<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" 
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
    xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/"
    xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
    xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd">
	<channel>
<title>Dan&#x27;s history reading</title><link>http://www.danallosso.com/home.html</link><description>words&#x2c; words&#x2c; words</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2009 Dan Allosso</dc:rights><dc:date>2011-01-06T17:33:07-05:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
<admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:dan@allosso.net" /><sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
<sy:updateBase>2000-01-01T12:00+00:00</sy:updateBase>
<lastBuildDate>Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:35:41 -0500</lastBuildDate><item><title>Food&#x2c; Inc. in the 1970s</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2011-01-06T17:33:07-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1fe0b5a3bd0dfe0e9a7ceb554a3e7afd-144.html#unique-entry-id-144</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1fe0b5a3bd0dfe0e9a7ceb554a3e7afd-144.html#unique-entry-id-144</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[First Majority-Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America


...Shover traced the rapid change of American agriculture and rural life in the three decades following World War II.    &ldquo;Farming,&rdquo; he says, is &ldquo;one of the last vestiges of the individual entrepreneur&rdquo; in America.    (1)  He argues for what he calls the &ldquo;Great Disjuncture,&rdquo; and although his name for it didn&rsquo;t stick, his observations have become widely-accepted truisms.    And yet, thirty-five years after its publication, many of the issues Shover calls attention to in First Majority are farther from resolution than ever.  


Shover calls attention to the fact that &ldquo;emigration from country to city in the years following the Great Depression has been greater in numbers than the entire immigration from foreign shores to the United States in the 100 years between 1820 and 1920.&rdquo; (xvi)  The rural exodus was enabled&mdash;actually forced&mdash;by increases in productivity.    In 1820, Shover says &ldquo;one farm worker was required to supply subsistence for four people; in 1945 the ratio was 1 for 14.6; in 1969 the estimate was 1 for 45.3.&rdquo;   (5)  The first improvement was brought about by tractors and nitrogen fertilizers, Shover says; the second by pesticides, herbicides, and hybrid crops and livestock.  ...  Nine-hundred thousand fewer farms operated in 1970 than in 1960, but virtually all the land except that diverted by government policy, remained in production.&rdquo; 

...A lot of the information Shover provides will be well-known to the contemporary reader of agricultural or rural history.    But it&rsquo;s interesting to see how much of the material publicized by others in the last few decades was already being discussed in the 1960s.    Shover notes, for example, that &ldquo;rural America has traditionally been on the move,&rdquo; (38) and he notes that &ldquo;surprisingly few studies of American farms and villages have given attention to their ethnic makeup.    This lack has produced a myopic view of rural politics, overlooking often intense and deep-seated ethnic and religious rivalries.&rdquo;   (48)  Both these observations are still quite relevant for historians and sociologists.    Shover also notes that &ldquo;the major market for motor vehicles shifted between 1905 and 1908, from the big city to the country town.&rdquo;  

...Perhaps the most interesting aspect of First Majority, which is fascinating precisely because the book is a generation old, is Shover&rsquo;s coverage of agribusiness.    Recent bestsellers like Michael Pollan&rsquo;s Omnivore&rsquo;s Dilemma, documentaries like Food, Inc. and King Corn, and the recent Justice Department/USDA probes of Walmart&rsquo;s &ldquo;stranglehold&rdquo; on rural communities, have sensitized us to problems facing food producers and rural Americans, but may also have created an impression that these issues and crises are recent.    In fact, Shover was calling attention to the same problems 35 years ago.    In 1968, he says, &ldquo;the 1 percent of the feedlots that have a capacity greater than 1,000 fed 47 percent of the cattle marketed.&rdquo;   (160)  Poultry consumption, which had been stable at about 16 pounds per person in the first half of the twentieth century, rose to 50 pounds per person in the early 1970s.   (146)  And even then, the industry was already dominated by &ldquo;producer corporations&rdquo; that paid the &ldquo;farmer-caretaker in 1972&hellip;fifty dollars for every 1,000 chickens he raised.&rdquo; 

...By 1970, the declining power of farm operators relative to their corporate overlords was already apparent.    In a 1970 report, the USDA declared that &ldquo;poultry growers were working at an average wage of minus fourteen cents hourly.&rdquo;   (My emphasis, 147)  &ldquo;Us folks in the chicken business are the only slaves left in the country,&rdquo; Shover quotes an Alabama striker saying.    &ldquo;They call all the shots&mdash;they give you a contract for as many or as few chickens as they want and then they pay you whatever they want.&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;In 1969,&rdquo; he says, the nation&rsquo;s 107 million cattle, 57 million hogs, 21 million sheep, and 2.1 billion chickens produced approximately ten times more biological waste than the entire human population.&rdquo; 

...While the producer&rsquo;s share of the food dollar &ldquo;pie&rdquo; wasn&rsquo;t as low in the 1960s as it has become, the growing slice taken by manufacturers and marketers was already a concern.    &ldquo;Thus in 1969,&rdquo; Shover says, &ldquo;farmers received 67c of every consumer dollar spent on eggs&hellip;50c for milk; 22c for fresh oranges; 14c for two loaves of bread&hellip;Producers of wheat and cotton could give away their entire crop free without creating more than a minor effect on the price of bread or shirts.&rdquo;   (177)  The fact that these problems have been known for decades, and during that time the situation has only gotten worse, should concern today&rsquo;s activists.    Shover shows some of the changes rural historians were beginning to explore in the mid-1970s, in the last few years before the election of Ronald Reagan and the political sea-change it brought about or reflected.   
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Cold War Labor </title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2011-01-05T21:27:10-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/57b28b8fa6333d9692b3c10833afc073-143.html#unique-entry-id-143</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/57b28b8fa6333d9692b3c10833afc073-143.html#unique-entry-id-143</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Robert W.   Cherny, Ed.


American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture


2004


A collection of essays, looking at the period from 1945-1960.    The editor says central question is, &ldquo;what kinds of relationships existed among the labor unions of the AFL and CIO, the radical left and the conservative right, business and other interest groups in American communities.&rdquo;   (4) Really, this can be boiled down to: what was the relationship between the American communist party and labor leaders, and did McCarthyism impact the development or retardation of the labor movement?  


These are interesting questions, in the sense that they suggest there was both a &ldquo;genuine and principled&rdquo; communism and anticommunism &ldquo;in the working class communities of the nation,&rdquo; and that what went on in front of TV cameras in Congress was in some way related to the grassroots conflict.   (5) But even so, they are very narrow questions, and the detailed narratives and oral histories related here need to be understood as a special case.    It might even be a stretch to imply that these types of things were happening in working class communities across the nation, much less that they represent some type of broad social event that mobilized large groups of regular people.  


In the first article, Ellen Schrecker points out that most labor leaders who joined the communist party &ldquo;felt it would help them build a strong labor movement.    None of them&hellip;tried to transform their unions into revolutionary organizations.&rdquo;   (9)  If they were indeed focused on building organizations that would be effective in promoting the agenda of actual workers, it stands to reason that they would have become disillusioned with the CPUSA after time; since it pretty much failed to deal with the reality of American society the same way it failed to deal with the reality of the Soviet Union.    Schrecker criticizes the AFL and CIO for being &ldquo;so thoroughly co-opted that its leaders provided cover for the CIA, and its conventions endorsed the war in Vietnam.&rdquo;    (19)  Clearly, the leaders of these unions do seem to have &ldquo;enlisted in the Cold War&rdquo; to some degree; but the framing of the discussion avoids the larger issues.    Who was the labor movement supposed to turn to, for guidance?    The CPUSA was useless.    The rank and file were, in many cases, conservative working stiffs who did support the war in Vietnam.    Remember &ldquo;America, Love it or Leave it&rdquo;?  


Gerald Zahavi&rsquo;s oral histories of Schenectady GE workers are very interesting.    They suggest ethnic and religious dimensions to the working-class encounter with communism that make the picture much richer and more satisfying, while at the same time suggesting that communism was not as central on the streets of company towns in upstate New York as it has become on the pages of histories.    This is the type of thing I&rsquo;d like to see more of, and I think the book succeeds when it focuses on actual people and lets them tell their stories.    The outline of labor and church leaders interacting with government and business leaders was tedious and didn&rsquo;t leave me feeling I understood what had really happened. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Heroes or Machines?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2011-01-05T21:38:52-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36eb68738d324ee1defe3fc9a34e847b-142.html#unique-entry-id-142</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36eb68738d324ee1defe3fc9a34e847b-142.html#unique-entry-id-142</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[&ldquo;Like all power structures,&rdquo; Hornborg begins, &ldquo;the machine will continue to reign only as long as it is not unmasked as a species of power.&rdquo;  

...The first is a definition of power as &ldquo; a social relation built on an asymmetrical distribution of resources and risks.&rdquo;   (1)  When I read this today, the image that came to my mind was Beowulf (but I couldn't find a good pic, so here's Aragorn).  

...The second is the idea that beyond the cultural construction of our idea of &ldquo;the machine,&rdquo; there are actual machines.  ...  Hornborg believes &ldquo;the foundation of machine technology is not primarily know-how but unequal exchange in the world system, which generates an increasing, global polarization of wealth and impoverishment.&rdquo; ...  But &ldquo;We do not recognize that what ultimately keep our machines running are global terms of trade.    The power of the machine is not of the machine, but of the asymmetric structures of exchange of which it is an expression.&rdquo; 

...The way machines concentrate resources from the periphery into the center, while seeming to be making something out of nothing, is by keeping our attention firmly focused on that center.    To prove his point, Hornborg cites the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Ilya Prigogine&rsquo;s elaboration of it in his theory of Dissipative Structures.    Increases in order, which Hornborg calls negative entropy or negentropy, are only possible locally, and are taken out of the wider environment.    &ldquo;Any local accretion of order,&rdquo; Hornborg says, &ldquo;can occur only at the expense of the total sum of order in the universe.&rdquo;   (123)  In the case of biomass, the energy to create this order is taken from sunlight by photosynthesis.  ...  Where the entropy law becomes really important, though, is in the creation of what Hornborg calls &ldquo;technomass&rdquo; out of non-renewable resources.    This is not only a zero-sum game, Hornborg says, but it has distributional implications that are deliberately, &ldquo;systematically concealed from view by the hegemonic, economic vocabulary.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The idea of distributing [technology] evenly among all the peoples of the world would be as contradictory as trying to keep a beef cow alive while restoring its molecules to all the tufts of grass from which it has sprung.&rdquo; 

...Well for one thing, once machines and the exchange relationships they use and represent &ldquo;assumed the appearance of natural law&hellip;the delegation of work from human bodies to machines introduced historically new possibilities for maintaining a discrepancy between exchange value and productive potential, which in other words means encouraging new strategies for underpayment and accumulation.&rdquo; ...  Because while it is relatively easy to recognize the basic justice that an individual owns his own work, it&rsquo;s harder to say who should own the work of the machines built with (cheap) resources and (cheap) labor bought far from the high-priced central markets.  


This was the thing that Marx missed, either because it was harder to see in his time, or because (as Hornborg suggests) he &ldquo;fetishized&rdquo; machines and expected them to solve the historic problem of the proletariat (there&rsquo;s a whole chapter redefining Marx&rsquo;s theory of fetishism and applying it, but I won&rsquo;t go there now).    At some point, Hornborg says, global growth became primarily based on &ldquo;underpayment for resources, including raw materials and other forms of energy than labor.&rdquo;  ...  Money values may increase and the illusion of global economic growth may temporarily hide the zero-sum nature of the game, but in the long run &ldquo;what locally appears as an expansion of resources&rdquo; turns out to be &ldquo;an asymmetric social transfer implying a [hidden] loss of resources elsewhere.&rdquo; 

...Another implication is that, historically and &ldquo;still today, industrial capitalism is very far from the universal condition of humankind, but rather a privileged activity, the existence of which would be unthinkable without various other modes of transferring&hellip;resources from peripheral sectors to centers.&rdquo;   (60)  This should impact discussions of the &ldquo;market transition&rdquo; in history just as it affects our understanding of contemporary economic development.  


...&ldquo;As long as a unit of biomass is directly dependent on its local niche for survival, there will tend to be constraints on overexploitation and a long-term (if oscillating) balance.  ...  (123)  The concept of capital breaks this local ecology, and creates what Hornborg calls &ldquo;a recursive (positive feedback) relationship between some kind of technological infrastructure and some kind of symbolic capacity to make claims on other people&rsquo;s resources.&rdquo;   (61)  When capital can begin to be accumulated far from its source, we&rsquo;re on our way to a world where &ldquo;the 225 richest individuals in the world own assets equal to the purchasing power of the 47 poorest percent of the planet&rsquo;s population.&rdquo;  


...One possible response might be to point out that people in the past did not necessarily know what thermodynamicists now know, and what Hornborg argues applies to society.    So, there was not necessarily the same sense of a conspiracy to evade this knowledge in the past, that Hornborg suggests there is in the present.    After all, enlightenment rationality grows out of and  responds to the longstanding medieval world view, in which people took for granted that the world had been created and peopled for a purpose.   


Another reaction might be to argue that Hornborg is wrong: that in fact dissipative structures do not make the center-periphery relationship look like he describes it.    Critics could argue that technology actually breaks the zero-sum nature of the game, and acts as a rising tide that lifts all ships.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Bidwell&#x27;s Rural America</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2011-01-04T22:22:27-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f4d44b79fca78cb3a92ab660ce3f4433-141.html#unique-entry-id-141</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f4d44b79fca78cb3a92ab660ce3f4433-141.html#unique-entry-id-141</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Percy W.   Bidwell


Rural Economy in New England at the Beginning of the 19th Century


1916


Bidwell based this book on the 1810 Census and related documents.    So, he was writing about what Southern New England had been like 100 years earlier.    He begins with a description of the inland town and the types of people found there.    He is careful to note that in 1810, proto-businessmen like the &ldquo;taverner or innkeeper, the country trader, the proprietors of the saw-mills, the grist-mills, the fulling-mills, the tanneries; the village artisans or mechanics, the blacksmiths, the carpenters and joiners, and the cobblers&rdquo; were usually only able to ply their trades part time.    Farming was their primary, and fall-back, occupation.    (256-7)


Bidwell attributes the &ldquo;union of all trades, businesses, and professions with agriculture,&rdquo; and the lack of division of labor to the lack of a market.    Quoting the Wealth of Nations, he says &ldquo;No better illustration than this could be desired of the famous dictum of Adam Smith that &lsquo;the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.&rsquo;&rdquo; (267, n.   1)  The outside markets available to New England farmers in 1810 were New York (population nearly 100,000), the Southern states, and the West Indies.    (294)  The problem was, getting products to the coast.  


&ldquo;The Connecticut River furnished the only means of cheap transportation through the central region of New England.    Although originally navigable only as far as the falls at Enfield, Connecticut, some sixty-five miles above its mouth, a series of canals constructed in the years 1790-1810 had made possible the passage of small boats to the village of Barnet in northern Vermont, about 180 miles further.&rdquo;   (309) Since transportation limited access to markets, one would expect farmers to be less interested in &ldquo;improvement&rdquo; and production for market than their counterparts in England and Europe.    This was the case, in the opinions of both foreign visitors and critics like Timothy Dwight of Yale.  


Bidwell says &ldquo;Contemporary criticisms were deserved,&rdquo; but suggests that there were good reasons for the state of farming.    (345)  &ldquo;Inefficiency in Agriculture was not due to ignorance,&rdquo; he insists.   (346)  &ldquo;Land was cheap and labor dear,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;Washington&rsquo;s explanation.&rdquo;    (349)  Bidwell agrees that emigration to the frontier drained New England&rsquo;s population and postponed intensive agriculture (351-2), but he insists that the &ldquo;real cause of inefficient agriculture was the lack of a market for farm products.&rdquo;    &ldquo;The expense of labor was at this time a hindrance to the growth of manufactures also,&rdquo; he observes, &ldquo;but when the market was opened through the failure of European competition, during the period of the Embargoes and the War of 1812, manufacturers found it profitable to employ workers even at the high wages demanded.&rdquo;   (353)  &ldquo;All other stimuli to agricultural improvement,&rdquo; Bidwell insists, &ldquo;were futile as long as a market was lacking...  Between the years 1810 and 1860 such a population arose in the manufacturing cities and towns of New England, and the market thus created brought changes which opened up a new era to the farmers of the inland towns.&rdquo; 


Interestingly, in the final page of his appendix, discussing &ldquo;Other Causes of Emigration,&rdquo; Bidwell says &ldquo;Some men were unable to fit into the rigid, Puritanical social and ecclesiastical systems.    They emigrated in order to breathe the freer, more unconventional atmosphere of the pioneer communities.&rdquo;    (391)  Also, while describing the Connecticut Valley, Bidwell says &ldquo;Middletown depended for its prosperity chiefly upon its commerce...  Up to 1810 the following manufactures had been established: A rum distillery with an annual output of 600 hogsheads, a paper mill...a powder mill...and a cotton factory.&rdquo;   (287)  Middletown, with 5,300 inhabitants, was Connecticut&rsquo;s third largest town in 1810, which was about the time Samuel Ranney moved from there to Ashfield.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Agrarianism &#x26; Empire</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2011-01-03T20:29:00-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c0f0c960ab2ec5a97d55a9e70479f9dd-140.html#unique-entry-id-140</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c0f0c960ab2ec5a97d55a9e70479f9dd-140.html#unique-entry-id-140</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[William Appleman Williams


The Roots of the Modern American Empire


1969


&ldquo;One of the striking problems confronting the modern executive&hellip;is created by the way the organization and operation of the corporation destroy the old social and economic ecology without creating a new balance based on a community of association, interest, and mutual responsibility.    That was precisely what happened&hellip;when consolidated capital from outside the region moved into the Red River Valley and created the huge bonanza grain farms of the 1870s and early 1880s.    The approach ultimately failed because its economies of scale proved insufficiently rewarding over a period of time, because it provoked serious political opposition, and because it failed to generate the development of a society (let alone a community).&rdquo; (xi) 


This is interesting, because it&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;ve been thinking about colonialism in rural America.    I think Williams is right: once the focus became colonial, rewards were judged based on competing opportunity costs of capital, not the inherent qualities, (success or failure, viability, sustainability, etc.) of the local operation. 


Williams goes on to cite J.   J.   Hill as &ldquo;a corporation leader who did learn from the weaknesses and failure of the bonanza farms, and who applied that lesson for the benefit of his own corporation and for the rest of the people in the region.    Hill did not become a utopian, or even a reformer in the usual sense of the term, but he did recognize and act on the necessity of dealing with the needs of the agricultural society in which he operated.    He realized that all corporations would go the way of the bonanza farms unless they became more relevant and responsive to the requirements of the rest of society.&rdquo;  


I wonder if a bio of Hill has ever been done on this middle ground, where he&rsquo;s neither a robber baron nor a saint?


Thesis: (italics his) &ldquo;The expansionist outlook that was entertained and acted upon by metropolitan American leaders during and after the 1890s was actually a crystallization in industrial form of an outlook that had been developed in agricultural terms by the agrarian majority of the country between 1860 and 1893.&rdquo;


In Williams&rsquo; account, the desire to expand agricultural markets pushes what is ultimately American expansionist foreign policy.    In the early 19th century, this takes the form of Adam Smith&rsquo;s &ldquo;tension and antagonism between the metropolis and the country.&rdquo;   (103)  Britain is the metropolis in this case, and the whole US is the &ldquo;granary and slaughterhouse&rdquo; that feeds it.    As America grows, Williams says the farm sector&rsquo;s export focus remains a prime mover of expansionism.    Although William Jennings Bryan claimed &ldquo;agriculturalists were as truly businessmen as their metropolitan counterparts,&rdquo; Williams says he did not convince them he could improve conditions for their business.    (404) 


Williams concludes that both the &ldquo;agricultural expansionists&rdquo; and the urban leaders who appropriated their ideas failed to &ldquo;maintain an operating balance between the expansion of freedom and the expansion of the marketplace&rdquo; because &ldquo;the overwhelming majority of farm businessmen shared the more conservative views of the dominant metropolitans.    Indeed, they had generated and shaped that outlook.    And, for that matter, many of the reformers soon acquiesced or assented.  The result was an overpowering imperial consensus that defined freedom in terms of what existed in America; or, in its most liberal form, in terms of what Americans sought for themselves.&rdquo;    (450)


In the final lines of his epilogue, Williams cautions radicals: &ldquo;because we are now just beginning, I suggest that we be very careful about winning when it requires us to become more like what we find so unacceptable.    For those kinds of victories can very easily change us into small businessmen promoting a marginal product.&rdquo;    (453)  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Conkin&#x27;s farm memories</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2011-01-01T14:48:16-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7823ff1ea187919ea0fccce503701301-139.html#unique-entry-id-139</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7823ff1ea187919ea0fccce503701301-139.html#unique-entry-id-139</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He includes his own memories and the farming experiences of members of his family, with a history drawn from statistics and other primary and secondary sources.  ...  Arthur Schlesinger praised Conkin&rsquo;s 1959 book about the New Deal, Tomorrow a New World, despite what he called its &ldquo;certain woodenness of style and a consequent failure always to convey the human dimension of the communitarian experiments.&rdquo;    The personal reflections and recollections in this book provide a good balance for what might otherwise be a dry, slightly intellectual history of farming.


One of the points Conkin stresses is that the popular notion that agriculture has &ldquo;declined&rdquo; in America depends on your point of view.  ...  Conkin says, &ldquo;agriculture has been the most successful sector in the recent economic history of the United States.&rdquo; (x)  Technology, but also markets, economic changers and government policy decisions, &ldquo;reduced the number of farm operators needed to produce 89 percent of our agricultural output from around 6 milion in the 1930s to less than 350,000 today.&rdquo; (xi)


...(1)  As recently as 1800, Conkin says, &ldquo;it took more than 50 percent of human labor worldwide to procure food.&rdquo; ...  This change is clearly beneficial in that it frees people up to do other things, but Conkin never really assesses the cost of these changes in terms of either the resources that enable them or the social changes that go with them.    In both cases, what happened is treated as somehow inevitable, and resistance to it (both by populists and by contemporary advocates of sustainability) is portrayed as backward-looking and wrongheaded.


...(4)  At harvest time, work was more strenuous and prolonged -- one of the important points Conkin makes in his reminiscences is that as new technology was introduced, its adoption took time.    While larger farms may have jumped right in (&ldquo;By 1860,&rdquo; he says, reapers were at work on a minority of farms (60,000).&rdquo; 9), many smaller farms continued using old tools and horse power well into the twentieth century.    Resistance to new technology may also have helped some smaller operators avoid the logic of expansion: if you don&rsquo;t buy the combine that only makes economic sense on a farm of 1000 acres, you may be able to continue to make ends meet on 250.  


Conkin portrays Calvin Coolidge as an enemy of export bounties (28), and Hoover as a farm supporter who passed the 1929 Agricultural Marketing Act, &ldquo;by far the most ambitious farm legislation to date.&rdquo;   (30)  Conkin credits new deal farm policy largely to Hoover, which is an interesting argument that may merit a closer look sometime. 

...Farm life in 1930, Conkin says, &ldquo;was closer to that of 1830 than 1960,&rdquo; and he describes some of the details from his own experience.   (49)  These passages will be especially valuable to students with no farm experience of their own (note to self, for future classroom use).    Conkin&rsquo;s appreciation of the economics is shown in these passages to originate in seeing farmers begin &ldquo;to buy more food in town and grow less on the farm. ...  (49)  He continues, &ldquo;After World War II, the efficiency of production in almost every specialized area of agriculture and the efficiencies in the processing and marketing of foods made it cheaper to buy almost any type of food than to grow one&rsquo;s own.&rdquo;    The fact that this change was enabled by a rapid increase in industrial inputs from off the farm (oil, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery) is not apparent from Conkin&rsquo;s point of view, just as it may not have been to other people who experienced the change.         


...Because his home was seventeen miles from three industrial centers, Conkin witnessed &ldquo;the gradual development of a single labor market embracing both urban and rural areas, accompanied by a complex array of lifestyle choices.&rdquo; ...  (94)  But Conkin does not examine any alternatives to individual ownership of all this equipment, despite his expertise in historical communitarian movements.    A large section of the book describes government farm policies from the new deal to the present, without shedding too much light on the subject.


In 2002, Conkin says, &ldquo;2,902 dairy farms had more than 500 cows, and almost all had annual sales of more than $1 million.  ...  In 1929 it took 85 hours of work to produce 1,000 pounds of broilers; by 1980 it took less than 1 hour.&rdquo;    Introducing his section on &ldquo;Critics and Criticisms,&rdquo; Conkin says, &ldquo;Everyone has to concede one point: American farmers have achieved a level of efficient food production unprecedented in world history.&rdquo; ...  It doesn&rsquo;t seem to occur to Conkin that as conditions like energy prices, resource depletion (phosphorus), and the risks associated with new techniques (GMOs) continue to change, the rational decision-makers he praises may need to reconsider practices that have become as traditional for modern farmers as cradling and crop rotation once were for their ancestors.   


...This is true, but no more so than many of the concepts that support the agricultural status quo, which Conkin tacitly accepts.    Conkin describes several of the leaders of alternative movements, like the Rodales and Wendell Berry, without giving much attention to the substance of the sustainability argument or the strength of the movements.    Only in his afterword does Conkin break free of the boosterism that has propelled him through the book, to argue that food prices need to rise.    Farm products (and government policy) should be more expensive, and &ldquo;the shift to higher costs should be based in large part on the pricing of as many externalities as possible.&rdquo;    &ldquo;If this seems like a prescription for the types of alternative agriculture described in chapter 8,&rdquo; Conkin concludes, &ldquo;so be it.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Creating the 20th Century</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2011-01-02T13:52:10-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3fe2930d58dfaf46717bb7f46c49dad5-138.html#unique-entry-id-138</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3fe2930d58dfaf46717bb7f46c49dad5-138.html#unique-entry-id-138</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact


...Smil argues that the modern world was largely created by technical advances achieved between the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of World War I, in a period he calls the &ldquo;Age of Synergy.&rdquo;    Many products and &ldquo;techniques whose everyday use keeps defining and shaping the modern civilization had not undergone any fundamental change during the course of the 20th century.&rdquo;   (5)  Taking aim at prophets of discontinuity like Kurzweil, Smil says that currently fashionable &ldquo;perceptions of accelerating innovation are ahistorical, myopic perspectives proffered by zealots of electronic faith.&rdquo;  ...  In its place, he offers a combination of &ldquo;phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium.&rdquo; 

...Interestingly, the &ldquo;most far-reaching of all modern technical innovations...[was] the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.&rdquo;    (7)  The Haber-Bosch process made nitrogen fertilizers available on an unprecedented scale (relative to previous sources, Peruvian guano and Chilean nitrate), allowing the world&rsquo;s human population to expand to its current level.   Without it, Smil says, &ldquo;the world could not support more than about 3.5 billion people.&rdquo;   (23) Interestingly, Smil always says &ldquo;technical innovation&rdquo; or &ldquo;technique&rdquo; -- toward the end of the book he congratulates George Orwell for the same thing (quoting a passage from a 1942 BBC broadcast, 259), and calls attention to the fact that he has not used the fuzzier term &ldquo;technology&rdquo; a single time in the text.    This might be frustrating for researchers searching keywords in the future, but it&rsquo;s an interesting distinction.


The key characteristics of the &ldquo;Unprecedented Saltation&rdquo; of 1867-1914, Smil says, were:


	1.	that the impact of these technical advances was almost instantaneous,


...	3.	the rate with which all kinds of innovations were promptly improved after their introduction,


...While discussing periodization, Smil mentions that he is &ldquo;deliberately ignoring&rdquo; dating by economic cycles like the Kondratiev wave.    He&rsquo;s also avoiding, although he doesn&rsquo;t say so, any discussion of cultural, economic and social changes that impacted things like producer financing and consumer behavior.    Tracing the feedback between technical innovation and these other areas is not the mission of this book.    But Smil does deal with the world beyond science: &ldquo;Edison&rsquo;s key insight,&rdquo; he says was not technical, but &ldquo;that any commercially viable lighting system must minimize electricity consumption and hence must use high-resistance filaments with lights connected in parallel across a constant-voltage system&rdquo; (41)  Edison was not designing a light bulb for the laboratory, he was designing a complete electrical generation and delivery system.    The bulb was just the visible end-point of a much more complex project.    Also, &ldquo;between 1880 and 1896 more than $2 million was spent in prosecuting more than 100 lawsuits&rdquo; for patent infringement.   (43)  Technology was no place for the faint-hearted, and the best technician didn&rsquo;t always win.    Not until 1943, a few months after Nicola Tesla&rsquo;s death, did the US Supreme Court finally acknowledge the priority of his patents over Marconi&rsquo;s, Smil says.    And ironically, it was &ldquo;merely a way for the court to avoid a decision regarding Marconi Co. suit against the U.S. government for using its patents.&rdquo;   (251)  Smil compare&rsquo;s Marconi&rsquo;s ability to &ldquo;package, and slightly improve, what is readily available,&rdquo; and benefit from &ldquo;alliances with powerful users&rdquo; with Microsoft&rsquo;s success marketing Windows.    He identifies Bill Gates with Marconi, whose status as &ldquo;not a great technical innovator&rdquo; was shown by his insistence that his radio would only be used to transmit Morse code.


Smil gives Edison credit for being able to play the game, but clearly has a soft spot for Tesla and even George Westinghouse, who he reminds us had 361 patents to his credit.   The stories of these people and their technical innovations would be even better, if they were expanded to include personal and business elements, which will probably lead me to read biographies of many of them when I have some free time.    In his conclusion, Smil supports his claim for the unique influence of technical change during this period by pointing out that &ldquo;only two of today&rsquo;s 10 largest multinationals...were not set up before 1914.&rdquo;   (301)  In addition to this short list, a quick look at the Fortune 500 would probably show that most of the world&rsquo;s business is probably based on techniques whose origins can be traced to his Age of Synergy.    Although that&rsquo;s clearly a trailing indicator, it does seem fair to conclude that claims about the exceptional nature of the digital age are overblown.    Smil shows that technical changes, and common sense suggests that the associated economic and social changes of the late 19th century still account for most of the world in which we live. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Genoveses on Social History</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-30T22:56:27-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/01d8efe62a68e6959845dea72479d726-137.html#unique-entry-id-137</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/01d8efe62a68e6959845dea72479d726-137.html#unique-entry-id-137</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I'm really not that interested in Marx or slavery.    But some of the things the Genoveses say in The Fruits of Merchant Capital make sense to me.    Here are a few I thought I'd hang onto:


&ldquo;To speak bluntly, as admirable as much of the recent social history has been and as valuable as much of the description of the life of the lower classes may eventually prove, the subject as a whole is steadily sinking into a neo-antiquarian swamp presided over by liberal ideologues, the burden of whose political argument, notwithstanding the usual pretense of not having a political argument, rests on an evasion of class confrontation.


&ldquo;The irony will be apparent: since most of the historians of lower-class life wish to tell the story, often in heroic terms, of the people with whom they identify, it rarely occurs to them that their own ideological framework and its appropriate methods do violence to their subjects&rsquo; lives.    It is, after all, worse than nonsense to pretend that slaves, serfs, or workers could possibly develop as human beings immune from the influence, positive as well as negative, of those who hold power over them.    It is an assault, however well-intentioned, on their humanity, for it makes retrospective demands upon them that no human beings should be expected to meet.


&ldquo;Any ideology has important negative as well as positive components and presents some image of resolved conflict&hellip;People espouse and defend beliefs and values as much for what they deny and guard against as for what they affirm.&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Hammond&#x27;s Jacksonian Banks</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-29T22:54:46-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/07401d1e92e4ee0561359dd2348056c4-136.html#unique-entry-id-136</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/07401d1e92e4ee0561359dd2348056c4-136.html#unique-entry-id-136</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Bray Hammond


Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War


1957


This is the text that economic historians complain is the only thing most mainstream historians have ever read about banking.    Hammond focuses on Andrew Jackson&rsquo;s bank war and specie circular, which he blames for the Panic of 1837.    The Second Bank, he says, was a prototype of central banking, which regulated credit and kept the state banks honest.    Jacksonians used the rhetoric of agrarianism, Hammond says, to break up the central bank for their own political gain:


&ldquo;The Jacksonians were unconventional and skillful in politics.    In their assault on the Bank they united five important elements, which, incongruities notwithstanding, comprised an effective combination.    These were Wall Street&rsquo;s jealousy of Chestnut Street, the business man&rsquo;s dislike of the federal Bank&rsquo;s restraint upon bank credit, the politician&rsquo;s resentment at the Bank&rsquo;s interference in states&rsquo; rights, popular identification of the Bank with the aristocracy of business, and the direction of agrarian antipathy away from banks in general to the federal Bank in particular.&rdquo;    (329)  The effect of Jackson&rsquo;s policies was that &ldquo;it left the poor agrarian as poor as he had been before and it left the money power possessed of more money and more power than ever.&rdquo;    Since these were the results of the policy, shouldn&rsquo;t we investigate whether the winners were in any way behind the policy?  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reception study isn&#x27;t history</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-28T22:52:28-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/354dd8410581d34ee434eaf139467b80-135.html#unique-entry-id-135</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/354dd8410581d34ee434eaf139467b80-135.html#unique-entry-id-135</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Philip Goldsteain and James L.   Machor


New Directions in American Reception Study


2008


Kenneth H.   Roemer, &ldquo;Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere: Reception Studies and Utopian Literature,&rdquo; 99-118


Roemer looks at Bellamy&rsquo;s Looking Backward, but not really.    He discusses contemporary and modern reviewers (including William Dean Howells, who apparently comments on what he thinks about its typical reader), and then does a reader response study of 733 contemporary readers.    This is interesting, but it doesn&rsquo;t go that far in my mind to situating the book in its time and place.     
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Great Frontier</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-28T22:52:32-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dd4ed0ce2785ec087f2044db30ce6e75-134.html#unique-entry-id-134</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dd4ed0ce2785ec087f2044db30ce6e75-134.html#unique-entry-id-134</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Walter Prescott Webb


The Great Frontier


1951


Webb recasts the story of the frontier as a global story of the &ldquo;great boom&rdquo; that began with the discovery of the New World.    In what sounds a little like central place theory for the common man (Christaller wasn&rsquo;t translated into English until 1966), Webb argues that the four-hundred year existence of the frontier gave the old European center access to &ldquo;inherently a vast body of wealth without proprietors.&rdquo;  


In a 1953 review, David Potter praised Webb&rsquo;s expansion of the Turner thesis beyond the American West and beyond Turner&rsquo;s strict agrarianism, but criticizes Webb&rsquo;s &ldquo;disregard of technology as a factor&rdquo; and his &ldquo;geographic determinism.&rdquo;    Potter subtly recasts Webb&rsquo;s argument as recognition of &ldquo;historical patterns which, because of their very magnitude&hellip;had never [been] perceived as a whole.&rdquo;    Like the Ag.   Historians&rsquo; arguments against Malthus, these may have been valid at the time; but at some point we probably need to reassess limits to growth and the idea that a boom caused by relatively &ldquo;free&rdquo; access to abundant resources may not last forever.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>1859 Banking and the Panic of &#x27;57</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-24T19:13:10-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0d74479ac13f02054f0829e802ec3f1f-133.html#unique-entry-id-133</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0d74479ac13f02054f0829e802ec3f1f-133.html#unique-entry-id-133</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[An account of 1850s banking, written in 1859, with a contemporary (bank-friendly) perspective on the causes of the Panic of 1857: 


...Re: &ldquo;persons who present checks&hellip;In character and disposition, the applicants are as different as in their features&mdash;boys, workmen, sailors, doctors, knaves, and drunkards.    Some want &lsquo;half gold and half notes,&rsquo; some &lsquo;half silver and the rest in small bills,&rsquo; some &lsquo;all bills,&rsquo; and some &lsquo;all gold and be damned to you.&rsquo;&rdquo; 

...The &lsquo;pass-book&rsquo; of the housekeeper is balanced by a note at three or six months.  ...  The jobber gives notes to the wholesale merchant, and he in turn to the manufacturer or producer.  ...  The factor is already under acceptance to the grower, and the grower&rsquo;s notes are given to the bank long before his &lsquo;fields are white unto harvest.&rsquo;    The sugar that reaches our wharves from Havana or New Orleans has two or three sets of notes predicated upon it before the first hogshead has discharged from the vessel; and it continues to accumulate notes as it passes through the hands of the refiner into those of the grocer.    Even after it has been swallowed in confections, its notes are still floating, unliquidated, in the market.    The market carries millions of notes for what is already consumed, and millions more for what is not yet sprouted in the furrow.&rdquo; 

...They are transferred, by indorsement, from one merchant to another, in settlement of debts, the same as bank bills; differing only in this&mdash;that they mature at a stated subsequent time, and that the other indorsers are liable to the owner, in case of non-payment by the drawer.&rdquo;  

...It is first counted by hand, and the pieces slip on each other.  ...  Although this does not for a long time sensibly affect the value of the pieces separately, it is very perceptible when a thousand of them are taken together, especially of the smaller denominations.    It is rarely that a bag of five thousand dollars by count, of what is in current use, of the quarter-eagles and of the one dollar pieces, holds out full value at weight.    The deficiency on that sum is very commonly from seven to ten dollars.&rdquo;  

...The immense supply of gold from California and Australia has superseded it in the general exchanges of commerce.    As it is not legal tender for sums over five dollars, our banks decline receiving it on deposit in large quantity.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;A prodigious weight of insolvency had been carried along for years in the volume of trade.    Extravagance of living had already sapped the foundations of commercial success, in hundreds of instances where credit supplied the place of lost capital&hellip;The deficiency of means to carry on business could be supplied only by an increase of the personal credit&hellip;There are no positive limitations to the expansion of individual credit.    A pernicious practice (this practice originated with the commission merchants) prevails of making promissory notes payable to the order of the drawer, and thus negotiable without indorsement.    When the seller finds that his customer has reached the line of credit that he is willing to allow, instead of refusing to sell more, and thus offering a prudential restriction to the extent of his business, he goes on selling, and disposes of the accumulating excess of the buyer&rsquo;s paper in &lsquo;the street.&rsquo;    In this way he overstocks the market with goods, and gives a credit of thirty thousand dollars to a man whom he considers it unsafe to trust with more than three thousand; and the risk of twenty-seven thousand is scattered broadcast in the community!    The buyer knows that his creditor gets rid of his notes, and what does he care if strangers lose by him?&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;The only proper use of currency is, circulation&mdash;to pay wages, to buy commodities in store or market, and to answer the convenience of daily expenditure by the people.    The privilege of issue is given by law for this purpose, and for no other.    The advantage to the bank consists in the currency fulfilling this function of circulation&mdash;in its passing from hand to hand, giving life to industry, and forming the basis of the larger operations of commerce.    The bank pays it out for notes discounted or for deposits, and realizes interest upon it until it is returned for redemption.  ...  It is, therefore, and object for banks to keep out their bills as long as possible.    They resort to various expedients for this purpose, such as discounting notes, on the condition that the bills shall be taken to a distance, and paid out for purchases of wool, for wages on a railroad, or other service.    A large aggregate of currency is thus forced out upon the country, to find its way back for redemption through the usual channels of exchange.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;Those banks which were the least able to redeem, and whose bills were, therefore, least entitled to credit, were most persevering and ingenious in keeping the community supplied with their currency.&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>More Greenbacks</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-24T13:50:43-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/62e359d2a846bf21ef0ffbda6f9e32eb-132.html#unique-entry-id-132</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/62e359d2a846bf21ef0ffbda6f9e32eb-132.html#unique-entry-id-132</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Irwin Unger


The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879


1964


&ldquo;Differences over currency and the related subject of banking have expressed basic American social and political antagonisms.&rdquo;   (He points to Joseph Dorfman&rsquo;s 5 volumes of The Economic Mind, 3) 


He credits Beard with developing these themes, but criticizes the dualism of &ldquo;Capitalist versus farmer, debtor versus creditor, East versus West, conservative versus radical, hard money versus soft money&mdash;these appear as successive guises of the same inherent division&hellip;.although their names may vary, [they] always remain essentially the same.&rdquo;   (5)    


&ldquo;Primarily this dualism may be defined as a contest between wealth in the form of land and wealth seeking outlets in commerce and industry.&rdquo;   (Quoting Potter, ed., Party Politics and Public Action, 1877-1917, p.   16.   5)  This is incredibly important &mdash; if it&rsquo;s a story about wealth vs.   Wealth, that&rsquo;s a lot different from wealth vs.   Poverty.    And, if it&rsquo;s the story about an uneven transition from one form of wealth to another, then it has a completely different character from the (Hicks?)   point of view.    I may be able to use this in my banking transition argument.


THESIS: &ldquo;most men tried to strike a balance between their pocket books and their duty.    This mixture of ethics and interest&hellip;must be recognized if we hope to understand the events of these years.&rdquo;   (8)  Good, but do all people share this ambivalence equally, or are some more &ldquo;ethical&rdquo; and others more &ldquo;interested?&rdquo;    We&rsquo;re moving toward the Gilded Age, after all&hellip;


Cf.   Hesseltine, &ldquo;Four American Tradtions&rdquo; http://www.jstor.org/stable/2204591


 


Unger repeats the consensus claim that &ldquo;rural anti-bankism of the 1860&rsquo;s and 1870&rsquo;s was tinged with anti-Semitism,&rdquo; but in his footnote gives both the Hofstadter/Handlin side and the Pollack/Higham response.    (210)  Cf.   Pollack, &ldquo;The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism.&rdquo; http://www.jstor.org/stable/1847185  


I tend to agree with Unger&rsquo;s conclusion that the Civil War did not &ldquo;divide American history into an older rural-agrarian and a newer urban-industrial phase,&rdquo; but not for the reasons he cites (407).    Unger sees a continuity in traditions (Calvinism, agrarianism) that I think were already undergoing huge changes before the war&mdash;I&rsquo;m more comfortable with accounts that see these changes as some of the causes of the Civil War, than with a story of old (and especially of ignorant old) traditions continuing to drive social and political thought almost to the twentieth century.    I&rsquo;m sure there was some of that, but I don&rsquo;t see how this focus really complicates the dualism Unger criticized in the &ldquo;Beardians.&rdquo;
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Moral History</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-23T13:16:20-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ebf4a67e81a2f151a1ae5b615a335b17-131.html#unique-entry-id-131</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ebf4a67e81a2f151a1ae5b615a335b17-131.html#unique-entry-id-131</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[John Higham


&ldquo;Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic&rdquo;


AHR, 1962


Higham tries to balance progressivism and &ldquo;consensus&rdquo; anti-progressivism, by suggesting that &ldquo;the moral standards of an age&rdquo; are a cultural consensus that are both contextual and comparable to those of the present.    Conflict (the staple of the progressives) can be found &ldquo;wherever those moral standards clash or break down, and so force men to make a choice.&rdquo;   (625)  &ldquo;Causal history and moral history at their best,&rdquo; Higham says, &ldquo;are reciprocal modes of understanding.&rdquo;   (622)


Progressives, Higham suggests, found polarity by oversimplifying the picture.    They missed the opportunity later historians took, to fragment &ldquo;into a welter of factions what the progressive historian had thought of as &lsquo;the business community.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (615)  But dividing groups into an infinite number of subgroups (until we arrive at individuals?)   precludes any ability to see broad social conflicts or shifting power relationships, resulting in &ldquo;tameness and amiability&rdquo; and ultimately &ldquo;a moral vacuum.&rdquo;   (616)  


In contrast with the historiography, which also tends to overemphasize conflict, I suspect Higham is right that the &ldquo;shift away from democratic affirmations should not be exaggerated.&rdquo;    Historians are Americans, and American &ldquo;liberal movements were after all conservative and...almost all Americans have really been liberal.&rdquo;   (614)  In a period of prosperous professionalism, conservative historians did not &ldquo;feel much at odds with powerful institutions or dominant social groups.&rdquo;    But cycles of prosperity and alienation among intellectuals (like those of the public at large) are themselves historical events.    Higham suggests that self-aware historians know this, and dymanically balance detachment and engagement to &ldquo;rise above a constricting present...[and] enter a living past.&rdquo;   (609)
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Influential Books&#x2c; 1939</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-22T13:45:49-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8a077a893bfa92e21565251bf32144b2-130.html#unique-entry-id-130</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8a077a893bfa92e21565251bf32144b2-130.html#unique-entry-id-130</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Malcolm Cowley & Bernard Smith


Books that Changed Our Minds


...This book, dedicated to Charles Beard, consists of a series of essays on authors or books deemed especially influential by American intellectuals responding to a New Republic inquiry.    While it does not provide first-hand information about the books that influenced regular people (or even women, since all the respondents were apparently male), many of the people they polled had written books that did influence large groups of Americans.    Carl Becker, for instance, nominated Sumner&rsquo;s Folkways, &ldquo;which impressed me with the relativity of custom and ideas,&rdquo; and Vaihinger&rsquo;s As If, which &ldquo;confirmed me in the notion that social thinking is shaped by certain unexamined preconceptions current at the time.&rdquo; (quoting Becker&rsquo;s letter, 6)  Beard said &ldquo;Brooks Adams&rsquo;s two books are thumping,&rdquo; which the editors took to mean The Law of Civilization and Decay and Theory of Social Revolutions.    Both Becker and Beard recommended Croce&rsquo;s History, Its Theory and Practice.


Beard himself was the second-most widely recommended author, just behind Thorstein Veblen (really!), and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and The Theory of the Leisure Class got an equal number of votes.    Authors popular with the surveyed intellectuals for the body of their work rather than a particular title included Sinclair Lewis, H. ...  Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, Emerson, and Thoreau.    Autobiographies included Henry Adams&rsquo;, Theodore Dreiser&rsquo;s, Joseph Freeman&rsquo;s, Robert M.   La Follette&rsquo;s, and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, which is called &ldquo;the key book of the depression...[that] came at exactly the right moment.&rdquo; 

...Several of the books listed also seem to be present in the lists of popular, &ldquo;amateur&rdquo; history I&rsquo;m compiling from Higham, Novick, and Tyrell (more on this later), and on bestseller lists.    They include:


Waldo Frank, Our America


Van Wyck Brooks, America&rsquo;s Coming of Age


Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World


Freud, Interpretation of Dreams


Croly, Promise of American Life


Brandeis, Other People&rsquo;s Money


Joseph Krutch, The Modern Temper (said to be &ldquo;very influential in the colleges,&rdquo; 13)


V.I. 

...Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World


Graham Wallas, The Great Society


John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power


Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes


James Frazer, The Golden Bough


Robert Lynd responded to the survey with authors like Adler, Dewey, James, Veblen, Huxley, and with Samuel Butler&rsquo;s Erewhon.    These suggestions, the editors note, are much different from the &ldquo;books taken from the Middletown public library in 1935,&rdquo; which Lynd describes in Middletown (Chapter 17) and Middletown in Transition (Chapter 7).    Those titles probably deserve a closer look, too.    Stay tuned...
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Celebrating Professionalism&#x2c; 1965</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-20T15:00:07-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/cd4eabe9923d07d1f672cf8e099eeb31-129.html#unique-entry-id-129</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/cd4eabe9923d07d1f672cf8e099eeb31-129.html#unique-entry-id-129</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Novick characterizes Higham&rsquo;s historiography as celebratory and Whiggish, and Higham acknowledges the validity of these points in his review of That Noble Dream.  ...  Sub-disciplines went their separate ways, post-modernists challenged what they believed was the naive epistemology of historians; instead of three acts ending in victory, we were left with four acts -- Higham&rsquo;s self-congratulatory third act now seems like pride before the fall.


But there&rsquo;s still a lot of good information in the book, and nearly fifty years later, it&rsquo;s a primary source for historiographers wanting to understand the point of view of the profession in the 1960s.    Higham celebrates the professionalism that set itself against an earlier, &ldquo;patrician&rdquo; style of history, as he sets out to trace the &ldquo;reciprocal relations between this emerging [American Historical] Association and the existing world of amateur scholarship.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;College curriculums until the 1870s,&rdquo; Higham says, &ldquo;had room for very few history courses, and these were generally taught by professors primarily interested in the classics or in philosophy.    As late as 1884 the four hundred American institutions of higher education had about twenty full-time teachers of history.&rdquo;  ...  Professional historians&rsquo; began &ldquo;cooperative action [to] establish and maintain their own standards of achievement instead of obeying some external authority.&rdquo;    (5)  This &ldquo;cooperative ethic,&rdquo; Higham admits, &ldquo;discouraged to some degree a quest for genius.&rdquo;  ...  Franklin Jameson, expected &ldquo;the insular and fraternal habits of professional association...to perpetuate the high level of mediocrity&rdquo; that Jameson believed would (somehow) precede &ldquo;truly great and profound work.&rdquo;    Higham adds that under the demands of teaching, the historian &ldquo;does not easily hold to an extravagant and selfish idea of achievement.&rdquo;  

...In contrast, Higham tells the story of the &ldquo;amateur historian [who] cherished his independence.&rdquo;    His example is John Bach McMaster, &ldquo;a self-made historian who secured a professorship...because he wrote an outstanding book, a scholar who was notably absent at the founding&rdquo; of the AHA, and who showed his unprofessional lack of solidarity by opposing Carnegie pensions for retired professors.   (7)  &ldquo;The amateur historian expected his work to survive or perish on its individual merits; he was little concerned about its status as a &lsquo;contribution&rsquo; to some continuing collective inquiry...  He chose his subject for its intrinsic interest and wrote either for his own satisfaction or for a public that would accept him on his own terms.&rdquo;    I don&rsquo;t think I need to comment on this, except to say that Ayn Rand could have written these words for Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead.


It&rsquo;s interesting, the central role Higham gives Jameson, as &ldquo;the administrative genius of the historical profession.&rdquo;   (26)  His &ldquo;committee formulated a precise and extensive plan for coordinating professional scholarship in American history.&rdquo;   (22)  This, much more than the economic focus of Beard and Becker, seems like Progressivism at work.    


...Increase Mather, Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England, 1676


...Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, 1843 (&ldquo;appealed so widely that seventy or more American newspapers reviewed it within a month of publication.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;Henry Adams&rsquo; profound and scintillating History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-91), sold a mere three thousand sets during the entire decade of the Nineties.&rdquo; 

...Rhodes&rsquo; History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1892-1906): &ldquo;Each volume sold about two or three thousand copies in its first year in print.&rdquo;


&ldquo;Hiram Martin Chittenden, who spent his leisure as an Army officer in the Missouri Valley  writing The American Fur Trade in the Far West (1902).


&ldquo;Even a scholarly work so controversial and contemporary in interest as Charles A.   Beard&rsquo;s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) sold fewer than eight thousand copies over a span of four decades.&rdquo;  

...Wells&rsquo;s Outline of History, issued by a hesitant publisher at an exorbitant price in 1920, sold one and a half million copies--one copy for every twenty homes in the country--within twelve years.&rdquo;  

...Beveridge, a former United States Senator...had done an astonishingly successful four-volume biography of John Marshall (1919) before he retired completely from politics and surpassed all previous biographers of Lincoln in breadth of research and in critical acumen.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;Some of the principal attributes of scientific history first appeared in the work of a good many amateur historians, beginning perhaps with Richard Hildreth, whose six-volume History of the United States was published between 1849 and 1852.&rdquo;   (92)  Higham celebrates the home-grown nature of scientific history: few if any of the &ldquo;amateur pioneers of scientific history studied abroad.&rdquo;  


...&ldquo;All of the leading historical journals ignored Main Currents in American Thought, presumably considering it outside their purview.&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Popular history</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-20T09:16:39-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d4768a5bbd5cfd5180eade58ab2ab513-128.html#unique-entry-id-128</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d4768a5bbd5cfd5180eade58ab2ab513-128.html#unique-entry-id-128</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Ian Tyrell


Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970


2005


It was probably unfair of me to read this book immediately after Novick.    It&rsquo;s a much dryer study, with much less personal detail.    Tyrell focuses mainly on the official life of the AHA, which makes this much less interesting for me.    But a few things did stick out, like the &ldquo;rapid rise of agricultural history, with the formation of the Agricultural History Society under AHA auspices in 1919 and a specialized journal in 1927.&rdquo;   (31)  Tyrell connects the advancing fortunes of ag. history with a Progressive interest in country life, which seems reasonable, but probably bears repeating just because it is so obvious.  


Another area Tyrell calls attention to, that I should look deeper into, is the influence of book clubs on American readers.    By the late 1920s, he says there were nine major American book clubs, led by the Book-of-the-Month Club (1926) and the Literary Guild (1927), &ldquo;serving over 100,000 readers each by the 1930s.&rdquo;   (45)  Tyrell also mentions the History Book Club -- it might be interesting to look at its history and the books it promoted over the years.


See also, American Heritage, ed.   Bruce Catton, Henry Pringle, and Mark Sullivan, whose multi-volume Our Times was said by Nevins to have &ldquo;probably done more to interest people in American history than anything else written in our generation.&rdquo;   (49) Marquis James won the 1937 Pulitzer for a study of Andrew Jackson (I should review award lists, too), and Harpers editor Frederick Allen wrote Only Yesterday.    Carl Sandburg wrote extensively on Lincoln, and newspaperman Walter Millis wrote Road to War: America, 1914-1917.    Then of course, there&rsquo;s Claude Bowen.    Popular history has its downside, too.


Yale professor Allen Johnson said &ldquo;there is little point in writing history that will not be read.&rdquo;   (57)  He edited the fifty-volume Chronicles of America series, which Publishers Weekly claimed sold &ldquo;tens of thousands&rdquo; in the 1920s by &ldquo;intensive subscription sale.&rdquo;   (57)  Tyrell also says Charles and Mary Beards&rsquo; Rise of American Civilization (1927) and America in Midpassage (1939) &ldquo;served a generation as textbooks in colleges and high schools.&rdquo;   (61)  I wonder how long the use of the Beards&rsquo; texts in schools continued, after they began to lose their preeminence in professional circles?


 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>That Noble Dream</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-19T22:08:55-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a48ec05ad4df777ace65e8c2ac4e0471-127.html#unique-entry-id-127</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a48ec05ad4df777ace65e8c2ac4e0471-127.html#unique-entry-id-127</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He also addresses the issues of professionalism, audience, the historian&rsquo;s role in society, and (of course) objectivity, in ways that are very interesting and seem quite fresh, even two decades after the book&rsquo;s publication.


...The interesting thing about these controversial concepts, though, is that the fact they are contested isn&rsquo;t an unfortunate effect of change, or a flaw in our understanding.  

...Novick describes a myth of objectivity, which he says includes assumptions about the &ldquo;reality of the past...a sharp separation between the knower and known, between fact and value, and , above all, between history and fiction.&rdquo; ...  (2)  This mythical objectivity is important, he says, not only because &ldquo;it has served in sustaining the professional historical venture&rdquo; (3), but also because of the &ldquo;numerous...assertions by historians that without such faith they would see no point in scholarship, and would abandon it.&rdquo;    The main issue here, for me at least, is that when you really follow this trail all the way to its source, you end up in a religious universe where there are patterns in history because there is a divine plan.  

...&ldquo;The e pluribus unum in the myth of historical objectivity,&rdquo; Novick says, &ldquo;promised to resolve the contradiction [between many points of view and &ldquo;reality&rdquo;], through a unitary convergent history which would correspond to a unitary past.&rdquo;   (5)  I don&rsquo;t see why we can&rsquo;t agree that there&rsquo;s a single reality, though, and also accept the proposition that it&rsquo;s unknowable -- both because of its ridiculous complexity and because our own consciousnesses are limited by our experience, environment, and (yes) language.    And I don&rsquo;t think you would have to be brought up with quantum mechanics or postmodernism to &ldquo;get&rdquo; this -- it seems like David Hume would be all you&rsquo;d need.  


Novick quotes Isaiah Berlin, who he says follows Hegel in describing the history of thought and culture as &ldquo;a changing pattern of great liberating ideas which inevitably turn into suffocating straitjackets.&rdquo; (quoting Concepts and Categories, 7)  But while this may be true in the overall history of ideas, in historiography (and to some extent in Novick&rsquo;s story) it frequently seems that differences of emphasis are mistaken for disagreement.  

...While this may be true, it also seems clear that relatively few people in the history of the profession have attempted grand syntheses or new overarching interpretations, and have been noticed and read by many people.  ...  In fact, part of my job, I think, is understanding the slight difference between the list of historians who were read by lots of people, and the ones now believed significant by historiographers.  

...In his introduction, Novick mentions the choices he had to make in writing, to balance accurate representation of historians&lsquo; positions with a more generalized discussion of their place.  ...  (9)  It might also be true that, since many of the historiographical arguments involve the selective misinterpretation of historians&lsquo; positions and the setting up of straw men, a less deep approach to their ideas might be entirely appropriate.  

...He claims that &ldquo;the philosophical stakes are very high&rdquo; for historians (especially on the objectivity issue); and yet he acknowledges that as historians we are aware that &ldquo;protagonists are in fact often disingenuous in their arguments, are following hidden agendas, and are expressing views shaped by &lsquo;extra rational&rsquo; factors.&rdquo; ...  I&rsquo;d suggest that in several areas, including overstating changes, imposing periodization, and reintroducing substantially similar interpretations using arcane new vocabulary, historians bow to the demands of professionalism in ways their (amateur) predecessors never needed to do.


...(27)  Even Ranke&rsquo;s famous dictum, that history should be written wie es eigentlich gewesen, is complicated by the fact that at the time Ranke wrote that, eigentlich &ldquo;also meant &lsquo;essentially,&rsquo; and it was in this sense that Ranke characteristically used it.&rdquo; 

...(34)  As an example, he points out that although Darwin believed (at least privately) that &ldquo;all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!&rdquo; ...  (35-6)  These ideas entered history through men like Albert Bushnell Hart, who &ldquo;like most other readers of Darwin, accepted at face value Darwin&rsquo;s claim to have &lsquo;worked on true Baconian principles&rsquo; and, in his AHA presidential address, urged historians to follow his example.&rdquo; 

...(48)  But in spite of the historical profession&rsquo;s attempts to institute a monopoly, &ldquo;much of the most distinguished historical work continued to be produced by those without Ph....  (54)  The professionalization of history not only shifted power from the reading public to the &ldquo;bureaucratic organization&rdquo; (63), it also promoted the idea of historians &ldquo;bringing their stones to one great building and piling them on and cementing them together&rdquo; (quoting Karl Pearson, 56)  &ldquo;Almost anyone, properly trained, could mold a brick,&rdquo; Novick says.  

...Re: approaching the past without preconceptions: &ldquo;Hoping to find something without looking for it, expecting to find final answers to life&rsquo;s riddle by resolutely refusing to ask questions--it was surely the most romantic species of realism yet invented, the oddest attempt ever made to get something for nothing.&rdquo; (quoting Becker, 1921, 254)  Novick calls attention to the &ldquo;conservatism inherent in unadorned factualism.  

...In the end, I&rsquo;m not convinced that the Objectivity Question is the most pressing one for historians, or even the central issue of That Noble Dream.  

...There&rsquo;s a lot of great material in here -- much of it comes in the form of behind the scenes looks at the personalities, animosities, and occasionally friendships of historians, as shown in their letters and private writings.  ...  Once or twice I wondered whether a particularly racist or otherwise obnoxious personal aside was necessary to my understanding of the issues, but on the whole it&rsquo;s a very useful insider&rsquo;s view of the profession.


Novick&rsquo;s close attention to these personal details went a long way to impress on me the relative smallness of the historical community (at least in terms of its &ldquo;players&rdquo;), and of the short duration of American historiography.  

...Handlin appears in so many different guises: early on, as a young Jewish historian thankfully allowed to enter the profession; then, in the 1940s, as a consensus critic of the progressives&rsquo; &ldquo;Bulletin 54&rdquo; (392); and finally as the Pulitzer-winning author of The Uprooted, announcing that he had &ldquo;learned to live with relativism.&rdquo; 

...Handlin described The Uprooted as an epic, and acknowledged that he &ldquo;did not find it in the nature of this work to give its pages the usual historical documentation&rdquo; (The Uprooted, 308).  ...  in The Uprooted suggests a position closer to the one characterized for ultra-relativists like Hayden White, than for &ldquo;hyperobjectivists&rdquo; like Handlin, who are supposed to find &ldquo;correspondence of a representation with its object...in the small pieces which together form the record&rdquo; (quoting Truth in History, 608).  


...Carl Becker, for example, seems to focus a good deal of thought on &ldquo;the history that common men carry around in their heads&rdquo; Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of Carl L. ...  But more to the point of That Noble Dream, I think the inconsistent and shifting positions of Handlin and others in Novick&rsquo;s account suggest a contingency based not only on changing American politics and culture, which Novick addresses, but also the shifting needs of careers and personal reputations.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Becker on history</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-17T19:50:19-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e5840492a1ba24580ecc62413d2bda8b-126.html#unique-entry-id-126</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e5840492a1ba24580ecc62413d2bda8b-126.html#unique-entry-id-126</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Becker isn&rsquo;t arguing for anything more radical than Hume (who he calls on in one of the pieces), and he's pretty much writing in plain English.  

...&ldquo;the historical fact is a thing wonderfully elusive after all, very difficult to fix, almost impossible to distinguish from &lsquo;theory,&rsquo; to which it is supposed to be completely antithetical.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;while we speak of historical facts as it they were pebbles to be gathered in a cup, there is in truth no unit fact in history.    The historical reality is continuous, and infinitely complex; and the cold hard facts into which it is said to be analyzed are not concrete portions of the reality, but only aspects of it.    The reality of history has forever disappeared, and the &lsquo;facts&rsquo; of history, whatever they once were, are only mental images or pictures which the historian makes in order to comprehend it.&rdquo; 

...I think it&rsquo;s interesting how this anticipates postmodernism -- but then so does Plato&rsquo;s Allegory of the Cave.  

...That argument does not really prove that miracles never occurred in history; it proves only that there is no use having a past through which the intellect cannot freely range with a certain sense of security.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;It seems, then, that the great point in historical synthesis is selection: which of the numberless particular facts will the historian select?&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The historian...does indeed have a concept of the end, and he selects the facts that will explain how that end came about.  

...Fling&rdquo; description of what historians do]; but the unique fact, selected because of its importance, was in every case selected because of its importance for some idea already in the field.  

...There is thus a distinction of capital importance to be made: the distinction between the ephemeral event which disappears, and the affirmation about the event which persists...  If so the historical fact is not the past event, but a symbol which enables us to recreate it imaginatively...

...And so I repeat...it is impossible to present all the facts; and...even if you could present all the facts the miserable things wouldn&rsquo;t say anything, would just say nothing at all.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;One historian will therefore necessarily choose certain affirmations about the event, and relate them in a certain way, rejecting other affirmations and other ways of relating them...  What is it that leads one historian to make, out of all the possible true affirmations about the given event , certain affirmations and not others?  ...  And so the purpose he has in mind will determine the precise meaning which he derives from the event.&rdquo; 

...He&rsquo;ll try to integrate this into an overall understanding based on context and agreement of sources, rather than just cherry-picking the ones he thinks are most interesting or agree with his thesis.


On the difference between history and science: &ldquo;The historian has to judge the significance of the series of events from the ons single performance, never to be repeated, and never, since the records are incomplete and imperfect, capable of being fully known or fully affirmed.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;every normal person does know some history, a good deal in fact...enough for his immediate purposes; otherwise he would be a lost soul indeed......  Knowledge or history, insofar as it is living history and not dead knowledge locked up in notebooks, is only an enrichment of our minds with the multiplied images of events, people, places, ideas, emotions outside our personal experience...enabling him to judge the acts and thoughts of men, his own included, on the basis of experience less immediate and restricted.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;the kind of history that has the most influence on the life of the community and the course of events is the history that common men carry around in their heads.    It won&rsquo;t do to say that history has no influence on the course of events because people refuse to read history books.    Whether the general run of people read history books or not, they inevitably picture the past in some fashion or other, and this picture, however little it corresponds to the real past, helps to determine their ideas about politics and society.  

...It is, indeed, not wholly the historian&rsquo;s fault that the mass of men will not read good history willingly and with understanding; but I think we should not be too complacent about it.&rdquo; 

...The truth is somewhat different: what he admired was not American democracy, but the ingenuity of Americans in inventing political devices for mitigating the evils of democracy...he was n intelligent and humane lover of the masses, and yet a highly differentiated individual who prized his liberties, including the liberty of not belonging to the masses whom he loved.&rdquo; 

...The first is what Alfred North Whitehead has taught us to call the &lsquo;climate of opinion&rsquo; -- those unconsciously accepted presuppositions which, in any age, so largely determine what men think about the nature of the universe and what can and cannot happen in it, and about the nature of man and what is essential to the good life.    The second is more specific: it derives from the political conflicts of the time, which dispose groups and classes to accept a particular interpretation of current ideas as a theoretical support for concrete political measures.    The third is still more specific: it derives from the mind and temperament of the individual who gives to the philosophy its ordered literary form.  ...  Whatever value is has for its own time depends largely on the extent to which it can be used to illuminate or resolve the particular political issues of that time and place.    But its value for other times and places will depend upon the the extent to which the fundamental presuppositions on which it rests have a universal validity--the extent to which they express some essential and enduring truth about nature and the life of man.&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Know Nothingism </title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-11T08:17:29-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/57a73a63fb68fec9f115e9a013387409-123.html#unique-entry-id-123</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/57a73a63fb68fec9f115e9a013387409-123.html#unique-entry-id-123</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Tyler Anbinder


Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s


...Anbinder argues that the Know Nothing party was formed and motivated by combination of anti-Catholic, nativist, and anti-slavery sentiments.    Anti-slavery attracted many northerners, swelling the ranks of the party initially, but eroding its strength as more specifically abolitionist political options became available.    Anbinder also suggests that interest in the party reflected a lot of pent-up frustration with the Whigs and Democrats.    This generalized discontent also facilitated the shift from Know Nothingism to Republicanism. 


&ldquo;From 1845 to 1854, some 2,900,000 immigrants landed in the United States, more than had come in the seven previous decades combined.    As a percentage of the nation&rsquo;s total population, the influx of immigrants...amounting to 14.5 percent of the 1845 population, has never been surpassed.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;Irish immigrants to the United States in the two decades after the War of 1812 tended to be...well-to-do farmers and middle-class city dwellers...[and] usually brought business or artisanal skills with them. 

...Then the potato blight struck in 1845.    &ldquo;It is estimated that between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 Irishmen died either of starvation or of starvation-related illness (out of a total pre-famine population of 8,000,000) during the famine.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;Although they received less publicity than the Irish, nearly as many Germans emigrated to the United States during the mid-1800s.    In fact, in the peak year of immigration, 1854, German emigration to the United States outpaced that from Ireland by two to one.&rdquo; (and &ldquo;the sources of greatest emigration do not correspond to the areas of revolutionary unrest.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;By 1855, immigrants outnumbered native-born citizens in Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee, and...would soon surpass the native in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Cincinnatti.&rdquo; 

...Morse charged in a series of published letters that the monarchies of Europe had enlisted the aid of the Catholic Church to subvert the spread of democracy by sending Catholic immigrants to take control of the under-populated American west.&rdquo;   (9)  Like father, like son...


Lincoln, in a letter to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855:


I am not a Know-Nothing.    That is certain.    How could I be?    How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?    Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.    As a nation, we began by declaring that &ldquo;all men are created equal.&rdquo;    We now practically read it &ldquo;all men are created equal, except negroes.&rdquo;    When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read &ldquo;all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.&rdquo;   When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.


Anbinder&rsquo;s argument with William Gienapp seems to revolve around Gienapp&rsquo;s claim that in the 1854 elections, nativism trumped anti-slavery, and that&rsquo;s why the Know Nothings did so well.    Anbinder suggests that a Know Nothing &ldquo;vote usually carried both anti-Catholic and anti-slavery connotations.    The temperance issue also drew many voters to the Know Nothing ticket, as did a general resentment toward the existing parties.&rdquo;   (66-7)  Even so, Anbinder agrees that &ldquo;if the question is posed...to determine whether anti-slavery or Know Nothingism played a key role in the Democrats&rsquo; defeat...it is evident that Know Nothingism was the decisive factor in bringing about the Democratic setback in Pennsylvania.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Lowbrow Historian</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-01T22:10:55-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/655aa3227d15b3328239dbb1cd197e32-122.html#unique-entry-id-122</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/655aa3227d15b3328239dbb1cd197e32-122.html#unique-entry-id-122</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Stewart H.   Holbrook


Lost Men of American History


1947


In a short introduction, Allan Nevins says:


&ldquo;There is always danger that the story of the nation, at least in its briefer versions, will become conventionalized...  And [Holbrook] also touches on a deeper question.    The United States is a great mass democracy, where equality of opportunity is emphasized;...have we not made a little too much of the very great men, the primary figures; and too little of the serried ranks of talent and achievement just behind them, the host of men whose labors were the main element in progress?&rdquo;    (viii)


In his own note to the reader, Holbrook says &ldquo;I believe that men, even one man or one woman, often have had immense effect in slowing or hastening the forces that are said to make history...  Many just such men and women have been slighted or wholly ignored in our history books.    They are in large part the people I want to tell about.&rdquo;


So it begins.    The book is filled with interesting material.    For example, &ldquo;The log cabin&rsquo;s first appearance in North America was in 1638, when members of the Swedish West India Company [who knew there was such a thing!]   set up a trading post and village on the shore of Delaware Bay.&rdquo;   (4)  This is not the Scandinavians&rsquo; only appearance.    Holbrook later tells the story of novelist Fredrika Bremer, who went back home to tell the Swedes about Minnesota, and Reinert Reiersen, whose 1844 book The Pathfinder for Norwegian Emigrants in the United North American States and Texas &ldquo;was a classic of its genre.&rdquo;   (201-3)  Holbrook covers a wide range of people and topics, including to my great surprise Abner Kneeland and Dr.   Charles Knowlton (whose name gets by his copy editor as &ldquo;Thomas&rdquo; later in the book, 126-7, 312).    Really interesting stuff, a lot of which could stand to be taken up by a guy like me -- some of which I&rsquo;m already working on.    But enough about that, for now!  


