Man kind

In Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Reza Aslan illustrates the limits of scripture (and the limits of limits)

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

I'm one of those people who was prompted to read this book after I saw, live, the author's interview on FOX News where his interlocutor insinuated that Aslan, as a Muslim, had ulterior motives in writing about Christianity other than that of a historian. (The anti-intellectual subtext was as strong as the implied invitation to religious bigotry). The exchange, which went viral, launched Zealot onto the New York Times bestseller list, something unlikely to have happened without out it, notwithstanding Aslan's previous well regarded book on Islam, No God but God. So it is that FOX demonstrates its perverse market power.

In terms of the book's argument, Zealot rests on a syllogism that goes something like this:

1. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a time and place of extraordinary political instability stemming from the seething religious and social tensions in Jewish Palestine.
2. After the death of Jesus, these tensions, which had periodically erupted into insurrection under Roman rule, finally provoked an overwhelming military response in 70 CE that discredited militant Judaism in the eyes of followers and outsiders alike.
3. Jesus therefore had to be sanded down for mass consumption, his sharp political edges softened as part of a larger process of transforming him from a Jewish messiah to a universal savior.

As Aslan acknowledges, calling Jesus a Zealot (capital Z) is anachronistic, a little like titling a biography of Abigail Adams Feminist. The Zealots as a discrete political faction only arose after the death of Jesus, and while there were people with that designation in his lifetime (lower-case z), he was not commonly associated with them. Aslan, however, feels that there's enough evidence of militancy in the gospels to suggest his affinity for them.

Perhaps the most concise statement of Aslan's argument comes when he reinterprets Jesus's famous injunction in the Gospel of Matthew to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," which is generally regarded as a statement of accommodation to secular rule while keeping one's eye focused on the spiritual realm. Instead, Azlan's preferred translation -- "Give back to Caesar the property that belongs to Caesar, and give back to God the property that belongs to God" -- is actually a demand that the Romans return to the kingdom of Israel to the Jews. For Aslan, the "milquetoast" misreading of scripture "perfectly accommodates the perception of Jesus as a detached, celestial spirit wholly unconcerned with material matters, a curious assertion about a man who not only lived in one of the most politically charged periods in Israel's history, but who claimed to be the promised messiah sent to liberate the Jews from Roman occupation."

Aslan believes the detachment of Jesus from his immediate political context was greatly facilitated by the apostle Paul, who, despite never knowing Jesus personally, managed to wrest control of the movement away from those (notably Jesus's brother, James) who did, and who tried to keep the Judaic dimension of his life central. It was Paul who made Jesus of Nazareth Jesus Christ, Hellenizing him for a broader (and often more educated) audience. Aslan, however, clearly prefers Jesus the man, who he concludes is "every bit as compelling, charismatic and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in."

This of course is not a new argument. (In an American context, I call this the Woody Guthrie school of Christianity -- Jesus as proto-communist.) But every bit as compelling? For a secular imagination, maybe. As Aslan recognizes, the miracles of Jesus are things that must be accommodated historically not because they're factual, but because they were so widely believed -- and so widely believed so early -- that they must be taken into account. For some, a Jesus stripped of spiritual dimensions may be sufficient. I don't really know how to explain to such a person why it isn't for believers in the resurrection except perhaps to suggest that such an argument would be like telling a gay person that sexual feelings are acceptable as long as you don't regard them as important.

But if Aslan isn't going to change many minds, he does provide a wealth of information in a surprisingly compact volume. The writing is limpid and is marked by a complex narrative structure (at one point I got confused about why he was telling us so much about what happened in Israel and Judah after Christ's death, but it does comport with his larger argument). His doctorate is in the sociology of religions, and he teaches creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, facts which suggest he's more of a popularizer than biblical scholar. Still, the book's utility is likely to be greater than its limits. Bless him for his labors.

