Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / Crazy Good

Crazy Good -- The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most  Famous Horse in America by Charles Leerhsen, Simon & Schuster '08, $26, 353 pages, ISBN #0743291778. Index, no bibliography or source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

In Meredith Wilson's celebrated Broadway musical, The Music Man, the mesmerizing snakeoil salesman Harold Hill lectures the denizens of River City, Iowa, about iniquities pervading their town and asks whether they'd "Like to see some stuck-up jockey boy sitting on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil, I should say." As a cast member in a community production years ago, I got the sense that Dan Patch was a racehorse but never heard a word about him before or since.

Until Charles Leerhsen came along, that is, to tell the story of the equine who, he claims, was once the most famous horse in America. For in the early years of the 20th century, Dan Patch grew from pulling a grocer's wagon in Oxford, Indiana; to learning he could win horse races at county fairs, to becoming wildly popular as a harness racer.

In spite of a crippled leg that nearly led his owner to euthanize him, Dan Patch was born at exactly the right time, in the heyday of harness racing. A decade later, Indianans would flock to the new Indianapolis Speedway to watch races by machines, not animals. But at a time when baseball's Ty Cobb earned $12,000 a year, making him the sport's highest paid player, Dan Patch earned more than $1 million a year.

Yet Harold Hill may have had a point. Horse racing in those days "attracted hustlers, cheats and touts." Race were often fixed and horses were sometimes drugged with whiskey or cocaine. "Dan's original owner was intimidated into selling him, and America's favorite horse spent the second half of his career touring the country in a plush private railroad car and putting on speed shows for crowds that sometimes exceeded 100,000 people." So quickly did cars replace horses as the national passion that when Dan Patch died in 1916, he was all but forgotten and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Book Alert / Henry James At Work

Henry James At Work by Theodora Bosanquet, Edited with Notes and  Introductions by  Lyall H. Powers, UMichigan Press '06, $29.95, 142 pages, ISBN #0472115715, Index, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press originally published Bosanquet's memoir in 1924, and the University of Michigan Press demonstrates, in republishing, enlarging and annotating it, a crucial function of the university press -- to focus in on lesser lights, who might not have the commercial potential for a trade biography but who, nevertheless, are important in their own right.

Theodora Bosanquet was 27 when she became secretary to novelist Henry James, then 64. In her eight years with him, she showed herself not only to be a resourceful helpmate to the iconic author but "a skilled writer and editor, an early feminist and a contemporary of the Bloomsbury literary community." After her employ with James, she went on to publish two of her own books, critical studies on Harriet Martineau and Paul Valery, and became a prominent figure in the woman's suffrage movement.

In addition to republishing Bosanquet's memoir, UMichigan Press has added an essay about her and her circle of professional and personal friends and snippets from her diaries and letters, now in the Harvard University archives.

Book Alert / Reclaiming Conservatism

Reclaiming Conservatism -- How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost -- And How it Can Find its Way Back by Mickey Edwards, Oxford  UP '08, $21.95, 230 pages, ISBN #0195335589. Index, selected reading, source notes, unillustrated.

The conservative blueprint that Barry Goldwater set forth in Conscience of a Conservative 48 years ago called for promotion of small government, lower spending and individual freedoms. Execution of this philosophy by the likes of Ronald Reagan may have made liberals wince, but they had to admit it was based on principles enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

But then came the administration of George W. Bush and the advent and/or expansion of illegal wire-tapping, secret prisons for suspected terrorists, the overriding of checks and balances, and an imperial presidency. In his new book, Mickey Edwards, for 16 years a conservative Republican congressman from Oklahoma, takes no prisoners in focusing blame for the dramatic transformation:

"...the finger of blame should be pointed directly at those people who call themselves 'conservatives.' If the Constitution and its fervent embrace of citizen rights is lost, they will bear responsibility for its demise."  Edwards not only shows conservatives "how far they have fallen" but offers prescriptions for returning conservatism to its original ideals.

Out in Paperback / An End to Poverty?

