Aieee! What’s become of Old is the New New? Where’s the brown on beige color scheme that looks sickly yellow on certain browsers? Where are the long bloviating triennial posts in a skinny center column that makes them seem even longer? Where are the inside jokes and references nobody can understand? Where’s that globey-planety thing I always scroll down and ignore?*

Have no fear. I am migrating have migrated over from Movable Type to WordPress, and I’ll be hacking the layout for a while yet, but while the new Old is the New New is under renovation, you can always find the old Old is the New New, plus its loyal sideblog The New New, at www.robmacdougall.org/old.

If you’re reading this in some kind of RSS reader, please update my feed. The new RSS feed for this site will be: http://www.robmacdougall.org/index.php/feed/.

*It’s called an orrery.

The annual wargame, roleplaying game, and dressing up like an elf convention GenCon (to which I have never been, by the way) bills itself as “the best four days in gaming.” Will the American Historical Association’s annual convention, which starts tomorrow in Atlanta, be the best four days in history? I’ll let you know—I’ll be there. If you’re going to be there too, let’s meet up: drop me a line using the AHA’s weirdly archaic message system, email me (electromail chez robmacdougall dot org, not com), or just look for the guy in the totally bitchin’ elf costume.

We’re still visiting family in (y)our nation’s capital and I’m finding it hard to write the second half of my books of 2006 post without more of the books in front of me. In its stead, I thought I’d excerpt two remarkable books I did bring with me on this trip. The books are John Hodgman’s crypto-pseudo-almanac The Areas of My Expertise, and James Livingston’s philsophical critique of American intellectual history, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy. The two books have nothing in common except that: I brought them both on vacation, they both impressed me, and they look almost identical. OK, maybe not identical identical, but they’re trade paperbacks of similar size and their covers have nearly identical color schemes. All week I was picking up Livingston and expecting it to be Hodgman or Hodgman and expecting it to be Livingston. You think you’re so clever, you tell me which is which!

“Only in the United States do the losers, deviants, miscreants, and malcontents get to narrate the national experience—not, mind you, as exiles or emigres such as Leon Trotsky or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but as accredited professionals boring from within their own cultures and disciplines.”

“The Metaphysicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.”

“Herbert Hoover’s cadre of fighting, pneumatic robots was but one of the amazing technological advances he obtained from the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla. … As Tesla slept, Hoover sent agents into his room equipped with one of Tesla’s own Dream-Coils, and thus gained the secrets to the Long Range Death Ray, the Mechanical Snake, the Ultra-Car, the Hover-Yacht, and many more revolutionary devices. Hoover was glad of them when the hoboes attacked. But in the very twilight of his presidency, wary of how history would judge a dream-thief, he ordered all of the prototypes and their designs destroyed. They are now gone forever.”

“Until the twentieth century, the primal scene of American historiography was typically a confrontation between cultures construed broadly as incommensurable ‘races.’ … ‘Progressive’ historiography of the early twentieth century constructed a new primal scene by introducing the figure of industrial or financial capital, and making it the predator of the small producer and the freeholder. Since then, the hegemonic narratives of American history have habitually been built around this primal scene of proletarianization. … It is instructive, I believe, that social, labor, and cultural historians—the cutting edges of American historiography—cannot agree on the timing or even the etiology of the event in quesiton, and yet can insist on its synchronic significance. That such a consensus exists in spite of the obvious chronological confusion indicates that the ‘moment’ of proletarianization is more historiographical convention than historical event, more construction than recollection.”

“Suppose you are an asthmatic child, unsuited for play in cold weather … There are still any number of indoor amusements that will not overtax the lungs or the inhaler. For example: Inhaler whittling. Fabrication of elaborate kites that shall never be flown. Pill-swapping. Bird-loathing. Lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. Finding new quiet radio programs to listen to. Hiding.”

“Don’t we need some way of appreciating the comic potential and redeeming value of the post-artisanal market society that entails proletarianization, corporate bureaucracies, scientific management, and consumer culture? Don’t we need some way of telling the story of nineteenth-century artisan-entrepreneurs which does not treat the decomposition of the market society they created as a tragedy—in other words, don’t we need a way of criticizing the corporate, postindustrial capitalism of the twentieth century which is not merely a protest against proletarianization? We do, of course, but it is not to be found in the extant critique of consumer culture … Pragmatism qualifies as a narrative form, a frame of acceptance that treats the rise of corporate capitalism as the first act of an unfinished comedy, not the last act of a bitter tragedy.”

“The poet and explorer Carl Sandburg asserted in his poem ‘Chicago’ that the city was populated by half-naked, white-toothed, magnetic dog-men who had enormous shoulders. At first it was believed that Sandburg was merely a dope fiend. Later it would be learned that he was in fact speaking of Omaha. Also, he didn’t exist either. Time and again, the Chicago-is-real theory simply does not stand up to scrutiny.”

“If the effect of the industrial revolution was ‘the de-domestication of women,’ as Fortune magazine claimed in 1935, that effect was not felt by native-born, middle-class women until the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism made paid employment a respectable and finally typical stage in their life cycle. So if the cause (in both senses) of modern feminism is the extrication of women from an exclusive preoccupation with domestic roles—a process that both presupposes paid employment and permits the detachment of female sexuality from familial objects or reproductive functions—and if modern feminism is by definition a cross-class social movement because it claims to speak for all women, it would seem to follow that the necessary condition of modern feminism is the rise of corporate capitalism.”

“The Muppet Movie: This was a movie about puppets who go to Hollywood to become stars. As they travel, they frequently consult the script of the movie in order to know what to do next. When they reach Hollywood, they begin making a movie about the movie the viewer has just been watching. The puppets build plywood simulations of props that, earlier in the film, were presented as real. … The frog and bear and pig simulations panic as the fake/real and real/fake worlds nearly destroy each other. The puppets then look directly into the camera and instruct the viewer that ‘life’s like a movie: write your own ending.’ This was the only film in which the French literary critic Roland Barthes received a screenplay credit (he also did uncredited work on Corvette Summer.)”

LIVINGSTON: 2. 1.* HODGMAN: 700**

*James “Cyclone” Davis. Richard Hofstadter is not, it turns out, a hobo name.
**800 in paperback edition.

