Procrastination

Are you having a hard time getting started on that writing project? Then perhaps you may want to procrastinate a bit and read Peg Boyle Single's recent piece. Here is a taste:

Procrastination occurs when we get distracted rather than working on what we need to work on. But what triggers procrastination? As I have worked with writers, it seems that procrastination is triggered when the anxiety of writing overrides the consequences of not writing. The thought of writing begins an anxiety reaction, and to lower it, at least in the short-term, you distract and put out of your mind the thoughts or goals that are triggering the anxiety reaction. OK, that is fine. But then why does writing trigger an anxiety reaction? Writing triggers an anxiety reaction because writing is a creative experience and any creative experience can open us up to self-exposure. The creative experience is more likely to trigger an anxiety reaction when it is linked to our core being, goals, and dreams. As a result, engaging in the activity can trigger the anxiety associated with not being good enough, feeling like a fraud, or not living up to the standards that we hold for ourselves. The level at which we want to work may not be the level at which we are currently working, and we don’t want to admit that to ourselves or to others. I know that writing as a creative experience triggers those reactions in me. My writing reflects how I think and what is important to me. In short, my writing reflects me.

Or maybe we are just lazy.

Messiah College Student Wins Gilder-Lehrman History Scholarship

Congratulations to Christine Kelly:

NEW YORK, NY (April 29, 2010) -Christine Kelly, a rising senior at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, of Dover Plains, New York, has been named to the 2010 Gilder Lehrman History Scholars Program. One of thirty students in the nation selected for this honor, Kelly will participate in a one-week intensive history program in New York City this June.

The Gilder Lehrman History Scholars Program identifies and supports the top undergraduate majors in American history across the country. One-Week Scholars visit museums and historical sites in New York City and meet with distinguished historians, writers, editors, museum curators, and other professionals to participate in discussions about major issues in American history and careers in the field.

Since 2003, 225 college sophomores and juniors have been named to the Gilder Lehrman History Scholars Program, and many have gone on to pursue graduate studies at leading institutions including Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, Yale, UCLA, and the University of Michigan. This year, thirty undergraduates have been awarded one-week scholarships and ten others have received scholarships for a five-week research program. To find out more, visit http://www.gilderlehrman.org/education/hs_overview.php

Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is a nonprofit organization improving and enriching American history education through a wide range of programs and resources for students, teachers, scholars, and history enthusiasts throughout the nation. Gilder Lehrman creates and works closely with history-focused schools; organizes summer seminars and development programs for teachers; produces print and digital publications and traveling exhibitions; hosts lectures by eminent historians; administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state and U.S. territory; and offers national book prizes and fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection as well as other renowned archives. Gilder Lehrman maintains the gateway to American history online: www.gilderlehrman.org, and hosts the quarterly online journal History Now at www.gilderlehrman.org/historynow, designed specifically for K-12 teachers and students.

Alan Wolfe Reviews Eric Miller's New Biography of Christopher Lasch

Check out Alan Wolfe's review of Eric Miller's Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch. (Unfortunately, you need to be a subscriber to The New Republic to read the entire review on-line). Miller, a professor of history at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, has written the first major biography of the late historian and cultural critic.

Wolfe's review is generally positive, but like so many essay-reviews of this nature we learn more about Lasch than we do about the argument of Miller's book. I seem to remember the same phenomenon happening a few years ago when David Brown's biography of Richard Hofstadter appeared. Reviewers used their reviews to pontificate about Hofstadter. Few reviews actually unpacked the argument of Brown's book.

At least The New Republic could have accompanied Wolfe's review with the cover image of Miller's book. Instead they opted for an image of Lasch's The Agony of the American Left.

I am waiting for Eerdmans to send me a review copy of Hope in a Scattering Time. When it arrives I look forward to working my way through the book here at the blog.

A Review of the Revisions to the Texas Social Studies Standards: Grades 1-2

As promised, today starts our review of the revisions to the Texas Social Studies standards. Let's begin with the standards for first and second grade. You can view the revisions here.

First, it is important to mention something about language. Since there has been a lot of debate over "who and what is in" and "who and what is out" of the standards, it is important to realize the difference between the use of the phrase "such as" and the use of the word "including."

If a standard says: "The student is expected to describe the origins of customs, holidays, and celebrations of the community, state, and nation such as San Jacinto Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day..." this means that the standard is offering San Jacinto Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day as possible examples or "illustrative examples" of holidays. I would imagine, and I could be wrong about this, that teachers will have the option of teaching any holiday they so desire and still meet the standard. To be honest, I have no idea how these "illustrious examples" will impact the content decisions of textbook publishers.

If a standard says: "The student is expected to identify contributions of historical figures including Sam Houston, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. who have influenced the community, state, and nation," then teachers are required to cover these individuals and students must master details about their lives. These standards are obviously a bit more controversial since students are forced to learn about the figures that the State Board of Education wants them to learn about.

First Grade Standards:

p.6: Students are asked to "identify historical figures including Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Garrett Morgan, and Richard Allen, and other individuals, who have exhibited individualism and inventiveness." Edison is pretty well-known and I would think most parents would want their kids to learn about him as a great inventor. The same might go for Alexander Graham Bell. Garrett Morgan is an African-American from Ohio who invented something similar to the modern-day gas mask. Richard Allen was a black preacher who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Morgan was added by the scholars who reviewed the original standards. Allen was added by the members of the State Board of Education. Few would probably have any qualms with students learning about these men, but the decision to include them just seems so random. Why should Texas students learn about these inventors and individualists and not others?

p.9: Students are "expected to identify historical figures such as Nathan Hale, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Scott Key, and Eleanor Roosevelt who have exemplified good citizenship." Again, the mention of all of these figures seems fine to me, but what was the motivation behind including these four people and not others who have exemplified good citizenship? This is a "such as" standard, so teachers could choose for their lessons whatever "good citizens" that they want. It is good to see that teachers, at least in this elementary curriculum, are getting the power to shape their lessons as they see fit.

Second Grade Standards:

p.12: "The student is expected to identify contributions of historical figures including Thurgood Marshall, Irma Rangel, John Hancock, and Theodore Roosevelt, who have influenced the community, state, and nation. Since this is an "including" standard, it means that students must master information about these figures. I am glad that Thurgood Marshall made the cut. Irma Rangel, a Texas politician, was the first female Mexican American legislator in Texas. Hancock and Roosevelt seem to fit the bill for this standard as well. The Board definitely tried to maintain diversity here in terms of race, gender, and political persuasion, but, again, the choice of these four figures just seems too random.

A similar thing could be said for the next standard: "The student is expected to identify historical figures including Amelia Earhart, Robert Fulton, George Washington Carver, and W.E.B. DuBois, who have exhibited individualism and inventiveness."

I am sure that the choices of these historical figures are the result of fierce debate among the board. I am also sure that there was a lot of compromise here.

p.14: "The student is expected to identify historical figures, including Paul Revere, Abigail Adams, World War II Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP's) and Navajo Code Talkers, and Sojourner Truth, who have exemplified good citizenship." Again, we have diversity here, but why were these individuals and groups chosen and not others?

p.14: "The student is expected to identify selected patriotic songs such as "The Star Spangled Banner and "America the Beautiful." Fair enough, but I imagine that a teacher could also introduce a more left-leaning patriotic song here, such as "This Land is Your Land."

Apart from the random choices of individuals, these early elementary standards look pretty good. Students get a flavor of important historical figures from a variety of political, ethnic, and racial perspectives.

