Place in Time (Part I)

The following is the first of a series of post on regionalism in U.S. history.

Maps, like movies, tell such wonderfully true lies. That’s “true lies” in the sense of certifiable falsehood as opposed to a half-truth or statement that can’t be proven, like “drinking alcohol will kill you,” (yes, under some circumstances) or “Michael Jordan is the best basketball player to ever play the game” (what’s the definition of “best,” and how do you measure it?) The assertion that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion of 2003: that’s truly a lie, one uttered repeatedly by officials in the Bush administration to mislead the American people to support a war against Iraq.

“True lies” can also refer to statements that are not factually correct but reveal a larger truth.  It is untrue – a true falsehood, as it were – to say that the character of Ilsa Lund ever utters the words “Play it again, Sam” to the piano player in the classic 1942 movie Casablanca, even though generations of film lovers have associated the line with the movie. But this fictive line, which refers to a song called “As Time Goes By,” that Ilsa really does want Sam to play, is the only real way – which is to say a way rooted in history – that she can express her now-secret attachment to Rick Blaine. At the end of that movie, Blaine will lie to Ilsa’s husband Victor Laszlo about his relationship with her as an act of kindness and as a way of honoring his true self. (If you don’t know what I mean you must see this movie!) In the world of Casablanca, which in some respects remains the world in which we live, facts don’t get in the way of truth, and on those occasions when they threaten it, as when a gambler asks Karl, an employee at Rick’s café, if its casino is honest, Karl answers by saying “as honest as the day is long.” That, truly, is a non-lie.

Maps are never as clever as Hollywood movies, however. They can’t afford to be – their existence is premised on an unwritten assertion of accuracy, of describing the boundaries of the world as it is, and no one will pay any attention to them unless they’re perceived as trustworthy. They do this often enough that we take their accuracy for granted. But maps also conceal, distort, and omit all kinds of things – in a way, that’s the essence of what a map is, i.e. a simplification of the world that helps people get their bearings. And yet even the most scrupulous maps get dated, even falsified, as facts on the ground change.

The maps that I’ve tended to find the most fascinating are political maps – maps that mark the boundaries cities, regions, and states. These of course are lies in some sense because in real life such boundaries are almost always invisible, at best marked by posted signs that signal you’re crossing lines you wouldn’t otherwise know exist. No flora or fauna change when you move between New York City and Westchester County, for example. Even when maps denote actual physical features on a landscape, it’s hard to say with any certainty where they begin and end.  What spot marks the rise of the Andes Mountains? The beginning of the Sahara Desert? Where is the mouth of the Nile River? (If you assume there are actually answers to these questions – there are more than one, depending on which direction from which you approach them – they’re subject to changes in climate and topography.) At best, maps are approximations, like so much else in our daily lives.

The other kind of maps I’ve tended intriguing are – surprise, surprise – historical ones, especially those that depict dramatic shifts in boundaries, like battlefield maps or those that mark the rise and fall of empires. Such maps are masterpieces of compression. Even those that illustrate changes that take place over a relatively short period of time (like, say, the conquests of Alexander the Great between 334 and 323 BC) convey years of action into a glance that can be absorbed in seconds. And yet, paradoxically, a small shape on a few inches of paper can capture the conquest of a vast continent or more.

Such maps have a way of leading me to suspend my usual ideological or political beliefs. I don’t really believe it would have been good for Europe as a whole for Napoleon to retain the territory his armies overran in the first dozen years of the nineteenth century, but I find myself oddly rooting for him when looking at maps that reconstruct his surge into Russia in 1812. More bizarre – and troubling – is the way I marvel over the comparable terrain engulfed by the German army in World War II. It doesn’t take long for even a novice map reader to appreciate how hard it is for any military force to dominate a continental stretch on the face of the earth, and to feel a thrill at the scale of conquest by a Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. Are these maps revealing lies I tell myself about who I really am and where my loyalties are? I wouldn’t think so. But maybe I am a little imperialist at heart.

In the space of a simple diagram, maps seem capture the fates of millions. But again, such pictures can be misleading at best. How accurate is it, really, is it to designate this or that sliver of central Asia as part of the Mongolian empire, given the vast distances, limited communication, and the avowedly hands-off approach of Mongolian civil administration that was one of the keys to its success? Were there any challenges, implicit or explicit, to such authority? Can it tell us anything meaningful about the lives of the people who lived in a fragment that’s shaded this way or that? Who makes these maps, anyway? And by whose authority have they ended up in our hands?

  These questions become more pressing when we get closer to home – if we pause to think about them. Which, often, we don’t. There are so many maps in our lives that we take for granted. Those of our hometowns, for example. Or our home states. And those of the United States. None of the boundaries in these maps are arbitrary. Sometimes they’re geographic, in the sense that a river, coast, or mountain range determines them. Kansas, for example, would be a neat rectangle, except that it gets nicked in the corner by the Missouri River, which determines is northeastern boundary. But the significance of that river in the shaping of Kansas was a decision that somebody made – there are plenty of rivers that run right through the middle of cities, for example – after a battle or some kind of meeting (or a meeting that was some kind of battle). We may not know or care about those meetings or battles, which as likely as not took long ago. But they nevertheless determine the taxes we pay, the kind of commute we have to work or school, or why we live in one place and not another. 

Next: Mapping American history

Storied analysis

In But Where is the Lamb? Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac, cultural historian James Goodman plumbs ancient scripture -- and modern secular faith

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.   

It's possible to describe this book in a fairly straightforward way, so I'll begin by doing that. But Where Is the Lamb? is an exegesis of nineteen verses from the Book of Genesis, a foundational piece of scripture for Jews, Christians and Muslims. James Goodman chronicles an array of interpretations these faith communities have generated with a slab of prose that's reproduced in its entirety on the cover of the book.

More specifically, Lamb (as I'll call it) is a reading of one of the most famous and perplexing stories in the canon of great world religions: God's commandment that Abraham sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, Abraham's preparations to act on this instruction, and the last-minute reprieve that gets delivered before Isaac is to be killed. Just what was God doing when he issued this injunction? Why did Abraham act on, if not execute, the order? Did Isaac understand what was happening? (The title of the book refers to the question he asks as his father prepares his sacrifice.) These are some of the questions Goodman plumbs in about 260 compact pages.

That said, the narrative arc of his study is vast, and, notwithstanding its brevity, surprisingly detailed. One can describe the first thousand or so years of interpretation as an intra-Jewish dialogue conducted against a backdrop of the rise and fall of Israel, the spread of Hellenism, and the expansion of the Roman Empire. So it is that we're introduced to the book of Jubilees, which argues that God always knew that Abraham would obey and was demonstrating this to Satan, much in the way he did with Job. The Hellenic-minded Philo, by contrast, emphasized Abraham's fidelity in a context of Greek religion, where the sacrifice of one's children was relatively common. (There's an intriguing anthropological subtext in the Lamb regarding the role of child sacrifice in the ancient world that might have been strengthened with a nod to places like pre-Columbian America -- it seems to have been remarkably widespread.) The Roman-era Flavius Josephus makes the tale of Abraham and Isaac one of fidelity by father and son, while Pseudo-Philo emphasizes the latter's conscious sacrifice, a model for Jewish martyrdom around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

The arrival of Christianity shifted the terms of the conversation about Abraham and Isaac. As was done with the Old Testament generally, the story became -- as far as Goodman is concerned, it was reduced to -- a set of typologies. Abraham's would-be sacrifice of his son prefigures God's actual sacrifice of his own son, Jesus. Abraham's wife/Isaac's mother Sarah, who was certainly a figure of some scrutiny earlier, gets foregrounded as a Mary figure. Such readings of the story prompted responses, some critical, others accommodating, within mainstream Judaism, though of course isolating the strands of Jewish tradition was a complicated matter in the early centuries of the Christian era.

