tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78963365625398667582024-03-05T20:09:36.278-08:00Patriots and PeoplesPatriots and Peoples
<p>History Notebook of James Stripes
<p>Inquiries, observations, and arguments from my reading in history</p></p>James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.comBlogger238125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-78682265724610209972024-02-13T10:09:00.000-08:002024-02-13T10:12:36.968-08:00Hamilton on the Nature of Genius<b><span style="font-size: medium;">A Lesson in Sourcing</span></b><br /><br />Many publications credit Alexander Hamilton with a statement that any genius he possesses is rooted in diligent study and a bit of obsession. Genius is "the fruit of labor and thought". This quote caught my interest last night while I was was reading a biography of a well-known twentieth century industrialist.* I went in search of a source, encountering mostly many quote aggregators that proliferate online with no sourcing information, each one simply presenting the same quotes as all the others with different lace surrounding the words.<br /><br />One such farm, however, claimed to source all the quotes it had aggregated. <i>LibQuotes</i> claims, "278 sourced quotes" (<a href="http://libquotes.com/alexander-hamilton">libquotes.com/alexander-hamilton</a>). Most of the sources among those that I checked are eighteenth century letters, essays, or reports authored by Hamilton, or early nineteenth century compilations of the same. But the quote on the nature of genius is sourced to an early twentieth century business education group that called itself the Alexander Hamilton Institute. The institute served to educate, principally through printed texts, business leaders. Their 1919 <i>Modern Business Report List</i> is the source referenced by <i>LibQuotes</i>. It neither is a credible source for the expressions of an eighteenth century political leader, nor the earliest readily available publication with Hamilton's alleged words. The quote appears on the back cover of the pamphlet.<br /><br />I made a screenshot of the back cover and posted it on Facebook, noting the lack of credible evidence that Hamilton said or wrote it. I awoke to several comments, including several comments from fellow historian and blogger, Larry Cebula. Cebula notes that the quote, "appears nowhere attributed to Hamilton until the early 20th century." <br /><br />Following Cebula's comments, I spent some time searching Google Books. The earliest reference turned up so far is <i>The Detroiter</i> (24 January 1916), 5. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Detroiter/9aEoAAAAYAAJ">It appears in a box</a>. Surely the quote was in circulation earlier, but where did it appear?<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi89srHC8TSxaO51zlj6AF5pQ1rMAzhZG5n-oxajmQVr1mLI-UaR1ckS1CkiQgsRnOnKpWsty5CVdw1ywpQce6o-9BPvQcKKIHOYW5J4hjeNmziVXdIJqhq_DbuMhdLDtezbKrJ5qAMR9mXponVxXaxvEkhjDaDQwz35Kku7RA4f1s8sdLM0ym7s2GL-3JL/s413/Quote.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="313" data-original-width="413" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi89srHC8TSxaO51zlj6AF5pQ1rMAzhZG5n-oxajmQVr1mLI-UaR1ckS1CkiQgsRnOnKpWsty5CVdw1ywpQce6o-9BPvQcKKIHOYW5J4hjeNmziVXdIJqhq_DbuMhdLDtezbKrJ5qAMR9mXponVxXaxvEkhjDaDQwz35Kku7RA4f1s8sdLM0ym7s2GL-3JL/w400-h304/Quote.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Detroiter</i> January 1916</td></tr></tbody></table>It appeared in many business publications as early as 1916 and into the 1920s, and continued to appear in similar publications up to our day. Tracing it to Hamilton is another matter. More than likely, the quote is fake. But it was fabricated more than a century ago. By whom? For what purpose? The search goes on.<br /><br /><br /><br />*R. L. Wilson, <i>Ruger & His Guns: A History of the Man, the Company and Their Firearms</i> (1996). The Hamilton quote appears on page 97.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-59403526938112984682023-09-17T15:29:00.001-07:002023-09-17T15:29:50.441-07:00If pigs could flyA list from Katie Couric Media, “<a href="https://katiecouric.com/entertainment/book-guide/10-american-history-books-to-read/">10 American History Books Every Citizen Should Read</a>” (26 June 2023) caught my attention when it was shared last month on Society for U.S. Intellectual History’s Facebook Page. I had read three of the ten, and had a fourth on my shelf. I quickly added a fourth I had read: Ijeoma Oluo, <i>Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America</i> (2020). It is a good book worth recommending, but I think it could have gone much further unpacking unmerited privilege and its consequences. Oluo does an excellent job of bringing forth example of oppression through compelling anecdotes well-written.<div><br /></div><div>Other books on the list that I had read previously are Howard Zinn, <i>A People’s History of the United States</i> (1980); James Loewen, <i>Lies My Teacher Told Me</i> (1995); and Charles C. Mann, <i>1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus</i> (2005). I bought with intentions to read another, but then my teaching schedule became busier than expected and sent my reading in other directions. Now, however, I may find the time to read Ibram X. Kendi, <i>Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America</i> (2016). Zinn, of course, is part of the initial focus of <i>Patriots and Peoples</i> (see “<a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2007/11/patriots-and-peoples-histories.html">Patriots' and Peoples' Histories</a>”). I have referenced Mann several times.</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYW_ihi1cS7OiN4TaFYSffn5PyQenwRGsZSbuzirjoYGB4Z3XxiRVvBOoFm2rgpAOEwil7Y0rWMlO6_sYqzx05L_nksuPXpHuo3hqqDS-oKQF2YrWtzuOiRR9rK80XijtKPBT09QCPmkRWAByWReOiTEbqedOlFc6VkaaQ77D3b6KrN7hLB3cbR03NKCdf/s2816/IMG_8118.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2806" data-original-width="2816" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYW_ihi1cS7OiN4TaFYSffn5PyQenwRGsZSbuzirjoYGB4Z3XxiRVvBOoFm2rgpAOEwil7Y0rWMlO6_sYqzx05L_nksuPXpHuo3hqqDS-oKQF2YrWtzuOiRR9rK80XijtKPBT09QCPmkRWAByWReOiTEbqedOlFc6VkaaQ77D3b6KrN7hLB3cbR03NKCdf/w200-h199/IMG_8118.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />Last week, I started into the Kindle sample of Jill Lepore, <i>These Truths: A History of the United States</i> (2018). The sample had been sitting idle in my app for two years. Early in the book was an egregious error that gave me considerable doubts about reading further.</div><div><br /></div><div>In a paragraph that begins, “In 1492,” Lepore wrote:</div><div><blockquote>…most people in the Americas lived in smaller settlements [Tenochtitlán is mentioned as having at least a quarter-million] and gathered and hunted for their food. A good number were farmers who grew squash and corn and beans, hunted and fished. They kept pigs and chickens but not bigger animals. (8)</blockquote></div><div>They did not keep pigs. Lepore should know this. If she does not, perhaps there is a great deal about the Columbian Exchange that she is missing as well (see “<a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-columbian-exchange.html">The Columbian Exchange</a>”). In the same paragraph is a confident assertion that the population of the Americas in 1492 was 75 million. It is a plausible number and within the range of what I consider likely, but should have been presented with more nuance. We do not know. All figures for the aboriginal population of the Americas are speculative, but some are far better estimates than others. There is a footnote, but the sample does not offer access. Now that I have the book, I can find the reference is to Mann, <i>1491</i>. I would prefer a reference to scholarship by a specialist in the field of American Indian studies.<br /><br />Chickens, too, came to America via the Columbian Exchange, although turkeys originated in the Americas. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even so, I pressed on through the sample. As I was doing so, I kept musing about how pigs, originally from Eurasia, made it to the Americas ahead of Columbus. Maybe they had wings and could fly.</div><div><br /></div><div>A few pages later, Lepore begins to describe the Columbian Exchange, albeit without deploying the term (it is absent from the index, as well). She correctly credits Columbus with introducing pigs:</div><div><blockquote>When Columbus made a second voyage across the ocean in 1493, he commanded a fleet of seventeen ships carrying twelve hundred men, and another kind of army, too: seeds and cuttings of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, greens, grapevines, and sugar cane, and horses, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats, male and female, two by two. Hidden among the men and plants and the animals were stowaways, seeds stuck to animal skins or clinging to the folds of cloaks and blankets, in clods of mud. (18)</blockquote></div><div>The process of ecological transformation that was fundamental to the European conquest is described well as this paragraph continues, including the astounding destructive success of eight pigs who quickly became thousands, spreading well ahead of Europeans. That paragraph rescued the book from its earlier error and I placed the order. Having the book in hand, I can also confirm the paragraph’s footnote offers Alfred Crosby’s two vital books on the subject: <i>Columbian Exchange </i>(1972) and <i>Ecological Imperialism</i> (1986).<br /><br />Lepore's focus in the book concerns the political ideals expressed during the American Revolution and in the Constitution. Small errors about pigs arriving ahead of Columbus are a minor distraction.</div><div><br /></div>James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-85136608080973839642023-03-31T20:26:00.000-07:002023-03-31T20:26:50.866-07:00The Allure of History<p>I am a child of the 1960s born at the tail-end of the post World war II "Baby Boom". It is strange to consider myself part of that generation because my parents were still children at the end of the war, only entering adulthood in the 1950s. They married young and my life began less than a year later. After my birth, but prior to entering kindergarten, my world was filled with books that I would use for good and for ill through college.<br /><br /></p><p>These book sets were purchased thorough direct sales on an installment plan. Among the sets were the 1962 edition of <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i>, the entire 54-volume set of Great Books of the Western World, and a much smaller set of encyclopedias. This smaller set required one-third of the shelf space required by <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i>, had larger print, and shorter articles. It was my first source in innumerable school projects from elementary school through high school. The volumes were tattered from use by the time my youngest brother graduated high school.<br /><br /></p><p>Reading more of the Great Books would have helped my education. I struggled to read Euclid when I was taking Geometry in high school, but spent too little time to get far. Likewise, I started but did not finish Darwin's <i>Origin of Species</i>. At my father's insistence, I read Richard henry Dana, Jr. <i>Two Years Before the Mast</i>. My father always insisted that it was a more realistic account of life at sea than <i>Moby-Dick</i>.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJFZxuBN2sC5FbDnZCwYOpH4HKi9q-lAI65KLW95diKE_hHq1ZneWBJk3qVahbLQEAlQjl21KUtY2Nk1HqK2AMIcOQMry55W6lm1e94q3z2qs6eluMLqn7fhpfdh75yaebfWlXw_Lm2dB-/s960/AmerHer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJFZxuBN2sC5FbDnZCwYOpH4HKi9q-lAI65KLW95diKE_hHq1ZneWBJk3qVahbLQEAlQjl21KUtY2Nk1HqK2AMIcOQMry55W6lm1e94q3z2qs6eluMLqn7fhpfdh75yaebfWlXw_Lm2dB-/s320/AmerHer.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Another, much smaller set of books set me on my life's course. It was a sixteen volume set containing illustrated essays and photo essays from the pages of <i>American Heritage</i>. Countless hours were spent looking at these images. More time was invested reading many of the articles.<p></p>James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-63121524430597196492021-03-09T11:33:00.000-08:002021-03-09T11:33:26.510-08:00A Method of War<p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic718746FZmmc6iwchNoOdmIo5k4-377XdfUq07kD0kg2uLE_HC9QGOrGMM_WahQoqdpPyKHcAaIHWaOOMv704_eqIsEahzE_Sf12LnpL0JIEfvElRKeepS7FJotCVHIpxkapLq44bCkuI/s700/Opechancanough.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="572" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic718746FZmmc6iwchNoOdmIo5k4-377XdfUq07kD0kg2uLE_HC9QGOrGMM_WahQoqdpPyKHcAaIHWaOOMv704_eqIsEahzE_Sf12LnpL0JIEfvElRKeepS7FJotCVHIpxkapLq44bCkuI/s320/Opechancanough.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Smith threatens Opechancanough</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The first Anglo-Powhatan war (1609-1614) was a brutal affair. Most British immigrants to the Jamestown Colony perished through the course of the first seven years, a great many in battle or due to conditions create by a siege of the fort (see "<a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2008/02/death-in-jamestown.html">Death in Jamestown</a>"). On the other side, entire Powhatan villages were destroyed.</p>James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-67194089573003730172020-11-09T10:38:00.004-08:002020-11-10T09:19:18.448-08:00What is Ignorance?<p></p><blockquote>As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.<br />Josh Billings</blockquote><p></p><p>I am reflecting on a statement I recall from the Reagan years while watching friends and acquaintances broadcast what they "know" about why Donald Trump should or should not concede that Joe Biden will be the next President. <br /></p><blockquote>Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.<br />Ronald Reagan, "<a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-behalf-senator-barry-goldwater-time-for-choosing ">A Time for Choosing</a>" </blockquote><p></p><p>Reagan's words were deployed against him in the presidential debate with Walter Mondale in October 1984.<br /></p><blockquote>Well, I guess I'm reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers once said about Hoover. He said, "It's not what he doesn't know that bothers me, it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so."