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#1 Dirk Vandewalle: Libya’s Divisions
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Death of an Enemy
Things Noted Here & There
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Cliopatria: A Group Blog
Aaron Bady (∞); Chris Bray (∞); Brett Holman (∞); Jonathan Jarrett (∞); Robert KC Johnson (∞); Rachel Leow (∞); Ralph E. Luker (∞); Scott McLemee (∞); Claire B. Potter (∞); Jonathan T. Reynolds (∞)
Cliopatria's History Blogroll Part I/Part II
Death of an Enemy
David Silbey
The New York Times of May 21, 1943:
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the com-bined Japanese Fleet, who reportedly boasted he would dictate peace terms to the United States from a seat in the White House, was killed during April "while engaged in combat with the enemy" aboard a warplane, Japanese Imperial Headquarters announced in a communique broadcast domestically this morning by the Tokyo radio.
"Gosh," said President Roosevelt upon hearing the news. The Times summarized Yamamoto's life and role in the war:
As Commander in Chief of the Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto had ultimate responsibility for the treacherous attack on Pearl Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Fleet Air Arm while diplomatic negotiations were going on in Washington on Dec. 7, 1941.
By the next day, people were already speculating as to how he died. The Times ran an article the next day highlighting the possibility of suicide, quoting Robert Bellaire, a United Press reporter:
'It may have been hara-kiri. Yamamoto frequently said that he would rather take his own life than lose any Japanese territory.'
In reality, Yamamoto had fallen to an American aerial ambush on 18 April 1943, fed by the ability of American intelligence to read some Japanese communication codes. The details began to leak almost immediately, though the American government worked hard to cover up the code-breaking aspect. The location where the Admiral's plane went down has become something of a tourist attraction, perhaps the fate of another such--albeit newly-created--site in Pakistan.
Post date: Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - 08:05
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Things Noted Here & There
Ralph E. Luker
Blake Gopnik, "Gabriel Metsu, Vermeer's Forgotten Rival," Daily Beast, 29 April, reviews "Gabriel Metsu 1629–1667," an exhibit at Washington, DC's National Gallery of Art.
Adam Kirsch, "House Divided," Tablet, 3 May, reviews Marc Lee Raphael's The Synagogue in America: A Short History.
Drew Gilpin Faust, "Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian," Humanities, May/June, is her Jefferson Lecture for 2011. Jim Leach, "Drew Gilpin Faust, Daughter of the South, President of Harvard," ibid., interviews her. David W. Blight, "A Historian's Historian," ibid., is Blight's appreciation of Faust.
John Richardson, "Picasso's Erotic Code," Vanity Fair, May, previews "Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L'Amour Fou," an exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street, in Manhattan.
Ekaterina Loushnikova, "The Last Prisoner," oDRussia: Post-Soviet world, 28 April, interviews Pavel Galitsky, a 100-year-old survivor of 15 years in a Siberian labor camp.
Thomas de Waal, "Chechens I Used to Know," National Interest, May/June, reviews Ilyas Akhmadov's and Miriam Lanskoy's The Chechen Struggle: Independence Won and Lost, German Sadulaev's I am a Chechen!, trans. by Anna Gunin, and Robert W. Schaefer's The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad.
Pankaj Mishra reviews Anatol Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country for the Guardian, 30 April.
Peniel E. Joseph, "Rescuing Malcolm X From His Calculated Myths," CHE, 1 May, reviews Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.
Finally, farewell to the distinguished British military historian, Richard Holmes.
Post date: Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - 00:12
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American History Notes
Ralph E. Luker
History Carnival XCVIII is up at H. Niyazi's Three Pipe Problem.
Thomas Bender, "The King's Men, After the American Revolution," NYT, 29 April, reviews Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.
Nicholas Mancusi, "Our Founding Wordsmith," Daily Beast, 30 April, reviews Joshua Kendall's The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture.
Eric Foner, "Why the North Fought the Civil War," NYT, 29 April, reviews Gary W. Gallagher's The Union War.
Adam Gopnik, "Memorials," New Yorker, 9 May, looks around the city and finds Civil War memorials you hadn't recalled.
Stefany Anne Golberg, "Taking the Plunge," Smart Set, 5 April, reviews "Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms," an exhibit at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. See also: Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950, Dust-to-Digital, 2009.
Dwight Garner, "Sing It Loud: Changing the World With a Stirring Cri de Coeur," NYT, 28 April, and Sean Wilentz, "A History of Protest Songs," NYT, 29 April, review Dorian Lynskey's 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, From Billie Holiday to Green Day. The publication of Lynskey's book prompts The Nation to ask "What's the Best Protest Song?" Nominate your favorite's at the link.
James M. Lindsay, "TWE Remembers: The Fall of Saigon," Council on Foreign Relations, 30 April, draws three lessons from the American experience in Viet Nam.
Catherine Lutz, "Journey and Legacy of Obama's Mother," NYT, 2 May, reviews Janny Scott's A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother.
Post date: Tuesday, May 3, 2011 - 03:47
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Little Man, What Now?
Chris Bray
In his biography of George Wallace, Dan Carter argues that most American politicians have avoided noticing Wallace's legacy, dismissing him as a marginal figure whose time has long since come and gone. But Carter suggests one notable exception: Pat Buchanan, a careful student of Wallace's enormously shrewd politics of resentment.
Helpful background to examine a spectacular case of missing the point: in this recent video, Buchanan talks for ten minutes about Barack Obama's charmed life, suggesting over and over that a man of ordinary intellect made it to Columbia University and Harvard Law School because of "affirmative action all the way" and because "palms were greased." In response, Democratic talking head Terry McAuliffe smirks and giggles and says repeatedly that Republicans are dooming themselves to political failure by talking about that stuff, because so many people are desperate for jobs and just want to hear who has the better policy ideas to create them.
But people who are desperate for jobs are exactly the audience for the story that Buchanan is telling. It seems to me that Republicans are telling this story more and more insistently precisely because of widespread economic pain and status anxiety. Democrats are reacting to a story about identity -- the "did he really go to these schools" story -- but that's just the wrapper for the real product: a story about privilege, told to an audience that can't pay its bills. This guy isn't smarter than you, but somebody helped him advance while so many hard-working others were left behind. Here's Donald Trump, telling the same story today: we've got to find out how this mediocrity jumped the line.
The point of the story isn't fear; the point of the story is jealously. It works. It's working. It often does. It's a jealousy that explains, that gives suffering people an interpretive model to understand the world. How do you link this to this? Members of the privileged class take care of one another. The fix is in. This argument has the advantage of having substantial truth behind it -- the details can be fudged.
