reflections at the intersection of American history, religion, politics, and academic life
The Author's Corner with Jeffrey Zvengrowski
January 16, 2020 January 12, 2020 / Annie Thorn
Jeffrey Zvengrowski is Assistant Editor of the Papers of George Washington and Assistant Research Professor at the University of Virginia. This interview is based on his new book, Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 1815-1870 (LSU Press, 2020).
JF: What led you to write Jefferson Davis?
JZ: Even before beginning history graduate studies at the University of Virginia, I was intrigued by aspects of the American Civil War and particularly the Confederacy that I do not think any group or "school" of historians have adequately explained. If nearly all Confederates fervently stood for states' rights, agriculturalism, and pro-slavery Protestantism, then why did the Confederacy feature such an intrusively powerful central government dedicated to industrialization? Only a handful of slaves ever entered Confederate service as soldiers, to be sure, but why did the Confederacy eventually decide to enlist slaves and promise them manumission? Why did the Confederate cabinet feature a Catholic (Stephen Mallory) and a Jew (Judah P. Benjamin)? And why did many Confederates so intensely hate Confederate president Jefferson Davis as well as Confederates who supported him?
I began reading through Davis's documentary record to answer such questions in graduate school, and I expected to find that he and likeminded Confederates shared the same beliefs as their Confederate disparagers but were much more pragmatic than the Confederacy's ideological hardliners. To my surprise, though, the Davis primary sources indicated to me that he and his supporters subscribed to an ideology very different from that of their vitriolic Confederate critics. I wrote my dissertation, "They Stood Like the Old Guard of Napoleon: Jefferson Davis and the Pro-Bonaparte Democrats, 1815–1870" (2015), to explain the nature of that ideology; and to offer solutions for what I take to be outstanding problems in Civil War historiography.
JF: In two sentences, what is the argument of Jefferson Davis?
JZ: I argue in my book that Davis and likeminded Confederates hailed from a venerable faction in the Democratic Party that championed equality among whites and white supremacy while insisting that states' rights did not preclude the federal government from vigorously exercising delegated powers to help all regions industrialize. Believing that French Bonapartists espoused similar "democratic" values and similarly loathed abolitionist Britain for championing inequality among whites together with racial equality, pro-Davis Confederates were willing to jettison slavery under continuing terms of white rule if doing so would help induce Napoleon III's France to overtly support the Confederacy against pro-British elements in the Americas.
JF: Why do we need to read Jefferson Davis?
JZ: In addition to answering what are, in my view, unsettled historical questions about the Confederacy, I believe that my book offers a fairly original and therefore refreshing interpretation of the entire Civil War era; one which meshes quite well with world history too. It's no coincidence that the most war-torn periods in nineteenth-century United States history (the War of 1812 and the Civil War) coincided with the rise and fall of the two Bonaparte emperors (Napoleon I and Napoleon III). We somehow appear to assume that the "War Hawks" who turned the U.S. into a de facto and nearly de jure ally of Napoleon I during the War of 1812 failed to sire any ideological heirs. The pro-Bonaparte faction, however, survived through the interregnum between Bonaparte emperors and returned to prominence under Secretary of War Davis shortly after Napoleon III rose to power in France. That faction's final descent into irrelevance and subsequent dissolution, moreover, corresponded with the Second French Empire's unexpected destruction in 1870, shortly before which Napoleon III had hosted Davis as an honored guest in Paris.
JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?
JZ: I was born and raised in Calgary, Canada. In the course of obtaining my BA in history at the University of Calgary, I wavered between pursuing graduate studies in history or attending law school. I opted for graduate school in 2006 because I hoped to make a living doing something I enjoy (studying history), and I am immensely fortunate that I have been able to so. I believe that I explained my specific interest in American history when answering the first question.
JF: What is your next project?
JZ: I am the co-editor for the Papers of George Washington of volume 28 in the Revolutionary War Series, which will be published in 2020 and features transcriptions with annotated footnotes of George Washington's correspondence from late August to late October 1780. Much of that correspondence pertains to Benedict Arnold's defection to the British.
In years to come, I would like to write a history of what might be called the first Cold War of the United States, which struggled with the British Empire for dominance in the Americas over the nineteenth century. We seem to have forgotten the important ideological dimension of that struggle, during which the United States generally advocated white supremacy and equality among whites while the British Empire espoused racial equality – at least in the Americas – and inequality among whites. The diminishment of that struggle's severity by the end of the nineteenth century, I think, coincided with the British Empire becoming more receptive to white supremacy even as the U.S. became more amenable to white inequality.