An End to Poverty? -- A Historical Debate by Gareth Stedman Jones, Columbia UP '04 paperback, 278 pages, ISBN #1861977298. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

Perhaps it's simply the hubris of our race. Throughout the period since the Enlightenment, at least, man has argued that we should be able to lift the unfortunate among us to at least a subsistence level. Earlier this year, in fact, former presidential candidate John Edwards unveiled a plan he vowed to pursue even outside the campaign framework, to end poverty in America within 30 years. Yet we remain haunted by Jesus's warning that, "You shall always have the poor with you."

In one slim volume, this Cambridge University political scientist examines the arguments of such seminal thinkers as Thomas Paine and Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet that "all citizens should be protected against the hazards of economic insecurity." Jones revisits the 1790s era in which this noble principle "was derailed by conservative as well as leftist thinkers."

Jones also demonstrates how "current discussions about economic issues -- downsizing, globalization, and financial regulation -- were shaped by the ideological conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

Out in Paperback / Architecture and Suburbia

Architecture and Suburbia -- From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000 by John Archer, Minnesota UP '05, 470 pages, ISBN #0816643040. Index, permissions, source notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The author, cultural studies professor at the University of Minnesota, writes that the evolution of the American suburban dream house stretches back to the 18th century and borrows much from bourgeois England. His table of contents nicely summarizes the book's three-part sweep:

Part I -- Eighteenth-Century England: The Genesis of the Bourgeois Dwelling, including subsections: Locating the Self in Space, Villa Suburbana, Terra Suburbana, and The Apparatus of Selfhood.

Part II -- Nineteenth-Century America: Republican Homes in Arcadian Suburbs, including subsections: Republican  Pastoral: Toward a bourgeois arcadia and suburbanizing the self.

Part III -- Twentieth-Century America: The Dream House Ideal and the Suburban Landscape, including subsections: Nationalizing the Dream, Analyzing the Dream, Conclusion: Reframing Suburbia; and Coda: Looking Ahead.

Remembering Jazz Organist Jimmy McGriff

Newsweek.com:

"For a span of several years in the 1960s, you couldn't walk through wide swaths of Philadelphia without hearing the burble of a Hammond B3 organ. The instrument came to embody a hip-hugging Philly jazz sound that was equal parts churchyard hum, speakeasy sizzle and slash-and-burn bar-room blooze. And few would master the jazz organ sound like Jimmy McGriff, who served up heaping slabs of greasy cheesesteak funk on and off for four decades until his death this week, at 72, of multiple sclerosis.

"Born to two piano-playing parents in Germantown, Pa., in 1936, James Harrell McGriff began learning drums at eight and would know his way around the alto saxophone, piano, upright bass and vibes by the time he graduated from high school. But a career in music would have to wait. McGriff was drafted after graduating and served as a military policeman in the Korean War. Upon returning he'd gig at night (the upright bass would be his instrument of choice for several years) and spend his days on the Philadelphia police force. The City of Brotherly Love was a fertile environment for any young musician in the early 1950s: Officer McGriff would spend his evenings playing bass behind marquee vocalists such as Carmen McCrae and Big Maybelle."

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Book Alert / A Guinea Pig's History Of Biology

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby, Harvard UP '08, $27.95, 499 pages, ISBN #0674027132. Index, bibliography, sources  and notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

And the 2008 Nobel Prize for Biology goes to.....the guinea pig. A heraldic award to a rodent? University of Sussex historian Jim Endersby might just cast such a vote, arguing that science has learned as much from the guinea pig, the fruit fly, corn, zebra fish, and the evening primrose as we take away from those senescent biologists whom the Nobel committee wines and dines each year at Oslo.

Not that Watson and Crick and company weren't hugely important in the march from complete ignorance to being able to buy simple genetic tests on the internet. But they and their colleagues did it on the backs of some flora and fauna who can't stand up to take a bow. So here's a shout out to them and an opportunity to learn from them a few lessons.

Endersby cites Robert Kohler's Lords of the Fly as a book that relates scientific history "in a  highly original way -- by making the fruit flies the heroes of his tale, rather than the geneticists who worked with them." The author argues that "A survey of some of the key organisms that have been used since Darwin's day illustrates how biological research itself has changed -- transforming the largely amateur practices of natural history into modern, laboratory-based molecular biology. It allows us  to trace the slow, uncertain path -- complete with diversions and dead ends -- that led us from the ancient world's understanding of inheritance to modern genetics."