Paranoid politics come from genuine crisis, and there's no way to exaggerate the social harm of deep and persistent unemployment. Couple long-term middle class crisis with massive bank bailouts and executive bonuses, and anything goes.
Watch McAuliffe smirk and snicker throughout Buchanan's comments -- you're seeing the shape of our next national election. The story that Obama advanced because of privilege is an extraordinarily powerful narrative at this moment, and smug reactions reinforce its power.
Post date: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 - 14:29
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More Noted Things
Ralph E. Luker
Garry Wills, "A Very Christlike Kiss'n'Tell," New Statesman, 20 April, is an extract from his most recent book, Augustine's Confessions: a Biography.
Nico Voigtländer and Hans Joachim Voth, "Medieval Origins Of Nazi Anti-Semitism," NYU/Economics, April, argues that high degrees of anti-Semitism in 14th century central Europe were strong predictors of anti-Semitism in 20th century in Germany.
In Richard White, "Fast Train to Nowhere," NYT, 23 April, the author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America celebrates reduced government subsidies for high-speed rail.
Peter Duffy, "The First Celebrity," The Book, 25 April, reviews Barbara and Michael Foster's A Dangerous Woman: The Lifes, Loves, and Scandals of Adah Isaacs Menken, America's Original Superstar.
Judith Flanders, "Song and Dance," TLS, 20 April, reviews Charlotte Greenspan's Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American musical, Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat: Collected lyrics (1954–1981), with attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines, and anecdotes, and Larry Stempel's Showtime: A history of the Broadway musical theater.
Ian Bostridge, "The ‘very particular' relationships of Lennox Berkeley and Benjamin Britten," TLS, 20 April, reviews Tony Scotland's Lennox and Freda and Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, eds., Letters from a Life: The selected letters of Benjamin Britten, Volume Five 1958–1963.
Rick Perlstein, "Inside The GOP's Fact-Free Nation," Mother Jones, May/June, argues that lying's been on the increase among Republicans.
Michael Kazin, "The Trouble With Independents," TNR, 26 April, argues that American Independent voters may hold the balance of power, but may also stand for nothing.
Post date: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 - 00:15
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Things Noted Here & There
Ralph E. Luker
Carnivalesque LXXIII, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Jost A Mon.
Philip Bethge, "'Culinary History Has To Be Analyzed Like Art History'," Der Spiegel, 21 April, part 1/part 2, interviews Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine.
David Sehat, "Five myths about church and state in America," Washington Post, 22 April, is by the author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom.
Rachel Polonsky, "A Sentimental Education," Literary Review, April, "Patron saints of literary gloom," Economist, 20 April, and Luke Kennard, "A defense of academia as a creative force," The National, 22 April, review Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Elif Batuman, "Life after a Bestseller," Guardian, 21 April, thinks about no longer being an outsider.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The Apple Fell Far from the Tree," NYRB, 12 May, reviews Peter Firstbrook's The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family. Mary Elizabeth Williams, "Barack Obama's mother: The girl who ran away," Salon, 21 April, reviews Janny Scott's Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother.
Sean Wilentz, "The Real Dylan in China," New Yorker, 10 April, Jon Wiener, "Bob Dylan in Beijing: No Sellout," Nation, 10 April, and Jeremiah Jenne, "Dylan in Beijing: final thoughts and a bit of a rant," Jottings from the Granite Studio, 10 April, reply to Maureen Dowd, "Blowin' in the Idiot Wind, NYT, 9 April.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Interpreting Protest in Modern China," Dissent, Winter, is updated by Cunningham's "Protest and Repression in China: An Update to ‘Interpreting Protest in Modern China'," Dissent, 11 April.
Finally, farewell to Miami University of Ohio's Phillip R. Shriver.
Post date: Tuesday, April 26, 2011 - 08:44
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Kyl and C-SPAN
Robert KC Johnson
Thanks in large part to the efforts of Stephen Colbert, Arizona senator Jon Kyl endured a round of mockery after his claim about 90% of Planned Parenthood funding going for abortions. Kyl’s office explained away the assertion as not “intended to be a factual statement.” Now, Kyl’s words will not appear in the permanent version of debate before Congress, the Congressional Record. (Members of Congress have the authority to make minor edits to their on-floor statements before the permanent Record is published.) According to the official publication of congressional proceedings and debates, Kyl actually said, “If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that is what Planned Parenthood does.”
Whether Kyl was better served by replacing an inaccurate statement with a misleading one is unclear. And, of course, thanks to C-SPAN, future scholars will always know exactly what Kyl said. The Kyl affair, in this respect, would seem like a victory for C-SPAN.
Perhaps. But such victories have come at considerable cost. C-SPAN started broadcasting House proceedings in 1979, and the intervening three decades have witnessed a dramatic decline in the quality (and quantity) of congressional debate. With more members playing for the cameras, the purpose of Senate addresses has changed from contributing to debate to offering prepared remarks before a basically empty chamber. And what is said has less to do with public policy than with pure partisanship. This appears to be part of a broader shift in how members of Congress conceive of their jobs: in analyzing 2005-7 press releases, Harvard political scientist Gary King recently concluded that, as the Washington Post summarized, “modern members of Congress spend about 27percent of the time just taunting each other.”
Partisanship—often of a fierce variety—always has formed a central component of American political culture. But the spreading to Congress is quite new. As someone who has spent a lot of time with the Congressional Record in differing periods of the 20th century (1913-35, 1945-89), I can’t think of any period before 1980 or so in which the Record was filled with such high levels of fact-free nonsense or partisan taunts.
So C-SPAN deserves kudos for preserving the accuracy of the historical record regarding Kyl’s comments. But in so doing, we should also acknowledge the network’s contribution to a fundamentally different—and less substantial—congressional culture.
Post date: Monday, April 25, 2011 - 19:30
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20th Century Notes
Ralph E. Luker
Edward Rothstein, "The Memory of Holocaust, Fortified," NYT, 22 April, reviews the two year-old Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.
Jessa Crispin, "The War Crimes Beat," Smart Set, 19 April, and Allison Hoffman, "Draft of History," Tablet, 11 April, revisit Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. James Rosen, "History of Eichmann trial holds few new revelations," Washington Post, 22 April, reviews Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial. See also: Stefan Reinecke and Christian Semler, "Mass murderers of conviction," soundandsight, 18 April, which interviews German holocaust historian, Ulrich Herbert.