Measured prose

In Nine Inches, Tom Perrotta returns to familiar terrain (amid fading light)

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

This summer I taught a class of largely minority students facing varying degrees of academic challenges. Seeking to give them a diet of adolescent-friendly fare for discussion and writing, I turned to figures like Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco and the Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz, to whom I was confident they could relate. Although I was less confident about it, I also decided to use Tom Perrotta's 1994 debut collection of short stories, Bad Haircut, which traces the life of a 1970s adolescent named Buddy from middle school through his high school graduation. (The juxtaposition with Diaz, another New Jersey chronicler of the suburbs whose fiction also includes subjects like coming to terms with the homosexuality of friends, proved to be quite arresting.) I'm happy to say my students loved Bad Haircut.

Having followed Perrotta through a half-dozen subsequent novels -- among them the bestselling Little Children (which was made into a movie) and The Leftovers (soon to be an HBO series) -- I was pleased to learn that his new book, Nine Inches, would be his second story collection. Unlike Bad Haircut, which followed a single character, these stories, many set in the fictional town of Gifford, (presumably not far from the imaginary Cranwood of Bad Haircut), depict a range of people, from high school students to senior citizens, policemen to doctors, solid citizens to small-time criminals. It's inevitable, then, that this collection would not have quite have the narrative cohesion of the first one.

Thematically, however, Nine Inches is surprisingly tight -- and surprisingly grim. Perrotta has been called "an American Chekov" and "the Steinbeck of suburbia," but the mood of this book is closer to the early James Joyce of The Dubliners, where protagonists have negative epiphanies in which they confront limitations they'd managed to avoid recognizing they have. Those limitations include character defects, like the math teacher of "Grade My Teacher," who, in disclosing more than she should to a student, hesitates "long enough to realize she was making a mistake, then kept going" (and going). They also include recognizing dreams that will never be fulfilled, like those of the regretful, abusive father of "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face"or the amateur blues guitarists of "One-Four-Five," who know they can never compensate for the families they have lost.

This sense of despair infects even 21st century Perrotta adolescents, of whom he writes with same assured air that he does of nineties kids in Election or seventies teens in Bad Haircut (he acknowledges his late-adolescent children as the source of anecdotes that "blossomed into stories"). Perrotta was far too satirical -- and far too realistic -- to ever suggest that the intensity of Tracy Flick in Election or the passivity of Dave Raymond in The Wishbones would ever be transformed much later in their lives. Still, you could have a sense of hope for them that's harder to feel for the concussion-stricken football player of "Senior Season" or the cynical protagonist of "The Test Taker," who impersonates his fellow students on the SATs. "I honestly didn't mind cheating for strangers," he explains. "If somebody wanted to pay me to help them get into a good college, I didn't see anything wrong with that. It wasn't all that different from hiring an expensive tutor, or getting a doctor diagnose a learning disability so you could buy yourself some extra time. That was just the way the system worked." He gets his comeuppance (and strikes back in ways that may make you feel complicit in your satisfaction), just as the retired narrator of "Kiddie Pool" is repaid for trespassing in his neighbor's garage with an unwelcome discovery.

To at least some extent, the downbeat mood of Nine Inches is offset by the sheer narrative invention in some of these stories. Donald, the narrator of "Backrub," who somehow managed to not to get into one of the twelve colleges to which he applied, finds himself stopped repeatedly by a policeman, who makes an unexpected demand (to which the Donald responds in an unexpected way before making an unexpected revelation). "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face" is a particularly intricate story, weaving a father's confession and adult psychodrama through an exciting rendition of a Little League championship game. The title story, which refers to the distance eighth graders must maintain at a middle school dance, is marked by a notably graceful contrapuntal style of storytelling that is Perrotta's trademark.

Perrotta's last book, The Leftovers, was very clearly an attempt to break new creative ground by venturing into the world of science fiction -- and bending the genre in a distinctly literary direction. In that light, it's possible to see Nine Inches as a retreat onto more familiar terrain. But for my money this is a more satisfying book, because it showcases a writer on his home turf, working within a familiar framework with uncommon power.

Though he ends the book on a lighter note with a redemptive story of second chances, I'm nevertheless saddened by the receding sense of possibility that seems to mark Perrotta's vision. Or maybe like the characters of these stories, I too am belatedly waking up to the reality he's been describing all along. The historical context for Nine Inches is worth noting: demographers are telling us that the suburbs are less attractive than they used to be for young people, who are returning to cities in numbers that have not been seen in close to a century. (One of the more memorable stories of Bad Haircut was "You Learn to Live," about the great adolescent ritual of learning to drive, which teenagers are doing less frequently now.)