<br />Walter Mondale, Presidential Debate</blockquote><p></p><p>The <i>New York Times</i> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/13/us/briefing-elusive-citation.html">attempted to source</a> the quote, determining that it did not emanate from Will Rogers. <br /><br />More often, the quote gets attributed to Mark Twain, such as in the epigraph to <i>The Big Short</i> (2015), a film about the 2008 financial crisis. The Center for Mark Twain Studies has a short article about it, "<a href="https://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain-things-we-know-that-just-aint-so/">The Apocryphal Twain: 'Things we Know that Just Ain't So</a>'". They note Al Gore's frequent attribution of the idea to Twain. <br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3mCL91HLD7h62vK_l4yGa0CV43eNMGWvkuFUdDdSGmZtHKbfqCvubBH7sey1wQUaVYt8qFdByvBGYSHd5YCsqzpWan6F5koaj4_6Dy5xI41vIo2zdoLf7-dhiGVQy7K1dZdODA-_8ljIX/s638/The_American_Humorists_by_G_M_Baker%252C_November%252C_1869%252C_Boston.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="379" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3mCL91HLD7h62vK_l4yGa0CV43eNMGWvkuFUdDdSGmZtHKbfqCvubBH7sey1wQUaVYt8qFdByvBGYSHd5YCsqzpWan6F5koaj4_6Dy5xI41vIo2zdoLf7-dhiGVQy7K1dZdODA-_8ljIX/s320/The_American_Humorists_by_G_M_Baker%252C_November%252C_1869%252C_Boston.jpg" /></a></div><br />It is a remarkable concept that resonates in our age of misinformation. Garson O'Toole, <i>Quote Investigator</i> has chased down the origins at least twice: "<a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/30/better-know/">It Is Better to Know Nothing than to Know What Ain’t So</a>" (May 2015) and "<a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/">It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So</a>" (November 2018). In both cases, Josh Billings seems to be the leading candidate for introducing the phrase to American discourse. <br /><br />In the 2015 article. O'Toole locates the precursor in vol. 11 of <i>An Universal History: From the Earliest Account of Time</i> (1747) by John Swinton and others. He highlights the expression, "it is better to know nothing, than to apprehend we know what we know not." A digital version of the pages of the book is available from the University of Michigan, accessible via <i><a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000436117">HathiTrust</a></i>.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEXNtgmmyCcz7eh1BzczadRbTFg2riaKJCIWqUBCLBdMbxrgLqqyKGRTJiEjJSMCdTs8bhwj3Jj_2deMLJVBfj5Tf2ZD-4tPnkBq9GQ1ch7rZkFc7q385bNTQM8X7p1Gsw4MrZUPq3uOAt/s414/apprehend.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="414" data-original-width="397" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEXNtgmmyCcz7eh1BzczadRbTFg2riaKJCIWqUBCLBdMbxrgLqqyKGRTJiEjJSMCdTs8bhwj3Jj_2deMLJVBfj5Tf2ZD-4tPnkBq9GQ1ch7rZkFc7q385bNTQM8X7p1Gsw4MrZUPq3uOAt/w192-h200/apprehend.jpg" width="192" /></a></div> I offer a screenshot of the relevant paragraph on the right.<br /><br />How do my friends "know" that Trump should not concede? They do not trust the mass media, which is too liberal. One conservative friend even told me that <i>FOX News</i> is not conservative enough. Where do they get their news, then? <br /><br />Certainly there are legal challenges in the courts, some of which were dismissed last week. But, even if they all succeed, will it be enough to turn the election Trump's way? The <i>Wall Street Journa</i>l does not appear to think so. See "<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/election-2020-what-are-the-trump-legal-claims-11604876612">Election 2020: What are the Trump Legal Claims?</a>" (8 November 2020).<br /><br />Elections are not final until certified, and the next President is selected when the Electoral College meets in mid-December. In the meantime, every major news outlet has declared former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris the projected President and Vice President. Even after Biden and Harris are inaugurated in January, the divisions in this nation remain deep. Those divisions are fueled by significant disagreement concerning the nature of credible information. How much do we know that is not so?<br /><br />Most of us can see ignorance in those with whom we disagree, but rarely note it in ourselves. It has been the mission of <i>Patriots and Peoples</i> (clicking on the banner takes you to the home screen--the latest article) from the beginning to look to original sources, to determine their credibility using the methods developed since the nineteenth century for the practice of history. Fact checkers utilize similar methods when evaluating claims by politicians. Mondale and Gore got it wrong when they sourced their quote. <p></p>James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-29344533558130064122020-06-01T08:46:00.001-07:002020-06-01T08:48:45.464-07:00Crowd Sourcing vs. Expertise<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For so long as opinions are counted, not weighed, the better part had often to be overcome by the greater.<br />
John Calvin, <i>Institutes of the Christian Religion</i>, vol. 2</blockquote>
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A student paper that I was grading about 2007 put me onto a source that was new to me. The student was making a claim that I had seen in dozens of college papers over the previous two decades, and that was discussed and dismissed in several books on my shelf. The student sourced the claim. I went to the source and found it there. I found other errors in the source.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7skaoiAIiJPSRPHvRFNF2NgSmTWZNtOK5F8F9xgtSOIFRNIG-UpY_AYVIQLuk1WEcF-dsPW4WILHCd5ayt_hUmGWCxD-3cNJuUElkcsOss8OKiphQpScF3Shbhi27UILT34Pd2AjJUijb/s1600/NPBooks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7skaoiAIiJPSRPHvRFNF2NgSmTWZNtOK5F8F9xgtSOIFRNIG-UpY_AYVIQLuk1WEcF-dsPW4WILHCd5ayt_hUmGWCxD-3cNJuUElkcsOss8OKiphQpScF3Shbhi27UILT34Pd2AjJUijb/s200/NPBooks.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Within the hour, or perhaps five minutes later, or maybe the next day, I discovered that I could correct the error. The "source" was the <i>Wikipedia</i> entry on the Nez Perce. It repeated a common myth that Chief Joseph was a military genius who led Nez Perce warriors in battle. Lucullus V. McWhorter (1860-1944) addressed this myth in two books that were the culmination of decades of interviews with survivors of the Nez Perce War of 1877, but it was still being pushed in documentaries about the war in the 1970s. <i>Wikipedia</i> also asserted that Nez Perce should have an accent mark. I corrected both errors.<br />
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Over the next few days or weeks, I repeatedly corrected these errors. I was quickly joined by a librarian at Washington State University,* where McWhorter's papers are housed in the archives. I had to join <i>Wikipedia</i> as a registered user in order to stop bots from automatically reverting my corrections back to the errors that preceded them. But, even as a registered user, it was a battle to remove the accent mark. Through reason, evidence, and persistence, the librarian and I ultimately won the battle and the Nez Perce entry has offered the correct spelling of Nez Perce for 13 years. The Chief Joseph myth, too, has been largely absent from the entry. Other users made other edits, and the article became a credible encyclopedia entry.<br />
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During my first months as a registered user of <i>Wikipedia</i>, I made many contributions. Another battle with other users ensued when I attempted to correct agreement with Ronald Reagan's faulty memory (or lies) about his student days. I did not then have access to the not yet published <i>The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan</i> (2014) by <a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2016/08/understanding-politics.html">Rick Perlstein</a>, but offered some of the work of Lou Cannon refuting Reagan's claims. The battle between Reagan partisans, on the one hand, and partisans for accurate history, on the other, grew so fierce that eventually the entire section was removed from the article. Then, a few years later, Reagan's lie reappeared in the article in another briefer section with a footnote to Cannon's book that refutes the claim.<br />
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When students ask about <i>Wikipedia</i> as a source for the past few years, I have told them about the Nez Perce spelling war and the dangers of correcting the memory of a President who died of Alzheimer's. Sometimes they would ask whether I might try to correct the error in the Reagan article again. It should not be too difficult to recover my password, or create a new one. In December 2019, I restored Reagan's "leadership" of student protests his freshman year to his "participation". My previous <i>Wikipedia</i> edits had been in 2014. The truth about Reagan's participation still stands today. How long before a mob tears it down again?<br />
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My own memory could be faulty, however, or at least short on details.** A search through my own <i>Wikipedia</i> edits this morning confirms that I added Lou Cannon, <i>Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power</i> (2003) on 12 March 2007, but the context appears to be the narrative about him making up facts during his broadcasts of baseball games, not his false claims about student leadership. I also added Garry Wills, <i>Reagan's America: Innocents at Home</i> (1987) that day, and many other small edits.<br />
<br />
For a few months in spring 2007, I made many edits to articles about US history and literature, and to chess, as well as a few other topics. At least once, I was corrected for adding what appeared to be original research. The insights of experts on a topic are welcome only insofar as they accord with general knowledge. Sometimes that will favor error when truth is elusive.<br />
<br />
<i>Wikipedia</i> editing proved to be a form of social media with its own network of personal relationships and friendships with people I have never met. In spring 2007, a new <a href="https://www.chess.com/">chess website</a> came online and I joined that fall. It had active forums that helped pull me away from <i>Wikipedia</i>. For a time, at least, the truth of checkmate offered better grounding for arguments than the evidence of primary sources that counter the memories of a dead president. If I am not mistaken, I also joined <i>Facebook</i> about that time. In fall 2007, I started <i>Patriots and Peoples</i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
*The Nez Perce talk page shows that she had made edits two years before I joined.<br />
**I may have made a lot of edits while not logged in, and then logged in to try to protect these edits from bots and well-meaning fools.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-43869890376699462392020-05-18T10:27:00.000-07:002020-05-18T10:35:06.223-07:00May 18, 1980<i><span style="font-size: large;">An Historic Day</span></i><br />
<br />
My memory.<br />
<br />
I returned to the dorm after church and was headed to the Rotunda for brunch (there were only two meals on Sundays), pausing to watch the darkest storm clouds I had ever seen rolling in. Then, I learned that they were not storm clouds, but volcanic ash. I ate quickly (I suspect) and then bicycled to Dissmore's IGA to buy some film for my camera. That afternoon, my 35mm Minolta was my ticket atop the Physical Science Building, along with a friend ("my assistant"), Vic Mulzac. I took photos of the marvelous "sunset" to the east as the clouds of ash darkened the skies.<br />
<br />
Later that afternoon, perhaps 4:00 pm., the ash began to fall. By morning, we had perhaps 1/2 inch of very fine powder--the consistency of concrete mix. Monday morning, 8:00 am classes were held, but the dust clouds grew so bad that the university cancelled classes for the day. A similar routine followed on Tuesday. Then, Wednesday, classes were cancelled for the rest of the week.<br />
<br />
There was a lot of drinking in the dorms, but I was trying to study for the last few weeks of the semester. I was only then, at the end of freshman year, beginning to acquire the study habits that were vital to surviving college. But, as the champ at caps (a drinking game involving throwing bottle caps into a glass of beer--I threw only Coors caps, as they were heavier), I was pressured a lot to join the games. I resisted successfully.<br />
<br />
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<br />James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-1396912341038685682020-05-17T07:09:00.000-07:002020-05-18T10:22:35.705-07:00Feudalism, Christianity, America<br />
I present an excerpt from a scholarly article published more than fifty years ago. Who writes like this today?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Despite the fact that Christ redeemed man and revealed to him the central democratic truth that all men have equal value on earth as well as in heaven, the medieval Church developed a hierarchical, authoritarian priesthood and encouraged feudalism, a totally undemocratic and hence anti-Christian system. During the Reformation, however, men like Luther and Calvin reasserted true Christianity by proclaiming religious equality and by insisting that the Bible contained all knowledge requisite to salvation and that every man could know God directly and personally, without the mediation of an authoritarian Church. Although they had thus forever destroyed the religious foundations of feudalism, the institution itself staggered on, even to Bancroft's own day. Because of her separation from Rome in the sixteenth century and the moral superiority of her Teutonic, freedom-loving people, England had realized greater progress towards liberty and equality than priest-ridden, despotic nations like Spain and France; yet in the seventeenth century England herself was so feudalistic as to have forced large numbers of her most morally advanced citizens to flee to North America, where they planted imperishable seeds of religious and political liberty. In the eighteenth century these colonists became convinced that if they were to realize their democratic visions they would have to separate from the mother country, and in the Revolutionary War they won for themselves and all mankind the independence which it was their destiny to translate into the finest and purest democracy the world had ever known. Now they bore the lamp of freedom that would light the world, leading it toward an inevitable democratic paradise, the final Kingdom of God on earth. Before the example of America all forms of tyranny would evaporate, and the mission of Christ and the will of Providence would be fulfilled.<br />
