My students and I had fun discussing political geography today.  For instance, take a look at these two maps side by side.  First, we have the presidential electoral map from 1860, from the National Atlas of the United States:

Then we have this recent study, from Open Left, depicting how white men (the only ones eligible to vote in 1860) voted in 2008:

Now, obviously it would be very easy to overdraw an analysis from these two maps.  And indeed, I think Open Left is a bit too Whiggish (despite trying not to be Whiggish) about the links between the expansion of voting rights and the election of Progressive presidential candidates–after all, the expanded electorate has certainly elected its share of conservative Presidents.

But it’s still pretty interesting.

Larry Cebula over at Northwest History has an interesting post with some suggestions for reforming the OAH.

Read the whole thing, but I’ll boil his suggestions down to the nuggets:

1. Make the JAH into an exclusively electronic publication
2. Shake up the conference (he prefers discussions and e-discussions to roundtables and traditional panels)
3. Establish an open, moderated blog (sort of like a Metafilter for historians)
4. Reach out to people interested in American history in various local venues
5. Provide database access to historians outside the academy
6. Take a firm hand in wrangling grants.

I agree with point 1, I’m in sympathy with point 2, I’d skeptically welcome 3, I’d be all for 4 if it could be proved feasible, and I agree with 5 and 6 in principle, at least.

I shared Professor Cebula’s post on Facebook, and got various responses.  I’ll let Jeff weigh in himself, but my favorite comment was from another senior scholar: “The rot set in when they changed the name of the journal.  What was wrong with The Mississippi Valley Historical Review?”  (Date of name change: 1964.)

I’m an OAH member, and I feel lucky every time the annual conference is held at a nearby town (I like seeing American historians outside my subfield and hearing a few interesting papers, although they always seem to schedule all the early American history panels to run concurrently), or every time the JAH has articles that interest me.

I’m not so selfish as to demand that the organization feature more early history at the expense of, say, the twentieth century (although the twentieth century would probably win a contest for Most Depressing Century Ever), but I admit that I sometimes regard the organization with something of a shrug.  As long as early American history has its own journals and conferences, I’m prone to feel a bit complacent about what the OAH puts out.  On the other hand, not everyone has the luxury of such specialization (and I myself teach at least through 1877), and it’s good to have an organization that can take a broader view.

Anyway, I’d be intrigued to see the OAH put some of Cebula’s ideas into play.

The blogger Atrios likes to highlight articles about the incongruities between urban life (with its walkability and density) and automobile culture (which demands curb cuts, parking spaces, fast-moving highways, and suburban developments). He’s especially giddy when drivers are driven mad by cities–because suburbanites perceive them to be unsuitable as places to live, yet they still want to visit urban attractions (or work their urban jobs).  So when they can’t find a place to park, their frustration is palpable (particularly on internet comment boards).  For an urban planner, the only solutions seem to be: a) destroy your city, or b) resist the suburbanites’ car-centric frustration, possibly by coming up with transportation alternatives.

Atrios highlighted an article on the parking shortage in Newport, RI, particularly this quote:

Though a modern streetcar system may seem out-of-place with the city’s colonial appeal, officials say it could actually be a throwback to the early 20th century, when trolleys operated in the city. Plus, Bronk said, there’s nothing quaint about the city’s traffic.

“Does four lanes of automobile congestion, is that in keeping with the colonial period? It’s not,” he said. “Is a highway downtown in keeping with the colonial era? It’s not.”

Of all the cities I discussed in Rebels Rising, Newport is the best place to discern a surviving colonial landscape and surviving colonial buildings.  After that, I’d rank them as follows, from best to worst: Charleston (SC), Philadelphia (where Atrios lives), Boston, and New York City.  (Obviously there were other cities at the time, but those are the five that got the most attention in my book.)  Of those five, Newport has grown the least, economically and demographically, over the years, so it’s not so surprising that more of its colonial landscape survives.  The other cities have also struggled with transportation access in a lot of ways, and I’m sure visitors to all these cities (and to all cities, really) can call to mind the highways that lead into these cities, the neighborhoods that have been blighted by modern highway construction, and the public transportation alternatives that exist (or don’t exist) in these places.

All this is making me very grateful that my fellow fellow at the John Carter Brown Library used to offer me a parking space at his father’s office whenever I was driving down to Newport for dissertation research.

UPDATE: Why preserve historic buildings?  Because sometimes the findings are really cool.

