entry-id-30Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 Ithaca: Cornell Press, 1990. “Between the 1780s and the 1860s the New England countryside underwent a profound social and economic transformation. From an economy dominated by independent farmers, it became part of a broader national market and an outpost of industrial capitalism.” (8) But what does independence mean? Is it subsistence farming, with the goal of 100% self-sufficiency? Trade with locals, based on negotiated values rather than “market” prices corresponding to those in faraway cities? A sense of not being “dependent” on wage-based employment, afforded by land-ownership and local reciprocity? When “the distribution of wealth and the social patterns of access to the instruments of capitalistic economic power became increasingly unequal,” (17) what was happening? Were the “river gods” making themselves aristocrats, keeping the money and power in the family? Were the Boston Associates coming into the Valley, creating a mill city at Holyoke? Were these developments inevitable, and did they have to proceed to the specific ends they arrived at? Lots of questions remain unanswered. If “Farmers traveled more to exchange produce” and “Prices...increasingly converged with each other and with those in distant markets,” (59) why were the farmers looking outside and producing for the cash market? Too many sons and not enough land? Taxes from Boston (which led to debt, foreclosures, Shays’ Rebellion)? And what about the Workingmen’s movement? Rev. Samuel C. Allen ran for governor in the 1830s, partly on a platform opposing agricultural mortgages held by corporations, “bringing the yeomanry...into a state of dependency and peril.” (205) This probably warrants a closer look... ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2009-11-25T17:11:04-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6c2c38d749d0e03eb08aabf428165e46-29.html#unique-entry-id-29http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6c2c38d749d0e03eb08aabf428165e46-29.html#unique-entry-id-29dan@allosso.netReading Blog2009-11-19T14:56:58-06:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1a41e239127eb9948cdb0a20276ebebd-28.html#unique-entry-id-28http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1a41e239127eb9948cdb0a20276ebebd-28.html#unique-entry-id-28Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Red Earth, 2004 Oklahoma is most frequently thought of by the public and portrayed by environmental historians as the site of the 1930s Dust Bowl of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Donald Worster wrote his classic tale of ecological mismanagement in the same year that Paul Bonnifield wrote a story of the triumph of Oklahoman spirit in the face of natural disaster (1979, The Dust Bowl and Dust Bowl, respectively). William Cronon used the 180 degree disparity between these histories to comment on the incredibly subjective nature of (even environmental) history, finally threading a way (after four rewrites, he says) through post-modern concerns regarding narrative and cognition, to an embrace of history as a more-or-less moral fiction, aiming at (but never quite reaching) truth (“A Place for Stories,” JAH March 1992). In contrast to these tales of declension and progress, Lynn-Sherow writes about the settlement of Oklahoma a generation earlier, and wonders what might have been. “Of all the ways in which history can be written and remembered,” she says, “human based environmental change is often a ‘winner’s’ history told by the people who remain” (145). Through a variety of influences including chance, culture (including racism), and environment, “in less than one generation, the collective farming practices of the Kiowas [tribe] and the mixed-use practices of African American settlers were swept aside” (147). In their place, “an elite group of native-born white farmers were eventually triumphant” and a “highly diverse ecology of native plants, animals, and people” became “a more simplified ecology centered on a scientifically approved list of domesticated crops and animals.” Her conclusion, that “white farmers’ acceptance and enthusiasm for mechanized agriculture…initiated and sustained the simplification of the territory” is a declension, in the sense Cronon said Worster’s book was. Or is it? A more simplified ecological system is usually more fragile and subject to disturbances (like drought). So she’s using Cronon’s "second set of narrative constraints" (making "ecological sense") to get past the subjectivity of her judgment that monoracial commercialized monoculture is bad.   Cool. ]]>dan@allosso.netReading Blog2009-10-26T20:45:49-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e7e51036714c2402b6f7defea73b1e04-27.html#unique-entry-id-27http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e7e51036714c2402b6f7defea73b1e04-27.html#unique-entry-id-27dan@allosso.netReading Blog2009-10-24T16:34:21-05:00http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9d083dd2909445bf46599d723e1aca21-26.html#unique-entry-id-26http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9d083dd2909445bf46599d723e1aca21-26.html#unique-entry-id-26http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6079d2f9262a10b63416c3e9631d89a8-25.html#unique-entry-id-25dan@allosso.netReading 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