dan's rss feed

Economic factoids

me@danallosso.com — 2012-04-10T13:07:54-04:00

Morgan Housel from the Motley Fool investment website recently made a list of fifty factoids about the economy that he says blow his mind. ... I usually don’t read investment opinions, because it doesn’t seem to me like anyone at Zacks or Seeking Alpha or the Fool is right more than half the time on average. ...According to economist Tyler Cowen, "Thirty years ago, college graduates made 40 percent more than high school graduates, but now the gap is about 83 percent." ...For the first time since 1949, the U.S. is now a net exporter of fuel products like gasoline and diesel. ...Just five companies, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Google, and Pfizer, now hold nearly one-quarter of all corporate cash, equal to more than a quarter-trillion dollars.

Some thoughts about Food

me@danallosso.com — 2012-04-06T09:49:22-04:00

Not one of the political appointees at the top of the heap, doing the bidding of agribusiness – but a real scientist who probably got into it because he cares a bit about both science and food. ...In contrast, I was really disappointed with the Boing Boing science editor’s approach to the issue last week, which was basically that “Given the massive amounts of energy it takes to raise a cow, I'd rather have us use all the cow, rather than waste the gross parts. ...The point is, if we’re paying for hamburger and it’s always been made in a particular way, out of a particular type of raw material, then not telling us you’ve changed the formula is a bit of a problem. ...Bottom line, it amounts to an admission by Monsanto: “Yes, we know our products are really bad for you and that if given a choice, you would avoid them. ...Finally, as if to prove that corporate arrogance isn’t limited to Monsanto, some idiots at a Chicken Shack fast food company attacked a regular guy over his “Eat More Kale” t-shirts.

Wind in Minnesota

me@danallosso.com — 2012-04-02T20:36:05-04:00

Looks like there’s wind in Minnesota too! Click on the map, to see the current wind conditions in the continental US, in motion! By Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, who have done loads of interesting data visualization - and thanks to Boing Boing for pointing it out. It’s cool and pretty. And it gets you thinking about where we might want to put windmills…

Solar in Minnesota

me@danallosso.com — 2012-03-31T09:48:41-04:00

ie=UTF8&tag=whatsdanreadt-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0470876255">

Real Time

me@danallosso.com — 2012-03-17T09:41:56-04:00

In a sense, maybe this is how authors worked in the days when they were doing the final edits on one manuscript while writing the next, proposing the one after that, and looking for the projects after those. ...The one thing that has really struck me, as I’ve been getting down to writing one project that I’ve been thinking about for a couple years, is how wasteful it is to go over the same ground again and again simply because I didn’t complete the job earlier. ...It’s good that I’ve been thinking about this project as long as I have been, and it will probably be a better end product because of it. ...But now that it’s writing time, I need to go back over all this material, rediscovering the paths I followed that led me to these records and relearning how they all fit together. ...I’m writing little abstracts and synopses now, so when the time comes I’ll understand how it all fits together and where each record fits in the story.

Self-publishing Histories

me@danallosso.com — 2012-03-07T08:37:40-05:00

Nearly all the “Centennial” histories on display or for sale at small-town historical societies were written by local people, mostly without formal literary or historical training, and published in small lots by local printers or specialist publishers. ... Charles Knowlton, for example, self-published his 500-page tome Elements of Modern Materialism using a small printer in Adams, Massachusetts, in 1828 (he bound the volumes in leather and stamped the spines with gilt ink himself), and his infamous birth control book, The Fruits of Philosophy was also produced at Knowlton’s own expense and sold by Knowlton out of his saddle-bags to his patients, until Abner Kneeland began advertising an expanded second edition in The Boston Investigator in 1833. ...But there are many more stories at these repositories than made it into those old histories, and there are often local historians who work for years at these societies, digging up material on particular families, or on political and social movements that interest them. ...There’s some truth to this argument, but I think it was much more valid when the book trade was big, profitable for small publishers, and the business was widely distributed among thousands of firms. ...If you know what you want to say, if you’re comfortable with the technical end of putting a book together (I like to remind myself that Knowlton and many of the people who published books in the past didn’t have a professional editor, either), and especially if you know who will want the book and how to reach them, self-publishing might be something to consider.

Course materials online

me@danallosso.com — 2012-02-02T18:54:35-05:00

I put my course I’m teaching this semester (a writing-intensive Honors version of the US History survey) online at http://www.history-punk.com/DUSH/USHist.html. I dress up a bit to teach it -- bow ties are cool!

More on PIPA/SOPA

me@danallosso.com — 2012-01-31T11:56:01-05:00

However, I think it would be very bad policy to allow car dealers to be shut down merely on the accusation by a car manufacturer or a competing dealer that they had done wrong. ... This is an issue that doesn't have an immediate analog in the bricks and mortar world, but you might describe it as prosecuting anyone who ever bought a car from the hypothetical dealer in your example. ...I hope our other elected officials can follow your example and raise this dialog to a level that will avoid the oversimplification that sometimes attends political debate in an election year. ...Thank you for contacting me regarding the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP; S. 968) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA; H.R. ...The input that I received from thousands of New Hampshire citizens highlighted the need to address concerns regarding Congress' legislative efforts to combat online piracy and copyright infringement.

Back to work

me@danallosso.com — 2012-01-27T20:06:27-05:00

I started the first lecture with the migration of the last batch of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa about 80,000 years ago, and their descendants’ subsequent migration from the area north of the Black Sea westward to Europe and eastward to Beringia and ultimately North America. I think the most interesting thing that’s come out of recent genetic revisionist prehistory is the idea that the Europeans and the Americans came from the same ancestral population about 30,000 years ago. So all the differences we see between the Europeans and “Indians” after they reconnect in the Caribbean in 1492 are based on the changes these people go through while they’re separated. ...And my proposal for the Historical Society’s conference in late May was accepted, so I’ll need to finish my biography of Knowlton in the next couple of months, too. The writing schedule I’ll be keeping may cut down a bit on my blogging, but by the end of this semester I should have some projects completed!

