Their There

In James Atlas's anthology How They See Us: Meditations on America, foreign observers register their charm, alarm, and disappointment with the United States

As more than one writer in this anthology of essays notes, there's something ethnocentric, if not clinically narcissistic, about asking a group of distinguished writers to be a "they" with their gaze on "America," itself an egocentric term when applied solely to the United States. James Atlas, the distinguished writer who both edited this volume and published it for his imprint Atlas & Co., acknowledges as much in his introduction to the collection. What he doesn't say, but surely believes, is that while such a title might be geopolitically incorrect, it's surely a good marketing strategy for domestic consumption. A little hucksterism is nothing if not the -- no, make that an -- American Way.

Not surprisingly, the twenty-one pieces that comprise this compact book defy generalization. Written in what is now the decade-long shadow of 9/11, they express admiration, affection, bemusement, disappointment, exasperation, and fury at the United States, sometimes within the same essay. At one end of the spectrum, Chinese immigrant Da Chen conveys the considered gratitude of the immigrant that one rarely hears anymore; at the other, Canadian Leila Nadir, whose family emigrated from Iraq, excoriates the United States for wreaking far more havoc on the world than Saddam Hussein ever did (or could). Many of the pieces express sorrow for the tragic loss of American life in the terror attacks of September 11. But those that do also lament what they consider the misguided U.S. response to those attacks, and incredulity, if not contempt, for an unstated, but nevertheless unmistakable, assumption on the part of a great many Americans that the approximately 3,000 lives lost justify the killings of some huge multiple of that number of Iraqis, Afghans, or anyone else who gets in the way. In the crude calculus of the Yanqui, American lives are evidently worth more than others.

Others voices project in more unexpected directions. Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan complains that Americans are so quick in their multiculturalism to identify themselves as victims that they crudely conflate their own historical experience with those they oppress. Nigerian writer Chris Abani makes an Tocquevillian observation that while Nigerians and Americans share a heritage as British colonial subjects, the former tend to reject their Western heritage while Americans pine for Oedipal approval from a European parent who withholds approval from the self-indulgent child (in no small measure because it is comprised of heirs who left an old world for a new one). British writer Terry Eagleton illustrates the difference between Irish and American mythology with a hilarious anecdote about a fiddling contest. Most of the writers in the book have studied or worked in the United States, and are able to comment on it with a sense of intimacy and authority.

To some degree, it's what isn't in the book that's as revealing as what is. Relatively few of these writers have much to say about U.S. politics and governance -- there are no paeans here to the Declaration of Independence, no analyses of the Constitution, no assessments of the strengths, weaknesses, or differences (or lack thereof) between the major political parties. Nor is much said about the American economy. That its productive prowess is no longer a subject of awe is perhaps to be expected, but its voracious appetite for credit elicits little expression of alarm or distaste, either. To a great extent, this is surely because the contributors to the book are mostly writers, many of them creative writers, and their primary interest in the United States is cultural. But even this obvious intellectual orientation has a surprising dimension in that the conversation is typically more about pop culture than literary or other artistic currents. (Though when Russian writer Victor Erofeyev is asked what he likes most about America, his answer, grounded in the nation's vast resources, is "Vermeer.") Moreover, while one might expect that figures like Marilyn Monroe would loom large as emblems of the American Century at its zenith, as she does for Mexican poet and novelist Carmen Boullosa, names like Michael Jordan or Bruce Springsteen -- who are more "Edwardian" symbols than the "Victorian" Monroe -- pop up frequently.

This, in an important sense, is the message of the book: Empires come, and empires go, but culture is forever. The American Dream is not a home in suburbs that will vanish no less surely than an Algonquin longhouse in the Eastern woodlands. It's Rock & Roll that's here to stay. It will be in a foreign museum someday.

A museum of what is the question. In the end -- an end that may come sooner rather than later -- is not one that "we" in the United States who will say."They," or their heirs, anyway, will decide. Given the ill will that the United States has engendered for some time now, combined with the reality that no human beings anywhere are angels, we can only hope that God will have have mercy on us. We can't really expect it from anyone else.

On a related note: Following my recent essay on "The Cosmpolitan Dilemma" for the History News Network, I received a copy of the Fall, 2009 issue of The Hedgehog Review, published by the Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, on "The Cosmpolitan Predicament." There are fine essays in the journal by figures ranging from Seyla Benhabib to William McNeill, as well as a revealing interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah and a very useful omnibus review of recent books in the field by Johann Neem. Definitely worth a look.