Holbrook was an interesting guy -- may be a subject in his own right.    His &ldquo;lowbrow history&rdquo; certainly anticipates my ideas of about the history of regular people, for regular people.    I&rsquo;m happy I had the idea on my own, before I heard of Holbrook.    I&rsquo;m also happy he had it, because I&rsquo;m looking forward to reading more and seeing where he took it.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>the Backcountry</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-12-01T22:09:45-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4645caf7a5acb38b67b61140986b28a2-121.html#unique-entry-id-121</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4645caf7a5acb38b67b61140986b28a2-121.html#unique-entry-id-121</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[His title recalls Raymond Williams, which White says he turned to in the early stages of thinking about this project.    The central question of this book is, &ldquo;What was the role of an urban public sphere in a largely rural society?&rdquo;    (xi) More generally, White asks, &ldquo;what did it mean to focus on urban literate culture,&rdquo; when explaining social movements in a largely rural society?    (xii)  The question is actually more compelling for American history, White suggests, than Williams&rsquo; made it for British.    While English literary traditions reflected an ancient agrarian heritage, &ldquo;for early America...the literary production, from the sermons and tracts all the way to the earliest newspapers and novels, is predominantly urban.&rdquo; 


The literary element of this question, ironically, is what interests me, because the history is outside my (current, orals-induced) range of interest.    It allows White to &ldquo;rethink conventional periodization,&rdquo; and ask &ldquo;From a backcountry perspective, what had actually changed with the American Revolution?&rdquo;   (xii)  I&rsquo;m not sure it&rsquo;s relevant for me at this point that White&rsquo;s ideas regarding &ldquo;structural analysis from below&rdquo; come from Gramsci&rsquo;s prison notebooks; but I loved his succinct summary of social history as &ldquo;statistics, averages, and representatives.&rdquo; (xiv, xv)  


&ldquo;Getting out of the city and into the country,&rdquo; White says, &ldquo;requires more than simply hitting the road, particularly if the roads are laid out by the urban planners.&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;Set against the well-documented and articulate culture of the urban seaports,&rdquo; White says, the early American &ldquo;backcountry lolls like a massive negation, a cultural nonbeing.&rdquo;   (2)  While this probably overstates the silence of rural people in the archives, it calls attention to a perception shared by many historians.    It&rsquo;s easier to ruralize urban writers, &ldquo;as in Vernon Parrington&rsquo;s insistence upon Ben Franklin&rsquo;s commitment to &lsquo;agrarian democracy,&rsquo;&rdquo; than it is to find the letters, diaries, or local newspaper editorials of actual agrarian democrats. 

...The most interesting part of White&rsquo;s argument, for my present purposes, is his discussion of the &ldquo;republican synthesis&rdquo; of Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock.    White says their &ldquo;insistence upon a cohesive, unified, republican discourse...hinged on the synthesizers&rsquo; [both the republicans&rsquo; and the historians&rsquo;] own distinction between random ideas and ideological systems.&rdquo;   (6, 7)  And the synthesis focused attention on the [republican] synthesizers rather than on the ideas they massaged into an ideological system.    White contrasts this with the stress he says Progressive historians and their heirs placed on both &ldquo;horizontal social division between classes and competing groups, and a vertical, discursive division between public expression and private intention.&rdquo;    (6)  Historians&rsquo; &ldquo;refusal to reduce revolutionary language to some hidden subtext,&rdquo; White implies, can lead them not only to the unrealistic claim that there was a single, monolithic, republican ideology, but it also focuses on the product and hides the process that created it.   (7)  The ongoing, often contested nature of that process, White says, can be seen in the verbs (&ldquo;formulate...articulate...mobilize...systematize&rdquo;) used to describe the founders&rsquo; activities. 

...The question that remains is, how much of the republican &ldquo;achievement&rdquo; was based on the founders&rsquo; success in improving on &ldquo;diffuse and rudimentary lines of thought,&rdquo; and how much did it involve marshaling and redeploying well-defined ideas in order to &ldquo;retard the thrust of the Revolution with the rhetoric of the Revolution&rdquo;?   (quoting Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 9)  &ldquo;The synthesis,&rdquo; White concludes, &ldquo;is an idealized federalism, and like the federalists the synthesizers...betray a deep theoretical hostility for that which cannot be easily synthesized...[and] realize that an important part of the battle for order is simply to keep insisting that order exists.&rdquo;   (10)  Setting aside the historiographical name-calling, it&rsquo;s easy to see how a set of ideas or especially actions that were not &ldquo;easily synthesized,&rdquo; could fall out of the story and be forgotten.    White believes the ongoing series of peripheral battles (Indian Wars, regulations, rebellions, and especially Paxton&rsquo;s Riot) are evidence of an ongoing social contest between urban elites and a variety of others whose contribution to America&rsquo;s republican achievement has been forgotten.  


White proposes to find evidence of the less-well-documented concerns of rural people, women, natives and others in &ldquo;the vernacular terminology of practical ensembles.&rdquo;    (17)  &ldquo;Yeoman petitions,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;are not simply expressions of a dominant republicanism...they instead mark a particular meeting of dispersed farmers trying to organize themselves in relation to an administrative body and a perceived threat.&rdquo; ...  (18)  While this may seem like another case of literary critics coming a generation late to the new social history party (White mentions this phenomenon, but I failed to note the page), White shows that something like this was going on in J. ...  So it&rsquo;s not an idea that historians have been universally successful at keeping in mind, and maybe a view from outside is useful now and then.  


The story White goes on to tell is less useful to me at present, because it falls well before the period I&rsquo;m studying.  ...  The revolts, rebellions, and regulations are interesting, and would be even more so with more people in them.    I like the idea that something is going on outside the cities; that there&rsquo;s an ongoing debate about the new society being formed; and that even if literate elites aren&rsquo;t using republican rhetoric to cynically rationalize their own agendas, there&rsquo;s a space between intention and rhetorical action where something is happening.    Of course, this same space exists between intention and physical action; and it should be taken into account when we&rsquo;re looking at all these &ldquo;practical ensembles&rdquo; and what they did.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Progressive politics</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-23T20:10:35-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/be144f718edc71f3e736ac73ec81d3bd-120.html#unique-entry-id-120</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/be144f718edc71f3e736ac73ec81d3bd-120.html#unique-entry-id-120</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Peri E.   Arnold


Remaking the Presidency: Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, 1901-1916


...Arnold examines the three presidents of the Progressive Era, arguing that &ldquo;to examine only a president&rsquo;s personal characteristics masks the opportunities and constraints within which he or she works.   But, to examine only the president&rsquo;s role and its political context is to miss how an individual functions within a given role and context.&rdquo;   (2) The unique contributions of Roosevelt and Wilson (and failure of Taft), then, are based on a lucky combination of character and the historical moment they found themselves in.    This seems a reasonable enough argument, echoing the old saying that achievement happens when opportunity meets preparation, on a grand scale.


Arnold points out that in the five presidential elections between 1876 and 1892, the winner averaged 47.72 percent of the popular vote.   (3) That means, on the average, nearly 53% of Americans voted against the (mostly) Republicans who presided over the Gilded Age.    He also notes that &ldquo;Democrats controlled the House for nine of the eleven sessions from 1874 through the 1894 election.&rdquo;    This is interesting, especially given the decidedly &ldquo;populist&rdquo; look and feel of many of Roosevelt&rsquo;s initiatives.    Were they welcomed by a Congress that was sent to Washington to make just those types of reforms?    The Dems lost the House in the 1894 mid-term elections, because Grover Cleveland was blamed for the financial crisis of 1893 (actually caused by the McKinley tariff).    They regained a lot of ground in 1896, in spite of Bryan&rsquo;s defeat, but remained the minority party. (wiki has a really good set of pages on this, complete with maps)


Arnold describes what others might call Theodore Roosevelt&rsquo;s opportunism as a political /philosophical journey.    He points out that Roosevelt&rsquo;s politics were never determined by party platforms (as McKinley&rsquo;s were, he says -- but didn&rsquo;t McKinley write the party platform, at least as far as the tariff was concerned?), and he sees this change as a watershed.    Roosevelt was independent enough from Republican dogma to say in 1907 that:


The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign--that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole--some effective power of supervision over their corporate use.    In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation should be held responsible by, and accountable to, some sovereign strong enough to control its conduct. (7th Annual Message)


&ldquo;Whatever McKinley &lsquo;saw&rsquo; was through the lens of being a Republican of the Civil War generation, his organizational experience as a party man and governor in Ohio, and his role as a Republican leader in Congress.&rdquo;   (14-5)  But in addition to being a generational issue (all Civil War Republicans weren&rsquo;t McKinleys, after all), Arnold also notes that McKinley&rsquo;s main experience was in politics, while Roosevelt&rsquo;s was in appointed, administrative government.    So naturally they&rsquo;d have different perspectives on what an executive should do, what government was for, and on the purpose of public rhetoric.    (17, 18)


In contrast to Roosevelt, Arnold portrays Taft as a president who was initially committed to continuing progressive reform, but who was temperamentally unable to embrace the new format of presidential leadership.    Taft did not have the &ldquo;tools,&rdquo; and he mistakenly tried to retreat to an older model of leadership that, if it was not dead as Arnold says, was at least impossible to step back into immediately following Roosevelt.    Wilson, on the other hand, &ldquo;was invested in the possibility of a prime ministerial stance within the American constitutional framework.&rdquo;   (200)  But of course, prime ministers stand and fall with their party&rsquo;s dominance of the legislature.    &ldquo;Had Wilson not entered the presidency accompanied by a Democratic Congress,&rdquo; Arnold says, &ldquo;it is hard to imagine how he would have constructed his leadership.&rdquo;    So in this sense, Roosevelt was the progressive president, Taft was a backslider (albeit unintentionally), and Wilson was a reflection of the Democratic party&rsquo;s legislative agenda.  


Arnold refers to Clifford Geertz&rsquo;s &ldquo;Centers, Kings, and Charisma,&rdquo; in Local Knowledge, 1983 -- would probably be worth a look sometime.   
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Presentist neo-consensus revisionism</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-29T18:31:58-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5221aa6b0fcc82bfafa470de4acc2f29-119.html#unique-entry-id-119</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5221aa6b0fcc82bfafa470de4acc2f29-119.html#unique-entry-id-119</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Something I find weird is histories that tell you more than you would ever want to know about a subject, except how it fits in its time.    I just read David Trask&rsquo;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&rsquo;s social or cultural context, and doesn&rsquo;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.    I suppose this is true, and that it will be read closely by people interested in the details of the military and diplomatic engagements.    But what it doesn&rsquo;t say may be as important as what it does.    I think it&rsquo;s remarkable that in nearly 500 pages of narrative, William Randolph Hearst is mentioned in passing on pages 27 and 30.    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.    Maybe this is possible, if Trask's book becomes the standard text many of his reviewers seem to hope it will be.    Is this how history gets revised?  


The question, I guess, is: what&rsquo;s more important?    The details of the war, or its motivations, context, and consequences?]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Presentism &#x26; Politics</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-29T18:45:49-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f329f719e1be064cf71ea83d94a67648-118.html#unique-entry-id-118</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f329f719e1be064cf71ea83d94a67648-118.html#unique-entry-id-118</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Jesse Lemisch


On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession


1975


Lemisch provides an interesting historiography of 1950s and 60s professional history, as seen from the left.    The Cold War dominates the picture, and the consensus school is portrayed largely as a response to the demands of the present.    Lemisch names names and traces influences.    This is a valuable essay.


Funny that the Consensus historians accused the Progressives of presentism, but failed to notice how much their own history was informed by their concerns about "Reaction," the Cold War, and anti-communism.    But in general, I'm not finding these labels to be too useful.    Seems like they obscure more than they reveal.    More on that soon...]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Carnegie</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-29T18:45:19-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/25756e4effdd3996926f93491ab94282-117.html#unique-entry-id-117</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/25756e4effdd3996926f93491ab94282-117.html#unique-entry-id-117</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Harold C.   Livesay


Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business


1975


(part of the Library of American Biography, edited by Oscar Handlin)


LIvesay says Carnegie&rsquo;s lifetime &ldquo;spanned two worlds, before and after mechanization,&rdquo; and as a result &ldquo;his actions continuously manifested an ambivalence rooted in his double exposure to the old world&rdquo; of peasant Scotland and the new world of industrial America.    Carnegie&rsquo;s business innovations and understanding of increasing returns to scale and demand elasticity were modern, but &ldquo;his attitudes towards politics, society, culture, and...even the ownership structure of his business exhibited the old world ideas he had absorbed as a boy in Scotland.&rdquo;    (13)  Carnegie brought &ldquo;cost control, low prices, low profits, and high volume&rdquo; to American business, Livesay says, which turned &ldquo;America into the world&rsquo;s richest society.&rdquo;   (189)  Livesay makes the contradictions in Carnegie&rsquo;s character into metaphors for American history.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>20th century farming remembered</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-21T15:52:47-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/437e297d5a4ec5085d32b287a2d76d43-116.html#unique-entry-id-116</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/437e297d5a4ec5085d32b287a2d76d43-116.html#unique-entry-id-116</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He includes his own memories and the farming experiences of members of his family, with a history drawn from statistics and other primary and secondary sources.  ...  Arthur Schlesinger praised Conkin&rsquo;s 1959 book about the New Deal, Tomorrow a New World, despite what he called its &ldquo;certain woodenness of style and a consequent failure always to convey the human dimension of the communitarian experiments.&rdquo;    The personal reflections and recollections in this book provide a good balance for what might otherwise be a dry, slightly intellectual history of farming.


One of the points Conkin stresses is that the popular notion that agriculture has &ldquo;declined&rdquo; in America depends on your point of view.  ...  Conkin says, &ldquo;agriculture has been the most successful sector in the recent economic history of the United States.&rdquo; (x)  Technology, but also markets, economic changers and government policy decisions, &ldquo;reduced the number of farm operators needed to produce 89 percent of our agricultural output from around 6 milion in the 1930s to less than 350,000 today.&rdquo; (xi)


...(1)  As recently as 1800, Conkin says, &ldquo;it took more than 50 percent of human labor worldwide to procure food.&rdquo; ...  This change is clearly beneficial in that it frees people up to do other things, but Conkin never really assesses the cost of these changes in terms of either the resources that enable them or the social changes that go with them.    In both cases, what happened is treated as somehow inevitable, and resistance to it (both by populists and by contemporary advocates of sustainability) is portrayed as backward-looking and wrongheaded.


...(4)  At harvest time, work was more strenuous and prolonged -- one of the important points Conkin makes in his reminiscences is that as new technology was introduced, its adoption took time.    While larger farms may have jumped right in (&ldquo;By 1860,&rdquo; he says, reapers were at work on a minority of farms (60,000).&rdquo; 9), many smaller farms continued using old tools and horse power well into the twentieth century.    Resistance to new technology may also have helped some smaller operators avoid the logic of expansion: if you don&rsquo;t buy the combine that only makes economic sense on a farm of 1000 acres, you may be able to continue to make ends meet on 250.  


Conkin portrays Calvin Coolidge as an enemy of export bounties (28), and Hoover as a farm supporter who passed the 1929 Agricultural Marketing Act, &ldquo;by far the most ambitious farm legislation to date.&rdquo;   (30)  Conkin credits new deal farm policy largely to Hoover, which is an interesting argument that may merit a closer look sometime. 

...Farm life in 1930, Conkin says, &ldquo;was closer to that of 1830 than 1960,&rdquo; and he describes some of the details from his own experience.   (49)  These passages will be especially valuable to students with no farm experience of their own (note to self, for future classroom use).    Conkin&rsquo;s appreciation of the economics is shown in these passages to originate in seeing farmers begin &ldquo;to buy more food in town and grow less on the farm. ...  (49)  He continues, &ldquo;After World War II, the efficiency of production in almost every specialized area of agriculture and the efficiencies in the processing and marketing of foods made it cheaper to buy almost any type of food than to grow one&rsquo;s own.&rdquo;    The fact that this change was enabled by a rapid increase in industrial inputs from off the farm (oil, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery) is not apparent from Conkin&rsquo;s point of view, just as it may not have been to other people who experienced the change.         


...Because his home was seventeen miles from three industrial centers, Conkin witnessed &ldquo;the gradual development of a single labor market embracing both urban and rural areas, accompanied by a complex array of lifestyle choices.&rdquo; ...  (94)  But Conkin does not examine any alternatives to individual ownership of all this equipment, despite his expertise in historical communitarian movements.    A large section of the book describes government farm policies from the new deal to the present, without shedding too much light on the subject.


In 2002, Conkin says, &ldquo;2,902 dairy farms had more than 500 cows, and almost all had annual sales of more than $1 million.  ...  In 1929 it took 85 hours of work to produce 1,000 pounds of broilers; by 1980 it took less than 1 hour.&rdquo;    Introducing his section on &ldquo;Critics and Criticisms,&rdquo; Conkin says, &ldquo;Everyone has to concede one point: American farmers have achieved a level of efficient food production unprecedented in world history.&rdquo; ...  It doesn&rsquo;t seem to occur to Conkin that as conditions like energy prices, resource depletion (phosphorus), and the risks associated with new techniques (GMOs) continue to change, the rational decision-makers he praises may need to reconsider practices that have become as traditional for modern farmers as cradling and crop rotation once were for their ancestors.   


...This is true, but no more so than many of the concepts that support the agricultural status quo, which Conkin tacitly accepts.    Conkin describes several of the leaders of alternative movements, like the Rodales and Wendell Berry, without giving much attention to the substance of the sustainability argument or the strength of the movements.    Only in his afterword does Conkin break free of the boosterism that has propelled him through the book, to argue that food prices need to rise.    Farm products (and government policy) should be more expensive, and &ldquo;the shift to higher costs should be based in large part on the pricing of as many externalities as possible.&rdquo;    &ldquo;If this seems like a prescription for the types of alternative agriculture described in chapter 8,&rdquo; Conkin concludes, &ldquo;so be it.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Peripheral Agrarians</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-17T16:21:40-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4e93882b33d05f3b5287c1288d2648bf-115.html#unique-entry-id-115</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4e93882b33d05f3b5287c1288d2648bf-115.html#unique-entry-id-115</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Sanders argues that &ldquo;agrarian movements constituted the most important political force driving the development of the American national state in the half century before World War I.&rdquo;    (1)  This story has not been well told, she says, because of a &ldquo;strong urban labor bias&rdquo; among social historians, and because Marxist-derived social theory perceives the &ldquo;industrial working class&rdquo; as the only &ldquo;significant constituency&rdquo; opposing the state and its ruling &ldquo;hegemonic capitalist class.&rdquo;   (2)  Sanders says &ldquo;the dynamic stimulus for Populist and Progressive Era state expansion was the periphery agrarians&rsquo; drive to establish public control over a rampaging capitalism.&rdquo;   (3-4)  In 1910, &ldquo;fewer than 9 percent of nonagricultural workers were members of trade unions,&rdquo; so the agrarians were well-placed to drive their reform message into the mainstream.   (5)  And they did just that, she says: &ldquo;the Democratic Party of the post-1896 period was an overwhelmingly agrarian vehicle that carried the legacy of populism.&rdquo;  

...Sanders argument is based on a very specific definition of agrarianism, that I think holds a lot of explanatory power.    &ldquo;The term &lsquo;agrarian,&rsquo;&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;is used here to reference those agricultural regions...that were devoted to one or two cash crops produced for national and international (as opposed to local) markets.&rdquo;    (28)  Sanders distinguishes these &ldquo;peripheral&rdquo; agrarians from the more prosperous (?), diversified farmers of perishable and &ldquo;truck&rdquo; products for local markets.    These &ldquo;hinterland&rdquo; farmers are dependent on their urban centers, and their political behavior will reflect this identification.    In contrast, &ldquo;periphery agrarians were more bound to the fate of a single crop (whose price was set in a world market), more distant from crop marketing, storage, and distribution centers; more likely to be dependent on a single rail line and monopolistic or oligopolistic purchasers,&rdquo; in short, the powerless producers of undifferentiated staples we normally think of, when reading accounts of the farm movement.


But for me, the really interesting element of the story might be this wedge Sanders opens between these different types of farmers, as well as between different types of cities.    Centers that served rich agricultural areas (Minneapolis, Spokane, even Chicago) displayed different political patterns than eastern cities whose economies relied less on agriculture.    &ldquo;Because of these differences in city functions, the urban-rural distinction per se has limited explanatory power in American politics.&rdquo;   (16) And farmers operating in the corn belt, responsible for &ldquo;the greatest concentration of corn and meat production in the world,&rdquo; clearly lived different lives and as a result had different political motivations from the periphery.   (17)  The fact that the South, &ldquo;by virtue of its size and the intensity of its grievances...almost inevitably led the periphery voting bloc in Congress,&rdquo; may be a clue to a relatively unexplored division between farmers.   (27)  Rather than think of them as sharing a common agenda, maybe we should be looking for the differences of opinion and political priorities that caused some of their major organizations to adopt an apolitical stance.        


Sanders suggests that political constituencies might be grouped like economic &ldquo;trading areas,&rdquo; citing Bensel&rsquo;s Sectionalism and American Political Development, and his use of Rand McNally trade area maps.    This seems like it might be a promising way to look at some of the issues I&rsquo;m finding in my research, which covers a group of farmers and rural businessmen who seem to be un-accounted for in the traditional story of agrarian radicalism.    She concludes that the agrarian-labor coalition failed because it was &ldquo;rent by class, ethnic, and regional political economy differences that diminished their capacity for economic and political mobilization and--particularly in the case of southern racial segregation--their moral authority.&rdquo;   (412)  But most interestingly, Sanders suggests that although the periphery agrarians naturally advocated national government action to right the wrongs of the production/distribution/finance system, they did not support the Progressive-style discretionary bureaucracy they ultimately got.    They believed &ldquo;Policy-making should not be the province of &lsquo;experts&rsquo; socially and geographically far removed&rdquo; from their constituents; it should be &ldquo;local, decentralized, ad-hoc.&rdquo;    (388-9)  So the question (and the story waiting to be told) is, wanting what they wanted, how is it they got what they got?   


...AHR, David Vaught (author of Cultivating California and After the Gold Rush) says she is merely repeating the arguments of progressive historians like John D. ...  He questions her division of the nation into industrial core, agrarian periphery and (disposable) diverse regions, based on a 1919 census she admits reflects WWI industrial concentration.    And he says she attributes politicians&rsquo; positions to regionalism, when in many cases they may have been based on party loyalty.  

...JAH, James Weinstein (socialist author of The Decline of Socialism in America, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State and The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left) calls it a tour de force that makes &ldquo;an irrefutable case for the importance of agrarian movements&rdquo; in shaping reform.    He calls attention to Sanders&rsquo; point that although the agrarians wanted a strong state, &ldquo;they opposed executive branch bureaucracies.  ...  This is a key point -- the growth of bureaucracy was not an inevitable result of agrarian claims for social justice.  

...Journal of Southern History, Ronald Formisano suggests that Sanders &ldquo;key assumption&rdquo;  that members of Congress &ldquo;are exquisitely sensitive&rdquo; to their constituents is too narrow; but praises the books revision of the traditional separation of the populist from the progressive movement.    Roots of Reform, he says, &ldquo;should have a powerful impact on the content delivered by textbooks and lecturers in survey courses.&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Columbian Exchange</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-16T16:19:13-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4552968dea9b6c5e153e15ce795b5488-114.html#unique-entry-id-114</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/4552968dea9b6c5e153e15ce795b5488-114.html#unique-entry-id-114</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Alfred W.   Crosby, Jr.


The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492


1972


This is another one of those books that must be read.    And even after 38 years, there&rsquo;s a lot of good stuff in it.    The thesis is summed up in the title, which has entered the language as a short-hand descriptor for the idea that &ldquo;the most important changes brought about by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature,&rdquo; even if not all the people who use the term agree with Crosby that the interaction of the old world and the new &ldquo;has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool.&rdquo; (xiv, 219)  


Crosby&rsquo;s narrative sets the scene by comparing the old world and the new, to show the biological contrasts between them.    He traces European conquest, and the diseases that spread with (and sometimes ahead of) conquistadors and settlers.    Crosby then describes the (mostly plant) species that were brought from the Americas to the old world, and the (mostly animal) species the Spanish brought to the new (interestingly, he says most of the really significant species were introduced by the Spanish by 1500, long before North American settlement was begun.   108).    After devoting a full chapter to the controversy over the origin of syphilis, Crosby concludes with a look at how American food crops enabled population growth in both Europe and Asia (and continue to, to the present day).    


Some of the interesting items along the way include Crosby&rsquo;s brief discussion of the possible influence of the new world on tradition and religious authority in the old.    &ldquo;Christian and Aristotelian&rdquo; belief systems, he says, &ldquo;proved too cramped to accomodate the New World...men of the Columbian generation discovered that &lsquo;Ptolomeus, and others knewe not the halfe.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (9) Crosby says an argument about &ldquo;multiple creations&rdquo; was carried on in Europe until 1859, when Darwin finally laid it to rest, &ldquo;while also knocking loose a large part of the foundation of traditional Judaism and Christianity.&rdquo;   (14)  Crosby&rsquo;s discussion of the extinction event that wiped out American megafauna has probably been eclipsed by more recent scientific findings, just as his discussion of the worldwide distribution of blood-types has been overtaken by DNA analysis, but in their day they were great examples of interdisciplinary thinking.  


Many of the details Crosby includes are startling.    Cotton Mather&rsquo;s description of the 1616-17 epidemic that wiped out most of the Massachusetts Indians as a Providential clearing of the woods &ldquo;of those pernicious creatures, to make room for better growth,&rdquo; confirms my impression of the Puritan leader.    (41)  The idea that &ldquo;a million Indians lived on Santo Domingo when the Europeans arrived,&rdquo; and that they were reduced by 1548 to 500, is something you really have to sit with for a while and think about.    (45)  The &ldquo;population of central Mexican dropped from about 25 million on the eve of conquest to 16.8 million a decade later.&rdquo;   (53)  That doesn&rsquo;t seem as bad, until it sinks in that it means one out of every three people was dead, in just ten years.    Makes all the recent movies about plagues and human apocalypse seem like so many nightmares of a guilty white American conscience.


I didn&rsquo;t know that when Columbus returned, he brought &ldquo;seventeen ships, 1,200 men, and seeds and cuttings for the planting of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, salad greens, grape vines, sugar cane, and fruit stones for the founding of orchards.&rdquo;   (67)  And it never occurred to me that some new world species, like the white potato, found their way to places like New England via Europe (brought &ldquo;by the Scotch-Irish...in 1718.&rdquo;   66)  Other interesting details: &ldquo;the banana, brought from the Canaries in 1516.&rdquo;   (68)  &ldquo;Cattle...first brought to Mexico for breeding purposes in 1521.&rdquo;   (87)  But by 1614, &ldquo;the residents of Santiago [Chile] possessed 39,250 head,&rdquo; (91) as well as 623,825 sheep.   (94)  I also didn&rsquo;t know, but should have guessed after reading about De Soto&rsquo;s expedition through Florida, that when Pizarro crossed the Andes into Peru in 1540, he brought over 2,000 pigs with him.   (79)  Somebody should write a history of the conquest that focuses on what it must have been like, moving conquistadors and their pigs through the wild Americas.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Technical Determinism</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-16T16:17:59-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1d8e0e8eff1862bba26d0b9cc1704056-113.html#unique-entry-id-113</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1d8e0e8eff1862bba26d0b9cc1704056-113.html#unique-entry-id-113</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact


...Smil argues that the modern world was largely created by technical advances achieved between the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of World War I, in a period he calls the &ldquo;Age of Synergy.&rdquo;    Many products and &ldquo;techniques whose everyday use keeps defining and shaping the modern civilization had not undergone any fundamental change during the course of the 20th century.&rdquo;   (5)  Taking aim at prophets of discontinuity like Kurzweil, Smil says that currently fashionable &ldquo;perceptions of accelerating innovation are ahistorical, myopic perspectives proffered by zealots of electronic faith.&rdquo;  ...  In its place, he offers a combination of &ldquo;phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium.&rdquo; 

...Interestingly, the &ldquo;most far-reaching of all modern technical innovations...[was] the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.&rdquo;    (7)  The Haber-Bosch process made nitrogen fertilizers available on an unprecedented scale (relative to previous sources, Peruvian guano and Chilean nitrate), allowing the world&rsquo;s human population to expand to its current level.   Without it, Smil says, &ldquo;the world could not support more than about 3.5 billion people.&rdquo;   (23) Interestingly, Smil always says &ldquo;technical innovation&rdquo; or &ldquo;technique&rdquo; -- toward the end of the book he congratulates George Orwell for the same thing (quoting a passage from a 1942 BBC broadcast, 259), and calls attention to the fact that he has not used the fuzzier term &ldquo;technology&rdquo; a single time in the text.    This might be frustrating for researchers searching keywords in the future, but it&rsquo;s an interesting distinction.


The key characteristics of the &ldquo;Unprecedented Saltation&rdquo; of 1867-1914, Smil says, were:


	1.	that the impact of these technical advances was almost instantaneous,


...	3.	the rate with which all kinds of innovations were promptly improved after their introduction,


...While discussing periodization, Smil mentions that he is &ldquo;deliberately ignoring&rdquo; dating by economic cycles like the Kondratiev wave.    He&rsquo;s also avoiding, although he doesn&rsquo;t say so, any discussion of cultural, economic and social changes that impacted things like producer financing and consumer behavior.    Tracing the feedback between technical innovation and these other areas is not the mission of this book.    But Smil does deal with the world beyond science: &ldquo;Edison&rsquo;s key insight,&rdquo; he says was not technical, but &ldquo;that any commercially viable lighting system must minimize electricity consumption and hence must use high-resistance filaments with lights connected in parallel across a constant-voltage system&rdquo; (41)  Edison was not designing a light bulb for the laboratory, he was designing a complete electrical generation and delivery system.    The bulb was just the visible end-point of a much more complex project.    Also, &ldquo;between 1880 and 1896 more than $2 million was spent in prosecuting more than 100 lawsuits&rdquo; for patent infringement.   (43)  Technology was no place for the faint-hearted, and the best technician didn&rsquo;t always win.    Not until 1943, a few months after Nicola Tesla&rsquo;s death, did the US Supreme Court finally acknowledge the priority of his patents over Marconi&rsquo;s, Smil says.    And ironically, it was &ldquo;merely a way for the court to avoid a decision regarding Marconi Co. suit against the U.S. government for using its patents.&rdquo;   (251)  Smil compare&rsquo;s Marconi&rsquo;s ability to &ldquo;package, and slightly improve, what is readily available,&rdquo; and benefit from &ldquo;alliances with powerful users&rdquo; with Microsoft&rsquo;s success marketing Windows.    He identifies Bill Gates with Marconi, whose status as &ldquo;not a great technical innovator&rdquo; was shown by his insistence that his radio would only be used to transmit Morse code.


Smil gives Edison credit for being able to play the game, but clearly has a soft spot for Tesla and even George Westinghouse, who he reminds us had 361 patents to his credit.   The stories of these people and their technical innovations would be even better, if they were expanded to include personal and business elements, which will probably lead me to read biographies of many of them when I have some free time.    In his conclusion, Smil supports his claim for the unique influence of technical change during this period by pointing out that &ldquo;only two of today&rsquo;s 10 largest multinationals...were not set up before 1914.&rdquo;   (301)  In addition to this short list, a quick look at the Fortune 500 would probably show that most of the world&rsquo;s business is probably based on techniques whose origins can be traced to his Age of Synergy.    Although that&rsquo;s clearly a trailing indicator, it does seem fair to conclude that claims about the exceptional nature of the digital age are overblown.    Smil shows that technical changes, and common sense suggests that the associated economic and social changes of the late 19th century still account for most of the world in which we live. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Parrington</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-13T16:09:17-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1952d44f23bd7d08730b8a1de611e3ec-112.html#unique-entry-id-112</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1952d44f23bd7d08730b8a1de611e3ec-112.html#unique-entry-id-112</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[&ldquo;New England,&rdquo; says Parrington, was &ldquo;a product of old-world custom and institutions, modified by new-world environment.&rdquo;    The key contribution of New England is the emergence of &ldquo;two classes: yeomanry, gentry; and two ideals: Puritan and Yankee.&rdquo;  

...Parrington says the English liberalism the colonists brought was &ldquo;an attempt to create a new social system to replace the feudal, resulting in the doctrine of natural rights, democracy, and equalitarianism.&rdquo;  ...  Calvinism was &ldquo;reactionary...established in absolutism,&rdquo; and focused on the &ldquo;universality of moral law, determinism, reprobation [and a] denial of natural rights.&rdquo;    But the New England settlers were from a &ldquo;middle period of the Puritan movement.&rdquo;  

...The Massachusetts Bay theocracy was dominated by John Cotton, who represented &ldquo;priestly stewardship,&rdquo; and John Winthrop, who represented &ldquo;magistracy ennobled by Puritanism.&rdquo;  ...  But the dominant presbyterianism (rule by the elders) was challenged by Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams, who established commonwealths in Connecticut and Rhode Island.  


The &ldquo;Twilight of the Oligarchy&rdquo; after 1660 was marked, Parrington says, by the &ldquo;spread of provincialism&rdquo; and the inability of later members of the &ldquo;Mather Dynasty&rdquo; to live up to their ancestor.  ...  Sewall was middle class, and if &ldquo;Uncreative, conservative, [and] conventional,&rdquo; at least he was &ldquo;generous, kindly, the first embodiment of village friendliness.&rdquo;    


...Benjamin Franklin, on the other hand, is described as &ldquo;A Democrat in an aristocratic world.&rdquo;  

...The rise of the middle class and expulsion of (wealthy) loyalists helped form republicanism around Lockean ideals of natural rights, representation.    Parrington gives much attention to the Tories, beginning with Thomas Hutchinson (royal governor of Massachusetts), and Whigs, focusing on John Dickinson of Philadelphia (once again, Virginia is left out!).    He then turns to Samuel Adams, who he calls a &ldquo;Master of political theory...an agitator and a practical politician.&rdquo;  


Between the Revolution and the Constitution, Parrington describes a period of &ldquo;Agrarian defeat,&rdquo; a &ldquo;struggle between political realists and humanitarian liberals,&rdquo; when agrarians retreated to &ldquo;seventeenth-century republicanism&rdquo; and an &ldquo;English middle class&rdquo; ethic of work and capitalism prevailed.    With the levelers and followers of Rousseau safely out of the way, the political field was left to Alexander Hamilton, representing the &ldquo;necessity of allying the wealthy with government,&rdquo; and John Adams, who thought &ldquo;rivalry, the class struggle, natural aristocracy&rdquo; more credible than &ldquo;French doctrines of equality and fraternity.&rdquo;  


...Jefferson, like Paine, believes in a &ldquo;social compact, the res publica, the diminished state...decentralization [and] the excellence of an agrarian economy.&rdquo;  

...Thesis: The &ldquo;humanitarian philosophy of the French Enlightenment&rdquo; does battle with the &ldquo;English philosophy of laissez faire&rdquo; for the soul of America, but &ldquo;practical politics&rdquo; intervenes in the form of &ldquo;the explosive Jacksonian revolution.&rdquo;    The outcome was a Democratic rhetoric based on &ldquo;political equalitarianism,&rdquo; and a Whiggery devoted to &ldquo;converting the democratic state into the servant of property interests.&rdquo;


Parrington finally arrives in the South, which he says is dominated by two traditions: Virginia and South Carolina.    Parrington traces the Virginian tradition to Jefferson, who he continues to identify with &ldquo;Physiocratic agrarianism, natural rights&rdquo; and now the &ldquo;terminable nature of compact&rdquo; which is the origin of nullification and the states rights argument; John Taylor, who he calls an &ldquo;Agrarian Economist;&rdquo; and John Marshall, an &ldquo;arch conservative&rdquo; who stood for &ldquo;sovereignty of the federal state; sanctity of private property...sovereignty of judiciary; irrevocable nature of contract.&rdquo;  


Three streams of thought met in the South, Parrington says: Virginia humanitarianism, western individualism, Carolina imperialism.  

...In the West, Parrington calls Henry Clay the &ldquo;embodiment of Whiggery,&rdquo; and then moves on to a comparison of the &ldquo;two spokesmen of the West:&rdquo;  Andrew Jackson, who he calls an &ldquo;Agrarian Liberal&rdquo; and &ldquo;our first great popular leader,&rdquo; and Abraham Lincoln, a &ldquo;Free-Soil Liberal&rdquo; who embodied the war of &ldquo;good will versus coercive sovereignty.&rdquo;    He compares romantic and the realistic depictions of the frontier, and the legends of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, whose legend Parrington calls a &ldquo;Whig attempt to catch the coonskin vote.&rdquo;


In the Middle-West, Parrington says both Philadelphia and New York suffered from &ldquo;lack of intellectual backgrounds.&rdquo;  

...Parrington calls the &ldquo;New England renaissance the last expression in America of eighteenth-century revolutionary thought.&rdquo;  ...  by Federalists like Fisher Ames, who Parrington calls &ldquo;a repository of aristocratic prejudice,&rdquo; New England develops a Whig perspective that sees the &ldquo;danger of agrarianism [and] particularism.&rdquo;  ...  The move to liberalism, when it finally comes, is &ldquo;ethical rather than economic; German rather than French.&rdquo;  


...But where the &ldquo;Puritan conscience&rdquo; had been &ldquo;individual rather than social,&rdquo; Unitarianism awakens &ldquo;a sense of social responsibility&rdquo; leading to both reform and transcendentalism -- and ultimately abolitionism.  

...Emerson&rsquo;s transcendental individualism is summed up in The American Scholar, Parrington says, and Thoreau&rsquo;s Walden is the &ldquo;extremest expression of eighteenth-century individualism.&rdquo;  

...Thesis: &ldquo;Changing patterns of thought: from the frontier came the doctrine of preemption, exploitation, progress; from the impact of science came the dissipation of the Enlightenment and a spirit of realism; from European proletarian philosophies came a new social theory.&rdquo;
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Canals &#x26; Railroads</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-15T14:24:56-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e9797ace0a2140eac7bf36cebaa00600-111.html#unique-entry-id-111</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e9797ace0a2140eac7bf36cebaa00600-111.html#unique-entry-id-111</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[George Rogers Taylor


The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860


1951


&ldquo;Most Americans of 1815 were born in the United States, for immigration had been relatively slight since the Revolution.&rdquo;   (3)


&ldquo;From the farms by river or road came products for export, but this was the back country; in 1815 every city seemed to face the sea...&rdquo;   (10)


&ldquo;The building of the Erie Canal was an act of faith, the demonstration of a spirit of enterprise by an organized government that has few parallels in world history.&rdquo;  (well, okay, the pyramids...33)


&ldquo;The Erie was enlarged and almost completely rebuilt at a cost of $44,500,000, a sum about six times the original investment.&rdquo;   (53)


&ldquo;The community gains [of railroads], the advantages resulting to those who were not actually investors, often greatly exceeded those which accrued to stockholders.&rdquo;    (88)  


&ldquo;After private ventures had failed, Michigan in 1837 began an ambitious program of state railroad construction in which it was planned to span the state with three lines.    By 1846, the two most southern...were in operation though not completed.&rdquo;   (91)


&ldquo;Troy, New York, with a population of less than 20,000, pioneered the field of municipal ownership.&rdquo;   (91)


&ldquo;There developed a sort of metropolitan mercantilism in which railroads, rather than merchant fleets, were the chief weapon of warfare.&rdquo;    (98)


&ldquo;In the 1850s, railroad finance began to assume the form which characterized it during the following decades.    Railroad bond issues became increasingly important and were marketed chiefly through eastern financial institutions.&rdquo;    (101)


So the railroad bond market helped familiarize investors everywhere with eastern financial markets, and when the state banks were killed during the Civil War, it was easy for people who had invested locally to turn toward these...


&ldquo;the railways triumphed because they were soundly managed, well located, and built to meet present rather than future traffic needs...&rdquo;    (103)


&ldquo;The itinerant sea merchant of 1815-1830 typically owned his own ship just as the peddler on land owned his horses and wagon.&rdquo;  (vs. common carriers...126)


cf.   Daniel Raymond, Thoughts on Political Economy, 1820, discussion of corporations. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Handlins on Commonwealth</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-15T14:22:59-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/193530869bdccfaeac133861a17b5df5-110.html#unique-entry-id-110</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/193530869bdccfaeac133861a17b5df5-110.html#unique-entry-id-110</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Oscar Handlin & Mary Flug Handlin


Commonwealth, A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861


...Dedicated to Schlesinger, this is an attempt to look behind economic and political events and actions, to find &ldquo;a large body of ideas, unformalized preconceptions, that embodied people&rsquo;s notions of the kind of world in which they lived and the kind of world in which they wanted to live&rdquo; (xv).  


&ldquo;All franchises included an element of privilege, permitting to a few, as special assistance in a worthwhile enterprise, what was forbidden to all others.&rdquo;  


&ldquo;Toward the end of 1791 Massachusetts shed the early reluctance to make large grants.    As a sensational boom turned men&rsquo;s minds to the prospect of getting rich from stocks and land, as the merchants looked about for new channels of investment, the government, like its colonial predecessors, began to seek out venturesome customers.    In 1791 it alienated almost two million acres...&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;In 1781 the Commonwealth chartered the Massachusetts Medical Society to regulate and encourage a desirable, but suffering, profession.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;In 1803 the Cambridge corporation [the Harvard Medical department] won the right to bestow degrees which automatically carried the license to practice, a privilege later extended as well to the chartered Berkshire Medical Institute of Williams College.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The question of liability did not arise as long as the power of unlimited assessment gave the corporation access to the resources of its members.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;William Jackson and Theodore Sedgwick...suggested that the state abandon the use of intermediaries and adopt instead the alternative of building and operating directly a canal or railroad...the old canals and turnpikes had fallen into the hands of &lsquo;speculating proprietors&rsquo;; only direct state control could ensure the management of the new enterprises for the public good.&rdquo;  (this was argued in 1825 -- how did MA experience influence NY in Erie Canal era?  

...By the early 1830s, &ldquo;The interests the merchants&rsquo; families shared with the rest of the state waned...  The industries also lost their ties with the countryside.    The new mills, unlike the old, had little contact with the surrounding agricultural areas, drawing their raw materials from distant sources and working them up entirely within the factory.&rdquo;  (is this true, outside of cotton?  

...&ldquo;The growth of factories further weakened the position of rural Massachusetts by taking away an important source of income, the domestic system.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;Without a common interest to cherish and defend, the General Court merely legislated for the select few...&rdquo; and caused everybody to criticize every act as catering to the welfare of one interest group or another. 

...&ldquo;Criticism of banks easily turned into fulminations agains a &lsquo;financial aristocracy&rsquo; ...  Locofocos and debt repudiators who seized control in other states...raised a terrifying specter for this minority: to weaken privilege at any point would be an entering wedge that would ultimately leave all wealth entirely at the mercy of every future legislature.&rdquo; (really?    Are they falling for the rhetoric?  

...&ldquo;What right had simple business organizations to the attributes of a governing body?    &lsquo;They are not for the public good -- in design or end,&rsquo; complained a moderate newspaper, &lsquo;they are for the aggrandizement of the stockholders -- for the promotion of the interests of the few...  We wish to have pubic good and private speculation more distinctly separated and understood.&rdquo;  (quoting Boston Daily Herald, Sept. 

...This is the key point.    Even where people didn&rsquo;t necessarily oppose business or corporations, many wanted to specify the difference between business activity and state activity.    This continues into the anti-monopoly period...


&ldquo;Divested of its communal functions, the corporation became an anomalous creature, privileged but unprincipled, armed with power yet devoid of responsibility.&rdquo; 

...When recession came, &ldquo;responsibility for the panic of 1837 fell upon Jacksonian finance, discredited the conception of a specie-rooted currency, and barred any program of reform that rested on that basis.&rdquo;    (216) Okay, but was this really the issue?    The fact that Jackson was wrong doesn&rsquo;t mean the Locofocos were right.  

...&ldquo;How far could the state act to terminate a self-created monopoly?&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>More Bodenhorn</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-05T10:13:55-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/129396b89c338d1d3d3e1b82202b5d2d-109.html#unique-entry-id-109</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/129396b89c338d1d3d3e1b82202b5d2d-109.html#unique-entry-id-109</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I do, actually, although I have issues with economic history which limit this book's usefulness to me.  

...Abig part of the motivation for this book seems to have been Bodenhorn&rsquo;s desire to refute the &ldquo;historical justification&rdquo; provided by the two classic histories of banking (Redlich&rsquo;s The Molding of American Banking and Hammond&rsquo;s Banks and Politics from the Revolution to the Civil War), for central banking in general and the broadening of the Federal Reserve&rsquo;s powers after the Great Depression in particular.    The other claim Bodenhorn makes is that no one has really done an economic history of American banking, applying and testing state of the art economic theories against historical evidence.  

...He wants to influence a wider range of scholars than economic history monographs normally do, but I think it&rsquo;s safe to say his focus is still very much on an academic readership.  ...  Bodenhorn regularly cites Ben Bernanke&rsquo;s published work (does it concern anyone but me that the guy GW Bush put in charge of the Federal Reserve -- and Obama kept -- is an expert on the economic history of the Great Depression?), which might illustrate the way in which economic historians seek to influence the present: from the top, down.  

...This is something economists are comfortable with (any econ grad student knows  hundreds of jokes about economists and assumptions), and outsiders are more-or-less unaware of -- and I think it&rsquo;s one of the factors that compromises the usefulness of economic models as explanations in history.  ...  Does it point to the individual decisions of people (and if so, does it assume they&rsquo;re &ldquo;rational allocators&rdquo; or does it allow for complexity and irrationality?), or does it point vaguely toward some generalized &ldquo;historical force&rdquo; that we&rsquo;d say was old-fashioned teleology, if it didn&rsquo;t come with the shiny new authorization of economic theory?   


...So a lot of State Banking in Early America wasn&rsquo;t particularly useful to me (again, this says more about me than about the book, which is why this is a blog and not a book review).    But some of it was, and some of it will be useful to set up the economic-historiographical baseline that my narrative of upstate New York will depart from.  


Bodenhorn&rsquo;s basic contention is that states with &ldquo;more banking facilities in 1830 experienced greater rates of growth up to 1860&rdquo; and that more liberal banking regulations facilitated the growth of banks in these places (New York being a notable one, 3).    One of the key economic roles of banks, that they have a particular advantage in, is &ldquo;in gathering and processing information on the likelihood of success for at least some entrepreneurial projects.&rdquo;    This focus expands slightly on his earlier discussion of banks as funnels for accumulated wealth, but he doesn&rsquo;t abandon that role either, of course.    Bodenhorn expands on the strict definition of free banking, to make it an example of &ldquo;decentralized federalism,&rdquo; reflecting &ldquo;the workings of early American Madisonian polity, in which state governments ceded as little power to the federal government as seemed possible&rdquo; (5).    He accepts Lamoreaux&rsquo;s description of New England banks as the &ldquo;financial arms&rdquo; of &ldquo;extended kinship networks of artisans, traders, and manufacturers,&rdquo; as well as her claim that &ldquo;younger men who promoted banks in the 1830s&rdquo; did so partly because they were left out of the game by their elders, but quickly caught up to them in wealth and power (7, 15).  

...The period they&rsquo;re talking about is earlier, and the demographics more urban-mercantile, but I wonder if this type of sentiment is still felt or remembered in the 1840s-50s, when my guys start making regular trips to New York City?    These are they types of questions this type of book is silent on -- but at least it opens the door and points me in a direction I can explore.  

...Bodenhorn&rsquo;s discussion of whether early banks followed a strict real-bills doctrine is interesting, because although he&rsquo;s more interested in what the bankers did, it sheds light on what they may have thought.  ...  This approach, he says, limits the role of banks to providing &ldquo;just enough credit to meet the &lsquo;needs of trade&rsquo; and no more;&rdquo; so it&rsquo;s not the growth-enabling transfer of capital he&rsquo;s looking for (46).    But it&rsquo;s interesting to me -- and I think it becomes even more interesting if the bankers are actually the people involved in getting in the harvest or creating the product.  

...They differ from bills of exchange in that bills are usually redeemed somewhere else, and then the redeeming bank (or merchant) returns them to the issuing bank for payment.  

...Dishonored notes or &ldquo;clean bills&rdquo; (those with no attached collateral) would be taken to a local judge or notary, who &ldquo;recorded it as &lsquo;protested&rsquo; for nonpayment and then notified all endorsers...that they stood potentially liable&rdquo; (49).    This also meant that protests could damage a merchant&rsquo;s relationship with his trade partners as well as his creditors (assuming they weren&rsquo;t the same people).  


&ldquo;The sheer complexity of these transactions,&rdquo; Bodenhorn says, &ldquo;and the apparent ease with which they were carried out, demonstrates that early American financial markets were more sophisticated than often believed&rdquo; (51-2).  ...  Especially because these sophisticated, complex transactions connected mercantile centers like New York and Boston with &ldquo;peripheral&rdquo; farmers and millers as far away as the western frontier, and it wasn&rsquo;t a one-way affair.  

...Describing New York&rsquo;s Safety Fund, Bodenhorn notes that around 1830, &ldquo;New York&rsquo;s per capita income was only about 84 percent of the national average,&rdquo; and about 2/3 of New Yorkers worked on farms (165).    The failure of the Wayne County Bank (which had &ldquo;a reputation of being managed in such a way as to produce large profits for its shareholders&rdquo; 168) and the Bank of Lyons are central events in the demise of the Safety Fund.  ...  Free Banking, which passed in New York in 1838 and gradually replaced the Safety Fund, required deposits of bonds or mortgages equalling the amount of circulating notes printed for the bank by the comptroller in Albany.  ...  This meant that someone who could scrape together (or borrow from his rich uncle) $100,000 worth of government bonds or mortgages could be a banker (the minimum was soon reduced to $50,000, 192).  

...Is this a distinction without a difference, or does it point to a subtle shift in ideas about what banking was for in New York state?  ...  But I still think there&rsquo;s something potentially more interesting, lurking behind this story, which may have something to do with the New York Whigs...
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Banks: Capital or Credit</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-03T22:22:44-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9e79799b63c4b32b5c3ffec93cc73c5d-108.html#unique-entry-id-108</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9e79799b63c4b32b5c3ffec93cc73c5d-108.html#unique-entry-id-108</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Bodenhorn focuses on the capital formation function of banks -- I&rsquo;m more interested in their transactional nature, as facilitators of exchange and sort-term credit.    Seems like their might be two ways of looking at banks, and thinking about their role in antebellum America.    One believes that growth was based on &ldquo;capital deepening&rdquo;: the accumulation of assets that were devoted to investment rather than consumption.    The other believes that growth was based on overextension -- on basically living beyond your means, and juggling credit as best as you can to keep the foreclosers at bay.  


Bodenhorn says &ldquo;by 1820...banks became better known, more reputable, more established, and therefore more trusted,&rdquo; presumably convincing more people (whether as shareholders or depositors) to put their money in banks (8).    This is capital deepening, a supply-side argument: growth happened when banks began to accumulate enough money to lend to industrialists or invest.  

...Maybe the upstate banks (and the businessmen who declared themselves to be bankers so that they could write their own notes rather than running around the county looking for currency) were taking advantage of an earlier &ldquo;deepening&rdquo; of the type Bodenhorn describes, that took place in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.    &ldquo;Bank-supplied currency,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;performed [a] dual role as both a medium of exchange and a store of wealth&rdquo; (9).  ...  So it&rsquo;s borrowing (even if only in the form of drafts written against shipped -- but not received -- products) that drives the money supply.    Even the ability to take your note and deposit it at a neighboring bank, and then draw against that deposit, suggests that capital formation, at least in the sticks, is based on credit.


Bodenhorn says Hugh Patrick called these competing views &ldquo;demand-following&rdquo; and &ldquo;supply-leading,&rdquo; but the way he uses them is not exactly what I was talking about.  ...  The &ldquo;supply-leading&rdquo; model, on the other hand, says &ldquo;the creation of financial institutions and the supply of financial services  must arise prior to the demand for them&rdquo; (13)  How does this happen?  ...  As proof, Bodenhorn cites New York&rsquo;s bank commissioners, who said in 1835 that banks were &ldquo;among the most useful and powerful agents in developing the resources and stimulating the industry of the country&rdquo; (15).  

...Bodenhorn says there was about $41 million of specie in the US economy in 1820, but half of it was tied up in bank reserves.    There were $36 million in bank notes, and $27 million in deposits (which are also considered liabilities of the banks, because they can be drawn against, 16-17).   So &ldquo;Of the $83 million in currency chasing goods around the economy, about 76 percent of it was bank-supplied&rdquo; (17).    But in spite of this, Bodenhorn insists that &ldquo;Money creation by banks, however important it may have been, was incidental to their most fundamental task--that of intermediating between borrowers and lenders, savers and investors&rdquo; (18).  

...Because I don&rsquo;t think that&rsquo;s what the guys I&rsquo;m studying in upstate New York were up to.    Maybe it&rsquo;s just a case of emphasis, but I really see the banks&rsquo; role as providing a circulating medium without which deals can&rsquo;t be done.    Bodenhorn admits that &ldquo;a fractional reserve system [was] a cheaper way to provide a given volume of money than...a pure specie basis,&rdquo; but he ignores the huge impact this would have in areas where money was tight (18).  ...  It also speeds up the velocity of money, because paper can be handed from buyer to seller to supplier to next seller much faster than bags of gold.  ...  Then there&rsquo;s all the notes and drafts that are being endorsed from one hand to the next (not even counted in Bodenhorn&rsquo;s $83 million -- he specifically set aside credit between individuals on p. ...  So the actual comparison ought to be between $41 million of gold and silver on the one hand, held by hoarders or moving very slowly and heavily through the economy; and something like $60 to $100 million of paper on the other, issued by banks and merchants, speeding its way from hand to hand, making transactions happen every step of the way.  

...The other big difference between these models of capital formation, which focus on banks as either conduits of wealth from holders to users, or as creators of a money supply that enables trade, is that in the first one, the rich get richer, by definition.  ...  Millers &ldquo;on the make&rdquo;* write notes against shipments of flour to market, and discount them at their local bank, then hand those notes to the next batch of farmers who show up with wheat.    Yeah, this is credit -- but it&rsquo;s not the &ldquo;freeing up wealth for capital investment&rdquo; thing Bodenhorn is talking about.  ...  Bodenhorn suggests that &ldquo;Bank credit...influenced the pace of industrialization&rdquo; when it &ldquo;freed mercantile and industrial capital for fixed investment&rdquo; (107).  ...  While this importance varies significantly with time and place, it seems to me that the much greater volume of &ldquo;working capital&rdquo; transactions in the antebellum economy (due in part to the smaller nature of machinery, plant and equipment in antebellum industry but also to the sheer number of credit transactions enabling all trade in a cash-poor farm sector) argues for recognition that in many cases, it wasn&rsquo;t the bankers&rsquo; awakening of old money from its slumber, but their creation of new money, that made America grow.


*Why is it that people who are generally well-disposed towards business and entrepreneurs, still allow themselves to look down their noses and say that everybody in Jacksonian America was &ldquo;on the make&rdquo;?    Is it because this was the moment when outsiders, people with no social standing or wealth, first got involved in &ldquo;making money&rdquo;?
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Farms as Factories</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-11-03T11:25:51-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/764664bb410964a4be6e1bed7a8b18f5-107.html#unique-entry-id-107</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/764664bb410964a4be6e1bed7a8b18f5-107.html#unique-entry-id-107</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Deborah Fitzgerald


Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture


...This is another book in the Yale Agrarian Studies series.    Lots of good stuff in this series...


Fitzgerald&rsquo;s argument is that &ldquo;although individual technologies, particular pieces of legislation, new sorts of expertise, and the availability or disappearance of credit opportunities are all key to understanding what happened in twentieth-century agriculture, it is essential to grasp the overarching logic of change that was taking place in bits and pieces and the industrial system that was being constructed across the country&rdquo; (4).    This modernization was oriented toward improving &ldquo;efficiency&rdquo; to the ideal point when &ldquo;rational management techniques&rdquo; took over farm life: &ldquo;Every Farm a Factory&rdquo; comes from and International Harvester ad (5). 


And this has got to be a big part of the story.    There&rsquo;s tremendous pressure on both sides of the family farm throughout the twentieth century, as both ag. markets and ag. inputs become dominated by fewer, larger businesses.    A combine is a huge investment, so the story of credit flows, and the control that goes with them, is key to understanding this change.    It&rsquo;s not just the farmers who are influenced by industrial logic.    It&rsquo;s their suppliers, their customers, and increasingly, the creditors (when they&rsquo;re third parties and not those same suppliers and customers), who the farmer has empowered by way of the collateral they hold in the farm and its continuing production.  


One of the issues noted by Country Life interviewers, Fitzgerald says, was that &ldquo;As land values increased...farm size increased as well&rdquo; (29).    Partly, this change must be attributed to an &ldquo;understanding&rdquo; of economies of scale on the part of both equipment manufacturers and farmers (cf Postel).    It was not inevitable that harvesters and combines needed to be built that would be so big and cost so much that it made no sense to run one on less than a full section of land.    It was not inevitable that individual farmers would buy these, rather than groups of neighbors, local associations, or harvest contractors.    But it may have seemed inevitable to Progressives steeped in this &ldquo;logic,&rdquo; and especially to IH marketing people and boosters of rural prosperity.


Fitzgerald begins Chapter 2 with a quote from George Warren (I assume this is George F.   Warren, the author of Farm Management), who says &ldquo;Statistics are very much better than opinions.&rdquo;    This resonates for me right now, since I&rsquo;ve been thinking about the uses of data and anecdote in history.    Facts and stories.    The assumption buried in Warren&rsquo;s claim, of course, is that his statistics are based on something other than opinions.    The binary nature of the types of questions that lead to statistics can hide the fact that many of these &ldquo;yes/no&rdquo; choices exist in a wider range of possibility that the question simply ignores.    Even prices (the ultimate &ldquo;hard data&rdquo;) can be understood as momentary still points in a turning world of dancing exogenous variables -- so maybe we should think twice about building too much certainty on statistics.    But I can agree with Fitzgerald that a belief that the complex, analog multivariance of a living system like agriculture could be reduced to &ldquo;the numbers,&rdquo; was a strong motivator.    It might also explain why actual farmers looked at scientific Progressives with ongoing skepticism, and continued to resist &ldquo;book farming&rdquo; prescriptions by well-meaning Country Life reformers.


I&rsquo;ve really got to read Taylor&rsquo;s Principles of Scientific Management soon.    Seems like it&rsquo;s every bit as important as many of the standard American Studies sources.  ...  116 AM Todd appears in a paragraph that begins with Pullman.    Todd must be spinning in his grave!    I&rsquo;m going to come back to this, and read it more closely -- for now, though, this book has been recalled by the library, so it&rsquo;s going back.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Extended Family in the 19th c.</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-29T18:39:28-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/07fe18a691b893d59c2117d29c7b8b37-105.html#unique-entry-id-105</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/07fe18a691b893d59c2117d29c7b8b37-105.html#unique-entry-id-105</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Donald H.   Parkerson


The Agricultural Transition in New York State


1995


&ldquo;One of the defining characteristics of mid-nineteenth-century New York State,&rdquo; Parkerson begins, &ldquo;was the extraordinary mobility of its rural people&rdquo; (3).    Contrary to popular belief and a historiographical tradition that mistakenly pictures a stable, tradition-bound rural world in contrast with the (more thoroughly studied) dynamic, industrializing urban world, Parkerson says that &ldquo;ordinary farm families...embraced social and economic change&rdquo; largely through chain migrations that extended the households of farmers trying to enter market production (4, 5).   This key factor of the commercial agricultural transition has been missed for several reasons.    Earlier studies of migration have tended to focus on household heads (because they are the ones named in the census, especially before 1860).    A persistent agrarian myth has prevented generations of historians from even looking at the issue.    And, when &ldquo;new social historians&rdquo; like Thernstrom began studying persistence in the 1970s, they used a technique, nominal record linkage, that failed to account for deaths, errors in census enumeration, and common name errors; or that attributed a much lower value to these potential errors than Parkerson does (I seem to recall a discussion of these in one of Thernstrom&rsquo;s articles -- but he seemed to believe he had corrected for them).   The bottom line, says Parkerson, is that the city populations were probably more persistent than we&rsquo;ve thought; but more importantly, &ldquo;the countryside was in constant motion, with rural people moving in perhaps even greater numbers than their urban cousins&rdquo; (146).


This mobility was not a Handlinesque tragedy, though.    Rural families who moved were not the passive victims of social dislocation and the collapse of the producer republic.    They were agents of change, and frequently they were taking advantage of opportunity, rather than running from trouble.    Parkerson notes that &ldquo;the price of winter wheat on the New York market increased by about 50 percent between 1840 and 1860, and corn and hog prices skyrocketed nearly 70 percent&rdquo; (7).    Rural families saw opportunities to enter the early consumer market, if only to free up women&rsquo;s time that had been spent producing homespun (recall Balstad-Miller&rsquo;s Erie Canal story), as demand for farm products was boosted by the Irish potato blight, the Crimean War, Sutter&rsquo;s Mill, and ultimately the Civil War (8).    If there&rsquo;s one flaw in this study, it&rsquo;s that in his effort to highlight how &ldquo;the investments and production strategies of surplus market farmers...increased their yields and made them wealthier by 1865,&rdquo; I think Parkerson consistently undervalues the effect of the Civil War on the New York farm economy (102).    If not for the Civil War, far fewer farmers might have shifted to market production, and the ones that made the change would not have become so rich.   The transition might not have marched all the way to the threshold of agribusiness and a &ldquo;more consolidated agricultural economy in which wealth increasingly was controlled by fewer and fewer farmers with larger, more productive farms&rdquo; (147).  


But that&rsquo;s a quibble.    This is an important study that shows how &ldquo;Migrants and host families had specific needs that could be satisfied only through kin cooperation and coresidence.    Migrants needed emotional support, a place to live, and knowledge of the emerging marketplace.    Host families, especially in their early married years, needed willing workers who could improve their human capital and help them enter the market economy&rdquo; (140-1).    I&rsquo;d add, both the migrants and the farmers needed the financial support that extended, multi-regional families could lend.    And (crucially for the people I&rsquo;m studying) when doing business over long distances, they needed to deal with people they knew they could trust.    Parkerson uses New York Census data, which includes information on the length of time people had been at their current address.    He also uses diaries and personal papers very effectively, giving the reader a solid sense of the people he&rsquo;s talking about.    By combining data and voices, Parkerson brings what would otherwise be a useful but sterile economic history to life.    The Agricultural Transition in New York State may be an unfortunate title, if it limits Parkerson&rsquo;s readership to people interested in upstate New York farmers.    This book is full of great detail (I particularly love the description on page 71 of how to make charcoal), and it makes a really important point about rural people, and about families in the 19th century.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>An insult to immigrants</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-29T18:37:15-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2ae27b15ed11ce1e059d812ef60941d2-104.html#unique-entry-id-104</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2ae27b15ed11ce1e059d812ef60941d2-104.html#unique-entry-id-104</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People


...Handlin&rsquo;s &ldquo;history of immigration is a history of alienation and its consequences&rdquo; (4).    But he never mentions anyone in particular.    &ldquo;I have not found it in the nature of this work to give its pages the usual historical documentation,&rdquo; he says (308).    Freed from any obligation to support his generalizations with the experiences (much less the voices) of real people, Handlin paints a picture of superstitious, ignorant peasants who are too thick to understand the new society they find in America.    They huddle together in ghettos until they are told by their social betters that they must become American; and then they discover the depth of their alienation -- they will never belong, and they can never go home.  


...&ldquo;The mighty collapse&rdquo; of &ldquo;the peasant heart of Europe...left without homes millions of helpless, bewildered people&rdquo; (7).    These peasant immigrants belong to a pre-modern, pre-commercial, and definitely pre-industrial world, in Handlin&rsquo;s account; so it makes sense that they are naively religious, believe in fairies, and feel attuned to the rhythms of nature (94-9).   Their village communities give structure and meaning to their lives; so they are adrift the moment they leave.   The horror of the passage weeded out the weakest and hardened the rest (43).    Once here, peasants who had known only the land were unable to escape the cities and find a place in the countryside.    Instead, they became unskilled workers on canal, then railroad, and then highway crews (66).  


&ldquo;Often,&rdquo; Handlin says, &ldquo;they would try to understand.    They would think about it in the pauses of their work, speculate sometimes as their minds wandered, tired, at the close of a long day&rdquo; (94).    It&rsquo;s as if he&rsquo;s talking about an alien species -- and perhaps from his perspective, he is.    The incredible condescension and sheer distance between the historian and his subjects is remarkable, in a book still regarded by many as a classic text.    Handlin consistently denies the immigrants agency: they are orphan birds forced from their &ldquo;nests&rdquo; and unable to return; &ldquo;and if they failed to reach the soil which had once been so much a part of their being, it was only because the town had somehow trapped them&rdquo; (64).


There are some interesting facts sprinkled into the melodrama, that suggest the skeleton of a more accurate and more interesting story.    &ldquo;A single year in the 1830&rsquo;s saw seventeen vessels founder on the run from Liverpool to Quebec alone,&rdquo; Handlin says (48).    And in 1847, he says, &ldquo;eighty-four ships were held at Grosse Isle below Quebec...ten thousand died&rdquo; (Unfortunately, he continues this passage not with facts, but with an italicized but unattributed statement written in slang, to sound like it&rsquo;s a first-person account: &ldquo;I have seen them lyin on the beach, crawlin on the mud, and dyin like fish out of water&rdquo; 55).    By 1910, Handlin says, there were not only 350,000 miles of railway, but 200,000 miles of paved highway (66).    And he says that Henry George was popular with foreign-born voters (218).  


Two of the most problematic elements of The Uprooted are Handlin&rsquo;s discussions of why the immigrants didn&rsquo;t move to country, and his musings on their sexual difficulties.    &ldquo;Reluctance to pitch on the cheapest frontier lands,&rdquo; he says, was based on &ldquo;the expensive compulsion to settle on farms already brought under cultivation by others,&rdquo; rather than the timing of their arrival and availability of accessible land (84).    Isolated farms, where &ldquo;neighbors lived two or three miles off,&rdquo; also discouraged village-oriented peasants, Handlin claims (165).   But this is a very late, high plains type of farming; for much of the period he&rsquo;s discussing it would not have applied.    And Handlin completely mischaracterizes truck farming close to urban centers; turning it into a sad affair where &ldquo;Would-be agriculturalists...found used-up bits of ground...[and] took up the sterile, neglected acres&rdquo; (88).    The fact that they were successful, and provided perishable foods to city-people while re-establishing their relationship with the land, goes almost unnoticed in Handlin&rsquo;s gloomy account.  


On the sexual front -- I&rsquo;m not even going to go there, except to say that it&rsquo;s unnecessary, it&rsquo;s a blatantly condescending caricature, and it&rsquo;s probably a figment of Handlin&rsquo;s own fevered imagination.  ...  This is a Grosset&rsquo;s Universal Library edition of an acclaimed history.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Hofstadter&#x27;s Age of Reform</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-28T16:34:23-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c846e866ece3d731b9497e56f7029a1b-103.html#unique-entry-id-103</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c846e866ece3d731b9497e56f7029a1b-103.html#unique-entry-id-103</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Richard Hofstadter


The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R.


1955


Introducing his subject in 1955, Hofstadter says, &ldquo;Our conception of Populism and Progressivism has...been intimately bound up with the new Deal experience&rdquo; (4).    While he admits it would have been impossible &ldquo;without the impetus given by certain social grievances,&rdquo; Hofstadter prefers to separate out a more-or-less cultural spirit of  progressivism, which he says was &ldquo;not nearly so much the movement of any social class,&rdquo; as &ldquo;a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation&rdquo; (5).    Why?    Because by distinguishing a generalized, apolitical spirit of improvement called progressivism, he can cut its ties with the Populist political movement that proceeded it.    And the Populist Party, in Hofstadter&rsquo;s judgment, is at best anachronistic and backward-looking, and at worst a haven for racist, xenophobic kooks.  


But this separation leads to a paradox Hofstadter recognizes as &ldquo;One of the more ironic problems confronting reformers...that the very activities they pursued in attempting to defend or restore the individualistic values they admired brought them closer to the techniques of organization they feared&rdquo; (7).    Hofstadter wants to separate the Populist and Progressive movements, because he &ldquo;found much that was retrograde and delusive, a little that was vicious, and a good deal that was comic&rdquo; in populism, and he wanted to purge those elements from progressivism (11).    Populism leads, he says, to &ldquo;the cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time,&rdquo; and he wants progressivism to lead somewhere purer, nobler, and more useful in the present day (15).  


The problem is, Hofstadter&rsquo;s definitions and the bundles of ideas he calls liberalism and conservatism are presentist (in 1955), and his concerns are very much those of his own day.    &ldquo;The United States,&rdquo; he famously begins Chapter One, &ldquo;was born in the country and has moved to the city&rdquo; (23).    It&rsquo;s a mistake, then, to project contemporary, urban ideas back onto the radical farmers of the Gilded Age.    The &ldquo;continued coexistence of reformism and reaction&rdquo; and the contradiction of &ldquo;liberal totalitarianism&rdquo; might look substantially different, if viewed from a 19th century, rural point of view (20).    And on some level, Hofstadter is clearly aware of this.   He reminds us that &ldquo;in origin the agrarian myth was not a popular but a literary idea, a preoccupation of the upper classes&rdquo; (25).    Hofstadter concludes too readily, I think, that farmers took on the Jeffersonian agrarian myth -- which he admits was a political device, &ldquo;the basis of a strategy of continental development&rdquo; (29).    That this led to a political rhetoric of &ldquo;producers,&rdquo; and later of &ldquo;an innocent and victimized populace&rdquo; does not prove that this was the way most rural people really thought of themselves and their world (35).    I think Hofstadter loses sight of the &ldquo;most characteristic thinking&rdquo; of the &ldquo;ordinary culture&rdquo; he wanted to find (6).