Dawn Turner Trice, "Civil rights leader reflects on 50th anniversary of Freedom Rides," Chicago Tribune, 25 April, includes Diane Nash's memories on the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Freedom Rides. Other Freedom Riders in 1961 included two historians: UC Berkeley's Charles G. Sellers and Wesleyan University's David E. Swift.
Adam Bradley for the Barnes & Noble Review, 8 April, Imani Perry for the San Francisco Chronicle, 24 April, and David Remnick, "This American Life," New Yorker, 25 April, review Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Karl Evanzz, "Paper Tiger: Manning Marable's Poison Pen, Truth Continuum, 13 April, is a very hostile review of Marable's biography of Malcolm X. The review was commissioned and, then, rejected by Skip Gates's The Root. Background here & here.
Dwight Garner, "Recalling Childhood as a Styron," NYT, 19 April, and James Campbell, "A Daughter Remembers William Styron," NYT, 22 April, review Alexandra Styron's Reading My Father: A Memoir.
Post date: Monday, April 25, 2011 - 00:35
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Next Military History Carnival
David Silbey
The deadline for the next Military History Carnival is May 24th, one month away. The Carnival itself will go up on May 27th. Submissions here.
Post date: Sunday, April 24, 2011 - 10:57
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18th & 19th Century Notes
Ralph E. Luker
The new Common-place is up! David Shields edits a special issue on foodways in early America.
Jill Lepore, "Poor Jane's Almanac," NYT, 24 April, contrasts the experience of Benjamin Franklin and his younger sister, Jane Franklin Mecom.
Willibald Sauerländer, "The Quiet Genius," NYRB, 28 April, reviews "L'Armoire secrète: Eine Leserin im Kontext" [The Secret Cabinet: A Reader in Context], an exhibit at the Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland; and Mariantonia Reinhard-felice, ed., Oskar Reinhart Collection Am Romerholz Winterthur: Complete Catalogue.
Debby Applegate, "A Nation Stirs, the Civil War Begins," NYT, 21 April, reviews Adam Goodheart's 1861: The Civil War Awakening.
Jonathan Barnes, "The Victorian art of murder," TLS, 13 April, reviews Judith Flanders's The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime.
Thomas Powers, "Incandescent Memory," LRB, 28 April, reviews Harriet Elinor Smith et al., eds., Autobiography of Mark Twain Vol. I.
David Greenberg, "Democracy" by Henry Adams, Slate, 20 April, offers to explain "why it's the only lasting anonymous Washington novel."
Vivian Gornick, "History and Heartbreak," Nation, 2 May, reviews Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, eds., The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg.
Alan Wolfe, "The Visitor," The Book, 21 April, reviews Lawrence A. Scaff's Max Weber in America.
Post date: Sunday, April 24, 2011 - 00:07
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It Takes Dos Testiculos To Rule The Known World: A Brief Comment On "The Borgias"
Claire Bond Potter
Q: What do you do when you discover that your Benedictine confessor is actually a Vatican spy, and you have just confessed your plan to have the King of France invade the Italian Peninsula to topple the papacy?
A: Take advantage of the screen in the confessional and stab him in the eye with a stiletto.
History fans will be pleased to know that the producers of The Tudors have debuted a series on late fifteenth century Italian politics, religion and family governance issues that make your problems look ridiculous. The Borgias stars Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, or Pope Alexander VI, father of Cesare (pronounced CHAY-za-ray) and Lucrezia, reputed to have been incestuous lovers. Certainly the series has strongly hinted at incest: how many grown-up brothers stroke and kiss a sister on her wedding night? I ask you.
So far, it is 1492 or so, and we have met Niccolo Machiavelli, who is working for the King of Florence; an anonymous Native American snatched by Christopher Columbus; the serial killer son of the dotty and deaf King of Naples (this happy princeling displays corpses in his own little rotting Last Supper tableau); too many scheming cardinals to name; and Savanarola, a Dominican friar who looks like Uncle Fester. You don't even have to look it up on Wikipedia to know that this latter fellow is heading for a heresy trial and worse. However, if you do click on that link you will find that Savanarola was not only excommunicated and tried, but racked mercilessly and then burned into bits too tiny to be used as relics, which served him right because he may also have been responsible for the first act of institutional homophobia. In true Foucauldian fashion, prior to burning him, "the torturers spar[ed] only Savonarola’s right arm in order that he might be able to sign his confession." Brilliant. I wish I had thought of it myself. They knew how to keep order in the fifteenth century.
The success of such shows is part of an interesting phenomenon: the rise of religion on TV. In a recent post about Friday Night Lights, another one of my favorite shows, Flavia writes about unusual it is to watch a television show about modern life that takes Christianity for granted. "All of the characters appear to be nondenominational Protestants and some of their churches are clearly megachurches," she notes; "but nothing about their religiosity is depicted snidely or ironically or played for laughs. At the same time, the church-goers aren't romanticized or presented as unusually good people. They're just people: flawed, complicated people, trying to live up to their professed pieties. And as realistic as all that sounds, I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like it on t.v."
That might be right, and may say something about the ways in which subcultural Christian media are going mainstream. Army Wives certainly has its moments where it is clear that God is lurking in the background; and Big Love has introduced a popular audience to the intricacies of the Church of Latter Day Saints. But shows like The Tudors and The Borgias go one step further and teach a lesson about what religion, and the political struggles that revolved around the evolution of Catholicism and Protestant dissent actually have to do with how world history unfolded. A keen watcher of The Tudors, for example, would think about how one lived from day to day in a culture that was framed by the mandatory celebration of key moments in the life of Christ. No sooner was Christmas over than one began prepping for Lent; following Easter, the various days of obligation and days of ascension never stopped until a good Christian was getting ready for Advent and gearing up for Christmas again. As the series progressed, moreover, a non-specialist understood that casting doubt on the deference of Kings to the Pope pretty much put every other fixed principle in play, particularly the "natural order" of gender that would ultimately result in England getting her first Queens and the eventual rule of commoners over both church and crown.
So far the most interesting thing I have learned from The Borgias, other than how to kill people with whatever tools the fifteenth century made available, was that back then the Pope had to be examined after the election to make sure he was actually a man. This had to be one of the worst jobs in Rome: crouching under a cleric's icky business to make sure he had, as the examiner announced,"Dos testiculos" (this was how they put it on Episode One) or "two balls, and they are well-hung," as I have found it described on several web sites. There is some disagreement as to whether this ritual actually happened or not: apparently this had to do with Pope John VIII, a superb intellect elected in 855, who turned out to be Pope Joan. Rumour has it she was discovered after she gave birth in the street during a papal procession and was executed, with her lover, on the spot. (I know: scholars who really know this field are going to ask me why I would go to a website called Papal Trivia: Fun Facts About the Popes for my information.)