Stay tuned: 3rd grade is next.

The Power of One Class

Marilee Lindemann has a nice reflection in today's Inside Higher Ed on the impact that only one course with one professor can have on a student's life. Here is a snippet:

Susan Gubar – who is retiring after a remarkable career as a teacher and writer in literature and women's studies -- was my teacher. At first glance, the claim might seem thin or self-aggrandizing, the evidence in support of it accurate but scant. I took just one class with Gubar, an undergraduate seminar at Indiana University in the fall of 1980. Three credits out of the 120 or so I earned for my bachelor’s degree. Fifteen weeks out of a student life that lasted nearly a quarter of a century.

So, no, I never took a graduate course with her, never experienced the peculiar intensity and intimacy of a dozen brilliant brats hammering away at big ideas and hoping to earn an approving "smart, very smart" from a demanding professor who delighted in the give-and-take of the seminar table. She did not chair my qualifying exam or direct my doctoral dissertation. She never tore my rough drafts to shreds, exhorting me to read more, think harder, or write more clearly. I never stayed up late grading papers for one of her lecture courses, never faced the terror of speaking in one of those big halls myself in front of one of the most dynamic lecturers in the history of teaching. I never ran to the library to track down a reference for an article she was writing, never house-sat for her, never sat through a mock interview with her in preparation for the job market. I did not teach her to quilt.

I took one class with her, and all I can say is that 30 years later I still give the class and the teacher credit for changing the course of my life. I don’t give Susan all the credit. At 21, I was ready to be inspired and transformed, to find the personal and professional paths I was meant to walk and take my first tentative steps on them, though that cheesy path metaphor makes me sound more like a Victorian heroine than the naïve and unkempt baby dyke I was at the time. In any case, I credit Susan with recognizing what was happening for me and doing everything she could to assure that the moment bore fruit.

What did that mean, in concrete terms? Well, for starters, it meant she didn’t toss me out of her office one autumn afternoon when I burst in without an appointment, pointed at her, and impetuously declared, "I want to do what you do." She sat me down, listened to me, talked to me about what realizing such an ambition would actually involve, and patiently guided me through the steps it would take to get into graduate school. She told me what schools to apply to, carefully read my personal statement, wrote in support of my application, and helped me make a decision when it came time to weigh admissions offers, including a fine one from her own department.

Lindemann laments the fact that these kind of encounters are becoming more and more difficult in public universities:

I write about it because I am concerned that the conditions of possibility for such encounters are threatened in the current economic climate of higher education. There will always be great teachers, but I fear that great teaching will be much less likely to occur as we reduce the opportunities for the kind of undergraduate learning experience I was so fortunate to have with Susan back in Bloomington all those years ago...

My point is simply this: Thirty years after my fortunate fall into a class that changed the course of my life, we've made it much harder for kids like me -- middle class, publicly educated, from non-academic families -- to have such experiences. For the upcoming fall semester, my department has exactly one undergraduate seminar on the schedule. It has 20 seats, all reserved for students in the honors program. Ten years ago, the department had six such courses on the fall schedule, each with 18 seats, open to all majors. I understand the brutal economic and institutional conditions that have dictated that shift, but I still can't help worrying about the 88 lost opportunities for students to stumble unwittingly into the delights of concentrated research or to have a close encounter with a faculty member that flicks on a switch they didn't even know they had.

I am sure that if I had only had the opportunity to take one of Susan's large lecture courses I still would have had a thrilling intellectual experience, but it's hard to imagine it would have had the same transformative impact as that magical seminar with the dry-sounding title. It's hard to imagine that, under such circumstances, she would have known me well enough to take seriously my passionate yet inchoate desire to "do what you do." I grabbed the apple and ate hungrily from the tree of knowledge, but the English department made sure I walked into the bounteous, well-tended garden of its roster of seminars...

This is a good reminder to all of us teachers as we wind down another academic year. It is also a good reminder to administrators not to forget their priorities in these times of economic difficulty.

Is The New York Times Anti-Catholic?

The New York Times has been leading the charge to implicate Pope Benedict in the Catholic priest abuse scandal, but veteran religion writer Kenneth Woodward thinks that a lot of their coverage is unfair. Here is a taste:

The New York Times isn’t fair. In its all-hands-on-deck drive to implicate the pope in diocesan cover-ups of abusive priests, the Times has relied on a steady stream of documents unearthed or supplied by Jeff Anderson, the nation’s most aggressive litigator on behalf of clergy-abuse victims. Fairness dictates that the Times give Anderson at least a co-byline.

After all, it was really Anderson who “broke” the story on March 25 about Fr. Lawrence Murphy and his abuse of two hundred deaf children a half-century ago in Wisconsin. Reporter Laurie Goodstein says her article emerged from her own “inquiries,” but the piece was based on Anderson documents. Indeed, in its ongoing exercise in J’accuse journalism, the Times has adopted as its own Anderson’s construal of what took place. Anderson is a persuasive fellow: back in 2002 he claimed that he had already won more than $60 million in settlements from the church. But the really big money is in Rome, which is why Anderson is trying to haul the Vatican into U.S. federal court. The Times did not mention this in its story, of course, but if the paper can show malfeasance on the part of the pope, Anderson may get his biggest payday yet.

It’s hard for a newspaper to climb in bed with a man like Anderson without making his cause its own. Does this mean that the Times is anti-Catholic? New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan thinks it is—he said so last October in response to an earlier series of stories on clergy abuse. Whatever one thinks of Dolan’s accusation, clearly the Times considers sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests more newsworthy than abuse committed by other groups. An April 13 verdict against the Boy Scouts of America, which has struggled with the child-sexual-abuse issue for a century, did not merit page-1, above-the-fold treatment but rather a single paragraph deep inside the paper. A longer April 15 story about a Brown University student credibly accused of raping another student, an incident the university did not report to the police and arguably “covered up” at the request of powerful figures in the Brown community, appeared on page 18.

No question, the Times’s worldview is secularist and secularizing, and as such it rivals the Catholic worldview. But that is not unusual with newspapers. What makes the Times unique—and what any Catholic bishop ought to understand—is that it is not just the nation’s self-appointed newspaper of record. It is, to paraphrase Chesterton, an institution with the soul of a church. And the church it most resembles in size, organization, internal culture, and international reach is the Roman Catholic Church.

Like the Church of Rome, the Times is a global organization. Even in these reduced economic times, the newspaper’s international network of news bureaus rivals the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. The difference is that Times bureau chiefs are better paid and, in most capitals, more influential. A report from a papal nuncio ends up in a Vatican dossier, but a report from a Times correspondent is published around the world, often with immediate repercussions. With the advent of the Internet, stories from the Times can become other outlets’ news in an ever-ramifying process of global cycling and recycling. That, of course, is exactly what happened with the Times piece on Fr. Murphy, the deceased Wisconsin child molester. The pope speaks twice a year urbi et orbi (to the city and to the world), but the Times does that every day.

Again like the Church of Rome, the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board. There is no issue, local or global, on which these (usually anonymous) writers do not pronounce with a papal-like editorial “we.” Like the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the editorial board is there to defend received truth as well as advance the paper’s political, social, and cultural agendas. One can no more imagine a Times editorial opposing any form of abortion—to take just one of that magisterium’s articles of faith—than imagine a papal encyclical in favor.

Read Woodward's entire piece here. It is good.