There are lots of great details in the book, that I&rsquo;d like to learn more about.    I didn&rsquo;t know that &ldquo;In 1914, Canadian officials estimated that 925,000 Americans had moved...to the lands of Alberta and Saskatchewan&rdquo; (53).    Didn&rsquo;t know that Ignatius Donnelly&rsquo;s book Caesar&rsquo;s Column was one of the most widely read books of the 1890s (67).    These are both interesting facts, and I think they both complicate Hofstadter&rsquo;s claim that because of the agrarian myth, the &ldquo;utopia of the Populists was in the past,&rdquo; and country people really wanted to &ldquo;restore the conditions prevailing before the development of industrialism and the commercialization of agriculture&rdquo; (62).    I guess the interpretation hangs on which conditions they wanted to reverse.    When Hofstadter calls attention to Populists&lsquo; use of the Jacksonian slogan &ldquo;Equal Rights for All, Special Privileges for None,&rdquo; I think he hits the nail on the head, and simultaneously undermines his argument.    Maybe the core of the issue is an even earlier misinterpretation by John Hicks, who characterized populism as &ldquo;the last phase of a long and...losing struggle...to save agricultural America from the devouring jaws of industrial America&rdquo; (quoting The Populist Revolt, 237, 94).    What if the populists weren&rsquo;t objecting so much to the changes that were happening in modernizing America (as Postel says), but to who benefited from them, and how power was being misused to achieve those results.        ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>THAT&#x27;S the way you do it.</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-27T19:02:05-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ba226e55ef5ac8d22f874bc72e56ec2f-102.html#unique-entry-id-102</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ba226e55ef5ac8d22f874bc72e56ec2f-102.html#unique-entry-id-102</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre


...In his blurb for HCR&rsquo;s third book in six years, her colleague Leonard Richards praises a &ldquo;mastery that brings even her bit players to life.&rdquo;    It&rsquo;s a great subject, and Richardson tells us a lot of things we didn&rsquo;t know (the 1890 South Dakota campaign was &ldquo;the largest military mobilization of the U. ...  But the best thing, I agree, is the way she brings the story to life.    People who want to write good history should pay close attention to the ways Richardson accomplishes this in Wounded Knee. 


...The rest of the book tells the story leading up to the event, and then it&rsquo;s narrated again, completely, in amazingly close detail.    But unlike many of the older histories I&rsquo;ve been reading recently, Richardson isn&rsquo;t making these details up.    Nearly every paragraph closes with a citation number (no kidding -- turn to any page in the book); even the one in which she speculates about how noisy it must have been.    But she&rsquo;s not really even guessing about that: she has transcripts of eye-witness interviews to set the scene with &ldquo;hooves hitting hard-packed earth, men calling to each other in both English and Lakota, wagons creaking, horses snorting, spurs rattling, people coughing&rdquo; (7).  


The storm that buried the bodies of the Indian dead (the soldiers remove their own casualties immediately) the night after the massacre &ldquo;quickly blew east...to Washington...[where] the social season was in full swing&rdquo; (11).    The story is as much about national party politics as it is about the Dakota territory, as Richardson explains how &ldquo;the Sioux...became crucial figures in the 1890 election&rdquo; (14).    But even when it&rsquo;s nearly straight-up political history, Wounded Knee never loses sight of people.    As a result, the Sherman brothers are as interesting as Sitting Bull; especially at moments like the one when she shows the aging General congratulating himself that in helping clear the frontier for white settlement &ldquo;I have done more good for our country and for the human race than I did in the Civil War&rdquo; (77).  


Richardson provides all the background readers need to understand the political stakes, without slowing the pace.    The section on economic policy is one of the clearest short descriptions I&rsquo;ve seen.    It could be (note to self) excerpted for an undergrad class: &ldquo;trusts could not survive without tariffs&rdquo; (84).    And in the midst of what might be dry and impersonal political background, Richardson inserts a description of someone&rsquo;s physical  appearance or a quirk of character that reminds the reader that these are people we&rsquo;re reading about, not abstract historical forces.  


There&rsquo;s a lot of contingency in Wounded Knee, but there&rsquo;s also a lot of venality, incompetence, and malice -- on both sides.    But regardless of the mistakes or poor judgments the Indians may have made, this was a massacre; women and children were murdered for no reason, and Richardson is not afraid to say so.   The one possible downside of the story&rsquo;s pace is that it&rsquo;s difficult to understand when characters change, and what changes them.    General Miles&rsquo; change of heart with respect to the danger the Indians pose, and his growing tendency to respond with annoyance, anger, and then rage, is one of those moments.  ...  The way coverup gave way to revisionism, where the Seventh Cavalry was lauded for another heroic victory, is not only interesting and ironic in it&rsquo;s time.  ...  Not just in the sense of new crises being manufactured to justify or camouflage political machinations in Washington.    But in the sense that these fake stories are still believed by many people in the western states where it all happened.    Does this suggest that out current crop of manufactured crises might become similarly enduring myths of America?   


It might be interesting at some point to study the legacy of the Indian Wars in the upper plains states.  ...  But, closer to home, what do the people of Mankato, Minnesota know, for example, about the execution that happened on the site of their public library?    There&rsquo;s a big statue of a bison next to the building, and a sign declaring that a few square feet across the street are a &ldquo;reconciliation park.&rdquo;    You can see it most clearly from the bay windows of the children&rsquo;s section. ...  you can hear them say to their toddlers -- but do any of the parents know what it is?  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Fixing Populist History</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-27T19:41:47-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b3cb9e92b184586b2f80fb92a163a5e2-101.html#unique-entry-id-101</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b3cb9e92b184586b2f80fb92a163a5e2-101.html#unique-entry-id-101</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[This book won the Bancroft Prize, and it deserved to win.    It is about &ldquo;how Americans responded to the traumas of technological innovation, expansion of corporate power, and commercial and cultural globalization in the 1880s and 1890s.&rdquo; (vii) Populists, Postel says were &ldquo;influenced by modernity and sought to make America modern.&rdquo; (vii)  Throughout the book, Postel shows rural people embracing change, and especially technological change that made their work and lives easier and more rewarding.    This view, he says, challenges the dominant strain of thought (especially Hofstadter), that sees rural people and especially populists as cranky victims of change, who looked back nostalgically to an earlier age when the rest of the world shared their agrarian &ldquo;producer&rdquo; philosophy.    A key example is the populist approach to railroads.    Nowhere does Postel find the suggestion that this new technology hadn&rsquo;t radically improved life in the countryside.    The issue was, how should these enterprises be organized, and for whose benefit?


...Postel gives regular people a lot of credit for intelligence, political awareness, and active involvement in the key issues of the day.    He begins his introduction with a description of how a voluntary association of florists (a coop) &ldquo;embraced the new technology&rdquo; of the telegraph, which had &ldquo;annihilated time and space&rdquo; (3).   They standardized their businesses and products to allow the customer to order uniform products that could be delivered across town or across continents: FTD.    Populists "believed in the transforming power of science and technology,&rdquo; Postel says.    &ldquo;They believed in economies of scale...they believed in the logic of modernity&rdquo; (4).   Just as important, he shows that they understood these issues, perhaps better than we do now.    &ldquo;Populism was known as &lsquo;a reading party&rsquo; and a &lsquo;writing and talking party&rsquo;&rdquo; (4).   It is important to understand what the Populists &ldquo;were for&rdquo; as well as what they were against, says Postel.   If they were pessimistic (as Turner and Hofstadter claimed), then it was with Hamlin Garland&rsquo;s &ldquo;kind of pessimism which is really optimism...that is to say, people who believe the imperfect and unjust can be improved upon&rdquo; (11).  


Postel also explores the connection between Populists and labor activists.    Although the standard story is that they could never get together because farmers were proprietor/employers and wage workers were not, Postel finds many examples of cooperation, especially with rural workers.    &ldquo;Farmers were often part-time coal miners, and coal miners often farmed to supplement their diet and income&rdquo; (19).    This approach shows a greater sensitivity to conditions on the ground than many other historians who stick to the categories.    But Postel is also quick to point out problems with the populist vision, such as when it veered toward racism and advocated majoritarian, government/industrial organization on a scale that would later (elsewhere) be called fascist.


If farmers had any antipathy toward universities, Postel says, it was only because rather than catering to their needs, the schools &ldquo;seemed to lavish resources on future lawyers, doctors, ministers, and other professionals&rdquo; (47).    So once again, their objection is not to change, but to who benefits from the change.    Farmers took their education into their own hands.    It was the &ldquo;great equalizer in commerce, technology, and social standing,&rdquo; so they &ldquo;built lecture circuits across some thirty states, and a network of approximately one thousand weekly newspapers&rdquo;  (49).


...This is jumping out at me right now, as I think about preparing to be a college-level teacher.    To a great extent, the early 20th century rise of professionalism and universities in America killed off this 19th century type of self-education.    But today, the web opens a possibility for people to take control of their own educations again.    I think I need to spend some quality time thinking about what I&rsquo;m doing, how I&rsquo;m doing it, and for whom?


Interesting people and things to research someday: Charles Macune, Luna Kellie, Marion Cannon, National Cordage and the National Union Company (did the 1893 National Cordage bankruptcy precipitate the stock market crash?), the Gulf and Interstate Railway Company (north-south transcontinental), William Peffer, 2nd class postage and RFD, Anna Fader Haskell (who sounds like a 19th century female version of Tyler Durden, and doesn&rsquo;t even have her own wiki page!), Marion Todd (1893, Railways of Europe and America -- is she related to AMT??), Daniel Weaver (a Chartist who tried to organize coal miners in the 1860s), and of course Darrow v.   Bryan at the Skopes Monkey Trial (1925), and Eugene V. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>You just can&#x27;t do it like this anymore...</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-27T15:26:33-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/424f46175346f08ea792f3dcc114a75a-100.html#unique-entry-id-100</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/424f46175346f08ea792f3dcc114a75a-100.html#unique-entry-id-100</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[(1) If you don&rsquo;t agree, you really don&rsquo;t have to read any further (unless this is on your Orals list), because Wiebe&rsquo;s argument (like that of many contemporary historians) depends on this prior condition.    America had to be pre-commercial, traditional, and parochial, or it could not have changed into the market-oriented, modern, cosmopolitan place it became.    And without this change, there would have been no displacement and anxiety, and no middle-class search for order.  

...But I have serious reservations about not only what the author of this highly influential history was saying, but how he said it.    I think this book can tell us a lot about how history used to be done, and should not be done anymore.  

...The issue isn&rsquo;t only the antiquated, magisterial tone of the text, which seems to say to the reader, &ldquo;this is the way it was, because I say so.&rdquo;    It would be one thing if the author was simply presenting uncontroversial facts in an excessively authoritative way.    It&rsquo;s something completely different to try to float an interpretation on nothing but a claim to superior (but unshared) knowledge.  

...Currency posed a knottier problem of morals, with greenbacks, the paper currency issued in quantity as a war measure, creating the major complication.  ...  In the boom times before the panic [of 1873], greenbacks had offered some relief from an insufficient gold currency, some encouragement to expansionists little and big who feared deflation and tight credit.  ...  Nevertheless, the impulse to recapture fundamentals proved too strong, and throughout the countryside waverers selected currency with a feel and a ring that crinkly paper could never match.  ...  Although it was a compromise in that it did not actually retire the greenbacks, the law still represented a moral commitment to currency that citizens could recognize as safe, sound, and honorable. 

...I think it&rsquo;s taking a big step, to argue that the money controversies of the 1870s were essentially a moral battle.    It&rsquo;s an interesting assertion, and it would be fascinating to see the point argued with evidence from political debates, newspapers, pamphlets, letters, etc.  ...  It only seems quiet, because Wiebe says it was and the average reader doesn&rsquo;t know any better.  

...Wiebe is vague, to the point of misleading, about who exactly were the &ldquo;expansionists little and big?&rdquo;  ...  Their interest was not ideological, they needed easier access to cash and credit in order to do business.  ...  Deflation meant they couldn&rsquo;t get a fair price for their products that reflected what they&rsquo;d put into them, and tight credit meant financial embarrassment or bankruptcy.    And there was nothing vague about their association of gold with bondholders, who insisted on being paid in specie while everyone else was forced to deal in depreciating paper; or about their feelings regarding this.    When Wiebe says country people were driven by an &ldquo;impulse to recover fundamentals&rdquo; or that they were motivated by their belief that gold coins felt more like money than &ldquo;crinkly paper,&rdquo; he is suggesting that they were either fanatics or fools.    Again, this denigration of country people isn&rsquo;t a claim Wiebe supports with evidence; he just states it as if it&rsquo;s a fact.  


Finally, in presenting specie resumption as a &ldquo;moral commitment&rdquo; and a victory for &ldquo;honorable&rdquo; money, Wiebe is not only ignoring the large proportion of Americans who opposed resumption (or why was a compromise over greenbacks necessary?), but he&rsquo;s not even trying to get at the real issues that motivated people on both sides of the debate.    He&rsquo;s just paraphrasing the political rhetoric the winning side used to rationalize its position, and pretending their propaganda tells the whole story of what really happened.  


There&rsquo;s much more to say -- my library copy of The Search for Order is bristling with little pink sticky-tabs.  ...  I think Wiebe&rsquo;s thesis that the changes of the Progressive Era were based partly on a middle-class search for rational principles of social order (or social control) is interesting and suggestive.    Maybe my response to the book indicates a change in our (or maybe only my) standards of argument and evidence in history since 1967.    Wiebe does not demonstrate anything, he does not cite any sources, and in a key section where he&rsquo;s making a cultural argument, he quotes a fictional character (Dr. ...  Bellamy&rsquo;s book seems very interesting, and has been on my &ldquo;read someday&rdquo; radar for a while now.    It&rsquo;s interesting that Wiebe apparently thought it was so influential that its characters were archetypes who could speak for nineteenth-century people.    But I&rsquo;d have been much more comfortable with that train of thought, if he would have showed some contemporary responses to the book, or even identified its popularity in terms of copies sold.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Traders beyond the Frontier</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-14T15:01:11-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/157451b3d242543b0c4944fb9027e239-99.html#unique-entry-id-99</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/157451b3d242543b0c4944fb9027e239-99.html#unique-entry-id-99</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Howard R.   Lamar


The Trader on the American Frontier: Myth&rsquo;s Victim


1977


In this short book (53 pages), Lamar challenges not only the American stereotype of frontier traders as &ldquo;despicable characters cavorting with Indians,&rdquo; but the east-to-west determinism of the Turner thesis.   (16)  There is a &ldquo;trader&rsquo;s point of view&rdquo; that we know little about; &ldquo;indeed, a trader&rsquo;s world that lasted from 1600 to 1850&rdquo; in the west.    &ldquo;In re-examining the main determinants of frontier history,&rdquo; Lamar says, &ldquo;we have neglected a dual tradition of trade and mercantile capitalism by overstressing the mythic figures of explorers, pioneers, and settlers.&rdquo;   (17)  


One of the elements that Lamar finds in native/native and native/white trade from very early, possibly pre-Columbian times is trade in human captives.    Lamar contrasts this to familiar Southern slavery, suggesting it was more like ancient European slavery, where &ldquo;captives were incorporated into households and often became a part of the tribe or nation that had captured them.&rdquo;   (19)  A more interesting point, for me, is Lamar&rsquo;s claim that &ldquo;the Plains tribes traded with whites from 1700 to 1850 without a notable deterioration of their culture and strength except by disease after the smallpox epidemics of 1837.&rdquo;   (21) So rather than the west we&rsquo;ve associated since Turner with &ldquo;anarchic freedom, virginity, and democracy,&rdquo; Lamar shows us a west filled with widespread, elaborate trade networks, and even some bondage.   (26) 


We should make maps, Lamar suggests, that show &ldquo;prehistoric Indian trade centers and routes, and then depict the Spanish, the French, the British, and the American ones.&rdquo;   (28)  &ldquo;The most successful trading post in the history of the United States,&rdquo; he says, was St.   Louis (1764), &ldquo;located almost on the site of one of the most elaborate and densely populated prehistoric Indian trading centers in the continental United States: Cahokia Mound.&rdquo;   (30)  And we should understand, Lamar says, the bicultural, multi-generational, familial nature of the North American fur trade.    Stretching from Canada to Mexico, west of settled America, this forgotten phase of history lasted nearly twice as long as the more familiar period that followed it.    There are probably some great stories in it, in addition to the opportunity to see different relationships among places and people that cast doubt on the inevitability of the outcome.  


One of the people it would be fun to look into someday is Charles A.   Siringo, &ldquo;Cowboy Detective,&rdquo; who denounced his employer in a pamphlet called Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism, 1915.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Spies among us&#x21;</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-14T14:24:49-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0f2cd37d39ce16f841df15be04fc5601-98.html#unique-entry-id-98</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0f2cd37d39ce16f841df15be04fc5601-98.html#unique-entry-id-98</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era


...In New York Undercover, Fronc argues that Progressive social activists used private investigators to spy on Americans in a variety of settings.    They went looking for information to confirm their suspicions about their fellow citizens, &ldquo;produced the knowledge necessary to alter conditions,&rdquo; and because they were willing to &ldquo;tamper with civil liberties, cross lines, and perform tasks that would have been illegal&rdquo; for government employees, &ldquo;they were central to the creation of a stronger federal state during the Progressive Era and World War I, one that became increasingly repressive in the interests of a national security agenda.&rdquo; (from Introduction -- I read this in ebook form, and I don&rsquo;t know how to see page numbers...this is a problem I need to resolve if I plan on using ebooks extensively)  Fronc distinguishes between the evangelical approach of earlier reformers and the &ldquo;instrumentalist pragmatism&rdquo; of these people (who she calls &ldquo;social activists&rdquo; to avoid using the term reform, which she says &ldquo;generations of historians have used in their desire to impose organizational synthesis on the contingency and chaos&rdquo; of the actual situation), who sought to &ldquo;enforce their own moral codes&rdquo; upon society by creating &ldquo;new types of knowledge about urban neighborhoods and their residents.&rdquo;    Fronc demonstrates that these private, often untrained undercover investigators played an &ldquo;essential role...in creating social knowledge and constituting political authority.&rdquo;    And she calls attention to the problem with this: the &ldquo;entire process was teleological: the predominantly middle-class social activists set the parameters of the investigations, had their concerns confirmed by their investigators&rsquo; findings and reports, and then moved to solve the problems their employees uncovered (or caused).&rdquo;


Fronc&rsquo;s narrative reveals interesting glimpses of the little-seen underside of early twentieth-century New York, through the reports of these investigators.    She also describes the activities of the main private organizations, like the Committee of Fourteen and the People&rsquo;s Institute, as well as more the &ldquo;liminal and vigilante&rdquo; National Civic Federation.    The evolution of &ldquo;moral reform&rdquo; from &ldquo;benevolent societies&rdquo; to &ldquo;preventive societies,&rdquo; and then to these semi-public committees and ultimately to government agencies, is interesting and disturbing.    In some cases, like the &ldquo;undercover investigation of midwives,&rdquo; the reader can clearly see the medical profession lobbying to &ldquo;safeguard against the usurpation of the function of the physician&rdquo; -- a function the physician had only recently wrested away from its traditional practitioners.    But overall, Fronc says &ldquo;The desire to control and regulate--rather than &lsquo;save&rsquo; or &lsquo;redeem&rsquo;--differentiated Progressive Era activists from their predecessors.&rdquo;    The elite condescension contained in these programs, and their racial, ethnic, and class biases did not go completely unchallenged at the time.  ...  DuBois and Frederick Whitin (Executive of the Committee of Fourteen), in which DuBois challenged the legality of the segregation the Committee tried to enforce on New York businesses.  


Fronc also highlights aspects of the period that get less notice than they ought.    She calls attention to the fact that the period of 1914-1916 saw &ldquo;nearly two years of monthly bombings in munitions plants, explosions aboard ships in New York harbor, and the arrests of German, Austrian, and Italian immigrants for bomb making in their apartments.&rdquo;    She traces the National Civic Federation&rsquo;s 1900 establishment back to its roots in Chicago&rsquo;s Columbian Exposition of 1893.    She points out that the NCF &ldquo;opposed groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, which wanted the government to protect small business interests from competition at the hands of large corporations and the demands of organized labor.&rdquo;    And that &ldquo;On August 1, 1914, &lsquo;the day after war was declared by Germany,&rsquo; the New York City Police Department officially expanded the Italian Squad and renamed it the Anarchist and Bomb Squad.&rdquo;  


Surveillance was undertaken by these activist Progressives, but is this type of somewhat sinister elitism pervade only their part of Progressivism?    Jane Addams is named several times in the text, but Fronc never suggests that she had any knowledge of the type of surveillance that was going on.    But in the sense that some of this spying was finding out interesting new things about people in the major cities (which is part of the reason they&rsquo;re still so interesting), isn&rsquo;t this exactly the type of information Addams would have been interested in, if she had known it existed?   


I also wonder how far outside the major cities this type of surveillance extends?    Clearly, by the time the government takes it over in WWI, they&rsquo;re looking at &ldquo;enemies of the state&rdquo; wherever they may be.    But how does that develop, outside the cities?  


And aren&rsquo;t the vigilantes who work with the government really manifesting the same principle that motivates the anarchists themselves?  ...  The anarchists and the vigilantes both believe it&rsquo;s within their legitimate scope of activities, to take on (violent) projects in the public sphere, which will later come to be (and is still, for us) understood as the monopoly of the state.    So really, in one sense, the same impulse is behind the vigilantes that ally with the government to attack outsiders, and with the outsiders who attack the organs of the state.  


The best things about this are that Fronc really uses things written by her subjects to great advantage.  ...  This is a great example for me, since I&rsquo;d like to do the same thing.    The other great thing is, she wasn&rsquo;t even looking for the investigators.  ...  That&rsquo;s so cool for those of us who spend our time in archives...
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Counterfeiters&#x21;</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-13T10:47:47-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f81f6765013eff51a2c9b786c871b1fa-97.html#unique-entry-id-97</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f81f6765013eff51a2c9b786c871b1fa-97.html#unique-entry-id-97</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States


...Mihm&rsquo;s argument is that the monetary chaos of the antebellum years prevented Americans from feeling confident in their currency, and by extension, in their economy and nation.    &ldquo;The Civil War, and the search for national unity it fostered, compelled the federal government to secure the right to make money.&rdquo;    The nation&rsquo;s fight against counterfeitors (including the establishment of the Secret Service by near-criminal William Patrick Wood) and nationalization of the currency were necessary steps in the United States becoming &ldquo;a genuine nation...[with] confidence in both our country and its currency.&rdquo;   (374)  Most of the narrative, however, covers the colorful lives of the counterfeiters themselves, and doesn&rsquo;t advance this thesis; which in the end seems like an afterthought, used to justify Mihm&rsquo;s interest in the story of counterfeiting -- which is interesting enough on its own, it didn&rsquo;t need justification.


For my purposes, the interesting bits are the glimpses into the chaotic but legitimate world of antebellum state banking (although I have to admit, Waterman Ormsby is a really attractive character that I&rsquo;d love to read more about).    By the 1850s, Mihm says, &ldquo;with so many entities commissioning bank notes of their own design...the money supply became a great confluence of more than ten thousand different kinds of paper that continually changed hands, baffled the uninitiated, and fluctuated in value according to the whims of the market.&rdquo;   (3) Not only was some of the money phony, a lot of the paper circulating in remote areas was &ldquo;the floating issue of broken banks.&rdquo; (quoting Maine storekeeper John Neal from Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life, 1869.   6) &ldquo;It was a popular remark among men of business at this time,&rdquo; Mihm quotes Allan Pinkerton saying in his 1884 memoir, &ldquo;that they preferred a good counterfeit on a solid bank to any genuine bill upon [a] shyster institution.&rdquo;   (10) The Maine storekeeper agreed: &ldquo;In our establishment, all such moneys, whether counterfeit, or only questionable, were always put back into the till.&rdquo;   (10) The willingness of people to pass on suspect notes reveals not only a decision not to be a martyr for the sake of &ldquo;good&rdquo; money, but what I see as an already well-developed, fairly sophisticated understanding that the money itself is only a symbol.    Mihm quotes a Michigan resident&rsquo;s recollection that &ldquo;counterfeiting and issuing worthless &lsquo;bank notes&rsquo;...was not looked upon as a felony as it would be today.    Of course it was taken for granted that it was a &lsquo;little crooked,&rsquo; but the scarcity of real money, together with the necessity for a medium of exchange, made almost anything that looked like money answer the purpose.&rdquo;   (Mihm quotes from Mevis, Pioneer Recollections: Semi-Historic Side Lights on the Early Days of Lansing, 1911, 33-4.   159) &ldquo;Money&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t have to have a value, as long as it represents value -- which it would continue to do, until someone took it to a bank and had it refused.    Not wanting to be that person, anyone who received it would pass it on, and so bogus notes would tend to stay in circulation, boosting the money supply.    An 1857 newspaper reported &ldquo;it is a favorite maxim with some to &lsquo;keep bad money in circulation,&lsquo; for they say it makes no difference whether a bill is counterfeit or not, as long as it will pass around freely.&rdquo; (from The Weekly Pantagraph, 233)  I wonder, how much shaky local banks may have benefited from the same reluctance of holders to find out their circulating notes were worthless?  


Counterfeiting seemed to some critics to highlight the deficiency of paper money.   To many hard-money enthusiasts, paper currency wasn&rsquo;t payment, it was the &ldquo;promise to pay, which, by universal understanding, is meant to signify the promise to pay on condition of not being required to do so.&rdquo; (quoting United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1839, emphasis in original.   9) Any paper issue not 100% backed by specie was in their opinion, a swindle on somebody.    Even in states with sophisticated regulatory arrangements, like New York (which had an insurance pool, but also had free banking), the authorities clearly recognized that even legitimate banks might be tempted to print more notes than they &ldquo;should.&rdquo;    &ldquo;In an attempt to prevent these &lsquo;genuine counterfeiters,&rsquo; New York passed a law in 1843 requiring that banks deposit their plates with the state&rsquo;s comptroller of the currency.&rdquo;   (283)  By the time the guys I&rsquo;m researching became bankers, there was apparently a semi-governmental printing office that they would write to, for more notes.


Another character who seems to demand a closer look is John Thompson.    Originally a counterfeit detector, Thompson founded the First National Bank of New York in 1863, when other New York bankers were resisting LIncoln&rsquo;s consolidation of National Banking.    Thompson was forced out in 1873, but went on to found Chase National bank in 1878, named after his good friend Salmon P. ...  Thompson was born in 1802 on a farm in Peru, Berkshire County, Mass.    All in all, even though Mihm&rsquo;s interest in the counterfeiters doesn&rsquo;t line up completely with my interest in the &ldquo;legitimate&rdquo; but still quite sketchy free state banks, I got a lot out of A Nation of Counterfeiters.    Thinking about his thesis again, I wonder if the chaos of antebellum currency, and the need to pay attention to the source and quality of the paper you accepted, slowed the movement other historians have noted, toward an &ldquo;anonymous&rdquo; commercial market.    Maybe it was the adoption of a national currency that allowed Americans to stop thinking about the social relations involved in buying and selling... 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Religious&#x2c; Legal Intellectual History</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-11T16:43:50-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/892013bd0a36469359cda72693bd5834-96.html#unique-entry-id-96</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/892013bd0a36469359cda72693bd5834-96.html#unique-entry-id-96</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I was pretty sure, going in, that it wasn&rsquo;t going to be the most fun I ever had reading for this list.   I wasn&rsquo;t mistaken, but there were some interesting things in this, even by my own admittedly &ldquo;outside the box&rdquo; standards.


Miller begins his first chapter on &ldquo;the Grand Era&rdquo; of evangelism by quoting Charles Grandison Finney, saying &ldquo;A revival of Religion presupposes a declension.&rdquo;    (3) Miller clearly supposes this declension to be a bad thing, and welcomes the Awakenings as opportunities for America to get itself back on track.    While it is true that &ldquo;several surviving leaders of the Revolution...were rationalistic to the point of overt Deism...[and] that Tom Paines The Age of Reason (1795) circulated among village dissidents, and especially among the rude settlements of the frontier...and in 1795...  Elihu Palmer did gather an out-and-out Deistic Society in New York,&rdquo; Miller minimizes these challenges to Christian hegemony in early America.   (4)  He suggests that these evangelists saw the small number of radical freethinkers as less dangerous to their cause than the large number of nominal christians who had no interest in attending or supporting their local congregations.   Miller cites works like A Correct View of that Part of the United States which lies West of the Allegheny Mountains with regard to Religion and Morals (1814) as demonstrating a missionary project on the part of eastern religious leaders and their university divinity students.   It&rsquo;s interesting to think of this work as not evangelical, but missionary, with all the elite condescension (even colonialism?) ...  (14)  Maybe that&rsquo;s because their evangelism was not filling a void, as they claimed and Miller seems to have believed, but trying to displace a consciously and conscientiously chosen irreligion that was a firm part of early republicanism.  


...The archetypal early West frontiersman is a character I should definitely return to, for close study, as are Cooper himself and probably his father, William Cooper.    My typical mental reservations  regarding the use of literary characters as &ldquo;voices of the people&rdquo; rather than actual people, was a little less evident while I was reading Miller.  ...  But it fits with his project; he&rsquo;s not pretending the be a social historian.    The element I have more difficulty swallowing was MIller&rsquo;s reverence for the concept of the &ldquo;sublime&rdquo; as the &ldquo;inner, if not the central, mainspring of the missionary exertion.&rdquo;   (57)  I was amazed, reading the section on the &ldquo;Event of the Century,&rdquo; (Miller&rsquo;s &ldquo;Third Great Awakening&rdquo; of 1857) how Miller manages to avoid talking about the Panic of 1857 as a motivator of revivalism.  ...  (88) The life of the mind apparently has not so much to do with the life of the pocketbook, social displacement, bankruptcy, or the empty stomach.


&ldquo;The people of this state, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrines of Christianity,&rdquo; Miller quotes from James Kent&rsquo;s New York decision in the blasphemy case, The People v. ...  (66) That this bland statement serves as a preface and justification for a blasphemy conviction, and that Miller sees this as an unproblematic example of the &ldquo;impression&rdquo; that &ldquo;prevails among our statesmen that the Bible is emphatically the foundation of our hopes as a people,&rdquo; is alarming.   (67) Miller adds that &ldquo;Besotted Ruggles vanished thereupon from history, and nobody then or since tried to make him a martyr, as Abner Kneeland became in Boston of 1838.&rdquo; ...  Ruggles is so absent from the historical record that many doubt his actual existence and claim that Kent fabricated him as an excuse to expound on the role of religion in the American State.   


The second section of Miller&rsquo;s book is a 155-page discussion of the eclipse of English-derived common law by a codified legal system dominated by a professionalized attorneys.    In spite of popular law books like John McDougal&rsquo;s The Farmer&rsquo;s Assistant  (1815) that tried to reduce regular people&rsquo;s dependence on this new elite, Miller consistently dismisses popular distrust of lawyers as &ldquo;anti-intellectualism.&rdquo;   (182) And he goes out of his way to establish the &ldquo;union of Christianity and the law,&rdquo; which was &ldquo;asserted most comprehensively by Chief Justice Shaw in 1838 when passing sentence upon Abner Kneeland.&rdquo;   (194) This sentiment found its logical conclusion in the 1859 claim of a Georgia jurist that &ldquo;no Lawyer properly imbued with the teachings of his Profession, can be an infidel or a skeptic.&rdquo;   (206)  If this was the common opinion of the &ldquo;best&rdquo; minds of the 1850s (Miller suggests it was, and doesn&rsquo;t see anything particularly troubling in that), is the Civil War any great surprise?


One of the ironies of Miller&rsquo;s book is that he doesn&rsquo;t really challenge the self-justifications of these early republic elites.    Miller quotes &ldquo;an amazingly frank&rdquo; 1843 article in the first issue of The American Law Magazine, which contends that &ldquo;the real concern of society is the protection of property&rdquo; and that the threats are real and immanent.    &ldquo;Democracy, says this writer, is incurably hostile to the possessions of the few,&rdquo; and therefore the law must protect those possessions and that few.   (227)  &ldquo;That government can scarcely be deemed free,&rdquo; claimed lawyers in 1830, &ldquo;where the rights of property are left solely dependent upon the will of a legislative body.&rdquo;   (228)  I don&rsquo;t necessarily disagree with that statement, but it&rsquo;s telling that it should be the agenda of the legal profession that &ldquo;the policy of the law preserves equality and political rights among the citizens; but equality of wealth and condition cannot exist among men, so long as they are divided into the provident and the improvident, the idle and the diligent.&rdquo; (quoting Judge Thacher in the 1834 Ursuline Convent decision, 229) Seems like they&rsquo;re well on their way to a social Darwinism in which, as HCR would say, some people must be poor, and it&rsquo;s their own fault.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Yankees in Michigan</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-10T12:22:14-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f79cbb133e35f7dd577d33c7938d6a0e-95.html#unique-entry-id-95</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f79cbb133e35f7dd577d33c7938d6a0e-95.html#unique-entry-id-95</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier


...Gray&rsquo;s story of three townships in the neighborhood of Kalamazoo Michigan could have been told as &ldquo;the mundane march of the farm boy who collects the herd in the back forty and drives it resolutely toward the barn,&rdquo; she says, except that &ldquo;the circumstances under which the townships were settled were by no means mundane, and the settlers saw themselves as anything but plodders.&rdquo;    (1)  Gray draws on many of the texts I&rsquo;ve read lately that describe the market transition and migration, as well as important old regional sources like the many memorial atlases and Lois K. ...  The historiography of the Yankee migrations, she says, is complicated by the story they created for themselves &ldquo;coeval&rdquo; with settlement, and &ldquo;an interpretation that reigned from the 1890s to about 1950, to which the works of Frederick Jackson Turner are central.&rdquo;   (3)  Even early accounts like James Lanman&rsquo;s 1839 History of Michigan, Gray says, struggle to define the &ldquo;third New England&rsquo;s&rdquo; response to the &ldquo;two congeries of Yankee cultural markers: the market and morality.&rdquo; 

...Gray describes the typical &ldquo;Yankee migration&rdquo; pattern as &ldquo;chain migration, usually, but not always, in family groups.&rdquo;    (11)  The two important elements of this type of migration are that there are familiar faces waiting for immigrants, after the first settlers arrive; and that there are family members still back in the old New England and New York communities, who are a source of not only ongoing migrants, but ongoing access to eastern capital.    This is why both migration and &ldquo;capitalism for Yankees seemed to promise not the destruction but the intensification of familial and community ties.&rdquo;   (12)  The primary sources I&rsquo;ve been reading (especially letters from migrants to siblings &ldquo;back home&rdquo;) seem to support Gray&rsquo;s argument.


Although she spends quite a lot of time on the religious conflicts of these frontier communities, Gray acknowledges that although &ldquo;organized settlements in Michigan, such as the one at Vermontville, near Lansing, involved relocations of entire congregations...they were not usual.    Most settlements--no less Yankee--were founded by groups of families.&rdquo; ...  Gilkey, was &ldquo;&lsquo;Behind none&rsquo; in contributing barrels of flour to the poor, he was known for his benevolence, but he belonged to no church.&rdquo;   (176)  Gray reminds us there were &ldquo;two New Englands--one coastal, commercial, and Congregational; the other, agrarian, democratic, and pluralistic.&rdquo;   (8)  I might amend that statement in two ways, to suggest that western Massachusetts and Vermont were also quite commercial, and to suggest that many Vermont deists and New York/New England freethinkers were still alive and well in the 1830s, when southern Michigan was first settled.


...MIchigan&rsquo;s growth in the 1830s was driven in part by land sales at the Kalamazoo District Land Office.    Although &ldquo;open only 169 days in 1836...it took in $2,043,866.87.&rdquo;   (44)  Michigan&rsquo;s &ldquo;General Banking Law of March 15, 1837, enabled any twelve landowners to form a banking association on application to the county treasurer or clerk.&rdquo;   (45) The Specie Circular slowed but did not stop land sales, Gray says, but the Panic of 1837-9 crushed the bankers, ruined rail and canal companies, and slowed population growth for decades.    &ldquo;The legislature stopped construction of the southern [rail] line at Hillsdale in 1843 and funded the central line only to Kalamazoo, which the line reached in 1846.&rdquo;    The &ldquo;panic and ensuing years of depression--was to arrest Michigan&rsquo;s economic development until the Civil War.&rdquo;  

...Gray&rsquo;s discussion of Kalamazoo politics seems to draw heavily on Formisano, which she seems to think provides a fairly accurate description of conditions around Kalamazoo.    She observes that &ldquo;although Kalamazoo was an intensely anti-Democratic county, it supported continuously only a Democratic paper, the Kalamazoo Gazette.&rdquo;   (152)  In 1849, she says, &ldquo;Democrats simply gave up the fight,&rdquo; allowing the Whigs to &ldquo;elect unanimously Uriah Upjohn...as supervisor.&rdquo;   (154)  Upjohn was a British-born Doctor, and father of W.E. ...  Gray calls him &ldquo;the sole known antislavery man who compiled a winning record in township elections... [as] a Whig who ran as a Free-Soil candidate for state senator in 1848.&rdquo;   (157)  &ldquo;The formation of rural elites,&rdquo; Gray suggests, &ldquo;is a relatively understudied aspect of the transition to capitalism in the countryside.&rdquo;    (159) The politics of Kalamazoo&rsquo;s civic leaders is also problematic, since Gray suggests it represents ethnic, religious, and social antagonisms from the home regions of these immigrant elites. 

...Two families that it might be useful for me to follow up on are the Mays and the Wells.    Richland settler Rockwell May (b. 1799) and his son, General Dwight May, seem interesting.  ...  Wells in Michigan Historical Collections, vol. 2, and also Ronald P. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Impending Crisis</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-09T16:51:41-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/181b8b4f35a2fe9eafdca38e9e721983-94.html#unique-entry-id-94</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/181b8b4f35a2fe9eafdca38e9e721983-94.html#unique-entry-id-94</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Henry Steele Commager introduces this posthumous edition of Potter&rsquo;s magnum opus (completed by Fehrenbacher) by praising Potter&rsquo;s ability to see that although &ldquo;slavery was indeed the overshadowing problem of the decade,&rdquo; it seems not to have &ldquo;monopolized the politics of the decade as it now tends to monopolize its history.&rdquo; (xiv)  And Potter does come back to this point again and again.    Lincoln was hardly a household name in 1850, and it was far from inevitable in the minds of most Americans that slavery would lead to secession, emancipation, and Civil War.    Even in &ldquo;Bleeding Kansas,&rdquo; Potter says &ldquo;a majority of the inhabitants apparently did not care very much one way or the other about slavery...an overwhelming proportion of the settlers were far more concerned about land titles than they were about any other public question.&rdquo;   (202)  This is especially interesting to me right now, as I seem to be spending a lot of my time wondering what the regular people out in the countryside actually thought about all the &ldquo;historic events&rdquo; I&rsquo;m reading about in all these books.  


...Polk didn&rsquo;t want to sign, but was pressured by his knowledge that the war, which was &ldquo;highly unpopular throughout a large part of the country,&rdquo; had to end. ...  A few pages later, he suggests that the Missouri Compromise allowed slavery to take center stage, arguing that &ldquo;the issue structured and polarized many random, unoriented points of conflict on which sectional interest diverged.&rdquo;   (43)  For the most part, Potter bypasses these voices and issues on the periphery of the main political story, but it&rsquo;s interesting to speculate how they might be motivating some of the otherwise inexplicable decisions of the central players.    For example, &ldquo;the Whigs passed over their party leader, Henry Clay, and nominated Zachary Taylor...a Louisiana planter who owned more than a hundred slaves but whose nomination had been engineered in part by two prominent anti-slavery Whigs from New York--Thurlow Weed and William H. ...  How much of that feeling was still strong in Weed and Seward&rsquo;s constituency, and how did influences from home play on the national politics practiced by Congressmen, Senators, and Presidential candidates?  


Potter&rsquo;s description of the 1848 election returns also suggests I should look at this more closely, especially when I get around to studying third parties.    &ldquo;The results of Van Buren&rsquo;s candidacy,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;were especially confusing, for he carried enough normally Democratic votes in New York to throw the state to Taylor, but enough normally Whig districts in Ohio to throw the state to Cass.  ...  His vote was large enough to make all northern Democrats respectful of the Free Soilers, but small enough to discourage his followers from continuing their third-party organization, so that in 1852 most of them returned to the Democratic ranks.&rdquo; ...  Fr&eacute;mont, a man who had never been in a Know-Nothing lodge and whose marriage to the daughter of Senator Benton had been performed by a Catholic priest.&rdquo;   Stories like this, which Potter calls one of the most &ldquo;obscure and neglected aspects of American political history,&rdquo; just seem to be screaming for someone to take a closer look at them. 

...&ldquo;Was the underground railroad,&rdquo; he wonders, &ldquo;really a large-scale organization, actually operating to facilitate the mass escape of fugitive slaves, or was it not rather a gigantic propaganda device, more significant psychologically than as an institution?&rdquo;  ...  But I am fascinated by Potter&rsquo;s repeated arguments that &ldquo;It is also realistic to recognize that for many people there were other public issues more important than slavery.&rdquo;   (145)  Even if we ultimately condemn these people a little bit for their limited, parochial outlook; if that&rsquo;s what a large portion of the population were thinking, it&rsquo;s important for us to know it.    One of our difficulties understanding Free Soilers and nativists seems to be that it&rsquo;s hard to imagine the frustration of people in upstate New York and the (old) West, who had just spent a generation or two carving out farms and towns from the forest; and just when things are settling down for them, change begins to accelerate.    A rising tide of immigration and the extension of plantation slavery and southern social organization into the territories threatens to overturn the new society they&rsquo;ve just worked so hard to build.    Why is it a moral failure if some of them are more concerned about the challenges to their neighborhoods and families, than about the plight of faraway strangers or about an abstract ethical/political argument?


...(229)  He attributes part of its disappearance after the 1848 election to the fact that &ldquo;43 percent of the Free Soil vote had been concentrated in the Empire State,&rdquo; and &ldquo;In 1849, John Van Buren led most of his father&rsquo;s Barnburner followers back into the Democratic fold.&rdquo;   (228)  In Ohio, where Potter says the Free Soil party &ldquo;collapsed,&rdquo; the election resulted in &ldquo;giving the state&rsquo;s Senate seats to Chase and Wade, two of the most pronounced anti-slavery men in public life.&rdquo; 

...English immigrants, he says &ldquo;went Whig by a ratio of 75:25,&rdquo; while by 1844 (according to Benson) &ldquo;the Catholic Irish of New York were Democratic by a ratio of 95 to 5......  &ldquo;American historians have been slow to recognize the relation between Know-Nothingism and Republicanism in 1854,&rdquo; he says, partly because &ldquo;it has been psychologically difficult, because of their predominantly liberal orientation, for them to cope with the fact that anti-slavery, which they tend to idealize, and nativism, which they tend to scorn, should have operated in partnership.&rdquo;  

...He briefly mentions Asa Whitney, who in 1844 proposed to build a railroad from Milwaukee to the Pacific if the government would sell him a &ldquo;strip of land sixty miles wide...for sixteen cents an acre.&rdquo;   (146)  Potter says Whitney&rsquo;s scheme created three &ldquo;articles of faith&rdquo; for railway enthusiasts: &ldquo;There must be a railroad to the Pacific; it must be financed by grants of public lands along the route; and it must be built by private interests which received these grants.&rdquo;   I don&rsquo;t know the whole story (yet), but I don&rsquo;t see the inevitability of private ownership, trusts, and the Credit Mobilier in Potter&rsquo;s description of Whitney&rsquo;s proposal.    Maybe Potter was so focused on the central, political story that he failed to apply the same skepticism to events on the periphery.


Another really interesting moment (and the one that convinced me to buy the book, so I can read it again more closely when I&rsquo;m done with the PhD) was &ldquo;On the evening before Washington&rsquo;s birthday, George N.   Sanders, the American consul in London, held a dinner party at which the guests included seven reolutionists--Massini, Garibaldi, and Orsini of Italy, Kossuth of Hungary, Arnold Ruge of Germany, Ledru-Rollin of France, Alexander Herzen of Russia--and [Minster to the UK] James Buchanan of Pennsylvania.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Is it World or Environmental History?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-10-08T15:19:02-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b379527ebbe49d60fe9c1c0402e4b570-93.html#unique-entry-id-93</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b379527ebbe49d60fe9c1c0402e4b570-93.html#unique-entry-id-93</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Richards


The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World


...The question my advisor asked me, but that we didn&rsquo;t really resolve was, do these two books (Radkau & Richards) work as introductory texts to global environmental history?    If I was teaching an undergraduate class in Global Environmental History, would I use them?    Interesting question, since I spent a couple of weeks at the beginning of this semester sitting in on just such a class, at Mount Holyoke College, for which these two books, along with Marks&rsquo; Origins of the Modern World and Cronon&rsquo;s Nature&rsquo;s Metropolis, were the assigned texts.    I haven&rsquo;t read Marks yet, but unlike Radkau & Richards, Cronon is not a global history, it&rsquo;s a story of change in one place, Chicago.  


The Unending Frontier, like Nature and Power, doesn&rsquo;t argue a particular thesis, as even Jared Diamond&rsquo;s popular book, Collapse, does about deforestation leading to erosion in Collapse.    Both Richards and Radkau are trying to present a more general picture of change, and weave environmental change into World History.    I think Radkau organizes his examples more effectively than Richards around themes, like the hydraulic society, that he finds in many times and places.    In some of Richards&rsquo; long descriptions of Chinese or Russian political history, I lose track of the idea that this is environmental history.    But I can see how he&rsquo;d feel he needed to set the stage pretty extensively, writing for an American audience that knows virtually nothing about these histories (I sure don&rsquo;t!).    The question might be, aren&rsquo;t there already some good world histories we could read (and assign our students), that might be refocused with a very pointed &ldquo;Environmental Supplement to World History?&rdquo;    As it is, it feels like I&rsquo;m spending a lot of time, in Richards, waiting through the world history set-up for the environmental history punchline. 


I think the complication in Radkau is that it&rsquo;s such a personal journey for the author.    But that&rsquo;s its strength as well as its weakness, at least for me.    I&rsquo;m the guy who&rsquo;s always asking for social history &ldquo;with the people in it.&rdquo;    Seems like (didn&rsquo;t Cronon say something about this in one of his articles?)   some enviro writers want to leave the people out, because they&rsquo;re &ldquo;the problem.&rdquo;    But if &ldquo;the fall&rdquo; is first contact with nature, we have nowhere to go but down.    Radkau actually acknowledges the emperor&rsquo;s new clothes at one point, when he says &ldquo;there is good reason to be uncomfortable with a philosophy that regards humanity as the &lsquo;cancer of the earth,&rsquo; a philosophy that should make one wish for nine-tenths of humanity to disappear from the planet.&rdquo;   (Radkau, 4)  I found the struggle in Radkau&rsquo;s book more satisfying than the lack of human connection in Richards&rsquo;, where I couldn&rsquo;t tell, for example, whether the Japanese peasants were happy, enlightened (or at least cooperative) ecologists or malnourished, frightened vassals of the local samurai chieftain.    Female infanticide might deserve more of a comment than &ldquo;despite its unpleasantness...an effective way to limit children.&rdquo;   (Richards, 181) 


But the short answer is, I would definitely use parts of both these books with environmental history undergrads.    In fact, I&rsquo;d probably use a chunk of &ldquo;The Columbian Exchange&rdquo; chapter at the beginning of the Americas section in my &ldquo;US History - Colonial to Reconstruction&rdquo; class.    Actually, now that I think of it, the parts of Richards&rsquo; book that deal with history I already know are the most interesting to me.    Maybe I&rsquo;m missing what makes his story different from other histories of South Africa or Mughal India, because I know nothing about them.    It might be the sense of the unfamiliar that makes this environmental history work.    The feeling of, &ldquo;why didn&rsquo;t I know that?&rdquo;   about the history we think we already know...
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Culture vs. Society in the Gilded Age</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-30T21:49:00-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c71d7223cf9f315e4b6d73aa227e14de-92.html#unique-entry-id-92</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c71d7223cf9f315e4b6d73aa227e14de-92.html#unique-entry-id-92</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Alan Trachtenberg


The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age


1982


About equal parts polemic and accessible undergraduate summary of the Gilded Age.    Trachtenberg begins with Charles Francis Adams Jr.&rsquo;s observation that &ldquo;We have no word to express government by monied corporations.&rdquo;   (3)  His claim is that the &ldquo;deepest changes&rdquo; and the &ldquo;deepest resistances&rdquo; to &ldquo;these decades of swift and thorough industrialization and urbanization lay at the level of culture, difficult for contemporaries to recognize, and baffling for historians.&rdquo;   (7) The book is organized thematically, as a &ldquo;dialectic between mind and world, culture and society.&rdquo;   (8) Like other &ldquo;cultural&rdquo; books on my reading list (The Country and the City, Virgin Land, The Machine in the Garden),  Trachtenberg&rsquo;s account left me wondering exactly who he was talking about.    Along the way he mentions a wide variety of titles that are probably some of the key windows into the contemporary culture.   I found myself wanting to know just how popular they were.    Who read these books, and what other books were they reading at the same time (or instead of these)?  


Texts to check out:


Alger, Ragged Dick, 1867


Emerson, &ldquo;The American Scholar,&rdquo; 1867


Twain, Roughing It, 1871


Gilpin, The Mission of the North American People, 1873


George, Progress and Poverty, 1883


Beard, American Nervousness, 1884


Bellamy, Looking Backward, 1888


Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, 1899


Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 1889


Melville, Billy Budd, 1891


Turner, &ldquo;The Significance of the Frontier&rdquo; 1893


Wyckoff, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality: The West, 1899


Wister, The Virginian, 1902


Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 1911


So I thought it might be a good idea at some point to find a list of American bestsellers, by year, for the entire nineteenth century -- if such a thing exists.    I was also reminded -- I&rsquo;m not completely sure why -- to look again at the Arts and Crafts movement, as a cultural response to this modernity, back towards an older (or forward towards a new) simpler agrarianism.    Should probably look at Lovett again sometime soon.  


 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Evildoers who hate our freedoms</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-29T21:44:36-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/23a161b99f79cf0bf980634b68eb1225-91.html#unique-entry-id-91</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/23a161b99f79cf0bf980634b68eb1225-91.html#unique-entry-id-91</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Rauchway&rsquo;s main point is that, contrary to the contemporaries and historians who have tried to portray him as a madman, Leon Czolgosz was rational.    &ldquo;He said plainly that he shot the President of the United States because he hated the politics of state-supported capitalism that the President and his party represented,&rdquo; Rauchway says, &ldquo;and in so doing he echoes hosts of critics in the United States and around the world.&rdquo;    Since Rauchway probably wrote this in the wake of 9/11, there are immediate, obvious connections to a present in which much of the world (and not just Islamic fundamentalists) are more or less antagonistic to the imperial corporate state they believe America has become.    But Rauchway also makes some subtle and interesting points about the arguments the assassination precipitated regarding environmental influences on behavior, threats to social order, and the role of the state in mitigating the harshest effects of the free market economy, to prevent the growth of a permanent, revolutionary underclass.    Theodore Roosevelt emerges from the obscurity of the Vice Presidency, to take a central place in all these discussions.    In contrast to standard depictions of the cowboy President, Rauchway presents a &ldquo;canny and manipulative Roosevelt...who made his career by controlling stories.&rdquo;  (xiii)  Roosevelt uses his famous patriotism and temper to enact a Progressive agenda remarkably like the platform of his party&rsquo;s populist opponents.    Without coming right out and saying it, Rauchway leads us toward a suspicion that this wasn&rsquo;t entirely accidental.


In spite of the fact that 1893 saw the beginning of the worst depression until the Great one, William Jennings Bryan failed to beat William McKinley in 1896.    McKinley presided over the Spanish-American War, claiming that God told him to &ldquo;take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.&rdquo; ...  In neither case would Bryan have won, even if he had received all the votes that went to minor party candidates (Prohibition, Social-Democratic, Populist, Socialist Labor, National Prohibition).  

...He became governor of New York on the basis of his family ties and well-documented war record as leader of the Rough Riders.    Rauchway says that, although he remained a loyal Republican, Roosevelt &ldquo;did not like the smell of the men behind&rdquo; McKinley, especially Mark Hanna.  ...  &ldquo;I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wold man,&rdquo; Hanna complained on McKinley&rsquo;s funeral train.  ...  But even more interestingly, Rauchway says that after meeting privately with Roosevelt during the same funeral trip, Hanna returned to his companion, &ldquo;smiling broadly.  ...  Hanna told his friend, leaving us to wonder what the two had discussed that had changed Hanna&rsquo;s mind about the new President.   (38)  Maybe a clue is contained in Rauchway&rsquo;s argument that &ldquo;Roosevelt and McKinley saw the same flood tide of revolution rising in the land; they differed only insofar as McKinley wanted to dam it up, while Roosevelt wanted to ride it.&rdquo;   (35)  On the other hand, Roosevelt said of &ldquo;the negro,&rdquo; and by implication &ldquo;all the plaintive portions of the American population,&rdquo;   


Inasmuch as he is here and can neither be killed nor driven away, the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have. 

...The &ldquo;no more&rdquo; part sounds like old-fashioned free labor; but the &ldquo;no less&rdquo; is a little trickier.  ...  Or is he subtly suggesting that there&rsquo;s something a person &ldquo;shows himself worthy to have&rdquo; simply by existing?   And what about that &ldquo;more&rdquo; part: is it possible for a person to have more than he is worthy of, and if so, what should society do about it?    Rachway later quotes Roosevelt saying &ldquo;Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.&rdquo;   (173)  Another statement that can be taken a number of ways -- but at least it acknowledges the fact that the corporate charter is a social contract.    Is Rauchway suggesting that Roosevelt used his excessive, testosterone-driven rhetoric as a cover for a really radical agenda?    At this point I know too little about Roosevelt to form an opinion -- but I definitely want to learn more!  


There are a lot of interesting details in the text about &ldquo;Fred Nieman&rdquo; Czolgosz&rsquo;s family, his statements at the trial and afterwards, and the psychologists and commentators who argued his sanity so publicly.  ...  Washington says that 125,000 people &ldquo;have been engaged in this anarchy of lynching&rdquo; 2,516 victims in the previous sixteen years.  ...  (77) And there&rsquo;s a technology history moment, when Herman Hollerith remembers &ldquo;seeing a railway conductor in the West produce what was known as a &lsquo;punch photograph&rsquo; -- using his pocket hole-punch, the conductor took a ticket and punched out a pattern indicating the hair color, height, skin color, and other defining features of a passenger.&rdquo;  

...Talking about Murdering McKinley with my reading partner, who had just finished Woodward&rsquo;s Strange Career of Jim Crow, we were struck by the strange similarity between Southern segregation and Roosevelt&rsquo;s fear that &ldquo;Harvard and Yale graduates&rdquo; were failing to procreate enough to prevent &ldquo;rapid race suicide.&rdquo;   (143)  His anxiety over anglo America, and his &ldquo;strenuous life&rdquo; paternalism toward imperial targets, are difficult to reconcile with the portrayal Rauchway seems to be advancing of Roosevelt.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Nature and Power</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-26T14:38:42-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6d06e487c7114f6cb329f2b362fd6633-90.html#unique-entry-id-90</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6d06e487c7114f6cb329f2b362fd6633-90.html#unique-entry-id-90</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Joachim Radkau says he was painfully aware of the pitfalls faced by authors of big histories when he chose to write a global history of the environment.    But he believed several themes including European exceptionalism, the dialog between the ideals of wilderness and sustainability, the effects of state, local, and individual control on environmental engagement, regulation of sexuality and xenophobia deserved greater attention.    His decision to translate Nature and Power into English was motivated by these issues, and also by a belief that &ldquo;Old World&rdquo; experience was key to 21st century environmentalism.    American textbooks already forget Chernobyl, Radkau says, and &ldquo;continental Europeans have rarely lived with the illusion of unlimited resources.&rdquo; (xv, xvi)  The result is a book that surveys several fascinating ways that people have interacted with their environments, acknowledges the particularity and contingency inherent in these accounts, and tries to draw some tentative conclusions and lessons for the future from them.  


...In his 2002 Preface to the German edition, Radkau wonders what the &ldquo;ecological and economic disaster of the communist bloc mean for that kind of environmental history whose basic assumptions would have led one to assume that a socialist state-run economy would be able to undo the environmental damage caused by the private profit motive?&rdquo;   (xi)  Radkau examines several ancient and modern societies, including Maoist China and Nazi Germany, and ultimately concludes that &ldquo;effective environmental protection requires&rdquo; neither strict laissez faire capitalism nor top-down, totalitarian central planning, but rather &ldquo;a spirited civil society, the courage of one&rsquo;s convictions, citizen initiatives, and a critical public.&rdquo;   (308)  Environmentalists looking to the past for a definitive answer on how to move forward may be frustrated, he says, but history seems to suggest that environmental failure or success has little direct connection to the political and economic forms a society chooses.    While &ldquo;in the end, the apparatus of the state remains the only - at least potential - counterweight to the omnipotence of private capital interests,&rdquo; Radkau admits that even though its environmental policy was less totalitarian than its social theory, national socialism &ldquo;wrecked&rdquo; any chance for idealistic Hegelians to believe &ldquo;that the state by its very nature embodies the common good and higher reason above all human selfishness.&rdquo; 

...Radkau dips one foot into the ecological experience of several ancient cultures, including some like Egypt whose history extends to the present.    But he keeps the other foot firmly in the present, both in his analysis of ancient social/environmental interactions as they may relate to present problems, and in his narrative of the history of modern environmentalism (and the somewhat parallel historiography of environmental history).      Part of the problem, of course, is that major environmental changes are happening in the present, and environmental awareness has changed dramatically in the immediate past.  

...Ancient public forest and water projects were not motivated solely to consolidate the elite&rsquo;s power, Radkau says, but &ldquo;ecological necessities often go hand in hand with opportunities for the exercise of power.&rdquo; ...  (307)  In the end, Radkau agrees with Max Weber that &ldquo;many historical experiences suggest that powerful historical movements require both a solid foundation of material interests and a vision that transcends daily life, that inspires and arouses passionate emotions.  

...(258)  &ldquo;The potato and coitus interruptus are key innovations of the eighteenth century that are environmentally relevant,&rdquo; Radkau says, in a memorable line that suggests a useful widening of the traditional definition of environment.   (6)  When the &ldquo;Bhutanese ecotopia&rdquo; is shown to be sustainable only through the expulsion of 100,000 Nepalese refugees along the Indian border, population control in democratic societies becomes an issue.   (285-6) Not only is &ldquo;Bhutan ecology...intertwined with the preservation of the political system,&rdquo; but so is the country&rsquo;s culture and existence, as shown by &ldquo;the fate of neighboring Sikkim, which lost its independence when Nepalese immigrants had grown into the majority of the population.&rdquo;   If environmental disasters force large-scale migrations in the future, what does Radkau&rsquo;s skepticism of &ldquo;Bhutanese exceptionalism&rdquo; suggest about the tension between local identity and global governance?  


...&ldquo;After the collapse of socialism,&rdquo; Radkau says, &ldquo;environmentalism is left as the only ideological alternative to the absolute hegemony of the quest for private profit and consumption.&rdquo;   (299)  Even if we agree that environmentalism&rsquo;s role is to take on Neo-liberal economics, Radkau seems to ignore the existence of other directions from which to critique capitalism, and may assume a unity of outlook and purpose on the part of the &ldquo;bad guys&rdquo; that is not demonstrated by his historical examples.    This is the point where Nature and Power&rsquo;s tension between the historical and the environmental seems to reach a breaking point.    Although Radkau argues that &ldquo;Not in every situation are the nature protectors the &lsquo;good guys&rsquo; and their adversaries the &lsquo;bad guys&rsquo;,&rdquo; (especially in the third world where colonialism and tourism motivates approaches that may exclude locals from the environment altogether); the real issue is that in history, unlike environmental politics, there aren&rsquo;t any good guys or bad guys: there are just a bunch of guys [apologies to The Zero Effect ]. ...  Their awareness, their motivations, and their goals may have had a vaguely, more-or-less environmental element; but their attention was almost always dominated by other considerations.   


...Throughout Nature and Power, Radkau provides valuable glimpses into distant cultures, from the unfamiliar angle of their relationship to their environments.    These perspectives complicate the reader&rsquo;s understanding of these cultures, and widen the scope of many environmental issues we may have believed were recent.  ...  Radkau mentions, for instance, John Stuart Mill&rsquo;s &ldquo;belief that the discomfort every sensitive person felt about a world in which every scrap of land was cultivated&rdquo; suggests an instinctive realization by Englishmen that &ldquo;it was dangerous to live without reserves.&rdquo;   (324) The actual context of Mill&rsquo;s statement (which, based on the source he cites, Radkau may have been unaware of), however, was a political argument over compulsory cultivation of thousands of acres of &ldquo;waste&rdquo; land held by aristocrats as game reserves.    Mill was (as usual) a middle of the road land reformer, facing pressure from a much more radical &ldquo;Land and Labour League&rdquo; led by working people and their champions.  ...  In another case, though, Radkau persuasively argues against monocausal explanations like Jared Diamond&rsquo;s Collapse, on the basis of data as well as interpretation.    According to pollen evidence, Radkau says, Easter Island was &ldquo;nearly treeless&rdquo; for a millennium before the Dutch discovered &ldquo;a flourishing agriculture with a rich variety of fruit&rdquo; in 1722.    Far from eco-suicide, the culture&rsquo;s destruction was &ldquo;completed in 1862 when the majority of the population was dragged off by Peruvian slave traders and the island was transformed into a large sheep ranch.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The long reconstruction</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-14T16:10:33-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1821f09e9f8da22b6f04ee7504a09ac4-89.html#unique-entry-id-89</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1821f09e9f8da22b6f04ee7504a09ac4-89.html#unique-entry-id-89</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[This is a continuation and extension of Professor Richardson&rsquo;s argument that political and social change in the middle of the 19th century was driven by conflict over ideas about individuals and their proper relationship with government.  ...  (2) Today, we hear &ldquo;antigovernment rhetoric from the South and western plains, regions that receive far more in federal aid than they pay in taxes.&rdquo;   (3)  Richardson sees in this a continuous, developing tradition of defining the middle class as &ldquo;true Americans&rdquo; and privileging them alone with access to government intervention; combined with a national myth that &ldquo;idealized the rural West as the opposite of the urban Northeast.&rdquo; 

...One of the most interesting elements of Richardson&rsquo;s argument in West From Appomattox is that she finds the origins of this middle class ideology in both the North and the South.    From the Union, she draws on a tradition of &ldquo;Lockean individuals&rdquo; and &ldquo;republican government based on the votes of economically independent&rdquo; property owners. ...  As a result, Richardson concludes, &ldquo;From the North, Americans had taken the idea of equal opportunity; from the South, they had taken the idea that not all men could rise.    From the racial and industrial troubles of the 1870s, they had taken the idea that those unable to rise and those at the top of society must not be permitted to harness the government to their own interests...  From the strikes and the business consolidation of the 1880s, they had taken the belief that the federal government must be used to protect American individualism.&rdquo;   (338)  While they claimed to be protecting the rights of individuals, &ldquo;mainstream Americans had come to believe that many would fail, that this was their own fault, and that they should be isolated from power before they destroyed society.&rdquo; ...  The big, difficult-to-explain problem in this story is the middle class&rsquo;s apparent inability to recognize the insane hypocrisy of their position.


...Richardson carefully balances the middle against both the bottom and the top as she analyzes this ideology, but were the results really balanced on the ground?    How significant was the middle class&rsquo;s attack on trusts and the very rich, compared to its abandonment of southern blacks, condemnation of striking workers, and denunciation of rural Populists?    On the one hand, a few millionaires had to reorganize the way they controlled their industrial empires; while on the other, black men were lynched, workers were shot and forced to accept starvation wages and absurd working conditions, and farmers were pushed to the political margins, where they found it impossible to organize effectively against rapidly consolidating markets and the railroads.  ...  Or is it possible to see them as patsies for the elite, making occasional rhetorical forays against the rich but really, very effectively, taking the poor out of the social equation?  


...In addition to the overwhelmingly negative results of this middle class ideology on the class below them, which I think suggest that the middle class were always (perhaps unwittingly) on the side of the rich, there&rsquo;s also the way these traditions manifest themselves today.    First, as Richardson says, in the anti-big-government rhetoric of Southern and Western red states, which regularly receive much more from government than they pay to it.  

...Much of the&nbsp;"federal money" going back into western states probably doesn't easily trickle down to the rural main street economy (even if airbases and ICBM silos aren't included). &nbsp;  So the average westerner paying his federal taxes could easily (and honestly) feel he was financing lazy eastern welfare moms. &nbsp;  Even if he doesn't know whether federal or state taxes are paying their benefits, he's pretty sure they aren't paying their way like he is. ...  While urbanites are unhappy that sparsely populated states still have their two Senators, Joe-the-rancher in Wyoming (pop. 544,270) hears about "welfare mothers" in Massachusetts (pop. 6,593,587), and goes ballistic. &nbsp;

...But even more suspicious, in my opinion, is the overwhelming tendency of middle class spokespeople to attack &ldquo;special interests,&rdquo; even when the majority of government intervention (and economic gain) is clearly directed elsewhere.  ...  The latest news, which they were talking about, was Obama&rsquo;s offer of $50 billion in what they called &ldquo;aid to the Unions.&rdquo;    Michele Malkin has called the infrastructure program they referred to, &ldquo;the Mother of All Big Dig Boondoggles,&rdquo; and this sentiment or something like it seemed to be present in their comments.    &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t these Union guys realize,&rdquo; one of the Dads asked, &ldquo;that Obama&rsquo;s just giving them back their own money?&rdquo;  


...&ldquo;But even so, isn&rsquo;t that better than giving it to Goldman Sachs and AIG?&rdquo;  


...But isn&rsquo;t it a little strange, how much easier it is to find sensible, working people bashing Unions and small social programs and calling for tax relief, while nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money is still pretty much unaccounted for, in the hands of some of America&rsquo;s biggest and richest corporations?    Is this because it&rsquo;s easier to visualize a &ldquo;Union guy&rdquo; than a credit-default-swap arbitrageur?    A &ldquo;Union guy,&rdquo; after all, is almost the same as the rest of us (oh, wait, I&rsquo;m in the UAW!) -- except that he&rsquo;s one of those &ldquo;special interests&rdquo; that are always trying to get something for nothing from the government.    Is it because these guys are being practical and choosing their battles -- and they&rsquo;ve concluded that the fight against the big corporations is hopeless?  ...  Underneath it all, isn&rsquo;t the effect of all this rhetoric that it divides and confuses, and thus conquers, the people who should be standing together against the real special interests, like Goldman Sachs and AIG?   
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Rochester</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-11T17:07:13-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e9cd96e5f2592f04e743659db236e9ba-88.html#unique-entry-id-88</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e9cd96e5f2592f04e743659db236e9ba-88.html#unique-entry-id-88</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A Shopkeeper&rsquo;s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837


...Johnson says this is because Rochester was the fastest-growing city in the US at this time, one of the most industrialized (especially per capita), and the one in which, for various political reasons, &ldquo;proto-industrialists&rdquo; decided that &ldquo;their most favored means of combatting drunkenness, spontaneous holidays, and inattention to work were the temperance society, the Sunday school, and the revival.&rdquo;   (6)  This is especially interesting to me, because I tend to want to look past the purely theological reasons for religious revivals and enthusiasm in general (I wonder how future -- or even present -- non-christian cultures will view the millions of hours and thousands of pages American historians&lsquo; have devoted to the intricate particulars of denominational controversy?    Even someone as supposedly mainstream as Sellars, with his antinomian heretics...but I digress.), to wonder what motivates -- and who benefits.    So Johnson&rsquo;s claim that &ldquo;free labor could generate a well-regulated, orderly, just, and happy society,&rdquo; as long as it was supported by revivalist moralism and the social controls it encouraged.  