JF: Thanks, Jeffrey!
The Author's Corner with Laura Lohman
Laura Lohman is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence and Professor of Music at Queens University of Charlotte. This interview is based on her new book, Hail Columbia!: American Music and Politics in the Early Nation (Oxford University Press, 2020).
JF: What led you to write Hail Columbia!?
LL: When I was a doctoral student I had come across some early sheet music for songs and a piano sonata commemorating naval battles and the capture of sailors from the Tripolitan War of the early 1800s. I was intrigued by how a songwriter or a composer sought to tell a story about a battle and war for audiences through music. I looked further into songs in this time period and was surprised to find hundreds of songs distributed in weekly and daily newspapers. These songs often had a political focus. They were full of sharp humor, effective propaganda, and a surprising vulgarity of expression. Music scholars hadn't focused on these songs or on newspapers as a medium of circulating music. I thought this was an important phenomenon to share with other audiences. Because so many of these songs were written to melodies that we still sing or recognize today, like "Anacreon in Heaven" (the melody of our national anthem), "God Save the King," and "Yankee Doodle," it's a topic that non-musicians can relate to as well.
JF: In two sentences, what is the argument of Hail Columbia!?
LL: Music was an essential form of political expression from the nation's founding. Americans used music to debate crucial political questions, laud and demonize their fellow citizens based on their political beliefs and actions, and construct powerful narratives about the nation's history, values, and institutions.
JF: Why do we need to read Hail Columbia!?
LL: It shows how much early Americans used music to make sense of the contemporary political landscape and how they used music to persuade others of their partisan vision. It brings to light hundreds of additional songs that can be used when teaching about this historical period. At the same time, I've intentionally written it in a way that non-musicians can understand. Much of the power of this music stems from song lyrics and from intertextual relationships, as a songwriter often deliberately invoked older lyrics to make a political point when writing new lyrics. So even if you don't consider yourself "musically trained," you'll be able to understand and benefit from the book.
LL: Honestly, it was when I was a graduate student focusing on music performance. I was spending four to eight hours alone in a practice room every day and at a certain point I realized I needed something intellectual to focus on instead. That was when I decided to focus on music history full-time and pursued doctoral study in this area. Fortunately, I had a strong grounding in research and writing about music history from my undergraduate education! I consider myself lucky to be able to continue this research today.
LL: This year I'm editing a book that will provide a practical introduction to working with relevant sources in music and dance from this time period for scholars in music and other disciplines, such as history and literary studies. It's titled Researching Secular Music and Dance in the Early United States: Extending the Legacy of Kate Van Winkle Keller, and it will be published by Routledge. It offers an accessible introduction to essential research tools, approaches, and issues for those new to researching music and dance from the revolutionary era through the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Keller was an exceptionally prolific and dedicated scholar who focused on this time period when many music scholars overlooked it. My hope is that this book spurs a new generation of scholars to delve into this fascinating period.
JF: Thanks, Laura!
Judiciary Committee Approves Two Articles of Impeachment Against Donald Trump
December 13, 2019 / johnfea
1868: Andrew Johnson
1974: Richard Nixon
1998: Bill Clinton
2019: Donald Trump
The Author's Corner with David Prior
November 18, 2019 November 17, 2019 / Annie Thorn
David Prior is Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. This interview is based on his new book, Between Freedom and Progress: The Lost World of Reconstruction Politics (LSU Press, 2019).
JF: What led you to write Between Freedom and Progress?
DP: I stumbled into the project through primary source research. When I started my graduate work, my advisor encouraged me to look at U.S. foreign relations during Reconstruction. In the process of doing that, I wrote an early seminar paper on American interest and involvement in an insurrection by Greek Orthodox Christians on the island of Crete against Ottoman imperial rule from 1866 to 1869. I was struck by how people in and from the United States, including former Confederates, not only discussed the insurrection, but argued over its meaning through competing sets of analogies to slaveholders, Apaches, Mormons, Poles, and Russians. Those analogies, and the underlying worldview they stemmed from, became what my book was about. I researched a number of seemingly disparate case studies that people at the time connected to each other and to Reconstruction, which is itself a term borrowed from Europe through analogy. I found myself attempting to fathom why these events, places, and individuals all called out for attention from people who, one would think, would have been narrowly focused on the South and its relation to the Union.