It’s year in review time, Loyal Dozens, that magical time of year when we review the year that went by since the last time it was time to review the year between the times when it’s time to review it. I’ll dispense with such fripperies as the year in movies, music, or current events, but I read a lot of books and every year I like to take some time to record a few that stayed with me, both for their own merits and for vaguely autobiographical purposes. (I try to associate the subjects of books with the places and times where I read them. Even though you can find a copy anywhere, for instance, it’s cool to me that I bought Colson Whitehead’s old weird NYC novel The Intuitionist, along with Ann Douglas’ Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, at the awesome Strand bookstore in Greenwich Village. Or that I read Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon while actually en route from Paris to the moon.) This is made easier this year by the LibraryThing account I started last December. Most people use LibraryThing to catalog the books they own, but I use the library so prodigiously that my the set of books I possess bears only a passing resemblance to the set of books that have passed under my eyeballs. Instead, I used LibraryThing to catalog books as I read them, regardless of their provenance. You can, if you care, see all the books I read in 2006 here. But here are some highlights, starting with fiction first.

5. HOW TO BE BAD, by David Bowker. Read April 24-25, 2006, in the maternity ward of Victoria Hospital. This book makes the list in spite of the fact that I have no memory of it—or, to be precise, I remember vividly the night I read it, but I have almost no memory of its contents. I believe it’s an unobjectionable “bookish author stand-in meets sexy bad girl and is drawn into a thrilling demimonde of crime” story, spiced up with a bunch of metatextual references and allusions to the novels of Nick Hornby. (It hadn’t occured to me before reading this how large Hornby’s shadow must loom over Gen-X British authors hoping to break into the lad lit game.) But I can’t remember the name of the main character, or what sort of crimes he gets drawn into, or which combination of he, the sexy bad girl, and/or Nick Hornby live happily ever after. Because I read this book while sitting next to L in the hospital waiting for the Ukelele to be born. Maybe I never got to the end. Maybe I was just a few pages from the thrilling conclusion when the delivery kicked into high gear (the nurse, a laconic Native woman reminiscent of Fleischman’s secretary Marilyn on Northern Exposure, shrugged around midnight and told L, “oh, you could probably start pushing now if you like”) and my life was forever bifurcated into Before and After. The book I had in my hand that night was at once instantly forgotten, and something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

4. A BUNCH OF BOOKS, by Philip K. Dick. Read in the feverish post-baby summer, often with crying newborn in arms. Armed with Jonathan Lethem’s essay parsing the good Philip K. Dick novels from the stinkers, I read a lot of Dick in May, June, July, and August: reading Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, and A Scanner Darkly for the first time, and rediscovering Ubik, Radio Free Albemuth, and The Man in the High Castle, which I’d read as a teenager but resented for not being more like Blade Runner. I now have a bunch of ideas for a super keen PKD role-playing game, but the specific mechanics continue to taunt and vex me. The novels made entirely appropriate reading for a summer of sleep deprivation, a crumbling grasp on reality, and the dawning realization that my free will had been broken and my life taken over by an invading alien in diapers and jammies from Baby Gap.

3. THE INTUITIONIST, by Colson Whitehead. Read ostentatiously in a succession of East Village hipster coffee shops because yes, I am (or was before the baby) That Guy. Don’t even bother trying to write the great American elevator inspector novel, folks, because It. Has. Been. Done. Again I defer to Jonathan Lethem: “This splendid novel reads as though a stray line in Pynchon or Millhauser had been meticulously unfolded to reveal an entire world, one of spooky, stylish alternate-Americana, as rich and haunted as our own.” Man, true. Colson Whitehead’s mysterious urban gothic milieu—the city is unnamed, but can only be an alternate New York—is the old weird Harlem to Ben Katchor’s never-quite-was Lower East Side. And the elevator shafts plunging through the heart of this novel offer the richest, strangest metaphor for race in America since Moby Dick. Oh, OK, smarty, and Ellison’s Invisible Man.

2. ABSURDISTAN, by Gary Shteyngart. Read November 3-5, 2006 on flight to and from Charlottesville, VA. Well, I ought to put one book on this list that was actually published in 2006. It’s made a couple of best of lists; in fact it tops the NYT’s (alphabetically-ordered) 100 Notable Books for 2006. “Why praise it first? Just quote from it at random,” said the Times. “Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself.” I loved Shteyngart’s debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. I gushed about it, and also tossed in an anecdote about Peter the Great’s “Cabinet of Monsters,” around this time two years ago. Absurdistan covers similar ground—in fact, Shteyngart’s first novel makes an appearance in his second, as the hack work of a poseur named “Jerry Shteynfarb,” who trades on his foreignness to mack on chicks—but the second novel is altogether bigger, sloppier, and richer. It’s the story of Misha Vainberg, bon vivant son of a murdered Russian mobster, whose heart is in New York but whose visa-less body is marooned in a crumbling ex-Soviet republic. Misha thinks and talks in hilarious, off-color stereotypes, and nobody really escapes getting skewered. I have no idea how accurate is Shteyngart’s portrayal of post-Soviet Russia and post-Soviet Russians, but I give him the benefit of the doubt; whenever he turns his gaze on subjects I do know, like American post-college slackers, he is funny, incisive, and a little cruel:

Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck. … At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicious white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those symposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid or the travails of their favorite superhero. Deep inside, we all wished to have communion with that tiny red-haired underwater bitch.

That sounds about right.

1. MOBY DICK, by Herman Melville. Read, mostly in bed, a few pages at a time, from August through November. This is a funny thing to say about one of the reigning classics of the American canon, but why didn’t anyone tell me Moby Dick was so great? The back cover of my copy, a British paperback edition, studiously undersells it: “Ignored for many years after its first publication … Moby Dick can be read as … a sociological critique of American class and racial prejudices, a philosophical inquiry into the structure of good and evil, and a repository of information about whaling.” Mmm, hard to see why that took a few years to catch fire. But here’s what they don’t tell you: it’s fantastic! First of all, and this was complete news to me, it’s hilarious. Melville leavens everything with these droll, dry asides, ranging from ridicule of racial chauvinism (way ahead of its time for a white American author) to dark laughter at humanity’s folly to fart jokes, plain and simple. Second, it’s filled with buckets of blood and gore. People complain about all the whaling trivia, but as it turns out, nineteenth-century whaling was insanely cool. There were about a hundred hideous ways to get drowned or crushed or maimed on a whaling voyage, and Ishmael catalogs every one with happy pedantry. Like the part where two severed whale heads are lashed to either side of the Pequod’s hull (like Locke and Kant, Ishmael jokes) and then one of the harpooners—Tashtego?—is scraping spermaceti out of one of the skull cavities, and he falls into the huge head, and gets stuck! Inside the head! And then the head falls off the side of the ship, and sinks with him in it! And Queequeg has to dive in after the head and swim down underwater and hack his way through the whale’s skull with a machete to rescue his buddy… That is so hardcore ridiculous awesome. Why isn’t that on the cover? I read this book slowly, a chapter or two in bed most nights between August and November, and still I was bereft when it ended, too soon. Talk about your old, weird America: Melville is the uncut mother lode.

