dan's rss feed

Morning over Monadnock

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-03T21:23:28-05:00

(null)

1/1/11 is Dump Facebook Day

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-01T17:18:40-05:00

I wasn't crazy about the "people from high school you didn't like enough to stay in touch with" aspect of facebook. ...I didn't think much about it, until I was looking at the underground pictures on Sleepycity.net the other night, and saw a little note next to the button. ...I thought this would be similar to using my gmail account to log into blogger: that it would capture my info, for use by the people who own the sites. ...Before I had even finished reading the article, I got an email message from Scribd telling me that two family members who are facebook friends had "subscribed" to my reading habits on Scribd. ...But then Steph found this site that explained how deactivating wasn't really effective (because facebook keeps your stuff up on the web).

Underground

me@danallosso.com — 2010-12-31T20:21:58-05:00

Every once in a while, Boing Boing comes across something really cool and unique, that I never would have seen otherwise. ... But not because I've spent any time in London (yet) -- mostly from books like Quicksilver and Neverwhere. Actually, aside from Gatwick and Victoria station, all the time I've spent in London has been underground. But it hasn't been very much, and it wasn't nearly as scenic as the stuff posted by the guys at Sleepycity.net. ... The Sleepy City guys (who I gather are originally from down under) have apparently been doing daring (and more or less illegal) trespass-photography for years now, in London, Paris, and assorted other places (their site sports a map).

Paper gear sculpture

me@danallosso.com — 2010-12-25T15:40:21-05:00

The trial gears look difficult enough, I don't think I'll ever need to try the heart. Nice to know people can do this type of thing with paper, though.

Tinderbox

me@danallosso.com — 2010-12-20T20:10:21-05:00

I posted a Tinderbox historiographical map on the THS blog, which got some positive comments. I sent Mark Bernstein a heads-up and he posted it on his blog. Will post the whole, updated map soon on the Comps. Reading page -- I'm hoping to figure out a way to make it live...

The Historical Society

me@danallosso.com — 2010-12-13T04:51:10-05:00

My first post on The Historical society's blog, about regular people's reading habits in American History.

End of the Post-Ideological Generation

me@danallosso.com — 2010-12-11T11:44:13-05:00

I wasn't able to find out who this kid is, but dang! Call him Bradlaugh!

New Regular People's History Site

me@danallosso.com — 2010-12-09T23:24:40-05:00

I started up another site, about what I call Regular People's History. There are three main elements I want to look at on it: ...Initially, it will consist of a blog where I work on those ideas. Then, when they hit critical mass, the ideas will be spun off into permanent pages. Some of the info that I think is relevant will be cross posted to this blog or to my rural history blog.

Neo-consensus revisionism

me@danallosso.com — 2010-11-29T18:38:07-05:00

I just read David Trask’s The War with Spain in 1898, which goes into the military history of the Spanish-American War in great detail, but gives less than a page (out of 600, including notes) to the war’s social or cultural context, and doesn’t even say much about politics. Trask portrays McKinley as reluctant to go to war (although remarkably efficient once he is forced to do so), but goaded on by an irresistible but unaccounted-for popular movement. This text fills a generation-long gap in coverage of the Spanish-American war, and was hailed as a magisterial account that will be read for generations. ... Trask apparently believes either that yellow journalism was not an influence on the decision to go to war or on the prosecution of the war, or that he can blame irrational public opinion for pushing McKinley into war and inadvertent empire, and leave it at that. Actually, he seems to believe that by simply ignoring the fact that the prior generation's history is all about Hearst and the splendid little war, he can make everybody forget.

Research trip

me@danallosso.com — 2010-11-20T17:57:55-05:00

The drive reminded me that Ethan Allen was said to have been able to get from one side of these mountains to the other in less than a day. ...But they also ran a banking company that moved money between the US and Ireland, and they brought a lot of Irish people over to America during the early part of the famine, around 1840. ...There were dozens of cash books, checkbooks, books filled with lists of promissory notes A Bell & Sons had received from a variety of sources over a wide range of years covering most of the second half of the 19th century, and letters. ... I didn't think to photograph the book itself on this trip; but I think I have a photo of one from my Michigan trip, which I’ll try to find and post sometime soon. ...These books frequently contain index pages at the front, where the writer can note the pages containing letters to particular people, since they’d be chronological in the book itself.

History 2015

me@danallosso.com — 2010-11-12T14:15:33-05:00

In some cases, it seems the only difference between some of the material freely available on the web, and the content students get in Gen Ed undergraduate classes, is the particular interpretation that the instructor wants to put on the course. This isn’t a trivial contribution, since there’s a nearly infinite number of paths through a period like “H150: US History Colonial to Reconstruction,” the course I’m currently TA-ing. But unless the POINT of the course (and by extension, the department, the school, the undergraduate education...) is to teach students the "right interpretation," (in which case, they're at a seminary rather than an academy), then it's more or less a matter of chance what the particular instructor decides to stress. ...So, that said, the most significant difference between good online content and an undergraduate course may be the fact that there are papers, tests, grades, and ultimately credit toward university core requirements and graduation. That’s an important difference, both in terms of the learning process it implies, and the journey toward pre-professional legitimacy that keeps most of these students coming to classes.

Luchar para Estudiar, Estudiar para Luchar

me@danallosso.com — 2010-11-06T21:41:12-04:00

Graffiti at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile. Means "Fight to Study, Study to Fight" I started a new page, based on the reading and research I did for my MA degree in Latin American History. I also put a big bunch of photos of Chile up on the site.

S-hook (first try)

me@danallosso.com — 2010-11-03T21:56:48-04:00

(null)

Memento Mori

me@danallosso.com — 2010-11-03T08:13:10-04:00

(null)

Time to get positive

me@danallosso.com — 2010-10-31T10:32:32-04:00

Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama revises an Act he sponsored as a Senator, so he can keep giving weapons to the Congo? ...I have to remind myself that everything wrong with the system now, is an opportunity to improve it. ... If others aren’t willing to step up, in a few short months we’ll be in a position to do it. ...This is a pretty conservative town, so the fact that someone painted that on the wall (and the powers that be left it there) is hopeful. And while Obama turns his back on whatever sliver of idealism he may once have had, and arms the Congolese militias, some regular people in Washington (state, not DC) went ahead and adopted orphans from the Congo, and then set up a non-profit that helps others do the same.

Overdone chestnuts

me@danallosso.com — 2010-10-29T18:47:42-04:00

And it blows my mind that some of the same people who pooh-pooh the old town histories (“oh, you can’t really get anything much out of them; they were all written by amateurs, you know”), take these magisterial, empty-of-evidence, condescending academic histories seriously! ...There are a few facts here and there; statistics on how many people came in each decade, how many miles of railroad track and paved highway were built before 1910 -- scaffolding for the story, which is all made up, and frequently in a pseudo-first person voice where the narrator is inside the heads of these poor unfortunate peasants, showing us their confusion and alienation. Several times in the story, Handlin actually gives us italicized statements, written as if they’re quotes, complete with bad grammar and colloquial contractions. ...I think Handlin got away with this partly because he was talking about peasant immigrants, who were as alien to his readers as Tahitian islanders. ...So, rather than just constantly ranting about all the things wrong with old histories, I think I’ll make a list of these flaws, and how to correct them.

Catching up...

me@danallosso.com — 2010-10-27T15:46:51-04:00

I’ve fallen behind on posting, so I’ll be adding a bunch of things to my reading blog in the next couple of days. ... My post of Wiebe’s Search for Order, for example, will probably offend some Wiebe fans (I checked -- the author died in 2000, so I don’t have to worry about hurting his feelings). ... I don’t want to write history that way, and if I ever do I hope someone will print this page, wrap it around a delicious bass, and whack me upside the head with it! ...And I’m looking forward to finishing Handlin’s Uprooted, and then comparing Parkerson’s Agricultural Transition in New York State and Guglielmo’s Living the Revolution. ... Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence was a harder read, and doesn’t lend itself to the quick, grad-student-reading-for-orals approach.

Steaming-punk-brain

me@danallosso.com — 2010-10-24T08:37:20-04:00

Steph made this pic for me. David Rumsey has put a lot of his maps on Second Life, and the gears are a brush pattern that's available for Photoshop. Apparently, she thought my brain was overheating, and needed a little ventilation!

Blacksmith lessons

me@danallosso.com — 2010-10-22T08:21:38-04:00

Points, both on the flat and the angle -- which seemed trickier, but actually wasn’t, because you’re moving less metal. ...It’s great to get the bar into the vice, and then get the wrench on the top and turn it. ... You use a chisel (or a sharp straight peen on the back of a second hammer) to score a vein on each side of your stock, then you twist it. If you hammer the bar flat again, you can vein it again, and then twist the other direction, and you end up with diamonds. But you need bigger stock for that -- there’s not a lot of room to work on 3/8”.

Orals

me@danallosso.com — 2010-10-12T17:51:02-04:00

Once again, I’ve revised my field reading list for my Comprehensive (“Oral”) Exams, which are now scheduled for Spring Break in March 2011. Or rather, I’ll do the written part over Spring Break, and then the “Oral” more or less immediately afterward. Then, assuming I pass, I’ll be “ABD,” and the last job will be to write up the dissertation. ... It’s why I’ve been doing all this, the past year and a half. So I’m looking forward to getting to it full-time.