...This is a short book, but Johnson covers a lot of ground in it.    I&rsquo;m not entirely convinced by his description of &ldquo;America in 1830,&rdquo; as a &ldquo;society in which normative and institutional restraints of every kind had fallen apart,&rdquo; but I&rsquo;m willing to believe that a particular group of people saw things this way and then found themselves in a position to do something about it.   (9)  Johnson says most historians of religion give some credence to the idea that revivals are &ldquo;attempts of bypassed elites to reestablish their dominance,&rdquo; but he buys into the idea popularized by Tocqueville that kin networks were disrupted, authority had collapsed at every level, and &ldquo;restraints of every kind were swept away by the market, by migration and personal ambition, and by the universal acceptance of democratic ideas.&rdquo;     


Regardless of whether we call this change barbarism or liberty, Rochester was a place where it flourished.    The &ldquo;first of the inland cities created after 1815,&rdquo; Rochester had been &ldquo;unbroken wilderness&rdquo; at the beginning of the War of 1812.    &ldquo;By 1830 the forest had given way to a city of 10,000.&rdquo;   (13)  Because it was an inland city, connecting farmers with remote markets via the Erie Canal, &ldquo;the wealthiest men in Rochester were merchants, millers, and manufacturers engaged directly in an agricultural economy.&rdquo;   (16)  This setting is the part of the story that interests me, more than the details of church membership and revival participation.    Rochester &ldquo;exported 26,000 barrels [of Genesee flour] in 1818, a good pre-canal year.    Ten years later the figure stood at 200,000, and by the close of the 1830s...a half-million barrels of flour annually.&rdquo;    (18)  Because they dealt extensively with suppliers and customers in the countryside, Rochester entrepreneurs &ldquo;kept substantial investments in the villages [and] relied on rural relatives and friends for capital and business information.&rdquo;   (20)  Kin networks and long-term friendships determined the ways investment funds and marketable products flowed in this system.    &ldquo;Individual fortunes were meshed with social networks...and entrepreneurial behavior was typified by caution and cooperation, and not by ungoverned individual ambition.    The result,&rdquo; Johnson says, &ldquo;was a remarkably orderly and closed community of entrepreneurs.&rdquo; 

...Rochester&rsquo;s &ldquo;pattern of family partnerships and family ties extending into the hinterland&rdquo; lasted beyond its early days.    As the city grew, &ldquo;participation in the boom-town business world&rdquo; led to &ldquo;not a collapse of kinship but the strengthening of old family loyalties and the invention of new ones.&rdquo;   (25)  Because most of the residents were new arrivals, &ldquo;agreements between brothers-in-law&rdquo; outnumbered father-son or uncle-nephew partnerships.  ...  (26)  The result, Johnson says, was &ldquo;the invention of new loyalties between distant kin and to a broadening of the concept of family.&rdquo;  

...In contrast to this tightly-knit world of extended, kinship-based business connections, in which &ldquo;ungoverned ambition was a fatal liability,&rdquo; Johnson describes a rapidly growing &ldquo;unstable urban population.&rdquo; ...  By 1826, &ldquo;an editor estimated that 120 persons left Rochester every day, while 130 more arrived to take their places.&rdquo;   (37)  If this number is anywhere near correct, the number of people coming and going dwarfed the city&rsquo;s official population of 10-15,000.    The social instability caused by  population movement and new employment relations was exacerbated by elite family jealousies that led to political battles.    The story of the Anti-Masonic party and Thurlow Weed is a dramatic suggestion that mainstream national politics can spring from bizarre and extremely local events.    I&rsquo;m not sure that it supports Johnson&rsquo;s argument that the Rochester revival is a model of broader social change, but there&rsquo;s always tension between the contingent and the representative in histories like this.  ...  But I wonder whether others interested in the social and economic conditions that form the story&rsquo;s setting pass this book by, because they don&rsquo;t want to read another religious history.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Death of Reconstruction</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-08T15:01:42-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/05ef9ad7881976267c4b29231c5f0aca-87.html#unique-entry-id-87</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/05ef9ad7881976267c4b29231c5f0aca-87.html#unique-entry-id-87</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901


...Richardson expands on the racism/politics argument of Foner and others, saying that Northerners, &ldquo;seeing ex-slaves as abstract figures in a free labor society...ignored the devastating effects of poverty, racism, and economic dislocation in the postwar black experience.&rdquo;   (241)  Moderate Republicans couldn&rsquo;t understand why blacks were not satisfied with the &ldquo;free labor&rdquo; social ideology that whites had associated with abolition from the earliest, pre-war, Free Soil days.    They completely missed the point, ironically demonstrated by affluent blacks, that many more ex-slaves might have embraced this ideology, if only they had been allowed to actually participate.    But when most &ldquo;Southern African-Americans could not overcome the overwhelming obstacles in their path to economic security,&rdquo; and asked the government to intervene on their behalf, &ldquo;Northerners saw this as a rejection of free labor ideals, accused them of being deficient workers, and willingly read them out of American society.&rdquo;  


The story is really punctuated for me by two phenomena: the black exodus of 1879 and the wholesale lynching of black men in the late 1880s and 1890s.    I&rsquo;ll probably try to dig deeper into both of these events, as I read on.    The Exodusters seem to answer an obvious question I repeatedly had while reading Foner: was it possible to leave the South?    And if so, wouldn&rsquo;t that have been my response both to having been enslaved there, and then to the Black Codes, the Klan, etc.?    Seems like that would have been the first thing to do, if there were any places that were even remotely welcoming.    And on the lynching side, I think that could have used a little more graphic coverage.    I think Professor Richardson said something once in a class about being asked to tone that down when the book was in production -- but I think it should have been starker and maybe a little less comfortable for the reader, to really make the point that Northern Republicans who were outraged about the &ldquo;spoils system&rdquo; of political appointments, were somehow able to ignore vigilante murders of lower-class black men (and, in 1891, of 11 Italian Americans).    The fact that affluent blacks also excused this behavior is interesting, but I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s the whole story.    The race issue might even hide a more general shift in the Republican party, as the middle class turned its back on workers of all types.    This is mentioned briefly in the context of the Homestead and Pullman strikes, and President Hays&rsquo;s redeployment of the newly professionalized national guard against workers (instead of recalcitrant Southerners).    But I think it could be an even bigger point, for me.  ...  It&rsquo;s interesting that William Graham Sumner&rsquo;s 1875 social-Darwinist tract pretty much marked the end of the Republicans&rsquo; insistence on economic and social harmony.    Sumner &ldquo;reminded readers that human history was &lsquo;one long story of attempts by certain persons and classes to obtain control of the power of the State, so as to win earthly gratifications at the expense of others.&rsquo;&rdquo; 

...It&rsquo;s also interesting that this &ldquo;social, economic, and political suppression...coincided with the birth of the Progressive movement, which demanded that the American government redress the excesses of the nation&rsquo;s new industrial society,&rdquo; (244) but also established the authority of elite, urban, middle class professionals to identify society&rsquo;s problems and manage the remediation.    The &ldquo;logical connection between disenfranchisement and the Progressive movement&rdquo; was not only the ability to &ldquo;ameliorate the abuses of the industrialism without fearing the triumph of socialism,&rdquo; but also to harness a huge, new government machine to the needs of the &ldquo;better classes&rdquo; rather than the lower.    They demonized the people they couldn&rsquo;t or wouldn&rsquo;t help, took control of activist government, and put it to work for themselves.


...I suspect that a lot of the time, high-sounding rhetoric is a cover for motives that people would prefer to keep hidden.    But that doesn&rsquo;t mean some of these politicians didn&rsquo;t believe these ideals they knew moved the masses, at least some of the time.    The question, in Death of Reconstruction, is what was the process that took ideals and made them into party slogans?    Who was pulling the strings in the Republican party, how did that change over time, and what were the consequences for workers (black and white) and the country at large?    And how did some of these free soil, free labor ideals manage to migrate to the other side, and become the slogans of the other party just a few decades later?    I need to go back through this again, because it seems like elements of these competing ideas (blacks as &ldquo;good&rdquo; free laborers or &ldquo;bad&rdquo; loafers, two types of workers, etc.) are present all along, and it&rsquo;s more a question of which one happens to be on top at any given time.    


The sources Richardson uses are primarily large, mainstream newspapers and Harper&rsquo;s Weekly, which a contemporary called &ldquo;one of the most powerful organs of popular opinion&rdquo; and sold over 100,000 copies a week.  (xii)  She says the perspective these sources offer mirrors that of contemporaries (especially rural ones), giving us &ldquo;the opportunity to stand in the shoes of a Reconstruction era American and observe distant events the same way a literate nineteenth-century Northerner would have.&rdquo;    This is an interesting claim, since I&rsquo;ve been wondering how widely distributed and uniform the news and opinion reaching rural Americans was?  ...  Did local readers feel more connection to distant events than they had a decade earlier?    
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reconstruction</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-08T14:29:30-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ccc3504b7194db60537bea7fbdf9c56d-86.html#unique-entry-id-86</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ccc3504b7194db60537bea7fbdf9c56d-86.html#unique-entry-id-86</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Foner&rsquo;s task in this book is to retell the story of Reconstruction, and take it back from a  &ldquo;fraternity of professional historians,&rdquo; who rewrote history, to the profession&rsquo;s &ldquo;everlasting shame.&rdquo; 

...When the Civil War ended, the white South genuinely accepted the reality of military defeat, stood ready to do justice to the emancipated slaves, and desired above all a quick reintegration into the fabric of national life.    Before his death, Abraham Lincoln had embarked on a course of sectional reconciliation, and during Presidential Reconstruction (1865-67) his successor, Andrew Johnson, attempted to carry out Lincoln&rsquo;s magnanimous policies.  ...  Motivated by an irrational hatred of Southern &lsquo;rebels&rsquo; and the desire to consolidate their party&rsquo;s national ascendency, the Radicals in 1867 swept aside the Southern governments Johnson had established and fastened black suffrage upon the defeated South.    There followed the sordid period of Congressional or Radical Reconstruction (1867-77), an era of corruption presided over by unscrupulous &lsquo;carpetbaggers&rsquo; from the North, unprincipled Southern white &lsquo;scalawags,&lsquo; and ignorant freedmen. 

...Frederick Douglass said of Lincoln, &ldquo;He treated me as a man...he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.&rdquo;   (6)  Foner (like the Dunning School, actually) avoids attacking Lincoln, but he does point out that the president&rsquo;s main motivation, even for emancipation, was winning the war and preserving the Union. 


Foner characterizes rural, upcountry southern whites as essentially pre-commercial, in the sense used by historians like Steven Hahn (whom he cites, 15).    Many of these rural regions &ldquo;like East Tennessee and western North Carolina...would embrace the Republican party after the Civil War and remain strongholds well into the twentieth century.&rdquo; ...  Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson told Congress in 1867 that during the war years &ldquo;the loyal states have accumulated more capital, have added more to their wealth, than during any previous seven years in the history of the country.&rdquo;  ...  40th Congress, 2d Session, 246, 18)  &ldquo;Many farmers, as agricultural machinery magnate Cyrus McCormick complained, took advantage of inflation to liquidate mortgages an other debts; they &lsquo;pursued [their creditors] in triumph and paid them without mercy.&rsquo;    McCormick, however, also knew how to take advantage of the war, borrowing large sums in order to hoard raw materials, and buying up farmland and urban real estate with as small a down payment as possible.    By 1865 he was Chicago&rsquo;s largest landlord.&rdquo; (cf Rasmussen, &ldquo;The Civil War: A Catalyst of Agricultural Revolution,&rdquo; Ruggles, &ldquo;Economic Basis of the Greenback Movement in Iowa and Wisconsin,&rdquo; Hutchinson, Cyrus Hall McCormick, 19)


&ldquo;Perhaps 1 million northerners,&rdquo; Foner says, &ldquo;ended up owning shares in a national debt that by war&rsquo;s end amounted to over $2 billion.    But most bonds were held by wealthy individuals and financial institutions, who reaped the windfall from interest paid in gold at a time when depreciating paper money was employed for all other transactions.&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;The minimum capital requirement of $50,000 and a proviso barring national banks from holding mortgages on land restricted these institutions to large cities.&rdquo;  

...Freedmen wished to take control of the conditions under which they labored, free themselves from subordination to white authority, and carve out the greatest measure of economic autonomy.&rdquo; ...  The freedmen were seen as setting themselves against not the former slaveholders (on whom people like Stevens saw they had a legitimate and possibly enforceable claim), but against white workers with whom they should have been standing in solidarity.  ...  Of course, as Foner says, it was not easy for the blacks to fit themselves into a free labor version of the cotton South, when &ldquo;regulators...are riding about whipping, maiming, and killing all negroes who do not obey the orders of their former masters, just as if slavery existed.&rdquo; 

...Stevens &ldquo;knew that a landed aristocracy and a landless class were alike dangerous in the republic, and by a single act of justice he would abolish both.&rdquo; (quoting Kelley&rsquo;s posthumous remarks, 40th Cong 3d session 133-4, 236)    


&ldquo;Appropriate out of the vast amount of the surplus lands of the wealthy, a comfortable home for the helpless and dependent black man whose arduous labor for the last two hundred years justly entitles him to such inheritance.&rdquo; (petition by J. 

...&ldquo;Once Grant had been nominated, Congress moved to consolidate the party&rsquo;s position for the fall campaign, readmitting seven Southern states to the Union.&rdquo;  

...Foner isn&rsquo;t too sympathetic to Elizabeth Cady Stanton&rsquo;s frustration, and criticizes her &ldquo;racist and elitist arguments for rejecting the enfranchisement of black males while women of culture and wealth remained excluded.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;Banker Jay Cooke, the &lsquo;financier of the Civil War&rsquo; and leading individual contributor to Grant&rsquo;s presidential campaign, not only had the Republican party in his debt, but a remarkable number of its leading officials as well.&rdquo; 

...& Henry Adams, Chapters of the Erie and other essays, 1-96: &ldquo;the Erie battle seemed most of all to demonstrate that &lsquo;our great corporations are fast emancipating themselves from the State, or rather subjecting the State to their own control.&rdquo; 

...After the failure of Jay Cooke&rsquo;s bank in 1873 caused a panic and depression, &ldquo;The Nation linked the Northern poor and Southern freedmen as members of a dangerous new &lsquo;proletariat&rsquo; as different &lsquo;from the population by which the Republic was founded, as if they belonged to a foreign nation.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (519)  But I wonder how much easier was it to demonize all these dangerous outsiders when most of these Northern poor were not anglos?


Foner says &ldquo;1877 marked a decisive retreat from the idea, born during the Civil War, of a powerful national state protecting the fundamental rights of American citizens.&rdquo; ...  The real point seems to be, that the government became much more focused in its activism, and increasingly only used it in the service of corporations and imperial expansionism.    As a result of the &ldquo;Great Strike&rdquo; of 1877, when state volunteer militias had &ldquo;proved unwilling or unable to suppress the uprising,&rdquo; Charles Eliot Norton demanded they be &ldquo;&lsquo;essentially remodeled&rsquo; so as to provide an &lsquo;efficient force for the protection of life and property and the maintenance of order.&lsquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Alcoholic America?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-03T13:16:52-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dc78fc399667ae2639ce43c68b062c42-85.html#unique-entry-id-85</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dc78fc399667ae2639ce43c68b062c42-85.html#unique-entry-id-85</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Rorabaugh writes &ldquo;the United States [between 1790-1830] underwent such profound social and psychological change that a new national character emerged,&rdquo; and that excessive drinking during this period was a symptom of this stress. (xi)  America&rsquo;s democratic ideals and cult of individual freedom made men (after a few initial remarks, he doesn&rsquo;t spend a lot of time talking about gender differences in consumption) desire independence and achievement, but Rorabaugh says they lacked the will or &ldquo;motivation&rdquo; to really work for their goals until the Second Great Awakening (yeah, so you can already see what my problem with this is going to be...).  ...  Rorabaugh claims there is &ldquo;little psychological difference between a drunkard&rsquo;s hallucinations and an Anti-Mason&rsquo;s hysteria.&rdquo;   (173)  &ldquo;America,&rdquo; Rorabough concludes, &ldquo;was left as a culture dominated by an ambivalence that could be transcended only through an anti-intellectual faith.&rdquo;  

...Rorabaugh introduces clergymen and temperance moralists in the first paragraph of the book; but in a study that purports to deal with hidden psychological causes, he never really addresses their motivations.   (5)  The data, especially on changing rates of per capita consumption, is sometimes startling.    Americans now drink more than 18 gallons of beer per capita!  ...  Similarly, I wonder about the distribution and change over time of early drinking patterns.    Rorabaugh says that by the 1820s &ldquo;half the adult males...were drinking two-thirds of all the distilled spirits.&rdquo;    (11) At least, I think that&rsquo;s what he said -- the endnotes are completely impossible to follow.    A reviewer actually attacked the Oxford Press for the illegibility of the references in this book.    The problem is, they exacerbate the overall lack of specificity in the text, by making it impossible to nail down times and places where critical observations were made, or check the sources who made them.  ...  (118)  Farm owners were not heavy drinkers, but &ldquo;is it any wonder that farm hands turned to strong drink?&rdquo; 

...In spite of these flaws, Rorabaugh provides some interesting data, and a perspective that shines light on the nineteenth century from an interesting angle.    &ldquo;Between 1790 and 1810,&rdquo; he observes, Americans managed &ldquo;to bring into production almost as many acres as had been planted in the preceding two centuries...  In 1790, only one hundred thousand of four million Americans resided in the West; by 1810 one million of seven million did.&rdquo;    (126)  This is dramatic change, and it seems reasonable to suspect that it created social stresses that may have driven some increased alcohol consumption.  ...  Rorabaugh provides a really good synopsis of early American distilling, especially &ldquo;across the Appalachians&rdquo; where corn was abundant, but too bulky to bring to market.    His depiction of the west as a cash-poor land of unprecedented farm surpluses helps explain the growth of western distilling in the decades before canals and railroads. (80 ff.)   &ldquo;From 1802 through 1815,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;the federal government issued more than 100 patents for distilling devices...more than 5 percent of all patents granted.&rdquo;   (73)  By 1810, distilling was concentrated in Kentucky, Ohio, western PA, and upstate NY, and these four areas produced more than half of the nation&rsquo;s grain and fruit spirits.    (77)  Western New York production peaked in 1828, and continued even while flour shipments ramped up.  ...  Pennsylvania distilled more than half of the nation&rsquo;s grain spirits.&rdquo;   (85)  New York state&rsquo;s distilleries peaked in 1825 at 1,129, which produced an estimated 18 million gallons.    By 1840, the industry seems to have consolidated, with 212 distilleries producing 12 million gallons.    In 1850, 93 distilleries made 11.7 million gallons, and in 1860, 77 distilleries made 26.2 million gallons. (chart, 87)    


...Rorabaugh&rsquo;s analysis is not as helpful for my purposes, but still instructive.    Although his chart shows a steadily increasing value of the product of New York distilleries, Rorabaugh&rsquo;s narrative describes a &ldquo;whiskey glut&rdquo; that he says &ldquo;exemplified the inability of Americans who clung to traditional agrarian values to promote change.&rdquo;    The &ldquo;surplus grain had the potential to become either food for industrial workers or, if sold in the market, the means of acquiring money that could be used as capital to build factories&rdquo; (88).  ...  Rorabaugh&rsquo;s response to their choice to make whiskey rather than become industrialists illustrates a problem faced by contemporary historians looking at the rural past.    This anachronistic misunderstanding of rural people became extreme during the progressive era -- which I&rsquo;ll be getting to in the next couple of months. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Greenbacks</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-01T15:38:56-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e4b10f840dd85f1150e625fc0e07ae5d-84.html#unique-entry-id-84</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e4b10f840dd85f1150e625fc0e07ae5d-84.html#unique-entry-id-84</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Mitchell places a lot of the blame for the government&rsquo;s need to resort to legal tender notes with the failure of the Buchanan Treasury to raise any money.  ...  (7)  &ldquo;Public confidence in the Buchanan administration was shaken,&rdquo; Mitchell says, and as a result &ldquo;the government was compelled to pay such high rates of interest&rdquo; as 12% on one year Treasury Notes. 

...The early suspension of specie payments and issue of an irredeemable currency of legal tender paper in the Civil War occurred, then, under the administration of a secretary of the treasury who cherished a strong predilection for metallic money.&rdquo; 

...Luckily, eastern banks were in a position to help out (and profit by it), since Lincoln&rsquo;s election had precipitated a &ldquo;sudden panic [that] caused the banks to curtail discounts.  ...  &ldquo;Transactions of the New York clearing house declined from $129,000,000 in the second week of March [1861]. to $80,000,000 in the corresponding week of August.  ...  From December, 1860, to August, 1861, bank loans in New York diminished $23,000,000; in Boston the fall from January to July was $2,000,000 and in Philadelphia $3,000,000.&rdquo;   (22)  Heavy grain exports (due to good American and poor European harvests) shifted the balance of (gold) payments toward the US, offsetting the decline in California gold shipments as the western boom ended.    In August 1861, &ldquo;the ratio of specie held by the associated banks of New York to their deposits and circulation was 50 percent; for Boston it was 27, and for Philadelphia 39 percent.    Thus the banks were unusually strong; but they were making little profit because the stagnation of trade gave them few opportunities of lending to business men.&rdquo; 

...The losses of northern creditors were usually reckoned at $200,000,000.&rdquo; (21, note 5)  &ldquo;The specie in circulation was estimated by the director of the mint in October, 1861, at from $275,000,000 to $300,000,000, of which he thought not more than $20,000,000 was at the South...and the bank notes reported as issued by the 1,289 institutions in the loyal states amounted to about $129,000,000.&rdquo;   (142)  But because bank notes were redeemable in specie (by state law in places like NY), banks began issuing certified checks instead of notes, and &ldquo;there was a marked contraction in the bank-note circulation in the first months of 1862.    January 4, the New York city banks had outstanding $8,600,000 of notes; by March 1 this circulation had fallen to $5,400,000.&rdquo;    (145)  But after greenbacks began circulating in April 1862, the banks resumed paying out their own notes again, and &ldquo;by May 3 their circulation was practically as large as it had been January 4.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The first greenbacks in New York came in a remittance of $4,000,000 received by the assistant treasurer April 5...and from this time on issues were so rapid that $90,000,000 was outstanding before the 7th of June.&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;From the published tables of the premium it appears that regular dealing in gold began on the New York stock exchange January 13, 1862.&rdquo;  ...  (185)  &ldquo;The price of gold in currency&rdquo; was a measure of the deflation of the dollar&rsquo;s value [but how much it correlated to general price inflation is more complicated], and &ldquo;as determined by transactions in these New York markets, was regularly reported by telegraph in all considerable towns of the United States, and everywhere accepted as authoritative.&rdquo;    This may be the real point -- that New York became the money center, because there was a valuation to be made in the first place, and because there was a telegraph, to broadcast the news and create a uniform national value for gold.  

...But when politicians and commentators discussed the question, &ldquo;it was common to begin by demonstrating that the premium and the volume of the currency did not vary concomitantly, as they legitimately should have done [according to the accepted quantity theory of money], and then to launch into a tirade against unpatriotic gold gamblers.&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;In the fiscal year 1861 imports of gold exceeded exports by $14,900,000, but after specie payments had been suspended in 1862 exports exceeded imports by $21,500,000, in 1863 by $56,600,000, in 1864 by $89,500,000, in 1865 by $51,900,000, and in 1866 by $63,000,000.&rdquo;  

...Based on a bundle of 36 retail commodities, prices rose from a &ldquo;100&rdquo;  level in 1860 to peak at &ldquo;264&rdquo; in West Virginia, &ldquo;283&rdquo; in Ohio, and &ldquo;218&rdquo; in Indiana in 1864, before settling down to an average of &ldquo;200&rdquo; across the board by 1866.    If this bundle is representative, retail commodities were twice as expensive at the end of the war as they had been at its beginning. (table, 340)  Additionally, Mitchell mentions that on &ldquo;almost all loans made before 1864 and repaid at any subsequent time...the creditor found that the sum returned to him had a purchasing power much less&rdquo; than when he loaned the money.    (364)  This loss in value to the lender was theoretically a gain to the borrower, but since everything was suddenly more expensive, the borrower may not have felt like a winner either.    Mitchell also suggests that &ldquo;farmers of the loyal states were among the unfortunate producers whose products rose in price less than the majority of other articles, and that from this standpoint they were the losers rather than the gainers by the paper currency.&rdquo;    (388)  But is this conclusion based on Mitchell&rsquo;s knowledge that this is a point of contention in later [Populist] arguments?    If greenbacks had never been adopted, isn&rsquo;t it possible that supply and demand conditions in the wartime economy would have resulted in depressed farm prices relative to suddenly scarce imports and non-defense manufactures?  


Mitchell&rsquo;s last point is that the Civil War increased the &ldquo;rapid accumulation of an unusual number of fortunes,&rdquo; by changing the distribution of wealth in the US.    Most &ldquo;war-time fortunes,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;resulted in a very large measure from the mere transfer of wealth from a wide circle of persons to the relatively small number&rdquo; of people who had access to the proceeds of wartime industry.    (400)  This effect is probably given less attention than it deserves, Mitchell adds, because we underestimate the severity of the &ldquo;transfer.&rdquo;  ...  Even an attentive observer may fail to notice that the wives of workingmen are still wearing their last year&rsquo;s dresses and that the children are running barefoot longer than usual.&rdquo;    (400)  Thus the enrichment of the few is noticed, and reformers complain of it, but it&rsquo;s not seen as due to the impoverishment of everybody else.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>It&#x27;s the supporting cast...</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-09-01T12:06:07-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/13d2a838717f5d5056228a60864d375e-83.html#unique-entry-id-83</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/13d2a838717f5d5056228a60864d375e-83.html#unique-entry-id-83</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln


...This was not central to my interests, so I went through it quickly.    I was much more interested in the rivals than in Lincoln.    I was much more interested in the period before Lincoln&rsquo;s presidency and the Civil War, and the period after (which isn&rsquo;t there at all, as the book pretty much ends with Lincoln&rsquo;s death).    I was primarily interested in William H.   Seward, and I got a lot of interesting information about him.    This doesn&rsquo;t replace a biography of Seward, which is probably still needed.    But it&rsquo;s a really good start, and puts him in an interesting national context.    There&rsquo;s a lot less about his local and regional roles, of course. 


In the introduction, Goodwin says &ldquo;By widening the lens to include Lincoln&rsquo;s colleagues and their families, my story benefited from a treasure trove of primary sources that have not generally been used in Lincoln biographies.&rdquo;  (xviii)  This is the downside of doing a biography of someone so well documented, I suppose (warning to potential Seward biographers: there are apparently about 5,000 pages of manuscript letters, diaries, etc. in the main archive alone).    For regular people, getting the folks around them seems like more of a no-brainer.    On the other hand, Goodwin&rsquo;s observation suggests that even the &ldquo;great man&rdquo; biographies might benefit from a little more context in the social surroundings.    And, interestingly for me, maybe it also suggests that biographies or histories of smaller, more local people and events would gain from being connected to larger people and events.  ...  Like William Seward in my upstate New York story.    Or William Jennings Bryan in the Michigan chapters.  


In general, I will say that I felt weighed down by the amount of detail in Goodwin&rsquo;s story.    I did not need to know what Lincoln and Seward had for breakfast on their first day together in Washington DC.    On the other hand, lots of people bought, read, and loved this book.    So, there&rsquo;s a market for detailed description, especially when it helps the reader enter the subject&rsquo;s world.    I need to keep that in mind as I write.    I can&rsquo;t assume the setting, and focus only on my interest, the action.


And details are useful, like the fact that Seward moved to Auburn after finishing his degree at Union College in Schenectady, and married the daughter of Judge Elijah Miller, the &ldquo;leading citizen of Cayuga County.&rdquo;    Another name and western NY social network for me to explore...


Goodwin identifies the beginning of the Republican Party (at least by that name) at an 1854 meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin.   (181)  The whole history of the transition from Liberty to Free Soil (and Salmon P.   Chase&rsquo;s influence on it) to Republican is fascinating, and I should find something more substantial to read about it.    Team of Rivals provides teaser-glimpses of it, and then moves on.    Also, the Greeley-Seward estrangement is worth looking into.   (242) As are Seward&rsquo;s campaign visits to Kalamazoo on Lincoln&rsquo;s behalf (268).    And Lincoln&rsquo;s &ldquo;short address&rdquo; at the Astor House in NYC on his way to Washington (about Feb. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A digression into money</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-08-25T15:45:19-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/bf230ee9c66316be2858ee07268fc5b1-82.html#unique-entry-id-82</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/bf230ee9c66316be2858ee07268fc5b1-82.html#unique-entry-id-82</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Made a side-trip today, into the history of money in the U.S.    Read:


John Jay Knox, United States Notes: A History of the Various Issues of Paper Money by the Government of the United States, 1894


A.   Barton Hepburn, History of Coinage and Currency in the United States and the Perennial Contest for Sound Currency, 1903


Wilford I.   King, &ldquo;Circulating Credit: Its Nature and Relation to the Public Welfare" American Economic Review 10:4 (Dec 1920)


Started a couple of more recent things, that will take a couple of days.    The whole point of this detour, is for me to try to get a handle on the way people used money and credit in the 1840s through the late 1860s.    After this, there&rsquo;s a &ldquo;period&rdquo; shift -- we&rsquo;re suddenly into the &ldquo;greenback&rdquo; era and the fights over bi-metalism and money that animated a lot of the Populists and ultimately led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve system after the Panic of 1907.  


BUT...there seems to be a link missing in this change.    The historiography seems to jump right from the &ldquo;market transition&rdquo; to the gilded age and its money problems, and in doing this I think it misses an intermediate period that lasted two or three decades in some places.    So I&rsquo;m trying to get a handle on what I think goes into this &ldquo;financial transition&rdquo; -- and to see if somebody really has said something about it, and I just haven&rsquo;t found it yet.  
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Panic of 1857</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-08-23T16:01:38-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6a277523a3a8bccb84bcb004f0148af5-81.html#unique-entry-id-81</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6a277523a3a8bccb84bcb004f0148af5-81.html#unique-entry-id-81</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Paul L.   Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War, 1987.


Huston examines the economic events leading up to the Crisis in a very cursory fashion, then spends a fair amount of time discussing political and press reaction to it.    This leads him to some conclusions about the role of the Crisis in foregrounding some economic issues in the sectional debate that led to the Civil War, although Huston is quick to qualify these claims and place them in a generalized &ldquo;blame-everything-on-slavery&rdquo; context.    Interestingly, he misses the point that Republicans may have used this blaming technique as a way not only of focusing attention on issues they wanted to address, but as a way of diverting attention away from issues they wanted to ignore.    The Lynn strikes, for example, were recast (by Greeley and others) as an opportunity for western expansion that (darn those southerners!)   was imperiled by expansion of the slave southwest.    Republican &ldquo;labor policy,&rdquo; the idea that low wages were due to the &ldquo;degradation of labor,&rdquo; diverted attention to the specific abuses of (rich Republican) capitalists, as well as to systemic problems caused by the growth of  corporate (as opposed to small-producer) capitalism.    The irony is, early Republicans had warned of this, but had been pushed to the sidelines.


Huston&rsquo;s conclusion is that "Economic issues did not have to play a role in the election of 1860.    By their own intransigence,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;Democrats allowed Republicans to take advantage of the economic questions that the Panic had reinvigorated."   (266)  Did they?    Or does his story suggest that these economic policies were not hard-wired into either party's DNA, but were arrived at contingently and maybe a little opportunistically?   


One thing that does come out clearly, is the sectional nature of the Panic of 1857.    It had a much less lasting impact on the South and the Northeast than it did on the West.    This is interesting, for my work.    Also, the really clear causal role of wheat exports on the Crisis, and the impact of the Crimean War on overproduction and then collapse in the West, is helpful.    I wonder how the rebound in grain shipments to Europe ("in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1859, the United States exported 3,002,000 bushels of wheat; in fiscal year 1860 the total was 4,155,000; but in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1861, the amount grew to 31,238,000." 214) effected Western politics and the 1860 elections?
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Free Soil&#x2c; Free Labor&#x2c; Free Men</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-08-22T19:24:21-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1287a94a01fb3ed95e5cb30ece7fd400-80.html#unique-entry-id-80</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1287a94a01fb3ed95e5cb30ece7fd400-80.html#unique-entry-id-80</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Eric Foner&rsquo;s dissertation, which he revised and published in 1970.    The 25-year anniversary edition featured a new Foreword, in which an older and wiser Foner qualified his earlier statements, and responded to the generation of social history inspired at least partly by works like this one.


This is a political history.   The ideology Foner discusses is primarily that of parties and their leaders and leading commentators in the press.    The character who really jumps out and demands more attention is William H.   Seward (Salmon P.   Chase follows close in his wake, though).    That&rsquo;ll be helpful for me, because the history I&rsquo;m working on features cameo appearances of people like Seward.    Connects local events and personalities with national issues--at least, I hope it does.


The notes above are in Tinderbox.    The point isn&rsquo;t so much that they&rsquo;re graphic, as that they are html, so they&rsquo;re completely searchable.    The visual aspect is based on Foner&rsquo;s chapter organization.    At some point, I&rsquo;ll get around to looking at form as well as content; and this should help.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Gates&#x27; Farmer&#x27;s Age</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-08-18T14:02:13-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5396ba970bb8323097f0552015e660b7-79.html#unique-entry-id-79</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5396ba970bb8323097f0552015e660b7-79.html#unique-entry-id-79</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Paul W.   Gates


The Farmer&rsquo;s Age: Agriculture, 1815-1860


1960


Gates is one of those obligatory texts.    He was apparently a really experienced, hands-on farmer -- at least you get that impression from the detailed descriptions he gives of farming practices, techniques, and conditions.    The chapters are organized thematically (land, then machinery, then breeding, etc.), which doesn&rsquo;t enhance the historical story.    In fact, the thread of the story was pretty well lost under all the detail, as far as I was concerned.    But that was okay.    The detail held a lot of good material for later investigation.    I&rsquo;m thinking of it this way (click it for a bigger version):


It&rsquo;s a little random -- related more to my interests than Gates&rsquo; -- but that&rsquo;s probably a good thing.    While I think he provided a wealth of valuable detail, I don&rsquo;t think he sustained his basic argument that everything in American history (including the sectional differences that led to the Civil War) was the result of agriculture.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>more recently...</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-08-18T11:49:26-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/97759815a1bb5be2f4fb42eadadd3d32-78.html#unique-entry-id-78</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/97759815a1bb5be2f4fb42eadadd3d32-78.html#unique-entry-id-78</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve been reading a bunch of books I haven&rsquo;t gotten through writing my thoughts about.    Paul W.   Gates&rsquo; The Farmer&rsquo;s Age: Agriculture, 1815-1860, Eric Foner&rsquo;s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, the Heidlers&rsquo; Henry Clay, Bray Hammond&rsquo;s Banks and Politics in America.    Also Virgin Land and The Machine in the Garden, along with a little puttering around literature including a bit of Hamlin Garland.  


Not quite sure what I&rsquo;m going to do about posting -- sort of seems like it&rsquo;s time to start putting this all together into something.    But I don&rsquo;t think that&rsquo;s something I&rsquo;m going to blog -- at least not quite yet.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Banking and Economic Development</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-09T18:23:30-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3f8cc0423dabe9c350001c8fc078235b-77.html#unique-entry-id-77</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3f8cc0423dabe9c350001c8fc078235b-77.html#unique-entry-id-77</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Rockoff, H.   T. ...  "Varieties of Banking and Regional Economic Development in the United States, 1840-1860."   The Journal of Economic History 35(1): 160-181.


Although this is essentially an economic history article (meaning it uses and then discusses statistical techniques that I&rsquo;m not interested in, and don&rsquo;t necessarily believe), Rockoff makes some points that are helpful to me.    First, the general premise, that in &ldquo;the two decades before the Civil War...the Federal Government withdrew from the regulation of banking&rdquo; (irrelevant for me, but interesting for our times, Rockoff ultimately concludes that banking deregulation had little measurable effect on economic development in this period).  


Rockoff measures &ldquo;bank deposits and circulating notes...per capita as the measure of financial development.&rdquo;    (160)  This approach favors areas where population and wealth (and possibly inequality) are greatest, and not surprisingly urbanity correlates strongly with &ldquo;financial development.&rdquo;    But this may be misleading.    Rockoff seems to ignore other economic uses of money in favor of its role as a store and signal of wealth.    This basically wealth-oriented perspective discounts the (possibly much) greater velocity of money in developing regions, where funds are continuously cycling through the economy as people buy, sell, build, and consume.    Rockoff&rsquo;s lack of interest in this distinction is shown in the fact that New York is treated as a single entity, when in fact between 1840 and 1860, the state was a textbook example of the difference between urban and rural economies.


Rockoff highlights &ldquo;free banking&rdquo; laws in his analysis, which &ldquo;ended the requirement that banks obtain their charters through special legislative acts.&rdquo;   (161)  But this did not mean laissez faire.    Even under free banking, the law &ldquo;prohibited banks from investing in real property, [and] banks had to back issues of circulating notes with government bonds deposited with a state authority.&rdquo;   (162)  The bond-reserve requirement (he doesn&rsquo;t say, but I assume it was a 100% reserve) provided some security, but perhaps not as much as a specie reserve would have done.    There seems to have been a way to &ldquo;game&rdquo; the discrepancy between par and market values of the underlying (state-issued) bonds.    And many banks seem to have been started with capital that was immediately returned to investors in the form of loans.   (160)  But in any case, Rockoff says &ldquo;from 1845 to 1860 New York experienced virtually no bank failures.&rdquo;   (162)


Rockoff notes that the &ldquo;rate of growth of money per capita&rdquo; in New York during this period &ldquo;was quite rapid:  4.41 percent compared with 2.56 percent for the country as a whole.&rdquo;   (163)  Of course, for my purposes, there&rsquo;s the unresolved question of how much of that money growth was confined to New York City, and whether any of it found its way  upstate?    Proximity to the city probably increased the velocity of money through producing regions along the canal, but did it also divert accumulation to banks and their corresponding investments in the city, at the expense of local investment?    Rockoff says &ldquo;level of urbanization...explain[s] about seventy percent of the variance in per capita money balances.&rdquo;   (167)  But he also admits &ldquo;these coefficients refer to stocks of assets rather than flows and should therefore be compared with wealth rather than income.&rdquo; 

...And maybe this is the biggest take-away for me --- that there&rsquo;s a difference between wealth and income.    The way money works in a system (or the way you see it working) is different when it&rsquo;s moving, from when it&rsquo;s accumulated.    I don&rsquo;t have the language for it yet (and I should probably look for this in period, rather than in contemporary sources), but there&rsquo;s a crucial difference between stocks and flows of money in the nineteenth century.    To the extent that accumulation was an urban phenomenon (even for the rural elite, who deposited their wealth in secure, prestigious urban institutions), this is another &ldquo;country/city&rdquo; issue.    And maybe it plays a role in the personalities and conflicts I&rsquo;m seeing in sources like the credit reports...
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Banks and Kinship</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-10T18:22:08-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/afd8e2ca39accbe2419cf9cc6266fccd-76.html#unique-entry-id-76</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/afd8e2ca39accbe2419cf9cc6266fccd-76.html#unique-entry-id-76</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Lamoreaux challenges &ldquo;scholars [who] have seen the persistence of traditional social institutions, and especially kinship-oriented business, as major impediments to economic development.&rdquo;    (666)  Using an approach that looks somewhat like the Zeitlin/Ratcliff Chilean kinship-network argument of Landlords and Capitalists (albeit with a positive spin), Lamoreaux argues that &ldquo;Early banks in New England functioned not as commercial banks in the modern sense but as the financial arms of extended kinship networks.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;Scholars who have explored the relationship between banks and economic development have assessed the banking system in terms of what theoretically are its two major functions: to provide an adequate money supply and to serve as an intermediary between savers and investors.&rdquo;   I&rsquo;d add one more function, which I think was behind Rockoff&rsquo;s approach: as an intermediary to safeguard and insulate urban investors&rsquo; wealth (money stock) from direct contact with rural entrepreneur/borrowers (money flow).    But I completely buy her argument that it&rsquo;s the personal connections and kinship groups that are key here.


In 1800 there were 17 state-chartered banks in New England, with capital totaling $5.50 million.    By 1850, this number had increased to 300, and the capital available for loan to $62.87 million.    Ten years later, 505 New England banks controlled $123.56 million.  (chart, 651)  Capital during this period came to banks not primarily through deposits, but through investment, as first the founders and later a wider range of local people bought shares.    Lamoreaux disagrees with Rockoff: even if initial capital &ldquo;was largely fictitous...deposited only to satisfy legal requirements and then immediately withdrawn in the form of loans...sales of new shares to outsiders gradually transformed capital stock to a legitimate source of funds.   (653-4)  This may be true, but does it avoid the point that by getting in cheaply and then controlling subsequent paid-in capital, bank owners gained an incredible degree of economic power?  


In the long run, institutional investors like insurance companies, savings associations, and trustees of large estates contributed the majority of bank capital.    In many cases, these institutions were part of the same kin networks that initially owned, and continued to run the banks.  ...  (655)  The percentage of bank stock held by the initial owners tended to decrease as the banks grew, but &ldquo;the groups often retained their dominant positions on the banks&rsquo; boards of directors...because other stockholders rarely took an interest in the institutions&rsquo; affairs.&rdquo;   (655-6)  And these same &ldquo;kinship groups...often dominated the boards of the institutional investors that purchased their banks&rsquo; stock.&rdquo; 

...The role of these banks (despite the public-service rhetoric they employed to get their corporate charters during the early period, when incorporation implied quasi-governmental public status) was to &ldquo;become engines to supply insiders with capital.&rdquo; ...  (659)  After spending so much of his time in New York City, observing this process, is it any surprise that my upstate merchant started his own bank?    Especially since, in the words of the 1854 Bankers Magazine, &ldquo;where business is constantly and rapidly expanding, the younger class of business men who are entitled to bank facilities, equally with their older brethren, cannot have their wants fairly supplied without the occasional establishment of new banks.  

...Lamoreaux answers that &ldquo;although the system of group-dominated banking doubtless resulted in some degree of favoritism in credit markets, the situation was remarkably fluid.    Up-and-coming groups were able to build financial empires that rivaled those of the oldest, most established merchant families in the region.&rdquo;   (664)  But even with no barriers to entry, is this what we&rsquo;d call a &ldquo;credit market?&rdquo;  


One thing that does seem certain, though, is that these banks facilitated a particular type of economic development.    &ldquo;Could kinship groups have tapped the community&rsquo;s savings without their aid?&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;The market for securities of manufacturing corporations in early nineteenth-century New England was extremely narrow,&rdquo; she says.  ...  &ldquo;The market for bank securities was much wider...because the diversified enterprises of the kinship groups permitted them to pay high and steady dividends and thereby draw out the community&rsquo;s savings in a way that most individual ventures could never have done.&rdquo;   (665)  &ldquo;Without banks,&rdquo; she concludes, &ldquo;kinship groups would have been forced to depend largely on their own resources to finance investment.&rdquo; 

...Even if New England&rsquo;s financial system allowed relatively free entry into banking, and banks allowed a slightly wider public to participate in a diversified portfolio of investments that would otherwise have been restricted to the very rich, was the concentration of economic activity in the hands of these &ldquo;kinship groups&rdquo; a good thing?    Lamoreaux mentions in the first few pages of her article that lawsuits across New England challenged the &ldquo;insider&rdquo; ways in which these chartered corporations behaved.  ...  (651)  Although it involves counterhistorical speculation, it might be useful to ask what alternatives there may have been to simply accepting the inevitability that &ldquo;kinship groups&rdquo; should gain access to the &ldquo;community&rsquo;s savings&rdquo; to finance business ventures for their individual benefit.    To what degree is this a free choice, made by empowered individuals (investors and later depositors) acting in their own best interests, and to what degree is the public&rsquo;s range of choices limited by laws and social conventions that allow incorporation, interlocking control, and that regulate the terms and conditions of credit?    (along these lines, do usury laws actually benefit established banks, by lowering the incentive for individuals to loan money to each other at higher -- risk-appropriate -- rates of interest?) ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Merchants and Manufacturers</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-11T18:20:23-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1996af0af1a5105dd3e290fa370938af-75.html#unique-entry-id-75</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1996af0af1a5105dd3e290fa370938af-75.html#unique-entry-id-75</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Glenn Porter and Harold C.   Livesay	


Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing


1971


Their thesis is that &ldquo;Changes in distribution played at least as important a role in the story of our economic past as did changes in production.&rdquo;   (1)  No one who&rsquo;s studied the history of transportation would think this point needed to be made again -- but apparently the shelves of business historians are &ldquo;groaning with the weight of volumes dealing with...manufactured goods.&rdquo;


This is interesting, although of limited use to me, because they specifically exclude ag. products from their study.    Even so, their finding that &ldquo;the all-purpose merchant...was the key man in the American economy in 1815...the channel through which agricultural products flowed to market, and he supplied manufactured goods and imported raw materials to city craftsmen and country storekeepers.&rdquo;   (15-16)  And, for my purposes, he supplied country manufactures to the urban and international markets.


They briefly mention drug jobbers, who &ldquo;depended on extensive trade with the interior to provide a wide market area with a sufficient volume of trade to insure success.&rdquo;   (29)  These jobbers began as general merchants, in Porter and Livesay&rsquo;s model, and then specialized in response to increasing volumes and competitive pressures.    The jobber &ldquo;had to maintain a large inventory of goods...[and] be prepared to ship goods in small lots on short notice&rdquo; and extend credit to their rural retailers.    &ldquo;Storekeepers...relied on their suppliers to act as bankers and urban agents for them.&rdquo;   (29)  And, because the majority of drugs initially came from England, drug jobbers usually had extensive foreign connections.


Porter and Livesay say merchants were much more successful than manufacturers in obtaining bank credit in the early nineteenth century, because &ldquo;merchants usually were the banks.    An analysis of the directors and officers of the banks of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in 1840, 1850, and 1860 reveals that more than two-thirds of the officials were or had been merchants.&rdquo;   (72) This was probably even more the rule in smaller communities, where merchants would have been the main investors as well as the main customers of local banks.


The merchant&rsquo;s value as a financial expert declined during and after the Civil War,&rdquo; the authors say.    The proliferation of greenbacks allowed a &ldquo;switch from credit to cash [that] virtually eliminated the merchant&rsquo;s role as credit consultant and guarantor of payment.&rdquo;   (129) &ldquo;The financing of transactions became the province of specialized agencies that evolved from private banks and brokerage houses...  In 1850 it would have been difficult to find a producer not dependent on his distributors for capital; sixty years later one declared, &lsquo;the manufacturer who needs the jobber as a commercial banker is a weak manufacturer.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (129-30)  I think the point they miss, is that there wasn&rsquo;t a hard border between manufacturing and merchandizing.    Like the brothers whose papers I&rsquo;ve been reading, many of these early manufacturers were also merchants...and bankers.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Mr. Madison&#x27;s War</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-12T18:17:56-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d81e265b75cccca910ceadc21f52e979-74.html#unique-entry-id-74</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d81e265b75cccca910ceadc21f52e979-74.html#unique-entry-id-74</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Madison&rsquo;s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783-1830


...Stagg admits that the dominant feature of almost all literature&rdquo; on the War of 1812 &ldquo;has been its emphasis on the sheer ineptitude of the American war effort.&rdquo;    But even so, &ldquo;to stress ineptitude as the theme of the War of 1812...is to neglect an important, albeit obvious, point about its history--which is that no administration could have actually intended what happened to have occurred.&rdquo;  (x) The question is, was there a realistic plan behind Madison&rsquo;s policy, or was he too a source of incompetence?    &ldquo;The incompetence that seemed all-pervasive during the war years was more than simply the failings of so many individuals; rather it was symptomatic of political and administrative problems deeply rooted in the government of American society.    Yet the founding fathers, including Madison himself, had justified the introduction of a new constitution in 1789 very much on the grounds that it would provide the United States with a more efficient system of government and prevent a recurrence of the disorder that had characterized the War for Independence.&rdquo; (xi)  This is an interesting point, because it suggests that the founders were particularly concerned about facilitating a united military, in expectation of future wars with Britain.    And because it suggests a lack of concern with what the American people actually wanted, both in the minds of the founders and of Professor Stagg.


At the end of his introduction, Stagg also seems to admit that the war didn&rsquo;t really resolve anything.    Nor did &ldquo;the sudden rise of Anglo-American &lsquo;friendship&rsquo; after 1815.&rdquo; (xii)  The real change in British-American relations was brought about by neither Britons nor Americans, but by a change in the global balance of power created by &ldquo;the  emancipation of Latin America.&rdquo;    So in that sense, a study of politics and American foreign policy through 1830 that doesn&rsquo;t say another word about Spanish American independence, seems fatally myopic.


Madison&rsquo;s decision for war is hard to see as sensible.    When it declared war on Great Britain, the U.S. &ldquo;could command little more than six thousand regular troops and a naval force consisting of sixteen vessels of all sizes.&rdquo;    In contrast, the British controlled the seas with &ldquo;six hundred vessels in active service while also supporting a regular army at home and abroad that totaled nearly one quarter of a million men.&rdquo;   (3)  Stagg says Madison believed America could easily take a large part of Canada, and that this would bring Britain to the negotiating table.    But in 1812 his Jeffersonian political allies seem to have been on the same page: &ldquo;The best-known statement of American optimism about the ease of seizing Canada was Thomas Jefferson&rsquo;s claim that &lsquo;the acquisition of Canada...as far as the neighborhood of Quebec will be a mere matter of marching.&rsquo;&rdquo; (note 8, 5)  The critical issue was denying Britain access to raw materials it needed in order to maintain its West Indian colonies and its navy.    &ldquo;The growth of Upper Canada was a significant step toward freeing the British empire from the effects of American economic restrictions.&rdquo;   (41)  Canada, as an alternative source of nearly everything supplied by the U.S., had to be neutralized.    Ironically, an American diplomat in the West Indies in 1827-8 reported, &ldquo;the inhabitants of this island [Barbados] as well as the others, have less regard for Mr.   Jefferson than any of our Presidents (not excepting Mr.   Madison...yet they say he nevertheless, though not intentionally, rendered them a great service by laying on the Embargo, which taught them to find resources within themselves, that is to say, by cultivating ground provisions, which they never did before, and were entirely dependent on the United States.&rdquo; (quoting Robert Monroe Harrison to Henry Clay, 516)


Interestingly, &ldquo;the growth of Canada was also stimulated by, and in turn contributed to, the growth of the United States...and the settlers in this northeastern region were as likely to cross into Canada in search of new prosperity as they were to remain in the United States.&rdquo; (refs Lambert, Travels through Lower Canada and the United States, 1813, 244-55, 40) There&rsquo;s a story here...


Another interesting point, that Stagg mentions several times but doesn&rsquo;t develop, is the government&rsquo;s apparent difficulty raising troops.    In spite of the fact that &ldquo;the society of the early Republic greatly esteemed the virtuous citizen who willingly assumed public duties in a selfless, disinterested manner, recruiting in the northeast and northwest was hampered by men&rsquo;s loyalty to their regions (and regional militia) in preference to national army service.   (195)  Troop levies in the northwest were &ldquo;hampered by a series of petty obstructions, usually arising from attempts to use writs of habeus corpus to get men discharged on a variety of grounds, mainly wrongful enlistment.&rdquo;    (172)  This is another story, especially in light of the government&rsquo;s claims that one of the &ldquo;popular&rdquo; reasons for war was British impressment of American seamen.


A final dramatic moment (amidst several hundred pages of really dry political history) comes  on January 5 1815, when the Hartford convention convened to discuss possible New England secession.    An observer warned Monroe that they &ldquo;would have to be crushed immediately.    If the rebellious New England states were given time to organize an effective government, he believed they could, by virtue of their large populations and well-equipped militias, successfully &lsquo;bid defiance&rsquo; to the Union, seize all the property of the federal government, and perhaps enter into an alliance with Britain.  ...  He increased the guard on the Springfield armory and on January 10 authorized New York Republican leaders...to draw on more money and volunteers to crush a rebellion or an invasion.&rdquo;   (481-2)  Another story here, about regional interests, force, and national union.  


This is an interesting period, and it seems there are several interesting stories waiting to be told about it.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Culture of Credit</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-13T17:13:59-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/25919f7bbfe366caf99743a8ee268971-73.html#unique-entry-id-73</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/25919f7bbfe366caf99743a8ee268971-73.html#unique-entry-id-73</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Rowena Olegario


A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business


2006


&ldquo;In a circular dated 1858, the Mercantile Agency...estimated that 157,394 village and country stores owed an average of $14,500 each to city jobbers, an aggregate value of nearly $2.3 billion.    The amount of trade done on credit could be several times the capital resources of a business.&rdquo;   (26)  


&ldquo;The conventional wisdom found its way into Walden (1854) when, criticizing the heavy mortgages under which most farmers labored, Thoreau declared that &lsquo;what has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (37)


The Mercantile Agency &ldquo;relied on a network of &lsquo;correspondents,&rsquo; including sheriffs, merchants, postmasters, and bank cashiers for its information.    Attorneys, however, made up the bulk...&rdquo;   (49)


&ldquo;As capitalist values spread in the United States and more people became drawn into the credit economy, outward appearance, or &lsquo;reputation,&rsquo; took on extraordinary significance.    So, too, did the anxiety that appearances could be manipulated: &lsquo;Reputation, rather than character--to seem, rather than to be,&rsquo; fumed the Daily Illinois State Journal in 1856, &lsquo;has become the ultimate aim of too many in all departments of business and professional life.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (80)
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Farm&#x2c; Shop&#x2c; Landing</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-13T18:12:17-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c29d4d7f557b360513e14ddcdfb293a0-72.html#unique-entry-id-72</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c29d4d7f557b360513e14ddcdfb293a0-72.html#unique-entry-id-72</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860


...For Bruegel, the market society happened when &ldquo;Commercial transactions...moved from a physical setting to an abstract, intangible sphere where prices mattered more than people and relationships.&rdquo;  ...  It&rsquo;s Bruegel&rsquo;s extensive use of individual accounts, to an almost microhistorical level, that sets this book apart.   Bruegel says he&rsquo;s going to describe the &ldquo;social and economic processes that underlay the movement from an understanding of the world rooted in concrete and particular experiences to general abstractions.&rdquo;   (3-4)  While he rarely has an opportunity to present &ldquo;before&rdquo; and &ldquo;after&rdquo; views of an individual&rsquo;s changing orientation, I think he successfully shows a changing understanding of relationships and social realities in the Hudson River Valley.


The non-market, neighborhood relations that dominated Hudson Valley culture in the late eighteenth century, Bruegel says, was based on the subsistence basis of the agricultural economy.  ...  Participation was what mattered.&rdquo; (reminds me of a letter from LBH to HGH, 15)  As a result of the precariousness of rural life, Bruegel suggests the emphasis on self-sufficiency of farm households (vs. communities) is misplaced.    &ldquo;It is impossible to think about them separately,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;because it was precisely the constant exchange of labor and tools that conditioned the family&rsquo;s subsistence and held the neighborhood together.&rdquo; 

...Bruegel says the shift towards a commercial orientation was gradual and was marked by  &ldquo;the coexistence of nonmarket and market rationality in the rural economy&rdquo; for much of the early nineteenth century.    (62)  &ldquo;In practice,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;farmers straddled two worlds that historians and ethnologists have often tended to construe as incompatible.&rdquo;   (42) &ldquo;Commercial exchange,&rdquo; Bruegel suggests, was both a &ldquo;part of the farm families&lsquo; strategy to achieve a competence,&rdquo; and occurred in a market dominated by &ldquo;personal relations: these bonds actually predicated trade on the Hudson.&rdquo;   (42-3)  &ldquo;Trust lowered transaction costs,&rdquo; and this &ldquo;privileged bond...helped diminish the farmer&rsquo;s prejudice against the conniving merchant,&rdquo; or indeed, any outsider.   (42, 59)  But even though the majority of extralocal trading was done by only the most prosperous farmers, &ldquo;in a world of insecurity, where risk reduction guided the behavior of farm families, the establishment of dependable and durable credit and debt connections lay in the interest of both merchant and farmer;&rdquo; especially those of humbler means.    Their participation in the markets at the Hudson landings created a two tier system, in which the seller could choose either the local or the &ldquo;New York price.&rdquo;   As a result, &ldquo;over long periods of time, prices of locally produced goods in the neighborhood trading center remained constant and unresponsive to metropolitan fluctuations.&rdquo;  

...Bruegel seems to suggest that this situation would have persisted, if external social forces had not changed the game.    &ldquo;Political interventions in favor of deregulated internal commerce,&rdquo; he says &ldquo;show that there was nothing natural about the rise of a market society.&rdquo;    (66)  Following Horwitz, Bruegel says &ldquo;it was the law&rsquo;s aim to do away with the favored client status that liberal theory construed as collusion,&rdquo; but that locals at the landing valued as the relationships that tied commerce to community. ...  Society was able to claim that &ldquo;farming is no longer that uncertain, profitless work, which it once was.&rdquo;   (97)  One Kinderhook resident noted &ldquo;About 1790 this land was sold for $1 an acre: now it brings $75 or $80.&rdquo;   (95)  Farm productivity &ldquo;growth relied on the intensification of well-known work practices,&rdquo; introduction of cast-iron plows, and increasing use of wage labor throughout the season.    &ldquo;The extension of employment length distinguished a new labor force from the neighbors who still helped each other during the crest of harvest work.&rdquo; 

...These new workers, Bruegel suggests, lived separately from the farmers, and bought food and supplies at the local market, for cash.    This is interesting, if true -- I had always envisioned early farm wage-workers as young, single men, who lived with the farm family.  ...  He cites an 1820 book called Dialogues on Domestic and Rural Economy and the Fashionable Follies of the World, by Hannah Barnard, which seems to complicate the traditional view of separate gender spheres.    &ldquo;The agricultural family, in Barnard&rsquo;s depiction, was a collective in which men and women joined their forces and talents.&rdquo;    (115)  Bruegel cites several other contemporary local sources to suggest that Harriet Martineau and other European observes were wrong to conclude that American women had no place in the outdoor work of the farm.  


...It quickly became &ldquo;more fashionable and cheaper...to dress in fabricks of our rapidly increasing manufactories,&rdquo; as Sterling Goodenow observed in 1822. (in A Brief Topographical and Statistical Manual of the State of New York, 150)But in spite of this, &ldquo;As late as 1837, Kinderhook grocers J. and P. ...  (148)  Based on his sources, Bruegel concludes that rural consumption had not become &ldquo;rural consumerism...by the 1840s.    Rather, the dissemination of everyday articles projects the image of a world whose demands remained moderate...the quest for necessities, not luxuries, propelled the consumer behavior of the majority of rural dwellers,&rdquo; Bruegel says. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Railroad Land Grants</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-14T22:06:04-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7dbd00f2bf0fd581e9ae23a21f21580d-71.html#unique-entry-id-71</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7dbd00f2bf0fd581e9ae23a21f21580d-71.html#unique-entry-id-71</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Click the map for a bigger view


...&ldquo;The Railroad Land Grant Legend in American History Texts&rdquo;


...Henry said the public (especially students reading high school and college texts) has been misled by accounts of &ldquo;huge,&rdquo; &ldquo;breath-taking&rdquo; tracts of land given to railroad companies out of the public domain.    The truth, he says, is that much less land was actually given (only about 9.5% of the continental U.S.), the government ultimately got a good return on it (in the form of increased value of the rest of the land due to railroads going through, and also in special government freight rates), and the social/political/military benefits of national unity outweigh any costs, anyway.    The old maps, he says, mislead the public by drawing broad swaths across the west, when actually the railroads were only granted half the area drawn (in alternate sections, like a checkerboard), and in any case many of the grants were forfeited because no one built railroads to qualify for them.    In all, only about 131 million acres had been given to the railroads, according to Henry.    Since the 1884 presidential election, he said, &ldquo;when the Democratic party issued a campaign poster featuring what purported to be a map of lands granted to railroads,&rdquo; the issue had been a political football and the facts had given way to legend.


Henry&rsquo;s article appeared in the 1945 Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and set off a storm of protests (many of them carried by the same journal, and reprinted in Carstensen, The Public Lands).   David Maldwin Ellis suggested that 49 million acres of land grants by the states were relevant in the discussion.   (145)  And, even if granted lands had been forfeited or released, they still counted as grants (and they had still made those lands unavailable to settlers for many years - in some cases well into the 20th century).    The real extent of the land granted was slightly over 223 million acres (or nearly 17% of America, 146).    Ellis pointed out that &ldquo;The General Land Office withdrew from public appropriation not only the primary limits [of the land grants] as required by law, but also the lands within the indemnity limits...  The railroads sometimes tried to oust genuine homesteaders who had made their selections before the location of the railway route.&rdquo; 

...Shannon called Henry&rsquo;s article &ldquo;a piece of special pleading for the current lobby of railroad interests to secure the repeal of clauses in the land-grant acts...for rate concessions on carrying government traffic.&rdquo;   (Henry was assistant to the president of the Association of American Railroads when he wrote his article, 157) The big black swaths across the map, Shannon said, should be widened &ldquo;by 50 per cent so as to show the indemnity zones.&rdquo;   &ldquo;It must not be forgotten,&rdquo; Shannon said, &ldquo;that until 1887 settlement was excluded from government sections...and from 50 per cent of their width clear beyond the zones proper.&rdquo;   &ldquo;The railroads got just about one-tenth of the United States and for years restricted settlement in three-tenths of the United States,&rdquo; Shannon concluded.    &ldquo;This ratio is much higher in the West, where most of the grants lay.&rdquo; 

...I think this series of articles says some interesting things about how history is sometimes done, and about what we need to be wary of when reading.    In the first place, even taking Henry&rsquo;s numbers, railroad land grants were breath-taking.    Nearly ten percent of the land area of the nation?    More, in unsettled areas, where pioneers were competing for farmlands.    And an area at least double that (or nearly 1/5 of the American land mass) held back from sale?    That&rsquo;s pretty extreme.    Second, whether the government got it&rsquo;s money back is not the question.    Everyone seems to have lost sight of the fact that private, corporate, for-profit railroad development with government handouts wasn&rsquo;t the only way transportation, or the American West, could have been developed.    And it&rsquo;s not like there weren&rsquo;t people saying this at the time (A.M.   Todd, for example).    We just don&rsquo;t remember them.    What does that say about the textbooks that are being written and read for high-schoolers now?]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Bankruptcy made the middle class?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-06T16:53:31-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/35bb2d212e0a0128ad6a18c1b7f378ab-70.html#unique-entry-id-70</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/35bb2d212e0a0128ad6a18c1b7f378ab-70.html#unique-entry-id-70</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America


...Balleisen focuses on the 1841 Bankruptcy Law, &ldquo;partly because it coincided with and emanated from powerful transformations in the scope and character of American capitalism.&rdquo;   (4)  He agrees with Bushman and Lamoreaux that commercial acitivity was more universal and widespread than some of the &ldquo;market revolution&rdquo; historians would grant, but concedes that &ldquo;financial panics, like the ones in 1837 and 1839 that precipitated tens of thousands of commercial insolvencies&rdquo; not only &ldquo;unleashed an upsurge of political support for a comprehensive federal bankruptcy system,&rdquo; but also helped push some members of the growing middle class away from an ethic of entrepreneurial risk-taking and self-reliance, toward a desire for financial security in salaried employment. 

...&ldquo;To a great extent,&rdquo; Balleisen says, &ldquo;the relationship between failing antebellum proprietors and their creditors resembled a game of cat and mouse.&rdquo;   (84)  Since anyone could fail, maybe we could extend the group -- especially in light of the fact that only recently had a transition been made from an older system of credit between family members, neighbors, and friends, to an impersonal credit market.    Naturally, &ldquo;Debtors sought to hide their true circumstances from the holders of claims against them,...[and] creditors...did their best to pounce on whatever assets the debtors possessed.&rdquo;   (84-5)  This seems especially apparent in the case of the rural merchants I&rsquo;m studying, who seem to have credit relationships both in the family/community and outside it.    It might be interesting to see if they behave differently, depending on the creditor&rsquo;s status in their  local network.    It might also be interesting to look at the way these relationships change over time.    These guys, after all, were creditors as well as debtors.  


&ldquo;In addition to resuscitating the entrepreneurial exertions of myriad antebellum bankrupts and fostering considerable social flux,&rdquo; Balleisin says &ldquo;general releases from debt contributed to the mutability and dynamism of the nineteenth-century economy.    Along with the culture of privately negotiated compromises, antebellum bankruptcy discharges increased the pool of entrepreneurs who actively sought to make their fortune by extending the reach of commercial exchange, inventing new products, or developing new marketing techniques.&rdquo;   (198)  In other words, the ability to get out from under a failed business encouraged people to experiment and overextend, to reach for the brass ring of personal enrichment because the price of failure had been reduced.    It encouraged entrepreneurs who took risks, which means it penalized prudent, conservative, old-fashioned, and especially cash-based businessmen.    It allowed a small group of unusually aggressive players to keep trying until they won (whether by learning from their failures or simply by finally getting lucky), while it pushed their wiser, more prudent competitors to the sidelines.    Balleisen doesn&rsquo;t dwell on this, but it&rsquo;s the dark side of the &ldquo;perpetual search for profitable innovation that constitutes a defining characteristic of modern capitalism.&rdquo; 

...For some failed entrepreneurs, though, Balleisen says &ldquo;encounters with insolvency led them away from business ownership altogether.&rdquo;    There was &ldquo;a substantial class of bankrupts who either could not resume independent business careers [even as artisans] or chose not to accept the risks associated with doing so...  Many of these individuals walked away from the scenes of ongoing financial wreckage, seeking a different and less hazardous means of securing a living...  Their efforts link the experience of antebellum bankruptcy to the rise of a salaried urban middle class.&rdquo;   (201)  The result, Balleisen says, was a &ldquo;burgeoning class of clerks, bookkeepers, and agents [who] could not only take consolation in their enjoyment of relative economic stability but also lay claim to a version of republican independence--one in which the most fundamental &lsquo;autonomy&rsquo; rested not on the responsibilities of self-employment, but on freedom from both the most severe forms of subservience and the degrading precariousness of irretrievable indebtedness.&rdquo;   (219)  &ldquo;Despite the substantial contrast between these responses to personal legacies of insolvency,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;they worked together to help usher in a new economic order structured around large, bureaucratic corporations, rather than small-scale producers and purveyors of goods and services.    In part, post-bellum America&rsquo;s world of trusts and tycoons rested on a foundation of pervasive individual failure.&rdquo;   (227)  One way of looking at this would be to say, &ldquo;well, alright.    They lost their nerve and handed over the reins to their economic &lsquo;betters&rsquo; in return for security.    In return, they got to live quiet lives as modern consumers in the suburbs.&rdquo;    Another perspective, though, might be that changes in the legal system allowed bad money (and behavior) to drive out good, specifically because the bad actors were absolved of their responsibility when they failed.    The risks were socialized, the rewards privatized.    And 170 years later, here we are...


...Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 81-6
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Market Revolution&#x2c; grand narrative style</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-06-11T12:54:27-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/50a4bebe8ffbacdc45e18c2801d75b24-69.html#unique-entry-id-69</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/50a4bebe8ffbacdc45e18c2801d75b24-69.html#unique-entry-id-69</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[(31)  Sellers wavers between a sort of determinist conspiracy theory where &ldquo;Lawyers were the shock troops of capitalism&rdquo; and a religious drama, where &ldquo;Edwards&rsquo;s revolutionary New Light, as finally modulated to the stresses of capitalist accommodation by Finney&rsquo;s genius, nerved Americans for the personal transformation required by a competitive market.&rdquo;  

...In 1802 Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin &ldquo;convinced Congress to allocate land revenues from the new state of Ohio for a National Road connecting it with the Potomac via southwestern Pennsylvania, where his own investments were concentrated.&rdquo;   (62)  The &ldquo;Fourteenth Congress, convening in prosperous peace in December 1815, was filled with enterprise-minded lawyers&rdquo; who took credit for &ldquo;saving the republic from the military ineptitude of penny-pinching, old-fogy Republicanism.&rdquo; ...  Monroe &ldquo;falling thousands of dollars in debt to the [Second] Bank&rsquo;s chief promotor, John Jacob Astor, who regularly subsidized his habit of living beyond his means,&rdquo; is also interesting. ...  I think the story flows much more smoothly where Sellers describes events like &ldquo;the dramatic reversal of Republican tradition&rdquo; where, in President Madison&rsquo;s words, Republicans were &ldquo;reconciled to certain measures and arrangements which may be as proper now as they were premature or suspicious when urged by champions of Federalism.&rdquo; 

...This is the tension I always notice when reading Foner: is it possible for a group as off-the-charts wrong as Southern Congressmen were, to articulate a valid indictment of Northern wage-based industry?    And if not, is part of the tragedy of the antebellum period the fact that there was no one in a credible position to say what needed to be said about the way capitalist institutions were developing?    Is that the lesson of American politics in this period: that both sides are so compromised that there is never any pure ground to stand on, so you make your choice of the lesser evil?  

...Sellers says &ldquo;it is not surprising that the state banks, most having suspended specie payments during the war, were reluctant to resume redeeming their notes in gold or silver coin on demand.    With speicie payments suspended, new banks could open on no other capital than stock loans and a little borrowed specie, and then force their notes into circulation by lending freely.  ...  The resulting uncontrolled inflation threatened sound growth,&rdquo; but of course seemed like a good idea at the time, to each person who took the notes or loans from their eager local banker. ...  There&rsquo;s more going on than just an old fashioned culture (in which Jefferson cosigns his friend Nicholas&rsquo; loan and loses his fortune. 138) that doesn&rsquo;t understand what&rsquo;s happening...isn&rsquo;t there?  

...(138)    As a result, &ldquo;General William Henry Harrison, popular hero of Tippecanoe, bank director, and longtime grandee, was hard run for the state senate by an upstart radical lawyer and hero of the city&rsquo;s working class.&rdquo; ...  As does the idea that image politics began in 1828, when &ldquo;Farmers and workers were baffled as well as threatened by the abstraction and complexity of the interests and issues that engaged calculating elites,&rdquo; and as a result &ldquo;Jackson&rsquo;s charisma froze voters into a pattern of party identifications favoring his entourage.&rdquo; 

...Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.&rdquo;   (325)  But if the &ldquo;Bank War was the acid test of American democracy,&rdquo; how is it no one in Jackson&rsquo;s administration understood what throwing control back to unregulated state banks was going to do to the money supply?   (321)  It&rsquo;s hard to see how anyone believed that without some other controls, the result would be a return to metallic &ldquo;real&rdquo; money.  ...  As the money supply (bank notes, deposits, and circulating specie [he forgets credit notes, which functioned as cash]) swelled from $172 million in 1834 to $276 million in 1836, prices shot up 50%.&rdquo;    Thomas Hart Benton complained &ldquo;I did not join in putting down the Bank of the United States, to put up a wilderness of local banks...  I did not join in putting down the paper currency of a national bank, to put up a national paper currency of a thousand local banks.&rdquo; 

...The Specie Circular was overturned by Congress in December 1836 by Whigs and &ldquo;Conservative Democrats,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Jackson&rsquo;s last official act was a pocket veto sustaining his hard-money policy against the bipartisan dismay of politicians.&rdquo;  ...  Even if the immigrants had all arrived in and remained in New York City (they didn&rsquo;t), they would have made up only about 25% of the city&rsquo;s population.  

