History lesson

Radical historian Howard Zinn in the Nation:

The New Deal was tentative, cautious, bold enough to shake the pillars of the system but not to replace them. It created many jobs but left 9 million unemployed. It built public housing but not nearly enough. It helped large commercial farmers but not tenant farmers. Excluded from its programs were the poorest of the poor, especially blacks. As farm laborers, migrants or domestic workers, they didn't qualify for unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, Social Security or farm subsidies. Still, in today's climate of endless war and uncontrolled greed, drawing upon the heritage of the 1930s would be a huge step forward.

Whether you agree with Zinn's prescription, I think his characterization of politics in general is spot on. The right-wing noise machine can't admit it, and the milquetoast Clintons and Obamas can't either, but on economic issues, today's much-vilified "liberals" would have been right-wingers in the 1930s and 1940s.

Blue city, red country

"In red states, urbanites tended to vote blue, whereas in blue states, ruralites tended to vote red."

I know he goes on a bit, and he's trying to hard to make it interesting when it already is, but Daniel Herman writing at History News Network has a good reminder that it's not red states and blue states, it's cities and the countryside -- and they've switched colors in the last 120 years. There's something going on here that is neither right nor left.

16th century Protestantism still matters

Luther's reformation wasn't about freedom, let alone freedom to interpret the Bible, argues historian James Simpson (Burning to Read) at History News Network, and he chastises religious liberals for thinking otherwise:

we should abandon the following rock-hard persuasions of the liberal tradition: that Luther believed that readers should interpret the Bible freely, making up their own minds about the truth of Scripture; that Luther placed the liberating text of Scripture above the institution of the Church; and that Lutheran theology is more “democratic.”

Instead, we would be well advised to reread Luther and his vigorous English followers, especially William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536). There we discover that the Lutheran moment was the source of fundamentalism, and the source of different kinds of persecutory violence. ... Luther detested what he called “private interpretation.” He promoted, instead, a movement that repudiated interpretation itself. A recurrent theme in Lutheran theology is that Scripture interprets itself. Scripture is not, and cannot be subject to the messy negotiations of history in which all other texts are immersed. It does its own interpreting (i.e. Scripture interprets itself, but my interpretation is right).

The idea that anything interprets itself seems like a kind of intellectual cancer. I had no idea that its roots might be this deep or this reputable.

Business schools, a history

As someone who's spent some time arguing that journalism isn't a profession, I'm intrigued to run across a book that apparently makes a similar argument about management. Writing in Teachers College Record, James O'Toole of the University of Denver reviews Rakesh Khurana's From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Here's O'Toole's lead:

When prominent doctors, lawyers, and journalists are caught betraying the ethics of their respective professions, it is their peers in the medical, legal, and media communities who typically are the first to condemn their behavior. In sharp contrast, the collective silence of American business leaders was deafening during the Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Tyco and other turn-of-the-millennium corporate scandals. Nary a CEO spoke out publicly against the illegal and unethical practices of the likes of Messrs. Lay, Kozlowski, et al. Instead, as Federal Express’s CEO Fred Smith recently admitted to BusinessWeek, he and his fellow executives decided 'to lay low' until the storm blew over.

Dang! I may have to add this institutional history of business schools (of all things!) to my reading list.

Rating presidents -- not

Rick Shenkman of History News Network blogs (and, increasingly, videos) from the annual meeting of the American Historical Association:

Eric Foner got a roaring response from a large crowd gathered to hear about the ratings of presidents -- and why they're a parlor game and nothing more. He recalled that the libertarians came up with a rating system a few years ago that ranked presidents on the basis of their budget expenditures. Those who increased the budget the least came out on top. In their poll Harding was first, Andrew Johnson was second, and Lincoln came in dead last. Foner noted that the famous Schlesinger polls (by both Sr. and Jr.) were also flawed. Both Schlesingers consulted mainly white men. The 1992 poll conducted by Schlesinger Jr. included a single African American and a single woman. Foner speculated that if more black scholars were included the ranking of Woodrow Wilson would not have been nearly as high on account of the Virginia[n]'s notorious racism. One historian enjoyed Foner's presentation so much he said he would have paid admission to get in.