I find the angst here a little curious because at least superficially, it would seem that Perrotta, himself a product of New Jersey, ripened artistically on a suburban vine. Of course it would be stupid to suggest hypocrisy -- as an artist, he has to call 'em as he sees 'em, and it's likely that a Perrotta story set in a high-rise or on a farm would also be marked by negative epiphanies.  As someone who has also staked his ground in the suburbs, I can't help but hope that a future filing from the village will be more promising. But maybe that's another way I'm like the people of those stories, waiting for my train to come in.

A Place in Time (VI--final)

This is the final installment of a series of posts on regionalism in U.S. history. (Previous posts below.)

What does all this talk of regional identity  mean for you? That of course depends at least a bit on who “you” are, i.e. where you’re coming from in some literal or figurative way. (I, for my part, am the grandson of an Italian immigrant whose extended family, much of it Irish, is almost exclusively Mid-Atlantic by birth. But by marriage, education, and temperament, I am decidedly a Yankee in cultural affiliation.) Insofar as these regional themes I’m talking about have any reality, they include plenty of exceptions. You can find Chinese food in Tulsa (maybe not good Chinese food), and hear good bluegrass music in Manhattan (maybe not real bluegrass). Even overwhelmingly Republican Texas has Democratic pockets – which may soon become more than pockets as the racial complexion of the state changes. There are plenty of reasons, and ways, the nation-state will hold. Like our motto says, e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”).

On the other hand, there’s no reason to think the borders of the United States will remain permanent. Considered solely as a matter of topography, there’s nothing particularly cohesive about a stretch of continent that’s marked by large stretches of forest, plains, desert, and mountains, and which over the course of the last few thousand years has been the home of a wide variety of peoples who interacted with each other was well as lived in relative isolation. And many of our state boundaries – consider the rectangles that constitute the Dakotas, for example – are really matters of fictive convenience. Should the pressures, internal or external, become great enough, different pieces of the nation could break off or recombine in ways that are hard to foresee, but not exactly random, either.

Does that thought sadden you? At times it saddens me, though I’ll confess I find myself exasperated enough with the kinds of things I hear or see coming out of South Carolina and find myself thinking our lives would be a lot easier if we went our separate ways. I get annoyed at the way Idahoans complain about the intrusiveness of the federal government, even as they depend on it for the roads, jobs, and markets that keep it afloat. In recent years I’ve heard secessionist noise coming out of Texas, to which I feel inclined to say, “erring sisters, go in peace,” especially since I regard the circumstances by which Texas entered the Union to be highly dubious. On the other hand, I’m not sure any of the rest of the nation was much, if any, less so as a matter of moral legitimacy.

The real point of this particular conversation is less about making predictions or arguing for the value of one part of the country over the other than it is asking you to consider what you consider important about your national identity. What do you think it means to be an American? Is it a landscape, a set of habits, or a series of ideas? Are the things you value rooted more in one part of the continent than another? How bad would you feel if some part of it were to break off? And lastly, and more importantly: where – and how – do you want to live? If you’re lucky, you may have some choice in the matter. Try and exercise it wisely.

Place in Time (Part V)

The following post is part of series on the role of regionalism in American history. Previous posts are below.

In recent decades, some scholars have been paying attention to regionalism again. The actual number they name ranges from as few as four to as many as eleven, but a few regions, and a few dynamics, are always apparent. Take New England, which always features prominently in these accounts. Most of the Puritan and Pilgrim settlers of the region hailed from the same part of (southeastern) England. This part of English North America was distinctive in any number of ways, among them the migration of whole families, their relative lack of racial and ethnic diversity and, especially, their dedication to their (dissident) religion. New Englanders were the most communitarian people on the eastern seaboard, and the most committed to their belief that people could govern themselves in the name of a greater good – which also meant they were more inclined to regulate the behavior of themselves and others. New Englanders were an expansive people; settlers to that part of the world pushed westward and occupied a series of future states across the continent, from Ohio to California. To this day, the people of this northern tier tend to share many attitudes, and evince a moralistic streak in their politics.