The Good Don't Always Die Young: A Note on Billy Joel

The Piano Man as a musical historian

When I tuned in Sunday night to watch the HBO broadcast of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's 25th anniversary concerts held at Madison Square Garden in October -- which I assume will be rebroadcast periodically, and which in any case is available on demand -- it was to see Bruce Springsteen perform. I was happy to see any number of other artists, along with some truly marvelous pairings, like Ray Davies of the Kinks singing "You Really Got Me" with Metallica. (I had just played Davies's "Lola" in my "U.S. History Since 1940" class that morning to illustrate a closeted gay experience, and I just loved seeing him up there with presumably heterosexual James Hetfield & Co., though there's always been a fascinating queer thread running through some varieties of heavy metal.) Mick Jagger teamed up thrillingly with Fergie and U2 to sing "Gimme Shelter," and Jagger did an improbably good duo with Bono on U2's "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of." The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, both the museum and concerts, are great with these kinds of pinging influences.

So is Springsteen. Over the course of his set, he brought out Sam Moore, Darlene Love, and John Fogerty. But for the climax of this series, he announced an unscheduled guest whose identity became clear as Springsteen described him. "Long Island is about to meet New Jersey on the neutral ground of New York City," he said, and out came Billy Joel.

It was a disconcerting sight. Joel, who has kept a relatively low profile since his semi-retirement from pop music in 1993, looked older, heavier and balder than when I last saw him: He looked like a veteran high school history teacher. His performance was just fine; Springsteen shared singing duties with Joel on "New York State of Mind," and Joel returned the favor with "Born to Run." Once the song began, I looked forward to seeing him sing like Springsteen -- I consider Joel the best mimic of the rock era -- and he was pitch perfect. Which was a little disappointing: I was sort of hoping he would be a bit more playful, to tease Springsteen by exaggerating his grandiose romanticism. But Joel was oddly muted. Though they are almost exact contemporaries -- Springsteen is a mere three months younger than Joel -- The Boss is still touring regularly and leaping into the crowd mosh-pit style. Joel's gait was distinctly middle-aged.

Indeed, Joel's profile in popular culture has faded with surprising speed. Though the Recording Industry Association of America lists him as the sixth best-selling recording artist and third best-selling solo artist, he lacks the profile of peers like Elton John (with whom Joel occasionally tours, and who remains a consummate entertainer). Actually, in terms of critical reputation, Joel never had much of a profile to begin with -- he's never enjoyed the kind of esteem that Springsteen, for example, received from the very beginning.

To some extent, Joel himself is to blame for this. Notorious for his defensiveness and pugnacity, he and rock critics have long sustained mutual disdain (see, for example, Ron Rosenbaum's recent rant in Slate, and Joel's response to a New Zealand writer last year). And he's got a snottiness that shows up in songs like "Big Shot" and "My Life." Perhaps the best (or, more accurately, worst) example of these two traits converging is his 1980 album Glass Houses, and specifically his hit single "It's Still Rock & Roll to Me," which explicitly attacks the rage for punk rock in a way that makes him sound prematurely old-fashioned.

Joel's real problem, however, is that he was born too late. Many of his most famous songs, like "New York State of Mind," "Just the Way You Are," and "She's Always a Woman," are closer to the spirit of George Gershwin and Cole Porter than Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan. He was a piano man in the age of electric guitar. Again, Elton John, like Jerry Lee Lewis before him, had the charisma to overcome this problem. But Joel was always a lousy rock star.

All this said, Joel has a strength that I believe has never been fully appreciated: an extraordinary grasp of American history, musical and otherwise. Sometimes this takes the form of capturing the spirit of a time with exceptional clarity. Has anyone, for example, captured postwar suburban ennui with the deadly accuracy Joel does in "Captain Jack?" Or the intimacy of old friends remembering the faded Grease scenario of "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant?" In other cases, he writes songs of tremendous historical resonance. "The Entertainer" captures the often frantic anxiety of the would-be star that spans the careers of Sinatra to Swift. "Allentown" is a masterpiece in simultaneously depicting the passing the of the Greatest Generation in the Rustbelt, and the economic displacement of their children, during the wrenching downturn of the early Reagan years. (As such, the song has a fresh relevance.) Joel can also reflect compellingly on an individual's life span, whether in the reflectively embraced nostalgia of "Keeping the Faith," or his meditation on old age, "Vienna."

But it's in his musical allusions that Joel's historical consciousness is most fully realized. Probably the best example is his 1983 album An Innocent Man, whose string of hits -- "Tell Her About it," "Uptown Girl," "The Longest Time," and others -- is a gallery of tributes to Motown, the Four Seasons, and classic doo-wop. I never get tired of hearing his last big hit, "River of Dreams" (1993), which always strikes me as a perfect fusion of gospel and pop. Underrated as a singer and a pianist -- I've seen him in venues where he explains how pop songs work with stunning insight and affection -- he has shown himself to be a student in the truest sense of the term.