Shiitake Surprise

me@danallosso.com — 2010-10-02T08:28:44-04:00

I spent most of my time in the library this summer, reading for my Orals. ... I planted some tomatoes, peppers, cukes and pumpkins in the spring, and then pretty much ignored them. ...The biggest surprise, which I found by accident when I was picking a few cherries off the vine to eat in the garden, was that the border logs that stop the soil from washing away into the neighbor’s yard had sprouted a flush of shiitake mushrooms. I drilled them last year, and drove a bunch of Stamets plugs into them. ... Especially with the dry weather -- it hasn’t exactly bee a big year for wild mushrooms around here.

The Big E

me@danallosso.com — 2010-10-01T18:18:13-04:00

I’m going to enter something next year, even if it’s only photography. ...It was a weekday and pouring, so most of the people there were 4-H kids and people selling pillow pets and steam mops in the “Better Living” building. This fair covers the entire New England area -- it seems to be about 1/2 the size of the Minnesota State Fair, based on attendance. Funny thing is, I grew up less than 100 miles away, and never heard of it until I was an Aggie at UMass. ...That’s a fair-record pumpkin behind me, on the right, from Benson Vermont.

busy, busy

me@danallosso.com — 2010-09-25T11:49:09-04:00

I did a talk last week, at the Ashfield Historical Society’s annual meeting. ... My parents were visiting, so I took my father up to see the talk. And I met with one of my advisors, and talked about putting together a Global Environmental History reading list. And, I found out that a seminar was being offered at Mount Holyoke College, on environmental history and GIS, and I got myself into that. Just trying to keep busy...next week, hopefully I’ll get back to blacksmithing.

One week in...

me@danallosso.com — 2010-09-15T11:31:52-04:00

I suppose that’s also my way of admitting that I can’t read everything ever written on my field topics, before the exams. After exams, I’ll be “legal” to teach UMass continuing education classes, and I’ll feel somehow more “authorized” to offer my services at community and state colleges. ...I want to watch how the instructor does her thing, get a sense of how the students are responding, and think really hard about what I’d want to be saying in each of these lectures, if it was my class. ... I think being acquainted with just a tiny bit of European history (at least the reconquista) helps the students have a little better sense of who these guys were, and why they behaved the way they did toward the natives. And details like the 30-generation christian/muslim war in Spain and military technologies that let the Spaniards stand out of range of their enemies and mow them down, give a really contemporary feel to the material -- and suggest reasons why we’re interested in this history in the first place.

COOL!!!

me@danallosso.com — 2010-09-13T08:35:45-04:00

(null)

$50 billion for infrastructure

me@danallosso.com — 2010-09-14T08:11:20-04:00

In the fight over the Obama infrastructure boondoggle, does the $50 billion that goes to pork barrel jobs really matter, in the face of the nearly Trillion dollars that went to “bail out” the richest corporations in America? Maybe, if you’ve given up on the Trillion dollars, and feel like the only thing left to fight for is the $50 billion. So maybe what we should be trying to do is stop fighting over the $50 billion of crumbs the elite was willing to throw to the workers, and refocus ourselves on that Trillion dollars they just stole from us. ...What if the liberals assumed, instead, that a lot of the people they write off as tea-party cranks are honestly concerned about the way things are going in America. ...I just think we’re wasting our time over pennies if we fight about that, and losing sight of the dollars.

"I still love technology..."

me@danallosso.com — 2010-08-31T11:21:30-04:00

There may be announcements or at least strong hints about the next gen iPads, which the rumor-mongers believe will include cameras for Facetime, and possibly something like the iPhone’s new ultra-high-res Retina display -- but only if it’s a smaller screen size, like 7 inches. ...This is a direct competitor to cable TV and DVRs, which I wouldn’t be likely to buy unless I could simultaneously say goodbye to Time Warner Cable (I can see it coexisting with Netflix on my Wii). ...On the other hand, if enough people had WIMAX radios, a signal could theoretically be routed from one to the other of them, without dropping into the commercial internet of the telecom/cable TV companies. ... But what about the regular net user who just wants to get online and doesn’t care about the technology, but wants to get out of that $100 a month TWC contract? ...They’ve been making noises lately (I think I heard it in that 2007 Steve Jobs/Bill Gates interview) about making a major new push with MobileMe, which hasn’t done anything since it sold websites as “dot Mac.”

Summer's ending

me@danallosso.com — 2010-08-23T22:24:34-04:00

That means there’ll be a few more people around campus. But really, I’ll still be spending most of my time reading. ... Still need to read the majority of them and fit them together into a story. ...Light colors are good in this map -- they mean I’ve read the book (blue) or article (gray). I’ve still got a way to go, but in some of the core themes, I’ve done quite a bit of major reading.

another ten

me@danallosso.com — 2010-08-19T08:26:34-04:00

Skated another ten miles in the morning, then worked all day on my reading (Gates) and documents for the book. Then did a little blacksmith lesson at the Greenfield Forge, Where Vinny cut up a big steel truck spring into chunks, and we straightened it to make tools (a chisel and a punch). We worked on the coal and the propane forges, today.

that boy is a (skating) monster

me@danallosso.com — 2010-08-17T12:45:03-04:00

It’s a 2 mile round trip, and although I’d love a trail with a little more length and scenery, the rail trail between Amherst and Northampton is next-to-impossible to skate. ...I found myself, without really having come to a conscious decision, heading back to the hill I climb before turning into another lap, rather than coasting into the parking lot to get my shoes, pack and lunch, and head to the library. ...On the way back to campus, I managed to get into a good (for me) Apolo Ohno crouch and power through the long straightaway. ...At least it’s an indication that there’s a real easy way for me to stay on the light side (I don’t underestimate the power of the dark side, especially on rainy days. ...And, more importantly, if the same logic applies to long projects like reading for comps and writing dissertations, then I guess I should just keep pushing through these booklists, do the transcriptions and write the stories that I find in these letters and documents.

Google, stick to your knitting

me@danallosso.com — 2010-08-08T19:25:54-04:00

Even though the "Neutral Net" is largely a fiction, and is a big case of spoiled first-worlders getting something for nothing for so long, they think they're entitled to it, I'm still not happy about a potential Google-Verizon deal that prioritizes paid content. It seems out of keeping with the environment in which Google originally flourished. As a former employee of the company (Silicon Graphics) that owned the real estate at 1600 Amphitheater Drive before it became the legendary Googleplex, I'd warn them against straying from the original formula. ... It would be a shame if they were remembered as the commercializers of the net. It won't be a good business decision in the long run.

Living History

me@danallosso.com — 2010-07-17T22:48:08-04:00

Launched a new page, about our experiences with Living History. Lots of slideshows and videos, which I'm posting as I complete them. The first set will be from our family Fourth of July experience -- an immersion into 1802 pioneering on the upstate New York frontier. Among them, one of me learning a little blacksmithing.

What does a million look like?

me@danallosso.com — 2010-07-12T17:28:39-04:00

I don't know what a million looks like. But I know what 10,000 looks like. As in, 5 tons of wood pellets, in 250 bags. From point A to point B in just over 90 minutes...

The Pioneer Experience

me@danallosso.com — 2010-07-05T14:42:13-04:00

But to change things up a little, we all spent the weekend in a log cabin in upstate New York, living as if it was 1802 (or so) on the Pioneer Farm at the Genesee Country Village and Museum. ...And this place gets a LOT of traffic (a regular patron told me he’d recently been to Williamsburg, and was disappointed because Genesee had set his expectations so high. ... We fetched our own water, fed the animals, read (and wrote with quills and ink) by candle and firelight, learned how to shoot a 1793 “Brown Bess” flintlock, and even made a few nails at the village blacksmith shop. But that's just the tip of the iceberg (ice would have been nice...did I mention it was HOT!!) ...That may take a few days, as we sort through the thousand-plus pics and videos we took...but in the meantime, here were our thoughts as we were leaving, before we even changed out of our HOT period costumes:

Summer Vacation

me@danallosso.com — 2010-06-28T11:09:02-04:00

Not working, the last week or so. Will resume in another week or so.

Tesla was right

me@danallosso.com — 2010-06-13T09:52:48-04:00

It is possible to broadcast electrical power wirelessly. ...How many other technologies have not been deployed, simply because they wouldn’t be in the short-term best interests of the powers that be? ... But they can't figure a way to fit it into the telecom model -- or rather, to prevent it from trashing the telecom model and establishing the possibility of wireless peer to peer networking. Somebody should write a book about the ways technology has been channeled by the pursuit of profits. It could begin with the dumping of the Minneapolis streetcars into Lake Minnetonka.

Lots of reading to keep track of...

me@danallosso.com — 2010-06-05T15:28:12-04:00

So I’m thinking about how to make this field reading as useful as possible for my program, which is establishing rural history as a field that addresses the issues I think are central to it. ...To keep track of what I’ve read, what I need to read, and how these things are all connected, I’m using a single Tinderbox map as a master list. ...The point of all this is to help me understand the history and the historiography, and to form an outline from which I can easily assemble arguments and narrative. Each entry, after I read the book, has my notes and responses, as well as the link information describing where the book or article fits into the big picture. ... At that point, I’ll be able to test out the system, and see if I can assemble a “chapter” from these notes and this map.

