January 17, 2006

Catch the Lightning Benergy!

Tags: Birthday wishes, refried posts, you know who.

Rebecca G of (a)musings of a grad student fame reminds me that today is Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday. Happy birthday, Ben! In honor of the occasion, Rebecca recommends the following Franklin-approved activities:

1. eat an apple,
2. launch a hoax,
3. make a friend of an enemy,
4. write a letter,
5. buy, borrow, or lend a book,
6. make a charitable donation,
7. invent a labor-saving device,
8. commit a sexual indiscretion,
9. organize a club,
10. buy insurance,
11. rig up an experiment with ordinary household items,
12. play a musical instrument,
13. go for a swim.

I can’t believe she didn’t include: “Go fly a kite!” I guess that’s included in number 11. Of course, I’m in the middle of reading this book, so I have Franklin’s kite on the brain.

Anyway, in a spirit of un-Franklinian laziness but entirely Franklinian show-off-itude, I’m going to remilk some previous posts on the Benjamin:

It’s Mostly About The Benjamins: Franklin in France, George Washington’s teeth, Christ’s crown of thorns, and who to root for in the French Revolution.

Turk 182: Franklin versus the Turk, Enlightenment automata, mesmerism, John Merlin, Harry Houdini, and Alexander Graham Bell.

Ben and Me: A personal post over in my LiveJournal, where I used Franklin’s autobiography to kick off a series of reminiscences of my time in Boston.

Edited to add: I can’t believe I didn’t see this before: Philadelphia is promoting the hell out of the Frankliversary, with the slogan (wait for it) “Philly’s got Benergy!” “Benergy”??? Bwaa ha ha hee. I titled this post “Catch the Lightning” because I thought that was a lame and witless slogan. Man, now I’m kind of embarassed for getting caught up in all the Benergy. Here, to atone, is an interview with David Waldstreicher, whose book Runaway America asks tough questions about Franklin, in particular his stance on slavery.

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January 15, 2006

History Carnival XXIII

Welcome back to the History Carnival. Our ringleader Sharon Howard gave the carnies New Year’s off, so this plus-size edition does double duty, covering an entire month of historical blogging. Many thanks to all those who sent in suggestions—and only slightly less enthusiastic thanks to those who sent in big heaps of suggestions in the last few hours before the deadline. There’s lots here, and even so, I’m leaving plenty out. I apologize to anyone and everyone I missed or didn’t use. The history blogiverse is growing so fast, and there’s so much good stuff out there. I can’t claim to have seen more than a fraction of it all.

Jonathan Dresner hosted the last History Carnival, and strove to keep it “reasonably clear and straightforward.” We will have none of that here! This is the 23rd edition of the History Carnival, and in honor of that number’s Discordian significance, this carnival skews a little to the strange. Not that there’s not good history here. But what is a carnival, I ask you, without a few freaks?

My colleague Bill Turkel has started a great looking blog called Digital History Hacks, devoted to exploring and teaching “methodology for the infinite archive” of the internet. An early post urges teaching young historians to search, spider, and scrape. (This is not the same thing as bowing and scraping—for that, see discussion of the AHA, below.) The Center for History and New Media launched a flotilla of staff blogs this month, on a variety of topics digital and historical. Tom Scheinfeldt’s Found History is poised to become one of my favorites, turning up “unintentional, unconventional, and amateur history” in such unlikely places as VH1, the Weather Channel, and the supermarket checkout aisle. The CHNM is also home to H-Bot, a robot (ok, a “software agent,” but you know how I feel about robots) that answers simple history questions. Sheila Brennan’s Relaxing on the Bayou introduced me to H-Bot with a post called “Web of Lies.” As that title suggests, H-Bot is only as good as the information it finds on the internet, but Daniel Cohen (H-Bot’s creator) and Roy Rosensweig say that’s pretty good. The robot got an 82% score on the fourth-grade National Assessment exam in American history, trouncing the average human fourth-grader and making no friends on the playground. But before you trade in your organic kids for shiny robot models, read Sam Wineburg’s terrific inaugural post at Cliopatria and the comments that followed. Prof. Wineburg reminds us that lamentations about how little history the next generation knows are hardly something new. Not that he councils complacency. As Wineburg has argued elsewhere, getting beyond the sound and fury of the history standards debate demands reckoning with a serious question: what good is history, and just what do we want to teach it for? Crooked Timber took a stab at that question this month in the British and American contexts, as did Ed Podesta, with an excellent post on the “grand tradition” of British school history, where all foreigners were “either sensibly allies or rightly defeated.” These questions are just as salient, if not more so, outside the West. Nouri Lumendifi, at The Moor Next Door, had strong words on the subject of historical maturity: “Only the historically mature historian is suited for the noble practice of history.” At Frog in a Well: Japan, Konrad Lawson reported on a junior high school in Fukuoka, Japan, where a teaching exercise involving mock draft cards cut to the crux of the relationship between nationalism and the history classroom.