In recent years, Joel has written and performed classical music, with an occasional foray into live performance (which, according to his website, he will apparently resume next year). There's no reason to think a big commercial comeback is in the offing. But if Billy Joel was a stock, I'd go long on him. In terms of appreciation for his body of work, I strongly suspect the best is yet to come.

Banking on Hamilton

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet play with the U.S. economy

The Maria Chronicles, #26

The play has been distributed, the parts assigned, and now the class is ready to go. Maria flicks the lights to indicate it's time to begin, and starts reading her own part as the narrator who will set the stage for what follows:

Today on American History Now, we’re at a post office in Medford, Massachusetts. It’s the summer of 1790, and a group of Revolutionary War veterans have gathered, as they often do on summer afternoons while waiting for the harvest. Some of them actually come to read newspapers, but mostly they gather to relax and exchange stories, since it’s cheaper to hang out here than at the local tavern, where the ale is expensive and their wives tend to keep track of expenses.

Today is a little unusual because a stranger has come to town. He’s a man calling himself Al the Banker. He has been discussing politics with the men, who are up to date with the issues from their reading and discussions. A debate is raging in the new Congress over the nation’s financial policy and the way it intersects with veterans’ issues. As everyone knows, many war vets have been promised payments for their service in the war for independence. And, as everyone also knows, these men have not been paid – and there’s no knowing if (when?) they’ll ever be. That’s why some of these vets have been selling their pension certificates, at a fraction of their face value, to speculators. One group of leaders, led by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, asserts the pensions should be paid in full. Another group or faction, under U.S. Representative James Madison of Virginia, says the government cannot—and should not—reward those exploiting the service of others. The Hamilton faction contends that such speculators actually serve the cash-strapped vets by offering them hard cash when they need it, and in any case are essential for the development of a strong American economy. The Madison faction replies that a strong American economy will not depend on such people, but rather the productive capacity of the nation’s farmers. This is a debate that has grown increasingly spirited – and, some might say, acrimonious.

That’s why the arrival of Al the Banker is such a novelty here in Medford. Suddenly, it seems, national politics has arrived on the post office doorstep. Some of those who have been listening to Al the Banker make his pitch have been intrigued; others repelled. But everyone is very interested in the proceedings, which continue and get renewed every time someone enters the post office. Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Ballard becomes the latest person to enter and receive Al the Banker’s pitch.

Al: Well, now, who do we have here?

Nathaniel: Name’s Nathaniel. Nathaniel Ballard.

Al: Very good indeed, Mr. Ballard. I see the insignia on your coat. And tell me -- where did you serve?

Nathaniel: I fought with Benjamin Lincoln. Was at Yorktown for the surrender in ’81.

Al: Excellent! (Change of tone indicates change of subject. Slightly conspiratorial): Mr. Ballard, the nation has been in your debt—and I mean that literally—since the time you enlisted in the army. Promises have been made, promises of payment for your service to our country. But you and I both know that even with the best of intentions, the U.S. government is struggling these days, and well, let’s face it: You have real doubts you’re ever going to see that money. Am I right?

Nathaniel (warily): That’s right.

Al: Well, Mr. Ballard, I’m here to help. My name is Al the Banker. I happen to know that you are in line to receive $100 for the U.S. treasury. But as likely as not you’re going to get nothing. That’s why, right here, right now, I’m prepared to give you $10 in cold hard cash (sounds of bills/coins). You sign that paperwork over to me and I’ll give you the money. Immediately.

Nathaniel (flatly): Is that right.

Al: Now let me be clear, Mr. Ballard, lest you think this is some kind of mendacious scheme that I am perpetrating here. I’m not making you this offer wholly out of a sense of altruism. I’m offering you this buyout of the government’s debt to you because it’s my hope that someday, somewhere down the line, I’ll get that $10 and more. If our Treasury Secretary, Mr. Alexander Hamilton, has his way, I stand to make a tidy profit. But we don’t know right now if he will get his way, or when. I could end up with that whole $100. Or I could end up with nothing. I’m asking you to take a chance, but I’m taking a chance, too.

Evan Baker (pipes in): Where are you getting the money?

Al: Well hello, sir. (offers his hand, which Evan takes half-heartedly.) Al the Banker here. And yourself.?

Evan: Name’s Evan. Evan Baker. Live in Medford now. But I’m from Maine. Down East country.

Al: Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr. Evan Baker. The short answer to your question is that I’m borrowing it. From London. There are people over there who believe in the value of what I’m doing. That’s the wonderful thing about free markets of the kind we now have in these new United States: People get to make choices. (Addresses Ballard): So what do you say? Would you like that $10 now? Buy your pretty little wife a dress? Maybe get yourself a new horse?

Nathaniel: I don’t know. I need to think about this.

Al: Fair enough. I’ve checked out of the Mason’s Arms – lovely inn you have there – and will be leaving in two hours. Would hate to see you miss your chance, Mr. Ballard.