On the other side of the seaboard was the South – first Virginia, more specifically the Tidewater, in a culture that spread west and south to the Carolinas. (Some observers distinguish between Virginia and the Deep South, with the latter having more of a Caribbean orientation. Like New England, this region was marked by a shared religion, but it was the mainstream Church of England, about which settlers were generally less serious than their Northern counterparts. Here too the settlers tended to come from the same part of England (this time the southern and western coasts), but there was more racial diversity because the region relied much more on slavery than New England ever did. Both southerners and New Englanders prized their freedom, a goal that played an important role in their migration. But the former tended to think about it in positive terms – freedom to, as in freedom to worship as they pleased (with more of an emphasis on the collective pronoun). The latter tended to think about freedom in negative terms – freedom from, which among other things meant not having to conform to rules of the kind New Englanders were apt to make. Many New Englanders came to see slavery as the opposite of freedom, and took active steps to end it; many Southerners came to view slavery as the very essence of what freedom was: the right to acquire property, including human property, without interference.

In between these people – actually, more like behind these people, in terms of when they came, where they settled, and their relative status in American life – is a regional segment known by a variety of names, among them the Scotch-Irish, Borderlanders, or Appalachians, each of which that provides some indication of their identities. These people tended to come from the northern periphery of Great Britain and Ireland, but these Irish were Protestant (mostly Presbyterian) colonists from England’s conquests of Ireland during the age of Queen Elizabeth. They were, on the whole, poorer than other British migrants, one reason they tended to settle on the western periphery of the colonies, in hilly or mountainous terrain. They were also fiercely clannish in their family organization, devoted to their religion (especially the Baptist and Methodist sects that flowered in the early 19^th century) and hostile to outsiders. Depending on the circumstances, this hostility was focused on Yankee-minded social reformers, who they regarded as control freaks, or Southern aristocrats, who they regarded as tyrants. Borderlands people, who became a large presence in a series of states from Pennsylvania to Texas, never managed to politically dominate any one of them for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though they formed a powerful presence in national politics. (They put Andrew Jackson in the White House much to the horror of old-line Yankees and Tidewater aristocrats.) They split during the Civil War, some joining the Confederacy, others choosing to secede from the secessionists, as West Virginia did in breaking from Virginia in 1863. But these days such people tend to cast their lots with Southern bloc, whether they happen to live in northern Georgia, eastern Tennessee or most of Oklahoma.

The other major piece of the puzzle between New England and the South is the region that includes New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, known collectively as the Mid-Atlantic region. Sometimes this is parsed as New York/northern Jersey and Pennsylvania/southern Jersey, with Delaware as an annex to Pennsylvania, reflecting the fact that metropolitan New York (originally New Amsterdam) was originally Dutch and Pennsylvania was English. The key point for our purposes is that this whole stretch of territory has always been highly diverse in just about every way we’ve been talking about – religious, racial, ethnic and political. When the English seized New Amsterdam without a shot in 1664 they kept its basic institutions intact, which is to say they respected its diversity Pennsylvania began as a haven for the far-out religious English Quakers, but the colony was quickly overrun with borderland settlers and immigrants from Central Europe. Pluralistic, commercial, and with a strong pacifist streak in Quaker Pennsylvania in particular that translated to skepticism about any kind of crusade, a Midlander ethos spread west from central Ohio into southeastern Colorado. Many of the states where such people are dominant, among them Missouri, are fiercely contested by their state political parties and are often up for grabs during presidential elections.

As is its wont, North American regionalism spills beyond U.S. national borders. The cultural remnants of New France are alive and well in Quebec, which features a French-speaking majority and a cultural sensibility at marked contrast with the rest of Canada (whose maritime provinces, like Nova Scotia, have a strong Yankee accent). The southwestern states of the United States – among them California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas – retain strong elements of their Spanish and Mexican heritage. Indeed, some observers believe the residents of “El Norte” on either side of the Rio Grande have more in common with each other than their respective national citizenship; in this regard the fence the U.S. has been building is more like a Berlin Wall dividing a country rather wall dividing two nations.