At Cliopatria, KC Johnson tells us that Lyndon Johnson thought in historical analogies: LBJ must have been a history blogger at heart, for we in the blogosphere love chewing on past parallels to current events. KC’s post measured some scandals of the past to see which shoe fit Jack Abramoff best. As the War on Terror continued to do collateral damage to the Tree of Liberty in the U.S.A., Caleb McDaniel pondered analogies between Abraham Lincoln’s bending of the law in wartime and George Bush’s willingness to do the same. Eric Muller at Is That Legal? saw another parallel in the domestic spying scandal, and laid out the criteria by which the U.S. government deemed Japanese Americans loyal or disloyal during World War II. That post ties in nicely with Gallup poll data at Frog In A Well on American views of Japan in 1946 and China in 1950, and, at James Rummel’s Hell in a Handbasket, a remarkable collection of wartime pamphlets written for the U.S. Army by, of all people, the American Historical Assocation. I’m stunned by the range of topics upon which Uncle Sam and G.I. Joe turned to the AHA for wisdom: “What shall be done about Japan?” “Shall I take up farming?” “Will there be a plane in every garage?” “Do you want your wife to work after the war?” and 38 more. I don’t think today’s U.S. Army is soliciting many opinions from the AHA, but at Cliopatria, soldier-historian Chris Bray has begun his own informed analysis of the war in Iraq.

Probably the only thing history bloggers like better than historical parallels are historical lists. Histomat offered the Top Ten Works of Marxist History, Ralph Luker named his Ten Worst Americans, and Nathanael Robinson listed Ten Events to Understand Modern France.

Speaking of the AHA, many denizens of Blogtown’s history district were in Philadelphia last week for the profession’s annual hoedown. City Girl confessed to having a bit of a historian’s crush. (“What will he look like? And will he speak as well as he writes?”) Jason Tebbe and Timothy Burke had downbeat reflections on the bristling security around Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. And Prithvi Shobhi blogged the history blogging panel, then tried to find a smiling historian, with no more luck than Diogenes in finding an honest man. At least Sharon Howard ate well (and enjoyed The Ben Franklin Code).

Canadians go to the polls on January 23rd (there’s that magic number again) for a federal election. At How To Save The World, Dave Pollard served up a some recent history that might help you to follow the players and the stakes. I often wish my fellow Canadians could express left-liberal sentiments without having to invoke the American bogeyman, but maybe I’m being naive about our neighbor to the South: Eb at No Great Matter and Matthew Yglesias at TPM Cafe both posted this month on the history of American plans for an invasion of Canada dating back to the 1930s and before.

Miscellaneous is always the largest category: Language Log answered a question that just came up in one of my classes: Did the Civil War really change the United States from an “are” into an “is”? And Hiram Hover’s Forty Acres (No Mule) considered the complex ramifications of one of history’s most famous broken promises. On the other side of the pond, Brett Holman’s wonderfully single-minded (in the best sense of the word) blog Air-minded is always about air power and British society in the early 20th century. A recent post described the high-flying 21st century imagined by Rudyard Kipling. Meanwhile, 19th century “blogger” Frances Williams Wynn outlined the state of the art in diving bells and aerial ballooning, while Frances’ go-between to the 21st century, Natalie Bennett, recounted the tale (but not the outcome) of the last fatal duel in Scotland. Finally, Jack McGowan contemplated the H word—historiography—at Smashing the Window, and offered this sobering thought: “Reading is the enemy of writing.” Ignore that, and read on…

The Fearsome GIANT Og,
Dr. Diacu’s HOLLOW Millenium,
MIRACLES of FAITH and DECEIT
plus The Celebrated Mr. HITE
and Other INCONGRUITIES
hitherto thought Incompatible
with Man’s Capacity for REASON

Smiles at the AHA weren’t the only rare game for which history bloggers went hunting. Andrew Ross of Air Pollution is writing on the history of the “dandy”. I’d point him to Nathanael Robinson’s post on men in corsets for some leads, but I see he’s already found it. Nathanael gets extra points for namechecking Bravo’s Project Runway, then promptly loses them by rooting for the odious Santino. Mortimer Randolph is searching for Scottish bison. Jim Davila of PaleoJudaica went digging for the story of Og, a biblical giant who rode unicorns, wrestled dragons, and survived the Flood. But Phil Harland trumps even that with a multi-part series on the history of Satan.