Garrison Keillor on Stephen Ambrose's Plagiarism

We blogged about this sad story last weeks. You may recall that an article in The New Yorker revealed that the late historian Stephen Ambrose had lied about his working relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Now Garrison Keillor weighs in on this case with his usual blend of criticism and humor. Here is a taste:

When the story came out in The New Yorker last week, I felt ill. I admired the man. I loved “Citizen Soldiers,” about the Battle of the Bulge. He was a deservedly best-selling historian (“D-Day,” “Band of Brothers”), the prolific author of books on Lewis and Clark, George A. Custer, the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War, biographer of Eisenhower and Nixon: Why did the gentleman need to stoop to such a pitiful petty lie? And why did he lift passages from other writers and use them without quotation marks? Did someone make fun of his lack of erudition, growing up in Whitewater, Wisconsin? Did he feel inferior to his doctor dad? A longtime smoker (who died of lung cancer in 2002), maybe Mr. Ambrose was given to tempting fate and playing with fire.

Plagiarism is suicide. It stems from envy, I suppose, or in Ambrose’s case, the rush to produce books in rapid succession, but no matter, it’s a stain that peroxide won’t lift out. All your hard work over a lifetime, blighted by the word “plagiarism” every time somebody writes about you. It’s in the third or fourth graph of your obituary, a splotch on your escutcheon.

Here, dear reader, I must disclose that I have repeatedly lied about my closeness to General Eisenhower and have claimed more than once to have been his aide aboard the cruiser Memphis where he observed the D-Day landing from the porthole of his cabin where he was ensconced with Marlene Dietrich, sipping champagne, as I sat outside the door strumming “Lili Marlene” on a HarmonyTone F-4 mandolin.

Years later, an eagle-eyed reader blew the whistle, pointing out that HarmonyTone’s F-4 mandolin was not manufactured until 1947. Also, that I was 2 years old at the time of D-Day. Also, that Marlene Dietrich was in Hawaii at the time, canoodling with John F. Kennedy.

Luckily for me, the exposé came out on the very day that President Nixon resigned, and so it got buried in the back pages, along with the embarrassing fact that my book, “Sailing With the General,” contained large swatches (unattributed) of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Thankfully, these embarrassing disclosures never got in the way of my friendship with President Eisenhower, and he and I golfed many, many rounds together, at Augusta and Burning Man and Plum Creek, with George S. Patton and Walter (Old Iron Pants) Cronkite, the memory of which the smell of plum blossoms brings back with startling clarity.

How Will Historians Use Twitter?

A few weeks ago it was announced that the Library of Congress had struck a deal with Twitter to store the complete archives of this social networking site. That's about 50 million "tweets" per day. We blogged about it here. At the time I thought it would be a goldmine for future social historians. I still do.

Along these lines, Christopher Beam has an interesting take on all of this in a recent piece at Slate. Beam asks if access to all of these tweets will make the historian's job easier or more difficult:

The answer is: both. On the one hand, there's more useful information for historians to sift. On the other, there's more useless information. And without the benefit of hindsight, it's impossible to tell which is which. It's like what John Wanamaker supposedly said about advertising: He knew half of it was wasted, he just didn't know which half.

But I wonder: What exactly is "useless information?" This seems like the old argument that early American diaries had too much in them that were mundane and or pedantic and were thus of little use to historians--an idea that was debunked in the Pulitzer-Prize winning fashion by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's masterful Midwife's Tale (among others). While I agree with Beam that future historians using Twitter will have their work cut out for them, I also think that was might "useless" to one historian could be very useful to another one. (I don't think Beam would disagree).

The entire article is worth a look.

HT

A Review of the Revisions to the Texas Social Studies Standards

As many of my readers know, we have spent considerable time here writing about the new social studies curriculum revisions made by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE). We have been following this debate from the beginning, with an op-ed in Houston Chronicle back in July 2009, a recent opinion piece in Sojourners magazine, and forty-one blog posts (and counting).

The revisions have yet to be made official. They will be voted on in late May. In the meantime, the SBOE has alotted a 30-day "public comment period." Between April 16 and May 15 Texas residents and others are encouraged to provide comments. I don't know how this all works, but I am assuming that the Board will take these comments into consideration before voting.

I was recently asked by a reporter from the Austin-American Statesman to comment on the revisions from the perspective of an American historian who has been following this story. So, over the course of the next week or two, I will try to read through all of the revisions and make some remarks.

Stay tuned. We will begin with the Kindergarten, First Grade, and Second Grade revisions in the next day or two. In the meantime, you can read all the revisions here.

Den Hartog on the Religious Faith of Washington and Lincoln

If you can't wait for Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Primer to make it to bookstores and you need your "Founding Fathers on Religion" fix, check out this radio interview with Northwestern College historian Jonathan Den Hartog.

Jill Lepore: Who Owns the American Revolution?

Here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home we have made an effort to call our readers' attention to authors who bring history to bear, in a responsible way, on the current Tea Party Movement. So far no one has done it better than Harvard history professor Jill Lepore. In her recent article in The New Yorker, "Tea and Sympathy," Lepore brilliantly offers us a piece of history journalism (is that a genre?) that weaves the current Tea Party movement in Boston with both the Boston Tea Party of 1774 and the bicentennial celebration (1974) of the event. Here is a very brief taste that does not do justice to the entire article:

Beginning even before it was over, the American Revolution has been put to wildly varying political ends. Federalists claimed its legacy; so did anti-Federalists. Jacksonian Democrats said they were the true sons of the Revolution. No, Whigs said, we are. The Union claimed the Revolution; so did the Confederacy.

Today’s Tea Party has roots in a battle over the Revolution that dates to the Bicentennial, when no one could agree on what story a country torn apart by the war in Vietnam and by civil-rights strife at home ought to tell about its unruly beginnings. Congress established an American Revolution Bicentennial Commission in 1966. “My view is that the Bicentennial should be a vehicle for social change,” Richard Barrett, who was a director of the commission under Lyndon Johnson, said. After Richard Nixon took office, in 1969, Barrett left. The new Administration, he said, “is not prepared to deal with the kinds of problems I’d like to see dealt with.”

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, killing four. This caused a lot of people to think about the Boston Massacre; almost exactly two hundred years earlier, British soldiers had fired into a crowd, killing five. In those years, Bostonians had opposed the military, insisting that a standing army was inconsistent with a free government. To a generation dodging the draft, that argument looked pretty interesting. The week after the shooting, a Kent State student said to the Times, “They told King George or whoever that guy was, ‘Look, leave us alone.’ And he said no. And they said, ‘Come on, leave us alone or there’s going to be trouble.’ And he still said no. So they said, ‘All right, mother,’ and they picked up a gun and started killing a bunch of British and tossing tea in the Boston harbor. And that’s what’s happening here.”