New Reading List

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-28T23:52:25-04:00

So, it's time to be serious about the reading. ...I put up a new (tentative) list, covering all my North American reading. I think I'll keep the British reading separate, on the Radicals site. The titles on this list will actually be split across two official "fields," but they really go toward the same basic goal. So they're together on this list, at least for now.

Reading and Sk8ing

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-28T07:11:45-04:00

I’ve been spending the days reading for my comprehensive exams, so evidence of my existence seems to be gathering in my reading blog rather than here. Along the way, I discovered why I really can’t stand Thomas Jefferson. ...It’s not really smooth, and it has some bad bumpy sections (I fell once last week). But that makes the skating more challenging, and in the end will improve my strength and balance better than a perfect trail would. ... In a month or so, I should be ready for the whole round-trip!

Going to New Harmony!

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-21T07:35:50-04:00

The Communal Studies Association is having their 2010 Conference at the site of Robert Owen's New Harmony community in Indiana. ... I’ll have to double-check the exact wording of my proposal, to see what the scope of this will be; but as I remember it I said I wanted to talk about Charles Knowlton and his friends, who started a Free Enquirers’ Society in Greenfield. My interest was in people who felt themselves to be outside of the mainstream, who had assimilated some of the ideas people like Owens implemented at places like New Harmony, but who stayed home. ...He and his Free Enquirer Society friends (men and women, because the Society considered women full members with all the rights of their male counterparts) were clearly interested in utopian ideas well outside the mainstream of their Western Massachusetts communities. ... I’m looking forward to talking about this, and to hearing what other people have been thinking about intentional communities this fall.

Pioneer House

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-15T19:44:11-04:00

So the family is going to spend a long weekend this summer in upstate NY in about 1805. We’re going to the Genesee Country Village and Museum. ... Steph applied a month or so ago and we sort-of forgot about it until she got a call today. They normally don't let families with little kids go -- but what they heck! ... During business hours, we're one of the museum exhibits.

American History

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-10T22:13:58-04:00

This year began with a book about teaching history in “Intro Class,” and ended with a bunch of things jumping off the shelves at me: Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened (Loewen), Thinking Through the Past (Hollitz), Telling the Truth About History, (Appleby, Hunt, Jacob), and Who Owns History (Foner). ...Wouldn’t it be more realistic to imagine that most people don’t know what really happened (and maybe think it’s impossible to know), and in the absence of knowledge opt for the most convenient and reassuring stories they can find? ...So I thought while I’m reading both the history and the historiography of the 19th & 20th century U.S., that I’d try to write about it for high school students and college undergrads. ... This can be tricky, because the same histories we read to find out what happened have to be read again, differently, to find what was on the historian’s (and presumably his audience’s) mind. This can be tricky, but it’s a skill high schoolers and undergrads need to develop if they’re going to keep from just passively believing everything they’re taught and told in life.

Local Money

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-05T07:37:04-04:00

And then converting these instruments to forms of currency they could use to pay local farmers, that the farmers could in turn use to buy stuff from them, other merchants, and each other. ...But, contrary to some of the histories I’ve been reading about the “transition to capitalism,” I don’t see them as outsiders, imposing some alien, urban (and corrupt, or corrupting, many of the histories imply) economic system on these poor, unwary rural folk. ...Dollar, which they promote as meaning Berkshares users get a 5% discount on everything they buy with Berkshares (since retailers only list prices in US$, and take Berkshares at face value). ...According to another little article in the same Adbuster issue, 68% of money spent in locally owned retailers stays local (mostly in the form of payrolls and taxes), versus 43% of the money spent at box stores or big chains. The effect is obviously enhanced if you can also buy stuff that is produced locally (and not surprisingly, local producers, artisans and service people are big supporters of Berkshares), but even if you buy a mass produced product at a local shop, you can do it with Berkshares.

Year One

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-03T21:40:01-04:00

I’ll probably post a different, much more comprehensive reading list in the next few days, and then tick the books off (and say something about them) as I go through them. ... Although I completely expect the lists to be tentative pretty much up to the time (less than a year from now) when I take my field exams. I’ll be reading some of the US History titles with a couple of other people in the program who are doing American fields. ... And I’m trying to do this reading in parallel with my research, because I think the two processes complement each other. But I’m not saying much about the dissertation/book until it’s pretty much done and sold...which I’ve gotta say, feels unnatural.

Give blood for Beltane

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-01T16:30:18-04:00

So, we took some time off from the first day of serious yard cleanup, and gave blood at the animal shelter. ... Steph’s hemoglobin wasn’t high enough, so after two finger-stabbing tests, they “deferred” her. ... In fact, when the guy stuck the needle in me, he nearly got a face-full of hot purple blood! After finishing the first 100ml in mere seconds, I filled the bag in 5:05. A quick bag of pretzels and we were off to look at the cats and bunnies.

Getting to know Tinderbox

me@danallosso.com — 2010-05-01T08:30:12-04:00

First, by what Tinderbox doesn’t want to be: powerpoint or mindmap (which is good, because there's something creepy about productivity tools that claim to be based on a profound insight into cognition supplied by pop psychology). ...I’m hoping to use Tinderbox along with Endnote as a way to store and organize things I’m working on, with an eventual goal of outputting information in the form of Comprehensive Exams, a dissertation, and a book. ...History and Enviro. are the obvious ones, but there will probably be books from Labor History, Political, and even general history that I’ll want to include. ...One of my fellow students at UMass uses Beedocs Timeline to map out the events he’s working with -- I noticed there’s some info from the Boston event on exporting to timelines. ...But I was surprised to find out how my documents were distributed in time, which I didn’t know until I moved them around on the screen.

Cool Tools

me@danallosso.com — 2010-04-24T14:12:49-04:00

While I don’t think tools are more important than work, I think a good set of tools makes the work easier, better, and more enjoyable. ...It isn’t clear to me how to create a page that incorporates a timeline with a sort-of “internet-cloud-diagram” that will allow me to fly through my data, turn on the types of links I want to look at (responses, disagreements, lineages of ideas, etc.)... ...I can group the books by topic and put them on a timeline (I hadn’t noticed, from looking at the biblio in the book, for instance, how many of Patricia Limerick’s secondary sources were published in the ‘70s). I can easily find the books that keep popping up on everybody’s biblio, and promote them to my own field reading list. ...I'm thinking of each of my maps of individual books is like one 2D layer -- when they all get slapped together, I'll have a 3D historiography.

Is it religion, or culture?

me@danallosso.com — 2010-04-19T22:09:50-04:00

I should not feel my own world destroyed if the greatest writer about love and tragedy and comedy and morals was finally revealed to have been the Earl of Oxford all along,” he continues, showing just how easy it is to slip from the discussion of religion to a larger one about the rest of the foundation of western culture. ...“The loss of faith,” Hitchens says, “can be compensated by the newer and finer [scientific] wonders that we have before us, as well as by immersion in the near-miraculous work of Homer and Shakespeare” and others (personally, I think his use of the word miraculous at this point is a misstep). ... This may have been true for his own Leon Trotsky/Rosa Luxemburg flavor of Marxism, but I think it’s more accurate to say that “messianic...historical and dialectical materialism” is absolute and supernatural at its core. Hitchens finally admits, at the chapter’s end, that “Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic.” It will be interesting to read further, and see how he gets around the objection that if secularism leads to authoritarian dictator ship just as religion does, why switch?

The Final Encyclopedia

me@danallosso.com — 2010-04-13T21:10:07-04:00

I’m doing a lot of my work at school now that it’s getting warmer and the windows are going to be open. ...(The big one in the picture is a 5 1/4 full height Maxtor -- it's a little newer than the Wren I'm talking about, but not much. The other one is a 2 1/2 inch 6 gig drive, which was the state of the art about 4 or 5 years ago. ...Three of these Wren drives would have cost about $6,000 and given you about 2 gigabytes of storage, in about a foot of vertical space (allowing a little bit for air-flow -- probably not enough!). ...When you can carry the equivalent of a thousand copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica or a tenth of the entire Library of Congress print collection in your back pocket instead of your wallet?

No England trip this year

me@danallosso.com — 2010-04-10T17:18:53-04:00

It turns out I won’t be going to England for the first European Rural History conference in September. ...So I won’t have a chance to go to the Bishopsgate Institute and look at the Bradlaugh files this fall. ...I was hoping to get a better idea about how Europeans and members of the British Commonwealth do rural history. But based on the conference schedule, it looks like they do a lot of stuff that isn’t really that good a fit with what I’m interested in doing. ...The change of plans will give me a chance to get to the Pacific Northwest and finish my research for this Dissertation/book project.

It's already Spring in Connecticut

me@danallosso.com — 2010-04-02T11:08:29-04:00

In the introduction to Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War, Clark says “Since the emergence of the ‘new social history’ in the 1960s there has been a massive outpouring of scholarship on...the complexities of class, race, and gender... ...Professor Clark, who had been discussing Nature’s Metropolis in a seminar just before we met, said that one student’s reaction to the book was initial dismay when Cronon announced in the introduction that there were no people in the book, but ultimately appreciation for the way Cronon managed to tell several fast-paced, conflict-laden stories, even though he didn’t use the particulars of individual characters’ lives (Note to self: It’s probably worth looking closely again at NM as an example of how to do narrative on generic or inanimate subjects). ...This is a break from the older historical approach of fitting local data into “big” models like central place theory -- and feeling obligated to leave the stories of individuals out because they introduce too many messy, local, contingent irregularities. ...(I put the library copy aside and ordered the book, so when it arrives I’ll find out) Regional particularities could be expected to play a huge role in these different visions of society. ...Slavery is so huge, and the issues so stark, that it might not be possible to get at the more subtle issues that influenced other elements of the different social visions that differentiated the middle west from New England or the arid west from the Ohio Valley.