My letter to my Rep & Senators

me@danallosso.com — 2012-01-18T08:29:25-05:00

The internet has evolved rapidly and in unexpected ways over the years, precisely because it has been relatively unhindered by top-down control. PIPA and SOPA are ill-conceived bills that will not only FAIL to stop the types of offshore abuses they are ostensibly designed to address, but they will stifle the free exchange of ideas and rapid evolution that the web has been all about. Imagine if Soviet central planners of the 1970s had gained control of the internet. ...Freedom of speech is more important than an occasional copyright dispute in which a billionaire somewhere feels he's been robbed by some penniless high-school blogger. The internet is the modern-day equivalent of the presses that people like Thomas Paine published their pamphlets on in the 1770s.

Stop the idiots

me@danallosso.com — 2012-01-17T20:02:00-05:00

I suppose if they break the internet we’ll find another way. But why let them?

Found Images

me@danallosso.com — 2012-01-12T11:00:04-05:00

(null)

Food for thought

me@danallosso.com — 2012-01-04T18:08:24-05:00

“I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.” Gibson, William (2012-01-03). Distrust That Particular Flavor (Kindle Locations 302-303). Penguin Group.

I've seen his act, now I've read his book!

me@danallosso.com — 2012-01-02T18:16:39-05:00

ie=UTF8&tag=whatsdanreadt-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004G8QTNE">“It’s an unfashionable belief in the atheist community, but truth just needs to be stated; it doesn’t have to be hyped. “If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. ... If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

The Doctor's advice to writers

me@danallosso.com — 2011-12-28T18:13:09-05:00

The longer version, which they used in the commercial for the sixth season of Doctor Who, went like this: “All of time and space, everything that ever happened, or ever will…where do you want to start? ...That’s what it’s all about, it finally occurred to me, when I’m writing. This is the question the reader has every time she opens a book: where are you taking me? It can be anything that ever happened (history), or ever will (fiction).

end of another semester

me@danallosso.com — 2011-12-19T17:06:26-05:00

I’ll be teaching the first half of the US History survey, which traditionally covers the period from the beginning of the British colonies to the end of the Civil War (or sometimes the end of Reconstruction, depending on when you think Reconstruction ended). The course fills a general education requirement, and the specific class I’ll be teaching will be an Honors section for UMass’s Commonwealth Honors College. ... I’m lucky to be getting this opportunity, and since it may be my only chance to ever teach a class at a place like UMass, I plan to make the most of it. ...Like the way Plato ranted about the growth of literacy, and how it was going to make people stupid because they’d no longer have to remember stuff. This was recounted in James Gleick’s The Information, and just goes to show that the archetype of the tools I mentioned down below is very old. and also that it can easily be take to ridiculous extremes.

Sandman on Fire

me@danallosso.com — 2011-12-12T13:41:02-05:00

I’m finally getting around to reading all the Sandman graphic novels, on the Kindle Fire. ... If only the Kindle Mac application would display the pages…but I assume they’ll get around to that soon. ...And they are GONE,” says Morpheus in the second chapter of Preludes and Nocturnes. ...Yeah, the Kindle Fire may also be an unnecessary tool that adds little to the content. ... Actually, I suspect that there are ways to use the Kindle that haven’t been done quite yet (but I’m working on it), that will add to the content...

Trees and books

me@danallosso.com — 2011-12-10T19:24:41-05:00

After getting a solstice tree this morning, I made a list of the books I’ve read over the last couple of years that I’ve written something about. It finally occurred to me that leaving them buried in the archives of my reading blog isn’t helpful -- there are a lot of them and I can’t even find them myself when I need them! There’s also a new page called Dan’s index of books that has a brief summary of each book.

Occupy Student Debt?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-11-22T10:50:15-05:00

On the website’s homepage (but nowhere else) there’s a link to a disclaimer that specifies that this is a “nonbinding pledge of refusal, which is not a call to immediate default,” and that under the current “reprehensible laws, which this campaign aims to change, defaulting on debt obligations may risk your (and co-signor’s) credit rating and history, and may cause your assets to be seized.” ...There’s also a “Faculty Pledge of Support,” in which professors can state that they “can no longer acquiesce to the ruinous impact on our students of the surging cost of higher education.” ...Well actually, it’s the seriousness of the issue that makes me so frustrated about the approach the Occupy campaign is taking, which I think makes it seem like a bunch of privileged kids and their professors whining. ...The grad student from a wealthy family who’s pursuing an esoteric topic of interest to ten people on the planet just as much as the GI who’s just done three tours and had a leg blown off? ...There’s one other principle, that I don’t object to: “Private and for-profit colleges and universities, which are largely financed through student debt, should open their books.”

New UC Davis recruiting poster

me@danallosso.com — 2011-11-21T18:04:07-05:00

Would you send your kid to this college? Photo:Brian Nguyen/The Aggie.

Old and new maps

me@danallosso.com — 2011-11-11T10:22:50-05:00

Maps! I was putting some maps on a page of my story, and I happened upon this cool website that lets you place old maps on top of Google maps, to see where things were. This will come in handy as I continue this project, and I can think of all kinds of other cool uses for it. You can adjust the opacity of the overlay -- click on the little map to go to the site and try it. Very cool stuff!

London Radicals

me@danallosso.com — 2011-09-22T10:21:23-04:00

I’ve been looking over a lot of information I’ve accumulated over the last couple of years, about British radical Charles Bradlaugh. When CB was thrown out of his house onto the streets of East London at age 16, for admitting he was an atheist, he found shelter for a while with the Eliza Sharples Carlile, the widow of radical freethinker Richard Carlile, and her three children. ...I’ll probably have more to say about them later -- in the meantime, here are a couple of portraits from the Bradlaugh papers. ...Yes, CB kept a portrait of Hypatia, and it survived his death 50 years after he was in love with her on Warner Street in East London. So yeah, maybe there’s more to that story than his daughter (whom he named Hypatia and who wrote a 2-volume biography of CB) wanted to tell…

Online Education and Apple

me@danallosso.com — 2011-09-19T10:19:30-04:00

AND, I had an external drive fail and found out that (despite it being in the manual) Apple’s Time Machine did not back up my files. ... Add to that I had to BUY Keynote today for my Air, even though I HAVE it on my iMac at school…these guys have deliberately hosed everything up so they can SEEM to be offering a solution. ...What’s even more impressive is that they’ve had more than 300 million in the last year alone — a testament to the growing popularity of the service. ... Schools contributing to the program range from big to small and include some of the world’s most prestigious institutions like Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, University of Melbourne and University of Tokyo. Open University and Stanford University top the list of most popular sources for iTunes U users, with each registering over 30 million downloads. iTunes U is available in 123 countries, with 30% of traffic reportedly coming from iOS devices.