Like The Tudors, The Borgias is also about how political structures and organized crime are more or less interchangeable forms of domination. The latter show is particularly striking in this regard, as the actors keep dropping family names that we are actually familiar with from The Sopranos. In other ways, The Borgias is just another juiced up soap opera that makes it clear how difficult it is to run a family when you are responsible for the spiritual and political fate of the known world. This responsibility requires dropping several bodies in every episode. In episode four, we see a garroting ("you use a cheese cutter," the assassin explains to Cesare, who has never seen someone dispatched this way), a stabbing, a snapped neck, and a poisoning gone wrong that has to be finished off with an inexpert smothering. These things must be done, there is no question, lest the Church fall into the grip of folks like, say, the Medecis, who in 1492 were still running a bank in Florence and biding their sweet time.
One of the show's signature moments, used in all the ads, has Rodrigo staring into the camera (this is early in the first episode, right after Cardinal Borgia has given Cesare his marching orders for how to buy the papacy) and murmuring intensely: "I will not forgive failure!" This sums it up: what responsible father of successful children would forgive failure?
Cross posted at Tenured Radical.
Post date: Saturday, April 23, 2011 - 11:23
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Hazel Dickens, 1935-2011
Ralph E. Luker
Hazel Dickens, who gave an Appalachian musical voice to women and working people, passed away on Friday. Here, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn introduces Joe Hill's "The Rebel Girl," sung by Hazel Dickens:
Post date: Saturday, April 23, 2011 - 01:11
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Pre-Modern Notes
Ralph E. Luker
Michael Dirda for the Washington Post, 13 April, and J. E. Lendon, "Nature's Noblemen," Weekly Standard, 18 April review John Armstrong's In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea.
Liesl Schillinger, "Simon Schama Talks About Everything," Daily Beast, 16 April, reports on a day with the author of Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill, and My Mother. Phillip Lopate, "Simon Schama: The Essayist as Star Writer," NYT, 22 April, reviews the book.
Steve Donoghue for The National, 8 April reviews John Aberth's Plagues in World History. It challenges William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples.
"Dancing Mania," Frontier Psychiatrist, 17 April, features epidemics of it in medieval and early modern central Europe.
Matthew Kaminski, "The Spanish Model," The Book, 20 April, reviews Stanley G. Payne's Spain: A Unique History.
Eric A. Posner, "The Court of Literature," The Book, 14 April, and Garry Wills, "Shakespeare Subpeoned," NYT, 15 April, review Kenji Yoshino's A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Tell Us About Justice.
Anthony Grafton, "About Time," Tablet, 14 April, reviews Elisheva Carlebach's Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe.
Post date: Saturday, April 23, 2011 - 00:13
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As I was Saying ...
Ralph E. Luker
The Giant's Shoulders #34: The Existentialist Edition of the history of science carnival, is up at Jai Virdi's From the Hands of Quacks.
An ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque will go up at Jost A Mon on 26 April. Send nominations of the best in ancient and medieval history blogging since 20 February to jostamon*@*hotmail*.*com or use the form.
Janny Scott, "Obama's Young Mother Abroad," NYTM, 20 April, is a fine portrait of the President's American mother.
Justin Erik Halldór Smith, "The Blog as Mask and Gravestone," JEHS, 19 April, is his provocative reflections on the odd behavior in which we engage.
Congratulations to the winners of Pulitzer Prizes for 2011: in History, Eric Foner for The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery; in Biography, Ron Chernow for Washington: A Life; and in General Non-Fiction, Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
Finally, farewell to my graduate school buddy, Margaret Pitoniak Olson. Through countless cigarettes and cups of coffee in UNC, Chapel Hill's Pine Room, Marge took me to task and clarified my thinking on dozens of important issues.
Post date: Friday, April 22, 2011 - 00:08
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Military History Digest #155
David Silbey
Contents
Early Modern
1. Cry Havoc! and Let Slip the Dogs of War; - the British, the Spanish, and the War of Jenkins Ear by Charles McCain
"I realize this wonderful line from Shakespeare's play,"Julius Caesar" is too sweeping and evocative to use as an introduction to this brief post on the War of Jenkins Ear but the juxtaposition appealed to me. On 9 April 1731, near Havana, the Spanish coast guard sloop La Isabela intercepted the British merchant brig Rebecca. Robert Jenkins, the master of the merchant vessel, was accused of violating certain trade regulations which then existed between the Kingdom of Spain and Great Britain. It is thought that harsh words were exchanged between the master of the Rebecca and the captain of the..."
2. Beginning of Civil War by Naval Institute Archives
"April, 12th 1861 Civil War begins when Confederates fire on Fort Sumter, Charleston South Carolina Taken from Naval History Magazine October, 2006 Charleston’s largest Civil War Relic, of course, lies in the harbor. Fort Sumter became a flash-point after South Carolina, convinced Abraham Lincoln’s election as president would lead to the eradication of slavery, left [...]..."
3. Action on the Cai Tau River, Republic of Vietnam, 5 April 1965 by NHHC
"USN Advisors to the River Assault Groups (RAG) of the Navy of the Republic of Vietnam in the spring of 1965 often found themselves in the thick of the fighting, in situations that required them to “depart from the quiet counsel of the Vietnamese commanders to an actual co-leadership status.” Being a RAG advisor carried [...]..."
4. Oscillate Wildly: on Shooting Into the Crowd by The Faceless Bureaucrat
"That's right, they stink on ice! It would seem to me, if we are on the subject of la longue durée and aerial bombing of civilians and all that, that we (as a species, I mean) don’t learn much, or at least, we don’t learn very well. It makes you wonder, the way we seem to repeat our mistakes, if there aren’t default settings to which we simply revert when all else fails. What in the hell am I talking about, dear reader? Well, I’ll tell you. I am struck by the reflex that sees regimes–anciens et aussi contemporaires..."
19th Century
1. The Architecture of Opium Production by Nicola
"These colour lithographs were originally made in 1850 at the request of Walter S. Sherwill, an army officer who served as a British “boundary commissioner” in Bengal. According to Ptak Science Books, these particular reproductions were taken from an article exploring the economic and infrastructural marvels of the Indian opium trade in an 1882 supplement to Scientific American. They show the main opium receiving, production, and distribution center of the East India Company in Patna, a town in the north-western Bihar province of India. From these vast mixing rooms and examining halls, the Company claimed to produce roughly 13,000,000..."
