Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / Blonde Faith

Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley, Little Brown '07, $25.99, 308 pages, ISBN #0316734594.

The entertainment business (publishing incuded) knows the public are suckers for farewells. Forty-five years ago, I was drawn to a concert by Fats Domino because it was said that the pudgy New Orleanian was terminally ill and was making his goodbye tour. Well, Fats is still alive and kicking and raking in the royalties. Last month, we reviewed Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, which ostensibly waves goodbye to Nathan Zuckerman, although the novel's ambiguous ending allows enough wiggle room for a later reappearance.

So veteran novelist Walter Mosley seems entitled to play with our emotions a bit in suggesting that his tenth Easy Rawlins detective saga could be Easy's last. His latest is set in post-Watts Los Angeles and features friends in trouble. For Christmas Black and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander are missing under circumstances that make it clear they're being hunted. Can Easy find his buddies before the hunters do?

This might be a tolerably good plot line by itself, but Mosley spices it up with a love interest. We learn that even though the sun rises and sets over Bonnie, Easy has decided for reasons we'll let the reader discover on his own that she must leave him. It's always a special treat for this white man to read this accomplished black novelist, since Mosley offers a glimpse of working class black people at ease, talking as they only do when no Caucasians are around.

Out in Paperback / Revolutionaries to Race Leaders

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders -- Black Power and the Making of African American Politics by Cedric Johnson, UMinn. Press '07, 294 pages, ISBN #0-8166-4478-0. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

The linked-arm marches for civil rights and Stokely Carmichael's black power clenched fist salutes are today merely the stuff of historical archives. Unquestionably, those efforts have greatly expanded the black middle class and installed its members in corporate boardrooms and suburban subdivisions.

But, as author Cedric Johnson argues, many millions of less educated, less affluent African Americans have been left behind, and the more conciliatory civil rights strategies employed today are largely ineffective in bettering the condition of the underclass. He argues for an edgier, more outspoken approach, including no less than "the renewal of popular struggle and class-conscious politics."

In doing so, Johnson traces the history of the "Negro Revolution" and Cold War America, the era of Black Power politics, the 1972 Gary Convention, African Liberation Day mobilizations and such radical departures as the National Black Political Assembly and the National Black Independent Political Party.

Book Alert / Paradise Road by Kirk Nesset

Paradise Road by Kirk Nesset, Pittsburgh UP '07, $24.95, 138 pages, ISBN #0-8229-4315-8.

Like other natural phenomena we'll never really understand, the hydra-headed thing we call love lends itself to endless deconstruction. Allegheny College English professor Kirk Nesset takes a whack at this elusive ghost in his new short story collection. Among the trenchant observations his characters make is this from the narrator of "The Prince of Perch Fishing": "Nothing comes and goes without a trace. In this world there are consequences for everything."

Nesset, recipient of a Pushcart Prize and author of a non-fiction study of the works of Raymond Carver, has won plaudits for his short stories, among them this from acclaimed novelist Ann Beattie: "They're about lives lived without a self-congratulatory champagne flute in sight, played against a background of shifting, uneasy, endlessly surprising ordinary life."

Out in Paperback / The California Idea and American Higher Education

The California Idea and American Higher Education -- 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan by John Aubrey Douglass, Stanford UP '07, 460 pages, ISBN #0-8047-05753-4.

One of the fertile ideas the Enlightment exported to the Colonies was the concept that higher education should be enjoyed not simply by the propertied elite but by the common man as well. Perhaps the most notable expression of this ideal came with the 1862 Congressional Morrill Act,  which established sixty-eight land grant colleges. Until then, most colleges and universities had sectarian roots, so many looked upon non-religious institutions of higher education with suspicion.

Yet it took many decades before college education became something most could hope to enjoy. In the 1930s, for instance, only 12 per cent of the nation's college age individuals matriculated to institutions of higher education. Curiously, at the same time, 24 per cent of Californians were doing so. By 1960, when the national average had climbed to 45 per cent, California outstripped the country with 55 per cent of young people going to college.