Spring 2010 Issue of Early American Studies is Here

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring 2010)

From the Editor Elaine Forman Crane

"A Historical Archaelogical Study of Eighteenth-Century Newport: Three Middling Households" by Christina J. Hodge and Diana S. Gallagher

"Widow Pratt's World of Goods: Implications of Consumer Choice in Colonial Newport, Rhode Island" by Christina J. Hodge

"Parasites and Sanitation in Eighteenth-Century Newport, Rhode Island: The Pratt, Brown, and Tate Families" by Diana S. Gallagher

"Calvin and Locke: Dueling Epistemologies in The New-England Primer, 1720-1790" by Stephanie Schnorbus

"'Astrology's from Heaven not from Hell': The Religious Significance of Early American Almanacs" by T. J. Tomlin

"'Light might possibly be requisite': Edgar Huntly, Regional History, and Historicist Criticism" by Andrew Newman

"'Ready to act in defiance of Government': Colonial Philadelphia Voluntary Culture and the Defense Association of 1747-1748" by Jessica Choppin Roney

"'A Flag of Defyance at the Masthead': The Delaware River Pilots and the Sinews of Philadelphia's Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century" by Simon Finger

"'Jacobins in this Country': The United States, Great Britain, and Trans-Atlantic Anti-Jacobinism" by Rachel Hope Cleves

"Glimpses of the Other before Orientalism: The Muslim World in Early American Periodicals, 1785-1800" by Robert Battistini

Sponsored by The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Early American Studies is a triannual journal dedicated to publishing original research on a broad range of topics. Starting in 2010 it will be triannual. Each issue is organized with the goal of fostering research and scholarly inquiry into the histories and cultures of North America in the Atlantic world before 1850. Special emphasis is focused on topics and issues centered in the mid-Atlantic region.

Why Doormen?

We have recently been discussing the meaning of work in my first-year interdisciplinary "Created and Called for Community" course. Both of the authors we have been discussing--Dorothy Sayers and John Paul II-- focus on the sacred value of even the most ordinary tasks and vocations.

This was the intellectual grid through which I read James Collins New York Times op-ed on the social utility of doormen. (The context for the piece was the recent threat of a doorman strike in New York City). Collins has convinced me that doormen really do serve a purpose. Here is a taste:

Why then does the institution persist and thrive? Tenants value their doormen, I believe, because they provide an extra layer of face-to-face social connection that is not strictly “necessary,” but is tremendously gratifying nonetheless. As the sociologist Peter Bearman points out in his fascinating book, “Doormen,” the doorman knows the tenants; he knows their comings and goings; he knows their friends; he knows what kind of food they like; he watches their children grow up; he may gossip to them about other tenants; for tenants he likes, he will break the rules.

Radical class distinctions no longer exist — not even the best buildings can provide them anymore — so the doorman, while still socially distant from the tenants, has risen from the status of a servant. Rather, in the big, indifferent city, he is like a small-town shopkeeper or postman or cop who knows your (and others’) business, looks out for you, helps the community cohere and talks mostly about the weather. (Mr. Bearman’s statistics confirm this.) As with those small-town figures, the doorman’s knowledge of a person can be worrying, but it is comforting, too. The doorman is a touch of Gemeinschaft in an ever more Gesellschaft world.

Sojourners Piece on Texas Social Studies Curriculum

Last week I blogged about my opinion piece in the May 2010 issue of Sojourners magazine on the Texas Social Studies curriculum. Here is the text in full:

Those Who Will Not Learn from History:
How Texas decides what your children will study about our past.
By John Fea

Like it or not, the far-Right members of the Texas State Board of Education may have already decided what your children will learn about American history.

The Board is in the midst of a major revision to the state’s social studies standards. It is well known that textbook publishers cater to their largest clients. California, the nation’s largest textbook market, is bankrupt; Texas is the second largest. This means that, when it comes to teaching American history, as Texas goes, so goes the nation.

Two of the consultants hired last year by the conservative members of the Texas Board are David Barton and Peter Marshall. Both run ministries that promote the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and use the past for the purpose of promoting Republican politics. Neither man is a trained historian, but their books are wildly popular among the Christian Right.

In January and March, the Board made decisions about who was in and who was out of the new curriculum. Since far-Right conservatives currently hold a majority of seats, they managed to push through most of the revisions they wanted.

For example, in state social studies standards on how Americans have worked to expand their economic opportunities and political rights, the Board deleted those Americans’ “racial, ethnic, gender, and religious groups” as a factor to consider—even though this standard was part of a larger category focused on “how people from various groups contribute to our national identity.”

Board conservatives decided to remove the word “imperialism” from the American history curriculum and replace it with “expansionism.” They approved a statement endorsing American exceptionalism, the idea that America has a special destiny to spread its ideals and values to the world. They also approved a statement vindicating the activities of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, by saying later information “confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.” Board conservatives inserted William F. Buckley and Newt Gingrich into the standards, but rejected the inclusion of Ted Kennedy.

As a historian, I am appalled at the way politics is driving these debates in Texas. Ted Kennedy was one of the most significant legislators in U.S. history. Students should learn about him—whether they (or their parents) agree with his politics or not. They should also learn that American involvement in the world has, at times, been less than virtuous. Patriotism means that we love our country despite its flaws, not in ignorance of them.

But what bothers me most is the failure of the Texas Board to understand the place of history in the school curriculum. History is not about who’s “in” or “out.” It is, rather, a discipline that has the power to transform the lives of students by teaching them virtues essential to the kind of human flourishing and civic responsibility that the United States desperately needs. Students should encounter the American past in all its fullness. They need to learn about heroic figures, as well as historical actors with whom they might disagree. Such encounters, when led by a good history educator, teach children empathy and civility for people and ideas that they find to be different or strange.

History teaches us that we are part of something larger than ourselves—a community made up of all kinds of people with all kinds of beliefs. A Christian might say that such a community is filled with human beings who have inherent dignity and worth because they were created in God’s image. Diverse expressions of the human experience should thus find their way into the stories we tell about the past. This is not “political correctness”; it is good history. And, I might add, good theology.

John Fea teaches American history at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennyslvania. He is completing a book on the idea of America as a Christian nation and blogs at www.philipvickersfithian.com.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on-line that caught my attention this week:

Jim Cullen reviews Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas

Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Presidential readers.

It was he, not his wife.

Bill Keller reviews Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.

More on history and the Tea Party movement.

Henry Louis Gates on slave reparations.

Historiann: Should you recycle conference presentations?

University Diaries: Why go to class when the notes are on Wiki.

Mark Noll reviews Andrew Finstuen's Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Rienhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety.

Douglass Brinkley on the Boston Tea party.

Are religions different paths to the same wisdom? Steven Prothero says no.

What happened to the liberal moment?

Williamjames Hull Hoffner on the Caning of Charles Sumner.
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Jon Meacham on the religious case for the separation of church and state.

The psychology of hoarding.

Barack Obama and Billy Graham.

Religious leaders condemn new Arizona immigration law.

Glenn Beck will deliver commencement address at Liberty University.

Lessons from Kent State

Stephen F. Hayward reviews five new books on conservatism

E.D. Hirsch reviews Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Greg Schneider reviews James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke

Jim Wallis on the New Arizona Immigration Law: We Will Not Comply

Jim Wallis, the founder and president of Sojourners, the largest network of progressive Christians in the United States focused on the biblical call to social justice, has weighed in on the new Arizona immigration law. Here is his statement:

The law signed today by Arizona Gov. Brewer is a social and racial sin, and should be denounced as such by people of faith and conscience across the nation. It is not just about Arizona, but about all of us, and about what kind of country we want to be. It is not only mean-spirited - it will be ineffective and will only serve to further divide communities in Arizona, making everyone more fearful and less safe. This radical new measure, which crosses many moral and legal lines, is a clear demonstration of the fundamental mistake of separating enforcement from comprehensive immigration reform. Enforcement without reform of the system is merely cruel. Enforcement without compassion is immoral. Enforcement that breaks up families is unacceptable. This law will make it illegal to love your neighbor in Arizona, and will force us to disobey Jesus and his gospel. We will not comply.