Bloggers also dig historical cover-ups. No Great Matter was the place to be for discussion of the Los Angeles Times’ revelation (if that’s what it was) that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were guilty and Upton Sinclair probably knew it all along (follow-ups here and here, critique of the historical profession’s “leftist lies” here). While Sinclair bit his tongue about the Italian anarchists, the economist John Maynard Keynes kept the personal papers of Isaac Newton under wraps. Newton biographer Gail Christianson described three centuries’ efforts to ignore, if not quite suppress, Newton’s obsessions with alchemy and the occult. Meanwhile, Marc Comtois at Spinning Clio was skeptical of arguments that the famously coincidental deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, fifty years to the day from the sigining of the Declaration of Independence, were no coincidence at all.

At Positive Liberty, Jason Kuznicki took on the historicity of Jesus and his miracles. At Frog in a Well: China, Remco Breuker told a tale of insecticide by ritual. The two posts raise similar questions about different eras and corners of the world. And great comment threads on both those posts engage the historical problem of how to approach and understand the actions of societies with beliefs and practices foreign to our own.

Not that our era is immune from odd beliefs. A handful of blogs and indeed the mainstream Canadian press discussed The Lost Millenium: History’s Timetables Under Siege. This new book by mathematician Florin Diacu contends the Middle Ages didn’t happen, the Peloponnesian Wars are fifteen centuries more recent than we think, and today’s date is January 15th, 964 A.D. If that sort of kookiness appeals to you, you must sample Kenneth Hite’s Eliptony Core Sample. I’ve talked about Ken’s free-wheeling alternate histories before; all this month he’s delving into his immense personal library of the pseudoscientific and the pseudohistorical, returning with droll reviews of dozens of books you must devoutly hope your students never read.

And while we’re talking about strange beliefs: It’s not a blog posting, but did you really think I wasn’t going to mention Stalin’s plan to breed half-man, half-ape super-troops?

After letting all this iffy history in to the Carnival, I’d better air out the big tent with some skeptics and debunkers. Orac considered analogies between medical quackery and historical quackery, specifically Holocaust denial, at Respectful Insolence. Another skepti-blogger at Photon in the Darkness embarked on a field guide to quackery and pseudoscience modeled on the great scientific texts of the 18th century. And there’s no better blog to bring down the curtain than the beautiful and mysterious Giornale Nuovo. A rich post there introduced me to Thomas Browne, 17th century scientist, author, alchemist and debunker. I’ll close the show with Browne’s words: “We carry with us the wonders we seek without us. There is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.”

NO extra charge for Admission
will be made,
the HISTORY CARNIVAL being
Wholly Dependent upon Voluntary Contributions
for Remuneration.

Whew. That’s it for me. Teaching Carnival #5 should also be up today, hosted by a fellow historian, at Ancarett’s Abode. The Elfin Ethicist will host the next History Carnival on February 1. Send suggestions to JonathanWilson [at] letu [dot] edu. The History Carnival can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear’s UberCarnival.

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January 10, 2006

Some Pig

Tags: Amish computing, the Ralphies, Senator McCarthy and me.

I’m surprised and happy to report that I have recently won two flattering awards! First, Turk 182, a post I wrote here almost exactly one year ago, won a Cliopatria Award for “Best Post.”

Rob MacDougall’s ‘Turk 182’ brilliantly traversed time and genres to illuminate the abiding fascination with Automata. His use of varied sources, erudition and clear affection for the subject-matter highlights it as the best post of the year.

My sincere thanks to the judges, and to Sharon Howard, who nominated that post and who I believe instigated the awards in the first place. And my congratulations to the other winners. I am honored to be in their company—please check them out if you don’t already read them. (The Cliopatria Awards need their own familiar / diminutive name, like the Emmys, Oscars, etc., don’t you think? But the name “Clios” is taken, by awards for advertising. I suppose we could call them “the Patties,” but I’m inclined to believe we should honor Cliopatria’s indefatigable Ralph Luker by dubbing them “the Ralphies.”)