2. How Slavery Really Ended in America - NYTimes.com by n/a
"..."
3. A Conflict's Acoustic Shadows - NYTimes.com by n/a
"..."
4. An Uncertain Message: Calling the Scv to Account by Brooks D. Simpson
"Take a look at the website of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It exists to honor the service of the Confederate “citizen soldier”: the organization reminds us that “the tenacity with which Confederate soldiers fought underscored their belief in the … Continue reading ..."
5. Your Army Command: Offensive Operations by Brooks D. Simpson
"In many Civil War discussion groups, contributors chat about all sorts of things, including their favorites, what might have happened, and so on. It’s in that spirit that I ask you ponder what you would do if presented with the … Continue reading ..."
6. The Mobs of New York by Charles McCain
"In the Kingdom of Prussia, often said to be an army which had a kingdom, as opposed to a kingdom which had an army, conscription was the rule of law for centuries. The same held true for other continental powers such as Tsarist Russia, France, the Habsburg Empire, et al. The US was different. Conscription did not exist. Indeed, the very reason many young men emigrated to the United States from states like Prussia and the Tsarist Russia was to avoid conscription into the armies of those powers. In the first one hundred years of the Republic, an appeal for..."
7. Pointed at Fort Sumter: the 8-Inch “New Columbiad” by Craig Swain
"I know, more 8-inch caliber Columbiads? Yes. Perhaps no better illustration of the evolution of heavy artillery in America than to look at the varieties of 8-inch weapons present at Charleston in 1861. Thus far I’ve discussed the Bomford “Seacoast … Continue reading ..."
8. Fort Sumter’s Largest – the 10-Inch Columbiads by Craig Swain
"According to the reports forwarded prior to the opening of hostilities, the largest caliber weapons mounted in Fort Sumter in April 1861 were 10-inch Columbiads. Two of these guns sat on the barbette tier facing Morris Island. The defenders mounted … Continue reading ..."
9. Mortars That Signaled the Start of the War by Craig Swain
"Continuing with my discussion of the cannons used at Fort Sumter in April 1861, I turn now to the mortars employed by the Confederates. One of these weapons signaled the “start” of the war (although I plead ambiguity there). A … Continue reading ..."
10. Rodman Field Guns? by Craig Swain
"I call your attention to this cannon at Fort Sumter. This is a Rodman. Here’s a bunch more: Rodman guns came in sizes ranging from 8-inch to 20-inch. These were mostly smoothbore, but with a few experimental rifled guns in … Continue reading ..."
11. Shiloh by Craig Swain
"Today is the 149th anniversary of the battle of Shiloh. As I mentioned some time back, I always take pause to consider that battle its anniversary. Fellow Missourian Michael Noirot posted posted a short piece on the battle (with links … Continue reading ..."
12. Benjamin Butler and the Contrabands by Donald R. Shaffer
"This weekend’s New York Times Magazine contains an article by Adam Goodheart, titled “How Slavery Really Ended in America,” adapted from his book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening. It tells the story of how in late May 1861, slaves began fleeing to the Union outpost of Fortress Monroe, Virginia, and how they were given sanctuary by the post’s commander, Major General Benjamin Butler. Newly arrived at Fortress Monroe, on May 23, 1861, Butler was confronted by the arrival of three fugitive slaves from the Confederate defensive works project across Hampton Roads. Faced with the looming prospect of being shipped to..."
13. Sex and Why Ordinary White Southerners Fought for Slavery by Donald R. Shaffer
"Yesterday’s Disunion in the New York Times, written by Nina Silber, asks a significant question. How can slavery be the cause of the Civil War, when in 1861 most southern households owned no slaves? It is a question that has vexed scholars for some time. After all, historians have long known only about one-fourth of white Southern families in 1860 owned slaves and the majority of those owned less than ten. So while it is clear that the slaveholding class was ready to secede in order to hold on to their human property, and said so quite clearly during..."
14. Images of Urban Slavery – April 1861 by Donald R. Shaffer
"As the United States careened toward Civil War, the British media took greater interest in the peculiar institution as it existed in the American South. In its April 6, 1861 edition, The London Illustrated News had two stories (with illustrations naturally) on slavery in Baltimore and New Orleans respectively. That this publication chose to feature slavery in two metropolitan centers of the antebellum South is interesting. Only about 5 percent of the American slave population lived in urban areas on the eve of the Civil War. If The London Illustrated News had really wanted to capture a more typical slice..."
15. Fear, Paranoia, and Slavery – April 1861 by Donald R. Shaffer
"To be a slaveholder was almost by definition to live in fear. While they proclaimed paternalistic feelings for their human property, slave owners regularly committed acts that created bitter hatred: whipping the disobedient; separating families; exploiting sexually black women; withholding adequate food, shelter, and clothing–the list could go on and on. While most slaves prudently kept any hatred to themselves, during a time of general crisis such as occurred at the start of the American Civil War, some slaveholders and other whites apparently could not help but exhibit what can only be described as a paranoid fear of African..."
16. Emancipation Day – Another Reason to Thank the Slaves by Donald R. Shaffer
"Today, April 15, Emancipation Day is observed in the District of Columbia. Normally, this holiday is celebrated in Washington, D.C. on April 16. However, since in 2011, April 16 falls on a Saturday, the observance has been moved one day earlier to give people who get public holidays off a three-day weekend. Emancipation Day commemorates the day–April 16, 1862–when Abraham Lincoln signed a law freeing the slaves in Washington, D.C. (nearly 3,000 in all). The District of Columbia Emancipation Act also is referred to as the “Compensated Emancipation Act” because it is one of the few instances..."
17. Confederate Privateering Begins by gordon.b.calhoun@navy.mil (Gordon Calhoun)
"Confederate privateer document (Image courtesy of the Museum of the Confederacy)With the hostilities officially underway, both sides began a series legal maneuvers that expanded the conflict beyond the shores of Fort Sumter. President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers to enlist in Federal army units. Taking this as a declaration of war against a sovereign state, Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued a counter-proclamation calling for patriotic Southerns to organize privateering outfits and take to the high seas against Yankee commerce. On April 17, 1861, he proclaimed that"Now, therefore, I, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate..."
18. Thoughtful Reflection in the Heart of the Confederacy by Kevin Levin
"Over the past few months I’ve done a number of interviews about the Civil War Sesquicentennial. At the end of my latest interview this past Friday the reporter noted that this was not the story that she anticipated writing. What she meant was that she was not going to write up a story around the [...]..."
