Entries associated with the tag "History":

Admit it. You've always wanted to know where Chicago's last wood-block pavement, tied houses, and black-on-yellow street signs are -- not to mention what became of Almond Street and DeKalb Avenue. Now you can, because the folks at Forgotten Chicago remember. (The "tied houses" are a parable of do-gooder regulation backfiring.) The site is Not Safe For Work...because if you are a true Chicago geek you may well forget to do any.

H/t to the Newberry Library.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. Reviewing two recent books on the Great Depression and FDR's response to it, Benjamin Friedman in the New York Review of Books ($) adduces some numbers that call into question the right-wing revisionist historians' contention that FDR did nothing (or less than nothing) to end the nation's greatest economic catastrophe, and that only WWII saved us. From 1929 to March 1933, total economic production dropped steeply and repeatedly.

"March 1933 marked the bottom. Total production rose 11 percent in 1934, 9 percent in 1935, and then 13 percent in 1936 -- just enough to regain the level reached in 1929. But by then businesses in many industries had learned to make do with less labor, even if they now produced just as much." The one-year decline in 1937-38 was smaller and quickly ended.

World War II didn't start until 1939.

These numbers seem to be incompatible with the assertions that FDR's policies perpetuated the Depression and discouraged business innovation. Is there some good economic reason why they're wrong or irrelevant? 

Brad DeLong reviews an interesting exchange about a 1980 speech Ronald Reagan made that gave aid and comfort to southern racists. (If you want to extend that discussion, post your comments at his site, not here.) In the comments I came across an obvious point from "Dan'l" that I'd never read or thought of before:

"Funny how those who supported states' rights never supported civil rights as a matter of policy within their own state."

Amplified later by "Bernard Yomtov":

"This is a critical and generally overlooked point. It was certainly possible to argue both that segregation was immoral and that it was the duty of the states, not the federal government, to abolish it. So far as I know, no one who opposed federal civil rights legislation on states rights grounds took this position."

The floor is open. Did anybody do that? Unlike some of our regular commenters, I'm willing to listen to evidence that might contradict my long-held belief, in this case that "states' rights" was and is simply code for white racism.

Gerald Bracey, a psychologist with a gift for polemic, has made a second career out of (in his words) "debunk[ing] the notion that schools were better in the past than they are today." In Education Week (registration required) he rolls out the guns once more to claim that the Soviets' launch of the first orbiting satellite 50 years ago "wounded" the reputation of US schools. According to him, they didn't deserve the criticism they got then -- and didn't deserve the criticisms they got in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s either.

In keeping with his stance as a defender of the educational status quo, Bracey doesn't even mention the real Sputnik effect: the influx of federal dollars and the collaborations between teachers and practicing scientists that led to new curricula and improved course designs in the sciences all the way down to grade school. In a paper from ten years ago, F. James Rutherford gives a more even-handed view of Sputnik's effects on US education, adding that if anything that reform program stopped too soon.

As for Bracey's hobbyhorse, he's partly right but mainly wrong. From my book Let's Kill Dick and Jane:

"This image of a lost Golden Age in American education helped fuel a movement to make schools more academically demanding. But as a picture of the world it is so incomplete as to be false. At the turn of the century, when American schools focused on traditional academic pursuits, they educated only a minority of American children." Only 20 percent of WWI veterans had finished eighth grade; 70 percent of WWII veterans had. "No wonder American schools and textbooks changed. For the first time they had to teach the children of all socio-economic classes for more than a few months. To do so, they followed the path of least resistance in a nation that had never been friendly to intellectual endeavor -- and made a virtue of this makeshift. American schools have not deteriorated -- they've never been good enough."

Rick Pearlstein, who wrote the book on Barry Goldwater and his movement, reminds us in his blog that some significant roots of present-day conservatism lie in the white racist crowds who tried to keep black kids from integrating the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas.