Next Time: Non.

Tags: Old weird America; Ratched, Wormer, and Hogg; the banality of anti-Americanism; your cheating humu humu nuku nuku a’pua’a.

“One measures a circle beginning anywhere,” said Charles Fort. Our expedition to the old, weird America will begin in Kansas: home of Dorothy, Bob Dole, Clark Kent, Brown v. Board, and the world’s largest ball of twine (disputed). This may seem an odd place to begin. Isn’t Kansas the anti-weird? The bluest of blue states, the pancake-flat heartland? Well, yes and no. Frank Baum knew what he was doing when he put the gateway to Oz there. But before we hit the road, a little discussion of what the old, weird America is good for, and why we might value it at this particular point in time.

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. … When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.
—the opening lines of The Wizard of Oz, duh.

I’ve had to make certain adjustments in teaching U.S. history to Canadian, rather than American, students. When you’re teaching U.S. history in an American classroom, you can almost always get some frisson in the classroom by shooting down comfortable myths about the nation’s past. Even in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, the very lair of Chomsky and Zinn, there will be at least one brave patriot willing to defend Thomas Jefferson or the Frontier Thesis or the G.I. Bill from your freedom-hating latte-liberal depredations. But with my Canadian students this gets me nowhere. They don’t push back against criticism of America. What do they care?

I could flip things, I guess, and spark more debate in the classroom by launching a spirited defense of American policies and institutions. Which is what I do when talking about America’s unquestionable, no-fooling, gifts to the world: “all men are created equal,” the D-Day landing, Chuck Berry, Texas BBQ, and so on. But my heart isn’t in it at this exact geopolitical moment. And it’s not like I mind if Canadians are critical of the United States. I’d be worried if they weren’t. What gets to me is what Tony Judt called “the banality of anti-Americanism.” In the Canadian case against Uncle Sam, the Trail of Tears, Abu Ghraib, Jerry Springer, and Kraft Singles all are crimes of essentially equal magnitude. None provoke horror or soul-searching or intellectual inquiry, just a smug shake of the head. “Americans. What can you do?”

I shouldn’t pick on my students. They’re smart and interested and a pleasure to teach. But they are the children of a culture in which it seems one can make any ludicrous generalization about “the States”—the term itself a warning sign of cud-chewing provinciality—without fear of contradiction. In the little town where my parents live, the term “American” refers to all summer tourists who drive noisy, irritating jet-skis, regardless of their citizenship. Actual Americans who prove themselves better than this stereotype—like, say, my wife—receive the ultimate Canadian compliment: “oh, you don’t count as an American.”

Greil Marcus adapted the phrase “the old weird America” from Kenneth Rexroth’s “the old free America,” a phrase Rexroth used to describe the country he found in the work of Carl Sandburg. “Those words … almost made me dizzy,” Marcus writes, but he recoiled from them, because he felt they fixed the free America, the true America, in the past, rebuking modern Americans but ultimately letting them off the hook. The old weird America, Marcus insists, is not a rebuke but an inheritance and a challenge to live up to, “an insistence that against every assurance to the contrary, America itself is a mystery.”

Consider Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Smith released it in 1952. That was the first year of the hydrogen bomb and the peak of Senator McCarthy’s sway on American life. Frankie Lane and Doris Day topped the music chats. Pundits declared the decline of the American male because women—in 1952, mind you—had too much power in American life. Is it any wonder the Anthology blew all the folkies’ minds? What must it have looked like in 1952, with its cryptic liner notes and its theosophical-alchemical organization and its spooky familiar-unfamiliar tunes? What must it have sounded like? The Wichita, Kansas Public Library in 1952 was probably the last place and time you’d expect to get your mind blown. But that’s where the artist Bruce Conner came upon Smith’s Anthology. “It was like field recordings, from the Amazon, or Africa … a confrontation with another culture … arcane, or unknown, or unfamiliar views of the world, hidden within these words, melodies, and harmonies,” Conner remembered. “In Kansas, this was fascinating. I was sure something was going on in the country besides Wichita mind control.”

“Wichita mind control.” That’s a good name for it, the pressing weight of Cold War conformity and atomic fear. Or Patriot Act conformity and post-9/11 fear, come to think of it. That’s how many of my students are inclined to imagine America, I think. Not as Moloch, not as Amerikkka, not as the Great Satan. Just the Wichita Public Library, 1952. Dorothy’s Kansas in black and white. A town council staffed by Nurse Ratched, Dean Wormer, and Boss Hogg. Footloose before Kevin Bacon comes to town, Pleasantville before Reese Witherspoon. “How had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?” Oedipa asks in The Crying of Lot 49. “How had this Melvillean collection of “mongrel renegades and castaways and cannibals” been brought to accept such a diminished conception of itself?” “This is the quintessentially sixties question,” observes historian David Harlan with a bit of a sneer. But it is not without relevance today.

I snickered a bit myself in my previous post at the Barking Irons guys, launching the “revolution against branding” with their $60 designer t-shirts. But actually I think what they’re doing is pretty cool. (And I want one of those shirts. Did I ever tell you about my zine about t-shirts called SMXL? No?) The Times article quotes the Caserella brothers calling the Collect, a polluted pond drained in the early 1800s to form the notorious Five Points slum, the “original sin of Manhattan,” which is a neat idea. If Manhattan has an original sin, it surely involves real estate (cf. every second episode of Law and Order). And the t-shirt auteurs wonder if the city’s forgotten past can offer “an intellectual antidote to the superficial, surface-driven present.” Again: with $60 t-shirts? But still. The Caserellas have the right idea. The weirdness of the past is the best inoculation going against Wichita mind control in the present. Alternative pasts allow us to imagine alternative nows. Strange histories help us to see the ways the present is strange: the things we take for granted, the choices others made for us, the injustices we don’t protest. The old, weird America is an alternate history, not one that takes off from a historical turning point into a future that might have been, but one that snakes back from the present into a hidden past that really was. It insists that America is older, bigger, and stranger than we know. Ideally, it asks us what we intend to do about it.