JF: In two sentences, what is the argument of Between Freedom and Progress?
DP: In the broadest sense, the aim of the book is to take a new look at the cultural, intellectual, and political landscape inhabited by Reconstruction's partisans—those who struggled over and with Reconstruction's core issues. Between Freedom and Progress does this by recovering why and how they imagined themselves as actors in world history, and in particular how a belief that struggles for freedom and progress transcended the globe stood in creative tension with a closely related assumption that history was about and made by coherent, distinctive groups of people (nations, races, religions, tribes) with their own characters.
JF: Why do we need to read Between Freedom and Progress?
DP: To recover a sense of the otherness of the past, even while we continue to acknowledge the ways that racism and inequality link the United States and the world today back to the contested politics of the postbellum decade.
DP: I loved history, as well as economics, going back to high school and double majored in college. When I started thinking about graduate school, I decided I enjoyed history a touch more, although I'll admit I've always missed being able to engage with both disciplines.
DP: Right now I am working on an edited volume entitled Reconstruction and Empire that looks at the various ways in which the legacies of the Civil War and abolition shaped the imperial moment of the late 1890s and early 1900s.
JF: Thanks, David!
Politicians Have Claimed to Be Victims of Lynching for a Long Time
October 25, 2019 October 24, 2019 / johnfea
Joseph McCarthy described Senate hearings to censure him as a "lynch party."
Earlier this week, Donald Trump compared the impeachment inquiry against him to a lynching. Both Republicans and Democrats reminded Trump about the history of lynching in the United States. Over at The Washington Post, Lawrence Glickman, the Stephaen and Evalyn Milman professor of American Studies at Cornell University, provides some additional context.
Here is a taste of his piece:
Notwithstanding the shocked reaction to the outrageous comparison, Trump's comments were in keeping with a long-standing strand of conservative rhetoric that might best be dubbed "elite victimization." This is a mode of speech typically used by wealthy, powerful white men in which they employ the language of enslavement and Jim Crow to describe their plight and claim to be victims of everything from government programs to social movements they dislike to investigations into wrongdoing.
This language marks a double appropriation. First, it is a reaction to the increasing power of claiming rights by minority populations. In the 20th century, African Americans and other oppressed groups forced the country to confront its violent, racist history and demanded full rights and citizenship. By casting themselves as victims, elites frame their individual sense of being wronged as a violation of their rights, even though those rights are well-secured. Second, it is to demand sympathy for a kind of physical and spiritual suffering akin to that experienced by racial minorities that elites claim to endure when they feel under attack.
But the language may also feel true to them. Given that wealthy white men do not face discrimination on the basis of race, the slightest feeling of vulnerability or threat might feel like oppression, however distinct it is from the lived experience of oppressed groups. In 1946, for example, J. Howard Pew, the conservative oil man, condemned what he called "continued unfair and discriminatory legislation granting special privileges for favored minorities at the expense of the general welfare."
But this language perversely minimizes the plight of African Americans for much of American history and compares systemic wrongs with hideous consequences to legal actions or social movements that conservative white men happen to dislike.
Read the entire piece here. Then head over to Episode 55 of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast and listen to Glickman talk about his new book Free Enterprise: An American History.
Joanne Freeman Provides Some Historical Perspective on What Happened Yesterday in Congress
October 24, 2019 / johnfea
Yesterday we highlighted historian Joanne Freeman's tweet about the GOP Congressman who disrupted a deposition in the Trump impeachment inquiry. Today we have a video of Freeman offering some historical context for this event in an appearance on MSNBC:
How History Professor Allan Licthman Predicts Presidential Elections
I'm not sure what to make of this, but it is certainly interesting. Watch this interview with American University history professor Allan Lichtman. He has correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1984 with the exception of the 2000 election.
When France Meddled in American Elections
October 8, 2019 October 8, 2019 / johnfea
French ambassador Edmond Genet
Over at The Washington Post, historian Jordan Taylor reminds us that "the founding fathers knew first-hand that foreign interference in U.S. elections was dangerous." He points to French ambassadors Edmond-Charles Genet, Jean Antoine Joseph Fauchet, and Pierre-Auguste Adet in the 1790s.