"The people who first boosted Goldwater for the presidency, and arranged for his manifesto Conscience of a Conservative to be ghostwritten, chose Goldwater only for second choice as their preferred conservative presidential standard bearer. Their first choice was...Orval Faubus," Democratic governor of Arkansas who brought out the state's national guard to try to prevent integration 50 years ago.

Jim Johnson, "founder of the Arkansas White Citizens Councils and one of the organizers of the Little Rock mob" and a Faubus-for-president booster, is another connection. "He returned to the forefront of national conservative movement politics in the 1990s as one of the chief conspirators against the presidency of Bill Clinton, and narrators of the notorious smear video (distributed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell) the 'Clinton Chronicles.'"

Of course, times have changed in ways Pearlstein doesn't mention in his post. Just as the Catholic Church has had to admit that the earth revolves around the sun, today's conservatives have had to admit black people to leadership positions. In both cases it's a real concession that neither friends nor foes care to acknowledge as such.

I won't give Pat Buchanan a pass for the dirty tricks and baloney he's served up on his watch, but on Iran he's got more sense than most:

"It would be an obscenity, we are told, if Ahmadinejad were allowed to place a wreath at Ground Zero. This is a public-relations stunt that should never be permitted.

"That the Iranian president has PR in mind is undoubtedly true. Much of what national leaders do is symbolic. But that wreath-laying would have said something else, as well.

"It would have said that, to Iran, these Americans were victims who deserve to be honored and mourned and, by extension, the men who killed them were murderers. Bin Laden celebrates 9/11. So do all America-haters. By laying a wreath at Ground Zero, the president of Iran would be saying that in the war between al-Qaeda and the United States, he and his country side with the United States.

"How would we have been hurt by letting him send this message?"

Read the whole thing. Buchanan enumerates the far greater criminals and far more dangerous leaders -- Mao and Khrushchev, for two -- who Republican presidents have welcomed and dealt with in the recent past. Ahmadinejad isn't in their league.

"America and Iran have great differences, but also common interests. Among the latter, no Taliban in Kabul, no restoration of a Sunni Ba'athist dictatorship in Baghdad, and support for the present governments. Iran cannot want a Sunni-Shia war in the region, which would make her an enemy of most Arabs, and she cannot want a major war with America, which could lead to the destruction and breakup of the nation where only half the people are Persians.

"That is plenty to build a cold peace on, if the hysterics do not stampede us into another unnecessary war."

My grandfather worked security at the 1933-34 Chicago world's fair, "A Century of Progress." But until I saw Lisa Schrenk's new book Building a Century of Progress, I had no idea what a non-sinecure that was:

"The start of the extravagant closing ceremony also served as a spontaneous signal for a growing crescendo of carnivalesque hysteria to spin out of control. Hordes of fairgoers began appropriating unique mementos of the magnificent event. In the Halloween-night frenzy, people broke into many of the exhibition pavilions and walked away with furniture, light fixtures, signs, and decorative building details. Not a shred of the sixty-five pennants that lined the Avenue of Flags that day survived. Even shrubs and trees were yanked out of the ground. Guards, many of whom ended the night requiring first aid, did their best to combat the full-scale pillaging. ...Fortunately, most of the damage was to objects that were already scheduled for disposal as part of the planned demolition of the exposition." (page 254)

Schrenk teaches at Norwich University and used to be education director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation. In fairness, her generously illustrated book is more concerned about the Apollonian architecture than the Dionysian society surrounding it. The designers, she writes, sought to create "a distinctively American modern architecture that was clearly relevant to the times." (page 4) Most regular people, however, opted for colonial. Evidently they didn't take to heart the fair's amazing motto: "SCIENCE FINDS -- INDUSTRY APPLIES -- MAN CONFORMS."

Hear from the author yourself Thursday evening 6:30 pm at Roosevelt University ($).

Karen Ordahl Kupperman's The Jamestown Project is hard to put down. She's a good storyteller and doesn't waste any time getting into the story.

English colonization of North America was pretty much all private enterprise. Investors got in hoping to get rich quick like the plundering Spaniards had; they didn't, but they did waste a lot of time pestering colonists for immediate results.

