Summer is the slow time around here, mostly because summer “vacation” is when I get to work through my pile of history-writing projects that are supposed to lead to the production and consumption of paper products. You know the ones. As with most subjects, I wax hot and cold as to whether light blogging complements or interferes with other types of writing. Clearly the dial this June has been set to “interferes.” While we are on the subject of waxing hot, I can definitely report that our faltering HVAC system’s efforts to recreate the productivity of the summer of 1993, when I wrote 400 pages of dissertation in a stifling hot 4th-floor Boston apartment, did not work.

I have also found the public occurrences of recent weeks to be more of the wait-and-see Obama type than the call-forth-the-thunder Bush-era kind.  Mostly this is a good thing. The two most recent foreign political crises, in Iran and Honduras, are the sorts of situations that might or might not strongly affect the U.S. but that our government cannot really Do Something About without obvious interference that would amount to taking ownership of another country’s fate without being able to fully predict or control what that fate would be. Washington chin-waggers always suggest Something should be done — it’s easier and safer to maunder about Freedom somewhere else than take a constructive position on this country’s problems — and presidents have tended to fall into the trap of following the chinwaggers’ advice, often with the Something being “send in the military.”  Barack Obama may yet take that fall, but it has been refreshing so far to have a president whose characteristic response to a foreign crisis is to say some decent things about another people’s struggles, but otherwise stick to his job of managing the United States without trying to be World Emperor on top of it.

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Now playing: T-Bone Burnett – House of Mirrors
via FoxyTunes

This the 200th post on this blog, begun a little over a year ago. In celebration, I present the only “Bicentennial Minute” I could find on YouTube. I suspect these are a fond childhood memory for many of us budding early Americanists. Back in 1975-76, the young television viewer waiting for Kojak or Hawaii 5-0 to come on could learn a quite lot of history, probably more than any given hour of basic cable history programming today. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Miss Jessica Tandy:

Common-place publishes the occasional “Object Lessons” column with good reason: knowing your material culture is important.  For instance, when cataloging the office furniture purchases of ex-Merrill-Lynch CEO John Thain, The Consumerist’s Ben Popken makes a horrible mistake, and then corrects himself with the help of a little eighteenth-century know-how.

(hat tip, BPM)

“Beyond the Valley of the Founders,” the Common-Place Politics Issue that tookup quite a bit of the last half of my 2008, has just been sent to the C-P archives by the first issue of 2009. Never fear, however, the politics is still available to read and comment on, and remains eternally relevant. We are not even done with the “Myths of the Lost Atlantis” series yet! Readers just discovering this blog should be particularly sure to go back and look the Politics Issue .

This is also a good moment to express our gratitude to outgoing Common-Place editor Ed Gray, whose efficiency, editorial skill and astounding patience and diplomacy in dealing with troublesome authors and guest editors has really kept this unique enterprise going the last 5 years. I am sure he is already enjoying his greatly-reduced email load.

Common-Place editor and blogger in Milan, celebrating completion of Common-Place Politics Issue conferring on Thomas Paine.

Sharp-eyed readers, and aren’t you all, will have noticed a new name attached to some recent posts. In response to last week’s help wanted notice, Prof. Benjamin Carp of Tufts University is joining me here as a guest blogger to try out the whole “Publick Occurrences” experience. With any luck, he may even stay a while.

Ben is a University of Virginia Ph.D. whose book Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. (I see from Amazon that the paperback edition hits the streets this coming March.) He is currently completing a much-needed new study of the Boston Tea Party. I think I will let Ben tell anything more he wants readers to know about himself himself, but I feel lucky that such a distinguished young scholar is interested in helping out with our quirky little enterprise here. Welcome!

A pressing non-electronic project and a new course are going to limit my contributions here to around once a week for the foreseeable future. I will just have to hope that Barack has our back, and the forces of history behind him. I admit to some discomfort the with the wall-to-wall Clintonian centrists Obama seems to be choosing for his administration, and to some puzzlement by his and other leading Democrats’attitude toward the Senate. Why the rush to leave when big votes were coming? Why the high moral dudgeon over letting a legally appointed Democrat take his seat because the man who chose him was corrupt? Ever hear of Harry Truman and Tom Pendergast?  But by all means let’s give the reptilian Norm Coleman the benefit of the doubt, when really Harry Reid should exploiting every strategy possible to get Franken seated and incumbified and voting as soon as possible. Obama’s establishmentarianism is really quite worrisome and sadly not all that unexpected for someone with his educational pedigree (Ivy League, I mean). But, really the presidential transition period is best ignored unless you are looking for job in Washington, which I am so not.

For those those of you who value public exposure over money, and would like to see more activity in this beautiful space while I focus on writing in the old media (books) for a while, applications are hereby open for co-bloggers. Anyone with some level of historical experise, interest in modern politics, and a bit of writing ability is welcome to apply simply by dropping me an email (PasleyJ AT missouri.edu) explaining their interest and attaching a c.v. or resume.  There is no pay, so plenty of slots are open.

Finals week here, and many holiday duties as well, so I will have to content myself with limited posting for a bit. Today we have a follow-up to a post from two weeks ago on an unlikely link that was made between Thomas Jefferson and the anti-scientific Creation Museum outside Cincinnati.

Joseph Clarke, the author of the article that made the link, wrote me soon after the post went up and we had what I think was an interesting little exchange on the subject. With Clarke’s permission, I am going to share it here.

Clarke wrote:

Dear Dr Pasley:

I’ve just discovered your December 5 post about my article “Specters of a Young Earth” on northern Kentucky’s Creation Museum.