Richard Rodriguez on the Wholeness of Life

Richard Rodriguez to the Class of 2003 at Kenyon College:

There was so much I didn't know at 21. But maybe most of all what I didn't know when I was 21 was how much I did know. Because when I became a writer in my 30s, I began writing about the years of my schooling. The first sentence of the first book I ever wrote was about going to a classroom, a Spanish-speaking child in Sacramento, California, and about to confront a group of Irish nuns. I have been writing about education ever since. I have been writing about the years of grammar school, high school, adolescence, young adulthood. I have been looking through those memories of school because somewhere within those memories is some part of the man I became.

...When I was in graduate school in London there was a man at a dinner party who was the great hero of my reading life. I had read one of his books when I was your age and there he was, forty years later, standing across the room. He was of that age in England when hair begins to explode out of all of his openings. Hair was coming out of his ears and out of his eyes and out of his nose. But I went up to him bravely and I said "Mr (I will not tell you his name) you cannot know how important your book was to me in college, it changed my life." And he looked down at me and said, "not a day has passed when I have not regretted writing that book." And I thought to myself, "You Bastard." To do that to me--to say "that this book that was so important to you... is of no concern to me"--[is one thing]. But to do that to yourself, to turn against yourself--the middle aged man turning against the man he was when he was younger--is a betrayal of the deepest sort.

It is the temptation of every generation, of every season, of every year, of every decade in our lives to turn against ourselves. When we become middle age it is the temptation of the middle age to say how much we did not know when we were young. It is the temptation of the young not to believe that they will ever be old. Not to believe that your hands will turn into claws from arthritis and that some day you will be in wheelchairs. It is the temptation of all us not to believe that life is a whole...

I tell you that you are already father or mother to the men and women that you are going to become in ten, twenty, thirty years. You are already creating that older person. That older person lives with the consequences of what you do or don't do. What you know or don't know, now that you are 21.

Ellis Island Reflections

This was the fourth time I had visited Ellis Island since it opened as a museum in 1990, but it was the first time I had brought a group of students with me. It was a long day of touring, but the students in my Immigrant America course (and a few others--including my family) were up to the task.

We left the friendly confines of Grantham, PA at 7:00am and placed ourselves under the care of Larry, our fearless coach bus driver. The students seemed to develop a connection with Larry as he regaled us over his microphone with stories of animal bridges on Route 78, live reports from Williams Grove Speedway where his son was racing sprint cars, and his experience as a sailor on the U.S.S. Intrepid.

We arrived at Battery Park around 10:30 and enjoyed our bagged lunches. (Thanks to Sarah and Abby for getting this all taken care of and for lugging the bag of ice packs around all day!). Around 11:15 we headed into the Clinton Castle, a War of 1812 fort on the tip of Manhattan, and then boarded our ferry.

It was a beautiful day in New York. The skies were clear. The views of the city were breathtaking. We spent about an hour on Liberty Island where students got their pictures taken in front of the Statue of Liberty. We learned about historical figures such as Frederic Bartholdi, the French sculptor who designed Lady Liberty; Gustave Eiffel, who designed the framework of the statue; and Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper editor who was influential in raising funds for the construction of the pedestal/monument on which the statue stands.

Then it was off to Ellis Island, where we spent the bulk of our day. I am always moved when I visit Ellis Island. As I enter the Great Hall I always reflect on a the story my 99 year-old grandfather told me about arriving there as a young boy in 1913. Like so many immigrants, he passed through registration without incident and then was directed to the "Stairs of Separation" where he walked down the left set of stairs and met his father for the first time. (His father had arrived earlier to establish work and get settled). It was grandpa's first memory of America.

As I stand in that hall I find myself reflecting on the courage it must have taken for my great-grandparents to leave everything behind and start a new life in the United States. It is this kind of everyday courage that is celebrated at Ellis Island. Frankly, I am not sure I could imagine doing that today, but, of course, the world was different in 1913. My sense of historical contingency was palpable.

Apart from the Great Hall, my favorite part of Ellis Island is the second-floor exhibits devoted to period of "peak immigration." This section includes some phenomenal photos of eastern and southern European immigrants arriving to the Island around the turn of the twentieth-century.

Most of us watched a 30-minute documentary about Ellis Island, but few of us were expecting the movie to be preceded by a 20-minute lecture by a park ranger on the history of "open immigration" in America. The theater was incredibly hot and I must admit that I fell asleep for about half of the movie. (My wife and daughters insist that it was very good--I am sure it was). I think our time could have been used a bit better. If I had to do it again I would have skipped the movie and had the students join-up with one of the official ranger tours.

In general, the museum is filled with primary sources from the period. If one had the time or the energy she could spend days there. There is so much to see and study. One of the highlights for my daughters was finding their great-grandfather's name--Giovanni Fia--listed on a 1913 ship register.

As might be expected, we ended the day in the gift shop. Jason, the king of museum gift-shop shoppers, loaded up on an assortment of over-priced souvenirs and memorabilia.

After a long day of touring we headed back to Battery Park, split up for dinner, and then headed home. After some fruitful and engaging conversation with a few students on the relationship between history, theory, and liberal arts education we all settled in for our on-bus movie, "The Princess Bride."

With Larry behind the wheel we got home around 11pm. Overall it was a long and tiring day, but certainly worth it.

Can You Afford to Live the Simple Life?

The "simple life" is expensive.

I actually know someone who probably spent hundreds of dollars on a big wooden sign that says "Simplicity." It is proudly displayed in this person's kitchen. Here is a taste of what Charlotte Allen has to say about simplicity in a piece over at In Character.

Simplicity movement people always seem to shell out more money than the not-so-simple, usually because the simple things they love always seem to cost more than the mass-produced versions. On a website called Passionate Homemaking that's dedicated to making, among other things, your own cheese, your own beeswax candles, and your own underarm deodorant, you are also advised to cook with nothing but raw cultured butter from a mail-order outfit called Organic Pastures. The butter probably tastes great. It also costs $10.75 a pound - plus UPS shipping. At farmer's markets, where those striving for simplicity like to browse with their cloth shopping bags, the organic, the locally grown, and the humanely raised come at a price: tomatoes at $4 a pound, bread at $8 a loaf, and $6 for a cup of "artisanal" gelato.

Wealthy and well-born people admiring - and sparing themselves no expense in convincing themselves that they're cultivating - the virtues of humble folk is nothing new. Two millennia ago, Virgil, in his Georgics, heaped praise upon the tree pruners and beekeepers whom he likely could see toiling in the distance while he sipped wine on the veranda of his wealthy patron, Maecenas. Marie Antoinette liked to dress up as a shepherdess and hold court in her "rustic" cottage at the Petit Trianon. Other harbingers of today's simplicity movement were the arts-and-crafts devotees of the early 1900s who filled their homes with handcrafted medieval-looking benches and the 1960s hippies whose minibuses and geodesic domes that enabled their gypsy lifestyles usually came courtesy of checks from their parents.

And here is her conclusion:

The problem with the simplicity movement is that its proponents mistake simplicity, which is an aesthetic lifestyle choice, for humility, which is a genuine virtue. Humility is an honest acknowledgment of one's limitations and lowliness in the great scheme of things and a realization that power over other human beings is a dangerous thing, always to be exercised with utmost caution. The Amish, as well as monks, Eastern and Western, cultivate humility because they know they have a duty toward what is larger than themselves. Leo Babauta of the foregone grooming products cultivates simplicity because it makes him feel "happier," as he writes on his website. For humble people, their own happiness or other personal feelings are secondary.