The local Indians understood the English colonists better than the colonists understood them, having sheltered numerous shipwrecks and refugees in preceding years.

Jamestown was just one of dozens of attempts, most of which failed. Partly because the company allowed lots of small investors to get in, it managed to last long enough to learn the key lessons that later colonies in New England and elsewhere followed: "widespread ownership of land, control of taxation for public obligations through a representative assembly, the institution of a normal society through the inclusion of women, and development of a product that could be marketed profitably to sustain the economy."

One of the things that didn't work was putting the colony under an all-powerful Commander in Chief.

Going beyond Jamestown, I'd never quite realized just how the discovery of an inhabited New World forced people to think for themselves. It showed that tradition could be plain wrong. Of course, the biggie was that the Bible doesn't mention the New World and its inhabitants. But lesser beliefs took a whacking too, like the idea that climate had to be the same at the same latitude worldwide.

Three million people immigrated to British America (mainland and Caribbean islands) between 1600 and 1800. More than two million of them were slaves, and most of the whites were "indentured servants, redemptioners, or convicts."

That's what the numbers say. Georgetown University historian Alison Games, writing in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, summarizes the demographic, historical, and economic foundation of our country: "Transatlantic migration, for the population considered in its entirety, was centered around the dismal themes of enslavement, violence, and mortality."

(Google Book Search has a preview of this book, but not these pages.)

Elatia Harris at 3 Quarks Daily has a world-class blog post of stories that the Roberts "Plessy v. Ferguson was too liberal" Supreme Court needs to hear:

"A century before I was born in a large Southern city which shall be nameless, my mother’s family left Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where until the Civil War they raised cotton. Their house and everything in it had been garrisoned by Union soldiers before the war’s end, so when the family left, they left with nothing, and I was almost grown-up before I understood that that was as it should have been. Heading west, they joined a cousin in a not-so-distant state, a Methodist minister who wrote them there was pretty good cotton land to be had thereabouts. They got back on their feet – farming, ranching, banking.  There was, briefly, prosperity – my grandmother had a white Shetland pony, and was the fanciest little girl she knew – and then the Depression, which put paid to any notion of a real comeback.

"A Southern family with a plantation background is a family keenly aware of dispossession, of what it is to be on the wrong side of history. This is different from an awareness that one’s ancestors were participants in and beneficiaries of a crime so vast and systematic that one’s nation is rocking from it still.  I cannot say that in childhood I found 'plantation tales' charming and innocent, but the full horror of them was not yet available to me.  Here’s one.  When in 1860 my great-grandmother, Eleanor W., turned 6 years old, she was presented with her sixth slave, having already been given one for each previous year of her life.  Like little Eleanor, the slaves were children.

"Coming along a century later, should I have felt personal guilt for this?  Well, it didn’t make me proud.  But my imagination, including my moral imagination, was affected by this story in a way that I have the sense to be grateful for.  I can only have first heard it in the spirit it was told – by my grandmother, little Eleanor’s daughter, owner of the white pony -- as a testament to the lost paradise of plantation life.  It would be dense years of child-time before I could judge my grandmother for reckoning up the family’s glories this way, years more before I could understand the link between her own disappointments and her luscious memories of the subjugation of others."

Don't miss the one about her childhood visit to a country club the summer she'd tanned well.

The other day I heard on the radio that tuition at the University of Illinois has gone up -- again -- in part because of three consecutive years of reduced state funding. Then I read this from the new book Urban Meltdown by Clive Doucet, "the first poet ever elected to Ottawa [Canada] City Council":

"North American communities have just lived through two of the most prosperous decades the planet has ever seen, but where are the new public investments which reflect those wealthy years?"

The whole point of reading book reviews is to find the one book in a thousand that you absolutely have to read (and do), and to learn what the other 999 are about. So it's just perverse to read Steven Shapin's review in last week's New Yorker (excerpts here if that link goes away) and find that it mentions several must-reads, some more than a decade old. They're all about how we misunderstand technology when we think it's all about world-changing inventions.

