Where we are right now
In lieu of text, this is in part how I feel.
The past needs to be graded on its own curve
As a follow-up to the below post, I want to outline a bit more precisely how I view judgments of the nature of the Founding and Founders. The difficulty is due to the fact that: 1) The late 18th-century was a profoundly different time 2) Humans in the late 18th-century were also profoundly proto-modern in […]
Albion’s seeds in Arkansas
A few days ago The New York Times had a piece up that stirred a lot of comment, In the Land of Self-Defeat: What a fight over the local library in my hometown in rural Arkansas taught me about my neighbors’ go-it-alone mythology — and Donald Trump’s unbeatable appeal. It profiles the fight over the […]
The shadow of culture persists
A new working paper, Ancestry of the American Dream, presents some unsurprising results: Income inequality and intergenerational mobility—the degree to which (dis)advantage is passed on from parents to children—are among the defining political challenges of our time. While some scholars claim that more unequal countries exhibit a stronger persistence of income across generations, others argue […]
Give me liberty or give me alternative history!
For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga is one of the best alternative history science fiction novels written in the 20th century. It is literally encyclopedic. A fully realized alternative timeline, the novel takes the form of a narrative history! I don’t know if one can say that the world depicted […]
American folkways & American pedigrees
St. Augustine Historic districtOver ten thousand years after the first Americans settled the New World, from the Arctic to Patagonia, a new people arrived on these shores. From “deep history” to colonial history. Before Plymouth, before Jamestown, even…
Against Thomas Jefferson!
I was unexpectedly traveling on an airplane recently, so I had some time to read Michael Lind’s Land of Promise (I had just finished Peter Thiel’s Zero to One). Though with the subtitle “An Economic History of the United States,” it’s not a dispassionate, or frankly scholarly, take. Lind marshals a great deal of evidence, […]
Three books to understand the “Dark Matter” of American History
Grand theories of history often have less utility than the claims they make for themselves. Marxism is a classic example. But that does not mean that theories of history are useless. And arguably, Marxism is a classic example in this case too. Material forces and class conflicts can’t explain all of history, but they do explain […]
Three books to understand the “Dark Matter” of American History
Grand theories of history often have less utility than the claims they make for themselves. Marxism is a classic example. But that does not mean that theories of history are useless. And arguably, Marxism is a classic example in this case too. Material forces and class conflicts can’t explain all of history, but they do explain […]
Black ancestry in white Americans of colonial background
I stumbled upon striking photographs of “white slaves” while reading The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. The backstory here is that in the 19th century abolitionists realized that Northerners might be more horrified as to the nature of slavery if they could find children of mostly white ancestry, […]
American history in broad strokes
A comment below inquired about “good books” on American history. Unfortunately I don’t know as much about American history as I do about Roman or Chinese history. But over the years there have been several books which I find to have been very value-add in terms of understanding where we are now. In other words, […]
The American historical “dark matter”
Walter Russell Mead has a fascinating blog post up, The Birth of the Blues. In it, he traces the roots of modern American “Blue-state” liberalism back to the Puritans, the Yankees of New England. This is a plausible argument. I believe that many social-political coalitions and configurations in contemporary America do have deep historical roots. […]
The empires of American English
Over the past few days a website which maps American English dialects has gone around the blogs (I found it via Kevin Zelnio). Michelle has some suggestions for improvements of the map in Ohio. Here’s a cropped and resized dialect map: One thing that immediately stood out is the latitudinal banded pattern of the dialects. […]