Here is a taste:
Throughout the 1790s, France's ambassadors repeatedly sought to influence the results of American elections, hoping to sway policy in their favor.
Even after this meddling ended, fear of foreign influence persisted, ultimately making subsequent untainted elections seem illegitimate. Public faith in the democratic process had eroded. The entire experience convinced the founding generation that democracies live or die based on the integrity of their elections — a lesson we must remember today.
In 1793, a quirky and energetic man named Edmond-Charles Genêt arrived in the United States to assume his position as the new ambassador of France. Many Americans responded enthusiastically to Genêt at political gatherings and social engagements as he integrated himself with the Francophile Democratic-Republican party that opposed the Federalist Washington administration.
Unsurprisingly, relations between Genêt and the Washington administration quickly soured. George Washington's repeated refusal to align American interests with France angered Genêt. According to some accounts, he warned that if the president continued to rebuff him, he would "appeal to the people" themselves. This threat earned him immediate infamy, because it suggested that Genêt might seek to influence the American elections in 1794 to build support for policies friendly to France. To prevent him from taking such actions, the Washington administration demanded that France recall Genêt.
The new French ambassador, a sulking, stubborn man named Jean Antoine Joseph Fauchet, practiced greater discretion in advancing French interests. But though he was not as flamboyant as Genêt, Fauchet nonetheless paid small subsidies to Democratic-Republicans as they fought against the adoption of the looming Anglo-American "Jay Treaty" that would harm France's interests.
Read the entire piece here.
The Benefits of Impeachment: Some Lessons from Andrew Johnson
Historian Gregory Downs thinks that Trump should be impeached even if the Senate keeps him office. There is a good chance that the time between the impeachment in the House and the trial in the Senate might "curtail Trump's worst behaviors" and neutralize him politically.
Downs uses the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to make his point. Here is a taste of his piece at The Washington Post:
Johnson's adept attorneys succeeded in protecting his tenure in office in two ways. First, they sought to delay the Senate trial. Then, they used that delay to persuade Johnson to keep his hands off Reconstruction. As the trial hung over him and then dragged on through April and May, a chastened Johnson pledged to appoint a moderate secretary of war, stop shuffling generals in the Southern states, and let the Army and African American Republicans complete their work in the South. By April, a half-dozen former Confederate states had ratified their new constitutions and asked Congress for readmission. Only then, in mid-May, did the Senate finally vote on Johnson's fate.
Even with his acquiescence to Reconstruction, Johnson survived only by a single vote in that Senate tally. Although the 14th Amendment was not ratified until July 1868, the impeachment trial that put Johnson's fate into question allowed freedpeople, white Southern Republicans and the Army to freely engage in the crucial work of making what some scholars call a "Second Constitution," a refashioning of the federal government's role in protecting individual rights through the 14th Amendment's pledges of equal protection and due process. Most significantly, those reconstructed states provided the votes to ratify the proposed amendment, which has subsequently shaped Supreme Court decisions on desegregation, voting rights, same-sex marriage, freedom of speech and assembly, and many other basic rights we enjoy today.
Impeachment also did play a role in Johnson leaving office by weakening him politically. In 1866, Johnson had explored the creation of a new party that combined Democrats and conservative Republicans. When that collapsed, he spent part of 1867 trying to engineer nomination by the Democratic Party, his old home. But the trial helped make him untouchable, and the Democrats turned to a different candidate, New York's Horatio Seymour, leaving Johnson off the ballot.
Analogies are never perfect. We are not now in a period of Reconstruction, or a moment when Congress and the president are primarily at war over such a specific set of laws. Nonetheless, as Johnson did, Trump threatens the nation's stability by attacking our faith in elections and the rule of law, as well as our global alliances. His tweets and incendiary rhetoric are dangerous, and although no one can say how he would respond to a looming trial, one possibility is that he, like Johnson, might tone down his behavior to avoid removal. And this possibility makes it worth taking the political risk posed by impeachment.
Trying to judge the worthiness of impeachment solely by whether it ends in conviction and removal would be a mistake. If the presence of a trial disciplines Trump to stop encouraging foreign interference in U.S. elections and to start curtailing his destabilizing rhetoric, impeachment will have been worth it, whether it ends in conviction or acquittal, in 2020 reelection or defeat. While many will call for a speedy impeachment trial if the House votes to impeach, senators might look to the Johnson case to ask whether a deliberate process will sustain pressure on the White House to behave more responsibly, and give the president the opportunity to save — or destroy — his tenure in office.