A couple more thoughts about Wikipedia

me@danallosso.com — 2010-03-26T18:48:01-04:00

I think this is a fatal flaw of Wikipedia, which will undermine the quality of their entries and destroy their credibility with the people who make Wiki what it is with their contributions. ...It generated a moderate number of comments, mostly more-or-less in favor of letting students use internet sources, but with an understanding of their limitations. ...My big objection to Wiki is that it’s shooting itself in the foot by letting people or automated processes trash meaningful, well-documented content without putting something equally useful in its place. ...What if university departments asked their faculties and grad students to help populate a “this is what we do here” website that provided more than just marketing info about their most recent publications? What if we talked to our students about their future roles as producers of knowledge, and got them in the habit of contributing to this knowledge base rather than just consuming it?

Comix, blogs, writing

me@danallosso.com — 2010-03-24T21:15:00-04:00

Scott McCloud’s books, Understanding Comics and Making Comics were the basis of the discussion, and of course I brought in my complete From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (did you know Eddie Campbell has a blog? ... Either way, we’re looking at how people build stories around inanimate stuff -- which is basically what our historical arguments are when all’s said and done. ...One of the things I really like about this class is that we’re not limiting ourselves to academically oriented tools, to learn about writing. We’ve talked about the LoTR DVD directors’ commentary, and read Stephen King’s book, Rabiner’s Thinking Like Your Editor, Strunk & White, and now McCloud. ...There’ll be time enough once I’ve written (and sold) the book, to talk about the details and all the cool stuff that gets left on the cutting room floor.

Spring Break

me@danallosso.com — 2010-03-19T15:25:27-04:00

I hate to admit it's been literally decades since I’d been there. Things looked familiar, but there was a lot more to the campus than last time I was there. ...LOTS to read through now, and most of it's in faded, semi-legible 19th century cursive handwtiting. But there are a lot of surprises... More on the research in the not-too-distant future.

the Motley Crew

me@danallosso.com — 2010-03-09T22:07:14-05:00

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic ...I’ve been spending a lot of time researching my own stuff, and I was beginning to feel bad about letting the field reading slide a little. ... I half-reluctantly grabbed this from the bottom of the pile on my shelf, thinking I’d give it a day and jump-start this reading. A day and a half later, I’m thinking I need to break my rule and buy this book. And I think I need to borrow some of these characters -- many of whom I've never heard of before! -- for fiction in the future.

A good story = truth?

me@danallosso.com — 2010-03-05T21:48:10-05:00

I'm thinking of this as a way to try to merge a sort-of microhistorical focus on personality with all the demographics and economics you usually get in social histories like Roberta Balstad Miller's City and Hinterland or Margaret Walsh's Rise of the Midwestern Meatpacking Industry. ...But there's something to the idea that fictional characters usually have an internal consistency -- and that we think they should because that makes them "lifelike." ...Heather Cox Richardson said she used a technique in her forthcoming book on Wounded Knee "in which I talk about the American worldview in harsh, square images and straight lines, while I talk about the Indian worldview in gentler images and curved lines. ...But it and other techniques like it could be the reason people "get" the story at a deeper level than where they merely understand her argument and agree or disagree with her conclusion. ...I now know a lot about who lived and died in Ashfield, and where the other folks went, if they didn't die there (a much bigger number than I'd expected).

Rural Myths

me@danallosso.com — 2010-03-04T09:26:01-05:00

I’ve found out that, to whatever degree the town I’ve been looking at is representative, many of the things we believe about early American towns are wrong. I’m happy about this, because it gives me something to talk about, and because I’ve been hoping to do some myth busting in this project. One of the persistent myths about early American towns is that they were inherently stable, inward-looking communities; in contrast with cities which are thought of as the scene of rapid, disruptive changes leading to modernity. ... In contrast with the city’s commerce and profit-motivation, the farmers, artisans and small merchants of these exceptional New England communities are supposed to work for a competence or sufficiency. ... Democratic town meetings and the Congregational assembly are seen as institutions that focus social life and best represent the character of rural people.

Census stuff

me@danallosso.com — 2010-02-27T16:48:11-05:00

This is cool, because you can track a person from census to census, and see where he (yes, for most of the census years, they only took down head-of-household names, which were 99% male) lived at least every ten years. ...Some of these are other sources (lots of county and town histories are also available on ancestry and google), some take advantage of the fact you can compare census data from a series of years side by side. ... If I’m looking for John Doe who lived in Springfield in 1800, and there are five John Does in the 1810 census, I can see whether some of the others lived in the same places in 1800 and 1810, and eliminate those candidates. ...Seems like it’s going to be very difficult from now on, to make vague, generalized points about persistence, migration, and a whole bunch of social changes related to demographics; when you can check the numbers and say something precise. ... Not because I want to do a “migration history,” but because I just can’t imagine what type of excuse I’d use to get around knowing what happened with the people, in these places I’m studying.

More thoughts on Zinn

me@danallosso.com — 2010-02-25T10:33:42-05:00

I posted a few more thoughts I had on rereading A People’s History of the United States, for a class discussion on our favorite popular histories, on my reading blog and on the UMass grad students’ blog (where there may even be comments!). (click on Zinn to go to his website)

NEWS FLASH!

me@danallosso.com — 2010-02-24T00:01:06-05:00

Well, the news is my paper proposal was accepted for the first annual Rural History conference in Brighton, England this fall! ...And while I’m there, I’ll have a chance to get to London and see the Bishopsgate archives of the Bradlaugh Papers. And run around East London; see how long it takes to walk to the City from Warner Place. Maybe I’ll make a sidetrip to Northampton and have a pint with my facebook buddy Norman. ...The details of getting a PhD while I’m doing all this will just have to work themselves out...

My favorite popular history

me@danallosso.com — 2010-02-10T08:33:58-05:00

Looking back on it after reading more popular history, I think Zinn does a pretty good job with the facts, and a pretty good job with the narrative. ...As I’m listening to the civil rights story, what strikes me is how surprising it is, in the face of little girls getting blown up in churches, that blacks in the South didn’t grab the guns and gas cans. ...So far, I find myself thinking, “he’s deliberately making this into an academic exercise, to make it as irrelevant as possible to my life.” ... Ellis’ embellishments (the heavy fog on the still water as Burr and Hamilton are being rowed across the Hudson) are novelistic -- but from the type of novel I’d never read. ... Maybe these things are documented in someone’s journal -- seems like the author would want to say so, unless he’s so convinced of his narrative authority he expects the reader to believe anything he says.

Knowlton in print again!

me@danallosso.com — 2010-01-28T10:10:43-05:00

Got a thank-you and a citation in the Winter issue of Dartmouth Medicine. Billy Corbett used some of my info on Knowlton in his background piece. It’s a really nicely put together (and well-written) web-article. In the “Web Extras” they listed my url, so maybe it will get some traffic. ...To the right, a title page from Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy, from the article.

Gaiman on genre

me@danallosso.com — 2010-01-24T08:57:45-05:00

First part of a Neil Gaiman interview, on MIT's TechTV. Talks a lot about genres, and roots. Thanks to Boing Boing for calling it to attention again. Second part here too.

Week 1

me@danallosso.com — 2010-01-23T09:12:55-05:00

And, it’s interesting how the need to move quickly forces authors to make theoretical assumptions that reveal their underlying philosophy, maybe more than they would in a book-length work. ...I hesitate to double-post some of the “reviews” I’m writing of these books, even if they seem to fit in both the rural and radical slots. Maybe that goes back to my personal history, in the computer biz when entire systems contained less memory than some of the web-pages I have up there! But it’s good (for me) that a lot of these readings seem to have something to tell me about the development of radicalism in America and the history or mythology of the country. ... Christopher Hill provides what is for me almost an ancient history background, but which seems to lead directly to Benjamin Franklin (I also listened to an audio-book of Walter Isaacson’s biography).

Maps and Time

me@danallosso.com — 2010-01-08T22:07:59-05:00

How did those expectations change over time (as technology like telegraphs and railroads changed the space/time arrangements...and as new people came, who maybe hadn’t been party to the original reasons for moving. ...Anyway, there was a certain pattern of settlement in, say, 1900. (this map is a piece of one available here)You could look at the numbers and compile a population density map that would tell you something about where lots of people lived, and where only a few lived (it was still up to you to figure out why). ...When you put them one on top of the other (It's cooler when you can use Photoshop's sliders to mess with the opacity of the layers, but hopefully you get the idea), you see some places where there are lots of people now, that weren’t there a hundred years ago. More interesting, you see some places where there used to be lots of people, but now there are not. ...In the case of the four little dots in southern Iowa marked “V” (for 45 to 90 people per square mile), there seem to be stories behind these places.