The Muslim tradition introduced another wrinkle into the story by substituting Ishmael -- Abraham's illegitimate son by Hagar -- as the son to be sacrificed, though this was not a feature of all Islamic readings. Perhaps the simplest way of distinguishing the core differences in the three Abrahamic traditions would be to say that for Jews the story has been one of obedience; for Christians one of faith, and for Muslims one of submission. There is of course a considerable amount of overlap in these concepts, but Goodman teases out their nuances well enough to make clear that their implications really do cut in different directions.

That said, it was not really philosophical nuances that drove the rise of anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages -- in the case of the Crusades, it was a matter of Christians finding an indispensable enemy closer to home than the Levant. Centuries of pogroms gave the Abraham/Isaac story new significance for many Jews, some of whom drew analogies between Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son and their own willingness, literal as well as figurative, to sacrifice their children rather than to submit to Christianity by the sword.  This threat of systematic destruction never disappeared, but with the arrival of the Enlightenment new interpretive directions emerged, among them a quest to trace the historical record more accurately, a literary sensibility that expanded the story's meaning beyond religious indoctrination, and more psychological readings (the analysis of Kierkegaard in particular is quite compelling). Goodman continues his interpretative tour through the Holocaust and beyond, weaving landmark figures like Elie Wiesel into it. Along the way he also incorporates non-textual renderings of the Abraham/Isaac story from Rembrandt to Bob Dylan.

Considered solely on these terms, But Where is the Lamb? is an impressive book. (It must be a source of satisfaction to Goodman that Lamb is published by Schocken Books, the imprint of great Jewish writers from Franz Kafka to Primo Levi.) As he makes clear, Goodman is not a biblical scholar by training, though he has a journalist's suppleness in his ability to distill and sequence complicated ideas. I will confess that by the end I started to feel that the book had a one-damn-thing-after-another quality: it becomes increasingly clear as one reads that the Abraham/Isaac story, like so many others in scripture, can and has been bent in any number of different and even contradictory directions. (Abraham and Isaac as a parable of feminist empowerment? Sarah, re-enter stage left -- talking.) This sense of sprawl gets intensified because Goodman does not provide a compact argument as to how he understands the story, though his (conventionally modern) opinions are reasonably clear. Yet impatience of the kind I'm describing is at least partially misplaced. Though Lamb functions as a work of popular history, that's not the only, or even primary, reason to read it.

Actually, one can better another sense of what Goodman is really up to by considering this book in the context of his others: his Pulitzer-Prize nominated 1994 study Stories of Scottsboro, and Blackout, his 2005 book on the infamous 1977 electricity outage in New York City. In these works Goodman established himself as a leading practitioner of subgenre of cultural history known as memory, a distinctively postmodern historiographic school that explores the plurality of meanings that surround a given event or text. In some ways, the study of memory is now among the most vibrant of the intellectual currents to follow in the wake of the egalitarian currents of the 1960s. While others, like the New Social History, had similarly democratic impulses, they never managed to fully resolve the contradiction between its insular, even elitist methodology, and its purported egalitarianism. Such problems continue to afflict theoretically-minded approaches to the humanities on the ideological left.

Goodman doesn't have this problem: his prose is marvelous in its clarity. Lamb is written in an informal, first-person style marked by invented dialogue, speculative fancy, and phraseology -- like "Don't let me give you the wrong impression," "Believe me when I tell you" and "Believe me when I say" -- that most professional historians abjure. He even violates what might be considered a cardinal sin of expressing self-doubt, the subject of entire chapter in a book that is executed as a series of short, concatenated essays. "You have no training or special expertise in any relevant area," he quotes his editor as saying. "You don't even have the languages you would need." Goodman's reply: "'It's worse than that,' I said to him (and ever afterward to anyone who would listen). The real problem is not that I am not qualified. It is that I know how much I don't know.'"

There's something almost showy about this confession, because Goodman clearly had enough confidence to execute the book and expect that his reader would get to this point (which comes toward the end). He gets away with it as a matter of scholarship because this is in fact a deeply researched and well-documented book. Experts in the field are likely to argue with his assertions, but I suspect it will be hard for them to avoid taking him seriously.

But I don't think establishing his bona fides as a religious commentator is where Goodman's heart is in any case. I'm going to guess that he fretted more about matters of voice and structure than he did evidence and argument. In an important sense this is less the work of a historian than it is a fictively-inflected non-fiction writer. Here I should note that Goodman holds an unusual joint appointment at Rutgers in History and Creative Writing. And that he is the editor of the journal Rethinking History, which seeks to stretch the expressive boundaries of professional scholarship.

All of which strikes me as the logical outcome of his disciplinary obsessions -- which, you might say, have resulted in a crisis of faith.  When you make pluralism a (dare I say) sacred value -- a tendency that has dominated not just cultural history, but American intellectual life generally in the last half-century -- you're virtually begging for challenges to authority that are as likely to result in free market deregulation as they they are multiculturalism. If it's impossible to know what's true, you're thrown back on yourself. (Theologian G.H. Davies wrote in 1969 that the voice telling Abraham to kill Isaac came not from God but inside his own head, prompting angry fellow Baptists to withdraw the book they had commissioned from circulation.) If meanings are endlessly plastic, why should anybody pay attention to yours?

Goodman in effect goes about trying answer this question in two ways. The first is by avowedly embracing, as a lifelong Jew, the faith of his fathers (and mothers). When intellectual precepts are nothing more than a series of shifting currents, and the scientific method rests on a foundation of endless revision ("We now know ..."), the weight of tradition, religious and otherwise, becomes more appealing. As Goodman notes, ancient scripture seems vexing to us moderns because we're fixated by conflicts in the record, a fixation that can be loosely dated with the birth of modern Europe (i.e. that place and time when religious pluralism became common sense). But the writers who emended or supplemented the Torah all those centuries ago never understood themselves to be doing anything but elaborating on received truth: their confidence in the law mattered more than their quibbles or their doubts. Facts, chronology, translation: these were all beside the point. Which they remain for millions, even billions, of people, which is something that scares the hell out the secular imagination, even though it makes a kind of sense.

Clearly, such an answer can't be wholly sufficient to Goodman, either. Perhaps he believes, like the Puritans, that faith is an irresistible gift, not a choice. In any case, he's too much a creature of his own culture, and still too invested in the rituals of academic life, to surrender the longings for grace in that faith, which among other things involves the transcendence of a book that just might reach that mythic General Audience we all covet. But he has apparently concluded that the best way to get there is by not simply theorizing, but acting, on the truism that history is an art, not a (social) science. Which is the second half of his answer as to why we should listen to him, whether or not we're believers: even more than persuading us, he wants to beguile us with the alchemy of the written word. In this regard, Lamb is an imaginative experiment in history as literature. Believe this goyim when I when I tell you: this is the general direction in which the future of history lies -- and comes to life.

Killer instincts

Stephen King spins another great yarn in his pulpy summer novel Joyland.

The following review will be posted on the Books page of the History News Network.    

Good Labor Day weekend reading: Stephen King's new novel Joyland has spent most of the summer ensconced on the upper reaches of the New York Times Bestseller list, where most of his books enjoy long stays. What's interesting about this one is that it's a paperback original issued as part of Charles Ardai's Hard Case imprint, a series that reissues old crime classics (from James M. Cain to Donald Westlake) as well as original fiction (including that of Ardai himself). Hard Case is also distinguished by it pulpy covers depicting alluring women in various states of undress, many of them by artist Glen Orbik. They're not politically correct, but the resonate with the spirit of their pulp predecessors.