Richard C. Vitzthum, "Theme and Method in Bancroft's History of the United States,"<span style="font-style: italic;"> New England Quarterly</span>, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1968), 368-369.</blockquote>
Is Vitzthum writing in the voice of his subjects, employing historical ventriloquism to present seventeenth century ideologies? Does he embrace these ideologies?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://consolationsofatheism.blogspot.com/">On his blog</a>, Vitzthum asserts his atheism. That would favor ventriloquism. Efforts to articulate the views held by people in the past can get one in trouble these days.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-47792590896671922282020-04-18T08:09:00.000-07:002020-04-18T08:32:27.298-07:00Bad History<div class="tr_bq">
Bad history is common, especially in a world that favors crowd sourcing over the <a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2017/04/expertise.html">views of experts</a>. Even experts, however, are not infallible. Bad history grows from ignorance, laziness, lies, ideology. It has been a theme of <i>Patriots and Peoples</i> that ideology often cultivates error.</div>
<br />
I wrote the comment below on a <i>YouTube</i> video three months ago. The video was put up by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4-ADkrsKmZxuUxDN1wo7vw">Political Juice</a>, a popular channel with over 125 thousand subscribers. I have not watched other videos on this channel, but it is clear to me from this one that the creator is not a historian.<br />
<br />
The <a href="https://youtu.be/rhBwHiLcTG8">video</a> purports to present the history of the Second Amendment. It gets a few things correct, especially a small portion of Justice Scalia's argument in <i>D.C. v. Heller</i> (2008). It gets a whole lot wrong. I need to finish my review of Adam Winkler, <i>Gun Fight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America</i> (2011). That book presents a clear and accurate history of the Second Amendment that shows how extremists who are both pro- and anti-gun have been misguided in their understanding.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEtwYp9YuMCzoJffBMLO5cAvsp4C2ZoYQ0xdE2Wi-6UuyihSB3QIqSbznuEv6usgRgjWVI8PwrY7jte09_B7b0UI1Gm6XcJ5WA510S0nVd-mj15Hg0N6xMWw2o4AuQOQYfpXyWBGwUoalu/s1600/Puckle_gun_advertisement.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="767" data-original-width="1000" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEtwYp9YuMCzoJffBMLO5cAvsp4C2ZoYQ0xdE2Wi-6UuyihSB3QIqSbznuEv6usgRgjWVI8PwrY7jte09_B7b0UI1Gm6XcJ5WA510S0nVd-mj15Hg0N6xMWw2o4AuQOQYfpXyWBGwUoalu/s320/Puckle_gun_advertisement.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patent Application for Puckle Gun (1718)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
My comment (there are typos in the original that remain here):<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
The issues in this video start at the beginning. In the first eight minutes or so, PolJuice offers a short history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its changing relationship with England over half a century. About 80% of the facts are accurate (a couple of websites offer thin research), but the narrative itself is far from accurate in its interpretation. For instance, you mentions how the Puritans in the early years admitted people to church membership and full citizenship. However, this dramatically changed in 1662 with the Halfway Covenant (not mentioned in the video), due to internal pressures from growing secularization of the colony. Instead of seeking to understand the complexities of 1660s Massachusetts, the video blames all the conflicts on Charles II and James II. That's simply wrong. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Then, the next eight to ten minutes race through a host of actions of Parliament from the 1660s to the 1770s with minimal context. Such facile generalizations are always grounded in shortcuts that distort. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
This video only becomes tolerable when PJ summarizes Justice Scalia's grammatical analysis of the Second Amendment in the Heller decision. This portion is well-done and accurate until he addresses the counter arguments in the dissenting opinions. There mockery reigns, even using a comic voice to undermine the credibility of the arguments. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The final ten minutes or so is a mixed bag. The Puckle gun gets too much credit, as it does so often by people who don't delve into the history with any real effort. The Puckle gun was almost completely forgotten by the time Jefferson was born. Its deployment in any argument about the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It is also unnecessary. As the video points out, the First Amendment protects the sort of speech one finds on YouTube. Likewise, the Second Amendment has the flexibility to cover modern firearms. Using bad arguments to counter bad arguments does not strengthen your argument; it weakens it.</blockquote>
<br />James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-47945316941988848432020-04-15T10:27:00.001-07:002020-05-17T09:18:19.924-07:00Pandemic History: The Bibliography<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"[T]here remains the simple fact that the Black Death was, indeed, the greatest and most sustained demographic disaster in the history of the world."<br />
John Aberth </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Before that worldwide [influenza] pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history."<br />
John M. Barry </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"[T]he disaster to Amerindian populations assumed a scale that is hard for us to imagine, living as we do in an age when epidemic disease hardly matters. Ratios of 20:1 or even 25:1 between pre-Columbian populations and the bottoming-out point in Amerindian population curves seem more or less correct, despite wide local variations."<br />
William H. McNeill</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Variola was the deadliest killer in a terrible onslaught of alien microorganisms that, by some historical estimates, may have decimated as much as 90 percent of the precontact population of the Americas."<br />
Michael Willrich</blockquote>
<br />
As I noted in <a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2020/04/pandemic-history.html">Pandemic History</a>, the books in this list were not selected by a rigorous criteria of historical relevance. Rather, these are the books that I have have on shelves in my home (or as ebooks on my iPad). I am still reading some of these books, some I finished recently, one I have yet to start, and some were consumed more than thirty years ago. These books vary in quality, cost, and relevance.<br />
<br />
Today, the number of people worldwide confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 crossed two million. A minuscule portion of the population has been tested. The number of confirmed deaths is closing in on 130,000. The pandemic still seems to be on a steep upward climb. The most serious global impact, however, will be economic, rather than demographic. Advances in medicine and understanding of the possible consequences of epidemic disease protect us in immeasurable ways even as globalization has sped the process of epidemics becoming pandemics.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKxTOSmzIHMxVaUsIZPtsj8oqbA9zQ6YV-nmNqY1LEqS1Tw3nSFhx7U1FfqXDw8joL-MIwVsF8NcWn5jE5snJtvY1D2scfp2XJ1JfZYlmZ_rcMrvqGnpdUCU_OarR373hLhJ10UiXrPI51/s1600/twomillion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/" border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="1559" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKxTOSmzIHMxVaUsIZPtsj8oqbA9zQ6YV-nmNqY1LEqS1Tw3nSFhx7U1FfqXDw8joL-MIwVsF8NcWn5jE5snJtvY1D2scfp2XJ1JfZYlmZ_rcMrvqGnpdUCU_OarR373hLhJ10UiXrPI51/s400/twomillion.jpg" title="" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screenshot form the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<h4>
<i><span style="font-size: large;">The Bibliography</span></i></h4>
<br />
Aberth, John. <i>The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350, A Brief History with Documents</i>, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017.<br />
<br />
This book is a text designed for college classes. As such, it has limited, but highly focused analysis, a good summary of the state of the research, and consists mostly of extracts from primary sources. Aberth also has authored a scholarly monograph concerned with the Black Death, another general book on plagues throughout history, and several works on the European Middle Ages.<br />
<br />
Arnold, Catherine. <i>Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History</i>. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018.<br />
<br />
Technically, this book is not shelved in my house, but rather on my electronic devices as an ebook. I started it in late March, but others keep getting in the way of my progress. It is well-written, but somewhat disappointing. The phrase "eyewitness accounts" in the title led me to expect more in the way of excerpts from primary sources (see "<a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2009/08/reflective-thinking-teaching-and.html">Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning</a>" [2009]). The author quotes many sources at length, but the book is her narrative. Arnold offers a compelling account of the lives of people who struggled to survive a devastating pandemic. She draws on some of the best secondary works by historians, such as Alfred Crosby, <i>America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918</i> (2003) and John Barry (see below), and she draws from a range of primary sources that include works of fiction written by survivors. Nonetheless, as I am reading the book I am marking a few passages that I intend to return to with more attention because I have a hunch they contain some gross inaccuracies.<br />
<br />
Barry, John M. <i>The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History</i>. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004.<br />
<br />
My bookmark reveals that I had read just over one-third of this book before it gathered dust on my shelf for a decade. I started it anew in early March as COVID-19 could no longer be ignored. I finished it last week. About 20 March 2020, I saw that it had risen to a number one bestseller in several categories tracked by Amazon, including history of medicine. Barry narrates stories of the physicians who battled the pandemic in the context of a history of science. He asserts that the 1918 eruption of influenza "was the first great collision between nature and modern science" (5). <i>The Great Influenza</i> concentrates on the work of Paul Lewis, Simon Flexner, William Crawford Gorgas, William Henry Welch, and a host of others who built medical institutions and who struggled to find both cure and cause of influenza.<br />
<br />
Brown, Jeremy. <i>Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic</i>. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.<br />
<br />
Jeremy Brown is a medical doctor with decades of experience in emergency rooms. This book, which I read on my iPad the week I was also finishing Barry's <i>The Great Influenza</i>,<i> </i>does an excellent job of presenting the medical history of influenza. Brown then builds on the medical history to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of how the US government stockpiles medicines and other resources for combating pandemics. He shows how political influence of certain pharmaceutical companies tilt some of these preparations towards medicines of little to no value. Reading this book while under partial-quarantine is a chilling reminder of the failures of political leadership in a nation with a hostile relationship to science and expertise.<br />
<br />
Crosby, Alfred. <i>The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492</i>. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972.<br />
<br />
I have characterized this book as among a small number that every historian of America knows, whether by reading or by the references made to it by others. If Crosby and this book did not introduce the term "Columbian Exchange" into the vocabulary of historians, then he is at least responsible for promoting it. His thesis asserts the significance of disease in facilitating the European conquest of the Americas, but also highlights the role of flora, fauna, and ideologies. The exchange went both directions--Europeans acquired tobacco, tomatoes, and quinine, among many other things. The Columbian Exchange enriched the world, while impoverishing indigenous Americans. The core ideas from this book are expanded to global history in <i>Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900</i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Also, Crosby's "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," <i>William and Mary Quarterly</i> 33 (April 1976): 289-299 was, the last time that I checked, the most cited article in American history writing. Crosby is essential reading.<br />
<br />
See also "<a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-columbian-exchange.html">The Columbian Exchange</a>" (2014).<br />
<br />
__________. <i>America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918</i>, 2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.<br />
<br />
This book just arrived. I am looking forward to reading it.<br />
<br />
Crosby, Molly Caldwell. <i>The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped our History</i>. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.<br />
<br />