Bradlaugh in cartoons

me@danallosso.com — 2010-01-05T09:44:49-05:00

From May 9 1883 Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal, p. ..."Bradlaugh" is apparently a proper noun among Londoners, meaning irreligious. "Are you a religious man?" ... And his face is recognizable enough to be funny on the dog. More like this at http://www.bradlaugh.com/primary/primary.html

Why history?

me@danallosso.com — 2009-12-30T14:33:35-05:00

But, if the argument of the book is just a way to objectify (demonstrate, celebrate) the train of thought and feeling that led him to those particular Williams-isms, then cool: I got the point without having to read all the second-rate poetry along the way. ...That’s one thing Williams seems to have been keenly aware of: the tendency to reduce complexity and smear out ongoing evolution in an idea like “city” or “country” until it’s a handy, but misleading, archetype. ...It’s been in my head for a few years that Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” really got me interested, but I think it was more of a reminder than a discovery. ... And I thought it was cool, how Stephenson studiously puts known people in known situations, but is completely free to speculate about what’s going on in their heads. ...Am I the only person in the world who’s annoyed when the cute moose on Nickelodeon or Steve on Blues Clues does the “one of these things is not like the other” puzzle with my kids?

U.S. History

me@danallosso.com — 2009-12-29T17:30:55-05:00

I thought it went fairly well, but there were some things I thought I'd change, if I had it all to do myself. So, rather than forget what those things were, I went ahead today and wrote up a syllabus of how I would teach the class. ...There were some things we passed by -- there's not a lot of time to cover nearly a century and a half, after all. Another thing was (and maybe I'll get in trouble with some older faculty members for this, but here goes), I think the focus on Viet Nam was overdone. And I don't think you can really sustain the argument that the 60s hippie movement was as historically important as Civil Rights or the Women's movement.

Field Reading Lists

me@danallosso.com — 2009-12-22T12:34:13-05:00

I've added a new page to Rural History, called "Field Reading List," on which I'll list and say something about the books I'm reading for a "Field" in Rural History. This means that I'll be answering a question on Rural History during my comprehensive exam next fall. Seems to me, we PhD students (not only at UMass, but everywhere) spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. ... I'm doing three fields in the next year, the other two reading lists will go up in the next few days on radicalhistory.net, which I've just acquired. I'd love to see what other people are reading, and what they think about what they're reading.

Fruits of Philosophy, 1836

me@danallosso.com — 2009-12-16T20:44:13-05:00

An advertisement for James Watson’s reprint of Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, in the London Examiner, January 17, 1836. The Watson edition is the one Charles Watts acquired the plates of (in a bulk purchase from Watson’s estate) and reprinted until 1876, when he was charged with obscenity. Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant then formed the Freethought Publishing Company and reprinted Knowlton’s book, leading to the famous 1878 trial that forever changed the British birth rate.

Maps!

me@danallosso.com — 2009-12-04T23:04:04-05:00

All the good measurements are done on a county-by-county basis, so the units are counties where there’s a “metropolitan” core population of at least 50,000. ... From that, they create “combined statistical areas” that consist of a “core” and its feeder areas, tied to it by easy commuting routes to work, markets, etc. ...These are the cities and large towns it’s easy to call urban, and the surrounding counties that may look rural, but are economically tied to these centers. ...This next one, from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, claims “Rural areas across the country generally have seen more growth in employment than have cities.” ...From 2007 to 2009, the number of people using Food Stamps rose by about 30%, although in many places, only half of those who qualify are actually getting Food Stamps.

Rural People's Thoughts?

me@danallosso.com — 2009-12-03T14:48:26-05:00

This is one of the books everyone in Environmental History mentions, like Raymond Williams The Country and the City (which I also bought this semester, and haven’t read yet). ...Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. ...In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. ... Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America? ...The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book?

Recapitulation

me@danallosso.com — 2009-11-01T19:21:42-05:00

It strikes me that it might be one of those paradigms borrowed by historians from scientists (not unlike Kuhn's theory of paradigms itself). ...The development of embryos was observed to proceed through stages from a more primitive to a more advanced state. ... Thus, each human embryo, for example, "evolves" through the stages of human evolution as it matures. Historians seem to do something similar, when they draw parallels between, say, pre-Columbian native Americans and prehistoric European hunter-gatherers. The similaries between "primitive" peoples in the present and the distant past are assumed to outweigh their differences.

Bison beats Beef!

me@danallosso.com — 2009-08-12T15:29:44-04:00

They have two other locations, with about 300 acres and a thousand acres of pasture, where they raise their bison for processing. ... The Farmers (that’s their name, as well as their occupation) are looking to attract visitors, tourists, school groups, etc. ...The other animals are not grown there; the Farmers have made meat from other local growers available in their store. Or, you can get bison, and several of the other meats from the freezer at 24 Carrots. ...It’s been a long time since I’ve let myself enjoy a good Italian sausage – this will ADD sausage and pepper sandwiches, and all kinds of dishes back into our menu.

Dave's Keene Mushrooms

me@danallosso.com — 2009-08-09T15:28:50-04:00

On farmer’s market day in Keene, we ran into a surprising sign that announced one of the alleys between the downtown blocks as “Mushroom Alley.” I couldn’t resist, so we strolled down it to find Dave Wichland under a white tent at the corner of the parking lot behind the main farmer’s market area. His homemade sign announced him as “Wichland Woods Mushrooms,” and he had a variety of fresh and dried mushrooms, mushroom art, and even two flavors of sun-brewed mushroom tea, which he was offering samples of to passersby. ...One of the things that became apparent in our conversation, is that Dave has taken a lot of the general knowledge in books like Stamets’, and adapted it to the particular conditions of the New Hampshire climate and landscape. We bought a package of fresh Chanterelles and Black Trumpets, which went into a nice white sauce for pasta that evening (it’s always a challenge for me, finding out how to use new and different foods, because I’m not a big fan of recipe-reading.

History from the Outside, In (as opposed to, from the bottom, up)

me@danallosso.com — 2009-10-18T15:15:51-04:00

(Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 7) When people define things as binary pairs, the characteristics that separate them may not do so as completely as the definers believe. ... And, there may be other characteristics of the “opposites” that are similar or the same -- but these are not considered “essential” at the particular time and place where definition is being done. ...I’d add that, inasmuch as meanings continue to be “constructed through exclusions,” the changing relevance of specific elements in a definitional set over time, is a particularly interesting question for the historian. ...(9) She reminds us that “history, through its practices, produces (rather than gathers or reflects) knowledge about the past,” which means that “history operates as a particular kind of cultural institution endorsing and announcing constructions of” (she says gender, I’m going to substitute) social identity. What I’m thinking, as I’m reading this, is that I can formulate an “outsider history” along some of the same lines Scott used to define gender history.

Bradlaugh Party!

me@danallosso.com — 2009-10-04T15:50:44-04:00

This is a photo of the Charles Bradlaugh Society, which met in Northampton (I’d assume around CB’s birthday on Sept. 26th) for their 8th annual celebration of the atheist, radical leader’s life. ... He apparently saw my website, www.bradlaugh.com, because he commented on my interest in both Bradlaugh and Alan Moore, the graphic novel author (From Hell) who spoke at the event. My interest in Bradlaugh began a couple of years ago, when I discovered him during a British History class I was taking in Minnesota. I’ve written parts of a couple of biographies of Bradlaugh (an adult version, a young adult version, and I’ve played around with a historical novel as well; but that’s a long story), but I really need to go to London and read the archive at Bishopsgate before I’m ready to complete that project. The clipping came at the right time, to remind me why I got into the history PhD program, and what I ought to be doing.

Carnegie & contemporary excuses

me@danallosso.com — 2009-09-16T21:15:13-04:00

I don’t recall if it was in an Ayn Rand type anthology or a Foundation for Economic Education piece. ...On July 1 1889, the Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers struck at the Homestead steel mill July 1, 1889 after manager (Frick) cut wages, arguing that better technology (paid for by company) allowed them to produce 2x the steel as before. ...But is it credible that a guy like Carnegie, living when he did, knowing who he knew, could say the rich are more virtuous than the poor, or better qualified to decide on, then manage programs for the public good? “If thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap,” Carnegie warns all the ne’er-do-wells who’d like a piece of that public pie. ...It couldn’t be much more contemporary – all the language, assumptions, and arguments are in play every night on the news.

One week in...

me@danallosso.com — 2009-09-14T05:57:36-04:00

As far as the classes go, I’ve been to all but one (which wasn’t held last week due to Labor Day), and they seem about the same. ...This additional book is a challenge – in the sense that I have a lot of critical things I want to say about it, and it’s a challenge, finding constructive (or at least not flagrantly nasty) ways of saying them. ...I’ve talked to a couple of people about these readings – I’m curious what type of range of responses we’ll get in this group. The class is made up of all the incoming grad students, so it’s going to be big and diverse, relative to most grad seminars. So far, I haven’t felt like I’m not going to be able to stay ahead of the reading or do the level of surrounding work I like to do.

What does the flat world mean?

me@danallosso.com — 2009-08-12T21:26:31-04:00

...Friedman describes (beginning about 14:55) a pilot program begun by MacDonalds around Washington DC, “where if you go up to the drive-in window…you’re not actually speaking to that MacDonalds. You’re speaking now to a MacDonalds call center in Colorado Springs, that’s taking down your order, and taking your picture, and then zapping your picture and your order electronically back to that MacDonalds, where your picture and order are matched up when you drive up to the drive-in window.