King published an early Hard Case title, The Colorado Kid, back in 2005, a deeply haunting book but not one of his classic horror stories. Actually, King's oeuvre has been been notable for its versatility; he's written in a variety of genres, and his 2000 book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a marvelous primer for students of fiction, broadly construed.

Joyland is a story narrated by the melancholy Devin Jones, a man in his sixties recalling his youth working at the North Carolina amusement part of the title back in the summer and fall of 1973. Struggling to get over the girlfriend who ditched him, he becomes increasingly absorbed by a mysterious murder four years earlier at Joyland, which may have been part of a set of serial killings of young women. He also becomes involved in the lives of a seriously ill boy and his single mother. The two sets of storylines converge as Hurricane Gilda approaches the eastern seaboard. As is true of many King novels stretching back to his now-classic debut novel Carrie (1974), there is a paranormal element to the plot. But King has a light touch and leaves his readers with an interpretive margin, even if he resists easy explanations. He also weighs in occasionally with a meta-narrative comment. "If you read a whodunit or see a mystery movie, you can whistle gaily past whole heaps of corpses, only interested in finding out if it was the butler or the evil stepmother. But these had been real young women. Crows had probably ripped their flesh; maggots would have infested their eyes and squirmed up their noses and into the gray meat of their brains." (He challenges you even as he delivers the goods.)

There's something deeply likable about King's utter immersion in pop culture genres and his ability to entertain readers. There's also something admirable about his sense of loyalty. A writer of his commercial clout could have published this book with any number of major houses. Choosing to do so with a small paperback house is a way of honoring his pulp roots (this is also true of his pioneering efforts with electronic publishing, where he distributed his work in serial form, sometimes for free). In recent years, King has begun to enjoy critical esteem; he was recently the subject, with his family, of an admiring cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Whether or not his work survives his age, we have been lucky to have him.

Picturing the photographer

In Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, magazine editor Robert Wilson offers a focused portrait of a sketchy life

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.   

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Mathew Brady, who spent most of his adult life at the center of an emergent modern celebrity culture, is how little is known about him. His date of birth is unknown, as is much of his family life. Many of the most famous photographs associated with him are of uncertain provenance; his relationship with his peers have long been debated. And yet there is little question that Brady shaped the visual imagination of the nineteenth century. Amid ongoing uncertainty over exactly what he did, there is nevertheless substantial consensus that he was a major artist. That was true in his time, and remains true in ours.

In this relatively short, readable and incisive biography, American Scholar editor Robert Wilson deals with the dearth of information about Brady's life in two principal ways. The first is to mine the documentary record about which there is confidence with care and flair, analyzing the visual choices Brady made in the photographs he produced or supervised, and the context in which he chose to present them. (Many Brady photographs are reproduced in the book, though one can't help but wish there were more.) The other is compensate for the lack of record of Brady's inner life by situating in him in his time. To a great extent, this means looking at the careers of figures like Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, who began their careers as Brady's proteges but later became his rivals. (At times the book reads like it should have been titled Brady's Boys, a nod to Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson's 1996 book The Murrow Boys, about the pioneers of broadcast journalism.) Wilson acknowledges arguments that Brady exploited these people and that his relationships with them were marked by hard feelings, but regards them as exaggerations at best. In his telling Brady was no saint, but at worst he worked within the mores of people in his profession at the time.

The son of Irish immigrants from upstate New York, Brady moved to Manhattan as a young man and apparently benefited from the tutelage of Samuel Morse, who dabbled in early photography on the road to inventing the telegraph. He opened a gallery in downtown New York in the 1840s, shrewdly exploiting what were apparently excellent social skills and building a reputation by offering to photograph prominent people for free as a means of building up his business. Before the Civil War he was already established as a leading figure in the field, a portraitist known for his images of figures ranging from presidents to the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind, whose 1850s tour of the United States made her the Taylor Swift of her time. 

What it actually means to call such portraits his is a little complicated, however. Brady rarely operated cameras himself. He made technical decisions about matters like lighting, and he thought carefully about how his subjects would be posed and framed. He sometimes made his imprint by literally entering the picture. His studio -- he sometimes had two, one in New York and another in Washington -- was a bustling commercial operation employing a relatively large staff. He was like  modern film director, producer and studio head rolled up into one -- like, say, Steven Spielberg.

Brady of course is best known for his role in documenting the American Civil War. Again, however, he was rarely in the middle of the action; as Wilson notes, Brady's presence at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 was apparently a sufficiently harrowing experience that he worked hard to avoid repeating, even if he did return to the front in subsequent years, notably to Gettysburg in the aftermath of that battle. Wilson notes that even stipulating the obvious technical and logistical obstacles facing Civil War photographers, there are surprisingly few images of actual warfare. Photographers like Gardner, who actually worked for the U.S. government (doing things like copying maps) even while he worked for Brady, preferred to focus on more static subjects like the dead, and even here there appears to have been a more limited appetite for such images by the public than is commonly acknowledged. Wilson makes a compelling case for the quality of Brady's own photography, notably in his exceptional portrait of Robert E. Lee, taken days after he surrendered at Appomattox, a professional coup rooted in connections he had forged decades before.

Brady's postwar life is marked by ebbing prominence and mounting financial difficulties. He continued to enjoy the esteem of figures like Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, even as he found himself in increasingly narrow personal straits. With great difficulty, he convinced the U.S. government to buy his work, but mismanagement and possible graft undermined the value of the sale, both in terms of the compensation Brady reaped and the way his work was handled. Wilson has slightly more of a documentary record to work with in this phase of Brady's life. The story he tells is a melancholy one.

But it is nevertheless a valuable one. Amid a Civil War centennial and a prominent exhibition of Civil War photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this spring and summer, Wilson's book is a welcome and overdue tribute to a man whose achievements are often noted but rarely plumbed. It's one that's likely to last.

Uneasy Riders

In Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, journalist Brett Martin captures a moment that (for now) is still unfolding

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.   

Historians of popular culture know the pattern: every so often a confluence of developments -- technological change, new revenue sources, emerging audiences, and last (and, mythology notwithstanding, very possibly least), artistic innovation -- converge to create an unexpected cultural flowering in an established medium. It happened in the publishing industry circa 1850, radio circa 1930, the record business in the 1950s, and in Hollywood in the 1970s. As we're all aware, we seem to be living through such a moment now with cable television, reflected in the excitement of dramas like The Sopranos (1999-2007), The Wire (2002-2008), Mad Men (2007-), and Breaking Bad (2008-). One difference that may distinguish this particular efflorescence from previous ones is the degree of self-consciousness in the breadth and depth of the cultural commentary. It usually took a while, for instance, for good books to show up on even as recent a phenomenon as the rise of independent cinema. But in the case of cable, we have Alan Sepinwall's highly regarded The Revolution Was Televised, which came out last year. And we now have Brett Martin's newly published Difficult Men as well.

The most obvious model for Difficult Men is Peter Biskind's now-classic 1999 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-Rock & Roll Generation saved Hollywood. As befitting the different cultural moments, Martin's subjects -- notably Sopranos creator David Chase, The Wire's David Simon, and Mad Men's Matthew Weiner -- are a notably more dour, business-savvy crowd than the manic Francis Coppola or Martin Scorsese. But they're comparably driven personalities able to take advantage of a relative vacuum in a medium and realize passionate artistic visions. In the case of Hollywood in the seventies, this was a matter of an industry that had lost its way commercially. In the case of a network like HBO, it was a matter of very low, if not confused, expectations about how to proceed. In both cases, early success pushed open a door for others to follow -- in movies, it was a figure like Steven Spielberg; in the case of cable, Vince Gilligan (of Breaking Bad fame). Both were more mild personalities who seem to be able to work within the system (in Gilligan's case, the once-benighted world of basic cable like AMC, which acquired Mad Men as well as his show).