Other Famous American Whistleblowers
September 28, 2019 September 27, 2019 / johnfea
The list includes John Grannis, A. Ernest Fitzgerald, Frank Serpico, Karen Silkwood, Daniel Ellsberg, and Mark Felt. Will will add one more soon.
Here is Olivia Waxman of Time:
America's history with whistle-blowers is as old as the country itself, but the popular idea that they are courageous hasn't meant whistle-blowing isn't still risky, says Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, out Oct. 1. And in the intelligence community, where sharing secrets is a loaded idea, whistle-blowing is even more complicated.
The origins of the term "whistle-blower" are murky — one theory holds that it's a reference to the whistle blown by British policemen when they saw foul play, and another says it's a sports reference to the whistles blown by referees — but the principle dates back to medieval England by way of Roman law. Central to the existence of whistle-blowers is the concept that sometimes individuals, not governments or law-enforcement, need to be the ones who raise the alarm about wrongdoing.
Social Media in the 1790s
September 5, 2019 September 4, 2019 / johnfea
Jordan Taylor, a history professor at Smith College, writes, "Our familiar challenges with verification, fake news, irresponsible sharing, and partisan media would have been familiar to those who lived through the tumultuous 1790s." She adds, "spend an hour with the newspapers of the 1790s and it will be easy to spot their similarities with our present media landscape."
Read his entire piece here.
A Review of Three New Washington D.C. Exhibits on the Women's Suffrage Movement
August 16, 2019 August 15, 2019 / johnfea
Are you looking for one more quick get-away this summer? Why not take a women's suffrage-themed trip to Washington D.C.?
Over at The New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler reviews exhibits at the National Portrait Gallery, Library of Congress, and National Archives. These exhibits, Schuessler argues, reveal the complexity of the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States.
Here is a taste of her piece:
Together, these shows — all curated by women — make up one of the richest explorations of women's history yet assembled in the capital, or anywhere else. But they also offer a lesson in the messiness, complexities and compromises involved in any movement for social change — and the fraught politics of historical memory itself.
For years, the drive for women's suffrage was presented mainly as the story of middle-class white women and iconic national leaders like Anthony and Stanton. That story began with the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York in 1848 and ended with the triumphant adoption of the amendment on Aug. 26, 1920, which resulted in the single largest extension of democratic voting rights in American history.
But in recent decades scholars have taken a less top-down view, emphasizing the movement's multiple starting points and patchwork progress through hundreds of state and local campaigns. They have also excavated the role of African-American women, who were largely excluded from the major, white-led suffrage organizations and marginalized in the early histories of the movement, if they were mentioned at all.
Even before the centennial year began, there have been tensions over who and what to celebrate — or even how to sum up the amendment's significance.
The Author's Corner With William Nelson
William E. Nelson is Judge Edward Wienfeld Professor of Law at New York University. This interview is based on his new book, E Pluribus Unum: How the Common Law Helped Unify and Liberate Colonial America, 1607-1776 (Oxford University Press, 2019).
JF: What led you to write E Pluribus Unum?
WN: I decided to write a multi-volume history of colonial American law, of which E Pluribus Unum is a one-volume summary, because I knew that a massive amount of colonial courts records existed, that someone should study them, and that NYU Law School would support my study. Courts were the primary instrumentality of colonial government, and I believe the most important job of historians is to explain how government has worked in the past so that the people can better appreciate how to make it work for them in the present.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of E Pluribus Unum?
WN: The book traces how the early colonies had a variety of legal systems and how King Charles II and King James II for lack of other means decided to use lawyers and the common law to bring unity and effective governance to their colonies. For half a century, lawyers governed effectively on behalf of the Crown, but beginning with the Zenger case in 1735 and continuing in a series of cases thereafter, lawyers assumed an increasingly oppositional role, with the result that by the 1770s they were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement.
JF: Why do we need to read E Pluribus Unum?
WN: One reason to read the book is to understand the importance of law and local power in the DNA of the American nation; the nation still does not have bureaucratic national institutions that are capable of governing without the help of law and local power. The book also reports on significant details, such as the origins of judicial review of legislation during the Stamp Act controversy and the role of debt collection in the breakup of slave families and communities.