The Yellow Fever epidemic that struck Memphis, Tennessee in 1878 was not the first outbreak of the disease in American history. The 1793 epidemic in Philadelphia is better known. A graduate school colleague wrote his dissertation on the topic (<a href="https://searchit.libraries.wsu.edu/permalink/f/1j6uprt/CP71146776460001451">Arthur Robinson</a>, "The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse: a Multi-disciplinary Social History of the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia," 1993). Caldwell Crosby starts with a compelling story of Memphis as the disease kills nearly everyone she introduces (some readers have found the narrative difficult on this account), and then follows Yellow Fever to Cuba two decades later. There Walter Reed identified the mosquito that transmits the virus. Caldwell Crosby is a journalist who writes well, but there have been some critical concerns raised with respect to her accuracy.<br />
<br />
Diamond, Jared. <i>Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies</i>. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.<br />
<br />
I read this book at the end of the twentieth century after it came out in paperback. When I mentioned it as a guest lecturer in spring 2000, the professor and a few students had heard of it. When I mention it in college classes today, a few students have seen the PBS documentary based on the book (2005). Jared Diamond's work synthesizes and popularizes the work of others with his own meta-narrative. His answer to the question of why Eurasia, and more particularly Europe, became dominant in global affairs begins with the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Most of the virulent epidemic diseases that have tilted the balance of world history emerged from human associations with domesticated livestock. Long association with these diseases led to relative immunity for Eurasians that conferred an advantage over virgin populations in the Americas. Central to his argument is the east-west axis of the geography of Eurasia and the north-south axis of the Americas. The east-west axis facilitated the spread of crops, animals, diseases, and technologies. However, his extension of this contrast to Eurasia's advantage over Africa is less convincing. Africa is nearly as wide east to west, as it is long north to south. See the <a href="https://youtu.be/2OQmvRUdr3U">YouTube video</a>, "African History Disproves 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond" (2019).<br />
<br />
Dobyns, Henry F. <i>Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America</i>. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983.<br />
<br />
This book is groundbreaking and controversial. Henry Dobyns' research is broad and deep, his inquiry imaginative, and his importance to the historiography of disease in the Americas undeniable. Dobyns has led the way in revising estimates of the pre-Columbian populations of the Americas upward. Few scholars agree with him, but the opposite extreme embraced by American conservatives from Rush Limbaugh to the authors of <i>A Patriot's History of the United States</i> is vastly less credible. Dobyns deserves credit for raising the critical questions, even if his answers are disputable. I recall that his efforts to assess carrying capacity of the land reshaped some of my thinking about history in fundamental ways, but also that several of us in the graduate seminar found his estimates a little too generous, as it seemed that a sense of ecological balance was missing.<br />
<br />
Reconsideration of what should now be considered thoroughly discredited estimates begins with Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 7 (1966): 395-416. See also "<a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2008/01/indian-population-1492-john-d-daniels.html">Indian Population 1492: John D. Daniels</a>", where I assess some of the flaws of the most comprehensive overview of the topic.<br />
<br />
Fenn, Elizabeth A. <i>Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82</i>. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.<br />
<br />
Fenn's <i>Pox Americana</i> highlights the significance of smallpox to the American Revolution, controversies over early efforts to inoculate against it, and carries the story into the allegations of biological warfare (the notorious "orders" of Sir Jeffrey Amherst [88-89]), and the long-term impacts as smallpox spread across the continent, devastating native communities. Unfortunately, I can say little about this book. I started it while proctoring a final exam in American History: A Survey--reading that was frequently interrupted by students telling me how much they enjoyed the course (a job hazard). By the time I finished grading those exams, I had moved on to reading several other books (a hazard of my reading habits). I recall that I read the first few chapters with great enthusiasm for the quality of Fenn's research and analysis, and also that the book is well-written.<br />
<br />
Johnson, Steven. <i>The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World</i>. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.<br />
<br />
John Snow was a physician before he became one of the heroes of <i>Game of Thrones</i>. He believed that cholera spread through contaminated water, not through foul air (the miasma theory of disease that was orthodox science at the time). Snow, thus, stands as an important figure in the development of the germ theory disease that would be articulated with solid evidence later in the nineteenth century by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Snow appears to have understood the germ theory, argued it through the 1850s, and later produced a map of London's epidemic that helps to demonstrate the source of the tainted water and the spread of the disease. Johnson writes well.<br />
<br />
Lapham, Lewis H., ed. "Medicine". <i>Lapham's Quarterly</i>, vol. II, no. 4, Fall 2009.<br />
<br />
Lewis Lapham compiled and organized into this issue of his quarterly an astounding range of excerpts from ancient times to the present. All excerpts concern the quest for health amid sickness, the arts of healing, the nature of medicine across ages and cultures. Writers range from Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Ken Kesey to Hippocrates, Plato, Oliver Sacks, Louis Pasteur, and the unknown writer of The Plum in the Golden Vase from the late Ming Dynasty. The issue is absorbing, surprising, and insightful. Lapham's sequencing is well considered. The issue was published against the backdrop of Barack Obama's presidency and the promise of what became the Affordable Care Act.<br />
<br />
McNeill, William H. <i>Plagues and Peoples</i>. New York: Anchor Books, [1976] 1998.<br />
<br />
This book was vital in the process of bringing disease epidemiology into the consciousness of members of the history profession. William McNeill is concerned with the whole of human history from the evolutionary success of homo sapiens to global dominance by a few large bureaucratic states in the modern world. Diseases spread by invisible microparasites affect human societies in much the same way as macroparasites--humans preying upon other humans. Parasites survive by reaching equilibrium with their host populations just as governments built upon exploitation of subject peoples must protect them from more virulent threats (72). In the astounding success of European expansion in the wake of Columbus that largely set the structure of the modern world, "bacteriology was at least as important as technology" (235). This book sat on my shelf nearly untouched for more than a decade. Then I started examining it with the expectation that it would offer a quick and broad overview of the state of disease history half a century ago. Instead, I found a provocative approach to the subject as fresh as it was when first published. See also "<a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2020/03/only-quote.html">Only a Quote</a>" 2020.<br />
<br />
Parker, Samuel. <i>Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains</i>. Ithaca, N.Y.: Self-Published, 1838.<br />
<br />
This book is a primary source with minimal information useful to the study of disease. Nonetheless, it is a text that I often refer to it while lecturing on the topic of disease. Samuel Parker was a missionary with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions--the American West was foreign territory when he traveled there 1835-1837. Prior to his journey, he acquainted himself with the writings of explorers and fur traders who had been in the region. During his travels, he learned what he could from observation and through conversations with others. He observed the population of Native villages along the lower Columbia, noted that the number of people was substantially below what had been reported by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and discussed the matter with John McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Parker reports his estimate that 7/8 of the Chinook had perished, and mentions McLoughlin's estimate of 9/10. Many scholars have suggested that the epidemic that ravished the Chinook 1829-1832 was malaria. Others are less certain of the identity of the disease. Parker, and others of his time uses the term, "fever and ague" (178). Whatever the disease, the Chinook had controlled trade between the Pacific Coast and the interior before the epidemic, and effectively ceased as viable communities after.<br />
<br />
Rosen, William. <i>Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe</i>. New York: Penguin Viking, 2007.<br />
<br />
William Rosen seeks connections between and among microbiology, ecology, geography, military history, architecture, and other areas. His concern is for the large questions, such as whether the fall of the Roman Empire was a consequence of a flea-borne plague. The answer is nuanced. He asserts that the pandemic changed history, but labors to avoid overstating the case. Rosen seems to spurn a linear narrative. Those who grow frustrated with an author's extensive pursuit of what seems tangential to the central narrative should look elsewhere.<br />
<br />
The author has a <a href="http://www.justiniansflea.com/">website</a> with excerpts from the book, reviews (including a negative one), maps, errata.<br />
<br />
Welch, James. <i>Fools Crow</i>. New York: Penguin, 1986.<br />
<br />
<i>Fools Crow</i> was Blackfeet writer James Welch's third novel. It is a coming of age novel focused on a year in the life of a Piegan teenager. Welch makes him part of the Lone Eaters Band, a fictional group grounded in history. The fiction is set against the backdrop of a smallpox epidemic and the Marias River Massacre. As Welch noted in several interviews, after the massacre, the Blackfeet never lifted arms against the United States again. Welch stated that he read what historians wrote about this era, and also drew from Blackfeet oral tradition. My <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/spring-wind-rising-the-american-indian-novel-and-the-problem-of-history/oclc/45092815">dissertation</a>, "Spring Wind Rising: The American Indian Novel and the Problem of History", has a chapter that examines the interplay of Welch's first four novels with history. I suggested that this novel inscribes history that is more accurate than government sources, but was insufficiently clear that it contains fewer errors than the most popular secondary histories on the topic as well.<br />
<br />
Willrich, Michael. <i>Pox: An American History. </i>New York: Penguin, 2011.<br />
<br />
The smallpox epidemic that struck parts of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century was notable for its lack of severity. Even so, it came on the heels of a transformation of medicine, was met with widespread efforts to vaccinate large populations, and had a tremendous impact. I'm 10% into the Kindle version of this text and may revise this annotation at a later date.<br />
<br />James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-67524709772490496002020-04-03T18:06:00.001-07:002020-12-30T09:26:36.289-08:00Pandemic HistoryEpidemic disease has been a decisive factor in many of history's turning points. The "black death" (bubonic plague) has been credited with stimulating the end of the Middle Ages and ushering in the Renaissance.* Smallpox and other epidemic diseases infecting "virgin soil populations" was the decisive factor in the European conquest of the Americas.<br />
<br />
In the present, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes COVID-19 provoked American universities to move most instruction online in the course of a few weeks in late February and early March 2020.** Further measures developed day-by-day as I was writing this post over the course of two weeks in late March while finishing winter quarter grading and beginning to record my spring quarter lectures. On 23 March 2020, Governor Inslee (Washington) ordered "stay-at-home" effective 48 hours later, closing all but essential businesses for two weeks, with the possibility that the partial quarantine could be extended. It has now been extended into May.<br />
<br />
COVID-19 may also prove to be the defining moment in the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. Initially, Trump dismissed the epidemic as "under control", but as matters developed his views appeared to shift.*** Predictable partisan dissension made it impossible from the midst of the crisis to understand how well the United States was prepared, and whether actions had been taken, or not taken, that exacerbated or slowed the spread.<br />
<br />
The number of confirmed cases globally topped half a million 27 March, while it had been under 200,000 the weekend before Saint Patrick's Day. Confirmed cases topped one million 2 April, and the number of deaths passed the 50,000 mark that day also. The accuracy of the numbers are open to question as testing protocols vary. There are also suspicions that some countries might deliberately report inaccurate numbers. For up-to-date information on the COVID-19 pandemic, I recommend <a href="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html">Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center</a>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of my Disease History Books</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Disease in history long has been a personal interest--sometimes it is my main focus, sometimes it sits in the back of my mind while I pursue other questions. Emphases often shift in the life of a historian. These days, my central concerns are the global history of science and technology. This focus brings me back to the impact of bubonic plague, a topic I have neglected. My Amazon order of John Aberth, <i>The Black Death, the Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with Documents</i> (2016) will arrive about four weeks from the date of the order because I chose to pay for faster shipping. Amazon is backed up due to the pandemic, and has prioritized shipment of medical supplies.<br />