Perhaps this is a bit Founderesque, but Common-place readers are always in search of new ways of conveying history, and so you may appreciate this op-art essay in the New York Times online by Maria Kalman called “Time Wastes Too Fast.”  Using documents, photographs, archaeology, primary sources, and her own illustrations (many based on contemporary portraits), Kalman spins a travelogue, history and biography, and a life lesson from a trip to Monticello.  Perhaps the essay will inspire you to redeem more of your summertime, or perhaps it will send you spinning into an envious funk.  Or maybe you’ll just be inspired to go for a walk.

Two articles in the NYT are worthy of attention as the impact of the economic crisis spreads.

First, Michael Powell and Janet Roberts, in “Minorities Hit Hardest by Foreclosures in New York,” do a great job describing the foreclosure crisis in the NYC metropolitan area.  They also nicely situate their story in the social and economic developments of the last 30-60 years or so.

If all this economic pain still seems rather abstract to you, then turn to the first-person account by Edmund L. Andrews, “My Personal Credit Crisis,” in this weekend’s magazine section.  Sure, it’s an in-house book promotion, but it also nicely captures the psychological effects of this kind of financial pain.  Take the emotions from Andrews and map them onto the larger-scale developments in the Powell/Roberts article, and it really brings home the power and viciousness of the recession.

Via Matthew Yglesias (who ponders Confederate place names), Ed Kilgore discusses the “sovereignty resolutions” that have suddenly become popular, particularly (though not exclusively) in southern legislatures.  Atrios kicks in the snark.

Go read the posts, come back, discuss.

Last week I did some more Tea Party commentary elsewhere:

…it’s true that many (though not all) of the conservative protesters were invoking the “tea party” mostly as empty symbolism and not as an explicit historical parallel. But such unthinking (not to say cheap) symbolism can be potentially dangerous. After all, the actual perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party destroyed over £9000 worth of goods (the equivalent of between $1 and $2 million dollars in today’s money), and this was after weeks of threatening the British tea agents at their homes and places of business. Perhaps we might agree today that the colonists were forced to resort to violence and destruction because they suffered under a “tyrannical” empire that ignored their arguments—but in a representative government, we have other alternatives. Despite the signs calling for “tarring and feathering,” in New York City, the strong police presence probably discouraged any real thoughts of violence. But will those protesters who were calling for “rebellion” be content with civil disobedience in the future?

Check out OUPblog for the rest.

Reader BMC insists that I post on this clip from the Rachel Maddow show.  (If you want to know what all the snickering is about, I’d suggest consulting an online slang dictionary, and I’m not responsible for what you find.)

I think the easiest thing to do would be to start picking out all the bad historical analogies and use it as an excuse to guffaw at the “Tea Party” movement that’s scheduled to demonstrate on April 15, 2009 (tax filing day).  But I’m not going to do that–instead I’m going to try and be even-handed about this, and see if there’s anything to this grassroots conservative invocation of the Boston Tea Party.

Unfortunately, the ideology behind all of this seems rather vague.  For instance, here’s what the website TaxDayTeaParty.com says on its front page:

The Tea Party effort is just a small piece of a much larger movement aimed at restoring the basic free-market principles our country was built on. The Constitution, for the most part, is being ignored by our current government and we intend on working together to correct the problem.

The Tea Party effort is a grassroots, collaborative volunteer organization made up of every day American citizens from across the country. We take pride in the fact that we’ve built a 50 state network of leaders and activists using nothing more than the internet, a few websites and a burning desire to restore freedom.

There’s not much there: the protesters are in favor of “basic free-market principles” and “freedom.”  (Well, me too!)  The site doesn’t say how the government is ignoring the Constitution, exactly–and if you dig a little further, it all goes back to Rick Santelli’s displeasure with the stimulus plan and the budget.

To the extent that the 2009 tax protests are part of a grass-roots movement, I think it’s fine to invoke the Boston Tea Party as your inspiration–although many suspect that corporate lobbyists and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News have a lot to do with organizing and promoting this protest, and even Santelli himself apears to have been the frontman for a rightwing foundation.  Still, if people are responding to the movement and even organizing local “tea parties” on their own, then that does accord with the local tea protests that sprang up in 1773-1774 in the wake of (and even immediately before) the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773.

One historical analogy that fails, however, is the idea that the Bostonians aboard the tea ships in 1773 were protesting higher taxes under the Tea Act.  This is just wrong.