Now for me personally, as an outsider, the value of the old weird America is not always about finding a usable past in this way, but it is related. It’s about the joy of surprise: after years of studying this stuff, I am still learning new things all the time, and delighted every time I do so. Maybe you knew this already, for instance, but I learned just this week, from the podcast I mentioned last time, that the steel guitar, probably the most essential and instantly-recognizable instrument in honky-tonk country, was invented in Hawaii in the 1880s, and came to the mainland as part of a Hawaiian music craze kicked off by the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. In 1916, Victor sold more Hawaiian records than any other genre. Legendary guitar players like Bob Dunn took correspondence courses from the Hawaiians by mail and several early hits for Hank Williams and others like him were note-by-note reworkings of WWI-era Hawaiian novelty tunes. That is so damn cool. Add to that the minstrel roots of country, and it seems that American roots music consists in no small part of songs written by New York immigrants in imitation of imagined black slaves, played on Hawaiian instruments adapted from the Portuguese laborers who brought the guitar to Hawaii in the first place. A Melvillean collection of “mongrel castaways and cannibals” indeed.

Finally, the old weird America is another way for me to hook into Canadian students who might otherwise think they know it all about that country they’ve seen on TV, to crack through some of their assumptions and preconceptions and get them to really puzzle over the history of the United States. There is no learning without puzzlement. Any time I can get them to say, as the kids say, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, that’s a teaching moment. And American history will always reward a quizzical second look. What is the connection between Ignatius Donelly’s Populism and his devout belief in Atlantis? Is there none? What is going on in Randy Newman’s “Sail Away”? Is he serious? Is he joking? What is the joke? What is the deal with The Wizard of Oz? Why is it so creepy? What is the matter with Kansas? Well, I’ll get to that next time: nothing that a little weirdness can’t fix.

My colleague Alan stopped me in the hall the other day and said, “I don’t want to start this conversation by saying ‘hey, Rob, you’re into weird stuff, aren’t you?’ but, um, you are into weird stuff, aren’t you?” It’s a fair cop. He wasn’t inviting me to his swingers club or anything like that. The local news had called looking for someone to do fifteen seconds of talking head on the history of Halloween. Which I ended up doing.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed the change to my sidebar, which no longer mentions robots. (I still like robots, I just rarely post about them. Though to be fair, I never promised I’d post about robots, I just said I liked them. Which I still do.) Now the sidebar promises dowsing for “the old, weird America.” That mellifluous phrase comes from Greil Marcus; it’s the title of his book about Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and his name for that semi-buried world of often eerie Americana that Dylan and the Band tapped into by way of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. The old, weird America is a land of juke joints and revival preachers, medicine shows and haunted battlefields. It’s the music of Harmonica Frank, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, and the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. It’s the home of Tom Joad and John Henry, Mike Fink and Stagger Lee. Where preachers speak in tongues and tricksters make deals at crossroads, where grifters run long cons and hoboes lure young lads with songs of candy, where eggheads make breathless, pointless lists of rustic exotica, the old, weird America is near.

Robert Darnton wrote, in his excellent essay about George Washington’s false teeth, that “the taste for strangeness does not suit the favorite flavors of history in the United States.” With due respect, I’m not so sure. When I started this weblog way back in ought-four, I was actually going to call it “Old, Weird America,” but with my uncanny ability to misjudge the zeitgeist (Internet start-up or History PhD?), I didn’t. I think I was worried how the word “weird” might look to a skittish job search committee. Score 1/2 for the Tribbles of the world. But now I’m kicking myself, as I think the old, weird America—the idea and the phrase itself—is on the verge of having an Elvis moment. A random sample of utterly non-scientific evidence:

The Harry Smith Project: a tribute album that just came out with artists like Beck, Elvis Costello, Wilco, and Lou Reed covering the songs from the original Anthology. A movie about Harry Smith—musicologist, mystic, dope fiend, hunchback, theosophist, Templar—is in the works too, or really ought to be.

New Weird America: the inevitable label for a current eruption of psychedelic folk music embracing both outsider artists like Jandek and intentional weirdies like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart.

Barking Irons: An ultra-hip line of T-shirts inspired by the secret history of nineteenth-century New York. Call it old, weird NYC: that Five Points, Bowery, Gangs of New York-y cauldron of booze, violence, and minstrelsy that spawned America’s urban culture. Barking Irons’ creators consider themselves part of a “revolution against branding“—their T-shirts retail for about $60 US.

Down in the Flood: I must mention this great podcast on American roots music by Jason Chervokas. The canonical old, weird American soundtrack is of course Smith’s Anthology, and then the Basement Tapes are what got Greil Marcus going in the first place, but if you want more old weird sounds cruise the gems in this podcast. I especially liked the episodes on the minstrel roots of country and on John Henry and Stagger Lee.

The “secret history of hoboes” section of John Hodgman’s indispensable almanac The Areas of My Expertise, and especially the interwob’s unexpected reaction: a collaborative art project to illustrate Hodgman’s entire list of 700 hobo names. Hoboes are indisputably old, weird America, even without Hodgman’s delirious un-history of Herbert Hoover’s pneumatic hobo-fighting robots and the failed hobo coup of 1932. Sayeth Hodgman on a Boing Boing Boing podcast: “The response to the hobo section of the book has been so outsized compared to the rest of the book that it has really touched I think some sort of generational muscle memory of some lost primary source that we all read in seventh grade.”

Mark my words! (Or don’t: I’ve been predicting a Dobie Gillis / Gilligan’s Island revival for years.) While it’s probably too late to rename this site now, lest I confuse my half dozen loyal readers, I am packing the woodie wagon as we speak for some expeditions into the old, weird America. Maybe I’ll get around to posting them before this old, weird moment is gone.

All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable
I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers and friends. I’d meant to post this morbid little slice of historical polyphagy on Halloween, but it seems no less appropriate to serve it up now with your Yanksgiving yams and kugels. I quote the following verbatim from an essential little book entitled Biographical Sketches of Eccentric Characters, published in 1832. Harvard’s Widener Library has not one but two copies of this handy volume, on the stacks in open circulation—there’s a lot to love about Widener—which I used to peruse occasionally when procrastinating there. And now Google Book Search has the whole thing online, in a slightly unwieldy format—there’s a lot to love about Google, too. I’ll probably dip into the sketches again next time I’m feeling a little Kirchnerian. For now, I give you: The Miserable Career of Tarrare!

This man’s voracity would stagger all belief, were not the truth of the circumstances guarantied by the most unquestionable testimonies, among which it is only necessary to mention professor Baron Percy. At 17 years of age, Tarrare weighed only one hundred pounds, and yet he could devour, in the space of twenty-four hours, a quarter of beef as heavy as his body!