John Aubrey Douglass, University of California research fellow, argues that the reason for California's greater participation in higher education sprang from the creation of and carefully-orchestrated network of public colleges and universities. Douglass calls California's approach "the California idea" and traces its evolution from 1850, when such efforts were afoot even before the land grant legislation.

The scope of Douglass's work encompasses the influence of the Progressive Movement, the Regional College Movement, the Red Scare of the '50s, and the transforming effect of Governor Pat Brown and UC President Clark Kerr as well as the 1960 California Master Plan.

If Campaigns Fail, Candidates Could Start A Law Firm

The New York Times:

"You could put together a pretty decent little law firm drawing on just the leading presidential candidates. It would have two former prosecutors, one intense and the other folksy, a civil litigator from a tony regional firm, a superstar trial lawyer and that scrappy kid from Harvard who gave up the big money to do civil rights work. (O.K., it would also sound like a pitch for a doomed TV show.)

"Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Fred D. Thompson all have law degrees, and all but Mr. Romney worked as lawyers for years before entering politics. But the practices they pursued, and how they handled themselves in the process, say something about their values and temperaments, and perhaps provide the outlines of how they would conduct a presidency.

"There is certainly something of the commercial litigator’s polish and caution in Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Giuliani’s moral certainty is reflected in his crusades against government corruption, organized crime and insider trading when he was the United States attorney in Manhattan. And Mr. Edwards’s populism and appetite for risk has roots in his enormous success as a lawyer for injured plaintiffs."

                                                     (Click above link to read more)

Celebrating "Chick" Austin, The Museum Curator Who Put Hartford On The Map

The Hartford Courant:

'The late Chick Austin, the designer, artist, architect, magician and cutting-edge director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art who partied with the likes of Salvador Dali, Aaron Copland and Buckminster Fuller, would have approved of all the socializing at the Wadsworth this weekend, including one party marking a Hartford Stage production about him.

"The Premier Society Members of the Hartford Stage and the Atheneum shared champagne and fine food Friday night at a pre-play reception celebrating the opening of the theater's 'Chick: The Great Osram' and the museum exhibit on Austin's former home on Scarborough Street, called 'Magic Façade: The Austin House.' 'I have been fascinated with his house since we moved to Hartford,' said Dr. Bernard Passman, who attended with his wife, Jean. 'We're fascinated with Chick, too.'

"The exhibit includes originals and reproductions of furnishing from the flamboyant director's home, as well as family photographs and letters he wrote during his Atheneum tenure from 1927 to 1944. So is there a chance of finding another creatively dashing leader as the Atheneum brass get ready to fill the vacancy there now? Some said they already know the perfect choice as leader for the Hartford landmark.

"'Douglas Hyland from the New Britain Museum of American Art, he would be perfect,' said Krystian von Speidel, whose theater-night outfit included rubber Wellies that were the perfect choice given the torrential rains."

                                                   (Click above link to read more)

Book Alert / The Slave Ship -- A Human History

The Slave Ship -- A Human History by Marcus Rediker, Viking '07, $27.95, 434 pages, ISBN #0670018236. Index, source notes, no bibliography, grouping of b&w glossy images.

American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois has called the slave trade the "most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history....the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West . They descended into Hell." The word "magnificent" is used in the dictionary sense of being "grand or imposing to the mind" but, in the context of Rediker's compelling narrative, could also embody the resourcefulness of the newly-enslaved people in crafting, against impossible odds, strategies to live from day to day and sometimes to challenge their oppressors.

Bookshelves are filled with stories of the slave trade itself, and Rediker writes that it's not his mission to simply add another. Instead, his focus is on the slave ship itself, a combination factory-prison-conveyance designed to tame the human spirit to achieve the passive docility demanded of slaveholders. "Nor is it an exhaustive survey of its subject," the author concedes. "A broader history that compares and connects the slave ships of all the Atlantic powers -- not only Britain and the American colonies but also Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark and Sweden -- remains to be written."