...(Somehow, the Journal managed to not invite a number of social historians who had been working on the market revolution for decades.    But many of these historians had a chance to be heard in Stokes and Conway&rsquo;s 1996 book)  Kicking off was Richard Ellis, a former student of Sellers&rsquo; who said that although the book did &ldquo;not pay the careful attention to detail&rdquo; that people had come to expect from Sellers, his comprehensiveness [and]...aggressive presentation of meaningful and provocative generalizations...will act as a catalyst for numerous doctoral dissertations.&rdquo;   (447)  Mary Blewett hints that social historians have already moved well beyond Sellers&rsquo; and says they will be frustrated and disappointed by his synthesis.   (454)  Joel Silbey subtly suggests that Sellers is simply following a line of argument &ldquo;so well explored and synthesized previously by Harry Watson (who, in his blurb, called the book a &ldquo;brilliant achievement... 

...In his defense, Sellers admits that the &ldquo;theologisms&rdquo; are daunting, but says that&rsquo;s the way it has to be.  ...  (473)  Religion is important and &ldquo;demands the special attention of historians because through it, as through politics, the largest numbers of people most visibly register their reactions to their circumstances.&rdquo; ...  Politics is an imperfect mirror of regular people&rsquo;s ideas about life and society, because they most often are choosing from a set menu (between the giant douche or the turd sandwich, to put it in South Park terminology).  ...  &ldquo;Nothing could be more liberating for American historians,&rdquo; Sellers says, &ldquo;than recognizing our own embeddedness in the liberal ideology we should be subjecting to critical analysis.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Safety Valve</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-06-12T07:59:14-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2e90714dfd4ce4bd6e8158c819016a0d-68.html#unique-entry-id-68</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2e90714dfd4ce4bd6e8158c819016a0d-68.html#unique-entry-id-68</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Danhof, Clarence H.   "Farm-Making Costs and The "Safety Valve": 1850-60."   The Journal of Political Economy 49, no.   3 (1941): 317-359.


Danhof argues that the idea that western migration represented a safety-valve for eastern wage-based industry, keeping wages high with the threat of massive migration, is complicated by the expense of actually starting a farm on the frontier.   Using contemporary accounts and estimates provided in guidebooks, Danhof argues that it was not only true that a settler needed a minimum of $1,000 (&ldquo;to equip and 80-acre farm, exclusive of land.&rdquo; 325), but also that it was well-known.    A wage worker in industry or agriculture was doing well in 1850 if he managed to save a dollar a week.    Thus, a couple of people could hope to save a thousand dollars in about ten years.  


Quotes many useful contemporary sources, including an 1852 address by Horatio Seymour to the NY Ag Society that &ldquo;distinguished between the &lsquo;old&rsquo; self-sufficient type of agriculture and the &lsquo;new&rsquo; agriculture of the 1850s, focused on profits and markets.&rdquo;   (318) And: &ldquo;No error is more common that to suppose that the farmer does not require Capital,&rdquo; says the Working Farmer to its readers in 1859.   (319)  Even so, according to the Western Farm Journal there were &ldquo;three hundred thousand men who, it was estimated, would emigrate in 1857 [and] would take $20,000,000 with them.&rdquo;   (322)


Contrary to some accounts that talk about the denigration of &ldquo;wage-slavery,&rdquo; by agriculturalists, Danhof says &ldquo;Wage employment in the rapidly growing western towns and cities was frequently pictured to eastern mechanics as providing excellent opportunities to share in the growth of the West, since labor was in demand and wages were high.&rdquo;   (323-4)  Perhaps this urban labor demand, more than farm-making, was the safety valve and the force that helped keep eastern wages high. 


Government land sales to individuals totaled nearly fifty million acres from 1850-60, Danhof says.   (329)  And &ldquo;Under the military land-grant acts of 1847 and subsequent years, the government presented, to more than half a million individuals, tracts of land varying from 40 to 160 acres each and totaling more than 57,000,000 acres.    These lands came on the [secondary] market after the warrants granting them were made assignable in 1852, and an active market was conducted in them with prices substantially below the [$1.25 per acre] federal minimum.&rdquo;   (330)  The federal government assigned to individuals by...sale and grant--about 57 per cent of its total land transfers made during the decade.  the remaining land conveyances were made as grants to the states...and to canal and railroad companies.&rdquo;   (331) Many of these lands came back on the market in the 1850s; most notably those owned by the Illinois Central Railroad, of which by 1860 &ldquo;1,279,382 acres had been sold at an average price of $11.50 per acre on terms of up to six years&rsquo; credit.&rdquo;    Land office officials downplayed the role of speculators, but President Buchanan warned that &ldquo;large portions of &lsquo;the public lands] have become the property of individuals and companies, and thus the price is greatly enhanced to those who desire to purchase for actual settlement.&rdquo; (quoting 1857 Annual Message, 332)


Danhof mentions that many farmers were able to raise &ldquo;farm-making&rdquo; money by selling existing property in the east, where growth had dramatically pushed up values.   He  suggests on this basis that the majority of new western farmers were old eastern farmers, which can no doubt be verified demographically.    And he notes in passing in his conclusion that there were a lot of other things you could do beside farming, if you ran away to the west.    These other activities would have been resorted to by adventurous or desperate single people; families would (hopefully) have made more solid preparations and thought things through.   


Based on my primary reading, I&rsquo;d suggest that the BIG issue Danhof doesn&rsquo;t directly address is extended family.    Serial migration, financed by extended families.    Both people who had gone before, and those who (temporarily or permanently) stayed behind, contributed to the migrating family&rsquo;s expenses; with the expectation that when the time came, the previous migrants would contribute to the next.    People also seem to have lived with relatives for what we would consider ridiculously extended periods.  
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Consequences of the Market Revolution</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-06-09T14:48:47-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3332efcbae06fa0a826b6d2095e085e4-67.html#unique-entry-id-67</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3332efcbae06fa0a826b6d2095e085e4-67.html#unique-entry-id-67</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[This book is primarily a series of essays responding to Sellers&rsquo; Market Revolution.    The most interesting essay, from my perspective is Christopher Clark&rsquo;s.    Professor Clark is front and center, the first chapter and the the only contributor who &ldquo;addresses the paradigm itself,&rdquo; according to Sellers in his response.   There&rsquo;s also an interesting essay by Eric Foner, that revisits the ground he covered 25 years earlier in Free Soil.  


In his introduction, Stokes mentions an 1816 Senate report &ldquo;pointed out that a ton of goods could be brought from Europe for roughly nine dollars, while the same amount would pay for shipment over only thirty miles by land.&rdquo;   (2)  Stokes also reminds us that &ldquo;in the eight decades between Revolution and Civil War, government at all levels interfered constantly and with major consequences in American economic life.&rdquo; ...  In addition to the books I&rsquo;m planning to read, Stokes highlights Watson&rsquo;s Liberty and Power; Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy; Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties; Shade, Banks or No Banks; and Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (although this may be covered adequately by his later What Hath God Wrought, which is on my list).


Clark&rsquo;s response to Sellers begins on an interesting note, with a subtle challenge to the &ldquo;kind of overall synthesis that once seemed to provide clear interpretive frameworks for professional scholars and the public.&rdquo;   (23)  This is especially interesting to me, both because I&rsquo;m interested in the different ways we write history for professionals and for the public, and because that was my strongest reaction to Sellers&rsquo; book as well.    After reading dozens of detailed, primary-source rich new social histories, Market Revolution&rsquo;s  broad brushstrokes and Sellers&rsquo; claim to be writing the new master narrative that would overturn and replace its predecessors seemed both old-fashioned and (gotta say it) arrogant.    It seems to me that in light of the twin challenges of post-modernism and the intricate webs of causality, self-awareness, and complexity found by Clark and others, it&rsquo;s extremely difficult to argue for the type of straight-ahead, mono-causal approach typical of master narratives.    Difficult to attribute all change to one cause, but even more difficult to refute someone else&rsquo;s findings, given the universe of possible sources and stories the past holds.  


...Clark first summarizes the consensus built by himself and others, &ldquo;over a generation of scholarship in several fields, particularly in the rural history of the American north,&rdquo; (and remarkably, somehow absent from both Sellers book and the  first round of professional response -- cf. the 1992 Journal of the Early Republic Symposium) and suggests that these findings complicate the &ldquo;set of binary comparisons  between conditions before and after the market revolution&rdquo; presented by Sellers and most mainstream historians.   (24, 28) Clark&rsquo;s argument is &ldquo;not that these things did not happen...but rather that they are in many ways a selective, mutually reinforcing collection of observations that direct attention away from a much richer tapestry of circumstances.&rdquo;   (28) &ldquo;When markets and market values come to be seen as penetrating American society,&rdquo; Clark continues, &ldquo;we start to lose a sense of the intricate processes entailed in bringing this about.  ...  (29)  It&rsquo;s a little ironic that this should be the case for Sellers, who shares with Clark an interest in the ways many Americans resisted this growing capitalist hegemony.    How much more is it a danger for pro-capitalist historians like Appleby and Rothenberg?


Freed from a strict requirement to exhaustively back up every claim, Clark takes the opportunity to extend his position a little beyond its former (published) boundaries.    He says &ldquo;Market  is too often conflated with capitalism,&rdquo; but although he may sympathize with Merrill&rsquo;s argument, Clark doesn&rsquo;t repeat it.    Instead, he draws a distinction between &ldquo;adaptation to dependence on markets&rdquo; and the &ldquo;shift in social relations&rdquo; brought about by wage labor and the &ldquo;commercial and institutional relationships that handled finance, production, and distribution on a larger and larger scale.&rdquo;   (30)  The institutional relationships he&rsquo;s referring to include &ldquo;an increasing tendency for those with economic power to make use of legal principles and court judgments that could shield their interests from public scrutiny or interference.&rdquo;   (35)  This is substantially the Horwitz argument, modified by Tomlins (Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic, which I should read).  


The picture Clark wants to leave us with is of a change that&rsquo;s infinitely more varied and complicated than the words &ldquo;market revolution&rdquo; would imply.    Religious revivalism, credit panics and depressions, cultural distrust of peddlers and salesmen, and a stubborn persistence of &ldquo;moral economy&rdquo; all suggest that &ldquo;the process of market development was more interrupted and less unidirectional than we are often inclined to conceive of it.&rdquo;   (31) And that &ldquo;Acceptance of the notion that the market was morally neutral was...[and is] uneven and contested.&rdquo; 

...I think the most interesting idea in the chapter (and in the book, actually) is Clark&rsquo;s extension of the idea that &ldquo;legal judgments tended to place decisions about property rights beyond the risk of legislative interference,&rdquo; to the suggestion that &ldquo;&lsquo;Privacy&rsquo; was not so much a politically neutral social consequence of a market economy, as a carefully evolved, necessary condition of its continuation in a democratic context.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The conventional historical interpretation of the effects of the market revolution&rdquo; that Sellers represents, Clark says, is rooted in a &ldquo;mythology [that] was a product of the ideological hegemony of the beneficiaries and supporters of American capitalism.&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;Individualism, inventiveness, mobility, freedom, and entrepreneurialism were not the conditions under which most nineteenth-century people lived.&rdquo;    So the fact that they emerged at this time as the embodiment of Americanism needs to be explained.  ...  Or a combination of motives and responses, in some type of ongoing conversation that extends to the present.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Clark 1991</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-06-04T12:27:04-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/74aaf3b9eebad95288479480ee4d0f27-66.html#unique-entry-id-66</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/74aaf3b9eebad95288479480ee4d0f27-66.html#unique-entry-id-66</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Subtitle: "Opening up the Rural History of the Early American Northeast."


In his introduction, Clark says "These [prototypical capitalist] farmers were of little interest, except to local and agricultural historians."    (280)  This is an interesting comment, coming from a social historian.    Suggests that not everyone is equally interesting -- that in order to be worthy of study, data has to support analysis: show how something important changed over time, etc.    This could be interpreted simply as the "why should I care test," or it could be construed to imply an ideological litmus test, if you were looking for a fight.  


Clark argues for a synthesis of Kulikoff's "market" and "social" points of view, in which "the former's quantitative ecvidence is incorporated into the latter's broader perspective."    (281)  This whole attempt at integrating data with interpretive structure is interesting -- it's a microcosm of the problem facing the history profession today.    An example of this tension between evidence and theory is Clark's observation that "the rural Northeast provides an unusual phenomenon in the Wallerstein world-system: a periphery that turned itself into a core.    Explaining how this happened will have important theoretical implications," not least because it will test the amenability of systems theory to data.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Henretta&#x27;s Mentalit&#xe9;</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-06-03T12:18:53-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d0fd022a5c0ac44b03c270e0ab1d7c0e-65.html#unique-entry-id-65</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d0fd022a5c0ac44b03c270e0ab1d7c0e-65.html#unique-entry-id-65</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[In this essay, which stands as one of the three (with Clark 1979 and Merrill) founding documents of the new social history's approach to the market revolution, Henretta objects to Lemon's characterization (in The Best Poor Man's Country) of "settlers [as] individualists, enterprising men and women intent upon the pursuit of material advantage at the expese of communal and non-economic goals."   (4)  Henretta says the "data presented by Lemon do not support this description of the inhabitants' 'orientation.'"    Says instead, that peopel settled in ethnic and religious clusters, suggesting the "importance of communal values [and] identity."  


Henretta says early American communities showed "correlation among age, wealth, status, and power...indicat[ing] the profound importance of age as a basic principle of social differentiation."   (7)  He goes on to say that "geographical movement...helped to maintain social stability in long-settled agricultural towns.    One-third of all adult males in Goshen, connecticut, in 1750 were without land; but two decades later a majority of these men had left the town and 70 percent of those who remained had obtained property through marriage, inheritance, or the savings from their labor.    A new landless group of unmarried sons, wage laborers, and tenant farmers had appeared in Goshen by 1771, again encompassing one-third of adult males." (ref.   J.   T.   Main and Danhof, 9)  But another way of looking at this, is that families held the land (and wealth?).    How many of these landless young men were members of land-owning families?    Similarly, Henretta seems to underestimate migration as a family strategy, and the ability of the essential family bond to remain unchanged over great distances and successive moves.    The Ranney history suggests this very strongly.


Henretta quotes Neil McNall (Genesee Valley) that "on no frontier was there an easy avenue to land ownership for the farmer of limited means."   (10)  He disparages Hofstadter's "Myth of the Happy Yeoman," and respects Bidwell's logic and level-headedness.    "The revolution in agriculture, as well as the breaking down of the self-sufficient village life, awaited the growth of a [large, urban] non-agricultural population," he quotes.    (Bidwell, Rural Economy, 16)  Until there was a stable, safe, accessible market, farmers produced for themselves and near neighbors.    McNall apparently talks (in Ch. 4) about the ability of "bankers, speculators, and merchants [to] use their political and economic power th set the terms of exchange" and gain "unearned" profits -- this probably bears looking into, especially because he's talking about upstate NY. 


Henretta makes the leap into culture by suggesting that social-economic realities "inhibited the emergence of individualism" on the frontier.   (26)  And even after the settlers became successful, "young adults of thriving farm communities," who stood to inherit land and a profitable way of life, "were not forced to confront the difficult problems of occupational choice and psychological identity as were those from depressed and overcrowded rural environments or growing cities."   (30)  That may be a stretch, but clearly the problems (including identity crises) faced by rural kids were probably different from those of their urban cousins.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Rothenberg&#x27;s economic history</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-06-09T11:42:01-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7762f780a2db33faa1e0feb76650fa60-64.html#unique-entry-id-64</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/7762f780a2db33faa1e0feb76650fa60-64.html#unique-entry-id-64</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[While she performs a little sleight of hand navigating between a tight, economist&rsquo;s definition of capital and markets, and the expansive, politically loaded language used in the historians&rsquo; debate, Rothenberg uncovers some really valuable data which helps advance our understanding of events, wherever we stand on the &ldquo;social vs. market&rdquo; historiographical spectrum.


...&ldquo;Synchronicity and convergence in the behavior of prices,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;is an acknowledged diagnostic of the role of market forces in their determination.&rdquo; (xiv)  As transportation and communication improvements allow farmers to participate in distant markets and to use price cues from those markets as guides in their local exchange relationships, Rothenberg says &ldquo;markets embedded within and constrained by values antithetical to them within the culture&rdquo; evolved into &ldquo;the &lsquo;disembedded&lsquo; market whose values penetrated and reinvented that culture.&rdquo; 

...(20-1)  As she&rsquo;s pulling these two ideas together, Rothenberg considers and rejects Marc Bloch&rsquo;s suggestion that a market exists when people don&rsquo;t simply buy and sell, but &ldquo;live by buying and selling.&rdquo; 

...But if this is caused by the introduction of &ldquo;the fundamental assumption of modernity...that the social unit of society is not the group, the guild, the tribe, or the city, but the person,&rdquo; how did that work?  ...  15) It&rsquo;s all well and good to observe that &ldquo;the market (for better or worse) objectifies some of the culture&rsquo;s most cherished values,&rdquo; but Rothenberg wants to say it also created these values, without resorting to cultural or intellectual history or mentalit&eacute;s.    This is important, because if we can agree on the values (&ldquo;the sovereignty of the individual,&rdquo; 16), we can then turn to examining what happened and asking if events and actions were consistent with these ideals?  

...5 1791:  &ldquo;The aim of farmers in this country is, not to make the most from the land, which is or has been cheap, but the most from labour, which is dear: the consequence of which has been, much of the ground has been scratched over, and none cultivated or improved as it ought to have been.&rdquo;   (25)  Throughout the book, Rothenberg shows that farmers&rsquo; actions can be understood as economic decisions (and often sophisticated and reasonable ones) reflecting more knowledge and understanding of their environment and options than they are normally credited with having.    This is extremely helpful, even if I don&rsquo;t go as far as she does in rejecting the influence of other sources of information and values on farmers&rsquo; decisions.  


...(29)  Individualism is &ldquo;subordinated to community norms,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The two institutional pillars of the market system--the rule of contract and private property--are conspicuously absent&rdquo; (quoting Platteau regarding third world villages, which I think raises a question about the relevance of these kinds of atemporal sociological comparisons. ...  There may, she says, be a &ldquo;two-tier system in which exchanges within the village...are insulated from exchanges with the outside world...  The &lsquo;prices&rsquo; at which goods exchange within the village are mere &lsquo;cultural constructs,&rsquo;&rdquo; Rothenberg concludes, as if prices arrived at by &ldquo;market outcomes&rdquo; were not. 


&ldquo;Indexes of individuation&rdquo; are linked to the 1740-45 religious upheavals of the Great Awakening, Rothenberg says, because both are caused by &ldquo;the breakdown of community solidarity [that] in turn can be traced to rapid population growth.&rdquo; ...  Similarly, she not only lists the many difficulties of studying persistence (for example, varied and changing town dimensions that make it difficult to compare two towns or to compare the same town in different time periods), she also asks the important question, &ldquo;what in fact does persistence measure?&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The capacity to produce surpluses,&rdquo; Rothenberg says, &ldquo;is often treated as so necessary a condition to trade that the moral economists infer the absence of marketing solely from calculations that the local resource base would have been insufficient to produce surpluses.&rdquo;   (46)  This is the &ldquo;principal misconception in the historical literature on markets,&rdquo; because it implies that households and communities evolve from self-sufficiency to market involvement, which in many cases (like the cobbler&rsquo;s bare-foot children) is untrue.    Based on her data, Rothenberg argues &ldquo;that &lsquo;time&rsquo;s arrow&rsquo; may very well have gone from marketing to self-sufficiency&rdquo; in rural Massachusetts. 

...(106) But through most of it, I didn&rsquo;t feel that she was going off the tracks (as far as I could follow the argument, with an undergrad Ag. ...  But I also didn&rsquo;t feel particularly compelled to abandon a &ldquo;social&rdquo; perspective that could accept this data and integrate it with other, non-market factors Rothenberg believes she is refuting.  


&ldquo;Local markets relayed the shocks [of the national and world economies] as changing relative prices,&rdquo; Rothenberg says, &ldquo;and resilient farmers responded by shifting from grains to hay, from hay to dairying, and finally from agriculture to commerce and industry.&rdquo;   (113)  The interesting thing is, the increases in agricultural productivity and the  diversification of rural capital investment that made these changes possible seem to date from the years between the end of the Revolution and Jefferson&rsquo;s election.    This doesn&rsquo;t necessarily contradict Appleby&rsquo;s claim that the Jeffersonians were pro-commerce, but it suggests they were riding a wave not of their own making.  


&ldquo;Central to such a [rural capital] transformation must have been the development of an effective mechanism for increasing the liquidity of the regional economy,&rdquo; so that the gains farmers were accumulating were free to move within (and to leave) the local agricultural economy.  ...  The requirements for this change, Rothenberg says, are &ldquo;institutional elements&rdquo; allowing &ldquo;credit instruments [to] become more fully negotiable,&rdquo; an &ldquo;increasing size and widening geographic spread of individual credit networks,&rdquo; and sufficient &ldquo;liquidity of financial instruments and therefore the propensity of rural wealthholders to substitute them for physical assets.&rdquo; 

...It doesn&rsquo;t seem unreasonable to accept both Rothenberg&rsquo;s conclusions on when and how credit and negotiable notes penetrated rural markets, and Horwitz&rsquo;s suggestion that legal changes were producing a &ldquo;capitalist&rdquo; political/economic regime in the Merrill sense (for the benefit of the rich).    In fact, Rothenberg&rsquo;s data shows &ldquo;The very rich appear to have been borrowing in order to lend, using their acreage...to underwrite their borrowing while at the same time shifting the composition of their assets out of farming and into commercial paper.  

...The final chapter, on productivity, is surprising because Rothenberg finds evidence that &ldquo;Massachusetts farmers were moving away from cereals to specialize in hay...in advance of significant western competition;&rdquo; in fact &ldquo;by 1801.&rdquo;   (221) This would seem to support the view that demand from what Bidwell (1921) calls a &ldquo;home market&rdquo; may have driven productivity growth, but may have begun much earlier than previously supposed.     The earlier beginning of significant demand, increases in productivity, and the resulting returns to rural farmers could have financed the New England industrial revolution, just as Rothenberg suggests.  ...  And the story of Shays&rsquo;s Rebellion is enhanced (but not completely rewritten, since Richards has already improved on Szatmary&rsquo;s account) if an increasing upland/lowland disparity of farm prosperity adds to the other social and financial factors already cited as causes of that conflict.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Anti-Capitalist Origins</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-06-02T21:51:32-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/74ae9c1f2da962967c2952bc3e1b464b-63.html#unique-entry-id-63</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/74ae9c1f2da962967c2952bc3e1b464b-63.html#unique-entry-id-63</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Michael Merrill


&ldquo;The Anti-Capitalist Origins of the United States&rdquo;


...Adam Smith, Merrill says, was an anti-capitalist who &ldquo;sharply condemned the &lsquo;mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor should be, the rulers of mankind.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (465)  The point, of course, is that this argument (and the whole question of the &ldquo;capitalist transition&rdquo;) revolves around how you define &ldquo;capitalism.&rdquo;  


Merrill says the word was not used much in the 18th century, and when it was used he says it carried connotations of &ldquo;court capitalism,&rdquo; the process by which political hangers-on enriched themselves at the expense of the rest of society.    &ldquo;Capitalism,&rdquo; for Merrill, means a political-economic organization of society by and for the benefit of &ldquo;capitalists.&rdquo;    In this sense, he says, &ldquo;the American Revolution did more to retard than to hasten capitalism&rsquo;s triumph in the New World [by] bringing to power a self-conscious class of small property holders who would resist dispossession and proletarianization for more than a century.&rdquo;   (466)  


Historians, Merrill says, &ldquo;universally equate &lsquo;capitalism&rsquo; with what eighteenth-century political economists called &lsquo;commercial society,&rsquo; and take for granted that the expansion of the latter automatically entailed the triumph of the former.&rdquo;   (468)  &ldquo;This shift in emphasis is not inconsequential,&rdquo; Merrill says.   (471) The real question might be, was it self-conscious and deliberate?    Because, as he points out in 1995, equating a market economy with capitalism means that being anti-capitalist is the same as being against commerce -- which everyone realizes is absurd.


But back to the market revolution.    Merrill says &ldquo;if the Wealth of Nations had a single theme, it was that the monied interest was not the same as the public interest.&rdquo;   (475)  The cast of characters remains the same, but Merrill sees their motivations slightly differently.   &ldquo;Many of the former colonists,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;were set to sweep away the monopolies, duties, prohibitions, and restraints that both the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations had complained of so bitterly.&rdquo;   (480)  Hamilton tried to build a &ldquo;capitalist&rdquo; economy that emulated Great Britain &ldquo;not so much because he admired its economic and political institutions but because he feared its political might.&rdquo;   (486)  This is an interesting point, because it provides Hamilton with a patriotic benefit-of-the-doubt, where other historians have been quick to condemn him.


In his letters to Robert Morris, Hamilton complained &ldquo;as early as the winter of 1779-1780  [before Jefferson published his Notes on the State of Virginia] that &lsquo;a great part of our internal commerce is carried on by barter,&rsquo; which he thought &lsquo;inconvenient, partial, confined, [and] destructive of both commerce and industry.&rsquo;   Most awkwardly, it also interfered with the ability of the government to raise an adequate revenue,&rdquo; which is the main point.    &ldquo;The farmers have the game in their hands,&rdquo; Hamilton warned.   (487)  &ldquo;Hamilton&rsquo;s funding system created an artificial interest--a class of monied men whose wealth and income was due to public largess and not to their own industry,&rdquo; Merrill says, noting that this group &ldquo;would ever more work to secure legislation that benefited themselves at the expense of the public.&rdquo;   (490)  This is true, and tragic.    But, following the logic of Merrill&rsquo;s story, this is not why Hamilton did it.    He did it to locate economic power in a group that was dependent on government, in the hopes that he and his successors would be able to control the economy through them.    No one could imagine, of course, how large the economy (and thus the power of this dependent group) would grow in the nineteenth century.  


The Democratic-Republican agrarian alternative, which favored discriminating between the holders of the debt (to avoid enriching speculators by assumption), retiring it quickly, reducing taxes, and limiting banking and joint-stock corporations, seems very reasonable in retrospect.    Extensive, rather than intensive, development became more feasible after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.    The question is, did the Jeffersonians have a viable economic plan before the &ldquo;revolution of 1800,&rdquo; or were they arguing in a more &ldquo;moral economy&rdquo; direction?    And how did this effect our subsequent understanding of what happened in both political and economic history?]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Clark: Social Change in America</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-06-01T18:51:37-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/aeead267df6430ee56a61ba0ffce2839-62.html#unique-entry-id-62</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/aeead267df6430ee56a61ba0ffce2839-62.html#unique-entry-id-62</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War


...An overview of American social history over the &ldquo;market revolution&rdquo; period Professor Clark described in detail in western Massachusetts in The Roots of Rural Capitalism.    In the introduction, Clark outlines six areas he thinks hold the most interest: families and households, work and labor, new social structures and elites that emerge &ldquo;from the interactions of households, labor, and property,&rdquo; regional differences, and the tension between &ldquo;extensive&rdquo; growth over new territories and &ldquo;intensive&rdquo; development in settled areas. (x)  He anchors the narrative in a &ldquo;perspective that places regional social differences at the heart of an argument about national developments.    These differences were not variations or exceptions to general trends,&rdquo; Clark says; &ldquo;rather, their interactions were the essence of social change&rdquo; throughout this period. (xi)


Clark further suggests &ldquo;that the inequalities of status between individuals within households played almost as significant a role in driving social change as conflicts and tensions arising from inequalities between social groups.&rdquo; (xi)  This is a difficult claim to sustain in a book of national scope, I think.    Slavery is such a monumental problem, it seems to overwhelm local, family-based conflicts over paternalism and dependence.  ...  (233)  While it&rsquo;s true that political freedom and economic freedom are not the same, a nuanced analysis of &ldquo;unfreedom&rdquo; in families and the household&rsquo;s role as a model of society seems a bit trivial when compared with America&rsquo;s big issue of the nineteenth century.    It&rsquo;s an interesting dilemma: how do you talk about smaller social issues that were more relevant to the lives of many Americans, when you have to keep jumping back to the big problem, and do it justice?    The point, I guess, is that the same basic problem of power and inequality is at the root of all these issues. 


This text would be a really interesting way to organize an undergrad class (or even an AP high school class).    Clark introduces ideas students could run a long way with: that &ldquo;Households were the primary...agents of social and economic organization,&rdquo; and that &ldquo;on the eve of the American Revolution, four of every five people&rdquo; lacked the basic rights the Colonies were fighting for &ldquo;because they held a status legally defined as dependent.&rdquo;   (3, 4)  Interesting too, that John Adams recognized in 1790, that &ldquo;the great question will forever remain, who shall work?&rdquo; 

...The undergrads won&rsquo;t notice, of course, but as I was reading, I was able to sort-of tick off (some of) the historiography.  ...  (12)  There&rsquo;s urban growth and seasonal labor demands influencing migration between country and city.   (16) But he threw in some thought-provoking surprises: &ldquo;in the late colonial period, the Mid-Atlantic region was supplying about one-seventh of the world&rsquo;s rapidly-growing demand for iron.&rdquo;   (14) Or: &ldquo;When peace was signed in 1783, the British resettled thousands of black soldiers in eastern Canada.&rdquo;   (49) And the narrative is shaped by ideas: &ldquo;the existence of elites...shaped the geography of revolution and the initial boundaries of the new United States.&rdquo;   (35) It would be a good exercise, as I read for the fields, to try to fit what I&rsquo;m learning into an overarching narrative like this one.


Other interesting notes for me: &ldquo;the population of New York State nearly trebled within twenty years, from 340,000 people in 1790 to 959,000 in 1810.&rdquo;   (90)  And, confirming my suspicion (derived originally from Clark in the Roots or somewhere else, I don&rsquo;t recall?)   that women really pushed forward the &ldquo;transition&rdquo; to get out of time-consuming, inefficient home textile production, Clark quotes an 1833 Dudley resident, Aaron Tufts: &ldquo;Comparatively nothing is done in the household manufactory...a female can now earn more cloth in a day than she could make in the household way in a week.&rdquo; (from &ldquo;the McLane Report,&rdquo; Documents Relative to Manufacture in the United States, Doc. no. ...  165)  A good reminder that the new economy benefited rural people, and that they knew this and acted accordingly.


...&ldquo;Irish immigration...100,000 in 1847 [to] as high as 221,000 in 1851.&rdquo;   (181) German migration, peaking in 1854 when the total of 215,000 immigrants &ldquo;temporarily exceeded that of any other group.&rdquo;   (182)  Part of the answer to the question of settlement patterns could be based in the local economies at the time these people landed, especially the relative weakness of particular agricultural markets.  

...Northeastern urban/rural differences in inequality are also interesting.    &ldquo;In Boston, 1 percent of the total population held 65 percent of aggregate wealth recorded in tax lists in 1860, and the richest 10 percent held more than 95 percent...  The remaining 5 percent of wealth was held by the middling 40 percent ...and the bottom half of the city&rsquo;s population had nothing at all.&rdquo; ...  A couple of pages later: &ldquo;While there were about 1,800 clergymen in 1800...by 1845 there were almost 40,000.&rdquo; 

...I found a couple of books in it that hadn&rsquo;t been on my radar, that now are.    
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Lawyers and the Elite</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-29T16:45:44-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/75e6dc0e3579d3fd194287cb0562ef36-61.html#unique-entry-id-61</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/75e6dc0e3579d3fd194287cb0562ef36-61.html#unique-entry-id-61</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He says &ldquo;I seek to show that one of the crucial choices made during the antebellum period was to promote economic growth primarily through the legal, not the tax, system, a choice which had major consequences for the distribution of wealth and power in American society.&rdquo; (xv)  He also has some interesting ideas about the way &ldquo;the internal technical life of a field generates autonomous forces that determine its history.&rdquo; (xi)  We make a mistake, Horwitz believes, if we fail to account for the activities and interests of lawyers, judges, the legal profession, law schools, etc., when looking at how &ldquo;the law&rdquo; influenced history.  

...Constitutional law, he says, &ldquo;represents episodic legal intervention buttressed by a rhetorical tradition that is often an unreliable guide to the slower (and often more unconscious) processes of legal change in America.&rdquo; (xii)  Constitutional law also focuses on judicial review, rather than what Horwitz characterizes as a very active, constructive, legislative role taken on by nineteenth century jurists.  ...  As judges began to conceive of common law adjudication as a process of making and not merely discovering legal rules, they were led to frame general doctrines based on a self-conscious consideration of social and economic policies.&rdquo;   (2)  The ancient tradition of &ldquo;an eternal set of principles expressed in custom and derived from natural law&rdquo; gave way to an understanding of law as &ldquo;an instrument of policy&rdquo; that could be used &ldquo;for governing society and promoting socially desirable conduct.&rdquo; 

...The major examples Horwitz uses to illustrate this change surround the competing uses for water (mill power, irrigation, navigation, fishing -- although he doesn&rsquo;t really try to make the case for each of these or point out how these interests were distributed in society), which illustrated the problems inherent in &ldquo;a conception of ownership [including] a commitment to absolute dominion.&rdquo; ...  (34)  He fails to examine closely whether the &ldquo;greater efficiency&rdquo; ever really produced its claimed social benefits (or even existed, other than as short-term paper gains) -- but maybe the people at the time didn&rsquo;t ask these questions either.    The point is that &ldquo;By changing the rules and disguising the changes in the complexities of technical legal doctrine, the facade of economic security can be maintained even as new property is allowed to sweep away the old.&rdquo; ...  The legal system, he says, was used to not only change the rules of the game to benefit an increasingly elite class, but also to hide the fact that these changes were being made.  ...  What it needs is some people in the story to show how it happened, and how people reacted, assuming anyone on the short end of the transaction knew it was happening. (this raises an interesting question: how do we tell stories about things we now see were happening, but that people of the time were unaware of?  

...(41)  This opened the door for the courts to direct business toward their idea of the public good and &ldquo;enabled common law judges to choose the direction of American economic development,&rdquo; at least when it came into contact with older legal ideas of property and equity.   (42)  I&rsquo;ve been wondering how people at the time responded to these changes; maybe one place to look would be at the &ldquo;storm of bitter protest&rdquo; caused by the &ldquo;extension of the mill act to manufacturing establishments.&rdquo;   (51)  Apparently there were people who saw through the similarity of water power, and argued that while early mills had been almost communal in nature, &ldquo;manufacturing establishments were private institutions.&rdquo; 

...A State grant is no good if &ldquo;the grantee cannot exercise it without being subject to ruinous damages, so as to swell the cost of their enterprise&rdquo; beyond its ability to make a profit, one commentator warned.   (69) Rather than examine whether these social costs really argued against the business going forward (especially in the cases of railroads in the 1840s-60s), Horwitz says the courts socialized &ldquo;consequential damages.&rdquo;    This enabled them to disqualify them, under the legal justification that &ldquo;The law gives no private remedy for anything but a private wrong.&rdquo; (quoting Blackstone, 76)  So the costs were socialized (in economic terms, externalized) at the same time the benefits were privatized in the form of corporate profits.   (Horwitz doesn&rsquo;t say much about the decision to do projects like Canals and Railroads in the private rather than the public sector; but it would be interesting to understand how this choice was made in America.)


Over the course of the nineteenth century, Horwitz says the basic &ldquo;attitude toward legal liability&rdquo; became &ldquo;based on the assumption that the &lsquo;quiet citizen must keep out of the way of the exuberantly active one.&rsquo;  ...  (101)  Horwitz says &ldquo;there is reason to suppose&rdquo; that this &ldquo;was not simply an abstract effort to avoid political contention but that it entailed more conscious decisions about who would bear the burdens of economic growth.&rdquo;    This is a really interesting claim, but it needs to be backed up, I think, with some evidence that actual people made this decision at the time.


...Attributing the change in definition of corporations to an individualist spirit seems to put the cart before the horse, since early corporations &ldquo;continued to argue both that their charters were grants of exclusive property interests and that economic rivalry was, in effect, a private law nuisance to property.&rdquo;   (114)  This seems like a blatantly opportunistic attempt to have your cake and eat it to: the corporations were capitalizing on their status as something in between public and private, with the benefits of both.     But the question is, how did corporations get from the 18th century definition of a public body (like a municipality) working for the public good, to the 19th century definition of a private company doing business to produce profit for its investors?


...Promissory notes were used in place of cash, and &ldquo;in order to make notes negotiable a subsequent endorsee [must] be allowed to recover on the note regardless of the consideration between the original parties.&rdquo;   (177)  The same-as-cash nature of the note enabled &ldquo;merchants to exclude the question of the equality of a bargain by transacting their business through promissory notes,&rdquo; and excluded the courts from playing a role in judging the fairness of a transaction.  

...Returning to the issue of negotiable notes, Horwitz points out that common law not only established rules allowing &ldquo;subsequent innocent purchasers&rdquo; to collect on the notes regardless of any defects in the original deal, but it allowed &ldquo;the legal system [to] sanction private arrangements whose effect was to increase the supply of money by allowing individuals to agree to substitute their own notes for currency designated by the state.&rdquo;  ...  Growth would have been much slower, and demand for state money creation would have been more urgent, if people like my upstate NY merchants had not been able to do business using notes.  ...  Couldn&rsquo;t it also be argued that these people were making policy, and &ldquo;the law&rdquo; was just trying to keep up with them?  ...  Massachusetts Chief Justice Theophilus Parsons&rsquo; 1808 remarks seem the suggest the law was following: &ldquo;The circulation of negotiable paper,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is extremely useful to trade, as it multiplies commercial credit, and the notes pass form man to man as cash.  

...From a broader context, Horwitz shows that American law in the nineteenth century was no different in this respect from that of any other time or place.  ...  Horwitz believes recent historians have been &ldquo;more concerned with finding evidence of governmental intervention than they were in asking in whose interest these regulations were forged.&rdquo; (xiv)  His book suggests who some of the targets of questions should be -- it remains to be seen whether it can be proved these people were acting consciously, and how they and society at large understood their actions and the changes that resulted.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Peddlers of Progress</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-29T16:03:57-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f7b6fb3ecc1fe9d962f3229e316c7464-60.html#unique-entry-id-60</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f7b6fb3ecc1fe9d962f3229e316c7464-60.html#unique-entry-id-60</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Jaffee, D.   (1991).   "Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860."   The Journal of American History 78(2): 511-535.


http://www.jstor.org/stable/2079532


Jaffee 1991:  Draws heavily on Kulikoff, and talks a little too much about the bourgeoise cultural transformation, the &ldquo;self-fashioning of new identities,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;democratization of gentility.&rdquo;   (513)  After the Civil War, he says, the &ldquo;grass-roots character of rural marketing disappeared as the flow and agents of cultural change in the countryside reversed direction, rural agents becoming urban.&rdquo;   (534)  He spends a lot of time on Massachusetts&rsquo; Hawkers and Peddlers Act of 1846, &ldquo;which established a graded level of licenses based on &lsquo;morals and citizenship.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (533)  This was an attempt, he says, by local people to &ldquo;reduce the number of itinerants in the interior settlements and maintain the dominant role of the storekeeper as mediator between producer and consumer.&rdquo;   (532)  Not suprisingly, I&rsquo;m again dissatisfied with this either-or approach to the issue.    Rural is good, urban bad?    But by 1846, Massachusetts peddlers (many of them based in rural towns like Ashfield) were covering not only the northeast, but the west and south on behalf of urban and rural manufacturers.    So whose interests were being served by the 1846 bill?    Who was behind it?    Who voted against it?  


Maybe I&rsquo;m particularly hard on these types of accounts, because they come so frustratingly close, and then miss the mark.    &ldquo;The creation of the Yankee peddler in antebellum popular literature served as a rich vehicle to convey the meaning of the charged encounter...[and as] symbolic representations to rural people of changing economic transactions between individuals,&rdquo; Jaffee says.   (527)  But then he doesn&rsquo;t take it anywhere.    He lets it stand as just another example of what he seems to imagine is a straightforward, black vs. white conflict in the transition to capitalism: &ldquo;the market became dislodged from an actual sense of place and became an amorphoous entity, a free-floating concept&rdquo; (quoting Agnew, 527).    If anything, the presence of peddlers in the economic lives of rural people (both as suppliers of stuff, and as brothers, sons, and neighbors engaged in the business) argues that rural people had a more complex, layered engagement with commerce than these accounts from the Kulikoff school would suggest.    Their responses to &ldquo;itinerants&rdquo; are as ambivalent as their responses to &ldquo;capitalism,&rdquo; because in both cases, they&rsquo;re not engaging with those categories, but with the particulars of the situations they find themselves in.  


Along the way, some interesting facts:  &ldquo;in the 1850s the &lsquo;full-line, full-service wholesaler begain to market most standardized consumer goods&rsquo;&rdquo; (quoting Alfred D.   Chandler, Jr., 534).    The change from merchants maintaining a variety of supply relationships, to the one-stop wholesale shop seems to imply a radical change in power and agency.    And: &ldquo;By 1860...  In Massachusetts as a whole, there were 1,648 peddlers, 5 percent of the total commercial population of 35,937.&rdquo;   (522)  That&rsquo;s a low percentage, but I wonder what counts as commercial population.    And &ldquo;Rufus Porter [founder of Scientific American]...would stroll into villages with his brightly decorated camera box, a camera obscura...  Porter advertised his profiles (silhouettes) at twenty cents apiece and could produce perhaps twenty in an evening.&rdquo;   (521)  Another guy who needs to make a cameo appearance in a story!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Elusive Republic</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-28T07:10:50-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0fd0afdeeb61bca468098e64a635a8aa-59.html#unique-entry-id-59</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0fd0afdeeb61bca468098e64a635a8aa-59.html#unique-entry-id-59</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The basic premise of The Elusive Republic is that the Jeffersonian Republicans, especially Madison but even including Franklin, thought they could use the frontier to substitute development across space for development over time.    In this way, America could be kept in a sort-of artificial infancy, forestalling the what these men (all familiar with classical antiquity) universally believed was the inevitable declension of civilization and decadence.    Their objective was to keep America in an intermediate state which they hoped would allow for commercialization without the &ldquo;corruption&rdquo; of public morals and dependence on imported luxuries which they believed marked the beginning of the end for a republic.  ...  The irony, understood by only a few, was that in its attempt to keep people virtuous, Sparta had eliminated the freedoms and individual rights the republicans sought to protect.


...It is easy to assume that our basic concerns were theirs, and especially that our understanding of the Revolution and its legacy accurately reflects the meaning and significance they attached to it...few acknowledge how frightening and even distasteful twentieth-century America might appear to the members of a Revolutionary generation.&rdquo;   (5)  This is due, he says, not only to the unimaginable changes that separate them and us, but also to the fact that they were knowingly engaged in an anachronistic, &ldquo;poignant struggle to adapt the traditional, classical republican impulse to modern commercial society.&rdquo;   (9)  Since &ldquo;The Revolutionaries lived during an age when a consideration of the normative dimension of economic life&rdquo; was still expected, McCoy sets out to describe their attempt to &ldquo;establish...a republican system of political economy in America.&rdquo; 

...(10)  It might also be described, to extend his train of thought, as a system idealists like Jefferson tried to apply to a reality they didn&rsquo;t (and didn&rsquo;t want to)completely understand.    Or, if one were cynical, it might be described as a political ideology, presented to a European audience (via Francois Marbois) wondering how America was going to arrange its affairs.  

...Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.  ...  It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers.    Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition...generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer to measure its degree of corruption.&rdquo;  

...Even so, why should the breasts of farmers be the only possible &ldquo;deposit for substantial and genuine virtue&rdquo;?    Is it only because Jefferson says so -- and that&rsquo;s why he needs to resort to &ldquo;God&rdquo;?  ...  If it&rsquo;s Virginia gentlemen farmers, then he&rsquo;s conveniently forgetting not only that they owned slaves, but that they owned slaves specifically because they were not living in virtuous subsistence, but producing for foreign commercial markets!  

...&ldquo;Dependence begets subservience,&rdquo; is only a short step from some type of Rousseau-ian belief that any social interaction is a &ldquo;fall&rdquo; from a pure state of nature.  ...  Of course, he probably wasn&rsquo;t aware that slaves made his life as a Virginia-aristocrat-with-delusions-of-rusticity possible in the first place.  

...Republicans like Jefferson and George Mason, he says &ldquo;never doubted that the natural sequence of social development would culminate inevitably in the form of society he feared.&rdquo; ...  It is interesting, as McCoy notes, how these people are able to mix these ancient paradigms with &ldquo;enlightenment&rdquo; ideas from Hume and Adam Smith, in ways that seem unreasonable to us now.  


...He says Smith both &ldquo;emphatically approved of an advanced division of labor as the basis of continuing economic growth and social progress, [and] was also concerned with its concomitant tendency to relegate the laboring classes to a brutish existence that crippled their minds and bodies.&rdquo;    (37)  Smith is the smartest guy in this book, offering nuanced, qualified observations, such as his statement that under mercantilism, &ldquo;the private interest of a part, and of a subordinate part of society&rdquo; was taken to be &ldquo;the general interest of the whole.&rdquo; (quoting Wealth of Nations, 43).    Other insights are provided by Franklin: &ldquo;Manufactures are founded in poverty...it is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture.&rdquo; (quoting &ldquo;The Interest of Great Britain Considered,&rdquo; 51)  and John Adams: &ldquo;the balance of power in a society [parallels] the balance of property in land [so society must] make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society [or] make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates.&rdquo;  

...McCoy suggests there was some &ldquo;uneasy suspicion (and sometimes recognition) among the Revolutionaries that even predominantly agricultural America was already a relatively advanced commercial society.&rdquo; ...  After all, as Thomas Paine said, &ldquo;Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe.&rdquo;  (quoting Common Sense, 89)  


The cause of America&rsquo;s problems, in McCoy&rsquo;s story, was the new nation&rsquo;s inability to sell its agricultural surpluses freely in Europe and the West Indies.    In this sense, Britain nearly defeated the American republic, by causing a political crisis that split the founding generation into republican and federalist partisans.    Jefferson and Madison&rsquo;s idea of &ldquo;developing across space rather than through time&rdquo; depended on both the availability of a frontier and the &ldquo;ability of new settlers to get their surpluses to market.&rdquo;   (121-2)  The Embargo and attempts to eliminate foreign luxuries and focus on domestic manufacture of &ldquo;necessaries&rdquo; raise interesting questions about the role of government in economic development.    McCoy reminds the reader that even Hamilton insisted &ldquo;the development of advanced manufactures in America would require extensive government encouragement.&rdquo; (quoting the &ldquo;Report on Manufactures,&rdquo; 159)  He concludes that the republicans&rsquo; revolution, the &ldquo;escape from time,&rdquo; had always been understood by Madison as temporary.  ...  Maybe the defining moment, in political changes like the demise of agrarian republicanism and its reappearance as an American myth, is not when the other guys finally win out, but when its proponents give it up.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Public Land and the frontier</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-26T07:29:37-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2a690e869a48d9d0d00f3901b3eb9360-58.html#unique-entry-id-58</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2a690e869a48d9d0d00f3901b3eb9360-58.html#unique-entry-id-58</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A mostly administrative history of western expansion, that offers some interesting hints at culture, mostly unintentionally and between the lines.    &ldquo;The distribution of the public domain had a profound effect on the economic life of the nation,&rdquo; Rohrbough says.    Not only in the &ldquo;great agricultural empire&rdquo; of the early twentieth century, but because &ldquo;In the first fifty years of the Republic&rsquo;s history, citizens spent much time devising ways to get something for nothing from the public domain.&rdquo;  (of course, this may not have been the Indians&rsquo; perspective.    238)  As time passed, &ldquo;The politicians who increasingly administered the public domain did not do so out of a feeling of service but to make a profit.&rdquo;   (229)  This is an odd statement, as Rohrbough showed that appointees as early as Gallatin were heavy speculators.    &ldquo;Land speculation,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;was part of the American scene from the first settlements;&rdquo; and so, it seems, was the tendency to mix the public and private domains.


A recurring issue in distributing public lands were &ldquo;pioneer families [who] defied the Indians [and] challenged the authority of entrepreneurs,&rdquo; speculators, and bureaucrats.    (3)  Pre-emption deals had to be made throughout the period of western expansion, to accomodate those who squatted on frontier lands.    But the land and money expended on this seems like a drop in the bucket, compared with the fortunes and political power that accrued to the well-connected.    &ldquo;Congress...sold one million acres to the Ohio Company of Associates in the same week that it passed the Northwest Ordinance.&rdquo;   And &ldquo;John Cleves Symmes (a territorial judge and William Henry Harrison&rsquo;s father-in-law) concluded an arrangement with the Treasury Board for one million acres.&rdquo;  

...(24) Perhaps, given the size of the western wilderness, this did not seem at odds with his speculations, in Gallatin&rsquo;s mind.    &ldquo;William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, made a series of extensive purchases from the Indians&rdquo; in the first decade of the 1800s.    (30) The terms of these purchases are not elucidated, so it&rsquo;s not surprising that the Indians next appear as &ldquo;two thousand infuriated Hell Hounds&rdquo;  (quoting a settler, 49).    Chances are, both Rohrbough and the settlers knew what had infuriated the Indians, but chose not to think about it.


...And &ldquo;Altho you say the Ohio feever is abated in Vermont--the Missouri & Illinois Feever Rages greatly in Ohio, Kentucky, & Tennessee and carried off thousands.&rdquo;  (quoting a letter from a son to his father back east, 74)  Indeed, &ldquo;Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,&rdquo; wrote a contemporary traveler.    &ldquo;We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track, towards the Ohio, of family groups, behind and before us, some with a view to a particular spot; close to a brother perhaps, or a friend, who has gone before, and reported well of the country.&rdquo;   (103)  In 1819, the eastern half of Michigan was contained in a Land District whose office was at Detroit.  (map, 104-5)  By 1834, a new District had been formed for the western half, centered on Bronson (Kalamazoo), est. ...  (193)  Much of this purchasing was speculative and based on shaky credit, as shown by the experience of Allegan, &ldquo;One of the paper cities that vanished beneath the waves of the panic of 1837.&rdquo; 

...Crawford complained that many  &ldquo;Banks have been incorporated, not because there was capital seeking investment; not because the places where they were established had commerce and manufactures...but because men without active capital wanted the means of obtaining loans, which their standing in the community would not command from banks or individuals having real capital and established credit.&rdquo;   ...  But it also seems reasonable that when &ldquo;bank capital increased from $65,000,000 to more than $125,000,000&rdquo; between 1813 and 1819, some bad credit decisions may have been made.   (111)  The Second Bank of the United States&rsquo; &ldquo;loss of regulatory power...following Jackson&rsquo;s veto of the bill for recharter and the removal of deposits led to the rise of innumerable state banks which expanded loans at a dizzy rate.&rdquo;   (178)  As a result, &ldquo;In the thirty months from the fall of 1834 to the spring of 1837, the American people generated the largest land office business in the history of the Republic.    From the timberlands of Maine to the Cotton Kingdom of Mississippi, in city lots of Chicago, and in the wilderness of central Michigan, the dimensions of the land boom touched people of all stations and locations.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The desire for lands,&rdquo; Rohrbough says, &ldquo;was not dampened by Andrew Jackson&rsquo;s declaration that after September 1 only specie would be received in payment for public lands.    The Bank of Michigan in Detroit quickly ordered specie from the East, acquired $500,000 in hard money from New York in October alone, and supplied land office money to continue the Michigan boom.&rdquo;   (197)  Perhaps the Panic of 1837 and the subsequent ongoing scarcity of cash in places like upstate NY can be attributed in part to the fact that hard money continued to be found on the frontier.  ...  In spite of the continued Michigan boom, Rohrbough concludes that &ldquo;The specie circular...and the panic of 1837 marked the decline of the land office business as a dominant force in American life......  It was a world in which people would be drawn to cities rather than the land, in which the rise of the factory system would sharply distinguish a laboring class, in which great industrial complexes would attract the investment capital of the nation.&rdquo; 

...Rohrbough has made a good start -- now a social and cultural history of the people who came west, and the communities they formed, needs to take the next step.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Yankee Peddlers</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-17T21:23:29-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0205f346d564a8823c5eb91b3d66976d-57.html#unique-entry-id-57</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0205f346d564a8823c5eb91b3d66976d-57.html#unique-entry-id-57</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Although old, this book is still considered the master text on peddlers and itinerants in early America.    Wright devotes about half his time to Yankee Peddlers, and the rest to preachers, cobblers, tramps, itinerant craftsmen, and entertainers.    There are some interesting observations about the rise of automobile and bus transportation -- Wright expects technology will begin &ldquo;freeing&rdquo; people from urban life just as it once &ldquo;confined&rdquo; them.   


&ldquo;The dealer in small wares, essences and such, was called a &lsquo;trunk-peddler,&rsquo; because he carried his goods in one or two small, oblong, tin trunks slung on his back by a webbing harness or a leather strap.&rdquo;    (19)  I&rsquo;d like to see one of these set-ups.    Even more, I&rsquo;d like to put it on and carry a loaded rig for a couple of miles, to see what it felt like.    Wright mentions Timothy Dwight&rsquo;s disdain for peddlers, adding &ldquo;whatever exuberant youth does, the clergy consider wrong.  

...The young peddler&rsquo;s travels, Wright says, &ldquo;afforded him a fairly complete survey of the rural markets; he could judge the best neighborhoods in which to open a store.&rdquo;    (22)  They covered the entire settled area of the country; &ldquo;Even Horn&rsquo;s Overland Guide to California--the Baedecker of the forty-niners--contains the advertisement of a Mr.   Sypher in Fort Des Moines, who is willing to supply peddlers...at the lowest possible rates.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The essence peddler,&rdquo; says Wright, &ldquo;was quite a different sort.    Usually a free-lance, he managed to scrape together ten or twenty dollars [and] fill his tin trunk with peppermint, bergamot, and wintergreen extracts and bitters.    In the backwoods these bitters were in great demand.    They were mixed with the local brand of homemade liquor...  Other extracts were used as remedies and antidotes.&rdquo;   (56-7)  Wright quotes Hawthorne&rsquo;s 1838 passage from the American Note-books describing his conversation with an essence peddler on the way home to Ashfield, to renew his supply.  


Wright thinks &ldquo;We can trace the dislike of the town for the country through practically all phases of itinerant life.&rdquo;    Despite the fact that &ldquo;had there been no peddlers there would have been no countryside distribution, and...manufacturing, even of the humblest household sort, could never have survived,&rdquo; Wright says &ldquo;the peddler&rsquo;s foe was the established, settled, town merchant.&rdquo;   (89)  It&rsquo;s hard to judge this argument, because Wright simply asserts it.    He does not cite any examples (and although he includes a large bibliography, he includes no notes), but his general attitude is betrayed a few pages later when he comments &ldquo;a  vast amount of sentiment has been wasted over this Homespun Era.&rdquo;  

...In an interesting aside, Wright dates the entry of Jewish peddlers into the picture to about 1836, &ldquo;following the oppressive marriage laws promulgated in Bavaria&rdquo; in 1835.    He doesn&rsquo;t spend a lot of time on this, and it doesn&rsquo;t seem particularly relevant to my story, but it&rsquo;s interesting that there&rsquo;s a whole other view of peddling and the rise of Jewish families in America, that originates here.    See, for example, the American Jewish Historical Society website. 


I raced through the sections on preachers and entertainers, but noticed a couple of interesting people and facts along the way:  Jonathan Chapman and William Augustus Bowles are both probably worth a closer look at some point.    And &ldquo;the yeast man who kept his precious fluid--barm, it was called locally--in a jar in front of him in his cart,&rdquo; is probably a character who should make a cameo appearance in a story, someday.    (229)    New York street sellers are interesting, but seem a lot tamer than London costermongers.  


&ldquo;Out of Boston, in 1832...ran no fewer than 106 coach lines to all parts of the State and contiguous States.&rdquo;    (265)  Important for me to keep in mind that Ashfield was a rest-stop on the Boston to Albany mail run.    There&rsquo;s got to be some material on this, either in Ashfield or at the PVMA.  ...  Harnden, who started the &ldquo;Express Package Carrier&rdquo; company between Boston and New York in 1839 is also probably worth looking into.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>1994 Panel Discussion</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-06T21:19:45-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a96f856eb36fbd0ca45d87bd215eca69-56.html#unique-entry-id-56</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a96f856eb36fbd0ca45d87bd215eca69-56.html#unique-entry-id-56</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[This is another in a series of what seem to be central texts in the evolution of the &ldquo;market revolution.&rdquo;    Probably seems like incredibly old news to those who participated, so I should probably keep my mouth shut about it until I have a better sense of how it turned out.


Christopher Clark mentions in his introduction that most interpretations &ldquo;stress the class and other conflicts that helped structure politics in the Jacksonian period and after.&rdquo; ...  When we look at &ldquo;transitions&rdquo; in different regions, do we assume (like Turner) that they recapitulate a similar process?    Or on the other hand, are we tied to these national political eras like the Jacksonian, and do we miss similarities between regions at different times and long, slow developments?  


Daniel Vickers proposes we look at &ldquo;a period in which: 1) commerce spread gradually and mattered vitally to everyone it touched but did not dominate everywhere; 2) business interests were acquiring increasing influence over the state but had not captured it entirely; 3) the rules of custom and law were changing to facilitate the expropriation of small producers, although the process of expropriation was far from complete; and 4) wage labor was growing in importance but rarely became the sole support of any family.&rdquo;   (268)  Seems like we ought to call this &ldquo;the long, slow, irregular  transition to a capitalist market economy&rdquo; 


...I like the idea that trade was often supplemental to &ldquo;competence,&rdquo; but it seems like women&rsquo;s relatively quick abandonment of household textile manufacture is based on a very clear (and very smart) understanding that their time and energy is better spent doing other things.  ...  It&rsquo;s about what&rsquo;s best for the family (over the limited, contingent terrain they can see from where they stand).


...Would it be useful for part of this period to say that people (white men) exercised influence in their roles as businessmen -- rather than through some other leadership role they may have used earlier (political, social, religious, wealthy-gentleman)?  

...(But that said, it&rsquo;s true that boom and bust business cycles tend to drive smaller people out of businesses, which allows the big guys who can weather the recession to buy assets cheap, gain market share, etc. 

...I really like a comment Clark makes in the wrap-up, about &ldquo;the likelihood that wage work was often not an imposition, but demanded by men and women seeking to loosen the constraints imposed on them by family labor, servanthood or apprenticeship.&rdquo;   (280) This seems like a reasonable recognition that there are a lot of things worse than working for wages.


I do agree with Vickers that the &ldquo;ambivalent sense of the opportunities and dangers that nascent capitalism presented&rdquo; is really interesting.  

...Stephen Aron&rsquo;s focus on frontier land and the role of speculators is interesting partly because it highlights the way historians have made speculators the bad guys of the west (like merchants are the bad guys of the northeast?).    &ldquo;Unrestrained acquisitiveness,&rdquo; he says, on the part of both &ldquo;backcountry men&rdquo; and &ldquo;better-capitalized gentlemen...interfered with the homestead ethic, undermined the potency of agrarian radicalism, and ultimately eroded the sphere of economic life that existed apart from market relations.&rdquo;    I&rsquo;m not sure if I buy this, but the &ldquo;favoritism&rdquo; shown by the government to its friends when distributing land throughout the history of the frontier seems like a legitimate provocation for a &ldquo;radical agrarian critique of market relations,&rdquo; if that&rsquo;s the way they actually saw the situation.    Or did they see it as corrupt government intrusion into business, in a way we no longer do?


Nancy Grey Osterud observes that the division of labor between men and women meant that in some places, women preceded men into the market economy, while in others they trailed behind.  ...  It&rsquo;s interesting that in women&rsquo;s diaries she examined, &ldquo;it is difficult to distinguish an occasion of shared labor from a social visit.&rdquo;    But I&rsquo;m not sure this proves that &ldquo;men adopted market paradigms&rdquo; more readily than women, while women &ldquo;maintained a mode of conceiving of cooperative labor that was modeled on kin relationships.&rdquo;    (276) Maybe this isn&rsquo;t a (hard-wired) different response, but a difference in the timing of a response, based on differing experiences?


...(277)  &ldquo;Other historians,&rdquo; he admits, &ldquo;use the term [capitalism] differently--to refer to a system of production based, supposedly exclusively, on private enterprise, freedom, and individual initiative.  ...  A commercial system run by or in the interests of farmers, mechanics and laborers deserves to be called something else.&rdquo; 

...Or, the greater the share of the national income accruing to capital rather than labor (property rather than work) the more powerful the capitalists. ...  A higher-tech industrial base would seem to increase capital productivity (think semi-conductors vs. bricks), but buried in that conclusion are a lot of assumptions about intellectual property, who benefits from invention, etc.    There are a million qualifications that need to be made, but somehow I still sympathize with the idea that you can tell something about a society from looking at the wealth and income curves.    Not to mention Merrill&rsquo;s conclusion: &ldquo;Securing higher wages is not a diversion from the revolution.  

...Clark concludes that &ldquo;the dichotomy between &lsquo;market&rsquo; and &lsquo;social&rsquo; approaches&rdquo; is old news, and can safely be abandoned. ...  I think a lot of what I&rsquo;m seeing, when I look at the documents I&rsquo;m uncovering, can be understood as people working out not only economic, but social and political approaches to living in a rapidly modernizing world.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Vexed?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-05T19:49:37-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/06e708e014082d33c7bf9bf799bc9b35-54.html#unique-entry-id-54</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/06e708e014082d33c7bf9bf799bc9b35-54.html#unique-entry-id-54</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Appleby defines capitalism as &ldquo;a system that depends upon private property and the relatively free use of it in economic endeavors.&rdquo;    (1)  This is a fairly open definition, of the type that Merrill objects to.  ...  &ldquo;Smith discerned a benign law of unintended consequences [through which] the invisible hand of the market guided self-interested and competitive participants&rdquo; to the good of society, while &ldquo;For Marx, capitalists represented not only new men, but new men who shared common political goals&rdquo; at odds with the interests of the majority.   (8)  &ldquo;Neither theorist,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;showed much interest in the meaning market participants gave to their activities.&rdquo;   (9) A more insightful approach, she suggests, would build on the questions posed by Max Weber, using a concept of culture developed by Franz Boas. 

...Beginning with Charles Beard, who she says &ldquo;separated the economy of commercial agriculture--the capitalism of the many--from the investments of bankers and merchants--the capitalism of the few.&rdquo;   (2) This is a division that is still being attempted by people like Merrill, and it seems to me with good reason.    One type of &ldquo;capitalism&rdquo; didn&rsquo;t necessarily imply the other, and changing attitudes towards these different activities done by different people in different places are probably at the heart of this &ldquo;transition to capitalism.&rdquo;    The &ldquo;marked tendency of industrial capitalism to concentrate wealth and convert that wealth into political power&rdquo; needs to be unpacked. ...  Do business cycles favor the rich in some times and places; while law, government policy, or even popular support help people aggregate large fortunes in others? 


...(3) Their attack was answered by Consensus Historians like Robert Brown, David Potter, Daniel Boorstin and Louis Hartz, who &ldquo;rediscovered Alexis de Tocqueville&rsquo;s Democracy in America and turned the &lsquo;tyranny of the majority&rsquo; into the most compelling and disturbing truth of their day&rdquo; -- which after all it was, since all around them black, female, and other members of the majority began to challenge the status quo.   But when social historians of the &lsquo;60s and &lsquo;70s began looking for these other voices, they &ldquo;followed the Beardians in depicting capitalism as an exogenous force, thrust into the lives of unwary folk by profit-maximizing outsiders.&rdquo;   (4)  Where their predecessors had looked at industrial labor, these &ldquo;neo-Progressives&rdquo; focused on &ldquo;the green and pleasant countryside where tradition-bound yeoman fought to repel the relentless intrusion of the market.&rdquo; (she cites Kulikoff 1989 here, although she doesn&rsquo;t quote him.  

...This is about the point where I&rsquo;m beginning to have some doubts.    I&rsquo;ll have to read all these books and articles, I suppose, to determine whether she&rsquo;s doing their authors justice here.    But I do see an element of truth in things I&rsquo;ve read so far, that capitalism can appear &ldquo;less a historical development than a malevolent conspiracy perpetrated by outsiders.&rdquo;   (5)  Appleby says Morton Horowitz&rsquo;s The Transformation of American Law is another book in the &ldquo;promoter-resister mode,&rdquo; but again I wonder if this characterization doesn&rsquo;t unnecessarily limit the discussion.    &ldquo;The judges who transformed American law, Horowitz asserted, were responding to an elite whose entrepreneurial goals ran athwart the conservative sentiments of the bulk of the population.&rdquo;   (6) If this is the case (even some of the time), this is exactly the type of situation that Appleby&rsquo;s continuing use of the words &ldquo;capitalist&rdquo; and &ldquo;anti-capitalist&rdquo; obscures.


...She quotes Sellers saying &ldquo;every popular cultural or political movement in the early republic arose originally against the market.&rdquo;    Given the &ldquo;depth and breadth of antipathy to the market in Sellers account,&rdquo; it&rsquo;s hard to see how the Jacksonians lost. 

...Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, she notes made &ldquo;the brilliant observation that capitalism involved a ceaseless process of &lsquo;creative destruction.&rdquo;   (10) It&rsquo;s an interesting idea, but for a historian wouldn&rsquo;t the important questions be: whose stuff is destroyed?  

...(10)  I think Appleby is dead-on in characterizing this as elite snobbery, especially when applied to the past.    While it may be true that some contemporary first-worlders have &ldquo;borrowed tastes and manufactured needs,&rdquo; I agree that &ldquo;Depictions of consumers as victims...leave readers with &lsquo;an uncritical nostalgia toward a precapitalist past&rsquo;&rdquo; (quoting Lisa Tiersten 1993. 

...Appleby boils the problem down to &ldquo;three deficiencies in our historiography: construing as exogenous a cultural transformation that changed from within; limiting the appeal of a free enterprise economy to the lure of profit-maximizing; and interpreting discrete historical developments as parts of an inexorable process.&rdquo;   (14) The new economy (I&rsquo;m going to stop calling it capitalism, even though Appleby continues) &ldquo;resonated with those who wanted...social changes&rdquo; that would &ldquo;expand their scope of action and satisfy desires&rdquo; (13) And clearly historians are wrong when they imply the proponents or adversaries of change had any idea &ldquo;what would be the consequences of their decisions.&rdquo;    I&rsquo;m not sure that means all the new economy&rsquo;s &ldquo;opponents suffered from association with fixed hierarchies and inherited status.&rdquo;    But in a really interesting aside, Appleby suggests &ldquo;the attraction of youth to change, particularly changes that brought them early autonomy, has rarely been studied as a force against traditional...practices&rdquo; (18).  


I think Appleby makes a good case for looking at economic change in America as a &ldquo;succession of novelties compelling unrehearsed responses&rdquo; (16)  I agree that re-embedding this change in a broader context of social and cultural change offers a &ldquo;recovery of meaning [which] promises access to motives and, through motives, actions&rdquo; (17).  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>So what is this capitalism&#x2c; anyway?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-03T21:27:43-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6f329aa5ba318ed809ac9ee46fc76ec9-53.html#unique-entry-id-53</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6f329aa5ba318ed809ac9ee46fc76ec9-53.html#unique-entry-id-53</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Merrill, M. ...  "Putting "Capitalism" in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature."   The William and Mary Quarterly 52(2): 315-326.


http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2946977


...Merrill begins with Hartz, Hofstadter, and Schlesinger Jr., revisionists who he says &ldquo;rejected the Progressive emphasis on the important role a transition to capitalism played in American history.&rdquo;    (315)  For these revisionists, he says, the American colonists arrived as full-fledged capitalists, ready to participate in the market economy. 


The error in this thinking, Merrill says, is in equating the market economy with capitalism, and people&rsquo;s willingness (or eagerness) to participate in it with an embrace of capitalism.    This is an error in definition, he suggests, that has been continued by historians like Appleby and Kulikoff (interestingly, from opposite political directions).    When James Henretta describes &ldquo;a sophisticated, indigenous capital market distinguished by the number and complexity of financial instruments in circulation,&rdquo; Merrill doesn&rsquo;t disagree that&rsquo;s what was happening.    But he suggests it might be something other than what we normally define as capitalism. 

...Why does the definition matter?    And why is it important for me?  


Well, Kulikoff, for example, builds his story around a group of immigrants who &ldquo;migrated to North America in an attempt to stay a step ahead of what Marx called &lsquo;primitive accumulation,&rsquo; or the appropriation by capitalists of the &lsquo;means of production&rsquo;  (especially land) of small producers--in effect, to escape capitalism.&rdquo;   (322) These immigrants became yeoman farmers, but they were still &ldquo;embedded in capitalist world markets,&rdquo; so the result was inevitable.


Another problem is that equating capitalism with markets creates periodization: we &ldquo;see the prosperity that followed the Revolution as a sign of an emergent, radically new, capitalist order rather than as the expansion of a dynamic, profoundly anticapitalist, and democratic older order&rdquo; which Merrill believes it to be.   (323)  This is important for me, because the guys I&rsquo;m researching seem to have a foot in both camps.    They&rsquo;re merchants, but they&rsquo;re not necessarily the protocapitalists they ought to be if the distinction between capitalism and non- or anti-capitalism is viewed through the regular lens.  