BTW, if you have any taste for history, Foner's Reconstruction 1863-1877 is a must-read.

History -- what are you thinking?

Talk about off off topic -- I found the following quotation in a New York Review of Books article by Charles Simic on Christopher Marlowe (not on line unless you're either a print subscriber or have a spare $3); it's originally by David Quint, who was writing in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, which I make no pretense of having read or even seen:

There are two rival traditions of epic [poetry in imperial Rome]: the first is associated with Virgil and the epics of the imperial victors, and the second is associated with Lucan and the epics of the defeated. The victors experience history as a coherent, end-directed story, and the losers experience history as contingency and open-endedness.

May your New Year be open-ended.

What were your ancestors looking at?

Tara Calishain mentioned this database of historic wallpaper in her ever-amazing ResearchBuzz newsletter last fall. No kidding: search by year, designer, pattern number, or 20 other parameters.

Words fail me when I see some of what the old folks had to stare at. Actually it's mostly New England wallpaper, but what did you expect? They seem to grow more history there for some reason.

The denialists you will always have with you

Reading up on the past I keep running into the present. In Indiana History: A Book of Readings, I came across the memoirs of Oliver H. Smith, including the story of the turning point in his run for Congress in 1826. His opponent, Judge John Test, inadvertently aroused the wrath of the same wingnut intelligentsia that takes pride in (a) debunking, and (b) not reading about climate change today:

We met in Allenville, Switzerland county, on one occasion. The whole country was there. The judge was speaking, and for the first time introduced the new subject of railroads. He avowed himself in favor of them, and said he had voted for the Buffalo and New Orleans road, and then rising to the top of his voice, 'I tell you, fellow-citizens, that in England they run the cars thirty miles an hour, and they will yet be run at a higher speed in America.' This was enough. The crowd set up a loud laugh at the expense of the judge. An old fellow, standing by me, bawled out, 'You are crazy, or do you think we are all fools; a man could not live a moment at that speed.' {103}

The only enjoyable fundraising message I've read lately

From a Dec. 11 email from History News Network:

The success HNN has had this year in combating historical illiteracy has really paid off.
Politicians no longer make bogus analogies. They've stopped comparing their enemies to Hitler. And they have started reading Herodotus in the original Greek.

It's wonderful to live in a country where intellectuals can have such a great impact!....Click here to make a donation so we can make sure America doesn't backslide!

ChicagoAncestors.org

The Internet Scout Report has discovered the Newberry Library's intriguing map-based site ChicagoAncestors.org:

First-time visitors to the site can just go ahead and type in a street
address or browse through the online collections which are culled from a
variety of local institutions. In the "Tools" area, visitors will find
address conversion tools [from the Chicago History Museum],
Chicago City Directory street guides, and a tutorial on researching
Chicago in the period before the fire of 1871. Visitors also have the
opportunity to add content information to this interactive resource
[actually, free registration is required to do this], which it should
be noted is open source.

Genealogists have in the past been known to collect birth, marriage, and death dates without paying enough attention to where these things happened. This geography-centric site is a wonderful antidote. Chicago researchers in particular will appreciate the scanned-in street guides from 1866, 1870, 1875, 1880, 1885, 1892, 1900, 1910, and 1923, and the ability to convert pre-1909 street numbers to today's system. (Of course, at the physical Newberry you can view microfilms of full city directories from these years and many more. Hmm, the family of my wife's first cousin three times removed lived at 346 West Walnut just off Western for a few years in the 1870s; now I know that that became 2344 West Walnut in 1909. I haven't been to check what's there now; let's see, Metrobot's not much help this time, but on the Center for Neighborhood Technology's City News Chicago site it looks like a big two-story building of 1948 vintage covers that address and several more...)

Oh. Sorry. You still here? I was going to say that while ChicagoAncestors has allowed registrants to submit new material since November 2, I couldn't find the help section that would tell you how.