Furthermore, no virtue is a real virtue unless it is available to everyone. Simplicity doesn't fall into that category. If everyone decided to hunt boar in the Berkeley hills like Michael Pollan, it wouldn't take long for boars to become extinct. Furthermore, simplicity, because it is a lifestyle choice, necessarily means that its practitioners have to have the financial wherewithal - and usually plenty of it - to make the choices.

If you can't afford fine grooming products, you're not practicing simplicity by going without; you're just plain poor. Not so for humility, for even the poorest of the poor can be humble - or its opposite, irritatingly full of themselves.

Connecting the Past to the Present

Check out this CNN feature. Old photos are lined up with the current-day scene where they were taken. Some of the results are fascinating.
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You can also check out Jason Powell's similar project. (The picture on the left comes from his site).


HT

Missed It By One Day

My student Colin Riddle just informed me that Bruce Springsteen (and three others) was honored today on Ellis Island. He received the Ellis Island Heritage Award. I can't believe we missed Springsteen by one day!!

Here is the AP report:

NEW YORK — Everyone knows he was born in the USA, but it was Bruce Springsteen's European immigrant roots — and his family's 110-year American dream — that were celebrated on Thursday.

Accompanied by his proud mother and aunts — the women who "provided me with place" and "filled my family and all of my work with great meaning" — the rocker from New Jersey received an Ellis Island Family Heritage Award.

The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. presents the award to immigrants or their descendants "who have made a major contribution to the American experience." Also honored were investment banker Peter G. Peterson; Avon Chairman and CEO Andrea Jung, and NBA All-Star Dikembe Mutombo.

"You can't really know who you are and where you're going unless you know where you came from," Springsteen said.

Springsteen's maternal great-grandmother, Raffaela Zerilli, arrived at Ellis Island from Vico Equense, Italy, on Oct. 3, 1900, with five kids in tow.

"I docked at Ellis Island in a city of light and spires," their famous descendant later wrote in his song "American Land," a story not unlike their own.

They joined her husband, Raffaele, in Manhattan's West Village.

One of those kids, Antonio, grew up and married Adela Sorrentino. Their youngest daughter, Adele, went on to marry Irish-American Douglas Springsteen.

The Springsteens raised their three kids in New Jersey. One of them was a son.

When Bruce was 16, his mom borrowed money to buy him a guitar — an event he later chronicled in a tender tribute, "The Wish."

He taught himself how to play it — and went on to sell more than 120 million albums worldwide — including "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions — American Land," released in 2001. The title cut, "American Land," is a raucous, gritty pantheon of immigrant pluck and pride.

Adele Springsteen, now 85, who worked as a legal secretary for 47 years, went on to dance onstage with her son in New Jersey and Italy.

Her son — the self-described former high school outcast — played the Super Bowl halftime show and President Barack Obama's inauguration.

And on Thursday, mother, son and aunts found themselves on the island between New York and New Jersey, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, basking in warm applause.

Adele Springsteen married into poverty and "held our family together under just great, great, great difficulty," said her son. "Thank you, Mom. I love you very much."

Aunt Dora Kirby, 90, graduated with honors from college at age 67. "She's still cranking out people's income taxes," and will be available again next tax season, Springsteen said.

Ida Urbellis, 87, another aunt and a longtime garment worker, still works as a hairdresser on Wednesdays and Fridays.

"These fabulous women, they are my living connection to my heritage, to Ellis Island," said Springsteen.

"They have personified for me the tough optimism and the work ethic of first-generation-born American citizens," he added. "They lifted my spirit. I think they put the rock and roll in me."

Ellis Island Bound

I am taking the students in my Immigrant America course to Ellis Island tomorrow. It has been about ten years since I have been there, so I am open to ideas from readers about how to focus our time. Any "must see" or "must do" parts of the trip? A lot of the students want to see Ground Zero. Is there anything there to see?

I am also taking recommendations for restaurants in the general Battery Park area.

So What CAN You Do With A History Major Series

It is a busy traffic day today at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

AHA Today, the blog of the American Historical Association, has included our "So What CAN You Do With a History Major" series as part of their weekly "What We're Reading" feature.

As I have announced here before, we are always interested in hearing from undergraduate history majors and former undergraduate history majors about the ways they are using their degree. If you are interested in contributing please send me an e-mail: jfea(at)messiah(dot)edu

Richard Rodriguez at Kenyon College

Richard Rodriguez is one of my favorite writers. I know his views on Affirmative Action and bilingual education are controversial, but these are not the reasons why I like him. (Although I do think he gives us a lot to think about on both of these issues). I have been a Richard Rodriguez fan ever since I read Hunger of Memory. This book put into words what I have always felt as a first-generation college student from a lower-middle class background--the exhilaration of learning and ambition and the sense of loss that comes with it. His chapter on Roman Catholicism is one of the best pieces of religious writing I have ever read. Since I assign this book in my Immigrant America course, I have had the privilege of reading it many times. We are currently in the midst of discussing it in that class.

I recently learned, thanks to John Wilson at Books and Culture, that Rodriguez spoke at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing. I hope that his talk might appear on-line at some point.

If you are a Rodriguez fan and could not be at Calvin College last week, I would encourage you to listen to this 2003 commencement address that he delivered at Kenyon College in Ohio. It is outstanding and inspirational. It is only about 20 minutes long.

Interested in Public History?

One of the strengths of the Messiah College history department is its commitment to the field of public history. We offer an undergraduate course in the field and many of our students do internships at historical sites and museums throughout the south-central Pennsylvania area and beyond.

For those interested in public history, the National Council on Public History website offers a nice information page of graduate programs in public history, ideas for teaching public history, and internships in the field.

Are You a Friend of the Messiah College History Department?

Join the new Messiah College History Department Facebook page to stay up-to-date on students news, department events, and faculty publications and activities.

And while your at it, become a follower of "The Way of Improvement Leads Home" on Facebook!

More on Ambrose

Yesterday we reported on the way Stephen Ambrose apparently lied about the number of interviews he conducted with Dwight D. Eisenhower. But, as many of my readers know, this is not the first time that the late historian was accused of historical improprieties.

Back in 2002-2003 History News Network offered extensive coverage of accusations of plagiarism in many of Ambrose's books.

HT: Ralph Luker

Springsteen To Release DVD of 2009 London Show

Press Release:
On June 22, Columbia Records will release Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band's 'London Calling: Live In Hyde Park' concert film on one Blu-Ray disc and as a two DVD set. Captured in London at the Hard Rock Calling Festival on June 28, 2009 in HD, the 163-minute film documents 26 tracks of live Springsteen that begin in daylight and progress through a gorgeous sunset into night.

'London Calling: Live In Hyde Park' conveys both the experience of being on-stage and the vast crowd experience of the festival environment. Viewers are able to see Springsteen spontaneously directing the E Street Band and shaping the show as it evolves.

The set list spans from 'Born To Run' era to 'Working On a Dream' and includes rare covers such as The Clash's "London Calling," Jimmy Cliff's "Trapped," The Young Rascals' "Good Lovin'," and Eddie Floyd's "Raise Your Hand." Springsteen also performs fan favorite "Hard Times (Come Again No More)," written by Stephen Foster in 1854. Brian Fallon from The Gaslight Anthem joins the band as a guest vocalist on Springsteen's own "No Surrender."