Making Bread

me@danallosso.com — 2009-07-07T08:58:57-04:00

I think that’s a good idea, but I was actually more interested in just giving these girls a chance to make a loaf of bread. The recipe we used was the simplest I could find: flour, water, yeast, and small amounts of oil, salt and sugar (to start the yeast). ... But I think it’s cool (and important) that the girls had a chance to see the amount of work that goes into making something as basic and universal as a loaf of bread. ...I don’t know how much of the process these girls will remember, or if any of them will actually ever make another loaf of bread. ... And maybe for the uncounted millions of women who spent (and still spend, in places like Chile) part of their days doing exactly the same thing.

Book History

me@danallosso.com — 2009-06-17T17:58:46-04:00

The several disciplines that touch book history all share an understanding: printed artifacts do not give direct insight into the past; rather, that insight is mediated. that is to say, meaning does not leap directly from writers’ to readers’ minds through printed pages, but rather is produced through interventions, or mediations. For example, a writer writes for a “market”; editors and publishers reconfigure the writer’s work into book form and decide upon its packaging and distribution; booksellers display the book where potential buyers may be likely to see it; finally, different readers understand the book in a variety of different ways. ... Some scholars see these mediations as distortions—just as messages become mangled when whispered from person to person in a line—but book historians take these mediations as their principle object of study. ...The mediations the Zborays list seem very modern – I can almost see them thinking about their own process of writing, negotiating with their agent, working with content and then line editors, taking advice from packaging and marketing reps at the publishing house, going on author tours, etc. ... And what about a guy like Charles Knowlton, who self-published his books (that is, paid the printer directly), and carried them from place to place in his saddle-bags?

The Knowltons and the Kneelands

me@danallosso.com — 2009-06-14T10:39:08-04:00

Abner Kneeland was a lecturer for Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright’s secular organization, and later was the editor of the Boston Investigator, a freethought newspaper. Kneeland was tried and ultimately convicted of blasphemy, primarily for promoting Charles Knowlton’s birth control book The Fruits of Philosophy. ...Two years later, he published his first book (the American Definition Spelling Book), and by the time Charles was five, Abner was in Langdon, NH, being ordained as a Baptist minister. It might be interesting to trace the lives of these two men, since they came from similar backgrounds and ultimately found each other in the freethought movement, where they were both imprisoned for unpopular beliefs (where was Kneeland incarcerated? ... Since a very small minority of people with their backgrounds developed these views (as far as we currently know), and since Kneeland wrote about the beginnings of the labor movement (and Knowlton’s brothers were small-scale capitalists, probably employing a couple of dozen workers in their chair factory), this connection might lead in interesting directions.

UMass then and now

me@danallosso.com — 2009-06-09T20:38:59-04:00

I’m sure there’ll be other differences, but here’s one for a start:

Changes in the Land

me@danallosso.com — 2009-06-04T16:26:46-04:00

William Cronon begins with an introduction called “The View from Walden,” that not only acknowledges some of the changes Thoreau saw in his neighborhood, but explodes the idea that this represents some “fall” from a pristine, a-historical initial state. The landscape is always changing, and was changed by the “Indians” before white people arrived. “There has been no timeless wilderness in a state of perfect changelessness, no climax forest in permanent stasis.” Cronon criticizes first-generation ecologists for assuming that all systems tend toward a stable equilibrium, and also for assuming “humanity was somehow outside the ideal climax community.” This may be a cheap shot at ecologists, but it’s an instructive metaphor for historians.

Erasmus Darwin

me@danallosso.com — 2009-05-14T14:54:38-04:00

Among his designs were a canal lift, a speaking machine, a pantograph handwriting copier, the steering system used by modern automobiles, a steam turbine, a hydrogen/oxygen rocket engine, and a multi-mirror telescope. ...His two long poems, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of Plants (combined as The Botanic Garden) introduced mainstream readers to the sciences, especially plant biology, with hundreds of pages of essays and notes explaining the concepts in Darwin’s verse. ...The Temple of Nature was reviled by the Anti-Jacobin Review for its “total denial of any interference of a deity,” while the Gentleman’s Magazine called the poem “glaringly atheistical.” ...His fame in the new United States may be partly due to his friendship with Franklin and sympathy for revolutionary struggles in America and France. ... “In regard to religious matters,” he said, “there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of people from their infancy; which prevents their inquiry: credulity is made an indispensable virtue; to inquire or exert their reason in religious matters is denounced as sinful; and…is punished with more severe penances than moral crimes.”

UMass Library

me@danallosso.com — 2009-05-07T17:44:01-04:00

UMass doesn’t have ALL the Vital Records books, and it probably doesn’t make sense driving around to all the towns unless I have some inkling there’s a Darwin there. When I put up the Darwins page (maybe tonight), I should make a list of the towns, in addition to the map. ... As I was looking in the Vital Records today (page by page, because I’ve already done the easy ones that are online and can be searched), it seemed to me that if there were lots of really old-fashioned sounding biblical names, I was pretty certain NOT to find a Darwin. ... It might be interesting to try to correlate the Darwins with politics, demographics, Shaysite (as in Daniel Shays) towns, etc. Oh, that’s the view out the 14th floor window I was sitting next to, and the Fit got better than 40 mpg.

At Library with Soundtrack

me@danallosso.com — 2009-05-06T16:07:55-04:00

I’m sitting in the library (listening to the acoustic version of “Overkill” at the moment –thanks Scrubs!), rethinking the material I’ve gathered over the last couple of years, from the point of view of a PhD program. A lot of the stuff I thought was just going to end up as interesting background for historical fiction, may now be viable in papers, articles, and non-fiction. Long works like an adult history that incorporates Knowlton and Bradlaugh are suddenly back on the table, since I’ll have the platform and contacts needed to sell this type of work. ...“Yiddish Dance” or something like that by Del Castillo—I think this one’s just making it hard for me to think straight. ...And later this week, get down to the UMass library and get to work finding the rest of them in the Vital Records that aren’t online yet.

More people’s history of science

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-30T17:15:30-04:00

Conner’s a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York – how is it this school seems to specialize in biographers? I read a Mark Twain bio by Ron Powers a few months ago – also a John Jay faculty member. ...Robert Boyle later credited Drebbel with recognizing that the air we breathe is a mixture of various ‘airs,’ one of which is essential for sustaining life.” (252) According to wiki, Drebbel also invented a chicken incubator connected to a mercury thermometer (which he also invented), that automatically kept it at a constant temp. ...What if the elite scientists like the members of the Royal Society (founded 1660) had been more open to empiricism, and less dependent on a priori theorizing?

Reading in the old days

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-28T10:09:06-04:00

This is thought of as a “seminal text” in American book studies. 100 pages in, I can see why. Gilmore died in 1999, while working on a book called Republic of Knowledge. AAS has a typescript from 1998 called “The Regional Book Trade” that might be useful. ...The interesting thing about this study of books in the 18th century is that it’s about disenchantment and disillusionment. ... The “new mass culture centered on the printed and written word” that began during and just after the American Revolution has something to tell us about social change in the information age, and also maybe about the dream deferred.

before Darwin

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-23T10:51:40-04:00

The idea that evolution was “in the air” is supported: “it had recently made a considerable stir in France, with that infidel Lamarck and his party, and all the authority of Cuvier had been needed to put it down. ...“since the turn of the [19th] century…the theory has had no outstanding, serious, and determined popular apologist or representative…Among the informed few the idea is detested: a disgusting and exploded folly, kept alive only in atheistic, revolutionary France; it may also be a little feared.” ...“Francis Bowen, a philosophical conservative at war with Kant, Mill, Comte, and much besides, devoted some fifty-odd pages of his North American Review to a technical refutation of Vestiges, fortified by an exposure of its atheistic tendencies” (119-20). ...“Thomas Henry Huxley begins with a tart remark that Vestiges continues to appear although exploded, and continues enthusiastically in this key.” as always, Huxley is ambivalent about the impact on the public’s understanding of the issues. ...“Huxely…did not see it giving a substantial hint to Schopenhauer, or confirming Emerson’s intuition of nature, or intruding an argument or two into the contemptuous Spencer’s ‘Development Hypothesis,’ or gripping the attention of Lincoln as had only a half dozen books in his career.

Mushrooms!

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-22T08:10:36-04:00

Shiitake, Pipppino, Cinnamon Cap, and Stone Mushrooms...

Hall of Science

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-21T13:15:37-04:00

The announcements of his lectures suggest that he spoke on medical topics rather than his book on materialism. This suggests that he was already thinking about birth control in 1829 and 1830, and that the Hall of Science lectures were on topics thought beneficial to working people, and not just on the inaccuracy of the Bible or injustice of Christianity. It’s interesting that there was a secular movement in New York, Boston and Philadelphia that shows remarkable parallels to the movement in Britain. Bradlaugh’s main stage in London was at the old Owenite Hall of Science. The communication of ideas (and sometimes even movement of people) back and forth across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century is worth examining further...

Erasmus in Darwin books

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-21T11:57:47-04:00

Discussing Charles Darwin’s thought process around 1837, Quammen says “As a heading on the first page of [notebook] ‘B’ he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather” (27). He goes on to say that Erasmus was a boozy, gouty sire of bastards, and that “Zoonomia, mainly a medical treatise, included a section in which old Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own, suggesting that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,’ and that the common lineage possessed a capacity ‘of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity,’ with those improvements transmissible from parents to offspring.” ...It was the title of the book in which his grandfather Erasmus had set out his ideas on the subject of animal evolution sixty years before. ... But now, at twenty-eight, as he began to set down his thoughts on the subject of species and their origins, from the perspective of his five-year voyage, Paley was dismissed, and he proudly, secretly, claimed his intellectual inheritance.” ...Still others (Richard Darwin Keynes) suggest that Charles didn’t credit Erasmus, Lamarck, or anyone else because he thought the principle of development he was “proving” for the first time was actually so obvious as not to need acknowledgment.