Shapin's reviewing David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. "Edgerton notes that as things get older they tend to move from rich countries to poor ones, from low-maintenance to high-maintenance environments. In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire.

"'In the innovation-centric account, most places have no history of technology,' Edgerton writes [because nobody invented the car or the microchip there]. 'In use-centered accounts, nearly everywhere does.' John Powell’s marvelous study of vast vehicle-repair shops in Ghana, The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers (1995), describes a modern world in which vehicles imported from the developed world initially decay, and then something changes: 'As time goes by and the vehicle is reworked in the local system, it reaches a state of apparent equilibrium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely. . . . It is a condition of maintenance by constant repair."'

Historian Walter Laqueur has seen the future:

"Given the shrinking of its population, it is possible that Europe, or considerable parts of it, will turn into a cultural theme park, a kind of Disneyland on a level of a certain sophistication for well-to-do visitors from China and India, something like Brugge, Venice, Versailles, Stratford-on-Avon, or Rothenburg ob der Tauber on a larger scale. Some such parks already exist; when the coal mines in the Ruhr were closed down, the Warner Brothers Movie World was opened in Dortmund. This will be a Europe of tourist guides, gondoliers, and translators: 'Ladies and gentlemen, you are visiting the scenes of a highly developed civilization that once led the world. It gave us Shakespeare, Beethoven, the welfare state, and many other fine things...' There will be excursions for every taste; even now there are trips in Berlin to the slums and the areas considered dangerous ('Kreuzberg, the most colorful district: two hours').... [But] even if Europe's decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

"There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe's traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over."

Read the whole thing in the Chronicle Review; it's a foretaste of his book The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent. Which of Europe's traditions and values would you like to keep alive beyond the theme parks? The architecture? Urban design? Liberté/égalité/fraternité? The literature? The university? Religious toleration? Or did you think that was already gone?

Antichoice activists, including Illinois' former senator Peter Fitzgerald, love to dwell on the supposed parallel between opposing slavery and opposing the right to choose abortion. Turns out there's another parallel they'd rather forget.

Hat tip to Josh Glenn at Brainiac for tipping me off to Caleb Crain's blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, where he compares the first states to abolish slavery and the first states to legalize gay marriages or civil unions. The first five states to allow gay marriage in some form were Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New Hampshire. All five were among the first nine to abolish slavery (Vermont in 1777).

We've had 11 presidents since the end of World War II: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Only one of this motley crew ended his presidency with a higher approval rating than he began. Which? Your clue: he also enjoyed the highest end-of-term approval rating of all 11, around 63 percent. Answer and link below. No fair cheating!

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ANSWER: Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community has the goods, originally from the Wall Street Journal. Truman and Nixon had the record-lowest approval ratings of the bunch, and Truman and W. the biggest collapses during their tenures. The only post-WW2 president more popular at the end of his presidency than at the beginning was Bill Clinton.

The group historical blog Cliopatria and History News Network will soon post an online symposium on the question, "Why has the American national narrative characteristically taken New England/Puritans [first settlements 1620 and 1630] rather than Jamestown/Virginia/Anglicans [first settlement 1607] as its foundation touchstone?"

My first answer is simple: because the North won the Civil War. (Hey, nobody said it had to be a good reason!)

Here's another answer, from Paul Noonan in the comments:

"At Plymouth you have a family-based society of hard working humble folks who seek freedom to worship God in a way their society doesn't tolerate. They persevere in the face of great hardships.

"At Jamestown there are also great hardships, but there you also have an initially non-family based society (the original settlers were all men and for well over a decade the colony was a mostly male frontier society). Their religious sentiments were conventional; their motivations in coming to the New World had to do with economic opportunity (initially a delusional search for precious metals; later the growth of tobacco, an agricultural product with no nutritive value and - as we much later found out - actually deleterious to health). The early settlers were mostly 'gentlemen' who at one point had to be threatened with having their rations withheld in order to get them to do a decent day's work."