The concert earned rave reviews. The London Times called it "epic" and "a revved-up three-hour power drive through Springsteen’s America." The Independent concurred, "He awed the 50,000-strong crowd… Drenched in sweat by the second number, tossing his guitars to the roadies with the vigour of a frontman a third of his age and jogging down a walkway to meet his fans and take their requests, Springsteen's intensity was staggering from first powerful vocal to final thrashed-out chord."

GRAMMY and Emmy Award-winning producer and editor Thom Zimny and director Chris Hilson, both members of Springsteen's video team dating back over a decade, oversaw the film. Audio was mixed by Bob Clearmountain.

Bonus material includes stunning footage of "The River" from Glastonbury, June 27; and the full music video for "Wrecking Ball," filmed at New Jersey's Giants Stadium.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND LONDON CALLING: LIVE IN HYDE PARK

1. London Calling
2. Badlands
3. Night
4. She's The One
5. Outlaw Pete
6. Out In The Street
7. Working On A Dream
8. Seeds
9. Johnny 99
10. Youngstown
11. Good Lovin'
12. Bobby Jean
13. Trapped
14. No Surrender
15. Waiting On A Sunny Day
16. Promised Land
17. Racing In The Street
18. Radio Nowhere
19. Lonesome Day
20. The Rising
21. Born To Run
22. Hard Times (Come Again No More)
23. Jungleland
24. American Land
25. Glory Days
26. Dancing In The Dark
27. Music under end credit sequence: Raise Your Hand

BONUS MATERIAL:
The River: Glastonbury Festival, 2009
Wrecking Ball: Giants Stadium, 2009

Digital History Start-Up Grants

AHA Today is reporting on the new round of National Endowment for the Humanities grants for digital humanities.

Here are the grants related to American history:

City of Philadelphia, Department of Records -- Philadelphia, PA
Historic Overlays on Smart Phones
Joan Decker, Project Director
Outright: $49,885
To support: The development of prototype mobile phone applications that would allow users to see historic photographs of Philadelphia in the actual city locations by pointing the phone camera at the building, a technique known as "augmented reality." This project draws on the extensive records from the NEH-supported PhillyHistory.org database.

George Mason University -- Fairfax, VA
Crowdsourcing Documentary Transcription: an Open Source Tool
Sharon Leon, Project Director
Outright: $49,215
To support: The development of an open source tool that would allow scholars to contribute document transcriptions and research notes to digital archival projects, using the Papers of the War Department as a test case.

Pennsylvania State University, Main Campus -- University Park, PA
Learning as Playing: An Animated, Interactive Archive of 17th‑19th Century Narrative Media For and By Children
Jacqueline Reid‑Walsh, Project Director
Outright: $48,672
To support: Development of an animated, interactive, web‑based archive of selected 17th ‑19th century moveable flap books by and for children on the theme of transformation.

Sweet Briar College -- Sweet Briar, VA
African‑American Families Database: Community Formation in Albemarle County, Virginia, 1850‑1880
Lynn Rainville, Project Director
Outright: $24,963
To support: A pilot study for a collaborative online African‑American Families Database recording and displaying genealogical and geographical data tracking generations of 19th‑century descendants of individuals on two antebellum slave lists.

University of California, Los Angeles -- Los Angeles, CA
Software Interface for Real‑time Exploration of Three‑Dimensional Computer Models of Historic Urban Environments
Lisa Snyder, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The prototype development for a generalized, extensible platform that will allow for real‑time exploration, annotation, and tours in 3D computer models, using the NEH‑funded Digital Karnak as the test case.

University of Nebraska, Board of Regents -- Lincoln, NE
Sustaining Digital History
William Seefeldt, Project Director
Outright: $49,116
To support: A series of planning meetings with the editors of several print journals in history to explore various models of digital scholarship and publishing.

Washington State University -- Pullman, WA
Mukurtu: an Indigenous archive and publishing tool
Kimberly Christen, Project Director
Outright: $49,606
To support: Development of an online, open source archiving and publishing tool for use with cultural collections of Indigenous communities.

George Washington's $300,000 Library Fine

From the New York Daily News:

He may have never told a lie, but George Washington apparently had no problem stiffing a Manhattan library on two books.

Two centuries ago, the nation's first President borrowed two tomes from the New York Society Library on E. 79th St. and never returned them, racking up an inflation-adjusted $300,000 late fee.

But Washington can rest easy.

"We're not actively pursuing the overdue fines," quipped head librarian Mark Bartlett. "But we would be very happy if we were able to get the books back."

Washington's dastardly deed went unknown for almost 150 years.

Then in 1934, a dusty, beaten-up ledger was discovered in a trash heap in the library's basement.

On its tan pages were the names of all of the people who had borrowed books from the city's oldest library between July 1789 and April 1792.

At the time, the city was the nation's capital and the library - then located at Wall and Broad Sts. - was the only one in town.

Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay all borrowed books, the ledger shows.

They returned them, too.

The library's boldest bold-faced name wasn't as cooperative.

On Oct. 5, 1789, Washington borrowed the "Law of Nations," a treatise on international relations, and Vol. 12 of the "Commons Debates," which contained transcripts of debates from Britain's House of Commons.

Beside the names of the books, the librarian wrote on the ledger only, "President."

The entry, written with a quill pen, contains no return date.

The books were due by Nov. 2, 1789, and have been accruing a fine of a few pennies per day ever since.

This week, Bartlett and his staff became even more convinced the books were filched when librarian Matthew Haugen stumbled upon the long lost 14-volume collection of the "Commons Debates."

Sure enough, Vol. 12 was missing.

"It's hard to know what could have happened," Bartlett said. "There are as many questions for us as there are answers."

Did Stephen Ambrose Actually Interview Eisenhower?

Yes, but they were not extensive as Ambrose has led us to believe in his many books on the president. In a New Yorker essay titled "Channelling Ike," Richard Rayner explains how Ambrose only met with Eisenhower three times. Ambrose claimed he spent "hundreds and hundreds" of hours with him. Here is a taste of Rayner's piece:

...Before publishing a string of No. 1 best-sellers, including “Band of Brothers” and “D-Day,” Ambrose had made his name chronicling the life of Dwight D. Eisenhower. More than half of the thirty-plus books that Ambrose wrote, co-wrote, or edited concerned Eisenhower, and Ambrose spoke often, on C-SPAN or “Charlie Rose” or in print interviews, about how his life had been transformed by getting to know the former President and spending “hundreds and hundreds of hours” interviewing him over a five-year period before Eisenhower died, in 1969.

“I was a Civil War historian, and in 1964 I got a telephone call from General Eisenhower, who asked if I would be interested in writing his biography,” Ambrose said in a C-SPAN interview in 1994. In another interview, he added, “I thought I had flown to the moon.”

In Ambrose’s oft-repeated telling of the tale, Eisenhower contacted him after reading his biography of Henry Wager Halleck, Abraham Lincoln’s chief of staff. “I’d walk in to interview him, and his eyes would lock on mine and I would be there for three hours and they never left my eyes,” Ambrose told C-SPAN. “I was teaching at Johns Hopkins and going up two days a week to Gettysburg to work with him in his office.”