<br />
As someone who focused on American Indian history and culture in graduate school, I could not avoid the study of disease epidemiology (see "<a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/search/label/Depopulation">depopulation</a>" in the index). Moreover, the origins of <i>Patriots and Peoples</i> (this site) stem from a challenge in <i>A Patriot's History of the United States</i> (2004) to generally accepted understanding of the impact of disease on indigenous populations (see "<a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2007/11/patriots-and-peoples-histories.html">Patriots' and Peoples' Histories</a>" [2007]). The authors of <i>A Patriot's History</i> favor the lowest estimates of pre-Columbian indigenous populations and dismiss claims that disease epidemics were a significant factor. In the course of their arguments, they violate nearly every standard of honest scholarship.<br />
<br />
This post continues with "<a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2020/04/pandemic-history-bibliography.html">Pandemic History: The Bibliography</a>", published nearly two weeks later. It offers short annotations to a list of books on the history of disease that were selected on the whimsical base that I can find them on the shelves in my home within a few minutes.<br />
<br />
<h4>
<i><span style="font-size: large;">My Journey</span></i></h4>
<br />
My introduction to the topic of disease in history began spring 1988 as both a teaching assistant for American Indian History, where the professor assigned Francis Jennings, <i>Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest</i> (1976) as one of the texts, and in a graduate seminar, "Ethnohistory and the New Social History" with the same professor. Jennings' book (not annotated in the companion post) offers:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Not even the most brutally depraved of the conquistadors was able to purposely slaughter Indians on the scale that the gentle priest unwittingly accomplished by going from his sickbed ministrations to lay his hands in blessing on his Indian converts. As the invaders were descendants of the toughened survivors of the Middle Ages, so the Indians of today descend from those who could live through the trauma of a European handshake.<br />
Jennings, <i>Invasion of America</i>, 22.</blockquote>
In the seminar, the one dozen assigned books began with <i>Their Numbers Become Thinned</i> (1983) by Henry F. Dobyns. That seminar concluded with a social gathering that included dinner with William R. Swagerty, Dobyns' co-author for the longest chapter in the book. It was a good introduction to some of the controversies in efforts to estimate in impact of disease in the Americas.<br />
<br />
In that seminar, we each selected one of the books and led that week's discussion, created and distributed an annotated bibliography that put the book in context, and then wrote a paper. My text was James Axtell, <i>The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America</i> (1985). Four years later when I started teaching the upper-division American Indian History course for which I had been a TA in 1988, I assigned it as one of the texts. Axtell's book focused on Christian missions to indigenous Americans. Disease epidemics proved vital to the topic. His thesis concerning the sources of indigenous perceptions of European power identifies two principle factors: Europeans, especially priests, were akin to "the Indians' own shamans and conjurers" because they seemed to be "purveyors or preventers of disease" (10). Then he claims, European technological superiority was more vital.<br />
<br />
Since reading <i>The Invasion Within</i> early in graduate school, I have frequently revisited Axtell's assertion. I have expanded and developed my agreement of the central significance of disease, while qualifying and <a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2007/12/superior-european-technology.html">critiquing his assumptions</a> of technological superiority. A thesis statement I wrote for an encyclopedia article twenty years ago appears several times on <i>Patriots and Peoples</i>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Epidemic disease was the decisive factor in the European conquest. Epidemics not only eliminated entire communities, but the resulting sociocultural disruption created conditions that made Native peoples more receptive to European trade items and religious ideas.<br />
James Stripes, "Native Americans: An Overview," <i>Encyclopedia of American Studies</i>, vol. 3 (2001), 198.</blockquote>
In fall 1989, I worked up a twenty minute lecture on the impact of epidemic disease on Native populations as part of my responsibility as a teaching assistant. Twenty minutes exhausted most of what I knew at that point. By 2004, this kernel had grown into a three hour PowerPoint presentation. I use Axtell's title, The Invasion Within, as my lecture title. In the course of the presentation I venture into Dobyns' work and some of the views of his many critics. Often while presenting this lecture, I struggled to focus on the prepared material because I sensed that the whole three hours merely brushed the surface. I developed an extended version of this presentation for American Indian History (a course I created at Whitworth University) and a shorter version for Pacific Northwest History. For a course in Atlantic History, I created a Prezi presentation that qualified somewhat my assertion in <i>Encyclopedia of American Studies</i> (See "<a href="https://prezi.com/ybdjap3jpi04/the-decisive-factor/">The Decisive Factor</a>" [updated 17 August 2017]).<br />
<br />
For Technology in World Civilization, a course that is now my teaching focus, I cut this lecture down to ten minutes to expand and critique assertions in chapter four of Arnold Pacey, <i>Technology in World Civilization</i> (1991), one of the two texts. Pacey also has a section on the impact of bubonic plague. The other current text, <i>Society and Technological Change</i>, 8th ed. (2017) by Rudi Volti, has a section concerned with medical technologies and in my lectures I find it apropos to highlight success in the battle with infectious diseases. Moving this course online during the current pandemic causes the medium and the message to intertwine in ways that Marshall McLuhan anticipated.<br />
<br />
In short, my study of epidemic disease and histories of pandemics has been broad, sometimes deep, and has occupied a fair portion of the past four decades. Nonetheless, I am a mere dabbler compared to those who have specialized in this area. In the past few weeks, I have been dabbling with greater attention, reading quite a bit about the Influenza Pandemic that struck in 1918.<br />
<br />
<br />
*See Samuel Kline Cohn, "Plague and its Consequences," Oxford Bibliographies (updated 10 May 2010), <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0062.xml">www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0062.xml</a><br />
<br />
**World Health Organization, "Naming the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and the Virus that Causes it," WHO.int (accessed 3 April 2020), <a href="https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it?">https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it?</a><br />
<br />
***"CNBC Transcript: President Donald Trump Sits Down with CNBC's Joe Kernan at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland," CNBC.com (22 January 2020), <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/22/cnbc-transcript-president-donald-trump-sits-down-with-cnbcs-joe-kernen-at-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-switzerland.html">www.cnbc.com/2020/01/22/cnbc-transcript-president-donald-trump-sits-down-with-cnbcs-joe-kernen-at-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-switzerland.html</a><br />
<br />James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-66137451839066349132020-03-28T10:27:00.000-07:002020-05-04T15:16:15.332-07:00Only a QuoteSometimes a book that I have not read will validate something I have been saying for many years. Of course, this can be predictable, especially when the book in question was vital to the establishment of a field of inquiry in which I have done substantial reading. That is the case with William H. McNeill, <i>Plagues and Peoples</i> (1976). It is a book that I should have read in graduate school, or even undergraduate. I bought a copy in 2008, but it has been sitting on the shelf unread.<br />
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I have been working the past couple of weeks on one of my very long posts for <i>Patriots and Peoples</i>, "<a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2020/04/pandemic-history.html">Pandemic History</a>" and "<a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2020/04/pandemic-history-bibliography.html">Pandemic History: The Bibliography</a>" (planned as one, it became two). The bibliography includes annotations of a number of books. I read some of these books a long time ago, some recently, while others have been languishing unread on the shelf, or partially read. My intention yesterday was to race through <i>Plagues and Peoples</i> in a couple of hours--long enough to produce a competent annotation.<br />
<br />
I failed. The book has pulled me in. McNeill's vision is broad and interesting. He suggests some provocative metaphors--humans as macroparasites, for instance. I am reading the whole book. This morning's brief passage took me back to something I wrote.<br />
<br />
In my post, "<a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2008/02/origins-of-malaria.html">Origins of Malaria</a>" (2008), I summed up a point I had been making in college lectures for two decades:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Civilization made us sick, but it also made us more numerous so we could impose our will on those otherwise more fortunate. The maladies that afflicted Europeans contributed in significant measure to their global expansion.</blockquote>
Then, this morning I read in Plagues and Peoples:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When civilized societies learned to live with the "childhood diseases" that can only persist among large human populations, they acquired a very potent biological weapon. It came into play whenever new contacts with previously isolated, smaller human groups occurred.</blockquote>
<br />
I agree with McNeill. Maybe he's the one who suggested the idea to me in the first place through the filter of works by other scholars whose work followed his seminal contribution to the subject.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-33358667051448111902019-02-10T05:22:00.000-08:002019-02-10T07:59:35.018-08:00"Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it"<blockquote>
The attorneys for the missionaries sought to have this judgement enforced, but could not. General Jackson was President, and would do nothing of the sort. "Well: John Marshall has made his decision: <span style="font-style: italic;">now let him enforce it!</span>" was his commentary on the matter. So the missionaries languished years in prison, and the Cherokees were finally (1838) driven into exile, in defiance of the mandate of our highest judicial tribunal.<br />
Horace Greeley, <span style="font-style: italic;">The American Conflict</span> (1864), 106.</blockquote>
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Some high school civics textbooks report a Constitutional crisis in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision <span style="font-style: italic;">Worcester v. Georgia</span> (1832). The issue in the case was Georgia law requiring a license from the state and an oath of allegiance to the state constitution for non-Indians living and working among the Cherokee. The bulk of the Cherokee Nation fell within the state boundaries of Georgia; the state sought to exercise its sovereignty over these lands. Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler, missionaries among the Cherokee, refused to comply with Georgia's laws, were tried and convicted, and appealed their case to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall wrote the decision, which affirmed the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties and with the acts of Congress.<br />
<i>Worcester v. Georgia</i> 31 U.S. 515, at 520</blockquote>
Marshall's decision, along with one nine years earlier (<i>Johnson v. McIntosh</i>) and one the previous year (<i>Cherokee Nation v. Georgia</i>) form the foundation of Federal Indian Law. The so-called Marshall Trilogy of cases has been celebrated and condemned and been the subject of countless books.<br />
<br />
For the past few decades, I have occasionally checked high school civics and American government texts for how much space they devote to notions of tribal sovereignty, or to other Indian matters. The fishing rights cases of the 1970s sometimes appear, and sometimes there is a little bit about the American Indian Movement. However, the notion of tribal governments as sovereigns rarely makes an appearance. When <i>Worcester v. Georgia</i> is mentioned at all, Greeley's fabrication is the most frequent point.<br />
<br />
<i>Patriots and Peoples </i>began as a blog concerned with two US history texts, one unabashedly liberal, and the other equally partisan on the right. Both mention <i>Worcester.</i> Jackson's alleged words appear no where in the historical record prior to Horace Greeley's 1864 book, published 32 years after the event.<br />
<br />
Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen reveal no evidence of skepticism of the quote's authenticity:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Marshall's Court stated that Georgia could not violate Cherokee land rights because those rights were protected under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Jackson muttered, "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it," and proceeded to ignore the Supreme Court's ruling.<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">A Patriot's History</span>, 208</blockquote>
Howard Zinn does not pass on the quote, but makes reference to the putative Constitutional crisis:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
John Marshall, for the majority, declared that the Georgia law on which Worcester was jailed violated the treaty with the Cherokees, which by the Constitution was binding on the states. He ordered Worcester freed. Georgia ignored him, and President Jackson refused to enforce the court order.<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">A People's History</span>, 141</blockquote>
The conservative Schweikart and Allen and the liberal Zinn both cite as a leading source for these events the book <span style="font-style: italic;">Fathers and Children</span> (1975) by Michael P. Rogin. It a strong testament to Rogin's scholarship that both skewed histories choose his work as the foundation for their claims.<br />
<br />
Where Zinn differs from Schweikart and Allen becomes evident in what follows. Two paragraphs later in Zinn and the next sentence in Schweikart and Allen, we find contrasting interpretations of Jackson's views regarding states' rights, but neither highlights tribal sovereignty.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The same year Jackson was declaring states' rights for Georgia on the Cherokee question in 1832, he was attacking South Carolina's right to nullify a federal tariff.<br />
<i>A People's History</i>, 141 </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ultimately, the Cherokee learned that having the highest court in the land, and even Congress, on their side meant little to a president who disregarded the rule of law and the sovereignty of the states when it suited him.<br />
<i>A Patriot's History</i>, 208</blockquote>
I need to sit down with Rogin's book to examine whether he proceeds in either of these directions. I am also curious how he sources the claim. Greeley's own deployment of the alleged words 32 years after the event in question stretch the bounds of credibility. Questions drive me.<br />
<br />James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-79600222942190704462019-02-09T11:29:00.002-08:002019-02-09T11:29:18.478-08:00Gun ObsessionRecently, I became cognizant that every post on <i><a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/">Patriots and Peoples</a></i> the past three years has been about guns in one way or another. There also have been very few posts. Despite appearances, I have interests other than guns (read my more active <i><a href="http://chessskill.blogspot.com/">Chess Skills</a></i> for evidence). Nonetheless, my interest in guns has grown over the past few years. This interest is both personal and historical. Guns have long interested me, although for the better part of forty years that interest was mostly historical. My personal interest revived slowly over the past few years. Last fall, I returned to the woods as a hunter for the first time since the late 1970s.<br />
<br />
Three or four years ago, a friend shared a series of quotes on Facebook that he alleged made clear the views on the Founding Fathers on the matter of guns. My initial impression was that the list was not characterized by the usual array of fake quotes that seem the norm in highly partisan collections.<br /><br /><i><span style="font-size: large;">Study Regimen</span></i><br />
<br />
Over the next few weeks, I spent several hours tracking down the original sources of each quote, studying the context, and jotting down some notes in the computer file where I had pasted the collection. My intention was to create a series of blog posts assessing which quotes were credible and which were deceptive. When I saw my friend, I asked about his source. He had received the collection in an email, he recalled, but was vague on the specifics. I found the <a href="https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/gun-quotations-founding-fathers">whole collection online</a> at Buckeye Firearms Association, an Ohio gun rights organization. Their website offers:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Buckeye Firearms Association (BFA) is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that serves as the flagship of our grassroots efforts to defend and advance the right of more than 4 million Ohio citizens to own and use firearms for all legal activities, including self-defense, hunting, competition, and recreation.<br />
<a href="http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/">www.buckeyefirearms.org</a></blockquote>
My friend could have subscribed to their email, but he denied any knowledge of the organization. I am sure that the collection of quotes circulates several ways. It is possible that it originates with the BFA, but there may be another source.<br />
<br />
My main concern is the authenticity and relevance of each quote. I appreciate the sourcing in the collection. That is, the collection not only credits George Washington with, "A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined...", but also references the president's First Annual Message to Congress. There are many fake gun quotes attributed President Washington that begin with this one.<br /><br />One of my relatives shared on Facebook last week an image with a version that adds words not only that Washington did not utter, but that were contrary to his known views.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fake Quote</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
His source was Mary J. Ruwart, a biochemist turned libertarian political activist. She posted this image 1 February 2017 and it continues to circulate. The measures Facebook has taken against fake news stories does not apply to images and does not apply to errors of historical fact.<br /><br />I pointed out to my relative that the quote is fake and offered a link to the whole of Washington's address to Congress. I pasted my reply to Ruwart's <a href="https://www.facebook.com/maryjruwart/photos/a.515565335167309/1255932574463911">original post</a>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My Response</td></tr>
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This response and <a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2017/07/thats-not-what-they-meant.html">my post on Wayne LaPierre's errors</a> with respect to a John Adams quote both were aided by the work I started three years ago or so on the BFA quotes. My series of blog posts have not materialized the way I intended, but the work has been useful. Like many projects, it has taken longer than anticipated and other interests began to crown upon the project. When I started working through these quotes, I did not have a shelf of books on guns and gun history. Now I have several such shelves and another book is scheduled to arrive today.<br /><br />Yesterday morning, I started reading Adam Winkler, <i>Gun Fight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America</i> (2011). I am halfway through. I might post a review of this book, which I think is vastly superior to Michael Waldman, <i>The Second Amendment: A Biography</i> (2014), <a href="http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-second-amendment-book-review.html">which I reviewed</a> in 2017. I wanted to go to the shooting range yesterday morning, but the snow started falling at 6:00 am and my wife took our Explorer to work leaving me with the car that does less well on slick roads. Instead of shooting a gun or two at some targets, I spent my time reading about them.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-90860971757078208832019-01-15T07:53:00.000-08:002019-01-15T08:21:13.427-08:00Guns and Violence in America<br />
The problem of guns and violence in American society is a problem of overblown rhetoric compounded by willed ignorance. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its supporters take a stand that is both principled and wrong in opposition to all reasonable discussion of the limits of the right to bear arms. Those who seek to regulate firearms, on the other hand, seek band aids without addressing root causes. (See "<a href="https://theliberalgunclub.com/about-us/root-cause-mitigation-2/">Why Root Causes Matter</a>" for the views of another group of gun owners.)<br />
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More than 60% of gun deaths are suicides. Without accessible guns, many or even most of these people would find other means, albeit often less effective ones that fail. More than 60% of the remaining gun deaths are gang related. When physically mature teenagers kill one other over drug deals or turf, the anti-gunners add the numbers to their discussions of children being gunned down in their classrooms. (See "<a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/">Gun Deaths in America</a>".)<br />
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In 2000, I was a delegate to my County Democratic Convention. Because I liked Bill Bradley, I became more involved in the political process that year than normal. At the convention, there was a platform proposal to ban handguns that could accommodate more than six rounds “in the chamber”. I joined a small group of others who spent half an hour explaining that passing this proposal, which would push it on to the state convention, would embarrass us. It seeks to ban a gun that not only does not exist, but that cannot exist. Of course, we could have helped improve the language.* We weren’t interested in improving the proposal. We believed, or at least some of us did, that anti-gun planks in Democratic platforms hurt Democrats.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw2Ls_DAtZGwZ7qEr2Gf-2MzbZYjAXdjEKAdoiy6_M2Bngjs9dt0vj0I9-3D5-xEUEDl3a65bxbEzl84gmNofO4vhzFuScWv85VITZA6pobWYAlvirPf2KZKXlaeavBCROnWSTJSJ5RB1k/s1600/rifle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1240" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw2Ls_DAtZGwZ7qEr2Gf-2MzbZYjAXdjEKAdoiy6_M2Bngjs9dt0vj0I9-3D5-xEUEDl3a65bxbEzl84gmNofO4vhzFuScWv85VITZA6pobWYAlvirPf2KZKXlaeavBCROnWSTJSJ5RB1k/s320/rifle.jpg" width="247" /></a>I wasn’t a gun owner then. I am now. In 2000, I still thought that I agreed with the NRA. Since becoming a gun owner a couple of years ago, however, my views have evolved and this issue has risen in importance to me. I now realize how much I disagree with the NRA, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, also how much more I oppose some of the same things the NRA is fighting against. (See "<a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2017/07/thats-not-what-they-meant.html">That's Not What They Meant</a>" for part of my argument with one of the NRA's leaders.)<br />
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As a reluctant Democrat, I vote health care, the environment, the economy, and foreign policy over guns. On all of those issues, the GOP is nearly 100% wrong in my humble opinion. That doesn’t mean the Democrats are always right, only that they are better than Republicans. Even so, I’m growing increasingly frustrated with the priorities of Democrats who are more willing to seek a Constitutional Amendment eliminating the Electoral College than to find a way to win back the rural voters who once were the backbone of the party.<br />
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We need to have a real conversation in this nation about the root causes of violence. The United States is one of the most violent nations in the history of the world. Blaming the tools employed by the violent is no more useful than refusing to consider any improvements in safety training, safe storage, and limiting access to certain individuals.<br />
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*The author of the proposed plank meant magazine, but did not understand the difference. It might be argued that revolvers do accommodate multiple rounds in the chamber because each slot in the cylinder is essentially the chamber when it is lined up with the barrel. If so, this plank sought to ban revolvers holding more than six rounds in the cylinder, a very small percentage of firearms, but they do exist.<br />
<br />James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-46744430553157495492018-02-01T19:59:00.000-08:002019-01-15T10:52:50.658-08:00IronyAmerican history runs over with irony and contradictions. The gap between common beliefs and the evidence is especially true of the American West. The West revels in individualism, but the region as a whole is vastly more dependent upon the Federal government than the East.<br />
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Pamela Haag, <i>The Gunning of America: Business and the making of American Gun Culture</i> (2016) traces Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester's efforts to make a business of the manufacture of firearms. She offers a compelling sentence that crystallizes a central irony in Western America.<br />
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No objects are more indelibly associated with the American West that the Colt revolver and the Winchester rifle, and yet no objects relied more heavily for their survival--before, but especially after, the Civil War--on non-U.S., global markets.<br />
Haag, 35.</blockquote>
Samuel Colt's Cabinet of Memorials, for example, containing gifts from customers, contained a gold snuff box from the sultan of the Ottoman Empire; a ring from Alexander Alexandrovioch, the Russian grand duke; a ring from the king of Sardinia; a tea -caddy and cigar case from Siam; and other gifts from England, Italy, and the Islamic world.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-56489481428172234142017-08-15T11:27:00.000-07:002017-08-15T11:40:41.418-07:00Gun Ownership in Colonial VirginiaWhile rereading <i>A True Relation</i> (1608) by John Smith, a statement about most guns being packed away caught my eye. I noticed the statement because it provides corroborating evidence for an assertion that I read on the <a href="http://historicjamestowne.org/"><i>Jamestown Rediscovery</i> website</a>.<br />