I realize it’s possible to make too much of all of this. Besides, some of the nationalizing forces I’ve already mentioned, like the mass media, there are factors at work in U.S. life that are shaping the nation’s life and future at least as much as regionalism is. Immigration, for instance. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that the center of gravity for immigration has generally been centered in the Mid-Atlantic and its Borderland successors extending into the Midwest. There are two important exceptions to this rule. The first is New England, which first lost its ethnic uniformity almost 200 years ago when the Irish started swarming in, followed by Italians, Jews, and now Asians and Latinos. But New England has also shown a tremendous capacity for assimilating new arrivals to their ways, not so much in terms of things like language or expression as much as a belief in personal and collective self-improvement, something immigrants are likely to believe in anyway as a factor in their original decision to migrate.

The other exception is El Norte, where Latinos are becoming an ever-greater proportion of the population (Mexicans today are about the same proportion of the population that the Irish were in the late 19^th century.) But this is less a new development than a reversion to the ethnic mean. Latino immigrants like to say that they didn’t cross the border; the border crossed them. Now it’s crossing back. What may be a more advanced stage of this process is underway in the northern Canadian province of Nunavut, where indigenous peoples broke away from the province of the Northwest Territories and are reasserting their control over the land for the first time in 500 years.

Next: Concluding remarks

Place in Time (Part IV)

The following post is part of a series on the role of regionalism in American history. Preceding posts are below.

Because they’ve never been formally codified the way the boundaries of an American state like Wyoming or Alabama has, their number, size and shape have been contested. Some observers have made distinctions, for example, between the Tidewater south (the lowlands along the coast) and the Piedmont south (the hillier land leading to the Appalachian mountains), or distinguished between the West (an area that spans from about Colorado to California) and the Pacific Rim (a narrow strip along the coast that encompasses San Diego and Seattle). These regions or sections are not respecter of state or even national boundaries – Canadian Vancouver in many ways has more in common with coastal Portland than it does the province of British Columbia to which it belongs. Nor is demography isn’t the only misleading thing about our state boundaries. Many of us associate Colorado with the Rocky Mountains, for the very good reason that they are indeed a dominant feature of its landscape. But eastern Colorado is as flat as Kansas. So is eastern Montana. Texas has arid plains, a tropical coast, and blazing desert.

We all understand that lots of different kinds of people – different races, different sexual orientations, different classes, different politics – live in these places, and that in the United States it’s relatively easy to move between them temporarily or permanently. But we also know that there are relatively stable traits associated with them: accents, cuisine, and local celebrations. And that they tend to vote alike in elections. New England, for example, has pledged its allegiance to different political parties over the course of the last two centuries. But it almost always votes as a bloc. So does the Deep South. There are places that vary in their allegiance – these days, we call them swing counties or states. But as we’ll see, that’s because they’re places where regional cultures overlap (and cross borders). So it is, for example, that southern Ohio has more in common with Indiana than it does the rest of Ohio.

As I think we all understand, geography is a major factor in shaping the behavior of people living in the United States. Living in a place that doesn’t have a lot of water, for example, reduces population density, which means the people who live in such are place are going to be spread out and tend to believe in value, even necessity, of self-sufficiency in their everyday lives. On the other hand, different groups of people can impose their values on any given landscape, which can often support more than one lifestyle. The Eastern Woodlands of North America worked pretty well for the Algonquin peoples who inhabited them for centuries, as it has for their Euro successors. Yes, those Euros altered those woodlands, rather dramatically, but did the Algonquins. (Actually, much of the region has more trees now than it did in the nineteenth century, when large tracts of which were cleared for farming – Indians would recognize at least part of the region more easily today than they did 150 years ago.) Human beings, for better and worse, are always colonizing land in one way or another within limits that nature sometimes imposes in gradual or spectacular ways. But whatever the cause and effect, like-minded people tend to live together, reinforcing habits and folkways, even in highly mobile societies. Sometimes this seems to transcend geography – American cities, however far apart they may be, often have more in common with each other than the countryside around them. But regional accents never disappear entirely.