Thomas Baxter: Ten dollars is a lot of money, Nathaniel. Not enough to turn you into a gentleman, but certainly make your life a bit better.

Al: There you go, Mr. Ballard. A voice of reason. And you Mr . . . .

Thomas: Thomas Baxter. I’m a journeyman in the smithy across the way.

Al: Are you a veteran holding a pension certificate, Mr. Baxter?

Thomas: Yessir.

Al: And so may I infer that you would like to avail yourself of this offer?

Thomas: Yessir.

Al: Excellent! I have the paperwork right here. Let’s fill it out right now and then I’ll walk over to your shop or house and pick up that certificate.

(Sounds of paper pushing. Improvise language as Thomas signs on the dotted line.)

Joe Allgrant: Mr. Banker, I’d be obliged to enter into this proposition.

Al: That’s wonderful. Excuse me, Mr. Baxter as I take a copy of this document here for Mr. . . .

Joe: Allgrant. Joe Allgrant. Own me a small farm over in Somerville.

Ezekiel: You people are fools. Don’t you recognize a rascal when you see one?

Joe: I been sittin’ on my certificate for years, Ezekiel. What’s the point? We’re never going to see any of that money.

Ezekiel. Bankers are evil. Don’t care if they say they’re from London or from Boston. They’re all from hell, far as I’m concerned.

Al: The gentleman here is unpersuaded as to the value of my proposition. Fair enough. Mr. Baxter and Mr. Allgrant are aboard. As I prepare to take my leave, I’ll ask you, Mr. Baker, as to your disposition. Would you like to sell your certificate?

Evan: I will sell my certificate. For $25.

Al: Oh dear. I’m afraid I’m not in a position to accept such an offer, Mr. Baker.

Evan: Well, $20 then.

Al: You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Baker. I’m afraid I can only offer you $15.

Baker (pauses. Then, uncertainly): Well all right then.

Joe: I want $15!

Thomas: I want $25!

Al: I’m afraid that’s not possible, Mr. Allgrant, or Mr. Baxter. Our paperwork has already been filled out. You can of course refuse to turn over your certificates, but there can be no renegotiation of the terms.

Thomas: Well I’ll be damned! You are one slick operator, Al the Banker.

Al: Be that as it may. Mr. Ballard, you are the only one here whose stance is unresolved.

Nathaniel: Well, I . . . I

The voice of Mary Ballard is heard in the distance.

Mary: Nathaniel! Nathaniel! Are you in that godforsaken saloon again?

Nathaniel (shouts out the door): No, Mary. I’m here with the boys at the post office.

Mary (entering): Well now that’s a relief. For a minute there I thought you were actually doing something productive with the chickens!

Evan (deferentially): Good Day, Mary.

Joe, Thomas: Good Day, Mrs. Ballard.

Ezekiel: Wonderful to see you, Mary.

Mary: Oh stop lying, Ezekiel. You haven’t been happy to see since I caught you with Hannah Tillings behind the church fourteen years ago.

Nathaniel (trying to mollify her): Now, Mary. We were just discussing business with Al, a banker from out of town.

Mary: Just what we need! A bunch of country bumpkins matching wits with a city swell. Let me guess: He’s offering you boys the deal of a lifetime.

Joe: Well, as a matter of fact he is, Mary. I’m about to get me ten dollars in hard cash today.

Mary: I didn’t think your soul was worth ten dollars, Joe.

Evan: You’re quite the jester, Mary. Actually, Joe was selling his pension certificate for the ten dollars. I myself finagled fifteen. We’re never going to see a full redemption from this government.

Mary: No, Evan, I reckon you won’t.

Nathaniel: You think I should try and sell mine then, darlin’?

Mary: Certainly not!

Nathaniel: Why not? Do you think Al the Banker is a devious businessman?

Mary: Not more than any other businessman. But you boys are in over your heads. You can be sure that whatever proposition this man offers you is going to be less than you might get for yourselves.

Al: Madam, I’ve made clear already to these gentlemen that I am in fact counting on using my connections to realize gains that they will never be in a position to pursue. But the something they get will still be more than the nothing they now have.

Mary: Be that as it may, sir, my husband will not be participating.

Al: And why is that, Madam?

Mary: Because he has some chickens to slaughter. And if he doesn’t get home to do it, then he’s going to pay a price that can’t be measured in gold coins. Now let’s get out of here, Nathaniel!

Nathaniel (defeated): So long, boys.

Evan, Joe, Thomas, Ezekiel: G’bye, Nathaniel. (The Ballards depart.)

Al: Well, I can see Mr. Ballard is married to a formidable woman.

Ezekiel: You don’t know the half of it, Mr. Al the Banker. Mary Ballard makes the best strawberry jam in Middlesex County. She’s begun to jar and sell it to general stores. Made over $400 last year alone. John Hancock himself loves the stuff. So does vice-president Adams.

