Week 1
01/23/2010 09:12
I read a couple of anthologies over the last several days. Didn’t need to read everything in them, but I found several really good articles. It’s helpful, the way articles make the author distill it down into the point s/he thinks most important. Pointed me to a couple of historians I hadn’t known before. 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 really don’t like the articles that claim a lot without evidence -- even if the author has already been over that ground in a book. It just seems too arbitrary. I’ll have to keep that in mind when I write. Even for the general public -- I think they need to see (and maybe be reminded) that authorial claims need to be supported by data and interpretation.
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. This week, the “Jeffersonian agrarian” myth is especially prominent. 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). The Davis anthology had clues about people in the Revolution and early Republic I should look into. Barron’s classic study of those who stayed behind is a reminder to me about setting and characters. And the contrast between Kulikoff and Taylor in Young was instructive. I’m going to read them both.