2 books on the Vestiges

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-16T16:55:42-04:00

It almost seems that Charles Darwin was merely the figure who forced the scientific establishment (represented by the Royal Society) to consider a topic they’d been studiously avoiding ever since Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus published his Zoonomia in 1796! ...“Once again,” Millhauser says (is he referring to Erasmus Darwin?), “the public was informed, by a by a glib pseudo scientist without even Lamarck’s pretensions to authority, that the true Adam of the human race was a baboon” (5). ... And it has to do with the inevitable demise of a biblical creation story that no educated Englishman actually took seriously, but that nearly all believed should be upheld (as Plato’s Noble Lie) for the common people, especially in lieu of an alternative story that maintained the authority of the established church. ...He says “An early Victorian layman might still feel…that he had perceived a truth that the professionals had somehow managed to ignore or even to hush up, and that this might provide the principle of unification, the frank definition of the central tendency of science, for which the world was waiting” (8). This is an idea that has particular resonance for me at this point, not least in the political implications such a changed understanding of the world might have on regular people in the early 19th century.

Erasmus Darwins in Massachusetts

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-15T18:30:47-04:00

Erasmus Darwin never visited America, and although he was a political radical and a supporter of American independence (and critic of the Pitt government’s repressions in the 1790s), I’m surprised that he was so well-known in a remote western-Massachusetts hill-town like Ashfield. ... I also found 96 towns where there is no record of a child named “Erasmus” or “Darwin” in the Vital Records. (these two groups represent all the towns whose records I was able to find online) It’s possible that a few of the children named “Erasmus” may have been named for the fifteenth-century humanist, or for remote family members (close ones would have showed up in the records I was searching). ... Similarly, there is no record of “Darwin” being a common family name in these Massachusetts towns, and Charles Darwin’s only significant publication before 1849 was his The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. ...If people were going to be naming their children after a British scientist (obscure or famous), you’d expect them to live in cities, close to institutions of higher learning like Harvard, wouldn’t you?

Metahistory

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-14T18:14:27-04:00

I remember reading articles of White’s in historiography class (seems like a long time ago -- only 2 years!). He seemed to be the voice of reason, set against the irate ravings of Arthur Marwick. ...He raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative, how story forms and archetypes can function as interpretive prompts for the reader (and maybe for the historian). But then he goes off on a wild, ridiculous, nearly unreadable tangent for about 400 pages, before he concludes that since all knowledge is basically invalid, you can believe any type of history you want. ...I’ll have to look at them more closely, but it seems a shame that clear, plain-language writing frequently advocates reactionary politics, while radicals who have a legitimate case against the status quo often let themselves become lost in their rhetoric.

Pseudo-Science

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-13T15:18:29-04:00

“The term pseudo-science was introduced into the history of science by George Sarton and the other founders of the discipline, and it reflects their positivistic convitcion that the history of science is a narrative of the progressive victory of the physical, mathematical sciences over religious, metaphysical, and occult views of nature…In Comte’s account [in Cours de philosophie positive, 1830-42], the decisive epochal break separating the dark ages of religion and metaphysics from the Age of Reason and Enlightenment is the result of the Scientific Revolution and the consequent utilization of science by the intellectual and political elite to master nature and perfect society. ...“Recent scholarship showing the persistence of ancient traditions of esoteric religion and occult philosophy well into the modern epoch poses a fundamental challenge to these historiographical models—particularly when primary sources show that Bacon, Newton, and other founders of the modern age had a deep reverence for the truths hidden in the myths and symbols of the prisca theologia.” ...All of them have classical educations (this may be the main thing that distinguishes them from the “low mechanicks” who produced a lot of the technological innovation leading to new scientific theories, following Conner again), so they presumably believed in some sort of continuity in the “grand design.” ...The implications of their scientific discoveries (or systematizations of other people’s discoveries, if you go with Conner’s implication that the elite scientists’ role was mostly communicating the discoveries of technologists and trying to create over-arching, generalized natural philosophy out of them) were often scary; because they directly challenged the “truths” that formed the basis of early-modern society. ...These people might be useful for a little “Who’s Who in the History of Atheism” if I wanted to do such a thing…whether or not they’re atheists is a possible issue (but is it, really?)

People's History of Science

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-11T11:33:44-04:00

He’s definitely in the tradition of Zinn, who called it “a delightfully refreshing new look at the history of science” (I noticed on Amazon there’s a “people’s history of the world,” blurbed by Zinn, that might also be something for me to take a look at). ...He says the “imperialism of physics” really took off in the 20th century (especially with the Manhattan Project), and reminds us that “the appeal of neutrality [in “objective” academic science – see Haskell] operates in support of the status quo, which is underpinned by …assumptions of which the scientists themselves are often unaware.” ...One element where Conner’s account doesn’t seem to square with his claims is the repeated declarations of early scientists that they got their ideas from artisans and regular people. ... So I’m not sold on Conner’s claim that the problem is that “the history of science has been shaped not by historians of science but by scientists themselves.” ...Conner says social historians who present “bottom up” views have managed to broaden “the social context in which historic events have been understood,” but he warns that often they’ve failed to abandon “the point of view of the dominant social classes.”

Calomel

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-11T09:15:34-04:00

In a March 1828 letter on a case involving a woman with “Apoplexy,” the author says he prescribed a scruple (20 grains) of calomel for four days, until the patient’s “mouth became very painful, much swelled and inflamed from the calomel.” ... Another article quotes the City Physician of Boston, declaring that in a recent smallpox outbreak, “Calomel was given only a few times…but its administration, it was conceived, was followed by bad consequences, inasmuch as the ptyalism, peculiar to the disease, was very much increased, the breath more offensive, and the exhalations intolerable even to the patient himself.” ...In another case, a forty-year old man “to whom much mercury had been given, and pursued for a considerable time, in small doses, and even after profuse ptyalism had been established…His mouth and face swelled; he could not distinctly articulate for several months; his teeth fell out; and portions of his lower jaw, including the sockets of the teeth, came out. ...We then observed a very disagreeable fetor…At the time of dissolution, which happened on the 35th day of his sickness…the ulcer had spread to within an inch of the eye above, and was on a level with the base of the lower jaw…The affected parts had a jet black appearance, with an indescribably bad fetor.” ...Hubbard argues that Jackson didn’t say mercury had definitely been used in all his cases, and that where it was administered, “it had not produced its constitutional effects,” meaning it had purged, but not salivated the patients.

Golden Bough

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-10T09:42:28-04:00

Semicircular niches sunk in the walls and faced with columns formed a series of chapels…On the side of the lake the terrace rested on a mighty wall, over seven hundred feet long by thirty feet high, built in triangular buttresses…the temple itself was not large…solidly built of massive blocks of peperino, and adorned with Doric columns…cornices of marble and friezes of terra-cotta…enhanced by tiles of gilt bronze.” ...“In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. ...“the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs.” ...“According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch [that the priest was “defending” at the sacred oak] was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead” (11) (except, again, this happened at Avernus. ...I like the idea of pulling a scene from Frazer’s book, if I’m going to write a story that takes place partly in Victorian England, and deals with mythical characters.

Green adults?

me@danallosso.com — 2009-04-01T10:06:04-04:00

Steph and I have been helping Lucy get her Green Keene Teens group started, and as a result we’ve gotten fairly excited about some green ideas. We’ve been interested in this stuff for long time (I went to college for Ag. ...We got our winter 2009-2010 pellet fuel yesterday from pelletsales.com (you get a better deal if you buy it in the spring, and we have the space to store it). ... The two in their original shrinkwrap are a little tilted because the driver pushed them into the barn with the forklift. The third one (which he used to push the first two back) couldn’t quite make it, so I restacked it on a pallet from last season.

GKT Logo

me@danallosso.com — 2009-03-26T18:52:53-04:00

Made a new Green Keene Teens sticker for Lucy (using the logo my lovely bride Steph made), and labels for the GKT laundry soap. Looks like the soap may soon be seen on the shelves of 24 Carrots Farm Stand in Swanzey!

Retro-futurist Anticipations

me@danallosso.com — 2009-03-25T16:58:57-04:00

Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) (also built the Crystal Paris, Santiago rail station, etc) and also. ...If not for that, it may have prospered, and the French and British may have continued working on it, as well as Count Zeppelin. ...In 1896, “Public Opinion” reprints an American military article on “The Influence of the Air-Ship on War.” ...For my purposes, this might be boiled down to basically, Bismarck and the isolation of France from GB. The 3rd Republic , probably some good things in the Boulanger and Dreyfus crises (and) – this would be a good way to incorporate CB, Thiers, the Paris Commune, Zola, and even to flash back to Disraeli, Rothschild, and Paine v.