Al: Where do the Ballards live?

Joe: Over near Winthrop. You can get there through the Fells.

Al: What a fortunate coincidence. I have to head that way myself. Come, Mr. Baxter and Allgrant. Let us get those certificates. Then I can pay a visit to the Ballard homestead on my way out of town. (They leave.)

Thomas: So, Ezekiel, what do you think is going to happen? Will Hamilton succeed in getting full redemption on those bonds?

Ezekiel: Of course. The rich always figure out a way to come out ahead. C’mon, Thomas. I’ll buy you ale at the tavern. I figure my pension certificate is good as gold.

Empire of History

Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty is the latest entry in a series that is itself a historical artifact

The following review was published yesterday at the Books page of the History News Network website.

The Oxford University Press History of the United States, for which eight of a projected twelve volumes, each well over 700 pages, have now been published in non-chronological order, is certainly among the most ambitious enterprises of its kind in modern times. No one, however, could call it a quickly realized one. First conceived two grand old men of the profession, C. Vann Woodward and and Richard Hoftstadter, a half century ago, the first volume, Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause, covering 1763-1789, did not actually appear until 1982. (A revised edition was issued in 2005.)

It took another six years before James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, on the Civil War era, appeared in 1988, though it was well worth the wait: winner of a Pulitzer Prize, it remains the standard one-volume history in the field twenty years later. The next title to appear, James Patterson's Grand Expectations, covering 1945-74, did not surface until 1996; it won a Bancroft Prize for the best work of history that year. In 1999, David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear, covering the Great Depression and World War II, won a Pulitzer Prize. By that point, Hoftstader, who died in 1970, was long out of the picture, as was the remarkably productive nonagenarian Woodward, who finally died in 1999. So Kennedy himself took over editorship of the series.

The pace picked up significantly in this decade. Patterson reappeared in 2005 with Restless Giant, covering 1974-2000. In 2007, Daniel Walker Howe published What Hath God Wrought, covering 1815-1845; it won the third Pulitzer of the series. Last year witnessed the only book in the series to cover a single topic comprehensively, George Herring's survey of U.S. foreign policy, From Colony to Superpower. Future projected volumes include Peter Mancall on the early colonial era, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton on the British empire in North America, and Bruce Schulman on the early twentieth century. An H.W. Brands volume covering 1865-1900 was withdrawn under ambiguous circumstances (though the same might be said of any number of prospective authors who have come and gone in the last four decades). That segment is now apparently to be written by Richard White.

All of this is a long way of introducing the latest volume in the series, Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, which spans from ratification of the Constitution in 1789 to the end of the War of 1812. Yet rehearsing this history of the series seems important in understanding the book and its larger significance. Like its predecessors, An Empire of Liberty is a huge work of synthesis by a major scholar and represents the distillation of a lifetime's worth of study. Like its predecessors, too, it is a book notable for the clarity of its prose, something that can be attributed to the strong editorial hand guiding the project as well as the liquid smoothness that has always characterized Wood's work (he's long been a fixture at the New York Review of Books, among other publications). Magisterial, authoritative, comprehensive -- these are words you can apply to this book, just like you can the rest in the series. If Empire, perhaps more than others, illustrates some of the limits of grand visions, it must be said that the book is an achievement of a very high order, among the highest in two centuries of American historiography dating back to David Ramsay's history of the revolution published in 1789.

As Wood makes clear at the outset, Empire is less an extension than a recapitulation of his earlier work, notably his groundbreaking The Creation of of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969) and the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991). In those books and elsewhere, Wood, reflecting the influence of his mentor, Bernard Bailyn, as well as the generational temper of his historiographic generation, emphasized the role of ideology as a force in provoking and sustaining the American Revolution. Radicalism in particular was notable for its conceptually elegant narrative arc, which moved across a tripartite social transition from monarchy to republic to democracy in the half-century after 1776.

In Empire, Wood provides much more detail about a much shorter stretch of time. The key transition here is from the dominance of the avowedly elitist Federalist faction led by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s (which he views as largely necessary, but necessarily doomed) and the somewhat paradoxical celebration of the people emphasized by the Republican faction and embodied most vividly by the aristocratic, slaveholding Thomas Jefferson. This transition is captured at either end of the book in mentions of the arch-Federalist Noah Webster, who starts out by defining a "gentleman" as a person who has a liberal arts education and is not in engaged in trade, and ends up defining gentleman simply as a courtesy title to describe "men of education and breeding of every occupation." Wood expands upon this well-established historiographic framework in chapters that take him to relatively fresh ground, in particular a pair on the evolving U.S. judicial system, and others on evangelical religion, Republican foreign policy, and a notably provocative foray into cultural history. In all these cases, Wood traces the powerful egalitarian currents that course through early American society, even as he notes the counter-currents and paradoxes that result.