At the commencement of the revolutionary war, he entered the [French] army; but here he was so scantily supplied with food, that he soon fell ill, and was conducted to the military hospital at Soultz. On the day of his entrance, he got four rations, which, only serving to whet his appetite, he devoured every kind of refuse victuals in the ward, then searched the kitchen, dispensary, &c., devouring everything, even the poultices, that came in his way! In the presence of the chief physician of the army, Doctor Lorence, he ate a live cat in a few seconds, leaving nothing but the larger bones! In a few minutes, he devoured a dinner prepared for fifteen German laborers, and composed of various substantial dishes. After this tiffin, his belly appeared like a small balloon!

As the French in those days turned every thing to account, the commander-in-chief had him brought before him, and, after treating him with thirty pounds of liver and lights he caused him to swallow a small wooden case, in which was enclosed a letter to a French officer, then in the hands of the enemy. Tarrare set off, was taken prisoner, beaten and confined. He passed by stool the case with the letter, before he could see the officer, but immediately swallowed it again [Eds: Eeew.], to prevent its falling into the hands of the enemy. In another hospital where he was confined, the nurses frequently detected him drinking the blood which had been drawn from the sick; and when all other sources failed, he repaired to the dead-house, and satisfied his frightful appetite on human flesh!

At length, a child of fourteen months old disappeared all at once, and suspicions falling on Tarrare, he also disappeared for four years, when he was recognized again in the civil hospital of Paris, where he ended his miserable career.

For more on Tarrare from an unimpeachable source, see this Fortean Times article on eighteenth-century cat eaters.

I was and still am hoping to blog about the SHOT conference in Las Vegas a week ago, but this week finds me a bit overmatched, so what happened in Vegas will have to stay in Vegas a little longer yet. I can tell you that I met Josh Greenberg, one of the clever elves at CHNM and a fellow plot point on the “UWO-GMU axis of digital evil,” along with many other excellent people who inexplicably do not have weblogs. I can also tell you that I was in Las Vegas for about 72 hours, and probably heard or made one “what happens in Vegas…” reference per hour. Apparently my wife actually went to college with the guy who originally came up with that “…stays in Vegas” ad campaign. I hope his boss let him take the rest of that afternoon off.

I can’t believe I left this out of the History Carnival: I got an email last month from a guy named Jake Lowen, who saw my post about Superman vs. the Klan and did a video podcast about it. Jake is a community organizer in Kansas, Superman’s adopted home. He trains disenfranchised people, including kids, to fight for self-determination and political change. “I have the greatest job in the world,” Jake says on his site. “I fight evil for a living.” He keeps a video blog describing his adventures “kicking ass for justice,” and it’s pretty inspiring stuff. He gives me too much credit for digging up the Superman / Stetson Kennedy / KKK story, which was in Freakonomics after all, but I’m chuffed that somebody who is actually out in the world fighting for “truth, justice, and all that stuff” found something relevant or useful in my scribblings.

In other news, I’m leaving right this instant for the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) annual conference in Vegas, baby. I’m commentator for a panel on “The Rhetoric of Telecommunication Policy,” comparing the political and rhetorical construction of telecom networks in the U.S., Canada, and Sweden. We have scored the less-than-coveted Sunday morning slot, but it’s a good trio of papers, and I’m looking forward to the panel. And there’s lots of great stuff on the program this year, plus apparently this Las Vegas is something of a tourist town. So if you happen to find yourself on the Vegas strip early Sunday morning, in the vicinity of the Imperial Palace, fresh out of chips and looking for something to do… We’ll even waive the usual two drink minimum. Seriously, though, if anyone reading this is on their way to the conference, hit me with an email and we’ll get together.

In the hopper: What happens in Vegas, biographical sketches of eccentric characters, what I’m not reading.

About a month ago, Dave Davisson posted something called the Patahistory Manifesto at his blog, Patahistory, and ever since I’ve been wondering how best to respond. The Patahistory Manifesto starts like so:

Patahistory: A Positive Manifesto for Time Travel, Immersive History, and Synchronic Societies
Patahistory is the beginning of history. Today’s historical works are written for contemporary consumers. Patahistorical works are created for future Patahistorians. The Patahistorian expects his or her work to be changed, to be altered, reworked, and revised. The Patahistorian expects an open and democratic editing of raw history. Patahistory celebrates open-source archives and creative commons works.

And it goes from there. Like all the best manifestoes, the Patahistory Manifesto is a fertile mix of genius and manure, so well tilled that I am not sure where one substance ends and the other begins. It’s also kind of a Rorschach blot, in that it reflects the interests of its readers back to them: as I planned to write a response, all month I was bookmarking interesting things I read in the history blogosphere that seemed to illustrate or illuminate Dave’s Manifesto. This became a bit tedious, as I was also bookmarking interesting things I read in the history blogosphere for this iteration of the History Carnival. The solution came to me in a blaze of patahistorical imagination: the Patahistory Carnival.

So, with insincere apologies to Dave, here at last is History Carnival XL. My thanks to those who submitted entries, and my apologies, sincere this time, for the many fine entries I did not use. There was too much good stuff to cover, even in a frightening barrage of links like this, and I freely admit to being fickle, erratic, and unsystematic in my selections. If there is a larger point to all this (a big if), it is that Dave spake better than he knew: Patahistory is already here.

“Historians don’t think big enough or small enough,” says the Patahistory Manifesto. “Billion year histories are just as important as histories of this morning.” The Voltage Gate dips a toe into billion year history with a post on the Cambrian Explosion and the Burgess Shale. You remember the Cambrian Explosion, don’t you, about half a billion years ago, when previously unicellular life mutated into an immense variety of phyla and fauna? I couldn’t find any good histories of this morning, except in the sense that all blog posts tell the history of this morning, but Gus Van Horn tells the history of just last year in his memories of the Hurricane Rita evacuation.

“Patahistory is a team sport, more interested in wikis than tomes,” the Manifesto continues. Jeremy at ClioWeb agrees that history is a perpetual beta. “How do you do history when everything is recorded?” the Manifesto asks. “The next generation of historians will have to find ways of dealing with avalanches of information.” This is a challenge the next generation of digital historians is already considering. As I sample various student blogs, I’m pretty convinced they are all Patahistorians in training, wrestling with the panopticon and the problem of too much information. Their shining light, my colleague Bill Turkel, was kind enough to riff on my post about the secret syllabus in “No Secret Syllabus for Digital History.”