One last rant about the academy

me@danallosso.com — 2011-09-08T10:18:47-04:00

But maybe it IS evidence that we don’t live in the rich, happy, clueless world of high empire, when there’s just so much FAT on the beast that everybody can grab as much as they can carry without giving back. It’s as if some academics believe they can’t be accountable to the rabble (which in their minds includes administrators) because “they don’t understand the true nature and significance of my very important work.” Well, there are plenty of other fields like medicine and nuclear physics, where the people at work in them can’t necessarily explain what they’re doing on any given day to the people they meet in the grocery store aisles. ...It should be possible for a historian to say “my work, even though it’s on a vague and remote topic like Byzantine textiles, contributes to the overall understanding of change and development that has brought about the modern world. ...Do some people really prefer one over the other, and find themselves forced by the system to do both, when they’d really like to concentrate on what excites them?

Sunrise in Maine

me@danallosso.com — 2011-08-27T10:18:11-04:00

(null)

Kepler was not a creationist!

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-26T10:16:20-04:00

You hear about the big bang and the billions of years…” and then he goes on to say how his mission is to show how his god just made it look that way. ...And Kepler of course was a Creation Scientist, and that’s something I didn’t learn about when I was in school but we’re gonna make sure people get that information here, that Kepler was a devout Christian and started from the Bible.” ...In 1610, Kepler heard of Galileo’s discoveries and his trouble with the Inquisition, and published two books confirming Galileo’s telescope observations, which were a great support to Galileo, since by this time Kepler was Imperial Mathematician to Emperor Rudolph II. ...While it’s reasonable to suggest that Kepler’s willingness to challenge Biblical accuracy owes something to his religion, since he was living during the Protestant Reformation, the real lesson here is that Kepler was a man of his times who managed to make a scientific discovery that transcended his times. ... In 1613 Kepler published another book analyzing the Bible and proving that based on its own internal chronology, Jesus could not have been born when the church said, but instead must have been born in 4BC.

How fast is it melting?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-22T10:15:27-04:00

This just in, and it’s not from some Al Gore sponsored lefty think-tank. ...Our best assessment will probably be from precise measurements of changes of the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which can be monitored via measurements of Earth's gravitational field by satellites. Figure 2 shows that both Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are now losing mass at significant rates, as much as a few hundred cubic kilometers per year. We suggest that mass loss from disintegrating ice sheets probably can be approximated better by exponential mass loss than by linear mass loss. If either ice sheet were to lose mass at a rate with doubling time of 10 years or less, multi-meter sea level rise would occur this century.

Knowledge, Memory, Identity

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-16T10:14:36-04:00

id=k6paAAAAMAAJ&pg=PP8&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U1zZ4vpEenTymLP4kr_6f5L_n65CQ&ci=218%2C193%2C653%2C1064&edge=0"/>This week Jonathan Rees asks “Why take history classes when you can Google anything?” ...According to the study Carr is responding to, test subjects were more likely to remember the location of information rather than the information itself, if they believed they would be able to access that info freely on the web. ... But you really don’t sense that difference, until you’re dropped in the middle of a South American city, and need to communicate with the locals to get your next meal. ...The first one outlines this “Google Effect on Memory,” and when I read it I thought of the stories I’d once heard about bards who could recite epic stories from memory. ... But it was a gain for knowledge overall, because now we don’t have to spend our lives “becoming” one text, like the characters in Fahrenheit 451.

California's Disney History Thanks to my Dad for sending this clipping from the Sacramento Bee editorial page. California was long seen as the "antidote" to Texas' reactionary textbook adoption board. It was responsible for nearly as much purchasing as the Texas board, an it leaned the other way. But two wrongs don't make a right. I think I agree with Lehrer: mandating that diverse groups are "accurately portrayed" and then saying those portrayals "must not reflect adversely" on anyone is absurd. And it certainly shouldn't go by the name of history. I don't completely agree with Lehrer's argument against what he calls history as therapy (and quoting Schlesinger Jr. opens a pretty big can of worms). Of course, I wouldn't call it therapy. I'd call it setting the ethnocentric record straight, and I'd say that's an important role of history. "Revisionist" isn't a dirty word. If we're not revising our histories, we're not learning anything. The question Lincoln didn't ask in the passage quoted, although I suspect he was aware of it, was: Whose history? Whose truth?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-13T10:13:38-04:00

It was responsible for nearly as much purchasing as the Texas board, an it leaned the other way. ... I think I agree with Lehrer: mandating that diverse groups are "accurately portrayed" and then saying those portrayals "must not reflect adversely" on anyone is absurd. ...I don't completely agree with Lehrer's argument against what he calls history as therapy (and quoting Schlesinger Jr. opens a pretty big can of worms). ... I'd call it setting the ethnocentric record straight, and I'd say that's an important role of history. ...The question Lincoln didn't ask in the passage quoted, although I suspect he was aware of it, was: Whose history?

Any questions?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-11T10:12:43-04:00

(null)

New online story

me@danallosso.com — 2011-11-07T07:35:32-05:00

I'm putting some of the story material I'm working on up on this site. There's an experimental map of the story here, and the linear narrative begins here. Still working out how it all fits together, and how to link things, but I'm excited about the html possibilities…

Bookshelf

me@danallosso.com — 2011-11-02T11:55:34-04:00

I'm moving my home office today, which means I'm transporting all my books from one room to another, and shelving them. This always involves decisions about whether I really want to continue owning a copy of this or that. So I thought it might be interesting to jot down what I choose to keep and what I toss -- it'll be interesting to me at least, deciding whether to keep a bunch of these books I read for my comprehensive exams. There are a pile of books in addition to these, that I haven't looked at yet, so I don't know if I'll be keeping them. But I should really get back to reading more regularly; so hopefully I can start by working my way through those.

Back to work

me@danallosso.com — 2011-10-12T09:22:55-04:00

There will probably always be Harvards and Stanfords, it's hard to imagine what types of forces would make them unattractive to the people they've always attracted. ...I've been thinking about this for a while, both from the student's perspective, and from the perspective of someone getting a PhD, which qualifies me to teach undergraduates and grad students. I've sent several posts on the subject over to THS (as you can see, from the list of my recent posts), but I think people are getting tired of reading about this. ... The post I just sent over is also going to appear in the UMass grad student paper -- maybe it will generate more interest in that venue. ...I cancelled a paper I was going to give at a conference in Boston this winter -- there's no point doing conferences and writing for journals, because there are no jobs for me in the academy.