19. Dissolving in Water: What Is Known and Unknown by matthew.t.eng@navy.mil (Matthew T. Eng)
"It is still hard for the most knowledgeable student of the Civil War to grasp the complexities of the conflict. In four years, over 620,000 people died on land and water. Far more met their end from disease than any musket fire or cannonball. But why? Why the bloodshed? Many will say that it was a necessary answer to the problem of the peculiar institution, while others merit the right of state sovereignty. Although it is widely acknowledged by scholars from today that slavery was the overwhelming cause of the war, the events surrounding the war and its commemoration are..."
20. Beginning of Civil War by Naval Institute Archives
"April, 12th 1861 Civil War begins when Confederates fire on Fort Sumter, Charleston South Carolina Taken from Naval History Magazine October, 2006 Charleston’s largest Civil War Relic, of course, lies in the harbor. Fort Sumter became a flash-point after South Carolina, convinced Abraham Lincoln’s election as president would lead to the eradication of slavery, left [...]..."
21. Action on the Cai Tau River, Republic of Vietnam, 5 April 1965 by NHHC
"USN Advisors to the River Assault Groups (RAG) of the Navy of the Republic of Vietnam in the spring of 1965 often found themselves in the thick of the fighting, in situations that required them to “depart from the quiet counsel of the Vietnamese commanders to an actual co-leadership status.” Being a RAG advisor carried [...]..."
22. Browning:"Shifting Loyalties: the Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina" by noreply@blogger.com (Drew@CWBA)
"..."
23. Seven Days Travelogue, Part One by noreply@blogger.com (dw)
"Day One -- twenty or twenty-five of us met up with author and researcher Chris Ferguson at the South Cherry Street entrance to Hollywood Cemetery, and spent the next three hours hiking and driving through the graveyard with numerous stops to hear Chris relate the history of the cemetery, and stories about individuals buried there. Best quotes came from the records of the Old Soldiers Home, regarding the antics of a spritely and heavily-armed 80-year-old. Day Two -- Mechanicsville through Gaines's Mill with Bobby Krick, the best tour guide we've had in 15 years of conferences, and we've..."
24. Seven Days Travelogue, Part One by noreply@blogger.com (dw)
"CONFERENCE] Day One -- twenty or twenty-five of us met up with author and researcher Chris Ferguson at the South Cherry Street entrance to Hollywood Cemetery, and spent the next three hours hiking and driving through the graveyard with numerous stops to hear Chris relate the history of the cemetery, and stories about individuals buried there. Best quotes came from the records of the Old Soldiers Home, regarding the antics of a spritely and heavily-armed 80-year-old. [CONFERENCE] Day Two -- Mechanicsville through Gaines's Mill with Bobby Krick, the best tour guide we've had in 15 years of conferences..."
25. Peter a. Weber by Steve Soper
"Peter A. Weber was born in 1841 in New York, the son of Rev. William Myers (1803-1853) and Emeline Margaret (Talman, 1805-1879).William and Emeline were married sometime before 1833, possibly in New York. In 1857 Peter moved with his mother and family from Fairfield, Connecticut to Grand Rapids. He was, wrote the Grand Rapids Eagle,a bright, interesting lad, of about 15 years of age. His gentlemanly bearing, correct deportment, and intelligent activity, commanded more than casual notice from all with whom he came in contact. When, from a praiseworthy ambition to be doing for himself, he..."
26. Charles H. and John West by Steve Soper
"Charles H. West was born in 1845 in New York, the son of John (b. 1821) and possibly stepson of Susan E. (b. 1826 or 1832) .John and his wife settled in New York where they resided for some years. At some point John remarried to New York native Susan E. John had at least four children: Charles H. (b. 1845), Eugene C. (b. 1847), Daniel Dwight (b. 1850) and Mary L. (b. 1855). (It is likely that Charles and his younger brother Eugene were both from a previous marriage.) Between 1851 and 1855 John moved his family to Michigan..."
World War I
1. What Did We Do Before Google Earth? by Andrew Currey
"One of the many problems trench warfare presented to soldiers in the First World War was finding out what the enemy was doing behind his lines. The simple solution to this was height, and in a relatively short time many ways of getting men and a camera off the ground were developed. Some are simple [...]..."
World War II
1. Debating Bombing and Foreign Intervention — I by Brett Holman
"On 21 June 1938, Philip Noel-Baker MP moved a reduction of £100 in an amount being voted for Foreign Office salaries. This is a time-honoured way of starting an argument in the House of Commons (well, technically they are called debates): it allows the mover to get into the agenda an issue they consider to be of importance, to make their case for it, and for other speakers (including those representing the government) to give supporting or opposing points of view. The motion nearly always fails, but then that's not the point. Noel-Baker -- a former professor..."
2. B-24 Liberators: Cold and Numerous by Charles McCain
"The American made bomber, the B-24 Liberator, had a wingspan of 110 ten feet, a length of 64 feet, and weighed 41,000 pounds, which is 20.5 US short tons or 18.3 metric tons. Over 18,000 B-24's were produced for the war effort - half of which were built at the Willow Run manufacturing plant by Ford Motor Company. At its peak, Willow Run built 650 B-24's per month in 1944. B-24s were not pressurized. Above ten thousand feet in attitude, the men went on oxygen. If your oxygen hose was cut by shrapnel, which often..."
3. USS Indianapolis by Charles McCain
"The USS Indianapolis left Pearl Harbor on 6 December 1941. My father, whom I barely knew, was a junior gunnery officer aboard the Indy and had they not left Pearl on the 6th, I may not have been born. After serving in the campaign to drive the Japanese off the two Aleutian Islands (Attu and Kiska) they had occupied, the USS Indianapolis returned to the Pacific. The ship was built under the restrictions of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 which limited heavy cruisers to no more than 10,000 tons. Hence you will see references to the ship as a..."
4. Profile 47 - Chance Vought Kingfisher by wily1@mac.com (JSM)
"First, would I do this for a living? I mean - real living?Damn right. Gawd, I love this part of American history and...you should too.This morning, I started out having breakfast with a medic assigned to McArthur's return to the Philippines circa 1944. Then, a new acquaintance let me know that a pilot assigned to the USS South Dakota (battleship) was not only alive but had sold his Harley last year. Would he like to have his plane memorialized for all digital-eternity?Hell yeah.So, I guess Satan's Chille'n and Lt. Ted Hutchins' Chance Vought OS2U Kingfisher are now..."