Time Travel and the Participatory Panopticon
“Time travel is the cornerstone of Patahistory,” says the Manifesto. “Patahistory utilizes theories of time as instruments of its philosophical inquiry.” The cutting-edge digital history classes are already discussing Back To The Future and the Choose Your Own Adventure novels as models of narrative and time. (Blog Them Out of The Stone Age, meanwhile, asks you to Choose Your Own History Department, a different sort of adventure.) Other students contemplate something called “Wikipedia”—po-mo encyclopedia or vanguard of digital Maoism? I thought it was just an online reference to comic book plotlines, soon to join MOOs, Madonna videos, and Max Headroom as cultural entities for which the volume of academic theorizing they’ve inspired vastly overshadows any actual significance in the world. But another young historian reminds me, in Wikipedia and Citizendium, that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is about to launch Citizendium, a more top-down, less free-for-all wiki encyclopedia that TechCrunch dubs “Wikipedia for stick-in-the-muds.” There’s a market for that, I’m guessing.

The Patahistory Manifesto has a fair bit to say about something called the “participatory panopticon,” in which every life is grist for the patahistorian’s mill. Today’s panopticon is surely Google, which celebrated its eighth birthday this month without turning evil, as far as we know. What happens to a website when it falls away from Google’s all-seeing googly eyes? Infocult points to Ghost Sites, a blog tracking web pages that have “decayed, been abandoned, unupdated, or otherwise left to wither in the howling cruelty of cyberspace.”

Participatory panoptics have been with us longer than you’d think. Several bloggers pointed out Surveillance Society, Caleb Crain’s wonderful New Yorker essay on the Mass-Observation movement of the 1930s, which sent hundreds of Britons into the streets with notebook and pencil to record for future patahistorians such matters as the shouts and gestures of motorists, the anthropology of football pools, behavior of people at war memorials, and the number of outdoor copulations on a typical night in Blackpool (four, including one in which an observer participated). Crain himself is a history blogger (at Steamboats are Ruining Everything) and Sharon Howard has amassed a mass of Mass-Observation links at Early Modern Notes. Does the death of Mass-Observation offer any warning for Patahistorians? Sixty years before the blogiverse, a critic of Mass-Observation carped, “The facts simply multiply like maggots in a cheese.”

Patahistorical Tools and Publishing
Clearly, Patahistory will require new and special tools. At Noise and Impertinence, Matt Neale presents some tools for undergraduate success in history, but I think postgraduate patahistorians could make use of them too. The Foxit PDF Reader he mentions will pay for itself (well, it’s free) solely in the time you don’t spend waiting for Adobe Acrobat to open. I’m Too Sexy For My Master’s Thesis plugs an Endnote plugin for Firefox users, but if you’re really leet you’ll make the jump to Zotero, open-source bibliographic software from the Center for History and New Media. AcademHack, a blog of techie tools for academics, also plugs Zotero, and points to Notemesh and Notesengo, two wiki-based sites for collaborative student note-sharing. Finally, William Tozier’s Notional Slurry promotes the Distributed Proofreaders concept with a great excerpt from The Knickerbocker calling for better labeling of marriageable young ladies—call it metadata, circa 1844. As all historians of technology know, our tools themselves have histories; at ClioWeb, Jeremy points out a blog on the History of the Button.

“The anxieties of previous historians are not those of the Patahistorian,” the Manifesto continues. “Patahistorians are less concerened about truth, tenure, and publishing, than they are about collaboration, synchronic cultures, and making bank.” Bryan Andrachuck must be a Patahistorian; his fourth post finds him wondering if his interest in public history will lead to riches. I hope Prof. Turkel will break the truth to him gently. Speaking of publishing, a number of academic publishers have started blogging. But at Crooked Timber, Scott McLemee says reading blogs from mainstream media outlets is like watching Grandma dance the frug. What’s cooler, and much more patahistorical, is when blogs (like, say, Crooked Timber) start publishing.

Says the Manifesto: “Historians disdain popular histories and yearn for popular success. Patahistory is the reverse. It disdains success and yearns for popular histories.” Historianess Rebecca Goetz discussed that gap between popular and academic history, but Sepoy at Chapati Mystery said the cool kids (specifically graduate students studying South Asia) are bridging that divide. Sepoy’s hot-blooded friend Farangi weighed in on ABC’s Path to 9-11 (as did Jon Swift’s Jonathan Swift) and found nobody looking very good. At The Rhine River, Nathanael reports that some German historians condemned TV history programs as worthless historical pornography (Egads, what would the History Channel do without German history to kick around?) Surely some TV history is worthwhile: Chris Turner, who wrote the definitive book on The Simpsons, has, for an encore, decided to save the world. At Geography of Hope, Turner links to video of the British eco-activist comedian-historian (but he hates labels) Rob Newman’s delirious History of Oil.

Is Patahistory Fun?
The Manifesto chides historians for endlessly writing about “war, disease, starvation, and oppression,” and then wondering why people think history isn’t fun. “Only perverse and idiosyncratic minds … want to learn more about this miserable past.” Must be a lot of perverse and idiosyncratic minds out there, because miserable pasts of war and oppression seem pretty popular from where I’m sitting. Airminded compared the Battle of Britain to the movie, Battle of Britain. Normblog serialized a talk on the ubiquity of gallows’ hills in Shetland while Salto Sobrius dug up gallows’ hills in Sweden. The Year ‘Round ponders the ins and outs of hanging and a series of historic Victorian homicides. Holocaust Controversies continues doing battle with a YouTube-based holocaust denier, a battle with no end in sight; they call it “fun,” but I have my doubts. That damn yankee Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory discussed a new Civil War documentary, Virginians Desolate, Virginians Free, and also the work of Chandra Manning. Both discussions relate to the recent fracas over military history (Mark Grimsley is in the trenches of that fight; Spinning Clio surveys the battle from higher ground) and turn on the centrality of slavery to the Civil War experience. A comment on Kevin’s latter post accuses Manning of reductionism, in her insistence that ideas about slavery were fundamental to the worldview of soldiers on both sides. To which I reply: Chandra is a good and brilliant friend of mine, the one in grad school who put all the rest of us to shame. I’ve seen the size of her dissertation, to be published by Knopf next year, and I assure you it is not reductive about anything.

“Isn’t play also part of the human condition?” asks the Manifesto. “Where are the jokes? The songs? The dancing?” Well, Ali Eteraz asks if the prophet Muhammad was funny, but concludes he was more “lighthearted” and “corny” than ha ha funny. Sort of like my Dad. “Patahistory is a ludic history,” sayeth the Manifesto: that is, a playful history, a history of games. At Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog (of Serpentes on a Shippe fame), Chaucer’s son Lowys heaps derision on a computer game based on the Hundred Year’s War. Lowys’ 14th-century leet-speak is priceless: “IS ST SWITHUNZ DAY AND FOR XL MORE DAYS IT WILL BE RAINING THE BLOOD OF NOOBS!” But games can be serious business: Brett Schulte at American Civil War Gaming & Reading presents parts eight and nine of a mind-boggling ten part series on Eric Jacobson’s For Cause and for Country, a book about the Civil War battle of Franklin, Tennessee. Brett’s thoroughness testifies to the intense interest of certain gamers and simulators in accurate history. Acephalous’ Scott Kaufman has a much shorter answer for why the South lost the Civil War.