Thomas Paine memorialized

me@danallosso.com — 2011-09-27T13:00:51-04:00

I took this off a note dated 1899, from somebody (I couldn't read the signature) donating a copy of the very fist issue of the paper, to the Investigator's archive. ...The Investigator was apparently located in the Paine Memorial Building in Boston, which (according to King's Handbook of Boston, 1889) was "on Appleton Street, between Tremont and Berkeley Streets. ... This entry is followed by: "Investigator Hall, in the Paine Memorial Building, has a seating capacity of 600." ...These events are mentioned gloatingly by Joseph Cook (1838-1901), as a preface to one of his Tremont Temple prayer meetings titled "The First Cause as Personal." Cook is known for his attempts to reconcile science with faith, and apparently Paine was an easy target for ridicule -- the transcript begins, "Thomas Paine has recently been sold at auction in Boston.

See ya, Green Keene Teens!

me@danallosso.com — 2011-09-20T13:11:54-04:00

Lucy wrote a final installment to the Green Keene Teens blog today, and I posted it on the site. Lost the original formatting, which I liked a lot. But I got the post up, and a link to the story the local Coop people wrote about GKT giving all their accumulated money to the Coop. They also donated a couple of cases of Greenciles recycled pencils to Keene High School. GKT was a pretty cool club.

Ready for School?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-09-02T13:10:44-04:00

I put up a couple more short highlights videos for the Handbook chapters (also posted them to YouTube). Also sent a blog post to THS about the “technoskeptics” and their arguments against online education. I think they’re taking a much too narrow view, and they’re focusing too much on the suppliers (themselves, and the jeopardy their jobs are in because of “for-profit” online schools) rather than on the consumers, the students. It’s almost as if these bloggers are looking back wistfully at some imagined golden age of academia. It does no good to regret we don’t live in a Dead Poets Society world of teaching.

And writing videos!

me@danallosso.com — 2011-08-30T13:09:56-04:00

Chapter 1 (also on YouTube) Chapter 1 extra: On Arguments (also on YouTube)

Writing Handbook is ready!

me@danallosso.com — 2011-08-25T13:09:12-04:00

A Short Handbook for writing essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences ...A practical, step-by-step guide to writing college-level essays. ...D. is a master teacher of language and literature, with over 40 years experience teaching high school students and undergraduates. His original version of this book has been in continuous use at a major West-Coast university for the past twenty years. ...He is the author of an award-winning young adult novel, Outside the Box, and is currently teaching undergrads at an East-Coast university while completing his dissertation and working on several fiction and non-fiction projects.

Outside the Box gets Kindled!

me@danallosso.com — 2011-08-15T14:04:12-04:00

Outside the Box, my young adult novel, is now available as a Kindle Book on Amazon. I was thinking of publishing it in some other ebook formats, but they don’t look as good. ...I’m really impressed with Amazon’s publishing services. I’ll be writing more about that in the next few days, as I prepare A Short Handbook for writing essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences for publication. Stay tuned…it should be shipping by the end of next week.

Mr. Wells, meet Mr. Fargo, 1859

me@danallosso.com — 2011-08-05T17:24:36-04:00

(null)

what's Dan up to?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-08-04T14:19:46-04:00

A little quiet, because I’ve been pushing pretty hard to get through transcribing the rest of my primary sources for the dissertation. I’m trying to get them all done in the next couple of weeks, and simultaneously build a chronological outline of them. So from there, it should be a lot easier to connect the dots, and put things into some reasonable order. ...Tomorrow’s Friday, so I ought to be finishing up another chapter of Environmental History. It’s getting about time I started trying to get this in front of some high school and home school teachers, too.

Water, water everywhere

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-25T11:15:42-04:00

It holds 140 trillion times more water than all the oceans on earth, This water is 12 billion light years away, though, so it’s not going to help us solve our drinking-water issues here at home. The reason this discovery is remarkable, is because it shows in a very graphic way, that there’s a lot of water in the universe, and there always has been. The quasar this water vapor surrounds is really far away, so water isn’t a local, special condition of our immediate astronomical neighborhood. And since the microwave emissions of this quasar took 12 billion years to cross space and get to us, they left their source when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old. ...But for the rest of us, I think it’s interesting that the most basic ingredient of our type of life is out there, all over the place.

Don't Drink Keene Water

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-21T14:07:16-04:00

On the third page, we learn that Keene’s water contains the microbial parasite Cryptosporidium, which causes nausea, abdominal cramps, and diarrhea that “most healthy individuals can overcome…within a few weeks. ... The report does not say what the effects of repeated exposure are on healthy people, but I’d imagine they might include more or less chronic nausea, cramps, and diarrhea. ...Let me get this straight: you don’t filter the water, in source fields that are historically at high risk of contamination, and that interferes with disinfection. ...According to the pamphlet and other sources (here and here), these compounds are known to “lead to adverse health effects, liver or kidney problems, or nervous system effects, and may lead to an increased risk of cancer.” ...The steps Keene is taking to resolve these problems with its water supply, according to the pamphlet, amount to just this: “The settings on the discharge valve of each filter will be modified to restrict the backwash discharge rate of flow, or the programming will be changed to result in the discharged water being directed to the waste tank instead of the clearwell.

New American Environmental History Chapter posted

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-20T14:17:59-04:00

I posted another new chapter of American Environmental History today. ...One other person who got the C19 list message asked about the possibility of an online-only option for the journals. The rest of the people on the mailing list seemed to think that if enough of the “right people” make a stink about the defunding of the Washington State journals, that the administration will back down and everything can get back to the status quo ante. Seems to me, that’s just doing the same old thing, and expecting different results. ... My next THS post is about solutions --- I should probably make it a point to ignore all this brass-polishing on the Titanic from now on, and just focus on change.

New Chapter, new blog posts

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-18T14:00:32-04:00

Today I put up a new chapter of my online American Environmental History course. It’s Chapter One, American Environmental Prehistory, which in about 14 minutes covers ice ages and the arrival of the original native Americans. ...I also have a piece on The Historical Society’s blog today, about the economics of academic journals. Later this week, there should be another post on THS about online education. ...My thoughts about history are now mostly going up on my new blog at history-punk.com, so if you’ve been wondering what’s happened to Regular People or Truth Squad posts, please look there.