Unlike The Revolution Will Be Televised, which is organized around particular shows, Difficult Men is constructed in a more complex, woven structure driven by personalities. Though it occasionally makes forays into usually very good textual reading of individual episodes, notably the "College" episode from the first decade of The Sopranos, its core is interviews with the showrunners of these programs. Here Martin's strength as a reporter -- he writes for GQ, among other magazines -- shines through. One nevertheless wishes the documentation had been a little more careful, at least in terms of secondary sources. Still, the sense of craft here is impressive; Martin may owe a debt here to master editor Colin Dickerman at Penguin. He avoids the sense of irritating idiosyncrasy that sometimes attends such books (why so much Sopranos and so little Big Love?) by making a reasonably good case for the distinctive significance of the shows he focuses on in terms of their impact on the television industry.

The most striking strength of this book, though, is the overarching argument that animates Martin's narrative. He makes a compelling case that this television renaissance -- he calls it the "Third Golden Age" after those of the early years of TV and the Hill Street Blues era of the eighties -- was driven by a notably gendered male angst rooted in a post-feminist zeitgeist, both in terms of the way these shows were made and in what they depicted. As with the breakdown of network dominance of the television industry in the 1990s, the more diversity-minded milieu of the 21st century paradoxically legitimated the art of of mostly white men -- though Martin makes a good case that HBO became an unexpected venue for African American culture -- because it could be seen as simply one subculture among many in a broadcast world where cable audiences for even the most successful shows were a fraction of those of the network era. Notwithstanding the rise of recent female-centered dramas like Homeland and The Americans, I suspect this moment may be viewed with more distaste in the coming years as cultural undercurrents shift, and the auteurist-minded sensibility of autocratic figures like Chase and Weiner, who pride themselves on the degree to which the exercise control over their creations, are subjected to ongoing critical scrutiny. But the place of their shows will be secure as historical phenomena, if not necessarily in terms of their artistry.

One also suspects -- as one suspects Martin suspects -- that this particular flowering may be close to running its course. As a younger generation with far less willingness to pay inflated (and, ironically, socialistic) bundled fees for multiple networks refuses to pay for cable television at all, much less a package of channels subscribers don't necessarily want, the financial model that sustains these uniformly expensive enterprises may disappear. Quality television -- no, make that quality shows, which may or may not show up on television -- will not disappear. But they're likely to be fewer and farther between, and show up in different venues. Someday someone will long to be David Chase, just as Chase longed to be Martin Scorsese. The intensity of that desire will a precondition for success. The rest of it will involve recognizing the emergence of new worlds and figuring out ways to capitalize on them. Such is the stuff our moneyed (and recyclable) dreams are made of.

Jim is vacationing, as he has for a number of years now, in northern Vermont with his family. The agenda includes swimming, hiking, shopping, and improving his napping skills. Vacation reading includes the latest Archer Mayor novel, Paradise City. This installment finds salt-of-the-earth-cop-extraordinaire Joe Gunther of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation chasing down the source of a complicated string of crimes that stretch from Boston to Burlington, centered on the the fashionable art scene of Northampton, Massachusetts, the so-called Paradise City of the title. Reading Mayor's novels this time of year is as comfortable as slipping into an old shoe.

Also on the docket is Brett Martin's Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Being deprived of the most recent episode of the latter makes the book a source of comfort amid some decidedly relative deprivation. (Tracking down the latest misadventures of Walter White will be at the top of the docket upon returning to home.) A full review of the book of the Martin book is likely to be up by early next week.

Best all as we head into the home stretch of summer.

Framing the collapse

In The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, Scottish intellectual extraordinaire Niall Ferguson offers a provocative, if flawed, overview as to why the Western world is fading

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

I'm a sucker for lecture series books. For many years, Harvard University Press has published the William E. Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which have included wonderful titles like Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988), Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country (1998), and Andrew Delbanco's The Real American Dream (1999). Louisiana State University Press's Walter Lynwood Fleming Lecture series is also very good, notable for Drew Gilpin Faust's The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (1989), among other titles. What's nice about these books is that they often distill a cast of mind into highly readable, short volumes that can be digested in chunks. They're typically small in terms of trim size and their number of pages.

What's not typical is for a major commercial press like Penguin to publish a series of lectures. But then Niall Ferguson is not exactly a typical author -- he's an academic superstar with appointments Harvard, Oxford and Stanford and a veritable journalism and television brand. In The Great Degeneration, he offers a précis of his libertarian brand of thinking with an expansive view of Anglo-American society -- and why it's falling apart. It rests on a key insight, and a questionable prescription.

The insight -- a usefully provocative one -- is to view the United States and Britain (with occasional references to the rest of the West) through the lens of institutions. Actually, it's a little surprising this isn't done more often. In recent years we've tended to focus on things like climate/geography, brilliantly argued in works like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) or culture (the orientation of neoconservative intellectuals such as Thomas Sowell). Ferguson instead focuses his four chapters, bounded by an introduction and conclusion, by four institutional forces in everyday life: government, the marketplace, the legal system, and civil society (he's a big Tocqueville fan). In each case, he locates the triumph of Anglo-American life in the last three centuries to the way England and the United States have organized these institutions relative to their rivals. And in each case, he also cites the degeneration of the title, which he captures with brief, vivid strokes (and a few graphs). In diagnosing a problem, he's fairly persuasive.

It's when he starts prescribing a solution that Ferguson runs into trouble. The underlying cause of these maladies, as he sees it, is excessive regulation. It leads to government tyranny, market decay, legal shenanigans (he describes the replacement of the rule of law with "the rule of lawyers"), and the evisceration of the voluntarism that provided the sinews of greatness. The problem is not exactly that he's wrong -- though he certainly has his critics -- so much is that he can't resist potshots that undercut his credibility. So, for example, he complains that the creeping socialistic mentality in the West has led to demands for rights to things like education and healthcare, which he regards as unsustainable. But when he asks as an aside, "Why not a right to a drinkable wine, too?" he trivializes understandable longings with a bon mot that suggests glibness, if not heartlessness.

Other times Ferguson is simply too selective to be taken seriously. When describing his legitimate concern about cost of entitlements for future generations, Ferguson asserts that "if young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be fans of Paul Ryan." Ryan does indeed want to cut social programs. But since his ardor for cutting taxes and offering benefits to large corporations ultimately outstrips his desire to balance the U.S. budget, it's hard to accept that he's thinking in the long-term way Ferguson advocates. Ferguson fairly notes that deregulation of financial markets has led to substantial growth relative to countries -- notably Canada -- that have been less aggressive in this regard. But he fails to mention that whatever its defects, Canada has not suffered the spectacular failures seen by U.S. and British financial institutions in the last decade. He has some legitimate, even amusing, anecdotes to offer about silly attempts by the government to micromanage the economy. But he never acknowledges that such efforts, however misguided, do not emerge in a vacuum -- they're often a response to the often unrelenting efforts of large corporations to accept any form of accountability, especially in the realm of paying taxes.

 Still, Ferguson can't be dismissed out of hand. The vigor and economy of his prose has always been a strength, and they're in sharp focus in a book that began its life as part of a radio series for the British Broadcasting Company in 2012. Ferguson notes in his acknowledgments that he produced the book in the seven months after a newborn son (one wonders how much a distraction the child proved to be). A reference to President Obama's notorious "you didn't build that" speech of last summer suggests the book's perishability. Still, as an introduction to Ferguson's work and a lively, if boilerplate, presentation of libertarian ideology, The Great Degeneration is not a bad place to start. If nothing else, Ferguson frames the problems of our time with the simplicity that is the hallmark of a powerful mind that even his complacency can't completely undercut.