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On 22 April 1607, according to Smith,* He, Captain Christopher Newport, and twenty others set out upriver to explore and gather food for the nascent colony. While they were away, the fort at Jamestown on which construction had barely begun, was attacked by about 400 Indians. The English colonists were fortunate in their ability to repel the attacks because most of the guns were still packed away in shipping containers. The exceptions were those possessed by "gentlemen". Smith noted, "...their Armes beeing then in drievats and few ready but certain Gentlemen of their own" (35).<br />
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The <i>Jamestown Rediscovery</i> website mentions restrictions on ownership and access to firearms in the England of James I.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There had been no major military battles in England since the war against Spain that ended in 1603; so, at the time of Jamestown’s settlement there was a shortage of arms and armor in England for the Virginia Company to supply to its colony. The English government strictly controlled all the military equipment, which was stored in city armories or private households of the rural gentry.<br />
"Arms and Armor," <a href="http://historicjamestowne.org/collections/selected-artifacts/arms-armor/">Jamestown Rediscovery</a> (accessed 15 August 2017).</blockquote>
For centuries leading up to this time, men in England had a <i>duty</i> to be trained in the use of arms for service in the militia, as well as for service in the defense of themselves and their neighbors. But, ownership of weapons was not yet articulated as a <i>right</i>. Moreover, there were restrictions, especially on concealable weapons--crossbows and firearms less than a yard in length. Additional restrictions were put into place early in the reign of James I (1603-1625).<br />
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In <i>To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right</i> (1994), Joyce Lee Malcolm traces how the duty to bear arms became a right as articulated in the <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp">English Bill of Rights of 1689</a>. She suggests that gun ownership among the common people, as well as by the gentry, was widespread in rural England, and most of England was rural. But, she also notes that James I restricted firearm, crossbows, and hunting dogs through a series game acts in 1604, 1605, and 1609.<br />
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These acts altered the property qualification needed to hunt far more materially than any act in the preceding two centuries; made it illegal for unqualified persons to keep coursing dogs, sell game, use guns, crossbows, or other devices to take game; and brought some poaching cases before the kingdom's highest courts.<br />
Malcolm, <i>To Keep and Bear Arms</i>, 13.</blockquote>
The needs for self defense and for hunting certainly differed in colonial Virginia than in the home country. Although perhaps difficult, the colonists were supplied with firearms. But, it appears that when they first arrived, guns were not individual possessions for the majority. Smith was a soldier and had pistols. Others were armed as needed, such as when on guard duty. Gentlemen possessed their own arms and these were all that were readily available during the first Indian attack.<br />
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As the settlement at Jamestown grew and expanded along the James River, those with farms certainly had firearms. That was not inconsistent with the practice in England where land owners ordinarily possessed firearms and other weapons for hunting and for self-defense. Slowly, during the fifteen years from 1607-1622, the English also began to instruct their Indian neighbors in the use of these weapons.<br />
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This training was negotiated. The English wished to offer religious training to the Natives. Opechancanough, chief of the Powhatans, agreed to this religious training on the stipulation that firearms training came as part of the package. In 1622, Opechancanough led his people to slaughter one-quarter of the English colonists, most of them in their own homes with their own weapons.<br />
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Over the course of the rest of the century, ownership of firearms expanded. As ownership expanded, the duty of Englishmen to be prepared for service in the militia also developed into a right to own and use firearms. It was a long process, and one that is not well-documented.<br />
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*21 May 1607, according to Lyon Gardiner Tyler, editor of <i>Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625 </i>(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907) 33. My source for Smith's <i>True Relation</i> is this book, 27-71, digitized at <a href="http://www.americanjourneys.org/aj-074/summary/">American Journeys</a>.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-87375584013823801052017-07-09T16:51:00.001-07:002017-07-11T06:47:23.431-07:00The Second Amendment: A Book Review<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19777264-the-second-amendment" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="The Second Amendment" border="0" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387736272m/19777264.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19777264-the-second-amendment">The Second Amendment</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14980519.Michael_Waldman">Michael Waldman</a><br />
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2054309310">3 of 5 stars</a><br />
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<strong>Disappointing</strong><br />
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On the one hand, <i>The Second Amendment: A Biography</i> offers a fair summary of the framing of the Second Amendment, the paucity of interpretations of its meaning by the Supreme Court, the cultural shifts and advocacy that affected political power, and the novelty of the <i>Heller</i> decision. On the other hand, the book seems more of a skewed legal brief than the sort of history it advocates--thorough and dispassionate. The ultimate purpose seems to be advocacy that those who wish to restrict guns need to learn the methodologies of their enemies in order to turn the tide.<br />
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Michael Waldman offers a critique of Justice Scalia's decision in <i>District of Columbia v. Heller</i> (2008), noting weaknesses that it reveals in Originalism when historical evidence is mixed or silent. He venerates Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent, and he suggests that lower courts are finding more of use there than in the majority opinion.<br />
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The book has merits. I learned from this book. It gave me things to think about and questions to pursue in further reading. <i>The Second Amendment: A Biography</i> offers historical analysis of the the era of the Framers, interpretations of the Second Amendment by the Court before <i>Heller</i>, the Revolt at Cincinnati (1977) that changed the direction of leadership for the National Rifle Association, the <i>Heller</i> and <i>McDonald</i> decisions, and how the these landmark Second Amendment decisions have played out in lower courts since 2010.<br />
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Dispite its seemingly comprehensive scope, it failed to meet my expectations. The author is smart and knowledgeable; he could have produced a better book. Perhaps he tried to do too much. Perhaps his political bias got in the way.<br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24726901-james-stripes">View all my reviews</a><br />
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James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-65030342719520825222017-07-07T20:42:00.001-07:002017-07-07T22:15:35.999-07:00That's Not What They MeantThere are books that I start over and over again, always returning them to the shelf before getting far. There are many reasons for this behavior pattern. Some books require a certain mood or frame of mind that I rediscover each time I start them at the wrong time. Some books are badly written, but of such value (maybe praised by others) that I am unwilling to rid myself of their presence in my home. Some prove vexing because the arguments they provoke in the reader contain some unintended layers. <i>Guns, Crime, and Freedom</i> (1994) by Wayne LaPierre is one such book in this last group. I cannot recall how often I have started it, read most or all of the first chapter, and then gave up, trying again a year or more later. LaPierre drives me to his sources as I ponder his argument.<br />
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The first chapter, "That's Not What They Meant", takes issue with the argument that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution applies only to militias, not to an <i>individual right</i> to bear arms. LaPierre asserts, "Even a <i>casual reading</i> of our Founding Father's works would prove" that the Second Amendment supports an individual right (emphasis added, 4). Reading the book today, of course, a reader must be aware that in <i>District of Columbia v. Heller</i> (2008), the U. S. Supreme Court affirmed the view advocated by the National Rifle Association during the tenure of LaPierre's leadership.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.<br />
Syllabus, <i>District of Columbia v. Heller</i>, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/">https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/</a></blockquote>
If my issues with LaPierre's argument were principally focused on his conclusion, my time would be better spent pursuing Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in <i>Heller</i>. But my concern is less with this conclusion than with the means LaPierre uses to get there. LaPierre focuses his argument on the speeches, writings, and events that expressed the views of and shaped the Revolutionary Generation and the documents of self-governance that they produced.<br />
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I read footnotes. When any author makes an argument that relies upon historical sources, I evaluate the way these sources are deployed. Are quotes accurate? Are arguments attributed to speeches and texts an accurate reflection of what was spoken or written? How well does a book's narrative accord with other accounts of the events? Such criticism--both affirming and refuting claims in various books--has been the guiding focus of <i><a href="https://historynotebook.blogspot.com/">Patriots and Peoples</a></i>.<br />
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In <i>Guns, Crime, and Freedom</i>, LaPierre starts well enough. He states his thesis clearly in the first paragraph, then proceeds to note how the phrase, "<i>rights</i> of the people," appears in the Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, as well as the Second (4, emphasis added). Scalia makes a similar, but more accurate point in <i>D.C. v. Heller</i>. The phrase, "right of the people" (note the singular), appears in the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments, while similar language appears in the Ninth. Scalia omits the Tenth in the opinion of the court.<br />
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In my reading, I pass over this first small error without difficulty. In the third paragraph, I also pass over his labeling of those who disagree with the individual right view as "foes of the Second Amendment" (4). LaPierre states the structure of his argument: understanding what the Framers expressed and experienced affirms their belief in an individual right to bear arms. Of course, they often expressed this view in discussions favoring militias over a standing army, and consequently the words of George Mason loom large. Mason's speeches and letters, more so than any other Founders, express clearly that the "whole people" comprise the militia (Address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 4 June 1788).*<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">Revolutionary Focus</span></i><br />
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The beginning of the fifth paragraph gives me pause.<br />
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LaPierre asserts, "The Boston Massacre was the fuse that lit the powder keg of debate over the right of the people to be armed" (4). This strong statement concerning cause and effect calls for evidence. Was the American Revolution a battle to protect citizens against disarmament? Most historians point to other issues--taxation was preeminent. The British troops who perpetrated the massacre on 5 March 1770 were there at the behest of the tax commissioners who had been sent to enforce new taxes. The British had been regulating the importation of molasses to New England since 1733, but enforcement was lax and molasses from French colonies was cheaper and often of better quality, and hence preferred by New England's rum makers. Following the Seven Years War (1754-1763), often called the French and Indian War in U.S. textbooks, Parliament sought to offset some of the costs of its North American empire with more effective taxes and stronger enforcement. These taxes were onerous to the colonists in North America.<br />
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LaPierre's argument moves from this assertion to a discussion of the right to arms as expressed by John Adams in the trial of the British soldiers who killed five individuals on that day in 1770. Adams had been retained as counsel by Captain Thomas Preston, whom some witnesses claimed had given the order to fire. In Adams' closing arguments, he summarized some of the leading opinions of British jurists on the matter of self-defense. One of these was William Hawkins, <i>A Treatise of Pleas of the Crown</i>. Adams quotes Hawkins several times in the course of his argument.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“And so perhaps the killing of dangerous rioters, may be justified by any private persons, who cannot otherwise suppress them, or defend themselves from them; in as much as every private person seems to be authorized by the law, to arm himself for the purposes aforesaid.” Hawkins p. 71. §1412—Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time, for their defence, not for offence, that distinction is material and must be attended to.<br />