Book Alert / Brand New China

Brand New China -- Advertising, Media and Commercial Culture by Jing Wang, Harvard UP '08, $28.95, 411 pages, ISBN #0674026802. Index, references, notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

One staggering statistic in Wang's new book speaks, at once, to the hugeness of the world's largest nation and the rapidity with which its economic system is changing. As of 2005, she writes, there were 84,272 advertising agencies in China.

Wang's book is a thorough-going study of branding and advertising in contemporary China, as seen from the inside of typical ad agencies. In it, she "examines the impact of new media practices on Chinese advertising, deliberates on the convergence of grassroots creative culture and viral marketing strategies, samples successful advertising campaigns, provides practical insights about Chinese consumer segments, and offers methodological reflections on pop culture  and advertising research."

Advertising as we know it had just begun when Mao Zedong arrived to quash it. But lest one think that the current advertising boom is simply an effort to emulate America and the West, Wang argues that one must understand "the intangible link between China's socialist persona and its capitalist face that lies behind many success stories in corporate China." Corporate branding, for example, "relies heavily on the disciplining power of corporatized Mao-speak and the Chairman's famed ideology of the 'permanent revolution.'"

Wang's chapter headings foreshadow content: "Positioning the New Modern Girl," "The Synergy Buzz and JV Brands," "Storytelling and Corporate Branding," "Bourgeois Bohemians in China?", "Hello Moto: Youth Culture and  Music Marketing,", and "CCTV and the Advertising Media." The book's conclusion is entitled, "Countdown to the Olympics."

Current Advice To Hillary: Possibly Good Counsel But Terrible History

Slate.com:

"The press is inundating Hillary Clinton with advice to forget about the presidency, not just this year but for all time, just like Ted Kennedy did after he failed to wrest the nomination from Jimmy Carter in 1980. Kennedy, it is said, hunkered down in the Senate to craft (and, given his current robustness despite recently being diagnosed with a brain tumor, may well continue to craft) the legislation that became his true lasting legacy. This might or might not be good advice. It's terrible history.

"I'm not sure exactly where the post-1980 Camelot meme began, but in the May 21 Chicago Tribune, Michael Tackett wrote:

"There is another model of a candidate who lost in a close primary, Sen. Edward Kennedy, who on Tuesday revealed he has a malignant brain tumor. He challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and took his fight to the convention. He was criticized at the time and to a degree marginalized as the rare Kennedy who lost a political race. But over time, he built an impressive record of accomplishment in the Senate."

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As Long As There's Censorship, John Milton Will Be Relevant

The New Yorker:

"Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.' Milton was thirty years old—his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, 'Paradise Lost,' all lay before him.

"But the encounter left a deep imprint on him. It crept into 'Paradise Lost,' where Satan’s shield looks like the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope, and in Milton’s great defense of free speech, 'Areopagitica,' Milton recalls his visit to Galileo and warns that England will buckle under inquisitorial forces if it bows to censorship, 'an undeserved thraldom upon learning.'

"Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter—it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman—there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe. Milton depicted the earth hanging fixed from a golden chain, and when he contemplated the heavens he saw God enthroned and angels warring. The sense of the new and the old colliding forms part of Milton’s complex aura.

"The best-known portrait of his mature years makes Milton look like the dyspeptic brother of the man on the Quaker Oats box, but he is far more our contemporary than Shakespeare, who died when Milton was seven. Nobody would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work. Though 'Paradise Lost' is a dilation on a moment in Genesis, it contains passages so personal that you cannot read far without knowing that the author was a blind man fallen on 'evil days.' Even in his political prose, Milton will pause to tell us that he is really not all that short, despite what his enemies say. Though he coined the name 'Pandemonium'—'all the demons'—for the palace that Satan and his fallen crew build in Hell, he also coined the word 'self-esteem,' as contemporary a concept as there is and one that governed much of Milton’s life."

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