WN: In my last year of college, I couldn't decide whether I wanted to practice law or become a history professor. The minute I arrived at law school, it became clear that the right path for me would be to become a law professor whose scholarly focus was on history.
WN: My next book is a comparative study of New York and Texas law in the 20th century, with a goal of striving to better understand what differentiates conservatives in places like Texas from liberals in places like New York.
JF: Thanks, Bill!
What Happened to the Never-Trump Republicans?
August 7, 2019 August 6, 2019 / johnfea	/ 15 Comments
A few still exist, but most of them have lined-up with their Trump-controlled party.
I can't tell you how many times I hear from people who did not support Trump in 2016, but today defend him and his policies with vigor. Lawrence Glickman, a historian at Cornell University, provides some historical context to help us understand why these never-Trump Republicans like Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, and Erick Erickson went "extinct."
Here is a taste of his piece at The Washington Post:
The very same thing happened in 1964, when party loyalty and ideological similarity convinced moderate Republicans to embrace the controversial candidate upending their party. In the late spring that year, as it became increasingly likely that Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.) had a clear path to the Republican nomination for the presidency, twin fears gripped the then-formidable moderate wing of the party: first, that Goldwater might bring catastrophic loss to the Republican Party, and second, that if he were to win, it would bring a dangerous man to the White House.
But rather than going to war against Goldwater, the moderates, led by former president Dwight Eisenhower, first vacillated in their criticism and then relented, ultimately offering active support for their putative enemy.
Their actions help explain how a shared enemy and ideological affinities often lead political figures to overcome doubts they once had about the fitness and extremism of the leader of their party.
Of the moderates, Eisenhower's behavior is especially telling. He should have been leading the charge against Goldwater. After all, the Arizona lawmaker and author of "The Conscience of a Conservative" had denounced the social welfare policies of his administration as a "dime-store New Deal." And according to the journalist Theodore H. White, author of "The Making of the President" series, "Eisenhower was appalled at the prospect of Goldwater's nomination."
Yet the former president refused to publicly or explicitly denounce Goldwater. Instead, he whipsawed from private criticism of Goldwater to loyalty to his party, seeming to endorse even some of Goldwater's more extreme ideas.
Kevin Kruse on the Differences Between Donald Trump and George Wallace (Hint: Trump is More Dangerous)
August 2, 2019 / johnfea	/ 3 Comments
Here is a taste of the Princeton historian's recent piece at The New York Times:
This leads us to the significant difference between Mr. Wallace and Mr. Trump. Mr. Wallace's targets were, for the most part, presented in the abstract. Though he denounced broad categories of generic enemies — "agitators," "anarchists" and "communists" — he rarely went after an individual by name.
Mr. Trump, in pointed contrast, has used his rallies to single out specific enemies. During the 2016 campaign, he demonized his political opponents in the primaries and the general election, and also denounced private individuals, from Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, to the former Miss Universe Alicia Machado and the federal judge Gonzalo Curiel.
At recent rallies, he has targeted four Democratic House members who have criticized him and his administration — Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley.
Participants at Mr. Trump's rallies have been moved to attack individuals he's singled out. For most rally participants, the attacks have been confined to ominous but nevertheless nonviolent chants — from the 2016 cries of "Lock her up!" to the recent refrain of "Send her back!" But a handful have gone further, targeting the individuals named by the president with death threats and even attempts at violence.
Quick Thoughts on Reagan's Racist Remarks. Or What Say Ye Dinesh D'Souza and Friends?
August 1, 2019 August 1, 2019 / johnfea	/ 3 Comments
By now you should know about the recently released audio recording of Ronald Reagan calling African people "monkeys." Reagan, who was governor of California at the time, made the remarks to Richard Nixon in 1971.
Listen to the remarks here and read historian Tim Naftali's contextual piece at The Atlantic.
When I learned about this recording I thought about the debate between conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza and Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse. For several years D'Souza has been making the case that the Democratic Party is the real racist political party, while the Republicans, as the party of Lincoln, is the party of equality and civil rights.
Southern Democrats were indeed racist in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century. Many Republicans were also pretty racist, but they championed abolitionism, led a war to end slavery, and fought for the equality of African-Americans in the decades following the war. But things change. Historians study change over time. While Southern Democrats opposed the civil rights movement, so did conservative Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and others. Meanwhile, other Democrats, such as John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and the leaders of the civil rights movement, all sought to end Jim Crow in America. Today the overwhelming majority of African Americans vote for Democratic candidates because of this legacy.