Where's the Beach?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-15T12:04:47-04:00

There were some really startling images of the changes in mountain glaciers (which are doomed, and this will be a nightmare when it happens, because a third of the world's people depend on glaciers for drinking water) and also of Greenland meltwater and glacial calving. On the companion website, there are a series of illustrations of what the coastlines would look like in a couple of places, if sea levels rose 17 feet (which is what they expect if Greenland's ice all melts) or 170 feet (if all ice in Antarctica melted). And also what would happen if sea levels fell 400 feet — corresponding to the approximate sea level during the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago. ... That's my personal bet, based on the melting of some of the Greenland ice and the West Antarctic ice shelf, which projects over the ocean, and is at much greater risk than East Antarctic ice. ...And, just for fun, here's a pic of me with my Dad & Sister, looking at my first glacier, the source of the Rhine river.

No Singularity

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-14T20:40:20-04:00

David J Linden is the neuroscientist, and he provides a lot of good nuts and bolts illustrations of why nanobots won’t be buzzing around in our brains anytime soon. Linden’s big argument with Ray Kurzweil, though, is that Ray applies Moore’s Law not only to science and technology, but to the insights they produce. Linden concedes that the data sets may be increasing at an exponential rate, but he insists that our understanding of the brain and consciousness is “stubbornly linear.” ...I’m always surprised that no one ever seems concerned about the distributive justice question when we get to talking about mind uploads. ...But actually, I've always suspected that if Ray ever did manage to upload his consciousness to the cloud, it would only take him about a nanosecond to become Skynet from the Terminator movies.

history-punk.com

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-12T22:20:14-04:00

I've been keeping up too many different pages, so I'm going to consolidate most of my history sites into a new page called history-punk.com, and a history-punk blog. That means I'll be taking down several of my sites, like Rural History and Regular People's History, and doing all my "history business" on history-punk.com. I also moved my new American Environmental History project to the new site. So change your bookmarks and enjoy the ride...

Announcing Dan's American Environmental History

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-08T13:05:13-04:00

So I’m working at finishing this PhD in History at UMass, but in the meantime, I’m stealing some time from my dissertation to put up a series of short talks about American Environmental History, for regular people. ... My daughter just took “AP Enviro” during her senior year, and is going on to an environmentally focused college. People like her need a little historical context, to help them understand how we got to where we are, and what we can do about it. I’ll be posting a series of 18 short (15 to 20 minute) talks, about what I think are the most important issues in environmental history. The viewer I’m imagining while I’m doing this is a high school, college, or home school student — although I hope that anyone who’s interested in the American environment and how it got this way will find these useful.

Labor vs. management?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-05T12:19:37-04:00

But I agree, educators would have to take on some administrative roles, if we wanted to offer an online alternative that met the current set of accreditation requirements, built during (and FOR) the age of brick and mortar schools. ...Yes, although hopefully it’s new and fresh and important for each student who goes through the survey, after a couple of semesters teaching it, the course is pretty much routine for the teacher. ... Second, there’s a difference between the up-front work of creating and implementing a curriculum for the first time, and the work of continuing to teach that survey year after year. ...Sure, it’s important for people to understand how we got where we are, especially if they want to do something about our present problems. ...What I do think, is that the web allows us to question everything; not doing so suggests we like the way things are.

Old Home Days

me@danallosso.com — 2011-07-02T11:50:17-04:00

Went to “Old Home Days” in Harrisville this morning. There was a blacksmith working at a portable coal forge; a bouncy house for the kids to jump in; Green Keene Teens were selling laundry soap, bread, and crafts; and the local library was selling off some of its old books. I got three volumes of The Granite Monthly, from 1880, ’82, and ’83. Looks like there are a lot of interesting articles, mini-biographies, and essays about subjects like slavery and emancipation in New Hampshire. I noticed here’s also a 4th of July oration by Daniel Webster, which I may take a look at this weekend.

Corporations, the environment, and Atlas Shrugged

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-30T12:14:41-04:00

The typical corporation does not contain tools or mechanisms to allow it to focus on the long-term or on the social or natural environment beyond the thing it was particularly chartered to do: make a specific product for a specific market. ...Evil only comes into the picture, when corporations or their champions try to prevent anyone else from speaking on behalf of these other social interests the corporations were not designed to address. It gets a little sketchy, when the corporations try to use government to shut down unions, or to let them drive the agenda on health & safety or environmental issues that are clearly at odds with the short-term growth and profit goals they were designed to pursue. ...The Atlas Shrugged point of view assumes that if steel-industrialist Hank Rearden discovered that the building of a particular factory or the siting of a particular mine would, for example, lead to the extinction of a species of owl, that Hank would do the right thing. ...The other thing that doesn’t work about the anti-collectivist Ayn Rand world-view, when you try to apply it to reality, is that concentration of wealth happens.

A couple more thoughts about history...

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-28T11:59:41-04:00

Kulikoff narrates two hypothetical career tracks, one based on the way things are, the other based on changes he’d like to see made. ...It’s ironic, because further on in the article, Kulikoff suggests that departments should prepare grad students for a more useful role in a changing world, by stressing public history. ... Kulikoff doesn’t seem to consider writing history for the public as something young historians ought to do, although he does suggest departments should “Encourage tenured faculty to write for the public and count those books in promotion to full professor.” But why didn’t it occur to him that a (former) historian could take insights about causality and human motivation, along with interesting historical facts, and write popular books that might achieve goals similar to those of public historians? What is it about the historians’ project that scholars like Kulikoff believe must be done by (senior) professional historians, through traditional (and especially through non-fiction) writing?

Textbooks & Online Teaching

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-27T12:24:11-04:00

The other one, which used a set of primary source readings posted on Blackboard, ended up being about the professor’s interests and priorities. Although these were interesting, the class was so unbalanced and so obviously not a survey of US history, that I think the students were not well served. So the one argument for a textbook, I guess, is that having a document that guides the curriculum might prevent an instructor from hijacking the course. ...The difference between publishing a course-specific textbook (or collection of readings) and putting course materials on an institutional Blackboard site might not be apparent to people thinking only about the students in the desks in front of them. ...It sparked a lively discussion in the comments, where Rees’s position was challenged by a professor at an online, for-profit institution.