You object to “innocent Founders being dragged in to get blamed or credited for everything that a given writer likes or dislikes about American culture.” I’m not sure Jefferson would appreciate the implication that his efforts to shape American culture met with so little lasting success. The notion of Jefferson as one of the Creation Museum’s “intellectual progenitors” in a doctrinal sense is absurd, and I make no such claim. But surely mainstream America’s views on urbanism do owe a great deal to Jefferson, who, as an amateur architect, had particularly strong views on the question of what form settlement should take on the continent.

According to the great Italian architectural scholar Manfredo Tafuri–and I’d be interested to know whether you agree–Jefferson’s efforts to restrain industrial development in order to create an agrarian utopia is a persistent drive in the national psyche. Tafuri writes, in his book Architecture and Utopia:

“Hamilton interpreted the aims of the political situation–that had begun with the American Revolution–to be economic, and coldly and lucidly pursued an accelerated development of American financial and industrial capital. Jefferson, on the contrary, remained faithful to a democracy arrested at the level of a utopia. Agricultural economy, local and regional autonomy as pivots of the democratic system, and the restraining of industrial development all had an explicit significance for Jefferson. They were symbols of his fear in face of the processes set in motion by the Revolution. Essentially this was fear of the dangers of involution, of the transformation of democracy into a new authoritarianism, brought into being by capitalist competition, urban development, and the birth and growth of an urban proletariat. In this sense Jefferson was against the city and against the development of industrial economy. This is why he tried to impede the logical economic consequences of democracy. With him came into being ‘radical America,’ or rather the ambiguous conscience of American intellectuals, who acknowledge the foundations of the democratic system while opposing its concrete manifestations.”

I hope it’s apparent that I regard the Creation Museum as a benighted pastiche of many such aspects of American culture, and its invocation of the “Jeffersonian” agrarian impulse as entirely unwitting.

Joseph Clarke

I replied:

Mr. Clarke:

Thanks for writing. It took me a few minutes to connect the name! I actually liked your article quite a lot and possibly my  “intellectual progenitor” line was a little unfair. The passage on Jefferson just seemed to fall under one of the categories I try to police on the blog, deployments of the Founders (especially Jefferson) into arguments where they do not seem to fit very well. You may not have been quite clear enough if you meant to distinguish the Creation Museum’s “benighted pastiche” from Jefferson and Bryan’s celebrations of rural life. It came off as, “Here are the CM’s deep roots in American culture.” Jefferson gets used as a rough stand-in for “American Culture” so often — these days usually in a critical context where he stands in for American racism or expansionism or ruralism — that I usually feel compelled to remind people how Jefferson was seen and what he stood for as a public figure in own time: as man of the left (a Jacobin to his critics), dedicated to the progress of Enlightenment and democracy, within some of the limits of his time, but quite beyond others. Obviously in the longer run, and in terms of many of his specific writings and actions, a very different portrait of Jefferson can be painted, but to me they miss his essential significance for his period.

Part of the problem, though it is not much of a problem, is the fact that you are writing as much about the architecture and siting of the Creation Museum building as its “scientific” content. Jefferson may be more relevant to the former than to the latter, though I wonder about that too. Certainly Jefferson’s own orderly Palladian style, with its domed centers and wings, seems more traditional museum than the anti-monumental office park style you talk about quite insightfully in the article. My own guess would be that the origins of the Creation Museum’s worldview should be located much more recently. I tend to see W.J. Bryan’s synthesis of Jeffersonianism with religious fundamentalism as a failure that portended the decisive rightward shift of American evangelical Christianity and “agrarianism”/ruralism as they confronted the mass society of the 20th century.

We really should have this discussion publicly. I would be happy to post your comment on my blog, or a fuller response that I could promote to a guest post, if you are interested.

Yours,
Jeff Pasley

(more…)

I just wanted to call readers’ attention to Rosemarie Zagarri’s very helpful comment on my pre-Thanksgiving post on the use and abuse of American history in Newsweek. Rosie provides a nice antidote to my vacation hip-shooting.  While you are at it, be sure to check out Rosie’s guest post in the “Myths of the Lost Atlantis” series, too.

There is more Lost Atlantis coming once I make some progress on a few other pressing matters, like Christmas shopping and grading and some non-Internet writing projects.

Please excuse the lack of Atlantean soundings since Rosie’s post last week. We have at least three more posts in the pipeline, but it was starting to seem better to let readers absorb them rather than pumping them all out before the current election, when people, and even historians, are probably more focused on the here and now than the Early Republic. So stay tuned for more, and remember you can always use the drop-down “categories” box at the right to select “Myths of the Lost Atlantis” and see all the posts in the series, latest one at the top.

Clearly I should not have promised new “Lost Atlantis” posts every 3-5 days and then run off to the land of uncertain Internet access that Italy turned out to be. My apologies. At any rate, I restarted the series Wednesday, almost as soon as I walked back in the door, with Andrew Shankman’s post on Jeffersonian charges of monarchism, below.  (I seem to have figured out how to make footnotes work on the blog on this one occasion, so enjoy.) Matthew Mason’s and Rosemarie Zagarri’s posts will be coming soon after that, and more are looming on the horizon. I am also happy to report that new contributors have volunteered, so the series will be continuing for a while.

As to the blog itself, I will be posting my own comments, but I must say that I am feeling pretty inhibited about commenting on the presidential election right now because of my strict no-gloating and no pre-hatched-chicken-counting rules.

As to Alan Greenspan, in his case, I think we early American historians are entitled to gloat, given that he went up to Capitol Hill and admitted that his and most other economists’ ideology of the market and “private enterprise” as infallible, self-policing mechanisms is wrong, wrong, wrong:

Greenspan called this “a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”

We did tell him so, most recently in the current issue of Common-Place.