Merrill doesn&rsquo;t propose an exact definition to replace the broad, sloppy one he opposes.     But it clearly has a political element.    People &ldquo;did not ask whether there should be a market; they asked who would control it and which social class would reap the lion&rsquo;s share of its benefits.&rdquo;    (324)  Of course, this is what they&rsquo;re still asking; that&rsquo;s the point.    &ldquo;To equate capitalism with any market economy,&rdquo; Merrill says, discredits opposition.    Any critique is &ldquo;fundamentally wrongheaded and says, in effect, that...the only acceptable alternative to capitalism is a society without markets.&rdquo; 

...So it seems like it would be a good idea, rather than doing a history that says &ldquo;these guys were sort-of precapitalist, and these other guys were sort-of capitalist,&rdquo; to try to describe what they actually did and said, and see if they felt they were allies or adversaries.    There are still fights and lawsuits -- tons of them, in fact.    But the players didn&rsquo;t seem to be fitting into their roles the way they were supposed to.    Maybe the way to go about this is to try to figure out what groups these people thought they fit into, and why.


see also 


Henretta 1998: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124895


1994 Panel Discussion: http://www.jstor.org/stable/494769
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Speculators or developers?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-03T21:19:39-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/316f34ea3f37452cf1c7a2f448ffd46f-52.html#unique-entry-id-52</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/316f34ea3f37452cf1c7a2f448ffd46f-52.html#unique-entry-id-52</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Wyckoff, W.   (1988).   The developer's frontier : the making of the western New York landscape.   New Haven, Yale University Press.


	


Historical Geographers are another group fascinated by Turner&rsquo;s frontier thesis.   Wyckoff focuses on land developers and resident land agents.    Their activities, he says, &ldquo;directly effected the frontier settlement pattern,&rdquo; and &ldquo;became an enduring legacy on the landscape, especially in the form of surviving survey lines, village locations, and road networks.    That palpable imprint on the land is largely unrecognized and uncelebrated,&rdquo; and Wyckoff believes &ldquo;existing theories of frontier settlement...do little to interpret in any penetrating way the impact of these promoters, investors, and developers on the making of the American landscape or on the evolution of American culture.&rdquo;    (4)  


Wyckoff acknowledges challenges made to the standard Turnerian model of frontier evolution (the one that recapitulates the evolution of western civilization), especially those of Paul Wallace Gates and A.M.   Sakolski, &ldquo;who began his work The Great American Land Bubble with the dramatic words, &ldquo;America, from its inception, was a speculation.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (7)  But the derogatory tone surrounding their treatment of speculators is misplaced, he says.    Because it links the frontier with eastern (and even international) investors and capital markets, &ldquo;the presence of the land speculator complicates and to some extent contradicts aspects of the classic Turnerian model.&rdquo;    But Wyckoff insists &ldquo;the speculator&rsquo;s frontier is just as sharply distinguished from the developer&rsquo;s frontier, in which land agents were committed not only to promoting and selling land but also to reshaping and transforming the landscape in a manner that would attract settlers and would endure on the visible scene for decades.&rdquo;   (8)


Wyckoff also suggests, citing Douglass C.   North, R.D.   Mitchell, and others, that the development he is going to describe is tightly bound to commerce with urban centers, in a way that seems to anticipate central place theory -- or to imply that developers, if not immigrants, had a similar idea in mind.    Wyckoff tries to bridge a gap between theory and observation and answer an important question, by suggesting that the agents of this change were the developers whose &ldquo;decisions shaped the course of settlement and the subsequent look of the land.&rdquo;  


William Cooper&rsquo;s Guide to the Wilderness is probably worth a look, as well as William Cooper&rsquo;s Town.  
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Roots of Rural Capitalism </title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-04-21T22:26:15-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8a5454f519db143f092a7b8305bf42cb-51.html#unique-entry-id-51</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8a5454f519db143f092a7b8305bf42cb-51.html#unique-entry-id-51</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Christopher Clark&rsquo;s account of the transition from a &ldquo;subsistence-surplus&rdquo; economy to &ldquo;rural capitalism&rdquo; in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts is built around his observation that it was not an ideological shift that prompted this change, but &ldquo;the search for livelihoods and security&rdquo; (318).  

...Shire towns like Northampton that had been influential in the eighteenth century under the &ldquo;River Gods&rdquo; lost their status as &ldquo;central places,&rdquo; while households and local communities became the cores of social and economic life.    The household economy expected a lot from women and children, and Clark seems to suggest that women may have led the shift toward a cash economy by producing for the market so they could buy textiles rather than spin and weave homespun cloth.    Whether or not the women made this decision consciously and by themselves, Clark&rsquo;s stress on the importance of household strategies in this transition makes sense.


&ldquo;It is no longer acceptable,&rdquo; Clark says, &ldquo;to portray rural people simply as passive victims of &lsquo;the extension of the market&rsquo; that &lsquo;broke down family-based household structures&rsquo;&rdquo; (323).    And while rural people were certainly not omniscient, and unintended consequences happened everywhere, Clark argues there was fairly widespread awareness that &ldquo;a clash between two ethics&rdquo; was taking place (324).  ...  Against the standard interpretation&rsquo;s emphasis on individualism and the profit motive, Clark insists &ldquo;Family and household concerns indeed played a central role in capitalist development; perhaps it was only after family security had been achieved that thoughts of profits and individual interests could develop in the minds of members of the successful middle classes&rdquo; (326).  

...Henretta (&ldquo;Families and Farms: Mentalit&eacute; in Pre-Industrial America&rdquo; 1978) and Michael Merrill (&ldquo;Cash is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States&rdquo; 1977); and by Clark himself (1979).    In this book, Clark suggests &ldquo;a synthesis between &lsquo;market&rsquo; and &lsquo;social&rsquo; interpretations, based on the observation that &lsquo;markets&rsquo; are not determinant but are created in and derived from social circumstances&rdquo; (See also Allan Kulikoff, 1989, and Gregory Nobles, 1988. 

...&ldquo;The diffused economic power of rural households and their commitment to independence,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;posed a potential problem for ministers and political leaders seeking to impose a concept of authority in the countryside&rdquo; (23).  ...  Of course, &ldquo;disposable&rdquo; is the operative word here: these goods were luxuries, just as &ldquo;products exported beyond the Valley were necessities extra to the requirements of local households or by-products of their production.&rdquo;  

...Clark quotes European travelers in 1787, remarking on the &ldquo;large variety of exchanges which would not be done in Europe other than with a considerable quantity of money&rdquo; (33)  Cash, he says, &ldquo;implies abstraction - a social distance&rdquo; different from the &ldquo;complex webs [and] networks of obligation&rdquo; created by local exchange.    These webs and networks are exactly what I&rsquo;m running into as I read the letters of upstate New York merchant-millers trying to create a cash economy.    Are they unique, or is there an intermediate story waiting to be told about how these guys tried to adapt the &ldquo;local&rdquo; economic model of trust, relationships, and complex webs of exchange and credit, to the wider commercial world?


...And the debt crisis that leads to Shays&rsquo;s &ldquo;regulation&rdquo; has a lot to do with &ldquo;rural resources...being overwhelmed by the speed with which repayment of debts was sought&rdquo; (45).   This begs the question, how did the social climate change so dramatically, that Bostonians felt they could demand immediate payment on rural debts that had accumulated over long periods?  

...&ldquo;&lsquo;We are sencable...that a great debt is justly brought upon us by the war,&rsquo; declared the town of Greenwich in 1786, &lsquo;and we are as willing to pay our shares towards itt as we are to injoy our shars in independancy and constatutional priviledges in the Commonwealth.&rsquo;   If only &lsquo;prudant mesuers were taken and a moderate quantety of medium to circulate so that our property might sel for the real value,&rsquo; the petition concluded, &lsquo;we mite in proper time pay said debt&rsquo;&rdquo; (47).  

...It&rsquo;s interesting how patronage mimics &ldquo;the local exchange ethic,&rdquo; and that &ldquo;rural support for federalism [occurred] among farmers concerned to maintain a distance from the market&rdquo; (ref. ...  Maybe it would distract from the main line of the economic story; but maybe it would expand and explain the hints at rural concerns about western migration and elite social-control efforts that crop up throughout.  


Clark says &ldquo;The &lsquo;local&rsquo; ethic valued the longer-term reciprocity between dealers embedded in a network of social connections; morality lay in accepting obligations and discharging them over time.   The &lsquo;market&rsquo; ethic emphasized quick payment and assumed a formal equality between individual dealers at the point of exchange; morality lay in the quick discharge of obligation&rdquo; (196)  But the seeming equality of market exchange hides an imbalance: the merchant is assumed to be the exclusive provider of &ldquo;goods,&rdquo; while the &ldquo;consumer&rdquo; no longer exchanges household products, but pays in cash.  ...  Furthermore, the inequality in the &ldquo;local&rdquo; ethic implied by the &ldquo;formal equality&rdquo; of the market was mitigated by the long-term nature of the relationships: over time, everything balances and everyone is morally equal. 


...Did &ldquo;this tightening of discipline...of credit reporting [to] insert the tighter rules of long-distance exchange into the local economy&rdquo; betray a more basic effort on the part of town elites to extend their influence back into the countryside they once ruled as squires and River Gods? 

...If long-distance commerce was a new system being tried out in these communities, how did people feel about it when it was working well?  ...  The single (market-based) price is really a merchant&rsquo;s declaration that no individual transaction or customer is important enough to go to the trouble of bargaining.  

...Merchants and traders,&rdquo; who were more diversified than their proto-industrialist cousins and had wider credit networks, &ldquo;had a disproportionate share in bailing out artisans and mill owners&rdquo; (245).  

...(271)  They pooled their depositors&rsquo; funds and invested them in local business ventures -- wouldn&rsquo;t this have been seen by the depositors as a wise fiduciary decision?  

...On the other, court decisions showed &ldquo;the social structure of a diversified rural economy no longer left room for assumptions that private and public interests would coincide&rdquo; (reminiscent of Steinberg in Nature Incorporated, published a year later. ...  How does it come about that the &ldquo;public interest&rdquo; becomes synonymous with private profits at precisely this time and place, while the rural yeoman simultaneously becomes a creature of nostalgic myth?  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Capitalism? Really?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-03-27T15:00:19-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0a48e8ec110c08ea10d23e8068746fc2-50.html#unique-entry-id-50</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/0a48e8ec110c08ea10d23e8068746fc2-50.html#unique-entry-id-50</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It was defeated, she says, because the dons feared the republicanism undergraduates might spread among the general public, at a time when British republicanism in the form of the Reform League looked particularly unsettling to the ruling class.    Richard Cobden remarked that no &ldquo;Oxford of Cambridge undergraduate...could have pointed out Chicago on a map even though it was a city that indirectly fed a million Englishmen.&rdquo;  

...She argues in these lectures that both the facts of economic change and the revolutionary changes in economic thinking pioneered by Adam Smith were more legitimately the property of Jeffersonian Republicans than of Hamiltonian Federalists.    In spite of a tradition that would cast Jefferson as an anti-capitalist agrarian, Appleby says the real division was between a party that looked forward (with Smith and Jefferson) to progress based on natural, rational self-interest, and a backward-looking &ldquo;classical&rdquo; republicanism (she doesn&rsquo;t mention Adams, but this seems to fit him like a glove) that believed a &ldquo;virtuous&rdquo; (in the old sense of politically-disinterested) elite was needed to balance the power of the interested democratic majority. ...  Suspect in Europe, this Hobbesian/Malthusian vision was completely invalid in the U.S., where the frontier &ldquo;stood Ricardo&rsquo;s iron law of rents and wages on its head.&rdquo; 

...An interesting element of Appleby&rsquo;s argument is that she&rsquo;s talking about intellectual history, not economic determinism.    While she acknowledges the influence of material changes, she&rsquo;s really interested in the &ldquo;Ideas [that] joined a group of established elite reformers to a network of political interlopers,&rdquo; resulting in the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800.  

...&ldquo;Classical theory,&rdquo; Appleby says, &ldquo;emphasized that civil society was fragile...that there were two orders of men -- the talented few and the ordinary many -- ...[and] a properly balanced constitution would balance the powers of these two groups.&rdquo; ...  (10)  While she admits there was a &ldquo;large bulge in the center of the social pyramid,&rdquo; Appleby suggests that the economic security, &ldquo;stability and well-being of the great majority of colonists permitted resistance to turn into rebellion and ...revolution.&rdquo; 

...Liberty, she says, had three &ldquo;intellectual contexts,&rdquo; and the one we&rsquo;re most familiar with today (&ldquo;liberty as personal freedom&rdquo;) was the one American colonists would have been least focused on -- at least until 1776.  ...  (16)  This distinction seems to blur the difference between individual versus group rights on the one hand, and political versus economic concerns on the other.    But maybe that&rsquo;s part of the ongoing issue with these ideas: that we&rsquo;re never that clear about how these various ideas about individual rights and group responsibilities ought to play together.


...Rather than looking for examples in classical cultures, &ldquo;Hobbes and Locke...reasoned from an imaginary account of man in the state of nature to an abstract definition of liberty.&rdquo; ...  Most people stuck to the old ideas of corporate liberty, so that &ldquo;Only when it became clear that their interpretation of the imperial crisis was not shared in the mother country did colonial rebels shift ground from the historic rights of English subjects to the abstract rights of all men.&rdquo;   (22)  But ultimately it was economic change, in the form of &ldquo;freedom from the fear of dearth,&rdquo; that enabled this change of attitude to become widespread.&rdquo; 

...I think I need to compare Appleby&rsquo;s idea about this change to accounts of Americans in England and British support for the American cause.  ...  (30)  But did the urge to systematize and depersonalize &ldquo;economic laws&rdquo; really originate with Smith and Ricardo&rsquo;s observations of British commerce, or with a zeitgeist that influenced intellectuals across a wide range of disciplines to seek global, scientific (and ironically non-empirical, a-priori) regularity in the face of increasingly diverse and often confusing data?


The new economic system (I almost want to say ideology) had a couple of hurdles it needed to get over: social beliefs formed by observation and classical tradition.    For example, &ldquo;Self-interest could only be accounted socially benign,&rdquo; Appleby says, &ldquo;if it could be demonstrated that all this incessant striving after private ends did not lead to chaos,&rdquo; but in fact to social optimization. ...  (35)  There&rsquo;s an interesting passage in Martin Bruegel&rsquo;s Farm, Shop, Landing, which I&rsquo;ve just started reading, where New York courts begin trying to enforce a uniform, impersonal &ldquo;market&rdquo; by banning preferential, relationship-based practices that had been the hallmarks of the older, physical market place (more on that in a couple of days).


Again, as I&rsquo;m reading this, I&rsquo;m wondering if it isn&rsquo;t the explosive growth of the mercantile sector at this moment in history that allows for this reductive sleight of hand?    If there wasn&rsquo;t so much to see in the world of commerce, would all the things left out of economic thinking have been more obvious?    Similarly, in the New Republic, are we seeing an increase in agricultural productivity based on expansion into fertile western lands and reduced population growth, and attributing these changes to a new rural capitalism, just because we know what happens later?  


Appleby mentions Jefferson&rsquo;s preference for wheat over tobacco in Notes on the State of Virginia, as a &ldquo;benign conception of an economy of food production [that] was to have far-reaching ideological implications.&rdquo;   (42)  I have a lot of trouble seeing Jefferson as someone with a clear vision of agricultural realities, but he was clearly the founder of a powerful agrarian, free labor ideology.    But Jefferson&rsquo;s agrarian vision (or at least the vision attributed to him) may hide more than it reveals.  ...  (45) But Jefferson&rsquo;s belief that wheat was a better crop than tobacco was based on the special case of early-cultivation bumper crops on an expanding frontier.  

...We still  say &ldquo;the first capitalists were farmers and landlords,&rdquo; as if we can recognize some universal definition of &ldquo;capitalists&rdquo; that applies equally to eighteenth-century farmers and twenty-first century investment bankers.   (46)  Appleby says Jackson Turner Main examined the issues dividing legislators, and then &ldquo;worked back to the constituencies...and discovered that American voters were either localists or cosmopolitans,&rdquo; depending on where they lived. 

...Burke in an octavo form, so as to confine it probably to the class of readers who may consider it cooly: so soon as it is published cheaply for dissemination among the populace, it will be my duty to prosecute.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Hill Towns</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-03-08T09:32:24-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/86a2dbc4db4fe9cddce490d058a8bc25-49.html#unique-entry-id-49</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/86a2dbc4db4fe9cddce490d058a8bc25-49.html#unique-entry-id-49</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Started Harold Fisher Wilson&rsquo;s The Hill Country of Northern New England.    It&rsquo;s beginning as expected, with a description of Thomas Nixon Carver&rsquo;s five stages of New England agriculture.    Wilson uses a seasonal metaphor for his narrative, beginning with Summer, 1790-1830.    This is the age of self-sufficiency, which is followed by a fall attributed to the railroads and &ldquo;external causes of unrest.&rdquo;    It&rsquo;s interesting that in 1936, Wilson seems to be turning a corner from a Progressive/New Deal sort of optimistic elitism to a new social history concern with &ldquo;those who stayed at home.&rdquo;   (4)  


This will probably be fairly interesting, since Wilson is supposed to be a lifelong New Englander with deep knowledge of the place and people.    The early pages reiterate a lot of the standard structure.    The soil is thin and rocky, so &ldquo;tillage is not profitable under modern conditions.&rdquo;   (5)  But does this mean farmers were actually trying to compete head-on with western staples?    Why do we generally assume they weren&rsquo;t astute enough to recognize their disadvantages and choose to do something they were more competitive at?    The later chapters seem to talk a lot about sheep and dairying -- we&rsquo;ll see if the farmers get to be agents of this change, or if it&rsquo;s just something that happens to them.


Wilson introduces the population question by remarking on the beginning of a trend in population loss as early as the decade from 1790 to 1800 (first two census decades), but accelerating in the 1820s-30s.    My question, after looking at the Ashfield census is, did these towns have a loss in households?    Or just in total population?    Once these townships were fully occupied (all the viable farmland divided and distributed), it seems almost inevitable that a homestead farming community was going to produce too many sons within a generation or so.    At that point, net outmigration is virtually guaranteed, until the &ldquo;pioneer generation&rdquo; stops having kids.    Wilson mentions that although people in the 1790s believed many farms had been abandoned, they were in fact &ldquo;unoccupied,&rdquo; they &ldquo;continued to be held by actual owners who paid taxes on them.&rdquo;   (9) Does this imply a different attitude toward these properties on the part of their owners, from the declension story we see?]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Some more thoughts on Zinn</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-02-25T10:18:17-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/94a45e1d237b021bf1bfddaa8e5526c7-48.html#unique-entry-id-48</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/94a45e1d237b021bf1bfddaa8e5526c7-48.html#unique-entry-id-48</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Some more things that strike me about A People&rsquo;s History of the United States: 


First, it tries to be a one-stop shop, for the general reader.    As I recall, from first seeing the book when I was a &ldquo;general reader,&rdquo; it does a good job of convincing readers that it&rsquo;s exposing them to the untold stories of the underside of the American Dream.    For many, I think being exposed to the idea that there was an underside was a shock.  

...As I look through the book now, I&rsquo;m surprised how much attribution Zinn does, right in the narrative.    I ignored it before, because I didn&rsquo;t recognize the names of the historians Zinn is quoting and paraphrasing.    Reading it again, I&rsquo;m as interested in the historiography as in the history.


Zinn says he intends his book to be a companion (and corrective) to the standard American history that we all learn in high school.    I think he does a pretty good job on two important fronts.    He talks about things the &ldquo;standard&rdquo; histories pass by, and he challenges the authority of &ldquo;standard&rdquo; historians.    This is important, because it&rsquo;s impossible to put everything into a general history survey text (or course), and a lot has to be left by the wayside.    But the general reader doesn&rsquo;t usually have to think about what gets included, and whose voice is ignored or suppressed.    It&rsquo;s the implication Zinn draws that maybe some voices have been suppressed, and not merely ignored, that makes the book memorable and controversial.


I think I read A People&rsquo;s History before Matt Damon mentioned it in Good Will Hunting, but I imagine a lot of people first read it as a result of that endorsement.    I always liked the mental image of a bunch of working class guys from Southey, talking about the Arawak Indians and how the Wobblies sang Joe Hill songs and scared the shit out of the powers that be.    When I loaded trucks for a living (and was a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters), I always had fun talking with guys who had half a clue, but were trying to find out more.    Critics of Zinn claim that he riles up the ignorant masses, leading people to believe in conspiracy theories and all kinds of bullshit.    But really, who gave them the right to say who&rsquo;s allowed to know more of the truth?  


Zinn said throwing your anger and tears back into the past was a waste of time.    His point was that there was a connection between then and now, and that by understanding what happened, we could make better choices in the present for the future.    Or at least have a better appreciation for the complexity and moral ambiguity of real people.    This seems to be the hope we all secretly share, when we get into history.    That&rsquo;s the &ldquo;why should I care&rdquo; test HCR keeps bringing us back to in class.    There&rsquo;s something resonant or instructive about anything we get excited enough about to write a book.  

...I&rsquo;m a little off track, but I&rsquo;ve been thinking about the subjects of the story I&rsquo;m writing.    I had a moment of panic last week, when I thought these folks weren&rsquo;t representative enough, and that their story is too full of contingency.    I&rsquo;ve been reading a lot of histories that leave the individual people out, so they can talk about places, forces, and how &ldquo;The People&rdquo; respond.    I was nervous that my story would seem trivial, if it was about less than the full sweep of rural history, across the entire country from the beginning until now.    Seems kind of silly, when I put it that way.  ...  So, A People&rsquo;s History helped me this week, as an illustration that you can talk about regular people, and still tell a big story.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Who was there and for how long? </title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-02-24T19:33:48-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8b62e696cf5dfa69ed476da4c72ac6e2-47.html#unique-entry-id-47</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/8b62e696cf5dfa69ed476da4c72ac6e2-47.html#unique-entry-id-47</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Today I&rsquo;m reading census data from 1790 to 1840.    Putting together a big spreadsheet that lists everybody, so I can see who came and who left the town I&rsquo;m writing about.    Ran into some interesting problems along the way.


The 1810 census was a mess!    I&rsquo;m still not sure I got it all -- I&rsquo;m going to have to search on all the missing names, to make sure they really are missing from the town.    Three different census recorders took parts of the town I&rsquo;m looking at, so my data is appended to the forms for three towns surrounding my target.    And the machine transcription on these forms was less than perfect, so it&rsquo;s a good thing I&rsquo;m familiar with the family names in this town, or I&rsquo;d be hopelessly lost.  


I don&rsquo;t want to do JUST a population study of any of these places, but with the info readily available these days, I don't see how you can avoid knowing what happened with the people, as part of the due diligence.    Persistence, turnover, where people went, who came to replace them...all go to establishing the character of the place. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Yankee exodus</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-02-14T22:15:14-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5484d970c22b250bc8e7467de2162268-46.html#unique-entry-id-46</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/5484d970c22b250bc8e7467de2162268-46.html#unique-entry-id-46</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Yankee Exodus: An Account of Migration from New England


...Synopsis:  Holbrook believes &ldquo;Yankees were born with an uncommon urge to see, with their own eyes, if the grass on the other side of the mountain really was greener.&rdquo;   (10) He doesn&rsquo;t ever completely explain why this urge would be universal, rather than be due to particular motivations like religion or economics.    Holbrook does not give any thought to people who may have moved more than once (New Englanders who moved to New York, and then moved on to MIchigan or Oregon).    Nor does he distinguish between those who left and those who stayed.    This might have complicated his argument (in a good way), especially where families sent some members west, while others stayed home in New England.    What Holbrook does provide is a heartfelt personal connection to these old Yankees, and a lot of good details it will be fun to track down someday, when I&rsquo;m looking for topics to research.


High on the list of things to check into someday are names.    Along with Ethan Allen, Holbrook singles out General Rufus Putnam, head of the Ohio Company of Associates.    He doesn&rsquo;t give much information about any one topic, and he doesn&rsquo;t make many judgements.    Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham are simply described as &ldquo;Two Massachusetts speculators&rdquo; who &ldquo;For $100,000...bought preemptive rights to a vast tract in the western part&rdquo; of New York and began the &ldquo;Genesee Fever.&rdquo;   (17)  A passage outlining the founding of Oberlin College is suggestive.    The &ldquo;new Oberlins&rdquo; (Hillsdale College in Michigan, Ripon, Northfield/Carelton, Grinnell and Tabor in Iowa could probably figure in a story about the intellectual/social history of the Upper Midwest in its early years. 

...Lucy Stone was a radical I&rsquo;d never heard of.   (45-6)  Another surprise was Vermont&rsquo;s &ldquo;Year of Two Winters, the infamous Eighteen Hundred and Frozen to Death, when snow fell a foot deep in June and was of aid in helping thousands of Yankees to make up their minds.&rdquo;   (48)  The story of the Mormons (and of other religious fanatics) recurs throughout the book.    I didn&rsquo;t know Smith had his vision of Moroni near Palmyra, or that Brigham Young lived on a farm in Mendon.


There are several references to Ashfielders, but none that are salient to my research.    Hiram Alden arrived in Coldwater, Branch County, MI in about 1834, and became a leading man in the new town.  ...  Barber settled in Eau Claire and became a leading lumberman.    His &ldquo;timber stands included yellow pine in Idaho, where the town of Barber is named for him.&rdquo;   (124) Ashfield&rsquo;s Rev.   Samuel Parker wrote a journal of his travels in the Pacific northwest, attracting immigrants to the Oregon territory.   (227)  And Zebulon B.   Taylor went to the Tacoma area.   (236) These brief mentions of people who may or may not be historically significant are typical of Holbrook&rsquo;s approach.   The book mentions many people, but rarely goes into depth.    Abner Kneeland gets about a page and a half of coverage that includes a mention of The Fruits of Philosophy, but not its author.    Kneeland&rsquo;s 1839 emigration to the Des Moines river in Iowa and his utopian community Salubria, like so many other items in The Yankee Exodus, scream for more attention.    


Critics:  Generally praised the &ldquo;rich word-pictures&rdquo; Holbrook provided, and criticized his lack of documented references and analytical rigor, and his filiopietism.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Land monopoly? Or is it water?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-02-09T12:44:08-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c6d65f40258fcf2667f46163b5f1b042-45.html#unique-entry-id-45</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c6d65f40258fcf2667f46163b5f1b042-45.html#unique-entry-id-45</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Donald J.   Pisani


Chapter 5: Land Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century California


Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920


1996


Synopsis:  &ldquo;In no American state,&rdquo; Pisani says, &ldquo;was land monopoly more of a perceived problem than in nineteenth-century California.&rdquo;    Pisani reviews Paul Wallace Gates&rsquo; indictment of monopolists, and suggests that &ldquo;the state&rsquo;s scarcity of water and the nature of irrigation agriculture contributed even more to the concentration of ownership than venal, shortsighted, and carelessly drawn national and state land land laws.&rdquo;   (86)


Bt 1872, &ldquo;each of 122 individuals and companies owned more than 20,000 acres&rdquo; of California farmland.   (86) &ldquo;Perhaps even more alarming, 2,298 people owned more than 1,000 acres, and the 620 largest farms and ranchos in California averaged 22,000 acres.   By the 1870s, the state&rsquo;s easily arable land was gone.&rdquo; 

...Gates argued that an 1851 law confirming prior Mexican land grants led to the rapid &ldquo;grabbing&rdquo; of most of California&rsquo;s best land (including a big chunk in San Francisco).    Pisani agrees that &ldquo;The Mexican claims were the wellspring of monopoly,&rdquo; but adds &ldquo;Congress did little to reserve California&rsquo;s remaining public land for bona fide settlers...   Given the flood of miners, Congress saw no need to provide special incentives.&rdquo;   (88-9) Pisani speculates that the lack of land may have pushed discouraged 49ers into urban life, but they may not have been the best potential farmers.    And their overwhelming presence in the state (and its resulting reputation) may have encouraged farmers to look elsewhere.   Whatever the reason, &ldquo;As early as 1860...21 percent of California&rsquo;s people lived in communities of 2,500 or more.   (Ten years after Ohio statehood only 1 percent of its people lived in towns larger than 2,500, and a decade after Illinois entered the union, that state did not contain a single community that large.)&rdquo;   (92)  California certainly developed differently than New England and the midwest (from which concerned citizens and historians drew their models of independent, small-farm development).


Between &ldquo;1868-1873, when about 6,000,000 acres of public land were taken in California, Homestead Act entries covered only 809,621 acres...  California railroads acquired most of their 11,500,000-acre subsidy after 1870.&rdquo;    The small number of family farms, relative to ranches and giant wheat producers in the Sacramento valley, set a pattern for California agriculture, &ldquo;long before the rise of &lsquo;agribusiness&rsquo; as we know it,&rdquo; or maybe as a model for agribusiness elsewhere.  

...But the land was dry.    &ldquo;Most land in California&rsquo;s Central Valley and south of the Tehachapi Mountains had little value without water.&rdquo;   (94) The failure of Californians to envision a public domain for water rights ultimately reinforced monopolistic land ownership and factory farming.    &ldquo;In 1875,&rdquo; Pisani says, competing capitalists bought up so many small water claims that between them they &ldquo;claimed 3,000 cubic feet per second from the Kern river, about three times more water than the stream had ever carried.&rdquo;   (94) &ldquo;The Bakersfield Grange bitterly protested to the legislature,&rdquo; but the capitalists owned the legislature.   (95) To realize short-term, personal gains, and to avoid fighting a losing battle, &ldquo;Many sold their riparian rights to upstream interests, as California courts abandoned the timeless principle that such rights were inalienable and appurtenant to the land.&rdquo;   (97) During the 1870s, opponents of land monopoly hoped that state ownership or control of water would force large landowners to sell their holdings.   In eerily modern &ldquo;red state&rdquo; terminology, &ldquo;arguments...against a comprehensive state water system [said] that the new bureaucracy would build up corrupt political &lsquo;rings,&rsquo; [and] that government was essentially wasteful and inefficient.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>It&#x27;s not obvious until someone says it.</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-02-02T14:04:22-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c1c56b3defb0c2b5fde43efe5c06f75d-44.html#unique-entry-id-44</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/c1c56b3defb0c2b5fde43efe5c06f75d-44.html#unique-entry-id-44</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Synopsis:  In a 1989 review article in The Western Historical Quarterly, Limerick said she &ldquo;wanted to narrow the widening gap between &lsquo;sophisticated, scholarly history&rsquo; and &lsquo;readable, simplified, popular history.&rsquo;    If you cannot express your findings in terms that an intelligent freshman can understand, I have long felt, then you haven&rsquo;t yet figured out those findings.&rdquo; ...  (1) The significance of that statement becomes more clear, as the reader continues, into a book that, for all its insights and contributions, is filled with heavy irony and a general air of accusation. 


...Limerick wrote in 1987, so she had not only the heroic, Turnerian history of the west to debunk, but the even more wildly out-of-touch Reagan western myth.    The attack she mounts on the normal view of the west is split between history and more current events; Limerick advocates for the continuity of western history to the present, and for the use of current newspapers as &ldquo;primary sources&rdquo; for that current view.    Since most of these issues were particularly intense in the 1970s and 1980s, the reader needs to work a little, to bring them up to date.  


...Limerick begins by quoting Turner&rsquo;s essay on history (not &ldquo;The Significance of the Frontier&rdquo;): &ldquo;The aim of history, then, is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past...the historian strives to show the present to itself by revealing its origin from the past.&rdquo;   (17) This Eliot-esque statement connects historical study with both the present and the public, and shows Turner, like the west itself, was complicated and multidimensional.    On the subject of the frontier thesis, Limerick says (paraphrasing Lamar) that it created an artificial barrier between &ldquo;America&rsquo;s rural past and its urban-industrial present.&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;One could easily argue,&rdquo; for example, &ldquo;that a sudden concentration of population marks the opening stage [of the frontier] and that a population lowered through...the departure of people from a used-up mining region marks the end of the frontier and its opportunities.&rdquo;     Even that complication may not be enough, since many areas go through cycles of growth, decline and regrowth, as conditions, technologies, and human goals change.   On a more concrete level, Limerick points out the very important point that in 1890, when the frontier was declared closed, &ldquo;one-half of the land remained federal property.&rdquo;   (23) She suggests that &ldquo;If it is difficult for Americans to imagine that an economy might be stable and also healthy,&rdquo; their addiction to growth may be related to the frontier myth, with its prospect of endless western opportunity.   (28) If so, this is doubly ironic, because Turner&rsquo;s whole point was that the frontier had closed, and America was going to need to find a new way to uphold its individualist, democratic values.


But, as Limerick says, &ldquo;humans live in a world in which mental reality does not have to submit to narrow tests of accuracy.&rdquo;   Historians should be interested, she says, in not only what happened, via &ldquo;the keepers of written records,&rdquo; but in what people believe, via &ldquo;the tellers of tales.&rdquo; ...  Contrary to all of the West&rsquo;s associations with self-reliance and individual responsibility,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;misfortune has usually caused white Westerners to cast themselves in the role of the innocent victim.&rdquo; ...  (44) She finds the origins of the &ldquo;injured innocent&rdquo; attitude, in the fact that &ldquo;Having practically destroyed the aboriginal population and enslaved the Africans...the white inhabitants of English America began to conceive of themselves as the victims, not the agents, of Old World Colonialism.&rdquo; (quoting Carole Shammas, 48)


...It&rsquo;s quite possible to imagine subgroups in both the colonial and western example, who did not necessarily share the same degree of &ldquo;guilt&rdquo; as the &ldquo;agents&rdquo; mentioned.  ...  (58) In the west, &ldquo;The advantage always accrued to the wealthy man of influence, regardless of what the law said.&rdquo; (quoting Malcolm Rohrbough, 61)  A case in point, Limerick says, is William Stewart&rsquo;s 1866 Mining Law, which established the groundrules for massive accumulation of patent claims.  ...  (67)  While &ldquo;Speculation is extremely disillusioning if you are trying to hold onto the illusion that agriculture and commerce are significantly different ways of life,&rdquo; it might be more accurate to highlight the ways property laws were devised to enable accumulation of vast tracts under the ownership of individuals and corporations. 


...&ldquo;Western settlers were so abundantly supplied with slogans and democratic formulas,&rdquo; Limerick says, &ldquo;that putting our trust in their recorded words alone would be misleading.&rdquo;   (83) The &ldquo;squatter government&rdquo; of Sioux Falls turns out to be &ldquo;agents of a land company, financed and organized by Minnesota Democrats.&rdquo; ...  (87) And the west regularly got more than its share: &ldquo;Per capita expenditures of federal agencies in Montana from 1933 to 1939...were $710, while they were only $143 in North Carolina.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;Despite the promises of the Homestead Act,&rdquo; Limerick says, &ldquo;much good land was already in possession of railroads and states, and &lsquo;purchase continued to be the most usual means to obtain a farm after 1865.&rsquo;&rdquo; (quoting Everett Dick, 125) The cost of outfitting a farm with &ldquo;a house, draft animals, wagon, plow, well, fencing, and seed grain could be as much as $1,000,&rdquo; putting homesteading out of reach to many eastern wage-earners. ...  (127-8)  One wonders how much state aid, in the form of subsidized railroads, government flour contracts, and the legal fiction of corporate rights, went into the building of Pillsbury&rsquo;s flour empire?  


...(130) But the assumption that no other arrangement of resource use was possible is anachronistic and avoids confronting the forces that created the victory of global economic concentration over community and regional self-sufficiency.    Limerick agrees with Williams that &ldquo;attribut[ing] ideal values to rural life that reality cannot match&rdquo; is as old as history, but it would still be useful to critically examine how &ldquo;rural nostalgia&rdquo; has been mobilized as a propaganda tool, from Jefferson to the present. 

...The rest of the book tells the story of the Chinese, Japanese, Mexican and Indian presence in western history, and of the government&rsquo;s continuing presence, especially in conservation in the era of Pinchot and Roosevelt.   Limerick concludes on a hopeful note, suggesting that a closer look at the complex history of the west will help solve some of America&rsquo;s ongoing problems.  
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Cronon on Turner</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-01-29T11:06:56-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d6a2ad3c12d8e40aec766f4d3da821be-43.html#unique-entry-id-43</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d6a2ad3c12d8e40aec766f4d3da821be-43.html#unique-entry-id-43</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[&ldquo;Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner&rdquo;


...Synopsis:  Cronon reviews the historiographical impact of Turner (especially, but not only his frontier thesis), and reevaluates its implications.    He suggests that the flaws in Turner&rsquo;s ideas can be ignored, and a core set of ideas remain that inform new (especially environmental) approaches to American history.


Cronon defines the frontier thesis using Turner&rsquo;s words: &ldquo;The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.&rdquo;    Turner combined Darwin and Haekel (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) &ldquo;evolution to narrate &ldquo;an evolution which recapitulated the development of civilization itself, tracing the path from hunter to trader to farmer to town,&rdquo; and forming &ldquo;a special American character...marked by fierce individualism, pragmatism, and egalitarianism.&rdquo;   (157)  This formulation is problematic, Cronon says, because its &ldquo;fuzzy language conferred on Turner&rsquo;s argument the illusion of great analytical power only because his central terms...were so broad and so ill-defined.&rdquo;   (158)  I&rsquo;d also suggest that the Darwinian paradigm is not a perfect fit for historical development, recapitulation is attractive but ultimately false, and that even if the frontier experience fostered individualism, pragmatism, and egalitarianism generally, it&rsquo;s crucial to understand how these traits were expressed and distributed.    Clearly everyone didn&rsquo;t have them all in equal quantities.    How and why some people became radically egalitarian while others became radically libertarian seems like it should be a central concern in western histories.


Cronon says Turner&rsquo;s critics have pointed out that &ldquo;westerners looked to the East,&rdquo; and that &ldquo;Among the eastern institutions dominating western life have been the Federal government, the corporation, and the city.&rdquo;    (158)  He calls attention to the &ldquo;urban character of much western settlement,&rdquo; (169) especially in &ldquo;rising urban centers whose growth was central to frontier expansion itself.&rdquo; (like Chicago in NM, 1992.   173) The impact of these points, for me, is that they break the smooth flow of the westward teleology (just as they break the static von Th&uuml;nen model).   Western (or any regional) history should challenge the idea that the story &ldquo;of any given American place could be written in terms of a progressive sequence of different economic and social activities [and] embodied in representative figures who might serve as &lsquo;types&rsquo;.&rdquo;   (166) Cronon suggests that in place of Turner&rsquo;s narrative arc (which he admits &ldquo;set American space in motion and gave it a plot,&rdquo; 166), historians could focus on changes in &ldquo;People&rsquo;s notions of abundance and scarcity--of wealth and poverty.&rdquo;   (172) &ldquo;Among the deepest struggles in American western history,&rdquo; he says, are &ldquo;those among peoples who have defined abundance--and the &lsquo;good life&rsquo;--in conflicting ways.&rdquo;   (175) New histories might &ldquo;discover a subtler periodization...[and] create a finer-grained sense of movement that will reflect interconnections between regional diversity and the shifting dialectic of scarcity and abundance.&rdquo; 

...Historians these days appreciate tightly-focused, evidence-based, bottom-up narratives, but they seem to miss the big, sweeping histories of the nineteenth century.    In his most recent book (which I&rsquo;m in the middle of reading) Kulikoff says he&rsquo;s bringing back the master narrative (we&rsquo;ll see).    My question is, how to put together a history that will drill down into the details of specific people&rsquo;s experiences in particular places and times, and at the same time suggest (if not prove) a &ldquo;big&rdquo; point about the relationship between country and city?    Turner&rsquo;s use of &ldquo;great men&rdquo; as representative &ldquo;types&rdquo; was racist and nineteenth-century, but it highlights the problem of believing any particular story can claim to be a general, representative view.    Maybe a series of well-chosen microhistories can be sewn together into something that resembles a wide view.    Doing this rural history, I might look more closely at the idea of cores and peripheries, which may show unexpected interactions between east and west.    I might find cycles of growth and decline that follow different trajectories from Turner&rsquo;s.    Cronon has already told a story of the simultaneous growth of a center and periphery, but more might be said about the people living in the shadow of a &ldquo;Chicago&rdquo; (or maybe a Minneapolis).    There must be ways rural people&rsquo;s lives remained unaffected, just as there are ways they were never free of the fact of the city&rsquo;s existence.    And Cronon&rsquo;s final question is a good one to keep in mind: &ldquo;To what extent has the peculiar nature of American class consciousness and republican government been shaped by the shifting resource base of our economic and social life?    How do nature and humanity transform each other?&rdquo;   (175) This question might help break an exclusive focus on the city-country binary, to focus on the changing ways rural areas relate to their environments in American history, and how that can be much different from the way cities do.    This might go a long way toward a story of how culture, class consciousness, and politics developed the way they did in rural America.    Comparing these to the stories city-Americans have always wanted to tell themselves about the character and qualities of their rural neighbors, might help explain how we got to where we are.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Transatlantic radical connections</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-01-28T17:02:05-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/84e7b6918eae285bb63d4887b68e6cb8-42.html#unique-entry-id-42</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/84e7b6918eae285bb63d4887b68e6cb8-42.html#unique-entry-id-42</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Synopsis:  Bonwick traces the influence of the Revolution on two groups of British radical, which he calls Commonwealthmen and new radicals.    The commonwealth or &ldquo;real whig&rdquo; tradition was based on &ldquo;the doctrine of the ancient constitution,&rdquo; while the new radicals based their movement on &ldquo;pure and self-justifying natural rights,&rdquo; derived from Thomas Paine&rsquo;s Rights of Man (esp. ...  Bonwick identifies two other strains of British radicalism: Bentham&rsquo;s utilitarianism, as described in his 1776 Fragment on Government, and Wilkes&rsquo; movement in the 1760s and 1770s, which &ldquo;provided a bridge between the commonwealth tradition and the artisan radicals of the 1790s.&rdquo; (xiv)  Bonwick narrates a detailed chronology that highlights connections between Americans and British radicals.


...(6) Granville Sharp and Thomas Brand Hollis were acquaintances of John Adams, and corresponded with him and other Americans after Adams returned to America.  

...Lee wrote newspaper articles he signed as &ldquo;Junius Americanus,&rdquo; which he compiled in The Political Detection: On the Treachery and Tyranny of Administration Both at Home and Abroad.    In 1774, he published An Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain as &ldquo;An Old Member of Parliament;&rdquo; which he followed a year later with a Second Appeal and A Speech Intended to Have Been Given in the House of Commons.  ...  (41-2) The Declaration of Independence &ldquo;arrived in England in August 1776 and immediately was reprinted in almost every newspaper, as a broadsheet, and in the various documentary collections.&rdquo; 

...When Franklin arrived in Paris in 1775, he asked Joseph Priestley to relay to their friend Richard Price his observation that &ldquo;Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head...during the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America.&rdquo; ...  &ldquo;Whereas Franklin had been admitted to the radical circle [including the Lunar Society and the Royal] initially as a scientist, Adams was welcomed as an American.&rdquo;    His elitist Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, which he hoped would communicate his Federalist ideals to &ldquo;some of the Enlightened Friends of Liberty here,&rdquo; was embraced by the more conservative Commonwealthmen as a rational and very recognizable approach to government.   (174) Older radicals like Brand Hollis clung to the idea that America had taken a step away from complete democracy, Bonwick says, especially after 1789.  

...&ldquo;After reading some Antifederalist pamphlets sent by Mercy Warren here reservations grew stronger&rdquo; that America had retreated too far from &ldquo;the rights for which Americans had fought.&rdquo;  

...In Bonwick&rsquo;s narrative, it caused Commonwealth radicals to reevaluate their reform agenda, even as it sparked a new radical generation that expanded much more widely into the artisan communities of London and other cities.    Many older radicals &ldquo;continued to attach greater importance to [America&rsquo;s] libertarianism,&rdquo; Bonwick says, while &ldquo;the new men were particularly impressed with the egalitarianism they believed to be inherent in American society.&rdquo;   (217) Bonwick is unclear exactly what the difference between these two positions is; the only significant difference seems to be that &ldquo;When the Birmingham Society for Constitutional Information told readers of a broadsheet, &lsquo;You have rights equal to all,&rsquo; they were saying nothing that was in itself new, what was remarkable was that they were addressing workmen.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The new generation of radicals was born in December 1791...[when] a group of artisans formed a Constitutional Society in the new industrial town of Sheffield......  (217-8) &ldquo;Thomas Hardy, shoemaker, secretary, and organizer of the LCS, had read extensively in the earlier tracts of the SCI (given him by Brand Hollis) and pamphlets by Sharp, Cartwright, Jebb, and Price.&rdquo;   (220)  While the older radicals like Hollis and Sharp continued corresponding with John Adams and Benjamin Rush, the younger men focused on Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow of Connecticut.  ...  In 1792, Barlow &ldquo;reached prominence&rdquo; with the publication of Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, which discussed &ldquo;principles enunciated by Price in his notorious Discourse on the Love of Our Country.&rdquo; 

...Paine &ldquo;arrived in England with a ready-made reputation based on Common Sense and had quickly made contacts with a wide range of politicians from Edmund Burke...[to] Brand Hollis.&rdquo; ...  Thompson, Bonwick says Paine gave English people &ldquo;a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the &lsquo;freeborn Englishman&rsquo; and which penetrated the subpolitical attitudes of the urban working people.&rdquo; ...  It circulated with extreme rapidity among the radical groups in Manchester, Sheffield, Norwich, and elsewhere and was warmly welcomed as a work of the highest importance...  A proclamation against seditious writings was intended to suppress the pamphlet, but had the opposite effect, and when Paine learned that a prosecution was immanent he arranged for the publication of a cheap edition&rdquo; and moved to France. ...  To supplement them, five editions and ten variants of Common Sense were published between 1791 and 1793, and the SCI distributed twelve thousand copies of his Letter to Secretary Dundas.&rdquo; 

...So, the American Revolution remained very present in the minds of British radicals, although there was wide variation in their response to it.    LCS co-founder John Thelwall,  &ldquo;who claimed to speak for the desperately poor...remarked that the American people had too much veneration fro property, religion, and law.&rdquo; ...  (232)  &ldquo;By the middle of the [1790s] many old radicals were appalled by the &lsquo;horrible excesses&lsquo; of the French Revolution [and] used American experience to redress these extremist tendencies.&rdquo; ...  Cartwright shared some of Wyvill&rsquo;s suspicions and worked hard to counteract Paine&rsquo;s republicanism, while Brand Hollis denied rumors that he saw Rights of Man prior to publication and reportedly refused Paine financial help when he was in difficulties.&rdquo;   (235) &ldquo;Commonwealthmen saw America in light of their own needs...following the Adams model in preference to the Pennsylvania model of a unicameral legislature.&rdquo;    But &ldquo;shortly before her death Catharine Macaulay told Washington that she had abandoned her preference for the American system in favor of the French unicameral model.&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Stylized isn&#x27;t that obsessive</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-01-25T21:16:45-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b8fdb29f5882d0d01f5107e551a24271-41.html#unique-entry-id-41</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/b8fdb29f5882d0d01f5107e551a24271-41.html#unique-entry-id-41</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Mark Garvey


Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White&rsquo;s The Elements of Style


2009


Actually, the title promises more than it delivers by way of quirkiness.    The book is partly a look at the history of The Elements of Style, partly a glimpse at the interactions of E.B.   White with a number of people including William Strunk and the Macmillan editors and managers who made the book possible.    The book obsession elements seem like they were inserted at the behest of an editor, to add a little quirkiness to an otherwise pretty straightforward story.


Part of the appeal of Stylized is the glimpse it gives the reader of New York literary culture during the years when White was one of its bright lights.    In this sense, it reminds me a bit of One Drop, Bliss Broyard&rsquo;s book about discovering her father was black.    Anatole Broyard was a critic for the New York Times in the seventies and eighties.    The difference is, Garvey is right: &ldquo;few books of any size, have had the impact on American literary culture and thought that The Elements of Style has.&rdquo;    White&rsquo;s ability to abstract (a little, not obsessively) from writing to life (&ldquo;it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong&rdquo;) probably accounts for much of the appeal of The Elements.    That, and the fact it helps people write.


Garvey gives White credit for having &ldquo;that straightforward prose that was exceptionally polished...without giving the impression of labor.&rdquo;   (33)  In one of the professional writers&rsquo; comments (I can&rsquo;t find it -- more about this in a moment), someone makes the point that White creates a &ldquo;myth&rdquo; of simple prose and clear thinking.    Garvey falls into this myth headfirst, taking several opportunities to attack postmodernism.    He disparages theory, and even belittles attempts to make language more gender-inclusive.    In drafting Strunk and White into his crusade, he&rsquo;s probably oversimplifying the positions they would have taken, which would have been both more nuanced and more humorous than Garvey&rsquo;s pedantic rants.


I couldn&rsquo;t find the author of the part I just paraphrased, because the book is organized in such a jumble.    Garvey apparently had conversations with several authors.    They give their opinions on The Elements and reflections on how it has influenced their work.    Some of these are interesting, some simply reinforce points Garvey has already made well enough, and pad the pages.    The real problem, though, is that Garvey or his editors chose to break these comments up, and intersperse them throughout the text.    In some cases, this may hide the fact that people repeated themselves quite a bit.    My objection is, many of these short blurbs come, complete with their own little boxes like textbook sidebars, in the middle of the story.    They completely break the flow, and I frequently found myself paging back, to see what Garvey had been saying, before he so rudely interrupted himself.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>2 views of agrarian radicalism</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-01-22T13:29:04-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/48a606444aea9db2f733758fe03318eb-40.html#unique-entry-id-40</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/48a606444aea9db2f733758fe03318eb-40.html#unique-entry-id-40</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As you&rsquo;d expect from the title, Kulikoff argues that there was class-consciousness among yeomen farmers, separating them not only from aristocrats and merchants, but also from capitalist farmers.    Kulikoff has written extensively on farmers and the revolutionary period, and I&rsquo;ll need to look at his books to discover whether his claims are supported, because he doesn&rsquo;t provide any primary evidence in this article (this is frustrating, and may be a warning to me, never to write an article without evidence, regardless how retrospective I think it is).    He defines yeoman farming as being based solely on family labor, and although sometimes selling surpluses in the market, primarily oriented toward self-sufficiency and survival (he does not use the word competency, but that seems to be the idea).  

...Kulikoff says &ldquo;These Virginia yeomen, who constituted three-fifths of the white heads of families in the colony, owned land and knew that freeholding land tenure was their only claim to political participation, their only security against impoverishment......  (81-2)  While I find the idea that politicians used (and partly manufactured) this yeoman image, partly to the detriment of the actual farmers, plausible, I think Kulikoff&rsquo;s argument is strained and too heavily informed by theory.


&ldquo;Yeomen,&rdquo; he says (his italics), &ldquo;were small, producing farmers who owned land and participated in markets to sustain familial autonomy and local exchange.  [in other words, they were philosophically committed to local, barter exchange within the community?  ...  Doesn&rsquo;t this really mean they had families to feed, they were living at a subsistence level, and the only people around to trade with were their neighbors, because there was no effective transportation to distant markets?]  ...  Or were they living in a remote, rural, subsistence economy where they were unable to get credit, and would have had no use for it anyway.  ...  Unlike yeomen, they often hired wage laborers to increase their output and profits. [am I being cynical, or do they have to use &ldquo;financial instruments&rdquo; and wage labor, and the yeomen have to be innocent of that sin, or the predetermined structure Kulikoff is building for us doesn&rsquo;t work?]    They became part of a capitalist economy, one where profits were divided between the original producers (farmers, artisans, small urban capitalists, wage laborers) and a class of capitalists who owned and controlled the means of production and who expropriated part of the value of goods every producer made. [how&rsquo;s that again?  

...Kulikoff says events like the resistance of Hudson Valley tenants in the 1760s &ldquo;led yeomen to greater self-definition as a class,&rdquo; (88) and this is fine as far as it goes.  ...  To legitimate their rights to land, yeomen embraced a labor theory of value, one they had carried over with them from England, but that lay dormant until conflict broke out.&rdquo; ...  The irony is that they had to appeal to the &ldquo;gentlemen&rdquo; in charge of the government for protection against these Indians, even as they tried to maintain their claims to the land and their autonomy.  

...This is an interesting argument, especially if it led to the Whigs promising (or hinting at) a revolutionary settlement they had no interest in or intention of supporting, once the war was won.


After the war, in the period leading up to the Constitution, Kulikoff says the Whig delegates to the Philadelphia convention &ldquo;sought a stronger national government, with the power to tax, regulate commerce, suppress internal conflict, and encourage economic development.  ...  &ldquo;In pushing for greater freeholder democracy in the 1780s and 1790s,&rdquo; Kulikoff says, &ldquo;yeomen became more conscious of themselves as a political class, distinct from gentlemen and merchants.&rdquo; 

...(105)  Heavy irony here: these sturdy individualist yeomen are appealing to the state to conquer the Indians, so they can have lands they will subsequently claim are theirs by natural right and not subject to taxation or competing claims by gentlemen who have the backing of that same state.  

...Founded in 1785 by merchants, doctors, and gentlemen (including Benjamin Rush and Robert Morris), nearly all of whom opposed Pennsylvania&rsquo;s democratic constitution of 1776 and applauded the federal Constitution of 1787, the society gave its first prize...to George Morgan, a gentleman farmer from Princeton, New Jersey.&rdquo;  ...  As capitalist farmers expanded on the northern frontiers, conflicts with yeomen ensued...only the radical legacy of the Revolution sustained yeomen democracy for so long, nurturing the yeomanry through their protracted struggles of the nineteenth century.&rdquo;  ...  Maybe that&rsquo;s the real central question: can people be part of a continuous class, based solely on their self-association with a myth, regardless of the fact that their life experience completely invalidates that association?  

...&ldquo;Who can have better right to the land than we who have fought for it, subdued it & made it valuable which if we had not done no proprietor would ever have enquired after it......  The General Court did wrong & what they had no right to do when they granted them in such large quantities to certain companies & individuals & the bad acts of government are not binding on the subject...&rdquo;


...&ldquo;As gentlemen of property and standing,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;Timothy Pickering, Philip Schuyler, and Henry Know fought a war for national independence, a war intended to place America&rsquo;s government in their own hands and to safeguard their extensive property from arbitrary parliamentary taxation.  

...Agrarians, he says &ldquo;sought an American Revolution that maximized their access to, and secured their possession of, freehold land on which they could realize their labor as their own private property.  

...They are a very industrious set of people, & such as make the best first settlers in a country like this; but the difficulty of clearing the land is so great that some years expire before a man can raise a subsistence for his family from it.&rdquo;   (231)  This indicates an understanding that different people and personalities were needed, to settle a frontier, and presumably that there was some type of ongoing social contract with these people, even after the pioneer phase ended.  

...Taylor suggests that &ldquo;leading men&rdquo; in remote agrarian communities helped the rebels, until Jefferson&rsquo;s party gave them a way out of their tight spot between their neighbors and the aristocrats.  ...  Jeffersonians&rsquo; propaganda extolled the virtues of the agrarians, which may have mitigated the rebels&rsquo; frustration with compromise; but they were practical farmers who were probably by this point more interested in providing for their families than fighting for principle.    Taylor concludes that the Jeffersonians&rsquo; compromises, and the general belief that this was the best deal anyone would ever get, helped the leading men sell their neighbors on ending the resistance, so that &ldquo;over time, the social mobility of a strategic few shrank the contested, marginal, autonomous districts that had temporarily expanded after the Revolution.&rdquo;  ...  So, to some degree, this was a victory for them, which they would never have achieved had they not stood up to the aristocrats in the cities. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Surprises in English history</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-01-21T12:39:46-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/475d47da14e7516277b60a6ce2636aa8-39.html#unique-entry-id-39</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/475d47da14e7516277b60a6ce2636aa8-39.html#unique-entry-id-39</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[&ldquo;In 1775 Lord North admitted to George III that &lsquo;the cause of Great Britain is not yet sufficiently popular&rsquo;, and Lord Camden claimed that &lsquo;the common people hold the war in abhorrence and the merchants and tradesmen, for obvious reasons, are likewise against it&rsquo;, and he told the House of Lords: &lsquo;You have not half of the nation on your side.&rsquo;    Benjamin Franklin believed that &lsquo;the body of the English people are our friends.&rsquo;    In August 1775, John Wesley...was alarmed that the bulk of the people were &lsquo;dangerously dissatisfied&rsquo; and highly critical of the King himself...  Temple Luttrell, having returned from a tour of England, told the House of Commons &lsquo;that the sense of the mass of the people is in favor of the Americans.&rsquo;&rdquo; ...  In the first place, are these descriptions all accurate, or are they being made by people with an agenda?  ...  Englishmen had relatives in America, and they probably thought of the colonists as people like themselves.    They could be against coercion (how does this compare to their reaction to Irish coercion?) ...  And then, when the war became one against France and Spain, they could become patriotic.


&ldquo;In London, Arthur Lee and William Lee, the brothers of the Virginia merchant Richard Henry Lee, and Richard&rsquo;s trading partner, Stephen Sayre, were very active in the American cause, with others including Benjamin Rush......  He wrote pamphlets and a series of newspaper articles as &lsquo;Junius Americanus&rsquo;...in 1769 he persuaded the radicals to include the government&rsquo;s American policy in their list of grievances...  William Lee...and Stephen Sayre were elected as the two sheriffs of London in 1773 and they both unsuccessfully contested parliamentary seats in the general election of 1774.&rdquo;   (5)  This is interesting -- we don&rsquo;t normally think of the American revolutionaries holding positions of authority in England.    It&rsquo;s a good reminder that they were rich, influential Englishmen right up to the last moment.


&ldquo;Benjamin Franklin was deeply involved with a group of radical thinkers (many of whom were Dissenters) who belonged to the Club of Honest Whigs in London.&rdquo; 

...From 1779 Christopher Wyvill began to organize a nationwide association movement committed to economical and moderate parliamentary reform...  The American patriots...had shifted the debate to a prolonged discussion about who could vote and in favor of the conclusion that all taxpayers should be directly represented in the legislature.&rdquo; 

...Michael Durey, &ldquo;The United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment, 1798-1807&rdquo;


&ldquo;In 1807 the old Federalist leader Rufus King was defeated when he stood for election to the New York assembly on a nativist &ldquo;American ticket&rsquo;.   Significant opposition to him was raised by a number of Irishmen who had recently settled in New York city and who were able to manipulate the considerable Irish voting bloc in the state.    Among these new Americans were Thomas Addis Emmet, William James MacNeven, William Sampson and George Cuming, all former United Irish leaders, who in 1798, among a large group of state prisoners, had reached an accommodation with the Irish government...  According to the state prisoners, their desire to emigrate to the United States in 1798 had been thwarted by an unholy alliance between Rufus King, then American ambassador to the court of St. ...  (96)  Durey says this story they told is substantially untrue, but it&rsquo;s interesting that they were in New York and able to use this story to influence American politics.  


Paul Crook, &ldquo;Whiggery and America: Accommodating the Radical Threat&rdquo; starts to explore some of the disillusionment with nineteenth century America.  


&ldquo;Disillusioned by the actions of Americans in Texas and Oregon, appalled by accounts of slavery and political corruption...[

...&ldquo;As Chartist clamour rose for America&rsquo;s ballot and universal suffrage...some of the old Whigs became positively anti-American in their efforts to oppose change...  Even [Edinburgh Review editor Francis] Jeffrey conceded that in America everything depended on the suffrage and favor of the sovereign people: &lsquo;and accordingly, it would appear that they are pampered with constant adulation...so that no one will venture to tell them of their faults, and moralists...dare not whisper a syllable of their prejudice.&rsquo;&rdquo; 

...McCalman mentions that in the 1780 Gordon Riots, &ldquo;that had visited more destruction on London in a week than Paris experienced throughout the Revolution,&rdquo; (207) Dickens understood &ldquo;it was precisely Lord George Gordon&rsquo;s blending of religious enthusiasm and enlightenment rationality that made him so dangerous.   Edmund Burke, himself a target of the rioters in June 1780, made the same diagnosis...forced to defend his family and house with a drawn sword...  He reflected in 1796: &lsquo;had the protentous comet of the Rights of Man...crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried...into all the vices, crimes, horrors and miseries of the French Revolution.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (220) This tends to mitigate my response to Burke as Paine&rsquo;s antagonist, and explain the shift between the Burke of 1770 and the Burke of 1796.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>INCREDIBLE Mobility</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-01-12T17:38:49-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/33ce64f80ca19b8cf9c5acef45bd8ad4-38.html#unique-entry-id-38</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/33ce64f80ca19b8cf9c5acef45bd8ad4-38.html#unique-entry-id-38</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[&ldquo;Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth- Century America&rdquo;


...Synopsis: Thernstrom (UCLA, later Harvard) and Knights (Illinois, later York) agree with Joseph Kennedy, the Superintendent of the 1852 Census, that &ldquo;the roving tendency of our people&rdquo; is given too little attention by historians (7, quoting this).    Rural mobility, they say, has been done by Malin 1935, Curti 1959, and Coleman 1962.    But the point they make about urban population change may apply equally to rural.    Recorded &ldquo;net population changes from census to census,&rdquo; they say, &ldquo;though often dramatic, pale into insignificance by comparison with the actual gross volume of in and out movement.&rdquo;   (10) &ldquo;Even in the most stable small or medium size community which has yet been examined approximately half of the population was transient within a relatively brief span of years.&rdquo; 

...To illustrate their point, the authors examined Boston documents to find &ldquo;the proportion of the city&rsquo;s 1890 residents who had moved into Boston in the preceding decade [when the city&rsquo;s population rose from 363,000 to 448,000] was...fully one third.&rdquo;    In fact, they say, because people were constantly leaving the city, &ldquo;Nearly 800,000 people moved into Boston between 1880 and 1890 to produce the net migration increase of 65,179.&rdquo;   (17) The turnover of the Boston population means that just about 700,000 people left the city in ten years.   (18) These people all went somewhere.


The 1880s were not unique in this regard.    Between 1830 and 1890, when population increased from 61,000 to 448,000, &ldquo;the number of migrants entering Boston...was an amazing 3,325,000, eight and a half times the net population increase.&rdquo;   (22)  Again, that means nearly three million people left Boston and went someplace else.    Where did they go, and when they got there, did they stop moving about?    There&rsquo;s apparently no reason to suppose they did.


&ldquo;Returning to the same dwelling after the passage of only 365 days, the city directory canvasser had less than a fifty-fifty chance of finding its former inhabitants living there,&rdquo; the authors say.    Of course the rich, who owned businesses and real estate, were much more persistent than the poor.    Thernstrom and Knights even speculate that transience might be higher than they can measure, because many poor workers may not have stayed long enough to be counted.  


A political consequence of short tenancy was disenfranchisement.    This may have led, the authors speculate, to a widespread feeling of alienation from the political process and a corresponding inability to organize effective dissident organizations.    It may also have contributed to the growth of regional voluntary organizations (and even the Knights of Labor) that could offer people some continuity in spite of their movements.    Bruce Laurie mentions Thernstrom several times in Artisans to Workers, but the extreme mobility of poor people and unskilled workers doesn&rsquo;t really impact his story of the skilled tradesmen unionized by the AF of L.    It might help explain the &ldquo;ruralization&rdquo; of the K of L, though... 


If true, this high-mobility &ldquo;floating proletariat&rdquo; (31) challenges Robert Wiebe&rsquo;s image of &ldquo;a nation of loosely connected islands,&rdquo; (32, quoting Search for Order) because they would have been moving constantly between these islands.  ...  between the urban islands and the rural sea.    Taking ideas and attitudes with them as they travelled from place to place.    This could have huge implications for popular culture...


...Howard Chudacoff (Brown) paraphrases and cites as first note in his article, &ldquo;A Reconsideration of Geographical Mobility in American Urban History,&rdquo; (1994) taking Thernstrom&rsquo;s thesis pretty much as proven.    David Ward, writing on American ethnic ghettos in the 1982 Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, also cites this article as proof that Irish immigrants were highly mobile.    Edward Pessen cites the article in 1972 to explain why the poor did not become involved in antebellum urban politics. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Pork Packing</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-01-08T19:05:17-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36c02dfc85beb52f5a9470e7144a9168-37.html#unique-entry-id-37</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/36c02dfc85beb52f5a9470e7144a9168-37.html#unique-entry-id-37</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Margaret Walsh


The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry


1982


Synopsis:  Walsh follows up on her 1972 book, The Manufacturing Frontier, with a look at the transition (between 1840-1870 more or less) of pork processing from a local, part-time activity to an industry.    She says &ldquo;pork packing is a good tool of analysis because agricultural processing early disseminated an industrial experience to newly settled farming country.&rdquo; (ix)  But also, it seems obvious, because primary processing is industry.    I wonder if similar work has been done yet on flour milling, lumber, tanning, cooperage, and especially brewing and distilling?    By 1870, Walsh says, the midwest was already &ldquo;responsible for 27 percent of the nation&rsquo;s value added.&rdquo;   (3)  Cronon notwithstanding, a lot of that took place outside Chicago.


(the rest of it -- and references -- here)]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Artisans Into Workers</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-01-06T18:11:44-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dab981e9a9b9bf316e877cf52c7a4f2f-36.html#unique-entry-id-36</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/dab981e9a9b9bf316e877cf52c7a4f2f-36.html#unique-entry-id-36</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Bruce Laurie	


Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America


1989


Synopsis:  The introduction begins with Werner Sombart&rsquo;s 1906 question, &ldquo;Why is there no socialism in the United States?&rdquo;    Laurie defines the socialism of the question as &ldquo;both class consciousness and a socialist party speaking for the working classes.&rdquo;    (3)  After tracing the high points of labor historiography (repeated in greater detail in a final, bibliographic essay), he suggests that &ldquo;the ideology of radicalism persisted longer than in any continental nation&rdquo; and that this &ldquo;durability of radicalism...[which] never completely repudiated the old republican axiom that active government was corrupt government...inhibited the transition to socialism.&rdquo;    (12) Laurie&rsquo;s radicalism is admittedly ambiguous: &ldquo;it harbored both individualism and collectivism and before the 1850s it was the universal language of skilled workers on both sides of the Atlantic.&rdquo;    (13)  The transatlantic nature of radicalism is rendered even more interesting by Laurie&rsquo;s claim to find both it and &ldquo;capitalism in the countryside as well as the city.&rdquo;   (14)


(the rest of this, including references, on my Radical Field List page)]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Nature&#x27;s Metropolis</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-01-05T19:05:35-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ca0ec5f87dd56fe1971c579dfa6ba472-35.html#unique-entry-id-35</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ca0ec5f87dd56fe1971c579dfa6ba472-35.html#unique-entry-id-35</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[William Hays, The Herd on the Move (1862)


William Cronon		


Nature&rsquo;s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West


1991


Synopsis:  The basic thrust of most of Cronon&rsquo;s writing is that nature and humanity (ecology and economy, country and city) are are not merely two sides of the same coin, but are parts of a whole that has been obscured and hidden by both market and anti-market (romantic) forces.    Nature&rsquo;s Metropolis uses the history of Chicago to illustrate this point.    Beginning and ending with his personal story of a childhood journey from New England to Wisconsin that took him through the city, Cronon concludes &ldquo;We fool ourselves if we think we can choose between [country and city], for the green lake and the orange cloud are creatures of the same landscape.&rdquo;   (385)  The text is a series of increasingly fine-grained illustrations of this point.


The most important feature of Nature&rsquo;s Metropolis is Cronon&rsquo;s story of the actual historical rural and urban development of the middle west (rather than an abstract or theorized rural and urban world) as a single, interdependent process.    While earlier Eastern settlement may have followed a different path, the growth of the middle west as a single unit is crucially important; especially when evaluating the politics and cultural construction of rural/urban relations in the Populist and Progressive eras.  


(the rest of this review is posted on my Rural Field List page)
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>the literary country</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-12-29T17:25:55-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/eb81dad26113eacd181aeb548f64f413-33.html#unique-entry-id-33</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/eb81dad26113eacd181aeb548f64f413-33.html#unique-entry-id-33</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Raymond Williams


The Country and the City


1973


Synopsis: While this is primarily about ideas of country and city in English literature, Williams makes some important points about the actual complexity of things.    Between the changing natures of the two poles, there are &ldquo;many kinds of intermediate and new kinds of social and physical organization.&rdquo;    Williams reminds us of the &ldquo;temptation to reduce the historical variety of the forms of interpretation to what are loosely called symbols or archetypes,&rdquo; when it is the variety and &ldquo;the coexistence of persistence and change which is really striking and interesting&rdquo; in our ideas about he country and city.   (289)  


Williams further claims that &ldquo;the idea of an ordered and happier [rural] past&rdquo; serves as a counterpoint to a critic&rsquo;s perception of &ldquo;disturbance and disorder&rdquo; in the present.    But any such idealization, he says, is based on a very selective view of fleeting moments in the past that &ldquo;cover and evade the actual and bitter contradictions of the time.&rdquo;   (45)  Even though Williams&rsquo; country is primarily in the past, his point may be equally valid for the rural world of the present: the noble, heroic country that promoters hark back to usually &ldquo;rested on the brief and aching lives of the permanently cheated&rdquo; who are invisible in the record.    We have to be especially careful not to let them remain invisible, or else it will be &ldquo;precisely at this point that the &lsquo;town and country&lsquo; fiction serve[s]: to promote superficial comparisons and prevent real ones.&rdquo;   (54)    


Critics: For the most part, they address The Country and the City&rsquo;s place in Williams&rsquo; development as a socialist humanist.    Like Williams himself, they remain a little too literary to be particularly useful to me from the perspective of history.    I think in the long run, I may have a chance to look again at the way Williams criticizes Marx and Engels for falling into an assumption about the &ldquo;idiocy of the country,&rdquo; but that seems dated -- I&rsquo;m not studying Victorian British rural history, and I don&rsquo;t believe in putting theory before evidence in the way I think I&rsquo;d need to, in order to use this more.    For my purposes, Williams channeled through Cronon will probably be the best bet.