If you'd rather think before opining, Cliopatria has links to reading material. And if you prefer books to blogbytes, my fave on Virginia is Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. 

Writing at the History News Network, Christopher McKnight Nichols slaps down several presidents and those troglodytes who still worship at the shrine of Mars:

"The domino theory [that if Vietnam went Communist the rest of southern Asia was doomed to do the same] failed by the standard of its own predictions. Communism never took hold in Indonesia, Thailand, or more importantly, in any of the other large countries in the region, most notably, India. There was no cascade effect triggered by the U.S. departure from South Vietnam. The United States continued as an economic and military power. And now, America and Vietnam are trading partners, which President Bush should know as he visited that nation last year. Southeast Asia is a vibrant engine of global commerce and the region has closer ties to the United States now than at any time in the past."

Thus with the liberals' falsehood-based and unwinnable war from the 1960s and 1970s. Now the Cheney administration is peddling the same theory in order to escalate the conservatives' falsehood-based and unwinnable war in Iraq. Nichols doesn't say, but what's up with imagining whole countries as dominos? Is that thought, or a substitute for it?

As if Rudy Giuliani didn't have enough problems as a potential presidential candidate, what with being too pro-choice and pro-gay for his own party and too Republican or too authoritarian for Democrats and independents. Now Lake Forest College historian Michael Ebner at History News Network (picked up in this morning's New York Times) notes that the former New York mayor is also running against the antiurban tide of American history in general and American presidential history in particular.

Politically speaking, Grover Cleveland (1885-'89, 1893-'97) is the only U.S. president who started as a big-city mayor. Culturally speaking, the odds are worse: "Well documented is the aversion of the founders to cities per se, which they regarded as fulcrums of political factionalism, unruliness, and rampant dissent.... [Later on,] in the eyes of many Americans their biggest cities seemed politically untamed and culturally uproarious."

Maybe Richard M. Daley should run. At least nobody's ever called him "culturally uproarious." 

Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin at Open University corrects the New York Times's reporting that the 2008 race is off to a "breathtakingly early start":

"In fact, since the dawn of mass parties in the 1820s, American politics--and presidential politics, in particular--has always been aggressively entrepreneurial. And, as with most markets, the personal sales effort rarely takes a break.

"During the winter of 1826-7, Martin Van Buren was already organizing furiously to avenge Andrew Jackson's unjust defeat in the previous [1824] election. William Henry Harrison began touring key states over a year before the 1836 election. After narrowly losing to Van Buren [in that year], the 64-year-old military hero was soon on the road again. He knew, after all, that his party rivals Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were doing it too."

Publius at Obsidian Wings reads John Gaddis's The Cold War: A New History and sees a lesson:

"Throughout the Cold War, America negotiated with -- and talked to -- the Soviet Union and its satellites. When Mao initially took over China, America didn't come to Taiwan's aid in the hopes that it could negotiate with him, as it did with Tito.  And of course, even despite China's support of America's enemies in Korea and Vietnam, Nixon shrewdly reached out to China to play the communist states against one another. Even the great Reagan adopted a strategy of engagement with the USSR. And throughout this entire period, communism was a far greater threat than either modern terrorism or the states of Iraq and Iran.

"None of this is to say that America was happy that Mao or Tito held power. But people realized that the world was not black and white, and that the national interest (and world security) in some cases required you to make nice with people you don't particularly care for. It's part of living in an adult world rather than a fairy tale world of dragons and knights.

"In addition, every silly argument you hear in favor of invading Iraq or of failing to engage with Iran or Syria could just have easily been made in the Cold War. People could have easily justified all-out war with, or diplomatic isolation of, Russia or China under the theory that those countries are 'evil' or that we would eventually have to fight them down the road. But we chose neither route. We didn't attack them (despite opportunities) and we chose to engage them. And our patience paid off. In 1989, Communism died in Europe without the inevitable war that the Kristols of the day predicted. And China has become one of our most important trading partners. Just imagine how different the world would be if someone like Dick Cheney had been making these critical calls."