One of the people who realized all of this most acutely was our friend Frederick Jackson Turner. As I mentioned, Turner became vastly influential for a theory that emphasized the primacy of the West in American history, depicting it the frontier a process of that seemed to transcend place in favor of a process of democratization and development. But toward the end of his life Turner began paying attention to what he called the sectional dimension of American history, and the way the persistent traits of older sections of the national state affected the development of newer ones. Turner understood that even in his time, the forces of modernization seemed more important than older regional patterns. Still, he said, “Improvements in communication, such as the automobile, the telephone, the radio, and movie pictures have diminished localism rather than sectionalism.”

Next: Surveying the regions of North America

Place in Time (Part III)

The following post is part of a series on the role of regionalism in U.S. history. Previous posts are below.

The United States began as a group of colonies launched by people from a series of countries – England, of course, but also Ireland the central European region of Germany, which until 1870 lacked political or geographic continuity even as it had a cohesive regional culture.  The U.S. became a nation with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was formally recognized as a state in 1783, when its territorial boundaries were drawn as part of the Treaty of Paris. We think of the “nation” part of this equation as stable, largely because the U.S. has been a republic governed by a Constitution since 1789. (Before that it was more a federation of states.) But even that was tenuous; until the Civil War, people spoke of the U.S. as plural – “these United States” – rather than singular. Many foreigners, perhaps reflecting their own experiences, still do, referring to the U.S. as “the states.”

For a long time, the most obvious feature of the United States was its shifting frontier boundary. Indeed, a century ago a lot of people thought this was the most significant thing about it. A big part of the reason why was a gifted historian by the name of Frederick Jackson Turner, who in an 1893 delivered a speech at an American Historical Association conference in Chicago that distilled his (and a lot of other people’s) thinking into a single sentence: "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."

Here in the 21^st century, it may be hard to appreciate just how unusual an assertion this really was. Turner, born in 1861 was a native of Wisconsin – which is to say he was from the edge of the American world – got his doctorate (among the first people to ever get one) at Johns Hopkins, where he was taught the then-dominant "germ" theory, which argued that western civilization owed its origins to the forests of Germany, out of which emerged a Teutonic seed that brought down the Roman empire, spread across western Europe, jumped to America, and now dominated the world. Like so much academic thought of the time, this approach to history was modeled on science, both in its emphasis on primary source research and its use of a biological model—more specifically a (Social) Darwinian model—to explain historical change.

 Turner embraced a process-driven approach to History—colleagues and students remember him as an obsessive collector of data and maps—and he too embraced scientific ideas. But when it came to evolution, Turner was decidedly on the environmental side of the Darwinian equation: he was fascinated not by the fixed, but rather the adaptable. The frontier was a place that did something to people, he said: it made them Americans. Which is to say it turned them into something new. And that's because they had lots of room to evolve through a renewable cycle. First would come the scouts, who explored a new region, wrangling with the natives as necessary.  They would be followed traders (think furs), and then farmers, and tradesmen. Once an area got settled, a new wave of scouts would push west, and the whole process would repeat in a new location. The process continued until 1890, Turner said, by which point the frontier as Americans had known it had disappeared. (They would have to come up with new frontiers, like a space program.)

Over the course the next fifty years or so, the Turner Thesis became common sense. Textbooks at the time gave more space to western expansion than they do today, describing the settlement of places like Tennessee and Arkansas. Even a historian like Charles Beard, who in fact was skeptical of Turner’s ideas and had his own about that nature of American history (one rooted in class conflict) still gave a chapter to the rise of new states in his classic 1927 book The Rise of American Civilization. These days, when textbooks do talk about western expansion, they almost always mention that the addition of new states, whose voting rules opened them up to mass participation (at least for white men) pressured older states to follow suit.