Last November, Tim Rives, the deputy director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, in Abilene, Kansas, moderated a panel that celebrated Ambrose’s writings, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the completion of his two-volume Eisenhower biography, a work that is still regarded as the standard. Rives was looking for items to put on display at the event when he came across previously unpublished source materials that debunk the Boswellian tale that Ambrose loved to tell.

In a letter dated September 10, 1964, Ambrose, having recently joined a team of historians at Johns Hopkins who were preparing Eisenhower’s papers for publication, wrote to the former President, introducing himself: “For the past six weeks I have been reading your World War II correspondence and feel I am getting to know you intimately; therefore I think it only fair that you have the opportunity to see some of my writing.” He enclosed two books, one the biography of Halleck. About a month later, on October 15th, Ambrose sent another letter. “It therefore seems to me that the time has come to begin the scholarly biographies of the leaders of World War II,” he wrote. “I would like to begin a full scale, scholarly account of your military career.”

The two men finally met two months later, on December 14th, when Ambrose’s boss, Dr. Alfred Chandler, took him to Gettysburg. “I want the General to meet Dr. Ambrose,” Chandler wrote in a letter to Eisenhower’s office.

Rives was interested to discover that, contrary to Ambrose’s claims, Eisenhower never approached him to write his biography. By telephone the other day from his office in Abilene, Rives said, “And, I’m sorry to say, these weren’t the only problems.”

Access to Eisenhower in his retirement years was tightly controlled and his activities were documented by his staff, particularly by his executive assistant, Brigadier General Robert L. Schulz, who kept meticulous records of his boss’s schedule and telephone calls (now part of the Abilene archive). These records show that Eisenhower saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours. The two men were never alone together. The footnotes to Ambrose’s first big Eisenhower book, “The Supreme Commander,” published in 1970, cite nine interview dates; seven of these conflict with the record. On October 7, 1965, when Ambrose claimed that he was interviewing Eisenhower at Gettysburg, Ike was travelling from Abilene to Kansas City. On December 7, 1965, another of the purported interview dates, Eisenhower was at Walter Reed Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and saw only General Arthur Nevins, his neighbor and farm manager; George Allen, a golf and bridge pal; and Gordon Moore, his brother-in-law. He dined that evening with his son, John Eisenhower. On October 5, 1967, rather than hobnobbing with his young biographer, Eisenhower met with General Lucius D. Clay, the former military governor of occupied Germany and a close friend, and, after Clay left, he talked politics over the phone with Walter Cronkite and called his attorney to discuss a trust fund for his grandchildren. The former President was very busy that day, but he didn’t meet with Stephen Ambrose. On October 21, 1967, another footnoted Gettysburg date, Eisenhower was on vacation at Augusta National Golf Club. He was still there on October 27th, when Ambrose claims that he again interviewed his subject in Gettysburg.

Is it possible that Ambrose met with Eisenhower outside office hours? John Eisenhower told Rives that such meetings never happened: “Oh, God, no. Never. Never. Never.” John Eisenhower, who is now eighty-seven, liked Ambrose, and he recalled, too, Ambrose’s fondness for embellishment and his tendency to sacrifice fact to narrative panache.

Ambrose continued to draw on his supposed Eisenhower interviews in subsequent books, including the two-volume biography, although in the later footnotes the specific dates were replaced with vaguer notations, such as “Interview with DDE.” As the citations grew more nebulous, the range of subjects that the interviews allegedly covered grew wider: the Rosenberg case, Dien Bien Phu, Douglas MacArthur, J.F.K., quitting smoking, the influence of Eisenhower’s mother, Brown v. Board of Education, and so on...

HT: Tim Lacy at U.S. Intellectual History

When Your Wife Writes Your Amazon Reviews

From the Guardian:

An extraordinary literary "whodunnit" over the identity of a mystery reviewer who savaged works by some of Britain's leading academics on the Amazon website has culminated in a top historian admitting that the culprit was, in fact, his wife.

Prof Orlando Figes, 50, an expert on Russia and professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, made the startling revelation in a statement through lawyers following a week of intrigue, suspicion, legal threats and angry email exchanges over postings on the website's UK book review pages.

The spat began last week when the Cambridge-based academic, Dr Rachel Polonsky, noticed among the many favourable reviews of her book on Russian culture, Molotov's Magic Lantern, one condemning her efforts as "dense", "pretentious" and "the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published".

It ended on late on Friday evening with the surprise unveiling of Figes's wife, Dr Stephanie Palmer, a senior law lecturer at Cambridge University, barrister, and member of the top human rights specialists, Blackstone Chambers, as the reviewer calling herself "Historian", and responsible for several anonymous online attacks on the works of her husband's rivals.

Read the rest here.

Are You an Educational Conservative?

Mark Bauerlein defends what he calls "educational conservativism":

What's an "education conservative"?

Education conservatives believe that liberal education should be centered on a core body of knowledge. In the humanities and "softer" social-science fields, all students should study a set of books, ideas, artworks, theories, events, and personages more or less stable over time. Those items are chosen on a variety of grounds: aesthetic excellence, historical impact, intellectual brilliance, ethical positions, etc. They may contradict one another and represent vastly different people and places and outlooks. The important thing is that the learning of them produces a thoughtful, informed, and responsible intelligence. Yes, additions and subtractions take place in the materials, but in a gradualist process. Education conservatives don't accept new things or drop old things without a fair degree of circumspection. They reject criteria of "relevance" and political correctness; they regret the hasty adoption of contemporary offerings and the loss of longstanding ones (e.g., the disappearance of Dryden is, to me, a painful development).

They also limit the choices students have in their coursework. Too many electives and too few core classes, they believe, not only grant too much discretion to 18-year-olds who haven't the wisdom to make the right choices. They also disperse the learning outcomes, creating a cohort of young adults without a common intellectual formation. To education conservatives, a fragmented curriculum leads to a fragmented society.

Opponents have obvious objections. Multiculturalists ask, "Who's to say what should make up the core? We can't stick with WASP-y stuff." Progressivist educators say, "Look, we don't teach knowledge—we teach children" (that's a direct quotation from one meeting I attended). Fair enough on both, and if only those debates did in fact proceed we might find conversations in education circles a lot more enlivening than they really are. Most of the time, from what I've seen, people have given up debating what should be the core and instead have developed standards and policies that either ignore it or leave it up to individual school districts and teachers.

Education conservatives run into trouble not only with folks on the left, but with many on the right as well. Education conservatism squares nicely with cultural and traditionalist conservatisms, but not with libertarian conservatism and social conservatism. Libertarian conservatives consider a core curriculum—or at least the premises behind it—too prescriptive. They prefer a more open marketplace of past and present materials. Social conservatives don't like the core because too many of its items run against social conservative ideology. Education conservatives might very well insist on assigning portions of The German Ideology, Howl, and John Dewey.

Read the rest here. Bauerlein argues that educational conservatism is quite compatible with political liberalism.

The more I think about Bauerlein's post, the more I think I am an educational conservative. There is little I disagree with about this post. At the college where I teach, students are required to take a General Education core, but they have so many choices within that core that common learning is very difficult. In fact, students are required to take only one course in which common learning, with common texts, takes place. They take this course in the second semester of the first year and they complain about it endlessly. After all, what college student today would want to read Augustine, Plato, John Henry Newman, J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O'Connor, Martin Luther King Jr. and St. Paul when they could be sitting through powerpoint lectures!

OK--I will stop the sarcasm before I get myself into trouble.