But those counter-currents and paradoxes never overshadow what Wood considers the bright mood of the times -- and Wood's own bright view of early American history. He of course is careful to consider the blight of slavery, which he discusses periodically over the course of the book and focuses on in one chapter. Yet given that 1789-1815 is the period in which slavery changed from what seemed to be a fading fact of life to a newly revitalized and nearly fatal cancer in the body politic, it's not hard to imagine another historian making much more of it. Ditto the treatment of U.S. Indian relations in the West. Or the role of women in society. These are, on the whole, subjects handled with both more depth and facility in what is the next chronological volume in the series, Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought -- which, in its full-throated affirmation of Whig ideology, has a somewhat sharper argument, beginning with its dedication to the oft-overlooked John Quincy Adams. In reading Wood's book, I found myself wondering what a younger historian like Woody Holton might have said on such subjects if he had this assignment, particularly since Holton's just-published book, a biography of Abigail Adams, casts her in a distinctively new light as a financial speculator. And I find myself asking -- as well as whether I should be asking -- how big a problem it is that every one of the published or projected volumes in this series is currently assigned to a white male historian.

In some sense such questions go to the core of what makes this project important and problematic at the same time, and to a great extent why it was conceived in the first place: a perceived need for synthesis in an age of ever-growing diversity. Given the demographic as well as intellectual pluralism that has characterized the profession in the last forty years, the series is bucking the tide of History. This is true in terms of its evident belief that U.S, history can be rendered in a fully integrated narrative. And it's even more true in terms of affirming the role of narrative itself in an age of monographic literature in which mastery of a discrete sub-specialty, coupled with a carefully wrought analytic apparatus, are regarded as the highest, and most readily rewarded, forms of historical writing in academe.

The people writing these books are hardly mavericks; indeed, they are among the most celebrated and esteemed in the profession, precisely because they've mastered the game as it's been played in the second half of the twentieth century. In their ends, they are throwbacks to a consensus era; in their means, they implicitly accept that the post-1960s academic scholarship they lean heavily upon (much of it their own) has not really been able to communicate effectively with a broader public without the kind of mediating function that they serve here. Which itself is problematic: Who has time these days to read a single 800-page doorstop, never mind a dozen, even if you can download them all on a single Kindle?

Of course, for many in the profession, the situation I'm describing is hardly a problem, but rather a solution: having everybody write synthesis would be too many chiefs and not enough Indians. A career track in which junior historians write monographs that become grist for the mill for the senior ones makes a lot of sense, whether or not the Holy Grail of "the general reading public" is ever found. Looked at in this way, this series demonstrates what was was possible during what may well come to be known as a Golden Era of American history.

If so, however, it is an era that may be rapidly drawing to a close. The now well-publicized upheaval the University of California at Berkeley, along with the financial pressures at university presses (though not, apparently, at Oxford University Press, itself a wily survivor of earlier imperial buckling), are undermining the intellectual infrastructure that that made this series possible: Taxpayers and tuition payers are unlikely to maintain current support of the sabbaticals, fellowships, research assistants and other perquisites that make books such as these possible much longer. The Oxford History of the United States has been a long time coming. It may be even longer before we see anything like it again. We should savor these books -- as books -- while they're being bound and printed in the present tense.

Jim is observing the Thanksgiving holiday. He invites readers to have a look at the current edition of the online history magazine, Common-Place, where his essay "Blogging, with Pickles," describes the circumstances behind the origins and trajectory of this blog.

Jim's recent reading includes David Benioff's City of Thieves (published in paperback earlier this year), an exceptionally rich and fast-paced novel that's structured like a fable but reads like literary fiction. In the winter of 1942, amid the Nazi siege of Leningrad, two lowly Russians are swept up by local police forces and imprisoned. A Soviet colonel offers to free them and return their confiscated ration cards -- if they can find a dozen eggs so that his daughter can have a bona fide wedding cake despite wartime deprivations. This odd, but increasingly attached, couple have a series of adventures that alternate between, and combine, comedy and tragedy. Benioff, by the way, is the author of both novel and screenplay for The 25th Hour, which was made into a very good movie starring Edward Norton and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2003, directed by Spike Lee in a commercially-minded moment.

Jim is currently embarked on Gordon Wood's massive An Empire for Liberty, which covers the years 1789-1815 in the Oxford History of the United States. A review will follow.

May you savor your blessings.

Thanksgiving break

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet call it a day

The Maria Chronicles, # 25

Maria is crying. She's lying in bed, where she's been since dusk, and is now waiting for sleep to overtake her as her apartment goes dark. No dinner. No work. She changed into sweats and a t-shirt, climbed under the covers, and now just wants this day to end.