	


One interesting point: the editors of Science Fiction Studies were apparently huge Williams fans.    One reviewer mentioned Jeffries&rsquo; After London, which I might want to look at in a different (Bradlaugh) light sometime.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>from Field Reading</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-12-23T11:01:09-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/892dea060ae7d9889fd73f35c29118a3-32.html#unique-entry-id-32</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/892dea060ae7d9889fd73f35c29118a3-32.html#unique-entry-id-32</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938


...Synopsis: The 1998 UC Berkeley dissertation underlying this book was subtitled Nostalgic modernism, reproduction, and the family in the United States, 1890-1930.  ...  In the new introduction, Lovett says the U.S. &ldquo;invested heavily in the reproduction of its citizenry during the early twentieth century.&rdquo;    She labels this covert, relatively non-coercive public policy focus &ldquo;pronatalism&rdquo; and suggests the subjects of her study &ldquo;promoted reproduction indirectly.&rdquo;    But the argument seems to circle back on itself, and at times it is unclear whether these reformers promoted families, motherhood, and reproduction for its own sake, or as a means to another end.    Setting aside the pronatalist framing argument she introduced in the book, Lovett&rsquo;s study of five reformers shows how they all used symbols and images of family and rural life, and asks important questions regarding the power these symbols had, over the reformers as well as their audiences.  


Idealization of rural family life is complicated by the two distinctly different uses Lovett shows it put to: for Mary Elizabeth Lease, &ldquo;political decisions had effects on the daily lives of women and children,&rdquo; (6) whereas for urban reformers like Roosevelt and Ross, family and the rural home are tools for &ldquo;controlling and directing a changing social order.&rdquo; ...  Maxwell&rsquo;s national irrigation plan and the Arts and Crafts movement that grew around it, and Florence Sherbon&rsquo;s popular eugenics), the motivations of the principals seems much less straightforward.    All the cases are interesting, and seem to scream for more attention.    Other attractive ideas for further study include the deployment of a &ldquo;Jeffersonian&rdquo; agrarian ideal, and how its definition and use may have changed over time, a broad assessment of Populism in both its positive and negative incarnations, a closer look at Edward A.   Ross (especially his relationships with Rita Hollingworth and Charlotte Perkins Gilman), and an investigation of the Craftsman and Back-to-the-Land movements.    And, as Lovett says, the use of nostalgia and especially rural nostalgia by reformers. 


Racism and fear of white &ldquo;race suicide&rdquo; seems to have been an important motivator for some reformers.    Lovett and Danbom seem to agree that urban activists had agendas beyond the good of country people, when they advocated &ldquo;Country Life&rdquo; improvements.    The chapter on Mary Lease extends the story by beginning to look at what country people thought.    Lovett enriches this story further by creating continuity from the populist era into the progressive (Danbom begins his study around 1900, and ignores rural agitation in the 1890s, implying that those issues had been resolved and the Country Life issues are new and unprecedented).    When Mary Lease sees &ldquo;the spread of Iowa evictions as a clear omen that English-style landlordism was establishing itself,&rdquo; and when she further notes that the evictions &ldquo;coincided with the government giveaway of 300,000 square miles of public domain land to railroad corporations,&rdquo; the rural critique of the system takes on dimensions of intelligence and sophistication lacking in some depictions of populism.   (27, 28)  Lease&rsquo;s charge that Roosevelt&rsquo;s &ldquo;Progressive party stole the Populist Platform plank by plank, clause by clause, without casting even the faintest shadow of a word of credit&rdquo; also suggests a closer look at politics across this transitional period might be a good idea.


Another unexpected idea is that although Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the frontier closed, George Maxwell &ldquo;spent much of his time arguing that...it was merely underwatered.&rdquo;    (48)  The National Irrigation Association and railroad sponsorship of the water projects that reshaped settlement and agriculture deserves more attention.  ...  Hill&rsquo;s role as &ldquo;empire builder&rdquo; might be worth a closer look, as well as the Little Landers, the evolution of the Arts and Crafts movement (especially William Morris&rsquo; London &ldquo;Red House&rdquo; and the connection to anarchist Peter Kropotkin. ...  Ross seems to have continued to develop through the years, unlike that of Roosevelt.  

...Similarly, the racism of the Country Life movement (and in the idealization of &ldquo;yeoman&rdquo; rurality in general?) ...  If the &ldquo;Huck&rdquo; accounts in Shutesbury were actually fabricated, and if classification of Swift River Valley people as &ldquo;degenerates&rdquo; helped Boston get the Quabbin Reservoir, there might be a story there.    In the popular eugenics chapter, the AES seems to have a grasp on the need to make rural life more &ldquo;economically and culturally attractive.&rdquo;    Their identification of the automobile&rsquo;s ability to enhance &ldquo;access and mate selection in rural communities&rdquo; goes a long way to explaining the dramatic increase in rural cars in the 1920s noted by Danbom. 


Critics: Jennifer Fronc reviewed Conceiving the Future for Reviews in American History (at the time, Fronc was at Virginia Commonwealth University -- they are now colleagues at UMass/Amherst).   Fronc says the book&rsquo;s greatest strengths &ldquo;rest in Lovett&rsquo;s perspective on the problems created by urbanization and her analysis of the gendered implications of pronatalist thinking.&rdquo;    (631)  I found the argument for pervasive pronatalism less convincing than the argument for pervasive racism, when it came to the motivations or hidden agendas of these people and groups.    For example, even  accepting the sincerity of Roosevelt&rsquo;s &ldquo;indictment of childless women,&rdquo; (95) his pronatalism was in service to his fear of &ldquo;race suicide.&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Rural Life&#x2c; 1908</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-12-13T12:11:16-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a14e1b207a7c8710af6ce224b2ce61d0-31.html#unique-entry-id-31</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a14e1b207a7c8710af6ce224b2ce61d0-31.html#unique-entry-id-31</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Plunkett was an Irish aristocrat (born at Dunsany Castle, 3rd son of the 16th baron -- the author of The King of Elfland's Daughter was the 18th baron) who became a leading figure in home rule and developed the idea of Irish rural cooperatives.  

...Plunkett&rsquo;s thesis in this book, which seems to have influenced a lot of American sociologists and County Lifers, is that &ldquo;the city has developed to the neglect of the country,&rdquo; and that of Roosevelt&rsquo;s three pillars of Country Life, &ldquo;better farming, better business, better living,&rdquo; the business problems of farmers should be addressed first.   (3, 12-13)  Plunkett refers briefly to his experience in rural Ireland, and also to Denmark, which has come up so many times in these primary texts that it probably demands some attention.


...He portrays these men as being genuinely concerned with &ldquo;The Future of the United States&rdquo; (title of a 1906 Hill speech I need to find a copy of), and especially with soil conservation.  

...During the first phase of the industrial revolution, Plunkett says &ldquo;economic science stepped in, and, scrupulously obeying its own law of demand and supply, told the then predominant middle classes just what they wished to be told.&rdquo;   (37) &ldquo;Social and political science,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;rose up in protest against both the economists and the manufacturers,&rdquo; which, if true, might be an interesting way to look at the development of these disciplines. 

...Interestingly for an analysis written a hundred years ago, Plunkett introduces the idea of a &ldquo;world-market,&rdquo; (40) and says rural neglect is caused in part by the fact that &ldquo;reciprocity&rdquo; between city and country &ldquo;has not ceased; it has actually increased......  (41)  &ldquo;Forty-two per cent of materials used in manufacture in the United States are from the farm, which also contributes seventy per cent of the country&rsquo;s exports.&rdquo; 

...But even though urban middlemen are to blame and the problem impoverishes rural people at the same time it aggravates poor city people, &ldquo;the remedy...lies with the farmer&rdquo; rather than with legislative action or government reform. 

...Although he doesn&rsquo;t explain how the system has managed to marginalize them, Plunkett suggests that excluding rural people from the political sphere has damaged democracy.    Farmers&rsquo; experience of the cycles of nature, which Plunkett pictures as slower and less mutable than the commercial and industrial processes city people live with, give them a more balanced political sense.    City dwellers&rsquo; &ldquo;one-sided experience&rdquo; may account for &ldquo;that disregard of inconvenient facts, and that impatience of the limits of practicability, which many observers note as a characteristic defect of popular government.&rdquo;   (49) Plunkett also suspects farmers might be less amenable to &ldquo;the cruder forms of Socialism...perhaps because in the country the question of the divorce of the worker from his raw material by capitalism does not arise.&rdquo;   (50-1) American farmers are not alienated from their means of production because most of them are proprietors (had this been a problem in tenant-farmer dominated Great Britain?).    So even if they aren&rsquo;t fully capitalists in the sense that urban industrialists are, Plunkett seems to say, at least they aren&rsquo;t victims of capitalism in the same way urban wage-earners are.    (Plunkett avoids any reference to the ethnic immigrant contribution to American life, with the exception of a subtle nod to the success his countrymen have had infiltrating urban politics)


Plunkett tries to call for &ldquo;a moral corrective to a too rapidly growing material prosperity,&rdquo; but he fails to identify the motivation for the &ldquo;reckless sacrifice of agricultural interests by the legislators of the towns.&rdquo;  

...Suggesting that even though they have no public voice, farmers &ldquo;keep a full stock of grievances in their mental stores,&rdquo; Plunkett warns of &ldquo;serious unrest in every part of the United States, even in the most prosperous regions.&rdquo; 

...Based on his personal observations of the Middle West in the 1880s, Plunkett says &ldquo;settlers, knowing that the land must rise rapidly in value, almost invariably purchased much larger farms than they could handle...they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its wastefulness.  ...  (67) Though averse to blaming government, Plunkett does recognize the &ldquo;opening up of the vast new territory by the provision of local traffic for transcontinental lines was an object of national urgency and importance...the policy of rewarding railroad enterprises with unconditional grants of vast areas of agricultural land,&rdquo; he concludes, is &ldquo;one of the evidences of urban domination over rural affairs.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;Under modern economic conditions, things must be done in a large way if they are to be done profitably,&rdquo; Plunkett says, &ldquo;and this necessitates a resort to combination.&rdquo;  ...  (90) For better or worse, he says, &ldquo;towns have flourished at the expense of the country by the use of these methods, and the countryman must adopt them if he is to get his own again.&rdquo;   (91) But farmers, Plunkett admits, being &ldquo;the most conservative and individualistic of human beings,&rdquo; are unlikely to organize themselves in joint stock companies and hand over control to others. 

...Plunkett&rsquo;s solution, the farmers&rsquo; cooperative, acknowledges the fact that &ldquo;when farmers combine, it is a combination not of money only, but of personal effort in relation to the entire business.&rdquo;    (96) While this description is not exactly accurate (farmers produce a standardized product, but there are limits to centralization and scale economies relative to say, steel production, so the economic comparison with industry is complicated), Plunkett is trying to emphasize that the &ldquo;distinction between the capitalistic basis of joint stock organization and the more human character of cooperative system is fundamentally important.&rdquo;   (97) Compared to Ireland, where Plunkett had been instrumental in developing rural coops, &ldquo;as things are, the [American] farming interest is at a fatal disadvantage in the purchase of agricultural requirements, in the sale of agricultural produce, and in obtaining proper credit facilities.&rdquo; 

...Rather than trying to &ldquo;bring the advantages of the city&rdquo; to the country, rural communities would &ldquo;develop in the country the things of the country, the very existence of which seems to have been forgotten.&rdquo;    &ldquo;After all,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;it is the world within us rather than the world without us that matters in the making of society,&rdquo; once the physical necessities like clean water, medicine, and electricity have been made available by attending to &ldquo;better business.&rdquo; 

...One point he does make is that existing rural organizations, the Grange, and the Farmers&rsquo; Union could all be enlisted into the cause of helping establish and support rural coops.    It would be interesting to read further, and see if the Country Life Movement ignored this advice, and stuck with a top-down approach; and if this limited its reach and efficacy.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Roots of Rural Capitalism</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-11-24T18:34:08-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/554e65e5677643121e3fa4cfb3c830fa-30.html#unique-entry-id-30</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/554e65e5677643121e3fa4cfb3c830fa-30.html#unique-entry-id-30</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 Ithaca: Cornell Press, 1990.


&ldquo;Between the 1780s and the 1860s the New England countryside underwent a profound social and economic transformation.    From an economy dominated by independent farmers, it became part of a broader national market and an outpost of industrial capitalism.&rdquo;    (8)


But what does independence mean?    Is it subsistence farming, with the goal of 100% self-sufficiency?    Trade with locals, based on negotiated values rather than &ldquo;market&rdquo; prices corresponding to those in faraway cities?    A sense of not being &ldquo;dependent&rdquo; on wage-based employment, afforded by land-ownership and local reciprocity?    When &ldquo;the distribution of wealth and the social patterns of access to the instruments of capitalistic economic power became increasingly unequal,&rdquo; (17) what was happening?    Were the &ldquo;river gods&rdquo; making themselves aristocrats, keeping the money and power in the family?    Were the Boston Associates coming into the Valley, creating a mill city at Holyoke?    Were these developments inevitable, and did they have to proceed to the specific ends they arrived at?    Lots of questions remain unanswered.  


If &ldquo;Farmers traveled more to exchange produce&rdquo; and &ldquo;Prices...increasingly converged with each other and with those in distant markets,&rdquo; (59) why were the farmers looking outside and producing for the cash market?    Too many sons and not enough land?    Taxes from Boston (which led to debt, foreclosures, Shays&rsquo; Rebellion)?    And what about the Workingmen&rsquo;s movement?    Rev.   Samuel C.   Allen ran for governor in the 1830s, partly on a platform opposing agricultural mortgages held by corporations, &ldquo;bringing the yeomanry...into a state of dependency and peril.&rdquo;    (205)  This probably warrants a closer look... ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Small Community Economics&#x2c; 1943</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-11-25T18:11:04-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6c2c38d749d0e03eb08aabf428165e46-29.html#unique-entry-id-29</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6c2c38d749d0e03eb08aabf428165e46-29.html#unique-entry-id-29</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Arthur E.   Morgan, Small Community Economics.    Yellow Springs, OH: Community Services, Inc.    1943


(Arthur E.   Morgan 1878-1975, born in Cincinnati, grew up in St.   Cloud, MN.    Engineer, Unitarian, President of Antioch College.  1st head of TVA in 1933, removed in 1938 for criticizing TVA&rsquo;s direction.    Utopian.    Wrote bio of Edward Bellamy.    Founded Community Service, Inc. in 1940.)


Morgan begins with foreword titled &ldquo;What Is Rural Life?&rdquo;    He says that according to the USDA, there are &ldquo;about 22,000,000 persons living on American farms.&rdquo;    (5)  This is about 17 percent of the 1943 population, and Morgan goes on to say that the &ldquo;better half of the farms&rdquo; produce &ldquo;90 per cent of all marketed farm produce.&rdquo;    If those farms would &ldquo;increase their production by only 10 per cent, which seems entirely feasible, the rest could go out of business without reducing the total of American agricultural produce.&rdquo;  


Morgan disagrees with sociologists like T.   Lynn Smith (President of the Rural Sociological Society and author of The Sociology of Rural Life) who claim &ldquo;farmer and countryman are almost synonymous terms.&rdquo;   (6) &ldquo;Even in agricultural communities,&rdquo; Morgan says, &ldquo;the population of towns which directly serve surrounding farm areas is from a quarter to a half as great...  Most of these village residents also are rural people.   Then there are fishing towns, mining towns, railroad towns, summer resort towns, quarry towns, lumbering towns, hydro-electric power plant communities, textile mill towns, and oil well towns, all with their non-farm, rural populations.    At the present moment probably about half of the rural population of America is non-farm population.&rdquo;


In view of this &ldquo;strikingly new picture of rural life,&rdquo; Morgan calls for a balanced approach to rural community planning.    The &ldquo;dominant economic activity&rdquo; should not be the area&rsquo;s only economic activity, he says.    (8)  Rather, &ldquo;Variety and range of economic activity&rdquo; are keys to developing communities that can satisfy &ldquo;the normal range of human needs.&rdquo;   (9)    Although a &ldquo;rural community is wise to produce a major part of its own food supply,&rdquo; Morgan believes &ldquo;producing crops for the general public seldom is profitable to the amateur.&rdquo;   (10)  He concludes that &ldquo;few American communities are more than fifty  per cent self-sufficient by local production,&rdquo; and urges rural communities to think about what they can produce for the outside market.


While parts of Morgan&rsquo;s booklet seem to betray a slightly &ldquo;New Deal&rdquo; technocratic orientation, his suggestions generally make sense.    And they&rsquo;re directed at rural people, not at bureaucrats -- possibly a result of Morgan&rsquo;s falling-out with TVA and its techno-bureaucracy.    The guy makes sense, and he&rsquo;s probably worth looking into a little more deeply, when I get around to writing about rural reformers and radicals.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Red Earth</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-11-19T15:56:58-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1a41e239127eb9948cdb0a20276ebebd-28.html#unique-entry-id-28</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/1a41e239127eb9948cdb0a20276ebebd-28.html#unique-entry-id-28</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Red Earth, 2004


Oklahoma is most frequently thought of by the public and portrayed by environmental historians as the site of the 1930s Dust Bowl of Steinbeck&rsquo;s Grapes of Wrath.    Donald Worster wrote his classic tale of ecological mismanagement in the same year that Paul Bonnifield wrote a story of the triumph of Oklahoman spirit in the face of natural disaster (1979, The Dust Bowl and Dust Bowl, respectively).    William Cronon used the 180 degree disparity between these histories to comment on the incredibly subjective nature of (even environmental) history, finally threading a way (after four rewrites, he says) through post-modern concerns regarding narrative and cognition, to an embrace of history as a more-or-less moral fiction, aiming at (but never quite reaching) truth (&ldquo;A Place for Stories,&rdquo; JAH March 1992).


In contrast to these tales of declension and progress, Lynn-Sherow writes about the settlement of Oklahoma a generation earlier, and wonders what might have been.    &ldquo;Of all the ways in which history can be written and remembered,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;human based environmental change is often a &lsquo;winner&rsquo;s&rsquo; history told by the people who remain&rdquo; (145).    Through a variety of influences including chance, culture (including racism), and environment, &ldquo;in less than one generation, the collective farming practices of the Kiowas [tribe] and the mixed-use practices of African American settlers were swept aside&rdquo; (147).    In their place, &ldquo;an elite group of native-born white farmers were eventually triumphant&rdquo; and a &ldquo;highly diverse ecology of native plants, animals, and people&rdquo; became &ldquo;a more simplified ecology centered on a scientifically approved list of domesticated crops and animals.&rdquo;  


Her conclusion, that &ldquo;white farmers&rsquo; acceptance and enthusiasm for mechanized agriculture&hellip;initiated and sustained the simplification of the territory&rdquo; is a declension, in the sense Cronon said Worster&rsquo;s book was.    Or is it?    A more simplified ecological system is usually more fragile and subject to disturbances (like drought).    So she&rsquo;s using Cronon&rsquo;s "second set of narrative constraints" (making "ecological sense") to get past the subjectivity of her judgment that monoracial commercialized monoculture is bad. &nbsp;  Cool.


 


   
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Wilderness and Class</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-10-26T21:45:49-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e7e51036714c2402b6f7defea73b1e04-27.html#unique-entry-id-27</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e7e51036714c2402b6f7defea73b1e04-27.html#unique-entry-id-27</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[William Cronon, &ldquo;The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.&rdquo;   Environmental History, 1996.


Cronon says the popular reaction to the idea of wilderness owes much to the two related concepts of &ldquo;the sublime and the frontier.&rdquo;   (9)  The sublime is &ldquo;one of the most important expressions of that broad transatlantic movement we today label as romanticism,&rdquo; (9-10) but maybe we should unpack it a little and separate the elements that go into it.    Cronon does not, and this leaves him only a vague ground to stand on, when he wants to talk about secular responses to the &ldquo;sublime.&rdquo;    He observes that in order to gain the power it has &ldquo;the concept of wilderness had to become loaded with some of the deepest core values of the culture that created and idealized it: it had to become sacred.&rdquo;   (10) This is true in more than just a metaphorical way, but Cronon doesn&rsquo;t go far enough unpacking these ideas.    A closer look at them might help us understand some of the problems carried over from this religious frame of mind, that get in the way of straightforward responses to environmental issues.


The frontier myth, Cronon says, allows Americans to believe that because they were pioneers in a &ldquo;virgin&rdquo; land, white Europeans &ldquo;reinvented direct democratic institutions&rdquo; and &ldquo;reinfused themselves with vigor, an independence and a creativity that were the source of American democracy and national character.&rdquo;    (13)  We&rsquo;re squarely in the territory of myth, here; it would be easy to argue that these famous results of frontier life were as mythical as the life itself.    But it&rsquo;s easy to agree that &ldquo;to protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation&rsquo;s most sacred myth of origin&rdquo; in the minds of many conservationists.


Cronon says nostalgic conservationists like Teddy Roosevelt and Owen Wister (author of The Virginian) showed an &ldquo;ambivalence, if not downright hostility, toward modernity.&rdquo;   (14)  But it was a modernity that had served them both very well.    Politician and popular author warned men against emasculation by the &ldquo;feminizing tendencies of civilization,&rdquo; but their status as wealthy, elite intellectuals probably put them in more danger than the fact they lived in cities.    Only men like them had the leisure time or the inclination to worry about their masculinity, which is why only the &ldquo;wealthiest citizens&rdquo; were found &ldquo;seeking out wilderness for themselves.&rdquo;    (15)  


The fact that most early enthusiasts were rich men might also help explain the otherworldliness of the wilderness ethic.    The &ldquo;quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism&rdquo; rest on a &ldquo;flight from history.&rdquo;    (16)  Unlike the experience of farmers, miners, or other workers whose jobs or lives gave them contact with the natural world, for these men &ldquo;wilderness embodie[d] a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural.&rdquo;   (17)  Extending this idea to the present, Cronon suggests that our supposed isolation from nature retards environmental progress.    To the &ldquo;extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness...we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead.&rdquo;  


Worse yet, Cronon says modern deep ecologists&rsquo; &ldquo;wilderness premise that nature, to be natural, must also be pristine,&rdquo; actually distracts society from important issues and opportunities for change.    &ldquo;We need an environmental ethic,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;that will teach us as much about using nature as about not using it.&rdquo;   (21)  Otherwise, the &ldquo;long affiliation between wilderness and wealth&rdquo; will be continued.   (20)  Only the wealthy are able to see wilderness, and then retreat to another place where they can be separate from it.   Everywhere else, &ldquo;too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate.&rdquo;  


Cronon argues that humanity must abandon environmental dualism and &ldquo;bipolar moral scales&rdquo; (nice allusion!).    The myth of wilderness, &ldquo;that we can somehow leave nature untouched by our passage&rdquo; or that we can wall off pieces of the environment and save them from human contamination, is absurd.    &ldquo;The dilemma we face,&rdquo; Cronon concludes, &ldquo;is to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leave.&rdquo;    This is a more realistic choice, and one that is open to everyone.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Adirondacks</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-10-24T17:34:21-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9d083dd2909445bf46599d723e1aca21-26.html#unique-entry-id-26</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9d083dd2909445bf46599d723e1aca21-26.html#unique-entry-id-26</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The first section, on the Adirondack State Park, was most interesting to me.    Jacoby highlights what he calls the &ldquo;hidden history of American Conservation, by which he means the consolidation of state power, the systematic denigration of rural land use (Jacoby calls this &ldquo;degradation discourse&rdquo;), and the elimination of local customs regarding commons with top-down state and national laws designating &ldquo;wilderness&rdquo; areas.    Jacoby suggests this wilderness is &ldquo;not some primeval character of nature but rather an artifact of modernity.&rdquo;   (198) Jacoby also agrees with William Cronon&rsquo;s suggestion (in &ldquo;The Trouble with Wilderness,&rdquo; 1996) that the idea of wilderness conservationists &ldquo;tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others,&rdquo; and betrays &ldquo;the long affiliation between wilderness and wealth.&rdquo; 

...He says he wants to provide a &ldquo;moral ecology...a vision of nature &lsquo;from the bottom up.&rsquo;   &rdquo; (3) Jacoby agrees rural commoners had a different response to their environments than the &ldquo;appreciation of wilderness&rdquo; Roderick Nash found in the &ldquo;minds of sophisticated Americans living in the more civilized East.&rdquo; (quoting Nash, &ldquo;The Value of Wilderness,&rdquo; 1977.   2)  But their response was not primitive or rapacious, as portrayed by George Perkins Marsh at the beginning of the conservation movement and historians like Marsh ever after.    In many cases, Jacoby says local resistance faced by conservationists was due to the fact that &ldquo;for many rural communities, the most notable feature of conservation was the transformation of previously acceptable practices into illegal acts.&rdquo;   (2)  Reading this introduction, I wondered was reminded of the &ldquo;hares and rabbits&rdquo; controversy in England.    Jacoby gets to this point, I found -- but not directly and not as strongly as I might have liked.    Which is nice, because he leaves something for me to do in a research paper.


...These are both important points, as is the forest&rsquo;s location, close to Albany.    Marsh&rsquo;s Man and Nature attracted attention in New York, and I should take a closer look at this and the other contemporary writing Jacoby mentions.    For me, the most interesting feature of the story is the proliferation of &ldquo;private parks,&rdquo; which seem very much like the enclosed, aristocratic hunting lands of Britain.    &ldquo;By 1893,&rdquo; Jacoby says, &ldquo;there were some sixty parks in the Adirondacks, containing more than 940,000 acres of private lands, including many of the region&rsquo;s best hunting and fishing grounds, at a time when the state-owned Forest Preserve contained only 730,000 acres.&rdquo;    Jacoby quotes Forest and Stream, which observed in 1894 that &ldquo;&lsquo;Private parks in the Adirondacks today occupy a considerably larger area than the State of Rhode Island.&rsquo;   &rdquo; (39)  By 1899, the New York legislature was debating the monopolization of land and exclusion of poor local people from hunting.  ...  In 1903, locals murdered Orrando Dexter, a park owner who had prosecuted several trespassers.  


I think there&rsquo;s a lot more to this story.    Jacoby is more interested in the evolution of conservation, and tends to see these conflicts as being between conservationists and their opponents.    I see it more as a conflict between locals and outsiders.    The Albany conservationists have more in common with robber-baron (and some politician) park owners than with any of the locals.    It&rsquo;s no coincidence that they tend to overlook tree theft by the timber industry and illegal (or obscenely excessive legal) hunting by the park owners, while prosecuting locals for &ldquo;squatting&rdquo; on ancestral lands, taking deer or fish out of season to feed their families, and cutting non-commercial hardwood species for firewood.    Jacoby tends to see this from the authorities&rsquo; point of view; I think this could be treated differently.    I&rsquo;m really curious, for example, about the locations of those sixty parks.    How much of the very best land did they take?    How many towns did they hem in, or restrict rights of way to?  ...  (according to Wiki, in 1900, the park&rsquo;s area was 2.8 million acres, of which 1.2 million was state owned.    In 2000, the park had grown to 6 million acres, of which 2.4 million is state owned.    After deducting for the area of towns, lakes, and small lots, that leaves about 3 million acres in private ownership.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Copper in 1867</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-18T15:22:52-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6079d2f9262a10b63416c3e9631d89a8-25.html#unique-entry-id-25</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6079d2f9262a10b63416c3e9631d89a8-25.html#unique-entry-id-25</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Technology was a major focus, the Michigan column describing new machinery at the Isle Royale mill, says: &ldquo;Never having seen the Chilian mills&mdash;on which this simply claims to an improvement&mdash;work, we have preferred to maks no speculations, pro. or con. on the subject.&rdquo;  

...A note from San Francisco dated Feb. 23 1867 mentions the &ldquo;high price of freight and the low price of ores in the markets of Swansea and Boston have had a very depressing effect on the California copper mining interest.&rdquo;  

...April 5 1867: &ldquo;Chili bars in Liverpool have been done at L71 10s. and L71 5s.  the West India Mail which arrived on Wednesday, has brought advices of shipment of only about 800 tons copper from Chili, which may strengthen our market.&rdquo;  

...&hellip;The stock of copper on hand April 1st, 1867, is about the same as in April, 1866, showing a consumption in 1866 of 24,000,000 in the United States, none exported.&rdquo;  (in fact, it shows 1,200,000 of &ldquo;Foreign refined copper&rdquo; imported).  

...May 17 1867 London report:  &ldquo;An animated business was reported both in Foreign and English copper, the former taking the lead&hellip;Chili bars L72 10s. spot and L73 to arrive&hellip;Since the arrival of the Chili mail advising shipments of about 2,200 tons of pure copper in a fortnight, buyers have withdrawn, and prices fell 20s. per ton lower.&rdquo;  


May 31 1867: &ldquo;The last mail from Chili having brought advice of smaller shipments (1,300 tons copper), the market is rather better&hellip;&rdquo; (no Chile price quoted) (this probably from mid-June issue)


July 1 1867 &ldquo;Copper Trade Circular&rdquo; from Baltimore says &ldquo;Copper mining has become extremely adventurous, and these mines that cannot produce native copper at less than 22 cents per lb. or ores less than $30 per ton delivered at navigable shore, cannot expect to live&hellip;Ingot Copper ranges at 23 &frac12; @ 24 &frac12;, being 4 per cent. below the cost of production.  

...The result of the continued low prices seems to have been to rid the market of the weak holders of English copper who went into the article during the Hispano-Chilian war, and also to bring down the price of the raw material to a more reasonable relative value, as compared with the prices of English copper.  these two things should give a healthier tone to the article, for such demand as there is now goes to the smelters, and so more directly helps off the stocks.  the want of demand, however, continues to be very much felt.    We report sales of Chili bars at from L69 to L70 per ton, and of about 2,000 tons of ore and regulus at 14s. per unit.  we have heard of no sales in fine foreign copper.&rdquo;


...VYB June 28 write &ldquo;The business done in Chili bars and ingots early in the week has been very considerable, the total being about 1,600, principally for shipment to France.    Prices have advanced about 10s. to 20s. per ton, the transactions we report having taken place at L68 10s. to L69 10s. for bars, and L78 to L78 10s. for ingots.    Holders now ask L70 for the former, and L79 for the latter&hellip;The Chili mail, received yesterday, advised only 1,200 tons of fine copper, 700 tons in bars, and 500 tons in ores and regulus, from May 3 to 17, 1867, as against 1,780 tons the same time last year.&rdquo;  


...Just below, VYB report &ldquo;Transactions in all kinds have been extremely limited, and although importers of Chilian copper produce are somewhat higher in their views, this does not seem to be warranted by the course of events.  the result [sic], indeed, has been an almost total absence of business.  there are, in fact, no sales of the least importance in Chili produce to record.  ...  Sheet copper for India has been parted with at L77&hellip;a lower price than has ever been known before&hellip;It is very disheartening to such considerable shipments reported from the West Coast by each mail, at rates which must leave the importers serious losers; in fact, the sanguine feelings which still prevailed in Chili as tot eh future of copper is one of the worst features of the market, as tending to keep production up to its full average.  

...August 16 1867 Metal Report announ ces &ldquo;A better feeling has come over the market, owing to warlike advices from Chili; holders are not pressing sellers, and in some instances an advance of one or two points has been established&hellip;Chili bars in Liverpool, L69 10s. to L70, buyers.  

...The principal transactions in Chili produce since our last have been about 1,000 tons of ores, at 13s. 10d. to 14s. per unit; 600 tons of regulus, at the latter figure, and 150 tons of bars, at L65 10s. and L69 per ton.    For bars, L69 10s. is now asked, and for ores and regulus, 14s. 3d. per unit&hellip;The mail from Chli brings advices of about 1,700 tons of copper produce having been chartered for, half in bars and the remainder in ores and regulus, with a list of sales amounting to nearly the same quantity of fine copper, prices in Valparaiso having slightly improved, and freights being rather higher.    The general feeling in the market here is better, and the tendency on the part of holders of copper (who can conveniently do so) is to keep it at present, in the hope of a future improvement being established.&rdquo;


...says &ldquo;Copper has been quiet, but with a steady demand for consumption, the price has gradually advanced from 26 3/8 @ 26 &frac12; c. for Detroit, 26c. for Portage Lake, and 25 &frac34; @ 26 c. for Baltimore.  ...  The stocks are almost entirely in the hands of parties who bought for investment or on speculation, and who look for much higher prices in the face of such advices as have just been received from England.    The low price and the cheap money have at last begun to tell, and the London market rose in the last fortnight of August from L67 10s. to L74 in Chili pig, with every prospect of a further advance when the position of the article is fully understood.  ...  But now an improved demand for the East Indies has sprung up, and the shipments from Chili begin to fall off at the same time that the production in Cornwall, Australia, California and Lake Superior shows a marked decrease.  

...In an August 23 1867 Metal Report (printed after the Sept 3 note above), Von Dadelzen [sic] and North say &ldquo;The market has been much firmer, and holders less willing to sell, pending further news from Chili&hellip;Chili bars, in Liverpool,  have advanced to L70 and L75 10s. to arrive.&rdquo;


VY&B (same date) agree: &ldquo;The firmness evinced by holders, especially of Chili produce in Liverpool, has resulted in a further improvement in prices of that description, bringing the figure for spot bars, good brands, up to 70l., whilst 14s. 6d. has been refused for a cargo of regulus to arrive.    The actual business done has been only moderate&mdash;120 tons spot bars, 69l. 10s. to 70l.; 120 tons bars to arrive, 70l., 10s. to 70l. 15s; 20 tons Urmeneta ingots, 78l., cash; 600 tons of ore (half Canadian) sold at 14s. 3d. per unit, and 160 tons of argentiferous regulus at 14s. 2d. per unit. 

...An additional section on the &ldquo;French and German Metal Markets&rdquo; says &ldquo;Advices from Havre indicate more stability in the price of copper at that port, and also induce an impression of a revival of activity in the article.  for 20 tons of disposable Chilian, in bars, 69l. 10s. per ton has been paid (Paris conditions;) since then the tone of the article has been a little firmer.&rdquo;  

...September 6 1867 the Weekly Metal Report says &ldquo;Copper is a shade easier, but holders are firm&hellip;Chili is in buyers&rsquo; favor, and quoted L72 10s. for bars, L92 for ingot.  

...The &ldquo;Metal Circular,&rdquo; date December 2 1867, New York, says &ldquo;Copper has improved a little in price in the beginning of November, and has since been steady at 22 and 22 &frac14; c. for Baltimore; 22 7/8 and 23 c. for Portage Lake, and 23 and 23 &frac14; for Detroit&hellip;The London market has declined to the lowest figure of last June, viz: L67 and L67 10s. for Chili Pig.  the shipments from Chili, which for a short time showed a falling off, had again increased and this has depressed the European markets.&rdquo;


...Another column titled &ldquo;Copper Mining,&rdquo; in the December 14 1867 issue, says &ldquo;A California paper discourses upon the condition and prospects of copper mining as follows: One of the chief demands of copper of late years has been for locomotives.    There is, on average, one engine for every three miles of railroad, and two tons of copper are put into every large locomotive, so that three mles of railroad demand two tons of copper.&rdquo;  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Chilean Copper in 1872</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-19T15:20:48-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2946a0ee2822a59c1aca5aeb55b894c4-24.html#unique-entry-id-24</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2946a0ee2822a59c1aca5aeb55b894c4-24.html#unique-entry-id-24</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Douglas begins his first installment of the article with a review of Chilean copper mining,  acknowledging the fact that &ldquo;As the produce of the Chili mines now regulates the price of copper all over the world, and all speculation as to its future price must depend on the probable future yield of these mines, their condition is a subject of prime importance to all interested in the copper trade.&rdquo;  


Nearly &ldquo;all the copper comes,&rdquo; Douglas says, &ldquo;from the coast range, and from within 30 miles of the sea; and nearly two-thirds of it from the three great mineral districts of Tomaya, Carrizal, and Cha&ntilde;aral.&rdquo;    A little copper comes from the &ldquo;Cajon de Maipu,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Condes Mines&rdquo; in the cordillera &ldquo;produce 200 tons or so of 23 per cent. ore annually.&rdquo;  

...South of Santiago, he says, &ldquo;a number of small mines are worked both in the Cordillera and the coast range; but their total yield falls short of 1,000 tons of fine copper annually.&rdquo;  

...He describes the ores (&ldquo;The San Felipe ores are of grey sulphides; but as a rule the lodes are narrow.&rdquo;), indicating that he&rsquo;s studied them first-hand in some detail.    The &ldquo;Paral mine on one of the Coimas group of lodes, where a lode of a yard wide yields on an average a 30 per cent. ore,&rdquo; is an exception, but &ldquo;the mine is very badly worked&hellip;twice as many men are employed in pumping as in breaking the ore.&rdquo;    About 3,000 tons a year from this district &ldquo;is made into regulus and bars at smelting establishments in the Melon and at Catemo.  ...  There&rsquo;s an article in an earlier number of the E&MJ about using peat for fuel in Britain and the US &ndash; apparently U&E are up to date on the latest doings.


...&ldquo;The hills are so saturated with copper that a desmontes or refuse heap enters as a conspicuous object into almost every bit of mountain scenery, and innumerable slag heaps in many a nook and corner mark the spots where furnaces smelted the ore from neighboring mines till the hill sides, to the serious detriment of agriculture, had been denuded of timber.&rdquo;  

...It is an isolated mountain, some 3 to 4 miles long, whose summit is 3,000 feet above the level of the plain, and 4,200 above the sea.&rdquo;  

...Douglas notes that &ldquo;It is&hellip;from this isolated hill that a great proportion of all the Chili copper came from the years 1860 to 1865.&rdquo;    The most productive mine on the hill has always been Pique, &ldquo;owned by Don Jos&eacute; Tom&aacute;s de Urmeneta, whose perseverance in prosecuting the work upon it during years of heavy expenditure and disappointment has been rewarded by raising him to the highest rank among successful miners, and by enabling him to confer vast benefits on his country; for Urmeneta was the first man to introduce into Chili first-rate hauling and mining machinery.&rdquo;  


...The yeld of the lode from wall to wall is from 8 to 10 per cent, and its average size varies from 3 to 6 feet&hellip;The greatest riches of the Pik&eacute; were derived from some enormous stopes at about the 60-fathom level, where the lode expanded to over 20 feet in width, and yielded a purple ore, which, as it came from the mine, averaged 30 to 35 per cent.  

...Douglas describes Pique in detail, mapping out the underground sections and explaining which levels &ldquo;have been abandoned to piqueneros or tributers,&rdquo; and how ore is raised &ldquo;by means of a Corliss engine and admirable machinery fitted with friction gearing, through three inclined shafts, which attain a depth of 80 fathoms below the end of the adit,&rdquo; but that the mine&rsquo;s bottom is 60 fathoms lower, and ore from here &ldquo;is raised this last 60 fathoms on the backs of apires (or carriers) and by hand winches.&rdquo;


In 1864, Urmeneta bought an adit on the south flank of the hill, &ldquo;commenced as far back as 1840 by Don Ramon Lecaros&hellip;It was driven but slowly and irregularly until 1864, when Urmeneta bought the work already done, and continued it more vigorously.&rdquo;  ...  The tributers are productive: of the 1,250 tons taken from the hill daily, &ldquo;about half comes from the Pik&eacute;, and of this half may be said to be extracted from the regular workings below the adit level, and half by tributers from the abandoned stopes or by pickers from the refuse heaps.&rdquo;


...So, Urmeneta doesn&rsquo;t own the entire mountain &ndash; although he may process all the ore that comes from it&hellip;  &ldquo;The rate of wages is for common labor 12 dols. a month and rations, worth 15 cents a day.  ...  Cornishmen alone can be trusted with the timbering, and they are even better paid; so that it is evidently a mistake to suppose Chili owes her mining importance to cheapness of labor.&rdquo;  

...The next site Douglas describes is the &ldquo;monster lode of Panulcillo&hellip;The Tomaya people say that Providence placed these great deposits almost side by side , that the ores of the one might serve to flux those of the other, but human perversity and English stupidity interfered to frustrate the kind intention.&rdquo;    The old smelter at the mouth of the mine was replaced in 1870 by a new establishment at &ldquo;the railroad terminus in the valley&hellip;[and] consists of ten large reverberatories, and four blast furnaces, erected last year by Charles Lambert, jun.&rdquo;  

...Only three miles from the &ldquo;northern sweep of the Bay of Coquimbo&hellip;[it was] more extensively worked than any other mine in the Indian and Spanish periods&hellip;Stone and copper hammers are still turned up in the refuse heaps&hellip;identical&hellip;with those from the Indian workings in the Lake Superior mines.&rdquo;  

...The next mineral, Carrizal, &ldquo;about six leagues in a straight line from the coast, has always been known to exist, but has been worked vigorously only within the last fifteen years&hellip;[it] now sends almost as much ore to market as the hill of Tomaya.&rdquo;  

...He mentions that &ldquo;the loss in picking, when the ore is broken by a Blake, exceeds that incurred when hand labor is employed; hence the tributers refuse to use it.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;The Chili peon can get one dollar a day on the Peruvian railroads, and will therefore no longer work at home for 25 cents&hellip;Though the yield from each may be insignificant, their total production is by no means trifling.  

...&ldquo;Tomaya will doubtless produce less&hellip;Panulcillo sails so close to the wind that if copper falls it will inevitably fail&hellip;No doubt Brillador could yield more&hellip;Carrizal&hellip;has seen its best days.&rdquo;  ...  &ldquo;A copper lode in a desert country cannot escape detection, more especially in Chili, where all the inhabitants are directly or indirectly interested in mines&hellip;All the great lodes now worked, except, perhaps, those of the Salado and others in the Atacama desert, have been known and worked from time immemorial.&rdquo;  


...&ldquo;Twenty-five years ago,&rdquo; Douglas says, &ldquo;very little copper was smelted in Chili; whereas, in 1870, only 3.16 per cent. was exported as ore, while 55.35 per cent. was exported as bars and ingots, and 41.48 per cent. as regulus.&rdquo;


...Lambert&hellip;erected the first reverberatory furnace in Chili about the year 1837&hellip;[and] &ldquo;the Mexican and South American Smelting Company&hellip;run from 1848 to 1857&hellip;benefited Chili by introducing Napier&rsquo;s method&hellip;There are throughout Chili about ninety furnaces making regulus, and about sixty calciners and furnaces making bars and ingots.&rdquo;  ...  Urmeneta and Errasuriz [sic], and are among the largest  in the world, running ordinarily seventeen triple hearth calcining furnaces, thirteen smelting reverberatories, and two refining furnaces&hellip;The same proprietors have furnaces at Cerillos, at the foot of the Tomaya hill&hellip;and other works at Tongoi, the port of Tomaya.&rdquo;    Across the Bay in Coquimbo are &ldquo;the abandoned smelting works of Charles Lambert and of Don Ramon Ovalle and Co., and the active works of Edwards and Co., where such care is taken in the selection and smelting that their bars and ingots bring a better price in the English market than those of either Lota or Guayacan.&rdquo;   
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Imagined Civil War</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-10-18T12:52:58-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f3476777b5f6eb518873574f5ebe9a4a-23.html#unique-entry-id-23</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/f3476777b5f6eb518873574f5ebe9a4a-23.html#unique-entry-id-23</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Fahs says our division of texts into elite and &ldquo;trash&rdquo; is a way of &ldquo;organizing cultural authority&hellip;that readers, writers, and publishers would not have recognized at the time.&rdquo;    (3)  It&rsquo;s also interesting, how there were not only &ldquo;shared rhetorics&rdquo; in Northern and Southern war writing, but common practices stemming from a shared &ldquo;commercial literary culture.&rdquo;  

...She describes a trajectory of group allegiance leading ultimately to &ldquo;nation-based individualism,&rdquo; but it&rsquo;s hard to distinguish this from an ongoing reaction against the tug of the mainstream.    As nationalism grows, and some writers &ldquo;celebrate the nation as a newly abstract entity,&rdquo; others begin to assert an individual&rsquo;s position relative to this new center of gravity.   (11) The &ldquo;felt tension between the needs of the nation and the needs of the individual,&rdquo; and a &ldquo;culture-wide sense that all stories were valuable&rdquo; could both be a response to the overwhelming of individualism and crushing of individual stories that took place in a military camp, a battlefield death, and a mass grave.    &ldquo;As the mass movements of armies increasingly defined the war and the outcome of battle was increasingly mass slaughter, sentimental literature often explicitly fought against the idea of the mass, instead singling out the individual soldier as an icon of heroism.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;Both north and south,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;war became not just an obsessive, all-consuming subject but also a mode of perception and a way of life.&rdquo; 

...Fahs reports that southern critics claimed &ldquo;Had a Southern novelist truly painted in as engaging a style&rdquo; as Uncle Tom&rsquo;s Cabin, popular opinion would have been swayed and America would have finally understood &ldquo;the real workings of out Biblical system of labor, and its truly Christianizing and elevating effects on the slave.&rdquo;   (27) It&rsquo;s unclear, from her presentation, however, whether this is a widely-held view, or just the ravings of a few critics at the Southern Monthly, who may or may not have believed it themselves.    Certainly, no novelist seems to have stepped forward to carry that torch, which probably says something about different the opinions of artists and critics. 


...(41) At least in more elite literary circles, the political break between north and south doesn&rsquo;t seem to have created the hoped-for (at least among editors) cultural divide.    Fahs also mentions that &ldquo;the issue that especially exercised the letter writers was [Harpers Weekly&rsquo;s] assertion that the war would &lsquo;inevitably sooner of later become a war of emancipation.&rsquo;&rdquo;    This claim apparently cost Harpers some of their ongoing southern readership &ndash; it would be interesting to know how much of the heat came from northerners who&rsquo;d been hoping it just wouldn&rsquo;t go that far.


...Yet imagining soldiers as &lsquo;boys&rsquo;&hellip;suggests a distinct cultural unease with the idea of soldiers as full-grown men separated from the maternalist culture of home.&rdquo; ...  Whereas in both north and south, &ldquo;early wartime poems imagined women renouncing men who would not be soldiers,&rdquo; (128) maybe neither side was so happy, getting what they&rsquo;d asked for.


In the book&rsquo;s fifth chapter (one of the issues with The Imagined Civil War is that it seems a little like a series of essays, each briefly exploring an area that in the future might support a wider treatment.  ...  She reports that some southern propagandists continued to predict a massive return of runaway slaves, as they realized how good they&rsquo;d had it on the plantations.    Northerners were somewhat ambivalent to portraying black men (and it was nearly always MEN) as heroes, until the &ldquo;aftermath of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth&rsquo;s fight at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863.&rdquo;   (169)  Even then, northern whites seemed most comfortable when heroic, armed black men died at the end of their stories.  ...  Even Louisa May Alcott, who published a story of an inter-racial relationship in Moncure Conway&rsquo;s radical Commonwealth in 1864, seems to have felt &ldquo;a fundamental discomfort&rdquo; with ideas like &ldquo;black soldiers killing whites they had known.&rdquo;   (173)  Fahs doesn&rsquo;t compare this with portrayals, in the same types of media, of whites killing their neighbors and even relatives.    So it&rsquo;s unclear whether the discomfort was primarily racial, or more a more general feature of coming to grips with the fratricidal nature of the war.


In a chapter on war humor, Fahs raises some interesting questions about the &ldquo;critical distance&rdquo; of satirists, who &ldquo;emphasized the fear, incompetence, cupidity, avarice, and racism of those involved in the war effort.&rdquo;   (201)  Between the lines, she hints at a growing class division, as humorists &ldquo;puncturing prevailing heroic ideas of war,&rdquo; begin to question the logic that has &ldquo;so long made all peoples the ready military sacrifices of some people.&rdquo; (quoting Robert Henry Newell writing as Orpheus C Kerr in the 1861 New-York Mercury, 204).  ...  Fahs describes Lincoln reading satire to his Cabinet, and mentions that Charles Farrar Brown (Artemus Ward) became editor of Vanity Fair in May 1861.


The final two chapters didn&rsquo;t seem as gripping (or didn&rsquo;t correspond to my own interests as much), but raised one really significant point, about the shift in story-telling about the war, toward spotlighting individual experiences.    It seems as if the increasingly anonymous ways in which Civil War soldiers fought and died spurred a reaction in popular consciousness.    The Civil War did not produce the (high) literary response of World War I, possibly because the rich and literate didn&rsquo;t volunteer for service the way educated Englishmen like Ford Madox Ford went to the trenches.    So maybe Fahs exploration of &ldquo;low&rdquo; print culture opens the door for an exploration of the birth of American modernism in the Civil War.    I hadn&rsquo;t ever really noticed that Stephen Crane&rsquo;s Red Badge of Courage was published thirty years after the war, by a young man who hadn&rsquo;t even been born until 1871!  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Martin Guerre</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-09-27T13:45:42-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/21120c9f0b6582adf317283dd90c5e7e-22.html#unique-entry-id-22</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/21120c9f0b6582adf317283dd90c5e7e-22.html#unique-entry-id-22</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Maybe the people most offended by Martin Guerre are the ones who don&rsquo;t WANT you to play with their histories.    The guys who don&rsquo;t want you in dialog or argument with them, questioning whether the people they describe would REALLY feel that way or do those things.    Natalie Zemon Davis doesn&rsquo;t seem to mind if I say, &ldquo;no, I think the dramatic arrival of the &lsquo;real&rsquo; Martin Guerre is just TOO MUCH of a coincidence, regardless of whether the court believed it a miracle.&rdquo;  ...  If it really was the original Martin Guerre (and Davis says he lived another thirty years and then died in Artigat as Martin Guerre, which would have been unlikely for a paid imposter &ndash; the fact that the first imposter DID is what makes the story so remarkable, after all), then how did he know to come home at precisely this moment?  

...The people who&rsquo;d hate this type of speculation most, would be historians who expect to be BELIEVED when they write narratives of the past.  

...Although Davis was challenged by &ldquo;new questions about the motivations of people in the sixteenth century,&rdquo; and wondered what had become of &ldquo;the &lsquo;perhapses,&rsquo; the &lsquo;may-have-beens&rsquo;&rdquo; typical of scholarly history; her close association with the production also led her to try &ldquo;an expository style for the first part of the book that could provide the equivalent of cinematic movement,&rdquo; to &ldquo;allow the book to be read, if one wished, like a detective story (or like Coras&rsquo;s Arrest Memorable) at a single sitting&rdquo;  (Martin Guerre viii, &ldquo;On the Lame&rdquo; 575).  ...  It also obscured some interesting questions about identity in the period (for example, if identity lies partly in playing social roles and fulfilling one&rsquo;s responsibility to the group, could Pierre Guerre have accepted the imposter as &ldquo;real,&rdquo; because he clearly was more successful than the original Martin at these roles?  ...  Did Pierre&rsquo;s suspicion begin when pseudo-Martin began conducting his business in ways that were against Basque &ldquo;identity,&rdquo; even though completely consistent with Artigat norms?).  

...Both in the sense that the book is short, filled with action and conflict, and won&rsquo;t send the average reader to the dictionary too frequently; and in the sense that the narrative voice is authoritative and decisive.    While Davis rightly argues that the rich settings and thorough backgrounds and back-stories help us enter the world these characters inhabited, this thick description also creates an air of narrative omniscience.    Davis compounds this impression by stating conclusions (&ldquo;Bertrande dreamed of a husband and lover who would come back, and be different&rdquo;) rather than making qualified guesses.  ...  But she didn&rsquo;t have a chance to discuss this, the way she structured Martin Guerre; and the reader can be pulled along by the fast-moving story, and pass by the issue without even realizing it&rsquo;s there.


...In Davis&rsquo;s response to Finlay, she discusses her thought processes, expands on the evidence (in copious French and Latin footnotes, to the dismay of the linguistically challenged), and substantially proves that she knows what she&rsquo;s talking about.    So if we give her the benefit of the doubt, is the real problem that Martin Guerre violates some hallowed expectations about the ways we express historical ideas to the public?


...He begins by saying &ldquo;It is the consensus [not HIS judgment, mind you, the consensus] that The Return of Martin Guerre is a genuine rarity, a work of sophisticated scholarship with general appeal&rdquo;, (555) and proceeds to argue that &ldquo;if historical records can be bypassed so thoroughly in the service of an inventive blend of intuition and assertion, it is difficult to see what distinguishes the writing of history from that of fiction.&rdquo;    Along the way, he implies that Davis may have lifted her story from Janet Lewis&rsquo;s historical romance, since &ldquo;Davis&rsquo;s version of the story mainly differs from Lewis&rsquo;s in her presentation of an explicit collaboration between the wife and the imposter&rdquo; (569, 570).


...The text is supreme, and &ldquo;speculation, whether founded on intuition or on concepts drawn from anthropology and literary criticism, is supposed to give way before the sovereignty of sources&rdquo; (571).    If documents are the only legitimate sources, presumably Finlay advocates giving up on the majority of those who lived in the past, and like the Guerres left no written records.  ...  She points out the specific endnote, which, oddly, does not exist in my edition of the book; and says this is just &ldquo;one of several places where my notes were &lsquo;beside the point&rsquo; for Finlay because he was inattentive to what was on Coras&rsquo;s page&rdquo; (592).


...Aside from the many (funny) personal shots the two historians take at each other, the disagreement comes down to Finlay&rsquo;s suspicion that Davis is playing games with the past, and Davis&rsquo; portrayal of Finlay&rsquo;s &ldquo;inattentiveness to the whole argument of my book and his deafness to my authorial voice&rdquo; (598).  ...  The problem seems to be that by writing Martin Guerre in the style she did, Davis undermined her ability to present an argument and conclusions acceptable by historians like Finlay.  ...  The endnotes were mostly technical abbreviations, and did very little to show the historian&rsquo;s process or the evidence she considered in crafting her story.


...Despite her demonstrated interest in them, did Davis&rsquo; style in Martin Guerre help or hinder the reader&rsquo;s understanding these complexities?  


I like the experiment of Martin Guerre, and the question both Finlay and Davis pose: &ldquo;In historical writing, where does reconstruction stop and invention begin?&rdquo;   (569, 572)  The reader experiences a fast-moving, straightforward narrative differently from an erudite, heavily-qualified scholarly text; and DIFFERENT readers experience it.  ...  Certainly, with the variety of legitimate historiographical schools and their competing sets of techniques for examining the past, it makes no sense to limit the tools historians can use to express their findings to the point where all histories look like academic monographs.    That would be like giving everybody an 18-wheeler, when some people clearly want and need only a pickup.  

...Would a cinematic Martin Guerre story, backed up by an in-depth documentary of the primary sources, the historian&rsquo;s techniques and conclusions, have resulted in a less contentious book?  ...  Would they have checked the endnotes more frequently, if they found a description of sources and a discussion of the historian&rsquo;s process there, rather than a series of coded references to archival documents they&rsquo;d never see?  

...Second: &ldquo;Trying to take him off guard, President de Mansencal asked him how he had invoked the evil spirit that taught him so much about the people of Artigat.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Environmental History</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-09-24T17:08:40-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/eb745442c3d6e1eb799438648cb88c8d-21.html#unique-entry-id-21</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/eb745442c3d6e1eb799438648cb88c8d-21.html#unique-entry-id-21</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[&ldquo;What we have only recently come to appreciate is that there was a whole generation of reformers very much concerned about the environment who were neither antimodernists [like Thoreau] nor wilderness protectors.    They were modernists who rejected not the modern world, but the way the modern world was being fashioned&hellip;they struggled to make the environment of the most settled parts of the nation more amenable to human habitation.&rdquo;


&ldquo;Henry Ingersoll Bowditch&hellip;pushed for a radical approach&hellip;saw environmental degradation as something to be confronted and ameliorated for the benefit of the poorest and weakest.&rdquo;  


&ldquo;According to the Connecticut Valley Farmer and Mechanic, farmers had to practice modern scientific farming in order to keep their farms productive and profitable.&rdquo;   (21, Springfield, May 1853) Other boks to look at might be Sylvester Judd&rsquo;s History of Hadley, Edwin M.   Bacon&rsquo;s The Connecticut River and the Valley&hellip;, and Dwight&rsquo;s Travels.    Other papers might be the Vermont Republican and American Yeoman and the Hampshire Gazette.


...Read this right after Merchant and Cronon.    Donohue examines the ecology of colonial Concord farming in extreme depth.    Some of my classmates thought this led to questions of relevance, which seems a fair criticism.    But Donohue&rsquo;s detailed description of the land and the agriculture Concordians practiced on it was a welcome antidote to Merchant&rsquo;s vagueness and ideologically-dominated narrative.


Part of the value in Donohue&rsquo;s book comes from his approach to the project he&rsquo;s undertaken.    Environmental historians spend a lot of time alluding to sustainability and degradation.    Donohue deliberately limits the question: &ldquo;did the system of husbandry put in place by the first proprietors and their descendants undermine its own ecological foundations, or could it be sustained?&rdquo;   


The answer to this question, it turns out is, it depends.    Fields were kept in tillage &ldquo;for centuries, and some is being plowed to this day.&rdquo;    Despite the arguments of Rothenberg, Cronon and Merchant, that he says &ldquo;have emphasized the ecological damage that resulted from this revolution to a &lsquo;world of fields and fences,&rsquo;&rdquo; Donohue believes &ldquo;these people knew what they were doing.&rdquo;    He concludes &ldquo;Colonial husbandry in Concord &hellip;was intensive farming, in which&hellip;a workable balance among these lands was established and carefully maintained.&rdquo;    Ironically, the market-oriented agriculture that followed, according to Donohue, was &ldquo;a far more extractive, extensive way of farming&rdquo; than the methods used by Concordians for nearly seven generations.


Donohue is so thorough in his descriptions of Concord farming, and his writing is so vivid, that a sense of inevitability seems to creep into the reader&rsquo;s mind.    He tries to avoid it, challenging assumptions as wide as the existence of the Holocene as a distinct period [in a passage that echoes &ldquo;big history,&rdquo; Donohue says we&rsquo;re in a Pleistocene interglacial, and it&rsquo;s nearly over].    But he does such a good job describing what happened in Concord, and how it was sustainable, that the reader can forget that Concord was not a closed system.    The combination of crops is altered toward the end of the period, when farmers begin planting potatoes.    In addition to being invisible on the records [and leading some to incorrectly assume that crop yields per acre were decreasing at a greater rate than they actually were], potatoes were a more efficient source of nutrition than the grain they replaced.    So even if sustainable, the Concord system was not necessarily optimal.


Similarly, technological change and other resource substitutions complicate the picture at the end of the period Donohue describes.    The increase in nearby urban populations, competition from newly accessible western farms [via the Erie Canal and railroads], and the sheer inability of Concord to feed all its people, necessitated openness to the outside world.    There are a variety of possible solutions to sustainability, once you decide how many and what types of relationships with the outside are allowed.    Maybe the lesson is that humans don&rsquo;t seem to want to live within the constraints of the closed system [especially with its limits to population growth], and are always seeking a way around it.    What happens when there&rsquo;s nowhere left to look for energy sources outside the system?  
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>More Big History</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-09-20T16:59:44-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/23ca28a700d10fd9e8b28f064f26993b-19.html#unique-entry-id-19</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/23ca28a700d10fd9e8b28f064f26993b-19.html#unique-entry-id-19</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Maps of Time, continued		


Did I mention before, that the discussion of these scientific ideas are tied up with the story of their discoverers/elaborators?    These are two different things, though.    Somehow, Bryson seems to do a more engaging job of this, because he introduces them as personalities, and gives them part of the narrative.


So, there&rsquo;s Bryson, there are more detailed studies of parts of the big picture, by the appropriate specialists&hellip;what&rsquo;s the selling point of the single-volume integration?    It&rsquo;s gotta be, the filters the author applies.    What Christian calls the creation of a new myth.


To some degree, anyone who writes a book featuring cosmology and human evolution is still fighting against the enemies of Darwin.    To what degree is this an issue, in Big History?    To what extent is Christian positioning history OUTSIDE the grasp of religion and its nonsense accounts of creation?    This IS still an ongoing battle, in a lot of places (a fact grad students at a place like UMass might easily forget).    Creationism is being forced into public schools.


Christian&rsquo;s main metaphor in the part of the book dealing with what we normally recognize as history, is a sort of Cisco communication model.    Hubs and centers of gravity.    Informational throughput, leading to innovation, mixing of cultures and ideas, etc.    China is a center of awesome gravity, but it falls behind because it isn&rsquo;t central enough.    On the other hand, it powers the entire system, by being a sink for silver and driving the Eurasian exchange network.    Is there a similar pattern at work in the Americas?    How does Michigan copper get to Central America?
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Big History</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-31T16:11:13-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3a492b3226b0e2addb3884b172f19c43-18.html#unique-entry-id-18</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/3a492b3226b0e2addb3884b172f19c43-18.html#unique-entry-id-18</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[David Christian, Maps of Time (first look)


Five hundred pages of text, fifty pages of notes, thirty pages of bibliography.    Christian begins at the beginning, with the Big Bang.    I&rsquo;m about 125 pages into the book, and multi-cellular organisms are just starting to appear.    In other words, I&rsquo;m still about 600 million years from the beginning of what we normally consider history.


So far, the text has been interesting and very readable.    I&rsquo;ve read a little about the cosmology and biology he&rsquo;s covered.    Enough to know that he&rsquo;s covering the high points well, and leaving out a lot of detail.    This is inevitable, and while it might not make an evolutionary biologist happy&hellip;then again, maybe it would!


The whole thing is about context and communication, I suppose.    It&rsquo;s interesting to me that the genre he&rsquo;s writing in really goes back a way &ndash; at least to Robert Chambers&rsquo; Vestiges in 1844!    He&rsquo;s probably exposing a lot of people to this science for the first time.    And, depending on what he does once he gets to the &ldquo;historical&rdquo; period, maybe he&rsquo;ll be able to get us to look at that from a new angle. 


In the introduction, Christian claims his two major influences are Annales-style longue dur&eacute;e history and Jungian mythologizing.    The archetype he seems to want to use to unite the macro (geological/biological) and micro (human social) histories is apparently the image of running up the &ldquo;down&rdquo; escalator.    The impulse of things (mainly life, but he extends it to stars and cultures) to fight entropy: to build order out of the growing chaos all around.  


This is a different archetype from Eliade&rsquo;s eternal return or Yeats&rsquo;s gyres.    And it&rsquo;s different from Hegel & Marx&rsquo;s teleology.    It&rsquo;ll be interesting to see where he takes it.  
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Slavery</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-27T19:57:34-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e63e63a336f7c15e508fa3d281e7c341-17.html#unique-entry-id-17</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/e63e63a336f7c15e508fa3d281e7c341-17.html#unique-entry-id-17</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The authors of the anthology introduce slavery with the observation that perhaps no other element of American history is as guilt-ridden, and that historians are not immune from the emotional power of slavery or contemporary race issues.  

...Breen and Innes begin (the excerpt is from &ldquo;Myne Owne Ground&rdquo;: Race and Freedom on Virginia&rsquo;s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676) by reminding the reader that &ldquo;Men have been enslaving one another for over three thousand years, receiving philosophic justification from every major Western thinker from Plato to Locke.&rdquo;  

...They reject Jordan&rsquo;s argument that statutes at least reveal &ldquo;communal attitudes;&rdquo; countering that &ldquo;many whites were indentured servants,&rdquo; who felt so much common cause with their black neighbors that &ldquo;the House of Burgesses became sufficiently worried about the unruliness of the colony&rsquo;s landless white freemen that they disenfranchised them.&rdquo;    In fact, they suggest, later Virginia statutes can be viewed as attempts to pry apart poor white and black Virginians, to prevent them from challenging the Colony&rsquo;s power structure.


...Breen and Innes show this to be an error, reviewing the wording of the law and citing later court records dealing with guns which clearly do not deny blacks the right to bear arms.  ...  Breen and Innes admit this possibility, but call attention to the fact that blacks and whites ran away together, apparently trusting each other with their safety and futures, if not their lives.  

...Once historians realize that some of the &ldquo;normal&rdquo; court transactions involved black people, they say, they may be able to widen their view of black history beyond the &ldquo;sexual and criminal activities that presently occupy a disproportionate place in the analysis of early American race relations.&rdquo;


...Breen and Innes were clearly criticizing this author and his belief that the early Virginia legal tradition represents an effort by racist whites to institute race differentiation as a precursor to establishing lifelong, hereditary slavery.  

...While he admits that unlike indentured whites, the blacks came involuntarily with no contract for eventual release, he says an equally important reason for their difference from white servants was that &ldquo;since the fifteenth century, Englishmen had regarded blackness as &ldquo;the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion.&rdquo;  

...I&rsquo;m actually really pleased that I was able to comment on Breen and Innes first, because it gave me an opportunity to talk about something other than religion.  ...  Fighting this prejudice is a heroic goal; unfortunately, Higginbotham&rsquo;s claims about racism in this selection can be sustained only if you avoid looking at the elephant in the room with him, which is religion.


&ldquo;Prior to 1680,&rdquo; Higginbotham says, &ldquo;the colonies would often follow the Spanish and English practice that blacks who had been baptized into the Christian religion were to be accorded the privileges of a free person.&rdquo;  

...Higginbotham claims the language shows the court&rsquo;s assumption of a black man&rsquo;s inferiority: &ldquo;In a jurisdiction where black did not carry the stigma of inferiority&hellip;the blemish of his race would not need to be washed clean by the grace of his Christian religion.&rdquo;   

...In 1630, the second judgment, Re Davis, has the defendant being &ldquo;soundly whipt before an assembly of negroes & others for abusing himself to the dishon[o]r of God and shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a negro.&rdquo; 

...If, as he says later, Davis was a poor man who would not be entitled to such privileges, would he have felt the humiliation Higginbotham suggests?    And in any case, if we&rsquo;re looking for crimes against Christianity, &ldquo;abuses&rdquo; that &ldquo;defile&rdquo; a person, isn&rsquo;t it more likely that Davis (whether black or white) and the &ldquo;negro&rdquo; he lay with were both male?    Is it just an editor&rsquo;s slip that has Higginbotham concluding that in the case &ldquo;the black person&rsquo;s irredeemable inferiority was measured by his presence as the reason for the white man&rsquo;s punishment&rdquo;?


In 1640, another sex case, Re Sweat, has the court whipping a pregnant black woman and forcing the white father to do &ldquo;public penance for his offence at James city church.&rdquo;   Higginbotham says the judgment focuses on humiliation rather than compensation to the woman&rsquo;s owner for the fact that &ldquo;during the pregnancy and post-childbirth period, she probably became less valuable,&rdquo; completely ignoring that since no mention is made of the child, the slave woman&rsquo;s owner apparently gets to keep her (assuming she survives the whipping). 

...The court declared &ldquo;the child shall be free&hellip;to be and remain at the disposing and education of the said Graweere  and the child&rsquo;s godfather who undertaketh to see it brought up in the Christian religion as aforesaid.&rdquo;  


...But if this is the case, why was it necessary for John Graweere to buy his son away from the boy&rsquo;s owner?  ...  Wouldn&rsquo;t  it be reasonable, if the father was non-Christian, for the court to be interested in the Christian godfather&rsquo;s role in training the boy?    Wouldn&rsquo;t it be likely, if Higginbotham&rsquo;s claims are correct and racism is creeping into the picture, that something as unusual as a white godfather promising to train a freed slave boy, might be mentioned more explicitly?


Higginbotham claims that &ldquo;if the precept of black inferiority meant anything, it certainly meant that, in the court&rsquo;s estimation, the child&rsquo;s Christian education would have been better safeguarded if entrusted to the care of a white colonist than if placed in the hands of a black servant, Christian or otherwise.&rdquo;  ...  Higginbotham also claims that if a black godfather could insure the boy&rsquo;s Christianity, then blacks would have converted &ldquo;en masse&rdquo; and petitioned the court for their freedom.    He forgets that John Graweere had bought his son&rsquo;s freedom, and the court was simply protecting him from a claim that would have undermined property conventions that were, contrary to Higginbotham&rsquo;s claim, moving towards institutionalizing hereditary slavery.  


...Higginbotham says the sexual crimes were dealt with harshly because the two white men involved were &ldquo;poor whites or servants who had managed to sleep with black women.&rdquo;    If this was the case, why did one court decision carefully record the black person&rsquo;s owner, while the other made no mention of it?    While it does seem reasonable to think the authorities may have wanted to minimize fraternization between potentially rebellious black and white populations, was rebellion even an issue at the time of these cases?


...Maybe that some of this illicit sex was leading to pairings (marriages, families, domestic alliances) that circumvented normal social channels and the controls of proper marriage, inheritance, and even property rights (if we conclude, contrary to Higginbotham, that the whites were already institutionalizing permanent, hereditary slavery).  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Teaching Kids History</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-26T16:47:05-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/39eef7d8ec9e9aba2fc07c21f2876420-16.html#unique-entry-id-16</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/39eef7d8ec9e9aba2fc07c21f2876420-16.html#unique-entry-id-16</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Wineburg&rsquo;s main point, that the &ldquo;historical thinking&rdquo; and close, critical reading practiced by professional historians are very different from the ways students in other fields (and high school students, even in history classes) are taught to read and think.    This is a valuable insight, which historians who write for the public (and grad students) would benefit from pondering.    Wineburg&rsquo;s essays, gathered from a decade of articles, conference papers and informal presentations, open a new field of study and outline a number of questions that he and others have begun trying to answer.


Wineburg begins by observing that standardized testing doesn&rsquo;t provide an accurate picture of students&rsquo; historical knowledge, partly because of the testers&rsquo; focus on data and facts.    He suggests that a wider exploration might explore the &ldquo;cultural pores&rdquo; through which students (and the general public) acquire historical understanding, &ldquo;make meaning&hellip;[and] situate their own personal histories in the context of national and world history.&rdquo;    Wineburg places the debate over history at the center of the American culture wars, complete with Lynne Cheney at the head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and candidate Bob Dole calling his opponents in the national standards debate &ldquo;worse than external enemies&rdquo; of America.    Given the nastiness of the debate over what should and shouldn&rsquo;t be taught, &ldquo;some might wonder why history was ever considered part of the humanities&hellip;that are supposed to teach us to spurn sloganeering, tolerate complexity, and cherish nuance.&rdquo;    Wineburg&rsquo;s claim is that history is mind-expanding and humanizing, but only if we learn to think like historians.