So what does D'Souza do about Reagan's racist comments? If the GOP is not the party of racism, then how does D'Souza explain the recorded remarks of the party's conservative flag bearer?
The Politicization of July 4th is as Old as the Republic
July 3, 2019 / johnfea	/ 1 Comment
Is Trump politicizing Independence Day with his military parade and "Salute to America" speech? Of course he is. And, as historian Shira Lurie reminds us, this practice dates back to the country's founding. Here is a taste of her Washington Post piece, "Why Democrats are wrong about Trump's politicization of the Fourth of July":
In the hours after The Washington Post broke the news, Democrats pounced on Trump for politicizing the national holiday. Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) denounced the president for "injecting partisan politics into the most nonpartisan sacred American holiday there is." Three prominent congressional Democrats, including House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), wrote a letter to the president describing the Fourth as a "nonpartisan and apolitical" day. "It is, therefore, unfortunate that you are considering a conflicting event, which would create the appearance of a televised, partisan campaign rally on the Mall at the public expense."
But these claims are wrong. The Fourth has never been apolitical or nonpartisan. Americans have always used Independence Day to disguise political messaging in the cloak of patriotism. And often, these messages have contained the divisiveness and acrimony we have come to associate with Trump.
Politicization of the Fourth of July began even before the United States was a country. During the War of Independence, officials used the anniversary of Congress's adoption of the Declaration of Independence as an opportunity to bolster anti-British sentiment. They rallied support for the Patriots' cause with toasts, orations, militia drills and fireworks. In the postwar years, the day transformed into a civics lesson, with Americans extolling the benefits of republican government and, later, the Constitution.
As soon as political parties developed in the 1790s, partisans began capitalizing on the nation's birthday as well. Local leaders hosted rival Fourth of July celebrations and positioned their parties as the "true" inheritors of the American Revolution's legacy. Occasionally they came to blows as each side vied for control over the crowds and public spaces in their communities.
The Author's Corner with Joseph Adelman
May 16, 2019 May 29, 2019 / johnfea
Joseph Adelman is Assistant Professor of History at Framingham State University in Framingham, Massachusetts. This interview is based on his new book, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
JF: What led you to write Revolutionary Networks?
JA: The book sits at the confluence of life and professional experiences that have shaped my thinking for several decades. I've long been interested in the American Revolution and in particular the politics of rebellion—how and why the "thirteen colonies" (and only those) decided to form a new nation. Second, between college and graduate school I worked for two years as the communications director for a New York state assemblyman. The work fascinated me, but because I was leaning towards becoming a historian, I often found myself stepping back from my day-to-day responsibilities to think about how various processes and structures of both politics and the media interacted and influenced what happened. So when I came to considering a research topic, I wanted to apply the questions I have about contemporary media to understand how the business of media intersected with politics during the era of the Revolution.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Revolutionary Networks?
JA: During the American Revolution, printers—artisans who worked with their hands at the press and also engaged in intellectual labor of editing and publishing—shaped political debate through the business practices of their trade. From the networks that printers developed across the colonies and around the Atlantic world to individual editorial decisions made in a single printing office, Revolutionary Networks shows how printers navigated a wide range of political and commercial environments to attempt to run successful businesses and also make an impact on the content of political debate.
JF: Why do we need to read Revolutionary Networks?
JA: We often assume that the news media were important during the American Revolution, and in fact many historians who have produced great scholarship on the Revolution require that to be true in order for their arguments to work. But very few have asked how the process of news creation worked—Revolutionary Networks fills that gap. It may seem like a narrow point at first, but what the book tries to document at a really close-in level is that those details matter a great deal. It changes our understanding of the politics surrounding the American Revolution that these artisans were making choices every day about what news to publish, where to situate it in context with other stories, whether to revise or amend the text they received, and so on. What appears on the surface to be a clear articulation of a political position instead is the result of a decisions and negotiations that focused not only on the beliefs of a text's author but also—and in fact often more so—on the political perspective and business interests of the printer/editor who published the material.