Cold War
1. Then and Now: Macv II Headquarters, 606 Tran Hung Dao Street, Cholon, Saigon, South Vietnam by noreply@blogger.com (J.R. Clark)
"606 Tran Hung Dao Street, Cholon, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2007. Today the building houses a medical center. MACV II Headquarters, 606 Tran Hung Dao Street, Cholon, Saigon, South Vietnam, 1965. ..."
2. Diary Entry 57: Saigon, Sunday Night, 12 September 1965 by noreply@blogger.com (J.R. Clark)
"Saigon Sunday Night, 12 September 1965Got back from Qui Nhon again (for the second time) last night but was just too tired to sit down and write. Am kinda sorry about that today as I’m real happy over the way the operation is going up there. Looks real professional, real good. I am talking about the arrival of the 1st Air Cav Division from Fort Benning. Back in late June and again in July, I went to Qui Nhon and An Khe on a mission. That mission was to plan for the reception and throughput of the 1st Air Cav..."
3. From the Editor: Deployment of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), 25 August - 20 September 1965 by noreply@blogger.com (J.R. Clark)
"The U.S. Army 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) was the first full division to arrive in Vietnam, and its movement from Qui Nhon to its base camp at An Khe challenged MACV J-4 and Movements Branch. As Clark recounted in his diary, the arrival of the 1st Air Cav was not without its contentious moments.Preparations for the arrival of the 1st Air Cav began in late June and early July, when Clark traveled aboard C-123s that landed over 200 tons of airstrip construction materials at the site of the division's base camp location at An Khe. In operations Clark..."
4. Diary Entry 58: Saigon, Tuesday Night, 14 September 1965 by noreply@blogger.com (J.R. Clark)
"Saigon Tuesday Night, 14 September 1965Tonight I feel kinda sad and down in the dumps. [Major] Harry [Brockman] went back to the States today and went out to Tan Son Nhut to see him off. Very depressing experience. Normally, I try real hard not to think about the time over here and never count the days as I don’t think I could take it if days were numbered. But going out to the airport and seeing the plane and watching it take off for the States kind of got to me. Am real homesick tonight. Funny how fast things change..."
5. Diary Entry 63: Saigon, Wednesday Night, 22 September 1965 by noreply@blogger.com (J.R. Clark)
"Saigon Wednesday Night, 22 September 1965Just finished eating supper in my room. Had crackers, peanut butter, olives, Vienna sausage, sweet pickles, and canned pineapple juice to drink. Had not planned to eat at home tonight, but one of my officers, a Major [Charles] Holbrook, wanted to talk to me after work. By the time he left it was too late to go to the Rex or to one of the French restaurants near here. So I just decided to simplify matters and make do in the room. Major Holbrook, who is a new addition to my branch, was worried because..."
6. Diary Entry 64: Saigon, Thursday Night, 23 September 1965 by noreply@blogger.com (J.R. Clark)
"Saigon Thursday Night, 23 September 1965Another month is just about done with and when it is, I will have completed 1/3 of my tour of duty over here. That doesn’t sound like much, but to me it is a milestone and I’m anxious to mark it off. Things seem to be going pretty well over here now. We’ve just about got the 1st Air Cav Division into the theater and settled down and we’re in the midst of doing some planning now. Early next month, I will have to send a couple of my officers back on the road..."
Misc/Thematic
1. The Story of an American Military Advisor and the Colombian Drug War by n/a
"Book Announcement: East of the Orteguaza: The Story of an American Military Advisor and the Colombian Drug War by Victor M. Roselló, Colonel, USA, Ret. Also available as a Kindle edition and discussed on Facebook. As stated in the subtitle, East of the Orteguaza is the story of an American military advisor and the Colombian drug war. The book’s title is a geographic reference to an actual place in time…a military base that was at the center of the drug war, deep inside the jungles of southern Colombia…and a place where the author lived and worked. Tres Esquinas..."
2. The Seventh Uniformed Service of the United States: Noaa by Charles McCain
"While doing research for my second novel, I came across the NOAA website and, procrastinator that I am, paged through it and discovered the existence of the Commissioned Officer Corps of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is one of the seven uniformed services of the US Government. Who knew? I always thought there were only six: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and US Public Health Service. + NOAAS Thomas Jefferson (S 222). New York Harbor, 2006. Their jobs look really interesting. I wish I had joined something like this when I was younger - I’m too old..."
3. Citizen Soldier: Repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell by Pritzker Military Library
"Ed Tracy sits down with Dr. John Allen Williams and Marine Jay Clark in the program entitled: Citizen Soldier: Repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell: A Conversation With One Marine. Originally aired 02/17/11. ..."
Post date: Friday, April 15, 2011 - 13:34
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More Modern History Notes
Ralph E. Luker
Nicholas Dames,"Why Bother?" n+1, Spring, reviews Terry Castle's The Professor and Other Writings, Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, and Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
Jed Perl,"A Room of One's Own," TNR, 13 April, reviews"Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century," an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ellen Handler Spitz,"Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," The Book, 13 April, reviews Simon Winchester's The Alice Behind Wonderland.
Rian Malan,"Without a Savior," bookforum, Apr/May, reviews R. W. Johnson's South Africa's Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid, Peter Godwin's The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe and Stephen Chan's Southern Africa: Old Treacheries and New Deceits.
Niall Ferguson Update:
Niall Ferguson,"'History has never been so unpopular'," Guardian, 29 March;
____________,"Murder on the EU Express," Newsweek, 3 April;
____________,"The Mash of Civilizations," Newsweek, 10 April;
Decca Aitkenhead,"Niall Ferguson: 'The left love being provoked by me ... they think I'm a reactionary imperialist scumbag'," Guardian, 11 April.
Post date: Thursday, April 14, 2011 - 00:13
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Things Noted Here & There
Ralph E. Luker
In Vinay Sitapati,"Hegemony in the politics department," Princeton Daily, 5 April, a Princeton graduate student is eloquently frank about his department.
Adam Kirsch,"National Treasure," Tablet, 12 April, reviews a critical edition of The Washington Haggadah, a 1478 manuscript in the Library of Congress.
Sarah Dunant reviews Craig A. Monson's Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art and Arson in the Convents of Italy for History Today, 22 March.
Christopher Hitchens,"When the King Saved God," Vanity Fair, May, reflects on how the King James translation of Hebrew and Greek scriptures gave expression to the English language.
