Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / A Nation of Counterfeiters

A Nation of Counterfeiters -- Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Mihm, Harvard '07, $29.95, 457 pages, ISBN #0-674-02657-8.  Index, a note on sources, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The financial requirements of the Civil War, explains the author, ended a loosely-conceived system of state-authorized currency production marked by rampant counterfeiting and exploitation. Under the old system, thousands of banks would print their own bank notes that became media of exchange, so that currency one carried in one's pocket might have emanated from numerous different banks and differed widely in appearance. At the time of the Civil War, says the University of Georgia historian, more than 10,000 different kinds of bills were in circulation.

Mihm sketches for his readers what life was like under such a system, whose players included "charismatic counterfeiters, aristocratic bankers, scheming bounty hunters, corrupt cops, and struggling bank note engravers, as well as the working-class men and women who relied on the counterfeit economy to make ends meet."

With the Civil War, however, came the greenback and the felt need for citizens to be able to rely on the legitimacy of currency. "As the currency became a symbol of the nation state," Mihm says, "counterfeiting became an intolerable infringement of federal economic sovereignty. Long tolerated, counterfeiters soon found themselves at the receiving end of a ruthless campaign of federal law enforcement."

Book Alert / God's Harvard

God's Harvard -- A Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin, Harcourt $25, 296 pages, ISBN #0151012628. Endnotes, no index, bibliography or illustrations.

If what comes to mind when you think of conservative Christians is televangelism, you're behind the times, according to Washington Post writer Hanna Rosin, who spent 18 months immersed in the right wing's latest venture, seven-year-old Patrick Henry College, just outside Washington, D.C.

The founders of Patrick Henry focus laser intensity on their mission -- to educate the best and the brightest of young conservatives and to integrate them into the next generation of America's political, scientific, business and entertainment leaders. Who then are these students and why should they matter?

They are mostly home schooled, many have scored a perfect 1600 on their SATs, and a number turned away Ivy League schools to attend Patrick Henry. Many have taken vows of chastity until marriage. Their stated mission is to save a culture gone awry, and rather than railing at sin from the margins, a la Jerry Falwell, they seek to blend in with the culture itself. Rosin foresees their influence will be felt in elective politics as early as the 2008 election.

Book Alert / Evocative Objects

Evocative Objects -- Things We Think With, Edited by Sherry Turkle, MIT Press '07, $24.95, 385 pages, ISBN #0-262-20168-2.  Index, epigraph sources, selected bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

My father died suddenly 57 years ago while I was a small child. As the only child of his second marriage, I inherited a monogrammed silver hairbrush, with which I have brushed my hair each day since his death. The metal back fits comfortably into my palm, and I feel like part of my beloved father is touching me each time I stroke my hair. He had such hopes for me, and I find myself talking with him, from time to time, about important events in my life.

Such is the power of inanimate objects to evoke thoughts, memories, desires and to facilitate meditation. Sherry Turkle, director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a deliciously offbeat study of what everyday objects do for us and to us.

In essays by three dozen people, objects are grouped into six themes: Objects of a) Design and Play, b) Discipline and Desire, c) History and Exchange, d) Transition and Passage, e) Mourning and Memory, and f) Meditation and New Vision. Turkle adds two essays of her own, exploring such issues as what makes an object evocative.

A couple of snippets illustrate the observations made by the essayists: Michelle Hlubinka writes, "My datebook and its events had their own esoteric language. Familiar venues, organizations, and individuals were noted in tiny writing and abbreviations that only I could decipher." Julian Beinart writes, "Although it looked like a Braun  transistor radio, this object never produced sound. I asked the boy about it and he said, 'It can't play music, but I sing when I carry it. One day I'll have a real one.'"

What's your evocative object?

Book Alert / The Scandal of the Season

The Scandal of the Season -- A Novel by Sophie Gee, Scribner '07, $25, 351 pages, ISBN #1-4165-4056-3.