Just one year out of the job market, I cannot say I was sorry to miss this year’s AHA. I was extremely sorry, however, to miss the history blogging panel, where the Cliopatria Awards were announced, and where many brilliant and talented history bloggers converged in actual space.

That reminds me! History Carnival #23 will be here on this blog on January 15th. Please send me your suggestions or nominations asap. The history district of Blogtown is expanding so fast, and there is so much good writing out there. All you can hope to do is catch a bit of it as it flies by.

Also, General Mud, a 24-hour role-playing game I wrote in November (by which I mean to say, I wrote it in 24 hours, you don’t play it for 24 hours, heaven forbid) won a “Ronnie” award from Ron Edwards, game designer and co-moderator of the Forge, the epicenter of indie game design today. General Mud is a story-telling game based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Players take the role of barnyard animals and see if they can alter the course of Orwell’s grim fable. Discussion of the game over at the Forge veered rather quickly from its design (rudimentary) to its politics (apparently more reactionary than I’d intended, at least in the eyes of some). I was even accused, if obliquely, of “McCarthyist historiography.” Keep it in mind: fun and games are serious business!

Or are they? What pleases me most about these two awards, I think, is that both are for things I wrote without any thought of reward—things I did, in fact, without any good reason for doing them at all. After all, if you’re waiting for a sensible reason to write an 1800-word post about Enlightenment robots or a 24-hour role-playing game about Communist farm animals, then you probably aren’t going to write one. The process has to be the point.

My favorite blog posts to write are usually the ones where I tie in every random thing I’m enthused about at the moment: robots and Ben Franklin and Ricky Jay; or South Park, the Talmud, and media literacy; or Weezer lyrics, my wife’s birthday, and photography in 19th century Japan. It troubles me a little that all those examples are at least a year old. What’s happening a lot lately is that I’ve been thinking too hard about why I’m writing this blog, trying to come up with things that are “important” or “serious” enough for here or Cliopatria. And when I do that I usually produce something much stiffer or, worse, I don’t post anything at all.

Paul Ford had a guest post last October on the essential productivity blog 43 Folders, about good and bad distractions, “Amish computing,” and why one subscription to the New York Times beats a thousand RSS feeds. (I saw a sticker once that said, “You have been infected by the Amish computer virus. Since the Amish don’t use computers, we go by the honor system. Please go home and delete all your files.” Larf.) It was a great little essay that gave me a lot to chew on. The bad habits Ford sees in himself are absolutely things I’m trying to deal with too. He offers this conclusion:

I’m very paranoid about any metric of productivity. One person’s wasted time is another person’s productivity. For most of my life people saw me doing the things I liked to do and said, “you have too much free time on your hands.” I’ve decided that when you hear that, it means you’re doing something right. I hear it a lot less now that I’ve got a novel out and work at Harper’s Magazine, which is a job that carries some prestige. But that doesn’t make sense, because I’m doing the same things I did before anyone else took interest. External metrics are pretty useless. I like to think about Allen Ginsberg, when he confessed to his shrink that all he wanted to was write poetry, and his shrink said “well, why don’t you?” If you measured life by productivity, who would pick up a guitar? Besides, I’m happiest when I’m narrowly distracted—when I’m working on a task and I find it interesting enough that the rest of the world goes pale and I can really focus and explore.

Is it true? I don’t know. I don’t have a novel or a job at Harper’s, and I can’t quite say external metrics are useless. (Are any future tenure committee members reading this?) I can certainly imagine somebody reading “Turk 182” or General Mud and saying, “you have too much free time on your hands.” But mostly, people don’t say that. When you can give yourself up to enjoying the process, when you do something creative not because you have to or you ought to but because it doesn’t occur to you not to, that’s when the really good stuff happens.

Um, in case any future tenure committee members happen to read this far, I do do academic work too. I do plenty of work, in fact, and I don’t have too much free time on my hands. Let’s see. I just published a short piece in the business history journal Enterprise and Society that is the best summary of my research on telephony you’re going to find. Check it out if you want to know what I write about when I’m not writing about Ben Franklin versus robots. And I have a couple more articles that I hope will be out soon in journals near you. Including one on which the revisions are due Sunday. And so, adieu!

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