It wasn't really a bad one. Three classes today, one of which was on Jefferson's presidency. (Maria spent a little extra time on Marbury v. Madison, because she always stints Supreme Court cases). There was a department meeting on the upcoming National History Day competition. Maria was joined at lunch by Edie Wilson, which surprised her a bit because she wasn't sure Edie liked her. Maria, for her part, decided that she actually liked Edie's sharp tongue, whose targets -- among them Edie herself -- are usually deserving.

After school, Maria was going to grade the set of quizzes she received yesterday so she could return them tomorrow, the last day before the Thanksgiving break. But after nearly dozing twice at her desk, she decided she'd go home and work there. She had just grabbed her mail out of the her box in alcove of her building when her cell rang, which she fished out of her handbag. It was her son Evan. Maria listened as she unpacked her laptop and he explained that while he was planning on coming to see her for Thanksgiving, his girlfriends' parents had sent a pair of refundable plane tickets to their home in Florida, and he was thinking that . . . .

You go on ahead, she had told him. Felicia had long since decided, after careful discussion with Maria, to spend Thanksgiving her father. Mother and daughter would be together for Christmas. Maria is almost relieved to face the long weekend alone. She'll go to a movie on Thursday -- she's always loved going to the movies on Thanksgiving -- and maybe stop by and see Jen, who invited her for dinner. But when would she see her children together again?

Maria was sorting through her mail, handbag on the floor and laptop case still on her shoulder, when she saw the official-looking document with the state seal of New Hampshire. Oh my God, she thought, as she tore the envelope and pulled out the sheet. She opened it up and was right: it was the final decree. Seventeen months since she discovered Mark's affair, sixteen months since they separated, thirteen months since they filed the no-fault divorce, and four months since she moved down here. And now here it was. She felt numb.

After about a full minute, Maria roused herself. Shedding all she had in her hands, she went into the kitchen put the dishes in the rack away, sorted some laundry, finished looking through the mail, and plugged her computer into its charger. Then took the quizzes and decree upstairs. She thought maybe she'd do some grading while sitting on her bed, maybe with the TV on. But after she changed, washed her face, and climbed into bed, she couldn't bring herself to break the silence with her clicker. Nor could she pick up the first quiz; the decree was on top, and it was as if it blocked her from picking the quizzes up.

Now, suddenly, the great wave of misery breaks upon Maria Bradstreet. She hangs her head and cries until her neck hurts. And then she slides under the covers and cries some more. It takes a good twenty minutes before she finally drifts to sleep. And it takes another 47 before she turns in her sleep and knocks the decree to the floor.

The cosmopolitan dilemma

The meaning of diversity been stretched to the breaking point. But what will take its place?

The following piece is running in the current edition of the History News Network website.

Cosmopolitan

/kozmpollit’n/

• adjective 1 consisting of people from many different countries and cultures: a cosmopolitan metropolis. 2 familiar with and at ease in many different countries and cultures.

• noun a cosmopolitan person.

--Oxford English Dictionary

After a long period of struggle, and amid ongoing resistance, the concept of diversity appears to have gained a relatively secure footing in American life. Elite institutions ranging from schools to banks have institutionalized it in their recruitment policies and daily practices; as a practical matter one can no more be opposed to diversity than one can democracy or even fairness. There is, of course, an enormous difference between diversity as an idea and diversity as a reality. Moreover, many of those who profess to support the ideal harbor doubts and hostility toward it, doubts and hostility that typically focus less on attacking diversity itself than what it is interpreted to mean (like quotas or political correctness, to cite two frequently cited examples).

Actually, the concept of diversity and its practical meaning may be under the most strain from those who are actually trying to implement it, something that became clear to me earlier this year when I was involved in a group effort to craft a new diversity statement for my school. The time has long since passed that diversity can simply be considered synonymous with racial preference, or that racial preference itself can be considered a black-and-white affair. That's true not only because Latinos, Asians and Native Americans have all been growing in absolute and relative numbers in recent decades, but also because mixed-race identities are scrambling once seemingly distinct categories. Exhibit A in this regard, of course, is the president of the United States, who is simultaneously African and American and whose children are African-American (among other things). The check-boxes on the forms just don't make as much sense anymore.

This is why most diversity statements I've seen now amount to a laundry list of categories -- the former trinity of race, class and gender now supplemented with ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, among others -- that only seem to invite consideration of further objections and omissions. The same might be said of the related term of inclusion, which is always relative and involves some form of exclusion. Typically such exclusion is cast in terms of rejecting those considered intolerant, though to those with deeply held beliefs "tolerance" can sometimes seem like little more than a polite way of expressing indifference.

The more one tries to pin down a definition of diversity, the more elusive it becomes. I was interested to learn recently about a decision that was made to admit a German student to a private school in the interests of diversity -- and then to admit a second in an effort to avoid the kind of isolation and tokenism that sometimes afflicts minorities. Minority: That's another word that's losing meaning amid the ongoing demographic transformation of the United States.