Weak Segues and Synchronic History
The patahistorian embraces weak segues; the Manifesto doesn’t say that anywhere, but I’m going to have to pretend it does or I’ll never get through all these links. At History Unfolding, David Kaiser looked at where the money went in 1965 and today. Adjusted for inflation, Kaiser found, almost every basic necessity costs only half today what it did in 1965—but in that “almost” lies at least one big catch. Jonathan Dresner learned from the Guardian’s News Blog that the British chocolate industry was founded by Quakers. “I wonder if the Pennsylvania Dutch have anything to do with Hershey’s,” he asks. Don’t get me started on candy history, Jonathan. Milton Hershey was in fact a Mennonite, not to mention an idealistic philanthropist who tried to build a chocolate utopian community and gave his fortune to orphans; his great rival, Forrest Mars Sr., was a notorious miser and recluse who lived out his days in a Las Vegas candy factory like the offspring of Willy Wonka and Howard Hughes. At American Presidents Blog, James Buchanan: A Lesson In Name Calling, remarks on the sexuality of the bachelor president and links to a weird but cool little exhibit called Tall, Slim, and Erect, which combines obscure biographical data on the U.S. presidents with portraits of plastic figurines for an odd meditation on the office and the men. My favorite figurine is probably Woodrow Wilson’s, my favorite entry Benjamin Harrison’s. APB also provides evidence that Barbara Bush was once a hottie.

It had no explicitly historical posts in the past fortnight, but I’m happy for the return of Petri Dish, which blogs on science, culture and history. This post on a class in science and popular culture is interesting, and it sounds like a great class. I’m also happy to welcome the second year of the Science Creative Quarterly, which seems like the sort of place Alfred Jarry would feel right at home. Editor Dave Ng combined Bruce Lee, SUVs, and DNA site-directed mutagenesis in his own manifesto of sorts, while Angela Beckett explained how to win a Nobel Prize. Collection Resurrection is a new blog by a recent graduate of my university’s public history program, now curating and restoring the collections of a small town Ontario museum. Seeds of Growth called Eli Whitney the original “Long Tail” entrepreneur. Chris Clarke’s comic book adaptation of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts may or may not be up when you read this—its sheer awesomeness devoured his bandwidth and crashed his site.

Patahistory requires “synchronic history,” the history of current things. A blog called Lewis and Clark: What Else Happened, dedicated to chronicling what else happened on every day of the Lewis and Clark expedition, reached its journey’s end this month, two hundred years to the day after Lewis and Clark completed theirs. Walking the Berkshires presented Patriotic Cover, with great images of Civil War era postcards, and discussed Lincoln’s Fast Day of September 26, 1861. Other holidays and anniversaries were noted in the blogosphere: Radical Geek observed Ignore the Constitution Day on September 17th. I suspect the Bush Administration observed it too, but perhaps not the way Rad Geek had in mind. The Axis of Evel Knievel marked the 68th birthday of “the worst historical analogy ever” and the start of last century’s longest conventional war. Finally, I know you know that September 19th was Talk Like A Pirate Day. The Skwib waxed piratical all week; I’m Too Sexy For My Master’s Thesis pointed to this article on Jewish Pirates (“The first shmuck to kvetch will find his tuchus keel-hauled!” declared my friend Judd Karlman); and Patahistory’s Dave Davisson, who is ultimately to blame for all of this, gets the final word with a wordless post: Pirates vs. Ninjas.

The End of Patahistory
Ta-da! That concludes this edition of the History Carnival. Thanks for scrolling. Jeremy Boggs will host the next History Carnival at ClioWeb on October 15th. (Look! He has cute baby pictures on his blog too!) Contact him via his site or use this handy form to submit entries for the next carnival. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the History Carnival homepage or at the Blog Carnival Index. I am out of here.

The History Carnival is lurching around the bend, even as we speak, but it may be a few hours, or even a day late, this time around. To tide you over until it comes: baby pictures! I defy you to resist them!

Two and a half addenda to my post about secret syllabi:

1. My colleague Bill Turkel assures me that his graduate course in digital history has no hidden syllabus; the questions he’s assigned his students are exactly the questions he’s wrestling with right now. In which case, I intend to get his students to see if they can hack my TiVo so it works in Canada. This reminds me: Bill’s course here at the University of Western Ontario and Josh Greenberg’s similar course at George Mason University have unleashed twenty-six new history bloggers on the ‘sphere. Blogrollers take note, and completists despair.

2. The second half of my post was basically a mash note to Eric Rauchway… and that was written before he outed himself as a Whoey! If you thought I was a Rauchway fanboy before this, just watch me now. Eric sees the good Doctor (who?) as one in a long line of English heroes who are “crypto-foreigners,” used by their creators to meditate on what it means to be British. I’d add to his list Christopher Banks, the Consulting Detective from Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, and, since he’s already opened the door to geek culture, the principals in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The other consequence of Rauchway’s post? If he can talk about Doctor Who at TNR’s Open University, never again will I refrain from posting something at Cliopatria because I think it might be too nerdy.

2 1/2. I will be hosting History Carnival XL (extra large?) right here at Old Is The New New on Sunday, October 1. Keep those nominations coming to electromail - at - robmacdougall - org (not com) or use the handy form.

Doesn’t that have a nice ring to it? The Secret Syllabus. It sounds like one of those erudite, but not too erudite, thrillers by photogenic Harvard undergrads who somehow score million-dollar advances for their first novels. Alas, it’s really just a blog post by me.

Ideally, one syllabus will bear some resemblance to the other. In my first year of grad school, a Certain Eminent Historian sometimes came to our methods seminar more interested in talking about the previous night’s Chicago Hope than The Rosicrucian Enlightenment or Time On The Cross. I don’t think our Eminent Historian had any particular affinity for Mandy Patinkin, but it was the 1990s, and that’s what people watched on Wednesday nights. Unless of course they were dim-witted graduate students busy plodding through Fogel and Engerman. His Eminence was pretty disgusted with us when he realized nobody was prepared to discuss last night’s hospital drama. Was he more up to date with pop culture than his twenty-something grad students? What part of “Must-See TV” didn’t we understand? I mean, it was a given that he’d be smarter than any of us, but he seemed a little put out by the indignity of being cooler than us too.