What novel of the seduction of a beautiful woman by a nobleman would be complete without the triangulation produced by a jealous third party waiting in the wings? Refreshingly, in this debut novel, Sophie Gee's third party doesn't bed either of the protagonists. He is content merely to observe  them and then write about it.

Fortunately, the British poet Alexander Pope was an uncommonly fine and witty writer. Otherwise, the threadbare Pope would never have been invited into the salons of the rich, where he witnessed sparks fly when celebrated Arabella Fermor and Robert Petre, seventh Baron of Ingatestone, spent time together at the masquerades, teas, and theater engagements that comprised London's social season.

Pope knew that a thin literary reputation wouldn't  carry him far, and the torrid affair in the making would provide grist for the mill from which he'd harvest fame. Soon he had published The Rape of the Lock, a satirical poem centering on lovely Belinda (read Arabella), that would sweep Pope into the lusty world of 18th century London, more than a century before Queen Victoria would come along and spoil all their fun.

Can You Imagine Manhattan Before The European Hordes?

The New Yorker:

"In this week’s issue, Nick Paumgarten writes about Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society who is trying to determine exactly how Manhattan—or Mannahatta, 'land of many hills,' as some scholars have translated the name used by the Lenape people who inhabited it—looked before the arrival of Europeans.

"The project is set for completion in 2009, the quadricentennial of Henry Hudson’s 1609 visit to the island, and will include a coffee-table book, interactive exhibits, a series of printed street guides, and a three-dimensional virtual re-creation. Here is a portfolio of images from the project thus far, including the maps that inspired it and new computer-generated illustrations of the hills and forests that once covered the island.

                                                      (Click above link to read more)

50 Years On: Learning Ike's True Role in Little Rock

The National Review:

"Today marks the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. To mark the occasion, National Review Online Editor Kathryn Jean Lopez asked Kasey S. Pipes, author of Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality a few questions.

"Kathryn Jean Lopez: If you had your way, how would history teachers, parents, and journalists be remembering the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock this week?

"Kasey S. Pipes: Little Rock should be remembered as a seminal moment in the civil-rights struggle — perhaps the seminal moment. If integration had failed at Little Rock, it’s hard to imagine it succeeding anywhere. And it would be great if parents, teachers, and journalists would remember that the 101st Airborne soldiers did not arrive on their own orders. Dwight D. Eisenhower had something to do with that."

                                                  (Click above link to read more)

Book Alert / The Day of the Barbarians

The Day of the Barbarians -- The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire by Alessandro Barbero, Walker '07, $24.95, 180 pages, ISBN #0-8027-1571-0. Index, suggestions for further reading, no source notes, one map is the only illustration.

Conventional wisdom has it that by the fourth century A.D., the Roman Empire was well into its unraveling. But Italian novelist and scholar Alessandro Barbero argues that its problems had stabilized by 378, when a battle between the Goths and the Romans at Adrianople resulted in an upset victory for the Goths and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Barbero's thesis is likely to ignite many debates within the academy.

The Goths had been largely subsistence farmers, dependent on Roman subsidies. But when Emperor Valens ended those subsidies and drew them across the Danube into prison camps, then led them on a humiliating march, the Goths formed a de facto army and managed to defeat battle-hardened Roman soldiers, killing two-thirds of the Romans and the Emperor himself.

Book Alert / Microtrends

Microtrends -- The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark J. Penn, Twelve '07, $25.99, 425 pages, ISBN #0-446-58096-1. Index, sources, graphics sprinkled through text.

Twenty years ago, John Naisbitt introduced us to ten overarching trends that were about to transform our lives, such as the advent of the information age, a globalized economy and the replacement of hierarchies in decision making with networking. But, argues Mark J. Penn, a trend followed by only one per cent of the people (three million people in America's case) can be large enough to have a transforming effect.