• First, the British Parliament first passed the tax on tea in 1767, and Bostonians had in fact purchased plenty of tea bearing the threepenny-per-pound duty during the intervening years.  New Yorkers and Philadelphians, who smuggled almost all of their tea from Holland and elsewhere, were in fact outraged at how little the New Englanders were able to stick to their “anti-tax” principles.  In this respect, the Boston Tea Party was almost an apology.
• Second, the Tea Act would in fact have lowered the price of tea for Americans–so the idea of invoking the “Tea Party” every time you think your taxes are too high is incorrect.  Instead, the Tea Party protesters were energized by a series of principles: the government was propping up a monopoly company (the East India Company), the government was perpetuating an unjust tax (the 1767 tax on tea which had been confirmed in 1770), and the government was using the revenue from that tax to pay the salaries of judges and executive officials, thus rendering them independent of local legislatures.
• Third, and most importantly: I’ve been extremely dismayed at how many of the protesters say, “Taxation WITH representation ain’t so hot either.“  (I’m not just cherry-picking a random blog comment here–this phrase is everywhere.)

Well, no, no one LIKES paying taxes, but most people recognize that you need some form of taxation in order to pay firemen and astronauts, defend the country’s borders, try to ensure that our food isn’t poisoned, etc.  The point of protest against the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, and Tea Act in 1765-1774 was that “taxation WITHOUT representation” would lead to slavery–in other words, the colonists believed that the British ministry was arbitrarily levying taxes on Americans when those Americans had no say in electing members of Parliament.  In a democratic republican government, if you don’t like the level of your taxes or you don’t like how your tax money is spent, you have the power to peaceably “throw the bums out.”  And you certainly have the First Amendment right to protest and rail against the stimulus and bailout.  But the point is, the people of the Revolutionary Era had to fight for those rights to get rid of a constitutional monarchy–it’s hardly the case that paying taxes from a colony to a (partially hereditary) government that you don’t elect is the same as paying taxes to a government consisting of representatives and an executive that you DO have the power to elect.

On the other hand, to the extent that the tax protesters believe that their government doesn’t adequately represent them anymore, they’re arguing something more interesting.  If we stipulate that the current execution of the United States Constitution has failed, and that reform of the Constitution is needed (which many on both the left and the right have argued), then legislation and executive policy under George W. Bush or Barack Obama (or whoever) really is the product of a flawed system, and therefore (perhaps) as unjust as anything passed by King George III and the British Parliament. Still, before making this argument, I’d recommend picking up (for instance) Edmund Morgan’s Inventing the People, on how Americans came to believe that a representative government DID have the legitimate right to make laws in a way that a king did not.

By all means, let’s have a civil debate about Obama’s policies in the midst of the economic crisis.  And by all means, if we think that the problems we’re facing are due to underlying constitutional problems rather than the current legislative/executive solutions, then let’s talk about constitutional reform.  But (although I realize it’s too late now) please don’t abuse the analogy to the Boston Tea Party, even if such abuse (again, from both the right and left) is almost as much of an American tradition as the Tea Party itself.

P.S.  Also?  Why even mention tea bags?  In 1773 they were dumping loose tea into the harbor–the tea bag wasn’t invented until later–and you can still buy loose tea.

This is a little like day-old bread (if not canned bread–ew), but I finally finished watching the fifth and final season of the HBO series The Wire on DVD.  Like many people who don’t much care for television, I think it’s the best show ever to have been on television: a perfect cast, multi-layered storytelling, a rich perspective on urban life, actual moral ambiguity: you’ve heard it all before.  One thing’s for sure: if you haven’t dedicated yourself to watching the series from beginning to end, you’re missing out.

Anyway, I wasn’t ready to let the show go, so I watched one of the special companion features.  Season Five had dealt with (among other things) the newsroom.  In the companion feature, David Simon (the show’s executive producer) addresses the issue of sensationalism vs. complexity in daily journalism:

The ultimate act of reportage would be to really surround something that is endemic and complex, and to make it understandable so that more people could address themselves to solving that problem than ever before.  And that never happens.

The feature then cuts to a scene from Season 5, where staff members in the Baltimore Sun newsroom are discussing how to cover the city schools.

Scott (smarmy reporter): You don’t need a lot of context to examine what goes on…

Gus (beleaguered metro editor): Really? I think you need a lot of context to examine anything.

Context!  What more could a historian ask for?  Historians often scoff at journalists’ notion that they’re writing the “first draft of history.”  “Is that so?” we think.  “Well no wonder it seems so badly in need of revision.”  The immediacy of journalism and its failure to address issues in their full context sometimes strike us as inadequate.  (Then again, they probably think most historians are turgid and hesitant writers, and they probably have a point.)

In the end, the two endeavors of journalism and history scholarship aren’t too far apart in their goals.  Unfortunately, the two endeavors also share some of the same problems: How can journalists and historians attract attention-deficient readers to our stories in an electronic age with so many other distractions?  How do we support good journalism and good history—both essential to a healthy democracy—when good journalism and good scholarship aren’t always responsive to market demands?  There aren’t easy answers to those questions, but then again, the problems portrayed in The Wire also resist easy answers.