"Adams' Argument for the Defense," in <i>Legal Papers of John Adams</i>, vol. 3 (1965), 247-248**</blockquote>
LaPierre quotes Adams' own words from the end of Hawkins' words to "not for offence", but employs the modern American spellings of defense and offense. In absence of context, the term "the inhabitants" could seem to refer to those rioting as a crowd formed outside the Customs House shortly before 9:00 pm on that late winter day. Shots were fired about 9:10, according to several witnesses. LaPierre seems to think "the inhabitants" refers to the citizens of Boston, although he does not fail to mention that Adams was serving as a defense attorney for a British soldier. On the other hand, the context of the remark makes clear that Adams was speaking of the right of the British soldiers to arm themselves in self-defense. Adams grounded his defense of the soldiers as men who were private citizens as well as employees of the British government.<br />
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Of course, the words of John Adams here could also apply to the residents of Boston who resented the presence of the troops, and who had been involved in numerous violent altercations with these troops over the previous two years. But, the right of citizens to be armed, aside from those eight soldiers on trial, was never at issue. In the depositions of 96 witnesses to the event that were taken by the Grand Jury prior to the trial, the right to arms was mentioned once.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
George Robert Twelves Hewes, of lawful age, testifies and says, that on the last night, about one o'clock, as he was returning alone from his house to the Town-house, he met Sergeant Chambers of the 29th, with eight or nine soldiers, all with very large clubs and cutlasses, when Dobson, a soldier, spoke to him and asked him how he fared, he told him very badly, to see his townsmen shot in such a manner, and asked him if he did not think it was a dreadful thing; said Dobson swore by God it was a fine thing, and said you shall see more of it; and on perceiving I had a cane, he informed Sergeant Chambers of it, who seized and forced it from me, saying I had no right to carry it; I told him I had as good a right to carry a cane as they had to carry clubs, but they hurried off with it into the main guard.<br />
Frederic Kidder, <i>History of the Boston Massacre</i> (1870)***</blockquote>
The British troops seized a cane! When the right to bear arms is discussed, the focus is rarely upon a walking stick that could be employed in self-defense. So far as I know, no politician has proposed regulating crutches and canes. This single seizure of an "arm" in the wee hours of the morning following the killing of five civilians in Boston certainly offers no support to the notion that the right to arms was at stake that night. Only when Adams sought to exculpate the shooters through an assessment of their right to self-defense did the matter arise.<br />
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Aside from modernizing the spelling of two words, LaPierre quotes John Adams accurately. The words quoted do support, and strongly so, an individual right to arms for self-defense. However, they are germane to the argument of the book only through a mangling of the context. Not only that, LaPierre asserts that Adams spoke these words in his opening argument. The trial of the soldiers ran 27 November - 5 December; Adams' speech was delivered 3-4 December. His footnote correctly names the book, <i>Legal Papers of John Adams</i>, vol 3, but he lists the editors as Lyman H. Butterfield, and Hilda B. Zobel. His citation is incorrect. The editors are L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel. One name is wrong; the other has changed gender. Lyman H. Butterfield was the editor of many volumes of the papers of John Adams, but not this one (see "Founders Online--Printed Volumes, The Adams Papers" <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/content/volumes">https://founders.archives.gov/content/volumes</a>).<br />
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If Wayne LaPierre's missteps concerning the Boston Massacre were the sole errors, I would have read the second chapter years ago. But these errors characterize the scholarship of his book. He similarly mangles the context of George Washington's popular quote in his First Annual Message to Congress, and also incorrectly lists the first initial of the compiler of his source. Similar problems could be elucidated with respect to Patrick Henry's famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech calling for an armed response, rather than further diplomatic efforts.<br />
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LaPierre advocates and offers a "casual reading". To make his case, however, he needs something more. He needs to read and write much more carefully. Near the end of the first chapter he challenges mangled histories:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Today, it is politically correct to ignore the Founding Fathers and their clear intent. For the sake of political expediency, the anti-gun lobby, the anti-gun media, and the anti-gun politicians, including the president, have twisted, tangled, and reinterpreted their words.<br />
LaPierre, <i>Guns, Crime, and Freedom</i>, 9-10.</blockquote>
If the prefix "pro" replaced each instance of "anti" in this passage, it would serve as a fair assessment of the chapter that it concludes.<br />
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*Although this speech could serve well LaPierre's argument, he omits it from the first chapter.<br />
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**My source is the online edition: <i>Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses</i>, ed.C. James Taylor. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2017.<br />
<a href="http://www.masshist.org/publications/apde2/">http://www.masshist.org/publications/apde2/</a><span id="goog_2025301287"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_2025301288"></span>. I also read Adams' speech in Samuel Willard, <i>John Adams: A Character Sketch</i> (1903), which the Library of Congress makes accessible at <i>John Adams and the Boston Massacre Trial of 1770</i>, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/law/help/rare-books/john_adams.php">https://www.loc.gov/law/help/rare-books/john_adams.php</a>.<br />
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***Frederic Kidder's book on the Boston Massacre, published one hundred years later, consists of transcriptions of John Adams' notes in the possession of Kidder with additional commentary. It is available in several reprint editions, as well as an ebook from Google Books and from the Library of Congress site cited in the note above.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-60037282488480124952017-04-15T08:14:00.002-07:002017-07-09T17:01:02.778-07:00ExpertiseConservative historian Tom Nichols offered his views concerning the growing distrust of people who know what they are talking about yesterday on <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/problem-thinking-know-experts/"><i>PBS News Hour</i></a>. It is worth watching.<br />
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<a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/problem-thinking-know-experts/">http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/problem-thinking-know-experts/</a> (click the link, not the image).<br />
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<br />James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-38641215869577985832016-11-09T00:15:00.003-08:002017-08-16T10:53:04.335-07:00Trump Wins?The electorate of the United States (that's you and me) had a tremendous opportunity to vote for the most unfit character ever. We have made grave errors in many elections and have harmed this country severely. But compared to the damage inflicted by previous incompetents, the danger to life, liberty, property, and happiness has never been greater. All we needed do is select the man who does not pay those contractors who build his hotels and we will have severely threatened to end this 240 year experiment in self-government.<br />
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Black Tuesday usually refers to 29 October 1929, when panicked sellers traded nearly 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange (four times the normal volume at the time), and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell -12%. Black Tuesday is often cited as the beginning of the Great Depression.<br />
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The attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001 has become Black Tuesday for younger generation.<br />
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Will historians of the future refer to 8 November 2016 as Black Tuesday also?<br />
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<a href="http://fortune.com/2016/11/08/dow-futures-mexican-peso-election-trump-clinton/">http://fortune.com/2016/11/08/dow-futures-mexican-peso-election-trump-clinton/</a>James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-64403787754991730732016-10-29T11:45:00.004-07:002016-10-29T11:49:23.982-07:00Standing Rock Protest<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="216" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/189264404" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="384"></iframe><br />
<a href="https://vimeo.com/189264404"><br />
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Police and Military Attack <i>Oceti Sakowin</i> Treaty Camp</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/unicornriot">Unicorn Riot</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-13109630836132775892016-09-26T09:51:00.001-07:002016-09-26T09:51:58.015-07:00ASA Statement in Support of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
American Studies Association Statement in Support of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation</div>
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The American Studies Association stands with the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota people who have come together to protect their waters, bodies, lands, and sacred places from those constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline and others who benefit fina<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">ncially from continued reliance on fossil-fuel extraction, refining, and consumption. This statement is a call for ASA members, American studies departments and programs, and others to support the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and those who have joined them in the Sacred Stone Camp, Red Warrior Camp, and Oceti Sakowin Camp as they fight to stop further construction of the DAPL.</span></div>
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Dakota Access Pipeline LLC intends the new pipeline to stretch 1,100 miles from North Dakota to Illinois and to carry 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Compelling evidence suggests that the effects of these plans on Mni Sose (the Missouri River), which is Standing Rock’s water supply, and the lands, other waterways, and human and non-human persons near the pipeline have not been adequately considered, assessed, or evaluated. If anything, that evidence points to Lakota cultural sites and burial areas already sustaining damage.</div>
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The ASA promotes the proliferation of knowledge of the environmental and human impact of such projects as the DAPL. Further, American studies as an academic and scholarly field has developed a growing commitment to understanding US history in the context of Indigenous persistence and the long history of the abrogation of the sovereignty of Indigenous nations by the U.S. nation-state. In light of what we learn and teach as American studies scholars, we join Indigenous organizations, American Indian governments, and other organizations, governments, and institutions around the world in pledging solidarity with and support for the people of Standing Rock.</div>
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Thus, we recognize the authority of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and join their call for an immediate and permanent end to construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The people of Standing Rock and their Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota relations in the Oceti Sakowin Oyate have made a stand to protect their land, lives, and water and against these threats to their sovereignty, human rights, and basic dignity. We join them in their stand, and we ask others to do so as well.</div>
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Approved by the Executive Committee, 23 September 2016</div>
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James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-49509381066503584762016-08-30T09:06:00.001-07:002016-09-22T10:14:12.179-07:00Spokane City Council votes in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day<a href="http://www.khq.com//story/32875015/spokane-city-council-votes-in-favor-of-indigenous-peoples-day#.V8Wu3Y04ADc.blogger">Spokane City Council votes in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day</a>: SPOKANE, Wash. - The Spokane City Council voted 6-1 Monday in favor of renaming Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples' Day. More than 100 people showed up to Monday's meeting to testify about the decisio...James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7896336562539866758.post-8167810670008632822016-08-28T15:12:00.000-07:002016-08-28T15:12:39.507-07:00Understanding PoliticsWant to understand how American politics became so dysfunctional that people who disagree can no longer communicate with one another? This trilogy of books is worth reading for a good start.<br />
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<br />James Stripeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13437334325501974461noreply@blogger.com0