An eerily modern old-fashioned war

In The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark refashions an old story and makes is startlingly new

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

At one point early on in The Sleepwalkers, University of Cambridge Professor Christopher Clark cites a perception -- certainly one I had growing up -- of the First World War taking place on the far side of a historical divide. "It was easy to imagine the disaster of Europe's 'last summer' as an Edwardian costume drama," he writes, attributing this view to Barbara Tuchman books. "The effete rituals and gaudy uniforms, the 'ornamentalism' of a world still largely organized around hereditary monarchy had a distancing effect on present-day recollection. They seemed to signal that the protagonists were people from another, vanished world."

The Sleepwalkers -- particularly the first of the book's three parts -- bracingly, even joltingly, revises this view. We are introduced to a shadowy world of fanatical terrorist cells engaged in plots that range across state borders, funded and armed by secret organizations that are connected, with carefully constructed plausible deniability, to official government ministries. The fanatics in this case are Serbian nationalists rather than Islamic fundamentalists (though it should be said that Serbian nationalism has long had strong religious overtones), but their outlook and methodology seem startlingly modern. So too are the polarizing pressures and media attention their activities generate, especially in terms of a positive feedback loop in which even presumably moderate figures feel compelled to emphasize their militancy for fear of appearing weak. When, after a series of botched attempts, one youthful member of an organization known as the Black Hand finally succeeds in murdering the heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it triggers a war in which many of the participants have only a peripheral relationship to its proximate cause. Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly don't seem so far away from the Balkans.

The second part of The Sleepwalkers is a traditional diplomatic history reminiscent of A.J.P. Taylor's classic 1954 study The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1914. Clark reconstructs the realignment of European great-power politics in the four decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The hallmark of his approach is pluralism: he demonstrates that for every national player in this drama, decision-making power was decentralized. In parliamentary societies, there were considerations of party politics, as well as the relationships between the military, the diplomatic corps, and a nation's political leadership. But even in presumably autocratic societies like Russia, policymaking was hardly straightforward; figures like Tsar Nicholas II or Kaiser Wilhelm were often managed by their ministers rather than leading their countries, and public opinion could influence strategic considerations no less than it did in France or England.

The final segment of The Sleepwalkers returns to Sarajevo in 1914, opening with a depiction of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that spools with cinematic clarity. Clark then proceeds to chart the sequence of decisions -- more like miscalculations -- that culminated in catastrophe. In light of his preceding analysis, it's clear that he rejects the notion of an overriding cause or a principal villain. As he explains in his conclusion, "The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over the corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol."

And yet the weight of his own analysis makes clear that Clark blames some figures more than others. Serbian nationalists were not only irresponsible in the intensity of their fervor, but in their insistence on the legitimacy of territorial claims flatly denied the realities of history and the presence of non-Serbs in places like Albania and Bosnia. (Serbian conquests in the Balkans in 1912-13 were followed by atrocities strongly reminiscent of ethnic cleansing.)  Russia's support of the Serbs was part of a larger pan-Slavic strategy that had less to do with mystic chords of memory than trying to realize a long-term goal of succeeding Ottoman Turkey as the master of the Straits of Bosphorus, one that led the Russians to take dangerous risks. And French desperation for a strong partner to counter Germany virtually goaded the Russians to take those risks.

Conversely, Clark rejects the view that Austria-Hungary was an empty husk of an empire lurching toward collapse -- indeed, Franz Ferdinand had a plausible scenario for a reformed and federalized polity that reduced the disproportionate influence of of Hungary and gave more representation for Slavs, including Serbians (one reason why radicals wishing to see the empire break up were so intent on killing him). Vienna's demands in the aftermath of the assassination were not unrealistic, though its delay in issuing them -- here again the baleful influence of internal divisions, one of which were foot-dragging Hungarians -- led rivals to mobilize their opposition. Germany is often portrayed as ratcheting up the pressure by giving the Austrians the notorious "blank check," but Clark depicts Berlin as believing the crisis could be resolved locally long after everyone else had concluded otherwise. British Conservatives welcomed war as a means of preventing Irish Home Rule, since fighting Germany would deprive Liberals of the military tools to implement a policy that had vocal, and possibly violent, opponents. More generally, there's a motif about anxieties surrounding masculinity being a factor for some of the characters he portrays, a nod toward cultural history that isn't really developed.

None of which is to say that The Sleepwalkers is a polemic in the vein of Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (1999), which considers Britain the culprit for the war. Clark's mode is tragic; his title refers to politicians who, "watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams," blindly led their peoples toward an outcome that no one wanted. Which makes for one more piece of revisionism worth noting here: Clark rejects the idea that jingoistic Europeans blithely leapt into the void in 1914. Instead he offers evidence that a great many people, both inside and outside government, were deeply worried about what was to come (he also gives us examples of diplomats who were literally sickened by the prospect). This may well be the most troubling aspect of this riveting, sobering book: in the end, good will and intelligence may simply not be enough to prevent disasters. Even those who remember the past may be condemned to repeat it.

Winning the battle -- and the war

In The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England, Marc Morris tells a story whose real drama began after the big big battle was over

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

I didn't realize until after I had finished Marc Morris's The Norman Conquest that I had done so shortly after reading another book about a pivotal battle in the history of a nation, Allen Guelzo's new book on Gettysburg, The Last Invasion (see my review here). In that book, as in every account of Gettysburg, there are countless subjects for speculation -- what Robert E. Lee was really thinking; how many effective troops the two armies actually had at their disposal; who really should get the credit for the Union army's retention of Little Round Top (and if that really mattered). But whatever questions may arise about that or any other battle in the American Civil War, the documentary record is immense. We know, for example, what Abraham Lincoln was doing on any given day, often on an hourly basis.

In the case of the Battle of Hastings, an epochal event in the making of England, the amount we don't know is vastly greater than what we do. History in such cases rests on the slimmest of written accounts, which often contradict each other. At one point in his narrative, Morris compares such accounts with the famed Bayeux Tapestry, and then quotes himself on some of the terms he used in preceding sentences: "seems"; "looks very much like"; "appears"; "as if." Though the battle took place was a "mere" 947 years ago, he has less to work with than even some ancient historians.

And yet Morris's professed uncertainty gives us confidence in him. He is as attuned to the historiography of his subject as he is the primary source record, which he deconstructs in some cases and affirms in others, often through a process of triangulation. Though clearly intended for a trade audience, and written by a non-academic (Morris is a magazine writer and broadcaster), The Norman Conquest is a tour de force piece of scholarship.

It took me a while to figure this out. I got a little impatient in the early going, which reviews a good deal of English history before and during the reign of King Edward the Confessor, a period marked by political instability and foreign occupation in a country where power was relatively decentralized.  It was not until about a third of the way through Morris's account that we finally get to hear about one of the more intriguing events that culminated in the Battle of Hastings: Earl Harold Godwineson's unexpected sojourn with William of Normandy -- which apparently happened when the earl's ship blew off course and he found himself a lavishly feted hostage -- that culminated in the Harold's pledge to support William's claim to the throne of England. But upon the death of Edward in January of 1066, Harold later took the crown for himself (he clearly regarded his promise,  made under duress, not binding). Harold fought off another claimant, that of the invading Scandinavian Harold Sigurdson -- the dreaded Harold Hardrada -- at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September, and then managed to make it to the other end of England in less than a month to meet William at Hastings, a battle he came within a whisker of winning. Morris's account of these dramatic events is authoritative and fast-paced. It's also complete before the book is half over.