Turn of the Century Tech

me@danallosso.com — 2009-03-24T18:08:34-04:00

But in general, technological improvement changed telegraphy from a high-skill to a low-skill job. ...A couple more books on Tesla (and also on Edison, Westinghouse, Steinmetz, etc.) came in today, so there’s info to process… ...In the air, the Davidson Aeroplane, the Lebaudy airship (and a wiki) and the Antionette Co. ... The Wright Bros first flight and Alberto Santos Dumont (Brazilian airship maker and first European flight), and, and , and, and a wiki. ...Finally, a Renault racer, an Oldsmobile Van, a Steam Motorcycle, and Sir Marcus Samuel Bart., who started Royal Dutch Shell.

Scientists

me@danallosso.com — 2009-03-20T16:05:27-04:00

The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” ... He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” ... (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. ...The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). ... It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit.

Tesla

me@danallosso.com — 2009-03-19T19:45:16-04:00

Nikola Tesla could no more have said why he favored numbers divisible by three than why he had a morbid fear of germs or, for that matter, why he was beset by any of the multitude of other obsessions tht plagued his life.” ...But he did “at one period maintain an apartment at the luxurious Hotel Marguery on the west side of Park Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets at the same time that his residence was at another hotel; and he once told Kenneth Swezey that he used it for meeting ‘special’ friends and acquaintances.” ...He boasted to reporters that he had a pocket-sized oscillator that he could use to destroy the Empire State Building or Brooklyn Bridge (116, the ESB was built in 1939 – like many of Cheney’s statements, these lack a specific time and place. ...Cheney later says Tesla’s 1901 patents “in which he describes the supercooling of conductors to appreciably lower their resistance…is yet another instance in which his pioneer work has gone unacknowledged—possibly because it might open a door for the U.S. ...A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one’s pocket may then be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news or such special messages as may be intended for it.

Bradlaugh and Anthropology

me@danallosso.com — 2009-03-18T14:46:39-04:00

Significant, because he isn’t just debating churchmen or attacking the Bible (this is the picture his rivals wanted to paint of him; and even the sympathetic reader might fall into this belief, given the huge volume of writing and speaking CB did on anti-religious topics). ...As a result, it’s interesting to look at the type of information that was making its way into the general public’s understanding of contemporary science (both from the pulpit of the Hall of Science, and in the form of 2-penny reprints of CB’s talks). CB begins the first of his three talks with a quote from Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature: “The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place man occupies in nature and of his relation to the universe of things.” ...Discussing the controversy over single or multiple origins, he notes that “polygenists” like Louis Agassiz, Gliddon and Nott, “having in view the very few thousand years then claimed by the Churches for man’s existence on earth, contended that the ordinarily accepted time was insufficient for the development of known diversities of type…But two features have now to be considered which were then excluded: one, the admittedly huge period of time man has inhabited the earth; the other, the light resulting from the untiring labors of Darwin in the path opened out by Lamarck and somewhat hesitatingly trodden by Wallace.” In addition to being the field that “more than any other science finds itself in conflict with religious and political institutions,” anthropology in CB’s mind is the best place to look for moral answers.

blah blah Middle Class blah blah

me@danallosso.com — 2009-02-22T17:06:05-05:00

So one of the big elements of the last presidential election was the idea that the government needed to focus a little more on the “Middle Class” rather than just rewarding the administration’s rich friends. Since the election, one of the most positive things I’ve seen is the huge amount of web-based communication the new administration has started doing (or has committed to do) about its activities and their results. ...It isn't the split between the rich and the middle class, who often see eye to eye (as an example, the recent CNBC rant about not wanting to help fix the housing crisis). ...But I think deep down they know this isn't true, and at some point they're going to have to deal with the fact that they not talking to working people. Because the Repubs are going back to race-bating, using country and now hip-hop music to try to fool working-class people into thinking that just because the Dems can't see them, the Repubs are the party of the workers.

Wind in NH!

me@danallosso.com — 2009-02-15T20:43:29-05:00

On the way to watch the horse skijoring at the 93rd annual Newport NH winter festival (longest-running winter fest in the US), we happened upon these really cool windmills in Lempster, NH. Went online to find out what’s up, and I really couldn’t find out a lot of good information, because the web was swamped with BS from a group that calls itself the “Industrial Wind Action Group.” Apparently these folks are up in arms at the idea that America is going to pollute its environment with wind energy stations. ...Their website says “Industrial Wind Action Group seeks to promote knowledge and raise awareness of the risks and damaging environmental impacts of industrial wind energy development. ...When you think about the number of people we’ve gotten used to dying for the coal power industry, it makes the whining of the anti-wind folks sound a little weak, doesn’t it?

Knowlton in Ashfield, 1833

me@danallosso.com — 2009-01-26T10:44:58-05:00

One of the things that interests me about the people I’m studying in the early 19th century, is their generally high level of literacy and understanding of what’s going on in the world, in spite of the remoteness of places like Ashfield. ...“There are no changes, no events, in a word, no effects without causes, and one effect as necessarily follows its cause as another, whether it occur within a man’s head or without. ... To have a mind to think so and so, is but to have thoughts and ideas that you will think so and so,—every one of which thoughts or ideas must and does have its cause; which cause, whatever it may be, is but the effect of a prior cause, and this, again, the effect of a still prior cause, and so on throughout the eternal chain of events.” “All those changes within a man’s head, called intellectual operations, such as remembering, judging, belief, &c. consist entirely of sensorial actions, called thoughts or ideas, which follow one after another, and every one of which has its cause.” (text of the speech as reported by Knowlton here) ...He subtly but unmistakably suggests that those who want to judge people by their beliefs rather than their actions (the minister and his friends) choose this because they know their actions will not stand close scrutiny.

Hawley

me@danallosso.com — 2009-01-24T14:02:15-05:00

Hawley, Massachusetts is right next to Ashfield. Charles Knowlton lived here 1824-7. He practiced medicine in Hawley and the neighboring towns, which means he rode his horse over this countryside, to get to his patients’ houses. Scenic, but it was probably pretty slow going in the winter.

Monadnock

me@danallosso.com — 2009-01-22T14:31:04-05:00

The mountain, and the rest of the hills around it, look great in the winter. And all year round, really. Contour is everything.

Intellectual Origins

me@danallosso.com — 2009-01-15T14:01:50-05:00

He asks whether something more should be added to Beard’s economic analysis, to explain why, although Hamilton and Madison’s economic ideas were “practically identical,” Madison, “the great antiparty philosopher of the Constitutional Convention, went into opposition and helped organize a highly effective party with Jefferson—supposedly Hamilton’s direct antithesis in economic doctrine”? ...The two missing pieces of Adair’s puzzle seem to repeatedly be: how did regular people react to all this classically-inspired politics, and how accurately did the founders really understand their situation, before they fit it to the models written by the masters two millennia earlier? ...Adams’ use of Thucydides account of the sedition at Corcyra in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States is shown to be not only “the most tenuous” of analogies (65), but also to miss the point that Shays and his rebels were behaving symbolically rather than trying to take over the State of Massachusetts. ...He knew well that his favorite form [monarchy] was inadmissible, unless as the result of a civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction, that the kind of government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country could be established in no other way. (77) (from) ...(120) Madison saw past this Hobbesian error after long review of his classics, Adair says, and “challenged the basic postulate upon which the ancient mixed government depended for its justification; and in so doing he exploded the justification for a permanent will in the community to keep the immutable strife of the few and the many within bounds.”

The American Revolution of 1800

me@danallosso.com — 2008-12-29T13:56:20-05:00

It begins well, and I was impressed enough after 30 pages to want a copy of this for my library (which is saying something, as I’ve pared that down to about 30 books). ...(11) There’s a lot of space to examine the real intentions of the diverse group that united to produce the revolution, and no reason to suppose that Jefferson’s interpretation of its “meaning” is the true or legitimate one. ...(21) It’s interesting that he refuses to throw Adams under the bus; but he needs to sustain that argument that the original revolution lived on in the minds of the founders, so how could Adams betray it? ...Two parties each trying to completely wipe out the other, a candidate with a revolutionary goal which he dissembles in order to build a mass movement and avoid alarming his opponents, charges by ideological purists that “he’s not going far enough.” Sisson opens some space around (what he claims is) the standard interpretation and stirs things up, as does Jefferson’s observation that the same parties have always existed.

New Tech Gripes

me@danallosso.com — 2009-01-21T23:25:11-05:00

Not the type of thing you’d stumble over, even if you were a certified UNIX hacker and C programmer with 20 years experience. ... Would’ve saved me a couple hours of frustration - and I can’t be the only one... ...Sure, you get herded into the dot Mac world, and woe betide you if you want to do things your own way. ... If iWeb could’ve synchronized with a third-party ISP, rather than forcing me to publish the whole site every time and ftp it to the server, I’d probably never have switched. Cuz I’ve got to say, even after all the frustration getting it going; once I changed a couple things on the site and it uploaded only the changes in a second or two --- THAT was COOL!

Hahvud

me@danallosso.com — 2009-01-20T23:08:46-05:00

The reading room I was in was called Holmes Hall, which I assume is for Oliver Wendell Holmes, but I didn’t ask. ...There was a copyright date for the first edition of the Fruits of Philosophy in Rhode Island, which supports the story that Knowlton spent some time there in 1831. ... It’s a lot easier, now that I can find all the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal articles on Google Books. ...One interesting connection, that Laura Lovett at UMass suggested to me last fall, is that Himes was researching connections between the birth control movement and eugenics. I don’t think it went back to the 1830s, but the utopians like Owen and Wright may have contributed ideas to the early eugenicists, even if they weren’t thinking along those lines themselves.