Not that the Cheney administration has learned anything from its own experience. Via TPM Cafe, here's Karen DeYoung in Sunday's Washington Post:

"The success of the Bush administration's new Iraq strategy depends on a series of rapid and dramatic political and economic reforms that even the plan's authors have little confidence will work." She spoke with a think-tanker who'd been approached by the White House in December: "'They wondered could I give them some [names] from the provinces or anywhere' from which to construct a new political base."

Stacy Mitchell clinches her case against big-box stores with an anti-imperialist cameo from American history:

"When American colonists forced their way onto three ships docked in Boston harbor in 1773 and dumped more than 90,000 pounds of tea into the sea, their actions were as much a challenge to global corporate power as they were a rebellion against King George III.  The ships were owned by the East India Company, a powerful transnational corporation . . . [seeking] to undercut small competitors . . . and drive them out of business. . . . Our communities are fast becoming colonies once again." 

She'll be in town Wednesday, November 8, to talk about her new book, Big-Box Swindle. I have a brief review of it in this week's Reader, but what struck me about this particular passage has nothing to do with Wal-Mart.  Notice how naturally this anti-imperialist rhetoric comes to us. After 233 years of repetition and counting, Mitchell doesn't have to explain that being a colony is just about the worst thing in the world. We take it for granted that "empire" = "exploitation."

So when a couple of Dartmouth economists come up with some evidence going the other way, it's hard to process:

"Using a new database of islands throughout the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, we examine whether colonial origins affect modern economic outcomes. The number of years spent as a European colony is strongly positively related to the island's GDP per capita and negatively related to infant mortality. This basic relationship is also found to hold for a standard dataset of developing countries."

Abstract here. A journalistic summary at Slate, followed by numerous highly critical and intelligent comments.  (Whatever its other flaws, the study does examine a random sample, because colonization was determined by wind currents in the days of sail, not by the amount of resources or other economic promise.)

The notion that empires might be OK is, of course, what historian Niall Ferguson is all about. (Not that I am a fan.)  It has also recently crept (in more and less sophisticated versions) onto blogs as different as Pseudo-Polymath and Marginal Revolution. Blip or trend? Threat or menace?

Amananta at Screaming into the Void remembers to be grateful--and to whom!

"'Women were given the right to vote.' This is what we are taught. The statement is often framed as such, implying that non-women--i.e., men--gave them that right. The reality of why women can vote here and in many other countries does not match this rather tepid statement. In order to win the right to vote, women have defied husbands and fathers, spoke publicly, started organizations, created newspapers, held massive protests and marches, petitioned lawmakers, were jailed for protesting, went on hunger strikes, were force-fed and sometimes died, rioted in the streets, set fire to houses of anti-suffragists, and sometimes defied the law not allowing them to vote by forcibly inserting their votes into ballot boxes. . . .

"After 72 years of protest and increasing political action, women’s ceaseless advocacy on thier own behalf hounded and shamed American political leaders into ceasing their discriminatory suffrage policy towards women. This was not a gift or a boon, but a hard-won victory. Every social and political right won by American women after this time has been won only because feminist groups consisting mainly of women have fought for that right. Women led the fight for legal contraception, for legal abortion, for equal pay, for fair treatment in school, at work, in all spheres of society. Men have NEVER led a political struggle for women’s rights--NEVER. Men as a group have been greatly resistant to the point of hostility to women’s demands for equality and freedom, both to both the women who petition for freedom and any men who side with them.

"So who is it exactly, that women should be grateful to for our freedoms? Why, to feminists, of course!"

In the words of Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."

 (Hat tip to Feminist Law Professors.)

Web designer Dan Cederholm asks himself that question over at Simple Bits, provoking a discussion about early-20th-century analogues to Web designing and the like. Does anyone else remember the science-fiction story about a medieval serf who was "strange" because he kept thinking of flying machines and fast-moving objects with wheels, things he couldn't even begin to describe so that anyone else could understand?