JA: I've been fascinated by history in general and the American Revolution in particular since I was in elementary school—as memory has it, my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Deuel, gave me a book about the Revolution and it was off to the races. But I decided I wanted to pursue a career as a historian around my sophomore year in college as I immersed myself in scholarly readings. I talked about it with a few of my professors, who cautioned me that it was a difficult path in some ways but offered lots of flexibility (this was around 2000, well before the academic jobs crisis, and came from a privileged undergraduate institution). After the two years with the New York State legislature, I knew I wanted to get a Ph.D. to answer the call to write and teach about the past.
JA: One of the key institutions that made the printing trade function was the Post Office, and the key player in that entity was Benjamin Franklin. I've wanted to do a project that focuses a bit more on Franklin and I'm fascinated by the contradictions in the Post Office's development—people saw it as a government institution but it has always functioned in many ways as a profit-seeking business. So I'm now writing a history of the post office in early America and the Atlantic world.
JF: Thanks, Joe!
Mapping Early American Elections
This looks like a really useful website from Lincoln Mullen, Rosemarie Zagarri, and the folks at George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media:
Mapping Early American Elections offers a window into the formative era of American politics by producing interactive maps and visualizations of Congressional elections from 1787 to 1825. The project makes available the electoral returns and spatial data underlying those maps, along with topical essays on the political history of the period and tutorials to encourage users to use the datasets to create their own maps.
If you use this project, please use the following citation or something like it:
Mapping Early American Elections project team, Mapping Early American Elections, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University (2019): http://earlyamericanelections.org, https://doi.org/10.31835/meae.
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2016 to offer enhanced access to the early American election returns in the New Nation Votes collection at Tufts University. The New Nation Votes dataset is the only comprehensive record of elections in existence for the early American republic. Scattered in newspapers, state archives, and local repositories around the country, the election returns have been painstakingly gathered over the past forty-five years by Philip J. Lampi of the American Antiquarian Society.
You can find the data we have released in our GitHub repository, along with the other codeproduced by the project.
For more about the project, please read our introductory essay and the other essays on early American politics.
Did Men Invent "Likability?"
May 11, 2019 / johnfea	/ 1 Comment
Check out historian Claire Potter's piece at The New York Times: "Men Invented 'Likability.' Guess Who Benefits." She reflects on the origins of the idea of "likability" advertising culture and, eventually presidential politics.
As Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and others jumped into the race, each seemed to affirm the new power of women in 2019, a power that was born when President Trump was sworn into office, exploded during #MeToo and came into its own during the 2018 midterms.
But no female candidate has yet led the polls. The men keep joining — Michael Bennet this week, Joe Biden the last — and keep garnering glowing press coverage. Although Mr. Biden fumbled two previous presidential bids, we are told he has "crossover appeal"; Bernie Sanders has been admired by this newspaper as "immune to intimidation"; and Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay man nominated for president, is "very authentic." By contrast Ms. Harris is "hard to define"; Ms. Klobuchar is "mean"; and Ms. Warren is a "wonky professor" who — you guessed it — is "not likable enough." Seeing comments like this, Mrs. Clinton said wryly in January, "really takes me back."
Likability: It is nebulous, arbitrary and meaningless, yet inescapable — and female politicians seem to be particularly burdened with it even when they win and especially when they run for president.
In a recent interview on CNN with Michael Smerconish, Potter challenged the audience to find one female candidate in the 2016 race who has been called "likability."
Here is another small taste of her piece:
Americans were also taught that being likable was a quality that could be cultivated as a means to get ahead. In 1936, Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" warned that those who tried too hard to be liked would fail: Theodore Roosevelt's naturally friendly greetings to everyone he passed, regardless of status, Carnegie noted, had made it impossible not to like him, but Henrietta G., now the "best liked" counselor at her office, had been isolated until she learned to stop bragging. (Though looking back, we have to wonder: Would Henry G. have needed to hide his accomplishments?)
As presidential candidates put advertising experts in charge of national campaigns, perhaps it was inevitable that likability would jump explicitly to politics. In 1952, some of the first televised election ads sought to highlight Dwight Eisenhower's likability. The advertising executive Rosser Reeves put Eisenhower in controlled settings where his optimism, self-confidence, humor and nonpartisanship could be emphasized over his political inexperience and what Reeves viewed as his "inept" speaking style. The animator Roy Disney was commissioned to make a cartoon spot with a catchy jingle: "Ike for President," the song repeated, cutting to Uncle Sam leading a parade down the streets. "You like Ike, I like Ike, everybody likes Ike," the chorus sang as Eisenhower's smiling cartoon face passed.
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