One of the things that Morris explains in the remainder of the book -- which you can sort of infer but which he makes vividly clear -- is that however decisive it may have been, the Battle of Hastings was only the beginning of the Norman conquest. It was far from clear that William could actually subjugate the rest of the country, pockets of which resisted him for years. Once he did, he had to contend with outside incursions from Scotland, Wales, and Denmark, all of which he managed to fend off. Once he did that, he had to deal with challenges from within his own family. The sheer unlikelihood that he prevailed becomes increasingly remarkable. Before 1066, successfully invading England wasn't all that difficult. After 1066, it never happened again.

The first half of Morris's subtitle is "the Battle of Hastings," which is the main reason why I (and, I suspect most other casual readers) picked it up. But it's the second half -- "the fall of Anglo-Saxon England" -- that's his real subject here. This is a book about a social revolution: a society whose law, language, religion, architecture and much else were transformed over the course of a generation. It wasn't a pretty process; indeed, William could be downright brutal, as in his notorious "Harrying of the North" in which he suppressed an uprising in Yorkshire by inducing a famine. Aristocrats and middling folk were stripped of their possessions, an expropriation codified in his legendary "Domesday Book," one of the most remarkable inventories ever created. But The Norman Conquest is not an account of unmitigated disaster; as Morris points out, the Normans ended slavery, reformed the churches, and took a less murderous stance toward defeated opponents than their predecessors did. In the long run, as he explains in a graceful final chapter, they laid the foundations for a hybrid state that proved remarkably durable and tensile.

The Norman Conquest is a highly readable and substantial account of one of the most pivotal events in British history. It is a distinguished contribution to the annals of 1066 and deserves to have a long history of its own.

My latest essay

I'm happy to report publication of a piece that reflects my intellectual preoccupations of the last year. It's called "Problems and Possibilities of the Self-Made Man," and it appears in the Summer 2013 edition of The Hedgehog Review, a quarterly journal published by the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies at the University of Virginia. The piece looks at the fading presence of the self-made man ideology in contemporary academic discourse, even as it persists in many -- and many unexpected -- corners of everyday American life. It was part of a larger project, since abandoned, on the self-made man in U.S. history, which I was having trouble managing effectively. I'm glad I was able to salvage something that I hope will prove useful.

You can link to the essay here. I'd be obliged if you had a look. Thanks.  --JC

Anne's House, Our House

Why I love the Puritans Dept: Remembering Goodwife Bradstreet, homes lost and homes found, on the 347th anniversary of a personal calamity.

Even now I can see that house burning. The fire, a huge orange sheet, sweeps up toward the New England night, overrunning the wood, glass and thatching, gray smoke against a black sky. Clothing writhes, curls and blackens amid the overpowering heat. I'm stunned by the quietness of the destruction, which is punctuated by occasional crackling and the songs of crickets.

I wasn't there, of course. But Anne Bradstreet was. She would have been about 54 years old. She labeled the poem she later wrote with this heading: “Here followes some verses upon the burning of our house, July 10, 1666. Copeyed out of loose paper." The "loose paper" is evocative; it's as if she literally or figuratively grabbed a fragment of the ruins and tried to inscribe her memory on them, to somehow preserve what was irretrievably lost.

She knew she couldn't bring that house back. And deep down, she knew that she shouldn't be trying. In essence, that’s exactly what her poem was about.

And when I could no longer look,
I blest his grace that gave and took,
That laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea, so it was, and so 'twas just.
It was his own; it was not mine.
Far be it that I should repine . . . .

The problem is that she does repine. She saying all the right things: that the house was never really hers to begin with, that all glory should go to God, that while his ways may be difficult to understand, they are always right – period. And yet as the poem proceeds, it's clear that she can't quite let the matter rest.

Here stood that Trunk, and there that chest,
There lay that store I counted best,
My pleasant things in ashes lie
And them behold no more shall I.
Under the roof no guest shall sit,
Nor at thy Table eat a bit.

It's a heartbreaking scene – and one that bristles with tension. I picture her as she pictures herself, walking among the ashes. No no, she saying, it doesn't bother me a bit that this place I loved has gone up in smoke. I won’t miss the furniture, or my trinkets, or the company of friends and family that gave it life. More importantly, my faith is so secure that I need not grieve for it. Really.

No pleasant talk shall 'ere be told
Nor things recounted done of old.
No Candle 'ere shall shine in Thee,
Nor bridegroom's voice ere heard shall bee.
In silence ever shalt thou lie.
Adieu, Adieu, All's Vanity.

Bradstreet didn’t want to come to America. Born in Northampton, England in 1612, she had been a child of relative privilege. Her father, Thomas Dudley, was a skilled manager who had transformed the balance sheet for Earl of Lincoln. Shortly after her marriage age 16 to Simon Bradstreet, she joined her new husband and father in founding the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630 (both men later became governor). But while she thus had some real stature in his fledgling community, she nevertheless found it difficult to adjust. As she later explained to her children, "I changed my condition and was married, and came into this country, at which my heart rose [in rebellion]. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the Church of Boston." You get the sense that there’s a lot of personal history compressed between those two sentences, a story she didn’t particularly want to tell at that point, the way parents sometimes don’t.

         To the difficulties involved in moving and the rigors of her faith was added another, which he described in language typical of the Puritans: "it pleased God to keep me a long time without children." She eventually raised eight in the frontier settlements of Ipswich and Andover (which is were the house that burned down was located), making the fact that she wrote any poetry all the more remarkable. Upon learning that she had accumulated a body of work, her brother-in-law brought some of it back to England, which was published in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America. These poems, which demonstrate the degree to which Bradstreet absorbed Renaissance history and literature, had a largely public voice; one poem, for example, is a tribute to Queen Elizabeth I.

      But much of her work, especially her later work, has a more personal focus, and at times a startlingly modern edge. “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits,” she complained of those real or imagined figures who complained about her. She could also be a true romantic. "If ever two were one then surely we," she begins a poem "To My Dear and Loving Husband.”

        But the central struggle of Bradstreet's life as expressed in her writing can be described in terms of the Puritan injunction to live in the world but not be of it. “Farewell dear babe, my hearts too much content," she wrote of a grandchild who died in 1665 (she lost four and a daughter-in-law in rapid succession, which broke her heart). This passionate, if somewhat belated, love of the life she had made in America was checked by a higher sense of duty, the very sense of duty that led her and her compatriots to come to a foreign land in the first place.

Indeed, while the house and Bradstreet lived in was an actual structure of stone and wood – its very materiality was a source of its comfort – a "house" is not necessarily synonymous with a "home." If for her, and many of us, the concept of home can notes a series of concentric circles that includes one's family, birthplace, region, and nation, Bradstreet in some respects left home for good at an early age. The Puritans, after all, founded Massachusetts because they believed that King Charles I – a sovereign from the “house” of Stuart – was betraying the legacy of a Protestant Reformation that had transformed the houses, villages and cities of England. While Bradstreet's Massachusetts Puritans called their variety of the Church of England Protestantism “non-separating” (in contrast to the even more disenchanted Pilgrims who founded the colony of Plymouth when they arrived on the Mayflower in 1620) it's clear that they were trying to put as much distance between themselves and the mother country as possible.

Even so, the ties between house, home and nation remained deeply entwined. In the context of the 17th-century world, when English and Dutch renegades challenged the supremacy of Catholic Spain, virtually all sacred and secular striving to place in a world of emerging religion-based nation-states. When future Governor John Winthrop, who arrived in the same boat as Bradstreet did, implored his fellow emigrants to found a fabled "city on a hill" even before they arrived in Boston, he took it for granted that a new Jerusalem could not be born in Spanish Mexico or French Québec. These people went on an errand into the wilderness to found a New England. And they did so – and distinguished themselves from the "savages" they conquered – not by building forts or trading posts, though they certainly did build those, but rather by building houses, far more of them in New England than anywhere else in the “new” world.