Interestingly, very few commenters mention what their grandparents and great-grandparents actually were doing at that time. Sometimes that makes the retro-extrapolation pretty easy: two of my three great-grandfathers were living in Chicago in 1906--one (pictured) was a former English teacher turned manuscript reader at McClurg's publishing house, the other was a stenographer/editor/translator of Swedish sermons for the Mission-Friend movement. (The third was a Methodist preacher downstate.)

Try it:

• Theodore Roosevelt is president (think Clinton's energy added to Cheney's arrogance).

• Mayor Edward F. Dunne is trying to get the City Council to take over the streetcar system.

• Cars are toys for rich people; the word itself refers to railroad cars.

• The White Sox beat the Cubs in the World Series.

• The Chicago Defender and the Industrial Workers of the World are just a year old.

• Society architect Daniel Burnham is working up a big plan.

• Jane Addams is managing Hull House, working for the reform of practices not even conservatives would defend today, and writing a book about it.

Where were "you" in 1906?

(Hat tip to kottke.org remaindered links.)

Forget "cities" and "suburbs." Purdue historian Jon Teaford plays Copernicus to the Ptolemaic epicycles that most urban observers still cling to. If you want to know what's going on, you have to silence your inner grandpa, and shake off the notion that today's city is the city of 1945 with minor adjustments.

In his new book, The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (Columbia University Press), he reminds us what urbanism was in 1945:

"The metropolis was a place with readily discernible edges, its lifestyle sharply distinguished from that of the rural 'rubes' and 'hicks,' many of whom had obtained the benefits of electricity only a decade before. Cities were in the nation's vanguard, enjoying the latest technology and defining the cutting edge in fashion and culture.  . . . Manhattan and Chicago were magnets attracting the ambitious and adventurous, those who sought to get ahead and enjoy the best in life.  . . .

"Metropolitan Americans not only perceived a single dominant focus [downtown] for urban life, but also shared common space.  . . . [R]esidents relied heavily on public transit. Middle-class men commuted to work on buses or streetcars that passed from middle-class neighborhoods through blue-collar districts, taking on working-class passengers, to the downtown area, a destination for residents from throughout the metropolis." Workers and shoppers alike shared space and depended on the ability of the city government to protect them.

We use the same words they did in 1945, but many of the referents are gone. In 2006 the metropolis has no center; most transportation is private and privatized; those who do still work or shop or visit downtown need see only their destination, and have at most a symbolic interest in what city government does or fails to do.

The limited residential revival downtown just cements Teaford's thesis that metro areas are "a sprawling mass offering a lifestyle smorgasbord." The Loop is just one dish in that restaurant. (The average urban downtown [of the 45 studied by planning expert Eugenie Birch] picked up 35,000 housing units between 1970 and 2000, while associated suburbs were gaining 13 million.)

Reformers, ignore this book at your peril! Buy and read the whole thing, or read an excerpt from the publisher.

FYI: Teaford's account lends some credibility to Wendell Cox's comment at the Heartland Institute blog, where he argues that coordinating land use and transportation will only work if the project involves more roads as well as more transit.

Photo and video links, some with more attitude than others:

• How far can you see from 500 miles above Chicago? See for yourself. 
  

• There are more weird statues in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (Hat tip to those weirdos at Slog.)

• Remember when a bumper sticker was just a bumper sticker? Visit the freeway blogger and see the entry for August 3 for some, er, carblogging.

• From the Hummer humpers' manifesto: "Those who see our actions merely as amorous displays toward a monolithic machine of our age are not looking closely enough." A variety of homemade videos.

• If you think that's offensive, stay away from this archive of old ads, a site which finds it necessary to include the following disclaimer: "This site includes historical materials that may contain negative stereotypes or language reflecting the culture or language of a particular period or place. These items are presented as part of the historical record."