Alienation

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-24T13:12:09-04:00

I’m feeling a little alienated at the moment, which reminds me that I’m kind of “good at” alienation. ... As I’ve been working my way through courses, qualifying exams, and the dissertation, I’ve — maybe unavoidably — been a little more INSIDE the box than I’m completely comfortable being. ...But if Jim Loewen is right, it’s not at the level of facts, but at the level of myth that high school history really operates. ...But typically, they’re then expected to accept (and ultimately inherit) the authority of the people and institutions they had rebelled against. ... If society’s current behaviors are unsustainable, should we be reassuring ourselves and our children that their alienation is just a phase that they’ll outgrow?

Then, as now...

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-14T15:50:59-04:00

This is the masthead of Abner Kneeland's Boston Investigator, 1831. It's a press, with the legend, "Tyrants Foe, The Peoples Friend." Kneeland was convicted of blasphemy in 1838, served a prison sentence, and then moved away to Iowa.

Education and rights-talk

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-09T09:45:12-04:00

The article concludes with the sentiment, “Sadly, the US will never be able to thoroughly discuss these issues unless government and community leaders begin a dialogue aimed at explaining that education is a right as important as any other.” ...You can believe that we all have rights to education, the means of production, adequate healthcare, a living wage, etc.; and support better education for everyone. But you can also believe we all have only the basic rights of life, liberty, and property guaranteed by a conservative interpretation of America’s founding documents; and still support better education for everyone. ...And, can proponents of better and more equal education find more money in these budgets, by arguing that education is more important than many of the other things the money is being spent on? ...So rather than duke it out over whether governments should spend money, we might do more good by engaging on what the government is buying with our money.

Why College?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-06T10:30:49-04:00

Menand mentions that schools like Harvard are now recruiting from an international pool, but he doesn’t mention the socio-economic backgrounds of the acceptees, so we have no way of knowing whether the changes of the 1970s he describes had an effect on outcomes, or merely on the number of applicants. ...Menand goes on to say that students who are better prepared for college and take tougher programs (“courses requiring them to write more than twenty pages a semester and to read more than forty pages a week”) tend to do better. ...Maybe the best argument for LIberal Arts education is the one Menand doesn’t deliberately make, “liberal education is the élite type of college education: it’s the gateway to the high-status professions.” ... He doesn’t mention that the millions of middle-income jobs (white collar, in skilled trades, and in self-employment) these newly-included people looked forward to have been substantially reduced by globalization and the financial crisis. Still, if you look at the things the kids who expect to succeed in life are doing, based on the data Menand cites, there seems to be a positive correlation between working hard and doing well.

Why PhD?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-03T10:21:36-04:00

Does this become a self-fulfilling prophecy: if the "stars" are assumed to have gone to the "best" schools that could afford to attract them, do the other schools tend to treat their students differently based on their idea of their place in the pecking order? ...In English: do conventional measures of success (the name of the school on your diploma, your undergrad GPA, your GRE scores) substitute for real measures of interest and ability, when people are making decisions who to accept into a program, who to hire, etc.? But let’s pass by that, and stipulate that although it’s an ongoing tension (and it’s certainly the job of the non-traditional candidate to point out the merit if s/he doesn’t have the prestigious credentials), it’s a problem most people are aware of and at least trying to correct for. ...If we agree that there are too many history PhDs for the available jobs, and that this is a long-term issue, then we need to either adjust our understanding of what the PhD is for, or reduce the number of PhDs. ...And the other parts of the process (reading and processing the historiography; wrestling with the post-modern challenge; finding a research topic, applying theory to formulate it, researching it, and writing) seem to be done best, when they’re done as independently as possible.

Skating, storms, & Gaga

me@danallosso.com — 2011-06-01T20:25:03-04:00

Started skating today. Then, took a break from audiobooks on the drive home, and listened to the new Lady Gaga album in the steamy aftermath of a major thunderstorm that had the sirens blaring at school (and dropped a tornado in the Springfield area). A bunch of these songs will probably make it onto this year's skating soundtrack.

Wild Mint

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-30T14:08:57-04:00

This is peppermint, growing in a damp ditch in Ashfield Massachusetts. Peppermint has been growing wild in Ashfield, on the edges of cultivated fields, since the early 1800s when the town was the center of the early mint oil business.

Student Evaluations

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-27T11:12:16-04:00

I’ve TAed three courses in the four semesters of my PhD program here: both halves of the US History Survey, as well as US Environmental History. The professor I worked with my first semester (Fall ’09) “hired” me back for Enviro last Spring, so I guess he liked my work. What I do know, because I get to look at them after the end of semester, is what the students said about me. They said things like “I loved every discussion with Dan; he made the class interesting and worthwhile” (Fall ’09), “TA was amazing!! ...Since it’s difficult for prospective employers to decide what kind of teacher a new PhD would be, by just looking at the CV, I posted a page with all the comments my students have made.

Biddle's Stairs

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-17T14:18:00-04:00

Nicholas Biddle, the famous president of the Second Bank of the United States and target of Andrew Jackson’s “Bank War,” is famous in upstate New York for another reason. In 1827, he visited the falls in the company of Augustus and (General) Peter Porter, the Secretary of War under John Quincy Adams. ... They wanted to encourage tourists to visit, so Biddle gave them $200 to build an 80-foot tall enclosed staircase on Goat Island. The “Biddle Stairs” operated for 98 years, until it was put out of business by the Cave of the Wind elevator in 1925. It’s interesting to think of banker Nicholas Biddle and Secretary of War Porter, in a wider context than their political offices.

History Truth Squad

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-14T18:59:48-04:00

Check it out! Join the Truth Squad. Save History from the clutches of propagandists!

Chester Cheetah

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-13T13:47:17-04:00

I guess what he’s saying is that some people are good researchers and academic historians, and others are good at telling stories that are relevant and interesting to the general public. ...But even if we let that pass, if you extend the metaphor, you have songwriters who need professional singers to get their songs in front of the public in an acceptable (salable) form. ...Or, is the issue that lots of Napsters are pirating the songs, so there are fewer actual purchases generating royalties for the record companies to share with songwriters? ...Doesn’t this discussion also sort-of assume that there are a limited number of good historical ideas that you can discover, and that we have to hoard them and guard them as if they’re precious? ... But once it’s a book, wouldn’t it actually be good for me, if my argument got mainstreamed to the point where it just appears everywhere, like a tune people are humming?