But in the second half of the century the Turner thesis came under increasing attack. Some scholars questioned Turner's data, others his findings, especially his assertions that the frontier was the engine of U.S. democracy. The most serious challenge came from those historians, notably the modern historian Patricia Limerick, who rejected the assumptions underlying the very idea of the frontier and Turner’s tendency to describe land as "empty" when he really meant it didn’t have white people on it. To Limerick, Turnerism was little more than a racist fantasy, at one point joking that for her and like-minded scholars the frontier had become “the f-word.”

Besides, there were other things – immigration, industrialization, efforts for social reform in ways that ranged from votes for women to rights for workers – that seemed more obvious in terms of determining the real boundaries of the United States. Whatever considerable regional or political differences remained in the nation in the decades following the Civil War, it still seemed to be inexorably stitching together. Nothing did a better job of this than the World Wars, which promoted mass migration (especially black people to Northern cities), the growth of industry in previously remote areas (like Los Angeles, but also places like Nevada and New Mexico), and a sense of national identity in combating the challengers like Communists or Nazis across the globe. Never before or since was the federal – which is to say, national, or central – government stronger.

But I want you to pay attention to that word “federal,” which I’m actually using for the first time in this conversation. It’s a word that has a lot of different meanings, but at the heart of all of them is some kind of alliance or partnership among a set of entities. In the U.S., as in many nations, there are subdivisions in the form of provinces, or in our case, fifty states, each of which has a measure of political autonomy. Those states, in turn, are subdivided into counties, cities, villages.

But there is another kind of geographic unit in the United States that doesn’t often make it onto maps, even though it might help explain ourselves to ourselves better than most maps do. This unit is closer to the concept of country than it is nation or state, because it reflects a set of attitudes and practices of large sets of people independent of whatever political system happens to be in place, or wherever state or municipal boundaries that happen to be drawn. Unlike some places where country/nation/state may once have been aligned, these never managed to gain recognition as discrete entities in North America. We know them as “regions” or “sections,” and give them names like “New England,” “the Midwest,” and “the South.”

Next: Continuity and Change in American regions

Place in Time (Part II)

The following is the second of a series of posts on regionalism in American history. (Previous post below).

If you managed to stay awake for some of your high school U.S. history classes, you have at least a vague sense of the country’s story as a series of maps. The only really fixed parameter on maps of the colonial era has been the Atlantic seaboard, which provided the dominant feature on each of the original thirteen colonies, whose westward boundaries were, as a matter of settlement, measured in dozens of miles, and whose northern and southern boundaries were often represented as straight lines understood to extend indefinitely. Such maps were often more aspiration than reality, because at the very moment they were being produced by the English, the French had their own maps that occupied some of the same territory. And though they weren’t published in any modern or conventional sense of the term, Indian tribes had their own maps that also portrayed them as occupying (or, at any rate, claiming) the same territory.

With the end of the American Revolution and a complex series of negotiations that culminated in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the newly created United States of America was now depicted by itself and Europeans as a solid slab of land bounded by two bodies of water: Atlantic Ocean in the east and the Mississippi River in the west. The boundaries of the states themselves within that slab (augmented by the admission of Kentucky and Vermont in 1791, followed by Tennessee five years later) remained vague and contested in the early republic. The government of Connecticut acknowledged the existence of New York and Pennsylvania to its west, but claimed all territory due west of its territorial boundaries all the way to California – a cheeky claim in all kinds of ways. One of the few things the weak national U.S. government of the 1780s got right was convincing such states to relinquish their claims in exchange for the national government assuming their debts, and in passing a series of laws we have come to know as the Northwest Ordinances. These laws, written by Thomas Jefferson, laid down an orderly process by which new states could be created from the unorganized pocket of the country that we typically consider the Middle West: the five states of Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837) and Wisconsin (1848). I find it interesting that while the maps that created these states also effectively created the justification by which a series of Native Americans could be shoved out of this real estate, the names of these places reflect the language of their previous inhabitants to this day (Michigan, for instance, is a Chippewa term that translates to “great water,” which does a pretty good job of describing a place whose contours are defined by a series of lakes).