Such counter-intuitive developments point toward a reality that defenders of diversity often cite when trying to reconcile them, namely that the point is not so much to right old wrongs than to create environments that advance the interests of specific institutions and society in general as they evolve. This is, in fact, the legal basis of that procedural pillar of diversity, Affirmative Action, as upheld in the Supreme Court's Bakke v. Regents case of 1977. There has long been a suspicion among some on the political Right that admissions offices, for example, have used Bakke as cover to fashion de facto racial quotas.

Whether or not this is true, it has become increasingly evident in recent years that even those institutions with an avowed embrace of racial diversity actively pursue other kinds as well. We've all heard proverbial stories about the SAT-deficient cello player from Indiana or semi-literate goalie from Phoenix who gained acceptance to Ivy League schools because they fit into the pointillistic portrait of a class the admissions office paints every year, a portrait whose exquisite fluidity defies any attempt at generalization on the part of those who lack access to the committee's studio. Such developments have been limned in a series of recent books, perhaps the best of which is Mitchell Stevens's Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (2007).

Amid this growing sense of confusion and contradiction, there is a word that does describe what value in fact these people are both affirming and making a reality: cosmopolitanism. In a sense, cosmopolitanism is synonymous with diversity as described here: both terms regard difference as a positive good, and one to be actively sought and promoted. Cosmopolitanism has the great advantage, though, of being avowedly kaleidoscopic: it not only savors variety, but also variation in that variety. It attends less to the features of a minority culture than a desire to blend many different kinds of experience in the hope that the resulting mixture will engender a sense of personal as well as collective improvement. The people produced from this process create a pool of leaders, broadly construed, who can be counted on to promote cosmopolitan values in societies where their opponents may pose challenges that range from the distasteful to the immoral. The process may vary, but the capacity of any society to reproduce such people comes close to describing what it means to sustain what we would call a civilization.

I'm describing what might be called the bright side of cosmopolitanism. There are others. Cosmopolitanism is avowedly elitist. It doesn't necessarily deny the particularism of local cultures -- they represent the spice of life -- but it finally does demand those who attain or inherit it surrender much of the local in the name of the global, as the very name "university" implies. To assert or pretend otherwise is worse than naive: it is dishonest to the point of oppressive, as an artistic tradition that stretches from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Kanye West's The College Dropout attests. Cosmopolitans typically display appealing traits of tolerance, good manners, and a willingness to innovate. But values like loyalty, egalitarianism, and a healthy skepticism about the march of Progress are harder to embrace and maintain.

In theory, at least, the difference between cosmopolitanism and diversity is that the latter has a more avowed commitment to meritocracy, of creating avenues of opportunity for upward mobility. There is some truth to this. But not much. We all know that it is the African American child New Rochelle lawyers who tends to gain admission to Harvard, not the child of Tennessee Baptists. (And the child of WASP legacies that is more likely than either, a truth that makes all the quibbling over the unfairness of Affirmative Action seem ridiculous.) Moreover, the concept of meritocracy itself is problematic. For one thing, the definition of merit itself is elusive when it's not avowedly discriminatory. For another, the very premise of meritocracy involves the awarding of hierarchical advantage to beneficiaries in ways that undercut its presumably democratic aims, one reason why beneficiaries of meritocracy sometimes act entitled, i.e. with a title, in the aristocratic sense of the term.

Where does this leave us? In short, with a dilemma. It's hard not to conclude at this point that the only truly non-discriminatory way to award privilege in this society would be on a random basis. Actually, I'd bet that if you were to replace the students at my elite independent school with a random collection of students, the latter would do surprisingly well once they had the advantages the presumably talented survivors of the admissions process did. But this is largely a moot point, because too many people have a literal and figurative investment in the status quo, a status quo in which private schools of any kind are not required to justify their otherwise problematic existence (beyond a commitment to the concept of diversity, that is).

The alternative is to drop diversity in favor of the more accurate term of cosmopolitanism as the governing paradigm for the distribution of privilege in American life. As I've been at some pains to make clear, cosmopolitanism has real problems. But then, so does diversity. Unlike diversity, however, the virtues of cosmopolitanism are clear and attainable, and there is at least some measure of amelioration built into it (there's room for a Tennessee Baptist in a cosmopolitan cosmos, after all). If nothing else, recognizing the reality of cosmopolitanism would be a constructive first step in fashioning an alternative. Honesty may not be the best policy. But it's probably the best place to start re-thinking how an American Dream of upward mobility can survive in a nation where long-term economic challenges may make any form of social opportunity seem like a luxury our elite institutions can no longer afford.

For some additional thoughts on the role of race in questions of diversity, see my post "Navigating Color without a Line."