Interest for Everybody

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-12T11:36:53-04:00

I blogged a few weeks ago on my own site as well as on THS, about bankers–and specifically on how I thought that historians spend too much time talking about the distrust that everybody had in the 19th century for banknotes (especially rural bank's notes). Although counterfeiters and fraudulent banknotes are certainly colorful, I think for the most part, 19th-century people accepted the notes that were presented to them. ...But I think that rather than showing that these people were all busily discounting the notes of bankers they didn't completely trust, it actually shows that they were learning how to charge and receive interest. We tend to forget, because the currency we carry around in her pockets does not, that most of the banknotes, bills of exchange, and other commercial paper that functioned as currency in the 19th century, carried interest. ...Clearly discounting was a skill for which there was still a need, even in 1870, five years after the national banking laws had begun taxing state bank currency out of existence.

Food Deserts

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-11T07:35:42-04:00

Living in an affluent, populated area in the Northeast, I have access to three supermarkets I use (Hannafords, Price Chopper, and Market Basket), as well as several I avoid (Shaws and Walmart). And there are a number of neighborhood stores that sell more than just beer and candy — one even has a New York style sandwich shop in the rear! ...The canal is still there, of course; and the towns are trying to make it a tourist attraction, putting in trails and bikeways along the historic waterway. ...That there are places (maybe a lot of them) where rural people have to go to a nearby, bigger town to buy groceries once a week, and feel a lack of options in their food choices? ... The food desert ends at eastern Wyoming, not because there are a lot of food stores, but because there aren’t a lot of people.

1796 New York state map

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-09T16:18:14-04:00

From David Rumsey collection, click map for link to page.

Dictating

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-06T11:07:35-04:00

I’m using the new version of Dragon dictation software for the Macintosh, and it seems to be working pretty well. I don’t have to go back and correct too much (although I will have to go to the first line and change study Carol to study carrel–and I had to do it here, too). This has been incredibly valuable to me in transcribing all of these old letters from the 19th century that I’m using as my primary sources. ... This is especially helpful in the long letters my subjects write to each other, describing their business strategies; and also for getting a much better sense of the language and tone they use with each other. ...But it’s not the first time I’ve worn a Plantronics headset, and as I get better at it, I expect it to go even quicker.

I love old books!

me@danallosso.com — 2011-05-04T12:26:09-04:00

I found this in an 1879 book called History of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts. Also, an illustration of the river valley, and a lot of interesting little biographies of regular people. I love these old books!

Who represents the people?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-04-11T08:50:57-04:00

It’s interesting that in these two pieces, Heather describes bad politics of the past from both sides of the aisle that look and feel a lot like bad politics of the present. ... In the Huffington post, it’s Republicans insisting that the only way out of our economic doldrums is to give even more to the wealthiest Americans. ...But look how much political capital is invested by both sides, trying to convince regular people that either the Repubs or the Dems are their real, natural allies. If history shows that in different times and places, both parties abandoned and betrayed regular people, then maybe that leads to a different conversation about how we move forward. ... What would a political history looked like, that threaded its way through the American past, calling out heroes and villains regardless of what badge they wore?

Environmental History for Environmentalists?

me@danallosso.com — 2011-03-27T12:21:28-04:00

I've been thinking about less traditional applications of history, than the obvious "get a job in a history department" next step in the regular career path. ...So I started thinking about how I might pitch an environmental history or rural history course to a place like Antioch, which has a program that focuses on training environmental studies teachers and advocate/activists. ... In a real sense, I realized, my ideas about putting together syllabi have been unconsciously organized around the idea that I'd be selling the syllabi to history departments, rather than to the end-users (or even, ironically, the students). The question of packaging a course for historians is bypassed, when the people to whom I’d be selling an Environmental History syllabus are not themselves historians, but Environmental people. ...I think the Horwitz's idea (in The Transformation of American Law) about how changes happen, illustrated by Steinberg, is important for environmentalists to understand.

Banging away at it

me@danallosso.com — 2011-03-25T09:14:56-04:00

Today’s my PhD oral exam, so of course, we were looking at old books illustrated by Arthur Rackham on Archive.org this morning. Steph said, “Hey, that one looks like you blacksmithing!” Okay, I admit there’s a resemblance -- and I’m reminded why I cut off my hair. But I don’t sit on a stool when I’m working! ...Nice detail of the bellows, the ladle for wetting the coals, the tools and anvil.

Spring Cleaning

me@danallosso.com — 2011-03-21T13:37:42-04:00

But that’s not stopping me from cleaning out the carrel, of books (on my chair) I don’t need to hang onto anymore for Comps. ...In a slightly more overall Spring Cleaning, I’ll probably look over my research material, and start figuring out how I’m going to attack that. Once I have the Orals completed, I’ll have a month to put together my dissertation prospectus. I also want to spend part of that month getting myself a little better organized to look for jobs. That means, updating the stuff on the website, maybe putting together a CV and some sample course syllabi, etc.

Notes for a writing manual:

me@danallosso.com — 2011-03-17T09:53:32-04:00

If “differential impacts” means the same thing as “different effects,” say “different effects.” Even if it’s a PhD comprehensive exam.

Comps

me@danallosso.com — 2011-03-15T08:56:43-04:00

I have five questions to answer in writing, and then my examiners get to read my responses next week, and we all sit down and talk about them in the oral exam a week from Friday. Then, assuming I pass, I’ll enter the weird in-between status known as “ABD” (all but dissertation). ... Then I’ll be able to get on with the final round of research and the writing. The big change that comes with being ABD, is that I’ll be eligible to teach. So I’m hoping to get some summer courses lined up (either at UMass or elsewhere), and I’m looking forward to trying out some of the syllabi I’ve been putting together as I’ve been taking classes, TA-ing for people here at UMass, and reading.

Movus

me@danallosso.com — 2011-03-08T20:30:07-05:00

(null)

Mind the Gap

me@danallosso.com — 2011-02-24T20:07:23-05:00

Saw some interesting graphs today, from Mother Jones. ... One of the commenters said something about how all Americans need to see this stuff every year, and ask themselves why they're still letting this happen. Problem is, only the same small group of people like Mother Jones subscribers see the info every year. Somehow, the message has to get out a little farther. So, I'm doing my share and posting it here for the dozen people who might see it here who hadn't seen it already.