But you probably regard all this as trivia. More vivid, perhaps, are the maps you may remember seeing countless times in your childhood that show the huge territorial gains the United States made in the first half of the nineteenth century. You can probably visualize the huge wedge of land – bigger than the original U.S. itself – known as the Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson, overriding his small government scruples, purchased from France in 1803. You can probably also see the Mexican Cession of 1848, another huge chunk of territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War that made the U.S. a continental power. In between, literally and figuratively, was Texas, created as independent state by American settlers who revolted against Mexico in 1836 and whose admission into the Union nine years later was a cause of the Mexican War. Then there was the Oregon territory, a split-the-difference resolution of a boundary dispute between the U.S. and Great Britain in 1846 that gave us that states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, as well as slivers of Montana and Wyoming. Florida, another purchase, became essentially an offer a badly weakened Spanish empire couldn’t refuse in 1819 after General Andrew Jackson chased some Creek and Seminole Indians into it. Sell it or lose it, the Spaniards were essentially told. Decades of war against the Seminoles followed.

That pretty much fills in the map, though the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 added a big piece of North America that isn’t contiguous with the “Lower 48” (as Alaskans like to call it), and the annexation of Hawaii became an important naval base in the Pacific. Other acquisitions, like Guam and Puerto Rico (wrested from Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898) have not been fully integrated into the United States. But the process of nation building is now largely complete, and largely centered on North America. The last two contiguous states to enter the Union on the North American continent, Arizona and New Mexico, were added in 1912. Alaska and Hawaii came aboard in 1959. It’s possible that Puerto Rico join the Union at some point – Puerto Ricans are ambivalent at the prospect – but as likely as not the number of stars on the flag isn’t going to get any larger.

 Which may be why you probably don’t think much about what might be termed the territorial integrity of the United States. The map hasn’t changed any since the time your parents were born; it’s something you take for granted. You know you live in a big country, which was, compared to most of Europe, pretty big even in its original state (King Charles II’s 1682 grant to William Penn for Pennsylvania was bigger than England). Indeed, as nations go, they don’t come much bigger: the United States today is the third-largest nation on the planet as a matter of geography, coming in behind Russia and Canada. (It happens to be number three in population size as well, behind China and India). Given that about half of Russia and Canada are sealed under permafrost –  at least for now – the U.S. has more on its rivals than mere square mileage would suggest. There’s a lot to work with between the redwood forest and the New York island.

But for all the charm in its variety – all those places you can ski, swim, survey autumn foliage or arid mesas – the span and diversity of the United States seems, as a matter of your national identity, secondary at best. Instead, it’s the abstractions that matter: common language, common law, common market. If these are not phenomenal achievements – I believe they are, ones that other societies past and present can only envy – they have certainly conferred tremendous benefits and indeed explain much of the nation’s rise to international pre-eminence. They have stitched the country together in ways that transcend any number of geographic differences. For proof you need not consider the virtually identical burger and fries (or pizza, or burrito) you can procure anywhere in a 3,000 mile span, but rather the rituals, from football games to proms, you can find at just about any American high school.

You realize that there are variations in climate and landscape across the continent, and that they have consequences in terms of accent and custom. But even if you’re not a big NASCAR fan, don’t celebrate Patriots Day or eat a lot of gumbo, you know about all these things thanks to a tightly stitched national media market and understand that they all fall under a capacious umbrella we know as American. I’m most aware of this when I watch a sports network like ESPN, where a scoreboard shows a dozen or more ball games taking place simultaneously at cities around the country, or when, coming out of a commercial break, a TV network gives us a shot of a local landmark before returning to the stadium. Geographic diversity is charming.

But I’m here to tell you that the shape of the United States is a little more fluid than you think, and that those maps that form the backdrop of our lives are at least a little illusory. As Americans, we tend to conflate the terms nation (a political construct), state (a geographic one) and country (a cultural one). But Kurds, a people sharing customs, language and history sprawled across Iraq, Turkey and other states in the Middle East, would not do this. Iraq, a state that consists of multiple – and hostile – ethnicities and religions, exists principally as a state because of the way the British drew its boundaries a century ago. Britain itself is a nation that includes Scotland, a country that in recent years has sought and received a measure of political autonomy. Much of the misery of the world derives from the lack of alignment between state, nation, and country.

Next: A sense of place -- and its contenders

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.