...Wineburg observed high school students, and found that even those with well-developed reading skills &ldquo;shaped the information [they] encountered so that the new conformed to the shape of the already known.&rdquo;    He compares the na&iuml;ve high-schooler&rsquo;s approach to Collingwood&rsquo;s belief &ldquo;that we can somehow &lsquo;know Caesar&rsquo; because human ways of thought, in some deep and essential way, transcend time and space.&rdquo;


Against this &ldquo;classic historicist stance,&rdquo; Wineburg argues with Carlo Ginzburg that the historian&rsquo;s task is to &ldquo;destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past&hellip;The morte we discover about these people&rsquo;s mental universes, the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them.&rdquo;  

...This is familiar territory to academic historians, who delight in the tension between the two extremes of &ldquo;classical&rdquo; objectivity and &ldquo;post-modern&rdquo; subjectivity &ndash; and generally live somewhere in between.  ...  The part that may be new and shocking to professional historians is how their nuanced, qualified descriptions of the past change as they enter the high school classroom.    Textbooks, Wineburg says, &ldquo;pivot on what Roland Barthes called the &lsquo;referential illusion,&rsquo; the notion that the way things are told is simply the way things were.&rdquo;    Textbooks eliminate &ldquo;metadiscourse&hellip;places in the text where the author intrudes to indicate positionality and stance.&rdquo;    They generally speak in the omniscient third person, suggesting that they&rsquo;re presenting &ldquo;just the facts, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; and that there&rsquo;s one correct interpretation and it&rsquo;s the one they&rsquo;ve presented. 

...This approach to teaching the past, Wineburg suggests, leaves students unaware that for actual historians, the past is substantially more mysterious and their understanding of it more tentative and contingent &ndash; and as a result much more interesting than the textbooks.    Students are left with a &ldquo;presentist&rdquo; point of view, and come to see concepts like prejudice, tolerance, racism, fairness, and equity &ldquo;as transcendent truths soaring above time and place,&rdquo; rather than as &ldquo;patterns of thought that take root in particular historical moments.&rdquo;    As a result of current methods, Wineburg says, students (and some teachers) don&rsquo;t know what to make of figures like Abraham Lincoln, whose attitudes toward black people don&rsquo;t fit those of the twenty-first century. 


The two main elements of &ldquo;historical thinking&rdquo; for Wineburg seem to be subtext and context.    General readers mine texts for data points, he says, while historians are aware of the text as both &ldquo;a rhetorical artifact and&hellip;as a human artifact.&rdquo;    To the historian, &ldquo;texts emerge as speech acts,&rdquo; subject to &ldquo;the same set of concepts we use to decipher human action.&rdquo;    Furthermore, historians are rarely the intended audience of the documents they study, so &ldquo;as eavesdroppers on conversations between others, [they] must try to understand both the authors&rsquo; intentions and the audiences&rsquo; reactions&rdquo; to the text.    In contrast, students and their teachers too often looked for &ldquo;straight information,&rdquo; and &ldquo;failed to see the text as a social instrument skillfully crafted to achieve a social end.&rdquo;  


...He shows bright, articulate high school students failing to understand the context of primary documents, while historians examine the sources of statements as closely as the statements themselves.    In one ironic passage, a student-teacher who majored in history as an undergraduate is less able to pull back from the text, than a former physics major (suggesting perhaps a difference in the way these people learned about paradigms and the contingency of knowledge?).    Finally, in a concluding essay, Wineburg makes some interesting points about lived and learned memory, and observes wryly that &ldquo;family&rdquo; experience of history has largely devolved into jumping onto the couch together and popping in a Spielberg video.  


...Clearly there&rsquo;s a lot left to do, if the goal is to teach secondary educators and high school students how to think more like historians.  ...  How to implement solutions, and how critical thinking in history is different from and superior to critical thinking in other fields, are questions that still need to be explored.    The promise of &ldquo;charting the future of teaching the past&rdquo; is not fulfilled in this volume &ndash; but maybe we now have some ideas about where to look.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Indians</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-25T16:32:10-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/231d7a222baf0c97628bff20b9cc9ff6-15.html#unique-entry-id-15</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/231d7a222baf0c97628bff20b9cc9ff6-15.html#unique-entry-id-15</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Chapter Three of this historiography textbook begins with an enigmatic quote: &ldquo;&rsquo;I am an Indian,&rsquo; wrote Virginia planter-historian Robert Beverley in his 1705 preface to his The History and the Present State of Virginia.&rdquo;  ...  But the sample readings they provide show how far the study of native cultures and their encounter with &ldquo;America&rdquo; still has to go.


...In their chapter introduction, they mention a number of writers who&rsquo;ve criticized the colonists&rsquo; treatment of the natives, beginning with &ldquo;Bartholeme de Las Casas&hellip;The Devastation of the Indies in 1552.&rdquo;    They quote Puritan leader Cotton Mather&rsquo;s celebration of the plague that wiped out &ldquo;Nineteen of Twenty&rdquo; people among the tribes near Plymouth prior to the Mayflower&rsquo;s arrival, &ldquo;so that the Woods were almost cleared of those pernicious Creatures, to make Room for better Growth.&rdquo;   (Mather&rsquo;s italics)  Also quoted is John Underhill&rsquo;s conviction that &ldquo;Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents&hellip;We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.&rdquo;  


These are insane statements, which go a long way toward either undermining the reader&rsquo;s belief that colonial leaders were actually religious people.    Or to confirming a suspicion that the religion they professed was imperial, white-supremecist, and in the end, all about power and domination.


That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s so surprising to me that the two passages included, about the new perspectives on Indian history, are both so deeply committed to exploring Indian culture&rsquo;s response to America solely from the perspective of religion.  ...  Or are we right to &ldquo;question the missionaries&rsquo; assumptions, finding their arrogance repellent and despising them as agents of cultural genocide&rdquo; (they were agents of actual, not cultural genocide)?    And if &ldquo;Christianity was a weapon of conquest, not a path to salvation,&rdquo; is the Indians&rsquo; relationship with colonial religion the most valuable cross-cultural element to explore?  


...If some Indian women converted in order to learn to spin wool or to read, and some men joined for weapons, it seems to me that the things they learned and got (spinning, reading, guns) are at least as relevant as the theology they embraced.    There are so many points of contact between the natives and the colonists, it seems like there would be other, more interesting dimensions to the interplay and resulting cultural change.    Trade, technology transfer, farming, travel, buying and selling land, fighting &ndash; not to mention all the cultural elements (ethical, economic, philosophical, political, scientific, and even household knowledge and fashion) that aren&rsquo;t part of the catechism &ndash; all seem more vital to understanding the Indian encounter with the white man than how natives reacted to white religion.


Religion seems to me most relevant to the ongoing relationship between the Indians and whites, not in how the Indians reacted to it, but in how the whites used it.    Whether in the sense of &ldquo;Spanish missionaries [who] regarded resettling Indian people as peasants&hellip;as a prerequisite of Christianity,&rdquo; or in the more passive sense of using religious communities (that &ldquo;resorted to whipping, branding, and solitary confinement to keep the Indians on the path to &lsquo;civilization and salvation&rsquo;&rdquo;) to sweep together the refugees of villages wiped out by white diseases, it&rsquo;s the colonists&rsquo; use or abuse of religion that&rsquo;s really relevant.    Or their refusal to engage when it suited them, as when &ldquo;in 1782, American militiamen butchered ninety-six pacifist and unarmed Morovian [Christian] Indians in their village at Gnadenh&uuml;tten.&rdquo;  


The most interesting element of the Indian response to Christianity might be Calloway&rsquo;s brief mention (quoting Axtell) that some &ldquo;Indians ensured the survival of native culture by taking on the protective coloration of the invaders&rsquo; culture.&rdquo;  ...  They learned from their conquerors that the religion was an empty vessel that could be filled with anything at all, so they hid their culture in the last place whites would look for it.


Gregory Evans Dowd, like Calloway, seems to put religion at the center of his study of the Indian response to invasion.    In Dowd&rsquo;s case, native spirituality is the vehicle for a prophetic nativist resistance to continuing white encroachment.  

...In this excerpt (hopefully not in the book it came from, nor in the author&rsquo;s complete body of work), the emphasis on religion is (slightly) less of a problem than Dowd&rsquo;s formulation of these two groups, the nativists and the accomodationists.    Although Dowd allows that &ldquo;Militant religion [was] in somewhat of a hiatus during those years,&rdquo; he insists that religion &ldquo;provided and continued to extend the intertribal network upon which unity depended.&rdquo;  

...&ldquo;The heritage of Indian diversity and of highly localized, familial, and ethnically oriented government&rdquo; made it extremely difficult for many Indians to join the artificial, newly-created &ldquo;nativist&rdquo; Indian nation.  ...  And the nativist prophets&rsquo; use of language and symbols seemingly borrowed from their enemies&rsquo; religion cannot have made matters any easier for the dissenters.


When &ldquo;prophets and shamans&hellip;accused them of the neglect of ritual and warned of an impending doom,&rdquo; skeptical listeners may have examined their own local experience against the prophets&rsquo; generalized complaints.  ...  Thoughtful Indians might have noticed that accusations that &ldquo;they had failed in their commitments to the sacred powers,&rdquo; and that they must &ldquo;kill witches&hellip;to purify themselves,&rdquo; had a remarkable resonance with the New England Christianity of the recent past.    And the emphasis on &ldquo;the Great Spirit, the remote Creator who became increasingly important, probably under the influence of Christianity,&rdquo; probably raised some doubts in the minds of tribes intent on preserving their own local traditions in the face of American encroachment.  


...But, notwithstanding the efforts of Neolin, Tenskwatawa and others, basing the nativist case for unity on a vaguely Christian-sounding religious appeal seems like it was a bad idea.     In the end, this selection leaves me wondering if, in fact, there were other bases for Indian unity, and to what extent they may have been tried.  ...  If we widen the scope of the idea, to encompass all (or nearly all) of Indian life, then the Indians&rsquo; actions make more sense.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Puritans</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-24T17:56:04-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2602d658ab6865d1e788b011c32395e0-14.html#unique-entry-id-14</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/2602d658ab6865d1e788b011c32395e0-14.html#unique-entry-id-14</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Puritans:  The basic claim seems to be that Puritanism is one of the main sources of American Exceptionalism, and possibly of the American character in the colonial and early national periods.  ...  But then, in distinguishing between &ldquo;authentic Puritanism&rdquo; and what its descendents (evangelism and universalism) retained of its elements, they immediately call into question whether the traits which persisted were peculiarly Puritan, or part of the underlying culture.


...Miller and Johnson make the insightful (and widely applicable) point that &ldquo;notwithstanding the depth of this divergence [between the Puritans and the English Church], the fact still remains that only certain specific questions were raised.&rdquo;  ...  In fact, &ldquo;the vast majority  [of] ideas held by New England Puritans&hellip;were precisely those of their opponents&hellip;about 90 percent of the intellectual life, scientific knowledge, morality, manners and customs, notions and prejudices&rdquo; that made up Puritan culture, were those &ldquo;of all Englishmen.&rdquo;  


Certainly, it was on the other ten percent that the Puritans defined themselves, when they set out to remove themselves from England and set up their own society in the New World.  ...  In fact, when they were NOT addressing the rationale behind their emigration, were these differences with their old neighbors and relatives in England really the guiding principles of life for the New England Puritans?  


Miller and Johnson point out that when historians try to &ldquo;trace developments and influences on subsequent American history and thought, we shall find that the starting point&hellip;is as apt to be found among the 90 percent as among the 10.    So again, if this is the case, how do we justify our acceptance of the 10% as the guiding lights in the daily lives of all the people who lived in Massachusetts Bay?


The situation is complicated if you&rsquo;re not a Christian, and as a result don&rsquo;t appreciate the subtleties of the theological differences that made up this putatively critical 10%.  

...Miller and Johnson admit that, to a large extent, the &ldquo;conflict between the Puritans and the Churchmen was&hellip;a debate among pundits.&rdquo;  

...Miller and Johnson describe the Puritan leaders&rsquo; attempts to control these excesses, which seem like nothing more than the logical conclusions of their differences with the English Churchmen.  

...But again, was this due to the 10% that was different, or the 90% that was the same as English religion?    Or do the needs of both sects, to propagate and maintain themselves by controlling the beliefs and behavior of their followers, require just such a feudal social order?


...Isn&rsquo;t this another way of saying that the urban elites and Puritan divines had little to offer that could lessen the struggles or enhance the wellbeing of pioneers struggling to survive on the frontiers?    &ldquo;Sermon after sermon reveals that in their eyes the cause of learning and the cause of hierarchical, differentiated social order were one and the same.&rdquo;  

...Seems to me that, far from rehabilitating Puritanism as the leading source of American exceptionalism, Miller and Johnson have called out a number of ways in which the small set of beliefs that set the Puritans apart from their theological adversaries are shown to be insignificant, self-contradictory, and possibly irrelevant in the creation of American culture.    In the end, isn&rsquo;t the Puritans&rsquo; real contribution, not their eccentric theology (abandoned and misrepresented even by their direct descendants, the new lights and the universalists), but rather their dogged insistence that they were, in fact, exceptional?  

...Philip Gura&rsquo;s 1984 contribution to the Puritan story suggested more attention should be paid to the radicals like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams who challenged the Puritan authorities.    Gura says &ldquo;in many cases, theirs were the same Protestant principles Winthrop and the others earlier had defended in England yet, under pressure to settle the wilderness and codify their ecclesiology, soon enough condemned as seditious or heretical.&rdquo;    That&rsquo;s a polite way of saying that when they&rsquo;d become the establishment, Winthrop and his allies denied the ideas that had formed the basis of their rebellion.  


Gura criticizes Miller for &ldquo;treating the whole literature as though it were the product of a single intelligence,&rdquo; and thus missing any subtle differences or development over time that might be seen in Puritan documents.    He says &ldquo;Miller viewed New England dissent as a sideshow to the events on the main stage of&hellip;intellectual and social history.&rdquo;    


...However, unlike others who questioned the reach of Puritan ideas across the wider working-class New England population, Gura continues to view New England as an area &ldquo;settled in the belief that it was to become nothing less than a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.&rdquo;  


Gura&rsquo;s exclusively theological focus allows him to conclude &ldquo;what is apparent in the colonists&rsquo; elaborate definitions and justifications&hellip;and evident in their polemics against dissenters is that the New Englander&rsquo;s ideological self-image was shaped&hellip;by an unyielding effort to neutralize the influence of those who argued for a much more radical reorganization of the society.&rdquo;    Again, this seems like a polite way of saying that, once they had gained power, the Puritans wanted to reinstate centralized authority and eliminate any further dissent or theological elaboration.    This rigidity toward those outside the power-group, who may not have realized the reform game was officially over, is what prompted Roger Williams the &ldquo;monstrous Paradox [that] God&rsquo;s children should persecute God&rsquo;s children.&rdquo;    The fact that New England congregationalism &ldquo;produced supporters as harsh and intolerant as the English prelates&rdquo; suggests that there really wasn&rsquo;t that much difference between the Puritans and their adversaries back in England.  

...Of the two excerpts presented in the text, it seems Miller and Johnson had a more ironic sense of the narrowness of Puritan thought, and the likelihood that although the Puritans contributed to the myth of American uniqueness, it may not have been through their theology; but rather through their arrogance.    Their declaration that they were exceptional, not the theological details of their position, seems to be the key to their contribution.    That, and the subsequent consolidation of social and political power that allowed them to dominate New England for more than a century.  
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Playing God?</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-17T19:24:14-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ff97869b2fa44f82e9be90660df893b5-13.html#unique-entry-id-13</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/ff97869b2fa44f82e9be90660df893b5-13.html#unique-entry-id-13</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Is it necessary to point out that there&rsquo;s a little element of personality cult going on here?  ...  His observations about the historian&rsquo;s role are almost an afterthought &ndash; a justification for the memoir?


Facts have indeed gone soft &ndash; or it&rsquo;s finally been admitted they were soft all along.    But do biographers REALLY believe they&rsquo;re digging out &ldquo;nuggets of reality&rdquo; any more or less than they ever did?    The &ldquo;nuggets&rdquo; &ndash;whether you&rsquo;re writing a nonfiction biography or a historical fiction&mdash;are what anchors your story to something that the reader can recognize as an acceptable story.    Or story-world; since may of those &ldquo;facts&rdquo; go toward establishing setting and populating the story with characters for your subject to interact with.  ...  But surely, we can (even if we&rsquo;re non-specialists, reading popular history) sense when a particular depiction might be &ldquo;realer&rdquo; than a competing account.


Darnton doesn&rsquo;t really describe his own decision-making process in full, and I&rsquo;d be interested to know more of the details of his Brissot story.    He had a manuscript in a drawer for thirty years, but all of a sudden he&rsquo;s writing a &ldquo;protective prolegomenon.&rdquo;  

...It seems like post-hagiographical bios are &ldquo;in&rdquo; right now, and a guy who had a second-rate publishing career, followed by a brief period of power in Revolutionary France; who visited America and may have been a police spy, might make an excellent subject.    If you wanted to portray the times as chaotic, a period when even the revolutionaries didn&rsquo;t agree much, and where loyalties were nearly impossible to maintain.  


Darnton gave up the Brissot project when he took up the one that would define his career.  ...  But it&rsquo;s a long step from there to the question of whether Brissot is worth the trouble.  ...  That using a well-known figure as &ldquo;the incarnation of a crucial process&rdquo; is in fact illegitimate.  


I&rsquo;ll agree that finding &ldquo;the key to Brissot&rsquo;s life&rdquo; and building a birth-to-death narrative around it seems a little old-fashioned, and might even be &ldquo;playing God.&rdquo;    But the other issue, &ldquo;pronouncing verdicts about&hellip;individuals I had never met,&rdquo; seems entirely within the scope of what a historian/biographer is understood to do.    If the (brand-new, previously unknown) evidence says that Marat was in France when he was thought to have been in England, then by all means say so!    I think the court-room analogy is a much better one than the &ldquo;playing God&rdquo; one.  

...Darnton&rsquo;s discovery, that previous biographers had followed Brissot&rsquo;s memoirs too credulously, suggests a change in our interests.    In the era of great men, Brissot was considered a philosopher because that&rsquo;s what he claimed to be.    But when Darnton &ldquo;began to read his works against the grain, they lost their luster.&rdquo;    Is this a nice way of saying that Brissot&rsquo;s ideas and writing were second-rate, and that close reading of the primary texts made this fact painfully obvious?  


The police-spying question is fascinating, because it points the spotlight on Brissot&rsquo;s place in the actual setting in which he lived.  ...  What did he do, and how did it square with the &ldquo;public image&rdquo; he tried to create?  

...The more interesting observation is, that Darnton found a lot of his own biography in the 1968 paper he wrote on Brissot.    The ever darker patterns he arranged his facts into were apparently predetermined ones Darnton chose unconsciously.  ...  The sixties may have been &ldquo;looking&rdquo; for different stories and patterns than the 2000s are&hellip;but is this &ldquo;discourse,&rdquo; or the spirit of the times?


...Do we really need to deconstruct history and biography to answer Darnton&rsquo;s concerns?  ...  In the end, as Darnton says, all lives are probably &ldquo;a bundle of contradictions,&rdquo; and none is an unambiguous metaphor for any historical insight (except maybe, complexity).  ...  Unless he&rsquo;s writing a novel &ndash; in which case he should say so and revel in it.    
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Michigan Copper&#x9;</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-07-24T11:28:44-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d7bc4b67325639047c55c14b837fbcd4-12.html#unique-entry-id-12</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d7bc4b67325639047c55c14b837fbcd4-12.html#unique-entry-id-12</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Apparently the story-telling pretty much begins with Angus Murdoch&rsquo;s 1943 epic, Boom Copper.    Later retellings, even if they only deal with a narrow topic like Calumet and Hecla, refer to Murdoch as the source of much of the color and legend associated with the region.    The book is divided between the historical narrative of the copper industry in the region, and the stories of the communities and personalities of the region.


Interesting that the UP was the scene of North America&rsquo;s first mineral &ldquo;rush,&rdquo; complete with Deadwood-esque boomtowns and characters.    Pure metal deposits were unknown to science, and scientists had trouble believing that commercial quantities of copper could be brought up that would require no smelting to remove impurities.    What were the implications for the overall US copper industry?    Compared to foreign competitors who had to smelt their ore (until Coro Coro, Bolivia)?


&ldquo;Three quarters of all the metal taken from the Cliff came out in the form of masses weighing anywhere from a ton to a hundred tons&hellip;Nowhere in the world had so much copper ever been taken from so small an area of mineral land.&rdquo;   (54, 56)  Sam Knapp&rsquo;s &ldquo;Minesota&rdquo; mine holds the record for the size of a single chunk: either 420 or 564 tons, depending on 1856 reports.    Murdoch says the Minesota is also distinguished as the most productive copper mine in history, &ldquo;in proportion to the amount of labor and capital expended.&rdquo;    From 1852-1856 (after four years of development beginning in 1848), &ldquo;the stockholders&rsquo; investment in the mine had doubled itself, and by 1876 they had received thirty dollars in dividends for every dollar invested.    At one time in the fifties, more than 2,000,000 pounds of mass copper was in sight, much of it all ready for cutting up...  Probably nowhere else on earth has there been a mine whose skips ran up and down through a solid copper shaft.&rdquo;   (92-3)


Murdoch&rsquo;s economic analysis of Michigan copper is a little sketchier than his setting and character descriptions.    He notes that 1870 was the first time in history copper went below twenty cents per pound (95), and that &ldquo;fissure mining&rdquo; was only successful three times (the Central, the Cliff, and the Minesota), but spurred a generation of mining ventures.    &ldquo;Of the 112 discoverable mining corporations which have operated in Ontonagon County,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;only the Minesota has paid more in dividends than it collected in assessments&rdquo; (97).    The story of silver (especially on Silver Islet in Thunder Bay) provides an interesting contrast between the economics of precious metals and copper.


Several of the characters like Sam Hill, Alexander Agassiz, and Sam Knapp would probably make interesting subjects.    Murdoch&rsquo;s treatment of the Secr&eacute;tan scandal, the paternalism of C & H, and the relationship between organized labor and the mining companies, is suggestive but short on detail.    He mentions that copper demand is relatively inelastic, but follows economic trends due to its use in infrastructure.    This is probably more true since the maturity of the electronics industry than it was during most of the Michigan heyday.    But it&rsquo;s interesting that he distinguishes between copper and other minerals from a demand perspective. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>First Impressions: Books looked at quickly</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-07-20T06:15:24-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9504696a126f63cf7ddfe7c2f8dc711e-10.html#unique-entry-id-10</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/9504696a126f63cf7ddfe7c2f8dc711e-10.html#unique-entry-id-10</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He makes the point in his introduction that, whatever else there is to say about the spread of democracy, &ldquo;habit and custom&rdquo; were generally against it.  &ldquo;even in Rhode Island where, as John Adams wrote, &lsquo;there has been no Clergy, no Church, and I had almost said no State, and some People say no religion, there has been a constant respect for certain old Families.&rsquo;&rdquo; (xiii)


Contains appendices with cast of characters by state, as well as political affiliations of early republic newspapers.


...Apparently a collection of essays he had laying around.    I shouldn&rsquo;t have read &ldquo;Publishing: A Survival Strategy for Academic Authors&rdquo; first.    It was so annoying and Bill-Brysonesque that it left everything else feeling a little too slimy with conceit.  


...Is this a standard intellectual history?  

...Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History


This is a series of essays from 1979, when intellectual history was &ldquo;in the wilderness.&rdquo;    Two of the major assumptions that had come under attack: that societies tend to be integrated (to have a meaningful &ldquo;national character&rdquo; at all), and that a shared culture maintains that integration.    If these are not true, then intellectual histories are possible for competing groups.    And, most interesting for me, between &ldquo;intellectuals&rdquo; and &ldquo;non-intellectuals.&rdquo;    (Is calling it mentalities sometimes a subtle slam at the subject of study, who we don&rsquo;t think is &ldquo;up to&rdquo; having an intellectual position?    This may be more than just a question of semantics) 


Is there a question of agency?    Do we assume that &ldquo;intellectuals&rdquo; choose their beliefs (world-view, attitude towards change, causality, etc.)?    And that regular people don&rsquo;t.  ...  And &ndash; is it not present in intellectual history?  


&ldquo;Some historians concentrate on clearly articulated beliefs that are amenable to formal exegesis.   Others are strongly drawn to examining the less refined level of consciousness the French have taught us to call collective mentalities.&rdquo;    Is this distinction what he thinks it is?    Isn&rsquo;t there a big chunk of underwater iceberg, holding up those &ldquo;clearly articulated beliefs?&rdquo;    Is it really that easy to distinguish them?    Isn&rsquo;t this why intellectual historians inevitably get around to flirting with psychology?  


The authors mention the fashion (at the Wingspread Conference) for studying communities and their &ldquo;paradigmatic&rdquo; assumptions (they mention Kuhn and Haskell).    This seems like it will be helpful, where it&rsquo;s possible to identify group membership.  ...  How does relative group ranking (&ldquo;family first&rdquo; among immigrant Italians) influence participation and level of commitment in other groups?    How does overall skepticism (or irony) affect acceptance of group paradigms? 

...Laurence Veysey quotes Charles Peirce: &ldquo;It is the belief men betray and not that which they parade which has to be studied.&rdquo;    Okay, I guess I need to read at least that article&hellip;


...Varg, America, From Client State to World Power
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>1817 view of the revolutions</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-07-12T19:39:42-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/da57e7fc5c2c7bec192eb8e8f154be15-9.html#unique-entry-id-9</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/da57e7fc5c2c7bec192eb8e8f154be15-9.html#unique-entry-id-9</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Manuel Palacio Fajardo, Outline of the Revolution in Spanish America (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817)


Palacio outlines the organization of the territories of Spanish America before Napoleon&rsquo;s overthrow of the Spanish monarchy.    He gives special attention to Thomas Picton&rsquo;s proclamation of 26 June 1797, which seemed to promise British aid to Spanish American independence.   (16)  In it, Henry Dundas (1st Viscount Melville, according to the author &ldquo;foreign minister to his Britannick Majesty,&rdquo; but actually Home Secretary 1791-4 and War Secretary 1794-1801 under Pitt, elevated in 1802, impeached 1806 for misappropriation of public money) is quoted in a letter of 7 April 1797 &ldquo;encouraging the inhabitants to resist the oppressive authority of their government&hellip;that they may be certain, that whenever they are in that disposition, they may receive at your hands all the succours to be expected from his Britannick Majesty, be it with forces, or with arms and ammunition to any extent; with the assurance, that the views of his Britannick Majesty go no further than to secure to them their independence, without pretending to any sovereignty over their country.&rdquo;    Of course, the Britannick Majesty in question was George III, so maybe the revolutionaries were na&iuml;ve to believe too strongly in his desire to see colonies freed from their mother countries.    By the time they got around to asking for such aid, Spain was no longer an enemy of Great Britain, but an ally in the war against Napoleon.


Palacio goes on to stress the loyalty of the Spanish Americans after the seizure of the Spanish throne.    Their juntas, he says, were temporary and were necessary to maintain order in light of the broken chain of command from the mother country.    In any case, they were no different from the juntas of Seville or the other peninsular cities that had taken on self-government in the name of the king.


Palacio says the Americans regarded the establishment of the regency in Spain as an illegal act, and determined to govern themselves independently only after it was clear to them that the illegal Spanish government intended to make war on the &ldquo;rebels&rdquo; in America.    He gives a detailed narrative of the revolutions up until 1817 (Bernardo O&rsquo;Higgins is Supreme Commander in Chile at the close).    I&rsquo;ll need to come back to this, when I have a clearer sense of the actual timeline, to see how accurate this account is.


The message Palacio leaves his London readers with, is that the Spanish Americans, although generally unsatisfied with peninsular rule, would never have revolted when they did, except for the assurances of the British that they&rsquo;d have aid and access to commerce.    At the time of publication, they had seen neither (it would be another six years before the British government recognized Spanish American independence).    In the final pages, &ldquo;young General Mina&rdquo; sails from Liverpool in May of 1816.    He arrives in the United States in June, where he picks up not only more &ldquo;musquets,&rdquo; (343) but a number of officers who sail with him to the Gulf of Mexico.    The United States government is no more enthusiastic about the revolution than Britain, but Palacio believes the people feel otherwise.   (346)  In the end, after describing unsuccessful missions to the governments of Britain, the U.S. and France (Bonaparte apparently promised his aid just before he was defeated at Leipsig), Palacio seems to be appealing to English-speaking public opinion for political or possibly direct support.    It&rsquo;ll be interesting to see if his book attracted any attention or comment in London or North America.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Lord Strangford</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-07-10T19:37:00-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/02e9c5f26c1a5dfcc4b6d42d1610e805-8.html#unique-entry-id-8</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/02e9c5f26c1a5dfcc4b6d42d1610e805-8.html#unique-entry-id-8</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[J.   Street, &ldquo;Lord Stangford and R&iacute;o de la Plata, 1808-1815&rdquo; Hispanic American Historical Review 33:4 (Nov., 1953) 477-510


Viscount Strangford, unlike &ldquo;the impressionable Smith or the irresponsible Cochrane&rdquo; (510) was not a romantic advocate of Spanish-American independence.    Street outlines Stangford&rsquo;s seven-year ministry to the Brazilian court, which made him the closest British official to the colonies as they began the period of self-government that led to secession from the Spanish Empire.  


Street argues against the view (held, he implies, by contemporary Argentine historians including E.   Ruiz-Gui&ntilde;az&uacute;) that Strangford was a &ldquo;magnanimous supporter of the Argentine Revolution of May, 1810&rdquo; (477).    The story he tells of Stangford&rsquo;s nearly constant involvement in Buenos Aires&rsquo; politics and diplomacy, however, at least suggests that the Spanish colony&rsquo;s issues were far more pressing (and interesting to Stangford?)   than anything going on in Brazil at the time.


Street refers extensively to letters and memos from the Foreign Office Archives, between Stangford and a succession of ministers including Canning, Marquise Wellesley, and Castlereagh (the particular timing of changes in the ministries might shed light on shifts in Britain&rsquo;s level of interest, if not her position on the Spanish Colonies.   Might be worth more reading &ndash; esp.   Castlereagh&rsquo;s possibly divergent view &ndash; p.   497).    There are also a couple of references to memoirs and books that may be useful.    And a hint: The United States, too, had aroused Stangford&rsquo;s suspicion by sheltering in Baltimore a French propaganda organization aimed at Latin America&rdquo; (495).   


This is an antidote to the idea that Britain ever had anything beside her own interests in mind, which should be obvious.    Street also suggests that Britain&rsquo;s European interests and policies were always paramount.    Even &ldquo;two-thousand leagues&rdquo; away, Stangford&rsquo;s actions are always predicated on his knowledge or surmise of what&rsquo;s happening in Europe, and what that means for Britain.    Maybe this sense of Latin America as a stage for the power-struggles of the old world is something I can do something with&hellip;
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Utopian ends still don&#x27;t justify the means</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-07-08T14:14:08-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a3c97aaa87f6426363d57f62e90961be-7.html#unique-entry-id-7</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/a3c97aaa87f6426363d57f62e90961be-7.html#unique-entry-id-7</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Maurice Meisner, Marxism Maoism and Utopianism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982)


&ldquo;The term &lsquo;utopia,&rsquo; Lewis Mumford once observed, can be taken to mean either the ultimate in human hope or the ultimate in human folly.    Mumford also noted that Sir Thomas More&hellip;was aware of both meanings of the word when he pointed to its divergent Greek origins: eutopia, which means the good place; and outopia, which means no place.&rdquo;   (3)  


Meisner says the Chinese Cultural Revolution was an application of Marxist-Maoist utopianism.    He argues, in spite of contemporary Chinese belief that these were &ldquo;ten lost years,&rdquo; that the tragic results are not the whole story.    Ultimately, Meisner agrees with Max Weber that &ldquo;man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.&rdquo; (27 and several other places)


Interesting, as far as it goes.    But it doesn&rsquo;t go far enough: doesn&rsquo;t really address the issue of means and ends.    Though Meisner mentions Robert Owen and others several times while discussing Marx and the sources of his utopianism (although he describes these sources as simply the historical setting for Marx&rsquo;s ideas), he completely misses the point that Owen and his elaborators in England and America were voluntarists.    Their utopian ideas culminated in the cooperative movement and in voluntary socialist communities like New Harmony; not in totalitarian (I hate to use the word, but it seems to apply), top-down, deadly government campaigns like the Cultural Revolution.


I admit to knowing next to nothing about Chinese history, but this seems to be a flaw in Meisner&rsquo;s argument.    Notwithstanding, he raises an interesting question: do utopian ideals necessarily lead to disastrous results?    Or just when implemented at gunpoint? 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Crisis of the Standing Order</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-05-18T18:13:16-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/408bc9670064ea6094af0e208a6ad9a4-6.html#unique-entry-id-6</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/408bc9670064ea6094af0e208a6ad9a4-6.html#unique-entry-id-6</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Field&rsquo;s thesis is that the Standing Order self-destructed in a war between proto-Unitarian &ldquo;Brahmins&rdquo; and orthodox Congregationalist leaders. 

...Field notes early on that Puritan practice banned ministers from holding secular office, so their authority rested entirely on their leadership role in the intellectual life of their society. ...  (2) It&rsquo;s ironic that the story of the orthodox fight to retain control in Mass is filled with their (futile) attempts to coerce. 

...Field proposes a &ldquo;social history of intellectuals,&rdquo; that treats the idealism of intellectual historians with a big dose of skepticism (if not cynicism), while retaining a focus on intellectuals as not only agents, but as a class (which he observes is missing from Marxist analysis. 

...What is clear is that the increasingly public disagreements between the orthodox clergy and their urbane, polished, and increasingly rich adversaries made it clear to anyone paying attention in the early decades of the 19th c., that the ministry was filled with partisans. ...  It&rsquo;s incredible to me that Morse managed to survive the Illuminati hoax with any credibility at all &ndash; and that might be a topic for further study.


...He places the ministers firmly on the side of the revolutionists (and says that until the Committees of Correspondence, they were nearly the only conduits of information, 26), which again illustrates a Boston-only focus. 

...Field mentions several items that don&rsquo;t fit smoothly into his interpretation, like the fact that Joseph Hawley brought a bill to the General Court in 1777 to disestablish the church, but &ldquo;he could not muster enough support even to bring it to the floor for a vote.&rdquo; 

...Hawley said: &ldquo;it is far from indisputable, and positively denied by many, viz, That it is the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons to worship, &c&hellip;.  It is inconsistent with the unalienable rights of conscience, which rights are certainly unalienable, if mankind have, (as the first article avers they have) any such rights.&rdquo; 

...Field doesn&rsquo;t really deal with the gradual shift of attitudes observed by some at the time, and he credits the revolution with imposing a &ldquo;limited moratorium on theological controversy&rdquo; (52).   He does outline the family ties between the proto-Unitarians and the merchant elite, and makes a good case that theirs was &ldquo;as much a social as a religious enterprise.&rdquo; ...  John Thornton Kirkland married the daughter of George Cabot; William Ellery Channing married Ruth Gibbs; Harvard professors Andrews Norton and George Ticknor married the daughters of Samuel Elliot; and Edward Everett married the daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, the first millionaire in Boston.


...This seems to undermine his claim that these groups were acting as self-aware, unified classes when they battled over the Illuminati in 1798 or David Tappan&rsquo;s Hollis chair in 1803-5. 

...The merchants and their make-believe ministers made a show of religion to please the society they lived in and advance their own social standing. 

...It is a sound point, though, that Boston was different from the rest of the state because its churches were NOT supported by taxes, they were all voluntary (a legacy of John Cotton?). ...  And again, Field admits on p. 143 that John Adams wrote to Morse that the ideas he complained were recent and Unitarian had been around for 65 years.


...(July 13 1798), Morse went so far as to declare it was &ldquo;necessary to exterminate [their] dangerous enemies,&rdquo; the Boston clergy who disagreed with them and refused to knuckle under to Morse&rsquo;s self-appointed authority. ...  While they&rsquo;d tried to support Morse&rsquo;s attacks on the republican plot, Federalist papers like the Columbian Centinal and Chronicle were nervous about their own credibility. ...  (150) Maybe part of the problem ministers like Morse were having is they believed they were living in an earlier world; where the clergy was not only the only source of information about the outside world for most people, but the prestige of the clergy virtually guaranteed that whatever the pastor told his flock would be believed. ...  But maybe the biggest damage was done by ministers like Morse, who showed themselves to be petty, partisan, and worst of all, miserably wrong.


...Without rigid enforcement of correct doctrines, he said, &ldquo;liberty, free enquiry [and] private judgment [were becoming] instruments of infidelity, and a fair mask, under which apostasy from Christianity and hatred of all goodness have disguised themselves.&rdquo; ...  Field doesn&rsquo;t really explain who the audience for this type of rhetoric is, or how effective it was. 

...The Andover Seminary&rsquo;s creed, which all faculty had to swear and renew every five years, pledged &ldquo;unswerving opposition , &lsquo;not only to Atheists and Infidels, but to Jews, Papists, Mahomatans, Arians, Pelagians, Antimonians, Arminians, Socinians, Sabellians, Unitarians, and Universalists.&rdquo; 

...Field points out that the &ldquo;growing class nature of Massachusetts society may not have been the efficient cause, but it was certainly a necessary cause of the crisis&hellip;&rdquo; (183) He says the older (and increasingly female) communicants were less prosperous than their neighbors, implying that the time required to achieve their high level of religious devotion cut them off from worldly success.   There&rsquo;s a good chance these people may have &ldquo;believed that the shrinking number of public confessions signaled a serious decline in religiosity&rdquo; in Massachusetts, as Field says. ...  (In general, Field ignores the audiences of the clerics he writes about, which is unfortunate) During the Dorchester conflict (when Codman refuses to exchange pulpits with Brahmins as his parishioners want), the orthodox minister&rsquo;s enemies are described as being &ldquo;exceedingly fond of amusements.&rdquo;   (197) Field points out this statement points to an underlying class conflict, but again he doesn&rsquo;t describe how it was received. 

...Maybe the Brahmins&rsquo; position was like the Baptists&rsquo; during the revolution: they weren&rsquo;t really against estabishment and authority, they were against someone else having it over them. 

...The ministers swallowed their pride and embraced revivalism, holding 116 in Mass in 1831 (232). 81 &ldquo;churches&rdquo; (ministers and communicants) were &ldquo;exiled&rdquo; by parish revolts by 1833, according to a study made by the orthodox and presented to their General Association of Massachusetts Ministers. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Unknown Revolution</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-05-18T17:39:38-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/87ec780ce86dae44aef7dc5b2fb2d0b0-5.html#unique-entry-id-5</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/87ec780ce86dae44aef7dc5b2fb2d0b0-5.html#unique-entry-id-5</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The book reflects this focus, and yet still seems to dwell excessively on the names you&rsquo;ll find in any old-fashioned political history.   I grabbed a bunch of things that pertain to my interests, and added a bunch more books he refers to, to my queue of titles.


Nash mentions that George Lippard was called out for embellishing his histories with legend or things he just made up.   He defended his attempt to personalize the story, saying that official history or the &ldquo;thing that generally passes for History is the most insolent, swaggering bully, the most graceless braggart, the most reckless equivocator that ever staggered forth on the great stage of the world.&rdquo; (xxvi) You can&rsquo;t really argue with that&hellip;


The Great Awakening, in this treatment, is &ldquo;a search for new sources of authority, new principles of action, new foundations of hope.&rdquo; (quoting William G.   McLoughlin, 8) &ldquo;The Awakeners preached that the old sources of authority were too effete to solve the problems of the day, too encrusted with tradition, self-indulgence, hypocrisy, and intellectualism to bring a sense of hope and faith to a generation that was witnessing the transformation of the world&hellip;&rdquo; (8) In what way was their world transformed?   All the listed problems would have been equally recognizable to infidels &ndash; is it really a reaction of people who want to remain religious, to outside critiques?


George Whitefield&rsquo;s message was that &ldquo;God did not work through the elite corps of learned clergy and their aristocratic allies.   Rather&hellip;through the inner light&hellip;The message was one of social leveling, for it put all people on one footing insofar as the conversion experience was concerned.&rdquo;   (8-9) This argument was also played out (the levelers lost) in the English Civil War, and countless other times in Christian history.   It explains how Jonathan Edwards could be socially democratic and theologically ultra-conservative, because the evidence of grace had to be based on some measure, if not on material success.


&ldquo;Virginia&rsquo;s ruling class had another reason to fear and oppose religious enthusiasm: It held great appeal for the enslaved.&rdquo; 

...Ethan Allen: New York attorney general John Tabor Kempe won a court victory over the Hampshire Grants.   &ldquo;Allen later wrote that Attorney General Kempe took him aside in a tavern the night of the court decision and tried to get him to convince his farmer friends to leave the area or recognize that they had new landlords.   Said Kempe&mdash;at least in Allen&rsquo;s recollection&mdash;&ldquo;We have might on our side, and you know that might often prevails against right.&rdquo;   Allen claims he replied, &ldquo;The gods of the hills are not the gods of the valley,&rdquo; indicating that the New England farmers would not give up their lands without a fight.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The New York Riot Act, which Allen promptly called the &lsquo;Bloody Act,&rsquo; specified that an assembly of three or more persons with &lsquo;unlawful intent&rsquo; would be subjected to the provisions of the law, which included capital punishment for infractions such as destroying fences and outhouses and burning haystacks.   With the Continental Congress about to assemble in Philadelphia, Allen defiantly wrote to [Governor] Tryon that &lsquo;We shall more than three, nay more than three times three hundred, assemble together if need be to maintain our common cause&rdquo; and promised that &ldquo;Printed sentences of death will not kill us&hellip;We will kill and destroy any persons, whomsoever, that shall presume to be accessory, aiding or assisting, in taking any of us.&rsquo;&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;The Baptist religious revolution of the 1760s was far more subversive than the Presbyterian revivalism of the 1740s and 1750s because it challenged gentry values and their social order more sharply and reached even lower into the social order for its recruits.   It was all the more subversive because almost all Baptist preachers were unschooled farmers or artisans&mdash;men drawn from &lsquo;Christ&rsquo;s poor.&rsquo;&rdquo; (147-8) cf Israel Williams&rsquo; tirade against Chileab and Ebenezer Smith of Ashfield and their church.


&ldquo;Vermont&rsquo;s constitution went farther than Pennsylvania&rsquo;s in several respects: it provided unrestricted manhood suffrage without even a taxpayer qualification; made all judges elective; gave special protection to debtors; and declared all slaves free, without compensation to their owners&hellip;The abolitionist principal received real application when Yale-trained David Avery arrived in Bennington to assume the pulpit of the Congregational church in 1779. 

...&ldquo;New York&rsquo;s legislature went so far as to threaten to withdraw from the war against England unless Congress took &lsquo;speedy and vigorous measures for reducing them [the Vermonters] to an obedience.&rsquo;&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;In many respects, the New York constitution was the most conservative passed by the states&hellip;it lacked a bill of rights&hellip; Ira Allen, Ethan&rsquo;s youngest brother, carried the constitutions of New York and Vermont from town to town in the Green Mountains region in 1777, inviting the citizens to compare them carefully&hellip;Forty towns in the region endorsed Vermont&rsquo;s constitution while rejecting New York&rsquo;s as perversely undemocratic.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;In no other state did ideas about the people as the foundation of all political authority ebb away so quickly in the face of a resurgent conservative view that favored strict limits on popular power.&rdquo; 

...Theophilus Parsons&rsquo; Essex Result was a criticism of the [already ultra-conservative] draft for the Mass constitution, claiming it didn&rsquo;t do enough to protect the wealthy against democracy. 

...&ldquo;Reconvening to count the votes in early June 1780, the convention declared that the requisite two-thirds of the voters had given their approval&hellip;they had a constitution. ...  Of 290 towns returning votes&hellip;only 42 accepted it without amendment&hellip;nearly half of them rejected the constitution because it strangled the voice of the people at large in favor of a government controlled by the elite&hellip;The constitution, wrote [Joseph] Hawley violated &lsquo;the natural, essential and inalienable right&rsquo; of every freeman to vote and hold office.&rdquo; 

...One of his first acts was to receive the resignations of two militia captains, Samuel Talbot and Lemuel Gay, who had been disenfranchised by the new Mass constitution&rsquo;s property requirements in the course of fighting in the Revolution. ...  They said &ldquo;We can no longer with truth encourage our fellow soldiers, who are so poor as to be thus deprived of their fundamental rights, that they are fighting for their own freedom; and how can an officer possessed of the generous feelings of humanity detach any of them into a service in which they are not interested.&rdquo;   They refused to lead men to fight for &ldquo;a form of government&hellip;that appears repugnant to the principals of freedom.&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>American Thinking Class</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-05-29T17:35:27-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d6d46d07d724602bd5d9b2cd389f3ca9-4.html#unique-entry-id-4</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/d6d46d07d724602bd5d9b2cd389f3ca9-4.html#unique-entry-id-4</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Staloff&rsquo;s thesis is that Puritan Massachusetts was run by an alliance of intellectuals (ministers, the producers of culture) and intelligentsia (magistrates, who administered culture through politics). 

...Staloff doesn&rsquo;t disparage the notion that the Puritan rulers, dissidents, and the laity had sincere theological differences; but he&rsquo;s clearly not interested in them. 

...(12) Staloff mentions events in England only briefly (although his historiographical appendix is mostly about English Puritanism), but reminds the reader that the Bay Puritans are (or at least may consider themselves) the radicals in an intercontinental movement (actually, Staloff lets his theory get away from him for a moment and calls them the &ldquo;vanguard of the militant Protestant internationale&rdquo;).


Staloff argues that the colony&rsquo;s toleration of high-ranking dissenters like Roger Williams (who was treated with kid gloves at a time when lesser men were being &ldquo;whipped, have his ears cutt of, Fyned &pound;40, and banished&hellip;for uttering mallitious and scandalous speeches against the government and the church of Salem.&rdquo; 21) was due to his status as a member of the intellectual ruling elite.   Every attempt was made to reconcile Williams&rsquo; differences with the ruling consensus, to avoid the appearance that the fundamental truths on which Puritan society was based were open to a variety of interpretations.   Anne Hutchinson was more easily dealt with, because she was a woman; the magistrates took much greater care bringing John Cotton (her mentor and the teacher of the Boston church) back into the fold.


...He argued for a more charismatic faith, where evidence of grace was somewhat disassociated from works (not as much as Anne Hutchinson believed, as it turned out).   In a sense, Cotton was &ldquo;seeing&rdquo; the Puritans&rsquo; miraculous-biblical social basis, and &ldquo;raising&rdquo; them with claims of contemporary miracles (experiences of saving grace as a qualification for &ldquo;saint&rdquo; status). 

...And Cotton&rsquo;s preference for at will offerings (in the richest parish in New England) over forced tithes reappears in Chileab Smith&rsquo;s schism with his son Ebenezer over ministerial salary at the end of the 18th century.


The Antinomian dissent was apparently supported by many of the Boston merchants, but Staloff doesn&rsquo;t make it clear how or why the &ldquo;urban bourgeoisie&rdquo; transformed their dissatisfaction with the &ldquo;arcane economic policy&rdquo; (40) of the inner party into Anne Hutchinson&rsquo;s theological break with Puritan orthodoxy. ...  On the one hand, he agrees with Ziff that &ldquo;so long as the doctrine itself was under attack, he stood by them, but when it became clear to him&hellip;that they aimed at a social revolution and were willing even to pervert doctrine to achieve it, he abandoned them.&rdquo;   But in the next paragraph, &ldquo;Cotton attempted to use the Antinomians in the same fashion that Mao Tse-tung used the Red Guards in his struggle for absolute preeminence against the other members of the inner party elite.&rdquo; 

...If the orthodox leaders allowed the existence of an &ldquo;inner light,&rdquo; then anyone could claim a personal revelation that was superior (or at least equivalent) to the Word as preached by the ministers.   The Synod of 1637 identified and condemned it as Error #53: &ldquo;No Minister can teach one that is anointed by the Spirit of Christ, more than hee knows already unlesse it be in some circumstances.&rdquo;   (45) This is obviously true as well of Cotton&rsquo;s saints, but they weren&rsquo;t pressing the point and Cotton was still one of the foremost ministers in the colony. 

...By 1660, there were 135 college-trained leaders among the second generation, of whom 116 were Harvard graduates.&rdquo; (q Harry Stout, 94-5) (cf New England&rsquo;s First Fruits) In addition, the college graduated magistrates for the General Court and teachers for the Latin schools, to prepare the next generation of Harvard men. ...  &ldquo;Here lay the key to Puritan toleration and repression: orthodox unanimity was sought not as an end in itself but as a means to cultural domination,&rdquo; Staloff concludes. 

...(106) This is an interesting construction, clearly showing the author&rsquo;s belief that church and commonwealth are two elements of a single society that everyone is responsible to keep up. 

...In the spring of 1643, the two traveled to Boston to place themselves and their followers under the Massachusetts jurisdiction and thus regain control of the land&hellip;&rdquo; (109-110) This is an interesting example, 32 years before King Philip&rsquo;s War, of the natives interacting with colonial government as if they consider it legitimate.


...&ldquo;Truly I cannot ascribe it to any outward thing, as to the putting of too much liberty into the hands of the multitude, which they are too weak to manage&hellip;&rdquo; (115) Staloff says the laity&rsquo;s loss of power in the church was partly balanced by a gain of some control over politics, as the deputies began disagreeing more frequently with the magistrates.   The Halfway Covenant was the ministers&rsquo; attempt to regain control over the population, by bringing them back into the church that &ldquo;saving grace&rdquo; had disqualified them from.


...In addition to a number of finable offences, they decided &ldquo;the death penalty was prescribed for blasphemy and, more pointedly, for any person who dared &lsquo;reproach the holy religion of God, as if it were but a polliticke devise to keep ignorant men in awe.&rsquo;  &hellip;Failure to attend the ministers&rsquo; public exercises&mdash;&lsquo;the ordinary meanes to subdue the harts of hearers not onely to the faith, & obedience to the Lord Jesus, but also to civill obedience, and allegiance unto magistracy;--would draw a fine of 5 shillings for each such occurrence.&rdquo; 

...Staloff claims &ldquo;the ultimate significance of the Quaker movement for the orthodox Bay regime was that it thus forced the magistrates and ministers to neutralize the danger of an unchurched majority that might easily be induced to support heterodox dissent.&rdquo; ...  (136) &ldquo;The most important way in which the half-way covenant centralized church power was by devaluing lay consent,&rdquo; (137) as well as the learning and emotional commitment required to qualify for membership. 

...The 1676 pre-election speaker, Harvard graduate William Hubbard, told his audience that those who called for &ldquo;a parity in any Society, will in the issue reduce things into a heap of confusion.&rdquo; 

...Interestingly, it was Solomon Stoddard who turned the synod from requiring testimony of saving grace, to &ldquo;a personal and publicke profession of their Faith and Repentance,&rdquo; (181) which paved the way for the half-way covenant.   Staloff&rsquo;s chronology seems confused here (or more likely his narrative is just too convoluted), but I should look into the debates between Stoddard and the Mathers (Cotton and Increase), and follow the thread down to Stoddard&rsquo;s grandson, Jonathan Edwards. (cf Mather, A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostacy, 1677)


...(182) Mather warned his listeners that &ldquo;God himself is speaking to you&hellip;though by mortal men like unto your selves,&rdquo; (183) and that not only the minister but the almighty was offended when they dozed off. 

...When it became clear that the king wanted changes in the Bay charter, reflecting increased religious liberty and toleration of other sects, Mather declared that there could be no compromise. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Radical Sects ignores the irreligious </title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-06-18T15:25:39-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/498ff0f6b71aabacc480c4ad8a80cf48-3.html#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/498ff0f6b71aabacc480c4ad8a80cf48-3.html#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Stephen A.   Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)


Mentioned by Gilmore in his notes and bibliography.    Covers the religious sectarianism of the revolutionary decades (1770-1790).    Completely ignores any challenges to religion from the outside.    As if there were no rationalists, materialists, &ldquo;infidels,&rdquo; deists, or atheists at all in New England.    The overall effect is to misrepresent the radical impulse, as if it was a denominational issue debated and decided within the religious community.


This isn&rsquo;t useful to me.    Although the religious scholars see a huge difference between the Old and New Light Congregationalists, to me they&rsquo;re pretty much all Calvinists.    The Baptists in Ashfield are interesting, with their appeal to King George III for their rights against the Puritans and their supporters in the Massachusetts legislature.    But Marini doesn&rsquo;t mention even this.    Ashfield gets a brief nod as a site of Shaker activity, but without acknowledgement that the Ashfield Congregational Society voted to run Mother Ann and the &ldquo;tremblers&rdquo; out of town.


I think there is some interesting history buried in the stories of these churches and their disintegration into rival sects in the revolution and early republic.    But I&rsquo;m more interested in what these changes say about the social situation in towns like Ashfield.    What if Baptist hisotry in Ashfield was as much about resistance to the people (mainly river-valley proprietors) running the Congregational Society as it was about theology.    It&rsquo;s easier for me to see Chileab Smith as a social dissident than as a theological disputant.    We&rsquo;ll see how that plays out.    In the meantime, Radical Sects goes in the discard pile. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Changes in the Land</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-06-04T16:19:21-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/35dc67bec437c7f7dcc38ec394136614-2.html#unique-entry-id-2</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/35dc67bec437c7f7dcc38ec394136614-2.html#unique-entry-id-2</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Changes in the Land by William Cronon (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003).    Begins with an introduction called &ldquo;The View from Walden,&rdquo; that not only acknowledges some of the changes Thoreau saw in his neighborhood, but explodes the idea that this represents some &ldquo;fall&rdquo; from a pristine, a-historical initial state.    The landscape is always changing, and was changed by the &ldquo;Indians&rdquo; before white people arrived.    &ldquo;There has been no timeless wilderness in a state of perfect changelessness, no climax forest in permanent stasis.&rdquo;    (11)  Cronon criticizes first-generation ecologists for assuming that all systems tend toward a stable equilibrium, and also for assuming &ldquo;humanity was somehow outside the ideal climax community.&rdquo;   (10)  This may be a cheap shot at ecologists, but it&rsquo;s an instructive metaphor for historians.


Cronon&rsquo;s economic argument centers on the ideas that European visitors&rsquo; and colonists&rsquo; response to New England was colored by their cultural baggage (valuation of the abundance they discovered was influenced by scarcity back home, as in the case of timber and firewood), and on the assertion that the colonists were part of a transatlantic capitalist market and drew the Indians into it as well (in his afterword, written on the twentieth anniversary of publication, Cronon seems to regret the slightly oversimplified depiction of &ldquo;capitalism&rdquo;).    The pre-colonial landscape he describes is quite different from the trackless wilderness I&rsquo;d imagined, and Cronon&rsquo;s detailed descriptions of these differences is one of the most attractive features of the book.    Along the way, I picked up a lot of interesting details: like that the colonists were generally healthier and longer-lived than the people they left behind, since they were no longer exposed to the European disease environment (24).    Of course, the diseases they brought with them killed 90-100% of the Indians in many affected villages.    But the Puritan settlers saw this as a sign of their God&rsquo;s providence. 

...&ldquo;Many European visitors were struck by what seemed to them the poverty of Indians who lived in the midst of a landscape endowed so astonishingly with abundance.&rdquo;   (33)  Cronon argues this is a misunderstanding of the Indian approach to life and land use.    In a passage that reminds me a lot of Colin Tudge&rsquo;s argument about agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers in Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers, Cronon says that not only did the Indians have a noncommercial value-system that led them to shun accumulation, but they were actually managing their environment in sophisticated ways that the colonists failed to recognize.  ...  Gardening in &ldquo;tangles&rdquo; of maize, beans, and squash maximized crop yields, reduced erosion, and increased soil fertility (relative to the colonists&rsquo; monoculture). 

...Cronon&rsquo;s point is that the Indians had a more stable approach to their environment than did the colonists.    He frequently accuses the colonists of &ldquo;mining&rdquo; the soil, but the fact that their society treated land as a commodity doesn&rsquo;t necessarily mean that individual farmers deliberately set out to put short-term gains before sustainability.    He may be leaning to heavily on Turner when he assumes they all simply planned on moving west when they exhausted their farms.    


The Indian approach clearly required mobility, which made it incompatible with settled European agricultural culture.   In another passage that Tudge echoes in his 1998 book, Cronon contrasts the Indians&rsquo; seasonal migrations with the colonists&rsquo; construction of fences &ndash; even their pastoralism was sedentary!    Cronon admits that Indian &ldquo;conservation&hellip;was less the result of an enlightened ecological sensibility than of the Indians&rsquo; limited social definition of &lsquo;need.&rsquo;&rdquo;   (98)  He invokes Leibig&rsquo;s Law to explain low Indian population densities (&ldquo;biological populations are limited not by the total annual resources available to them but by the minimum amount that can be found at the scarcest time of year&rdquo; 41), but doesn&rsquo;t elaborate on the mechanism of population control (was it by restricting fertility, or by the starvation of the weak?).    Clearly, though, the Indians are the &ldquo;good guys&rdquo; in Cronon&rsquo;s account.  

...The latter half of the book continues these arguments but doesn&rsquo;t extend them much.  ...  Springfield, begun by William Pynchon in 1636 as the latest in a string of &ldquo;fur posts&rdquo; on the Connecticut River.   (99)  Overhunting to the point that &ldquo;Hunting with us,&rdquo; says Timothy Dwight, &ldquo;exists chiefly in the tales of other times.&rdquo;   (101)  A typical New England household consumed thirty to forty cords of firewood a year.&rdquo;   (120)  &ldquo;Roads&hellip;were typically between 99 and 165 feet wide&hellip;since they facilitated moving large herds to market.&rdquo;   (140)  And Narragansett sachem Miantonomo made a speech in 1642 that complained about ecological degradation and warned &ldquo;we shall all be starved&rdquo; (162), so the colonists assassinated him in 1643.  ...  I don&rsquo;t feel compelled to mine his bibliography at the moment, although I&rsquo;m more interested in reading Timothy Dwight&rsquo;s Travels as a result of this.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Hayden White&#x27;s Metahistory</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-05-30T19:47:24-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6a62cc66ba6d3978716dea42d20fa62e-1.html#unique-entry-id-1</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6a62cc66ba6d3978716dea42d20fa62e-1.html#unique-entry-id-1</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I picked this book up because I&rsquo;ve read articles by White that have made sense, and because I&rsquo;m aware he&rsquo;s a pivotal figure in the battle over post-modern historiography.  

...In the Preface, he tosses off a definition of history that bears looking at:  &ldquo;a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse&hellip;[that] combine[s] a certain amount of &lsquo;data,&rsquo; theoretical concepts for &lsquo;explaining&rsquo; these data, and a narrative structure for their presentation&hellip;of events presumed to have occurred in times past.&rdquo;  

...These include not only grammar and syntax, but since history is presented as a story of the past, narrative structures (plots, themes, archetypes) that might carry meanings of their own, based on the reader&rsquo;s level of literacy, sensitivity to these subtle hints, etc.    So in addition to the choice of data and the explanations the historian advances, the way the story is plotted and presented may communicate the historian&rsquo;s interpretation and even his/her philosophy of history.


White goes farther, claiming that the historian&rsquo;s philosophy of history &ldquo;prefigures the field&rdquo; of study, and that histories can be decoded for their philosophical content by analyzing the rhetorical &ldquo;tropes&rdquo; the historian uses in their presentation.


The book is built on an introduction, where White lays out his theory, and nine chapters of examples, where he reviews the work of nineteenth-century historians and philosophers of history.    In White&rsquo;s theory &ldquo;the historical work represents an attempt to mediate among what I will call the historical field, the unprocessed historical record, other historical accounts, and an audience&rdquo; (5).  ...  The other elements are interesting, since they point to the historian&rsquo;s thought processes in searching for data, thinking about other historians&rsquo; interpretations, and trying to communicate something relevant and new with readers (White doesn&rsquo;t mention the historian&rsquo;s overriding motivation to find something new to say, and thus justify the new history.  

...This is obvious on reflection, and it&rsquo;s amazing that conservative historians like Marwick have allowed themselves to be viewed (or characterized) as trying to deny it.  ...  That choice is either completely random, or it&rsquo;s based on some principle, some question, some pre-existing idea that sent the historian to the data in the first place.


...And because it is, White makes his big jump and claims that the meanings of histories (and the philosophies of historians) can be analyzed using ideas from rhetoric.  


For the most part, White seems to be claiming that these processes are consciously chosen by historians (in contrast to others, who say the historian is unconsciously preconditioned by his language/culture).    &ldquo;Before the historian can bring to bear upon the data of the historical field the conceptual apparatus he will use to represent and explain it,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;he must first prefigure the field&mdash;that is to say, constitute it as an object of mental perception.    This poetic act is indistinguishable from the linguistic act in which the field is made ready for interpretation as a domain of a particular kind&rdquo; (30).    The problem is, if this means anything at all (and I have my doubts), it&rsquo;s an issue that should be addressed by looking at the most advanced epistemology/cognitive science.  

...Anyone who has read philosophy and still chooses to write history has either come to grips with these issues, or is trying to bamboozle people who aren&rsquo;t aware of them.    This is where White leaves himself a possible &ldquo;out&rdquo; by saying that &ldquo;In order to figure out &lsquo;what really happened&rsquo; in the past&hellip;the historian must first prefigure as a possible object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in the documents.    This prefigurative act is poetic  [a term he uses interchangeably with &ldquo;figurative&rdquo;] inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian&rsquo;s own consciousness&rdquo; (30-1).    There&rsquo;s an implication of na&iuml;ve literalism in the beginning of White&rsquo;s statement, as if historians (or at least un-enlightened ones) believe they&rsquo;re finding &ldquo;the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.&rdquo;  

...White goes on to populate his three explanatory forms (emplotment, argument, and ideology) with four &ldquo;modes&rdquo; that combine in particular ways according to their &ldquo;affinities&rdquo; to create historiographical styles.  ...  White admits there are legitimate combinations (the Romantic Comedy or Romantic Tragedy) and others that are not allowed (the Romantic Satire), suggesting the &ldquo;modes&rdquo; may not all be of the same type.  

...He reminds the reader of Nietzsche&rsquo;s warning that &ldquo;by such reductions&hellip;the phenomenal world can be populated with a host of agents and agencies that are presumed to exist behind it&rdquo; (35).  

...I don&rsquo;t see how it contributes anything to the content, and I suspect that it&rsquo;s intended partly to browbeat the reader into accepting the argument in order to simply follow it.    For example, White sneaks in a claim that &ldquo;there are no extra-ideological grounds on which to arbitrate among the conflicting conceptions of the historical process and of historical knowledge&hellip;since these conceptions have their origins in ethical considerations, the assumption of a given epistemological position by which to judge their cognitive accuracy would itself represent only another ethical choice&rdquo; (26).  

...This leads to mechanism in the form of Marx, and ultimately &ldquo;the consistent elaboration of a number of equally comprehensive and plausible, yet apparently mutually exclusive, conceptions of the same sets of events&rdquo; leads back to an ironic loss of confidence in the ability to know anything, &ldquo;freeing&hellip;historical consciousness from the impossible ideal of a transcendentally &lsquo;realist&rsquo; perspective on the world&rdquo; (41).


...I&rsquo;m not going to read the nearly 400 pages that separate this introduction from White&rsquo;s concluding remarks in which he says that &ldquo;if we wish to transcend the agnosticism which an Ironic perspective on history&hellip;foists on us, we have only to reject this Ironic perspective and to will to view history from another, anti-Ironic perspective,&rdquo; because, in the end, it&rsquo;s a moral or an esthetic choice. 

...I think there may even be something to the idea that we look for the archetypal stories and story-forms in history.  ...  Even if it was &ldquo;precritical and precognitive&rdquo; (which I don&rsquo;t accept), we&rsquo;re not uncritical, and we can be cognitive.  

...Even in a world where reality is mediated by perception and conception (our senses and our mental training/language/etc.), some models of the world are more accurate than others.    So it&rsquo;s not okay to embrace teleology or dialectical materialism just because it feels more comfortable or satisfies our yearning for beauty and meaning (or panders to our prejudices and justifies the status quo). 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Thomas Kuhn&#x27;s Paradigms</title><dc:creator>dan@allosso.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>reading</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-05-30T19:45:07-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6deef573099476e8d00987eaedf1d24d-0.html#unique-entry-id-0</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.danallosso.com/history/reading_files/6deef573099476e8d00987eaedf1d24d-0.html#unique-entry-id-0</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Instead, he says that it oscillates between stable periods of &ldquo;normal science,&rdquo; during which scientists elaborate and extend a single dominant paradigm, and revolutionary breaks, when an existing paradigm is abandoned in favor of a new one.


Kuhn rejects the belief that knowledge progresses by a series of &ldquo;successive increments&rdquo; (p. 2) which add to the accumulation  of facts making up current scientific truth.    He disputes the description of professional scientific life as an impartial empirical exploration, describing it instead as being guided and directed by paradigms which create the rules and standards for a scientific community.    Sharing a paradigm allows this community to take the foundations of their field for granted, resulting in highly refined studies into the most esoteric and elaborate problems.


Kuhn describes &ldquo;normal science&rdquo; as &ldquo;mop-up work,&rdquo;  which he describes as &ldquo;an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies.&rdquo;  (p. ...  This does not mean there is a single right solution in nature, just in the paradigm.


...&ldquo;Every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another viewpoint, as a counterinstance,&rdquo; (79), but some of these can ultimately be answered within the existing paradigm.  ...  &ldquo;Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.&rdquo;  

...Revolutions result when a scientific community rejects an existing paradigm in favor of a new one.  ...  The new paradigm comes to be recognized as better than the old one based on the set of criteria which (now) matter to the community.  

...Adoption of the new paradigm changes the scientist&rsquo;s perceptions, tools, and language in a way that makes his understanding incommensurable with that of the old-paradigm scientists.  ...  (122)  Ultimately all experience is processed through interpretive structures (paradigms), so there is no &ldquo;neutral observation-language&rdquo; from which to judge the paradigms.  

...Paradigm choices are made, not based on &ldquo;comparison of a single paradigm with nature,&rdquo; (145) because nature cannot be SEEN except through a paradigm.  ...  It is not always clear that the new paradigm is more successful than its predecessor when the decision is made.  

...This model works in science because of its reliance on a single paradigm at a time, and its very detailed elaboration of that paradigm.    There is an &ldquo;evolutionary&rdquo; element to the revolutions, in that the new paradigm must solve the outstanding counterinstances which caused the crisis (at least better than the old paradigm did), AND it must  &ldquo;promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem-solving ability&rdquo; of the predecessor model.  

...The term Paradigm is refined to mean: &ldquo;the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by members of a given community,&rdquo; AND &ldquo;the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution&rdquo; of scientific questions.  

...&ldquo;Crises need not be generated by the work of the community that experiences them and that sometimes undergoes revolution as a result,&rdquo;  Kuhn says.  

...This involves a &ldquo;disciplinary matrix&rdquo; which holds a group of sciences together and defines a &ldquo;field&rdquo; of science (182), &ldquo;symbolic generalizations&rdquo; which &ldquo;look like laws of nature,&rdquo;  and are also definitions of the symbols (&ldquo;the balance between their inseparable legislative and definitional force shifts over time&rdquo; as the paradigm matures) (183).    There are overarching &ldquo;metaphysical paradigms&rdquo;:  &ldquo;beliefs in particular models&hellip;[that] supply the group with preferred or permissible analogies and metaphors&rdquo;  (184), &ldquo;values&rdquo; such as plausibility, consistency, mathematical beauty, etc.  ...  The &ldquo;differences between sets of exemplars provide the community fine-structure of science,&rdquo; and because they point directly to the way humans know anything, learning a particular set means a student has &ldquo;assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing.&rdquo;  

...In his discussion of knowledge, Kuhn says we are &ldquo;tempted to identify stimuli one-to-one with sensations,&rdquo; and that we &ldquo;posit the existence of stimuli to explain our perceptions of the world, and we posit their immutability to avoid both individual and social solipsism.&rdquo;    (193)  He says that paradigms, in their role as exemplars, allow us to &ldquo;learn to see the same things when confronted with the same stimuli.&rdquo; 

...&ldquo;To say that the members of different groups have different perceptions when confronted with the same stimuli is not to imply that they may have just any perceptions at all.&rdquo;    (195)  &ldquo;What is built into the neural process that transforms stimuli to sensations has the following characteristics: it has been transmitted through education; it has, by trial, been found more effective than its historical competitors in a group&rsquo;s current environment; and, finally, it is subject to change both through further education and through the discovery of misfits with the environment.&rdquo;  

...The two processes are not the same, and what perception leaves for interpretation to complete depends drastically on the nature and amount of prior experience and training.&rdquo;  ...  &ldquo;There is no neutral algorithm for theory-choice, no systematic decision procedure which, properly applied, must lead each individual in the group to the same decision&hellip; Two men who perceive the same situation differently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words differently.&rdquo;  ...  But: &ldquo;To translate a theory or worldview into one&rsquo;s own language is not to make it one&rsquo;s own.  

...But &ldquo;How does one elect, and how is one elected to membership in a particular community, scientific or not?  ...  What does the group collectively see as its goals; what deviations, individual or collective, will it tolerate; and how does it control the impermissible aberration?&rdquo; ]]></content:encoded></item></channel>
</rss>