Storage and history

me@danallosso.com — 2011-02-17T13:00:24-05:00

I think the ability to show our work might tend to make historical monographs more like scientific works -- but I’m not sure that’s the same as saying they’ll become more “objective.” Objectivity is a term a lot of historians argue over, but I don’t think it’s really as central to what we do as people like Novick and Haskell suggest. I think it’s more of a convenient way into ideas they want to explore, but not the main point (which in both cases, I think has to do with professionalism and paradigms). ...If anything, the ability to branch and explore tangents or side-stories, or to circle around to backstories and detailed background and then rejoin the narrative, might actually lengthen the word-counts of our histories substantially, even if it doesn’t alter the narrative through-line. ...I know several town historians and historical society people who are annoyed that their local history is available on Archive.org, because they’d like to sell them in the gift shop.

Post Colonial Rhizomes

me@danallosso.com — 2011-02-05T19:05:41-05:00

One of the things that interests me about that rhizome idea that Heidi from Wales mentioned yesterday, is that it’s not really a theory. ... The traditional view is envisioned as a "tap-root," but as Bill Ashcroft says, this is an illusion caused by the way that "structures of power characterize themselves in terms of unities, hierarchies, binaries and centers." ... He may be completely on board, a little ambivalent, a closet rebel, or an opportunist looking out for his own interests. ... The point of the metaphor is, the thing only looks like a "tap-root" from far away, or if you're not looking carefully. ...The thing that caught my attention right now, however, is how people use these organic metaphors: lawns of grass or stands of bamboo versus trees with tap-roots that suck up all of the water and nutrients, and crowd out other growth.

Thoughts while driving

me@danallosso.com — 2011-02-04T22:24:26-05:00

She mentioned not only Foucault, but Deleuze and Gauttari (the rhizome theory), which was entirely appropriate for what she was talking about, but it got me thinking… One of the things that I might try to say in a job talk (or at least, would have ready to say, in answer to a “well what about Foucault” type of question), is that while I appreciate theory, I think it’s part of my mission to talk about history in plain English. If I’m going to be teaching undergrads and writing for the general public, then I need to be able to render high theoretical concepts in language that people familiar with college level (which was once high-school level) English can understand. Because, let’s face it, the number of people who are going to be able and willing to decode neologisms and jargon borrowed from the French, is vanishingly small. I do think that it’s part of the mission of people who want to teach undergraduates and write histories for the general public, to translate the best historical ideas available into plain language.

Need to Know

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-27T16:29:06-05:00

I’m reading Raup’s 1966 lecture on John Sanderson’s farm and the demise of New England agriculture. ...I’m seeing in it all the things I think are wrong about what he says (many of which, incidentally, I did NOT see a year ago, when I first read this). ...So, as I’m thinking about this, it comes back to me, the reason I’m rereading it is I’m preparing a lecture for undergrads. ...This view is based on the classic texts (Bidwell, Wilson, and Black); and if they were this wrong about the facts (or at least the interpretation) of New England agriculture, then the rest of their history is probably due for close scrutiny. Someday soon, someone should write a comprehensive history of American Agriculture, that incorporates all the new material that regional specialists have discovered.

Can't resist...

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-24T20:56:50-05:00

The material on this one (the first of nineteen reels) is mostly from his early years. ...Lots of legal documents, and page after page of transcripts from Bradlaugh’s 1863 arbitration meetings with George Jacob Holyoake. I didn’t have a chance to read them too closely, but I did get the impression that Holyoake was in over his head. ... I think it’s going to be a much more complicated story than the heroic tale told by his earlier biographers (His daughter Hypatia and the 1960s holder of his National Secular Society presidency, David Tribe). It will be interesting to see what Bryan Niblett says in the biography that’s on its way to me from Amazon.uk.

Comments are "ON"

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-22T16:01:56-05:00

That means, you can react to anything you see here, by clicking on the word "comments" at the end of a post. And you can see other people's comments the same way. I hope people will respond, with reactions to my stuff, your own ideas, suggestions, criticisms, etc. The comments are moderated, which means I can decline a comment if I think it's not appropriate. ... Please use your real name, unless you have a really good reason for staying anonymous.

"Spring" semester begins

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-18T14:14:47-05:00

And we had a full room; nearly all of the 60 students enrolled seemed to be there. ...Funny that it's Environmental History, and the first day we get a practical lesson in how everything is contingent on the environment. UMass closed at 12:30, just about the same time I managed to get home. ...Before class started I talked to a guy who's a Senior in Resource Economics. ... But when I was there, it was part of the Ag.

Balance

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-17T22:40:16-05:00

This reminded me of other times I've run into statements about ideas that are absurd when taken to their logical extremes. ... They were conveniently arranged to make that type of copying easy, and I must have been just one in an army of Heinlein fans that did this. ..."Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. ...Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. ...A couple of years later in the third Trek movie, Kirk answers a rescued, rejuvenated Spock, saying, "The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many."

Snow Days

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-13T20:06:37-05:00

That went surprisingly well, despite taking time out to play with the kids, shovel and bake bread. ... Will probably want to put that together into a manual at some point. When I can talk about all the research I did for the dissertation, and use it as an example. In the meantime, these posts will give me a chance to think this through, and maybe get some feedback from people about what seems to work. Might be able to collaborate with Elizabeth at the Antiquarian Society, and put something on their blog Past is Present, as well as THS.

AHA Convention

me@danallosso.com — 2011-01-08T22:16:48-05:00

There were hundreds of sessions, business meetings, receptions, and of course, a large vendor space filled with academic and trade publishers, a couple of government agencies, and the CIA, which was giving away some really interesting document collections that I can't find a link to, even keyword searching their website. ...Of course, there are no casinos in Boston, and book selling isn’t the main business of the AHA convention. ...But seriously, I think the AHA convention’s role as the place you go to interview and/or sell your book project may be in decline. The profession seems to be getting more rather than less fragmented, travel costs are up, porno scanning and pat-downs are a disincentive even to those who can afford a trip, and there aren’t a lot of jobs. ...But I don’t think I’ll be depending on the AHA convention to get myself a job or a book deal.

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.