So it was by this twisted path that Bradstreet’s house really had become a home as fact and symbol, an emblem of family and nation. And yet a spiritual restlessness would not quite allow her to live there at ease. In her poetry otherworldly commitments always have the last word. "The world no longer let me love," she concludes or elegy to her burned house. "My hope and Treasure lies above."

If, by some magical process, I could be transported into the wilderness of colonial Massachusetts, circa 1666, I would guess that Anne Bradstreet would not be so familiar. The differences between us – of sex, religion, and the sheer weight of history coursing like the Merrimack River near her house – are so great that I wonder if we could really communicate, even if we were both speaking the same language. To say, on the basis of reading a poem about her house burning down, that I understand how she feels, is more likely to trivialize her experience than honor her memory.

And yet I feel drawn to her. Some of this can be expressed in simple geography. I, too, have seen and marveled at “the trees all richly clad, yet void of pride” (as she describes the New England landscape in her celebrated poem "Contemplations"), trees that remain even after the advance of the interstate highway and cellphone tower. But there's more to it than that. Across the centuries, she and her children, literal and figurative, have shared a belief that their destinies would be found on these shores.

This is, of course, a familiar myth, though it isn't quite elastic enough to effortlessly incorporate other Americans, like slaves who didn't choose to immigrate, or Indians who (in this millennium anyway) didn't immigrate here at all and in fact were forced to emigrate further away. Still, for all its obvious shortcomings, the myth of America as adopted home has helped explain – better yet, it has helped unify – a nation that could, and did, find plenty of other reasons to be a house divided.

But I now realize that what may be the most important thing I share with Anne Bradstreet is a sense of shame. Her shame derive from a deep, but not altogether justifiable, love for the house that burned down in 1666. My house – our house – has not burned down. Yet we live in it with a sense of foreboding, because we know it cannot last forever, and we sometimes fear it may be demolished sooner rather than later. But our unease is not simply a sense of anxiety about the future; it also involves a sense of nagging unease about the past. We love the house even as are aware, however vaguely, of the displacements that made it possible, as well as the evasions that allow it to stand even as I sit to write these words. We cannot really expect mercy. But, God help us, we hope for it anyway. Here, for now, for the grace of Anne, we lie in our beds on summer nights.

A notably good recent biography of Anne Bradstreet is Charlotte Gordon's Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet (2005). For a nicely sculpted introduction to Bradstreet's work, I recommend Heidi Nichols's compact paperback Anne Bradsteet: A Guided Tour of the Life and Thought of a Puritan Poet (2006) Much of Bradstreet's poetry is available online.

Guelzo's Charge

In Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, Allen Guelzo brings a battle back to life in all its messy glory

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.    

I didn't expect to see a book about Gettysburg from Allen Guelzo. His early work focused on religious history; in recent years he has emerged as a Lincoln scholar of first rank on the strength of work like Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Shaped America (2008).  Making a typical move for a senior historian seeking to bolster his credentials, he published Fateful Lightning, a survey of the Civil War and Reconstruction, last year. But Gettysburg: The Last Invasion is a work of straight military history.  I had my doubts that an essentially intellectual historian could really master a distinct subgenre. But the recent sesquicentennial prodded me to pick up this sizable tome, which I read during the anniversary ofthe battle. I'm glad I did.

Guelzo delivers the goods you expect with a book like this: an overview that sets the stage, a blow-by-blow account of the fighting, thumbnail sketches of the principals, counterfactual assessments of the might-have-beens. We get lots of active verbs: regiments and brigades don't simply attack; they "lunge," "bang"or "slap" each other. In his recent review of the book in the New York Times, David Blight criticized Guelzo for this, invoking the great John Keegan's complaint about a “'Zap-Blatt-Banzai-Gott im Himmel-Bayonet in the Guts' style of military history." I take the point. But overall I have to say that Guelzo's approach animates his narrative without really trivializing his subject. Indeed, he uses statistics to suggest the gravity of the three-day battle, noting that in the most conservative estimate, the damage the Army of Northern Virginia was the equivalent of two sinkings of the Titanic, ten repetitions of the Great Blizzard of 1888 and two Pearl Harbors -- and two and a half times the losses taken by Allied armies in Normandy from D-Day through August of 1944. Union losses were comparable.

In sifting through the massive documentary record, Guelzo, who teaches at Gettysburg College and whose command of the landscape is evident, also has an eye for the colorful quote. He describes a slightly wounded soldier screaming "I'm dead, I'm dead," and the reply of his colonel to two stretcher bearers: "Go and take that dead man off -- if you can catch him." He offers a Union prisoner lying on the ground observing General George Pickett bracing for his fateful charge and speculating that "in looking at his cheeks and nose, we divined that their color was not caused by drinking sodawater only." Guelzo is no worshipper of Robert E. Lee -- like a lot of observers, he concludes that Lee badly overplayed his hand at Gettysburg -- and he's particularly critical of what he regards as Lee's passive-aggressive way of blaming subordinates and soldiers by saying he asked too much of them (in other words, they let him down). But he still manages to capture the understated essence of what made the man appealing to so many people. When one of his division commanders, reputedly Jubal Early, says of the the Yankees, "I wish they were all dead," Guelzo notes Lee's reply: "I wish they were all at home, attending to their own business, leaving us to do the same."

Of course, this is all pretty much standard issue stuff when it comes to a military narrative. But Guelzo has a series of interpretive statements to make as well. Among the most important is his rejection of the conventional wisdom that the Civil War was the first modern war. What he emphasizes instead is how backward looking it seems in terms of what came later, not just in the usual ways (like medicine), but in the lethargy, confusion, and technology of the armies -- Gettysburg was more like Waterloo than the Somme. Yes, rifles could fire a lot further. But that didn't make them any more accurate. Artillery shells moved so slowly through the air that soldiers could see them approach. That hardly made them less deadly, of course. But the rhythm of the fighting was different.

Guelzo also emphasizes the political intrigue that laced through the high command of both armies. In the case of the Confederates, it was the perception that Lee favored Virginians over others. In the Union army ideological conflict was sharper; many senior officers remained loyal to the recently sacked George McClellan -- and shared McClellan's anti-abolitionist views. Guelzo feels that in some cases, such perspectives had important military consequences in terms of how vigorously these people were willing to prosecute the war. Though it's clear that temperament and a concern for personal reputation were also important variables in shaping the conduct of soldiers, it's no accident that stalwart Republicans like Oliver Otis Howard were among those who nudged the recently appointed Union commander of the Army of the Potomac, George Meade, to engage the Confederates. Meade, a McClellanite, was motivated primarily by a fear of making a mistake, and was dragged into a confrontation with Lee in Pennsylvania against his instincts.

On the other hand, it was another McClellanite, John Fulton Reynolds, who forced Meade's hand. Thanks to works like Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, Reynolds has long been recognized as one of the heroes of the battle for his far-sighted recognition on the value of the high ground outside of Gettysburg. But Guelzo emphasizes there was a political dimension here, too: a native Pennsylvanian, Reynolds believed it was necessary to protect Pennsylvania from being ravaged by a hungry army (Guelzo emphasizes that northern Virginia had largely been picked clean by this point) and to drive invaders from native soil.