Craig Fehrman,"Civil war lit," Ideas, 10 April, considers the American Civil War's effect on American literature. Ken Burns,"A Conflict's Acoustic Shadows," Opinionator, 11 April, reflects on the Civil War's enduring relevance in the 21st century's post-racial, globalized world.
Maureen Mullarkey,"Modern Martyr," Weekly Standard, 11 April, reviews Meryle Secrest's Modigliani: A Life.
In Jan Fleischhauer,"Rape, Murder and Genocide: Nazi War Crimes as Described by German Soldiers," Der Spiegel, 8 April, veterans of the Wehrmacht discuss German war crimes against civilians. Hendrik Hertzberg,"Prisoners," New Yorker, 18 April, compares American treatment of German prisoners in World War II to the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo.
In Sheila K. Johnson,"The Blowback World of Chalmers Johnson," Mother Jones, 11 April, his widow reflects on the career of Chalmers Johnson. Thanks to Alan Baumler for the tip.
Post date: Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - 00:18
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Soup, Salad, and a Transistor Radio
Chris Bray
Buy three books with one click at Amazon:
This item: The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby Hardcover $19.77
How to Fail as a Therapist: 50+ Ways to Lose or Damage Your Patients (Practical Therapist) by Bernard Schwartz Paperback $16.47
What's the Problem by Paula S. Rothenberg Paperback $28.95
Which reminded me of my favorite email from Amazon, which has sat in my inbox for two years because I enjoy it too much to delete it:
Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) by Noenoe K. Silva have also purchased Beaches and Parks in Southern California (Experience the California Coast) by California Coastal Commission.
Post date: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 - 00:05
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The Nixon Library's Watergate Exhibit
Robert KC Johnson
In the L.A. Times last week, Jon Weiner reviewed the Nixon Library’s new Watergate exhibit. Weiner hailed the library not only for telling the story in a comprehensive fashion, but for doing so “with authority and rich detail, mobilizing up-to-the-minute interactive technology that might even engage middle school students brought here on tours.”
The praise is well-deserved: the exhibit is quite extraordinary. It provides the necessary historical context—regarding both Nixon’s previous abuses of power and the historical legacy of why Watergate mattered. It features a variety of documents, tape snippets, and oral histories, with figures ranging from George Schultz to Robert Bork to Leonard Garment.
The result is something that will provide new information for virtually anyone interested in Watergate. Take, for instance, the section on the battle for the tapes’ release, which features nearly 20 oral history excerpts with some TV snippets from the era and a classic Dean-Nixon conversation. Or the opening section, which examines Nixon’s conspiracy thinking, and combines a rich array of documents (like Bob Haldeman’s handwritten notes from a Nixon meeting outlining the rationale for the enemies’ list), tape excerpts, and oral histories. Just as significant, all of this material is available on-line, to an extent unprecedented in anything from any of the presidential libraries. That will help bring a primary-source rich approach to Watergate into high school social studies classes (and to a much lesser extent college, given the diminution of U.S. political history faculty and offerings).
The exhibit's strength becomes all the more apparent in comparison with what it replaced. Before the National Archives administered the Nixon Library, the Library had its own version of Watergate—which amounted to Watergate as Nixon’s family and friends wished things had occurred. (The current exhibit has a link to this imagined reality.) The old exhibit operates under the thesis that it is “irrefutable” that “President Nixon was in no way connected with this attempted ‘third-rate burglary.’” The Foundation's narrative attacks John Dean, introduces Sam Ervin as the man who “just nine years earlier would have denied equal protection under the law with his vote against the landmark Civil Rights Act,” and charges that “Kennedy protégé Archibald Cox” headed a special prosecutor’s office whose objectivity was in “serious doubt.”
The Nixon Foundation greeted the new exhibit with a blog post from Anne Walker, wife of the foundation chairman. Walker faulted the Library for not effectively representing the true victims of the affair—Nixon and his advisors. (She recalled “the days of reading about our pals in the Washington Post every day, seeing them accused and vilified.”) In a bizarre argument, Walker suggested that critical Watergate defendants didn’t commit wrongdoing, since they were merely convicted of perjury. “Anyone,” she reasoned, “would eventually perjure themselves after countless grand jury sessions,” at which people are asked things like “how much you paid for a ham sandwich on a specific lunch hour.”
Walker’s contentions, of course, are ludicrous. But they also starkly illustrate a tension within the Presidential Libraries and Museums system. Presidential libraries have two constituencies—the public on the one hand, and the President’s family and closest friends and supporters (who help fund the libraries’ facilities) on the other.
A best-case scenario would be figures such as Lady Bird Johnson and former LBJ Library director Harry McPherson. Both were committed to preserving Lyndon Johnson’s legacy—but believed that the best way to do so came through honesty with the public and ensuring that scholars had full access to the available documents in the LBJ Library. The Nixon Foundation approach clearly represents the other extreme--Walker's blog post wildly portrays Nixon Library director Tim Naftali as coordinating a conspiracy designed to spread in the media unflattering (but accurate) quotes from Nixon. (It could be said, I suppose, that Nixon's associates have unusual expertise on the issue of conspiracies.)
In the case of the Nixon Library, the National Archives clearly did the right thing, and made sure that historical accuracy trumped the family's concerns. But the affair should be a reminder that scholars need to be constantly vigilant about protecting the integrity of the presidential libraries system.
Post date: Monday, April 11, 2011 - 21:24
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Modern History Notes
Ralph E. Luker
Roderick Beaton,"Adamantios Korais – doctor of the Greek Revolution," TLS, 6 April, reviews Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ed., Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment.
Fergus M. Bordewich,"A Mixed Blessing," WSJ, 4 April, reviews Nancy Lusignan Schultz's Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle: The Prince, the Widow, and the Cure That Shocked Washington City. Megan Marshall,"American Heiresses on the World Stage," NYT, 8 April, reviews Jehanne Wake's Sisters of Fortune: America's Caton Sisters at Home and Abroad.
Ronald C. White, Jr.,"Two Civil War anthologies," LA Times, 10 April, reviews Harold Holzer, ed., Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War and Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, eds., The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It.
George Scialabba for the Barnes & Noble Review, 30 March, Salil Tripathi for the Washington Post, 8 April, and Anita Desai,"A Different Gandhi," NYRB, 28 April, review Joseph Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India.
Michael Korda,"Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley: Team of Rivals," NYT, 8 April, reviews Jonathan W. Jordan's Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe.
Franklin Foer,"Why the Eichmann Trial Really Mattered," NYT, 8 April, reviews Deborah E. Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial.
Post date: Monday, April 11, 2011 - 03:04
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