Rediker focuses on the height of the slave trade, from 1700 to 1808, when abolitionist forces succeeded in legislating the end of the industry in both England and America. He traces four human dramas:

1) Between the slave-ship captain and his crew, in which "Violent command applied almost as much to the rough crews of the slavers as to the hundreds of captives they shipped."

2) Between sailors and slaves, "predicated on vicious forced feedings, whippings, casual violence of all kinds, and the rape of women captives."

3) Among the enslaved people themselves, for whom survival demanded forging a collective bond with those who often spoke a different language. "Amid the brutal imprisonment, terror and premature death, they managed a creative, life-affirming response: they fashioned new languages, new cultural practices, new bonds, and a nascent community among themselves aboard the ship."

4) In America and Britain "as abolitionists drew one horrifying portrait after another of the Middle Passage for a metropolitan reading public," whose raised consciousness led gradually to legislated abolition.

Rediker is professor of history at the University of Pittsburg, author of four other books and winner of several book awards.

Book Alert / Democratic Capitalism And Its Discontents

Democratic Capitalism and its Discontents by Brian C. Anderson, ISI Books '07, 189 pages, ISBN #1933859245. Index.

For many free marketeers, the crumbling of communism meant the closure of an ideological battle that had consumed most of the 20th century and the advent of capitalistic hegemony. But waiting in the weeks were Islamic fanatics, moral libertines, and secular humanists, threatening once more to overturn the applecart.

Brian C. Anderson, writer for the conservative Manhattan Institute, addresses those challenges headon in a series of essays in his tendentious new book. Some of the essay headings suggest the content: Capitalism and the Suicide of Culture; The Ineducable Left; Religious America, Secular Europe; A Brief History of Judicial Activism; and Liberal Folly and Conservative Peace.

Out in Paperback / Playing America's Game

Playing America's Game -- Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line by Adrian Burgos, Jr., UCal. Press '07, 362 pages, ISBN #0520251431. Index, selected bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Desegregation of baseball is nearly always written about or thought of as a matter of black and white. But, as University of Illinois historian Adrian Burgos, Jr. writes, Latino participation in baseball came earlier than Jackie Robinson's 1947 breaking of the color barrier for blacks and proved helpful to Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey in strategizing that initiative.

Burgos's is a nuanced study of racial distinctions, emphasizing that segregation in baseball wasn't as simple as black and white but allowed the brokering of access according to such categories as skin color, particular physical features, and geographical locations. In his study, Burgos draws on the work of scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant in "racialization, a concept that seeks to unveil 'the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.'"

Book Alert / A More Perfect Constitution

A More Perfect Constitution -- 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America A Fairer Country by Larry J. Sabato, Walker '07, $25.95, 342 pages, ISBN #0-8027-1621-0. Index, selected bibliography, source notes, unillustated.

The framers of the Constitution envisioned it as a living document, susceptible to change in generations ahead to adjust to changed circumstances. However, in 220 years, it has only been amended 17 times, for it's seldom possible to propose a change without numerous factions insisting on unrelated changes of their own at the required Constitutional convention. Then too, three-quarters of the states must ratify each amendment, making success an uphill fight.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and a longtime student of the democratic process, finds this regrettable, going so far as to say that much of the dysfunction we witness in American government stems from failure to amend the Constitution along the way to reflect changed realities. "For all its unquestioned genius," he writes, "some of the documents important provisions are now outmoded, having been framed for a much smaller, less complex nation."

So while amending the constitution continues to be difficult, it doesn't prevent Sabato from proposing 23 changes he feels would make government fairer and more efficient. He groups his proposed changes thematically: changes to the Congress, such as term limits; changes to the Presidency, such as curbs on executive authority and consideration of a six-year, non-renewable term; fixed terms and age limits for Supreme Court justices; reform of the political process, including the electoral college; creation of a universal national service program; and ways to make worthy constitutional changes likelier to achieve.