Guelzo engages in subtle revisionism with some other familiar figures as well. Yes, J.E.B. Stuart made a serious mistake by going off on his own to raid the Pennsylvania countryside rather than stay near the main body of the army. But that's not because his absence meant Lee was flying blind, as has often been asserted, but rather he wasn't around to screen the Confederate army as it sought maximum tactical advantage.  Guelzo clearly believes that Captain Joshua Chamberlain, the Bowdoin College professor who led the valiant defense of Little Round Top, has gotten too much attention from Shaara and others. He has no interest in denying that Chamberlain and the 20th Maine regiment's valor, but he thinks that other figures, notably Meade's chief engineer, General Gouverneur Warren, and Pennsylvania Colonel Strong Vincent were more pivotal in recognizing the crisis caused by the actions of General Daniel Sickles (a scoundrel whom Guelzo finds endlessly entertaining) in Sickles's abandonment Little Round Top and taking the necessary action to shore it up. As is evident by the space he assigns to it, Guelzo clearly feels the battle was decided on the Cemetery Ridge.

My chief complaint with the book is something that's not Guelzo's fault: inadequate maps. There are plenty in the book, and they're very good -- at the highly localized level. What we never get, and desperately need as we wade through the minutiae, is an understanding of the bigger geographic picture. There's no map that situates Gettysburg strategically relative to places like Philadelphia, Washington, or New York. Nor do we get an overview map that encompasses the town of Gettsyburg and major sites of fighting like Cemetery Ridge, Culp's Hill, and the like. In a book with a $35 list price, it would have been nice to have some endpapers that a reader could refer to throughout. 

My minor complaint is a certain truculence of tone that Guelzo reveals early on. "The lure of the Civil War remains strong," he notes, "but dealing with its battles has acquired among my academic peers a reputation close to pornography." Guelzo attributes this in part to "a generation of professional historians whose youth was dominated by the Vietnam War." If it was ever fair, such a perception is dated; indeed, military history is by some standards thriving. Of course, Guelzo is hardly going to warm many academic hearts with a book that bears a jacket endorsement from Newt Gingrich.

But all of this is largely beside the point. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion is the work of a consummate professional, and an excellent one-volume treatment for novice, fan, and scholar alike.

The Window

In honor of our Founding Fathers, an archive edition of American History Now

So there they are, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, one a youthful 70 and the other a fussy 41, sharing a bed at an inn in New Jersey. They’re on their way from Philadelphia to Staten Island, part of a delegation sent by the Continental Congress to negotiate with Admiral Lord Richard Howe of the Royal Navy, in the hopes of avoiding a full-blown war between England and her American colonies. Two weeks earlier, George Washington’s fledgling army escaped seemingly certain destruction in Brooklyn and is for now, at least, alive to fight another day. Lord Howe hopes he can talk his American friends out of making a huge mistake. Adams considers Howe a phony, his overtures nothing more than “Machiavellian maneuvers.” That’s why he was chosen to be one of the negotiators. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, a man who had been reluctant to support independence (he has, and will, worry about the preservation of slavery) is another. And old Ben Franklin, who knew Howe back in England, will be the third.

It is the evening of September 9, 1776. The negotiators pause in their journey to spend the night in Brunswick, New Jersey. Unfortunately, there’s not much lodging to be had in the local taverns. Franklin and Adams agree to share a tiny room, no fireplace, with a single bed and a single open window. It is chilly, and Adams, a self described invalid, is “afraid of the air in the night” and shuts it. “Oh!” says Franklin. “Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.” When Adams relates his fears of coming down with an illness from the bad night air, Franklin, ever the scientist, replies by saying that the air in the room is far more likely to be a problem than that outside. “Come!” he tells Adams. Open the window and come to bed and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds.”

Adams complies and joins Franklin in bed. He is curious, even at “the risqué of a cold,” to hear Franklin’s reasoning. Lying there in the dark, side by side, Franklin begins his explanation, which, while apparently of some interest to Adams, literally puts him to sleep (“I left him and his Philosophy together,” he will later write, hearing Franklin trail off just as he does.) They will argue the point again, and in his account of their exchanges Adams will muse on Franklin’s reasoning but remain unconvinced.

At this point in his life, Adams admires Franklin. He likes to say that had Franklin done nothing more than invent the lightning rod, the world would justly honor this “great and good man.” But the next time they team up again, this time in Paris to negotiate an alliance with the French government – a phase of the two men's careers brilliantly captured in the 2008 HBO series, John Adams, from which the above photo was taken – Adams begins to have his doubts. Mr. “Early to Bed and Early to Rise” sleeps late all the time. (He slept through a lot of the Continental Congress, and though Adams will not be there to catch him, Franklin will sleep through a lot of the Constitutional Convention as well.) He drinks too much; he spends too much. And his behavior with French women is downright embarrassing. Adams feels self-conscious about his French, but as he learns it himself he begins to realize that Franklin understands a lot less than he lets on. And when Adams – once again playing bad cop, albeit a bit over his head – annoys the French foreign minister, Franklin writes a letter to Congress telling them that Adams is foolishly tampering with Franklin’s own delicate diplomacy. Adams will never forget or forgive Franklin for that.

Franklin is probably right to dump Adams. Adams probably knows Franklin is right, too. He is over his head. Adams is an intelligent and decent man. But he’s too stubborn, moralistic and vain to be a successful diplomat. He’s honest to a fault – he can’t play the game the way Franklin, who laughs right along when the King puts his image on the bottom his courtesan’s chamber pot, does. He tries not to lie, even to himself.

Part of the reason why someone like Franklin is such a trial to Adams is that he understands that the man really does exhibit traits Adams himself would be lucky to have. Franklin’s cool cheerfulness is a rebuke to Adams’s repressed stolidity. But a hunger for recognition, a hunger that’s never really sated, will not give Adams rest. His wonderfully acidic expression of resentment in 1790 encapsulates his frustration: “The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thenceforth these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures, and war.” (It was Adams who had proposed Washington take command of the Continental Army – an excellent idea, and one he can’t help but at least partially regret.)

Adams had about as successful a career as any person could ever rationally hope. From modest beginnings as a shoemaker’s son, he became a self-educated lawyer, political activist, and diplomat. He collaborated with Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence, and his work on the Massachusetts constitution was a major influence on the federal one. He managed to spend eight years generally keeping his mouth shut as vice president (no small achievement, particularly for him), and went on to become president himself. And he had the good sense and good fortune to marry Abigail, who brought wisdom, humor, and joy into his life. He lived to see his son John Quincy, become president. We should all be so lucky.

But somehow, you rarely get the impression that John Adams was happy. To be sure, he had legitimate sorrows, among them a son who drank himself to death and a daughter who died of cancer. He had powerful enemies, notably Alexander Hamilton and his erstwhile friend Thomas Jefferson, who, despite hating each other, worked to deny Adams a second term as president. (It’s to their credit that Adams and Jefferson were later able to patch things up – though perhaps it’s no accident that they did so while remaining 500 miles apart.) Still, you get the sense that the hardest single thing about John Adams’s life is that he had to live with John Adams. Feeling that way is hard enough. But it’s even harder when you’ve got people like Franklin, so seemingly self-assured, by your side.

Adams recorded the scene of his night with Franklin in the autobiography he began writing after his forced retirement from politics following his failed bid for re-election in 1800. Though he had a diary to draw on, the editor of the Adams Papers, L.H. Butterfield, reported in 1961 that he wrote this scene “from unaided memory.” I see him at his estate, Peacefield, in Quincy, Massachusetts, an old man remembering himself as a younger one, with Franklin, who had been dead for years, alive and likeable. Adams had been upset earlier that September day when he saw what he regarded as the indiscipline and “dissipation” of the American soldiers he had seen on the road (my guess is that he was being prudishly unrealistic). But he was “determined that it should not dishearten me.” I can’t be sure, but it seems like he’s succeeding, and that the memory of that night brings him pleasure and maybe even comfort in the long twilight of his life. Writing it down gives him something to do.

And us something to celebrate. Thank you, Mr. Adams. And Mr. Franklin.