Truth be told, I always enjoyed that seminar. And who am I to cast snark at someone of that stature? When I win a wall full of Bancrofts and Pulitzers (do Bancrofts and Pulitzers hang on a wall, or sit on a shelf?), then maybe I can turn my seminars over to discussing Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Until that day, I try to keep the extracurricular material I bring to class in the same general area as the topic at hand.

A friend told me not to put the books and articles I currently find most interesting on my syllabus. I probably find them interesting, he said, because they build on, complicate, or reverse the standard histories I’ve learned. My students are still learning that basic history. So the thing to do is to assign them the foundational works as reading, let those sink in, and then save the cool twists and surprises for the classroom. Best of all, he added, my students might give me credit for all those brilliant new ideas.

Three weeks into my new seminar on twentieth century U.S. history, the secret syllabus is pretty simple: all Eric Rauchway, all the time. Because this is my secret syllabus, Eric isn’t getting any extra book sales or royalties. But he does deserve some kind of teaching credit for making me look so good. Our very first class was on the September 11th anniversary, which occasioned talk of the twentieth century’s historical “bookends.” As events near the start of the century that offered possible pairings with the 9-11 attack, I mentioned the explosion of the USS Maine, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and the assassination of William McKinley in September 1901—the latter suggested and explicated, of course, by Rauchway’s ferociously readable Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America.

After that, we moved on to the United States’ place in the world around 1900. The students read primary sources from the debates over American imperialism in the Philippines, debates that feel excruciatingly current today. My favorite piece is probably Mark Twain’s sardonic “To The Person Sitting In Darkness,” and not just because I’ve adopted the phrase “Is it good? Sir, it is pie” for any and all occasions. That part near the end about the vacant seat in the trinity of national gods? “Washington, the Sword of the Liberator; Lincoln, the Slave’s Broken Chains; the Master, the Chains Repaired.” It gives me genuine chills. “It will give the Business a splendid new start,” Twain concludes darkly. “You will see.”

But the science I dropped on our discussion came from Rauchway’s new Blessed Among Nations: How The World Made America, which I pestered our librarians into rush ordering in time for this semester. Thomas Bender’s similarly-titled A Nation Among Nations, which we discussed at Cliopatria back in April, uses transnational history to argue against American exceptionalism. Rauchway, on the other hand, finds in transnational history the most plausible explanation for America’s exceptional qualities, and more importantly, for its own fervent belief in American exceptionalism, that I’ve yet seen. The idea that America might actually be that way for a reason hit my Canadian students like a clap of thunder.

Next week, our class will get back to domestic politics, tackling that old standby, “who were the Progressives?” And what do you know, Eric’s obliged me with this post. “What [the Progressives] could agree on,” he writes, “was the need … not for progress toward anything in particular, but progress away from something—away from the existing political-economic system. … The sense of progress as movement-away as opposed to movement-toward may not seem like much of a basis for anything, but it provided the foundation for the most fertile period in American thought since the Revolution … and for the most successful of third parties since the Republicans.” At the end, Rauchway promises to explain more—how did Republican Progressives end up to the left of liberals?—in his “next book but one” (so in addition to being brilliant, he’s got his next two books planned out, at least). But he’ll give us a sneak preview in a blog post if anyone asks. Well, I’ll bite, Eric. But what would really help me out would be if you blogged about Progressivism next week, and then about World War I the week after, and then spent a couple of weeks on business and culture in the 1920s, and then did a post or two on the New Deal…

So what was I up to in the Archives of Useless Research, you ask? Here (below the fold) is the prospectus for a paper I’ll be presenting in November at the University of Virginia, for a conference called “Inventing America: The Interplay of Technology and Democracy in Shaping American Identity,” loosely tied to the Benjamin Franklin tricentennial (I just can’t get away from that guy, can I?) and sponsored by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. (I wonder if the AUR’s hollow earths, perpetual motion machines, and secrets of the pyramids revealed are the sort of invention and innovation the Lemelsons had in mind…)

The late nineteenth century was, it has rightly been said, “the golden age of the crank” in America. Literally, a crank is a piece of machinery, and Americans in these years embraced machine technologies with enthusiasm. Scores turned their hands to tinkering and invention in hopes of becoming the next Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell. Figuratively, a crank is an eccentric individual obsessed with a single idea, and America was rich in these too. Eclectic druggists, backyard inventors, and political prophets toiled over patent medicines, perpetual motion machines, and social or financial nostrums for the ills of American democracy. Members of this eccentric fraternity often turned their hands to both technological and political reforms. This paper explores the interplay of technology and democracy in the personal imaginations and the public images of the great American cranks.

Before the late nineteenth century, there had been little systematic effort in America to define the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate scholarship. In Benjamin Franklin’s day, the scientific American was not a specialist but a generalist, dabbling in a variety of academic disciplines. “The book of Nature is open to all,” Franklin said—any humble tinkerer might remake the nation. Nineteenth-century Americans continued to cherish Franklin’s democratic vision of technology and applied science. The professionalization of American engineering, science, and medicine around the end of the nineteenth century, however, required purging these professions of dabblers and dilettantes. In the same way, the growth and bureaucratization of government pushed enthusiastic amateurs away from the machinery of American democracy. By the early twentieth century, a would-be Franklin who dabbled simultaneously in electrical, political, and moral experiments might well be regarded as a kook or a crank.

Yet the so-called cranks pushed back. They attacked the increasing specialization and stratification of American science and society, and appealed to popular traditions of democratic anti-elitism and homespun common sense. In an era of economic crises and social upheavals, they portrayed American democracy itself as a marvelous but malfunctioning machine that required only some small adjustment to resolve the growing contradictions between morality and progress, poverty and prosperity. In this, the so-called cranks reflected and responded to the anxieties and attitudes of a much larger public.

Not my most elegant writing, but it sounds like fun, no? And the Archives were full of good stuff (expect a series of excerpts and highlights here). Now I just have to write the paper. In all my copious free time.

I’m at the MIT Archives today, not the NYPL, but I, and I imagine most historians, can relate to the following description of our work:

That’s from Prophet of the Unexplained, Damon Knight’s 1971 biography of Charles Fort. I actually quite like working in the archives—blains, dyspepsia, and flatulence notwithstanding—but it’s still a great passage.

(I am put out, though, that MIT of all places does not allow digital cameras in their archives, even though the material I’m looking at is not copyrighted, and my flash-less camera will do no more harm to the documents than the pressure of my eyeballs.)