In his new book, Penn examines more than 70 microtrends in fields ranging from religion to politics. Penn, a veteran pollster and adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, targets such phenomena as people retiring but continuing to work, women driving technology, and men becoming dads at an older age and spending more time with their children.

Penn's chapters are typically three to five pages and filled with the kind of statistics you'd expect a pollster to have at his beck and call. Some trends have already gained labels in the marketplace, like "cougars," women who date younger men. And while the rule against office dating was axiomatic a generation ago (remember "Don't get your meat where you get your bread and butter?"), Penn reports that today, nearly 60 per cent of employees have been office romancers.

The microtrend of "extreme commuters," those who commute more than an hour to work, reflects America's population sprawl. Of the 10 million people in this category in 2000, more than three million joined their ranks within the previous decade. The shattering of the glass ceiling in such fields as communication, Penn writes, has allowed women to marry their natural ability to use words with management power, resulting in the fact that 57 per cent of TV news anchors are women.

A few other microtrends: The disproportionate success of Jews has made them hot marriage prospects, the number of interracial families has increased, and there are more Protestant Hispanics and Moderate Muslims. Chapters can be digested in 10 minutes or so at bedtime, and their lessons are fun to ponder as you drift off to dreamland.

Happy 90th, Louis Auchincloss, And Kudos On Book #65

The Headmaster's Dilemma -- A Novel by Louis Auchincloss, Houghton Mifflin '07, $25, 177 pages, ISBN #0618883428.

Perhaps it's the novelist's age or maybe it comes from the fact he so obviously emulates Henry James, but Louis Auchincloss novels, written as they usually are about the upper classes, embody a quaintness akin to the feeling of a baseball fan stepping back into time by watching a Wrigley Field day game, with no lights and manual scoreboards.

While book #65 (Whew! And consider he spent a lifetime practicing law as well) is set in post-Vietnam years, its forty year old protagonists still call each other darling and dearest. Auchincloss makes no secret of his privileged, prep school background, and in keeping with the adage about writing what you know, we find his characters ensconsed in a New England boarding school (The author attended St. Bernard's and Groton).

In Auchincloss's prep school days, such environ were cocoons, isolated from the cares of the outside world. But Michael Sayre, headmaster of Averhill, is a new breed, committed to co-education and diversity, a philosophy that is chalk on the blackboard to his hidebound trustees.

Sex, mostly of the boy-on-boy variety, permeates the novel, which revolves around an alleged assault by a prefect on one of his charges and what, if anything, ought to be done about it. But other tensions course through as well, such as those generated by Trustee President Donald Spencer, an arch-conservative fellow and former Sayre classmate, who never seems to have gotten over the fact that boys in the shower teased him about his rather minimal endowment (not of the financial variety).

Auchincloss's narrative style is more mannered than stilted, and it's refreshing to read sentences that could have come from Edith Wharton in a book centered in the last half of the 20th century. I suspect it's the inherent separateness of boarding school life that keeps the prose from feeling discordant.

Louis Auchincloss, today is your 90th birthday. May it be a happy one!

Clever Man, H.L. Mencken, He Predicted A Moron In The White House

Salt Lake Tribune:

                                                    BY JOSEPH GALLOWAY

"It took just eight decades, but H.L. Mencken's astute prediction on the future course of American presidential politics and the electorate's taste in candidates came true:

"On July 26, 1920, the acerbic and cranky scribe wrote in The Baltimore Sun: '' . . . all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre - the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.''

" My late good buddy Leon Daniel, a wire service legend for 40 years at United Press International, dredged up that Mencken quote several years ago and found that it was a perfect fit for George W. Bush, The Decider. MSNBC's Keith Olberman highlighted the same quote this week. A tip of the hat to both of them, and to Mencken.

'The White House is now so adorned by Mencken's downright moron, and has been for more than six excruciatingly painful years. It wouldn't be so bad if the occupant had at least enough sense to surround himself with smart, competent and honest advisers and listen to them. But he hasn't.'"

                                                    (Click above link to read more)