• And if you think that's offensive, this is for those who, like myself, see way too much MSM and way too little Jon Stewart: an unadorned report on the roots of the Middle Eastern conflict.

Writing at the uniquely wonderful Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, Ed Darrell proposes that "Voodoo history should be suspected if two or more of the [following] signs are present":

1. The author pitches the claim directly to the media or to organizations of nonhistorians, for pay.
2. The author says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
3. The sources that verify the new interpretation of history are obscure; if they involve a famous person, the sources are not those usually relied on by historians.
4. Evidence for the history is anecdotal.
5. The author says a belief is credible because it has endured for some time, or because many people believe it to be true.
6. The author has worked in isolation.
7. The author must propose a new interpretation of history to explain an observation.

Read the whole thing, including the amusing story of the Chicago church where Abraham Lincoln supposedly said his prayers every morning during the Republican Convention of 1860. (Didn't happen.) Darrell is following a 2003 publication by Robert Park on when to suspect bogus science, available here.

But don't go overboard. Suspicion of bogosity is not proof. Sam Smith, one of the first alternative journalists and a Clinton skeptic from way back, offers "A Thinker's Guide to Conspiracy Theories," that is, theories about major events on which important facts are still missing. Key quote:

"The intelligent response to such events is to remain agnostic, skeptical, and curious. Theories may be suggested--just as they are every day about less complex and more open matters on news broadcasts and op-ed pages--but such theories should not stray too far from available evidence. Conversely, as long as serious anomalies remain, dismissing questions and doubts as a 'conspiracy theory' is a highly unintelligent response."

Chicago has a distinctive past but a familiar-sounding (i.e., ominous) future, writes DePaul sociologist John P. Koval, introducing a new collection of articles he co-edited, The New Chicago: A Social and Cultural Analysis:

"Chicago . . . is our only major city that had, from its beginning, an immigrant core contained within an immigrant skin." Unlike Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, it was never a WASP town. "It has no colonial past:  only an immigrant and industrial history and a postindustrial present." (BTW, Jacqueline Peterson paints a dizzying and unforgettable picture of Chicago's non-WASP past in "The Founding Fathers," a chapter in the book Ethnic Chicago, the first few pages of which can be read online. For the full impact you'll have to find the book.)

But the past is past. Nowadays, business needs fewer workers, and those it does need come more and more from "a radically new creation: the contingent labor force. This innovation reduces the labor force to a few 'core' jobs and, as need dictates, brings in a 'just-in-time' contingent labor force . . . . The workforce mobilized by temporary help agencies doubled in size between 1982 and 1989 and doubled again between 1989 and 1997.  One temp agency executive refers to his and other agencies as the ATM's of the job market."

The big picture? "Chicago has two different yet coexisting economies. One is a shrinking but still very much alive industrial-based economy characterized by good pay and a large white- and blue-collar middle class . . . .

"The other economy consists of service and IT occupations with a two-tiered system of inequality. The upper segment is characterized by high skill and pay, job security, and high prestige. The lower tier"--well, you know.  "The metaphor is an hourglass."

In the 1910s and 1920s, "Zoning . . . was advocated as a tool that could be used with surgical precision to alleviate problems that had plagued cities for decades," such as congestion and noise, write Joseph Schwieterman of DePaul University and coauthor Dana Caspall in The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago.

The city's landmark 1923 zoning ordinance was also supposed to create a real-estate bonanza and "rid Chicago of its image as a crowded, dirty, and corrupt city." But once zoning became law, "residents began to push their alderman and the Zoning Board of Appeals for zoning changes that would benefit them." Today much of the zoning in the city is negotiable.

And zoning reflects the conventional wisdom of the time when it was passed. In the 1960s, for instance, on-street parking became a major headache because "far more of the tenants of apartment buildings owned cars than had been expected when the city drafted its parking regulations in the mid-1950s."

Let's not forget Alderman Emil Pacini, chairman of the City Council Committee on Buildings and Zoning, who described the city's 1957 zoning ordinance as "the greatest weapon the city can use to stop the flight to the suburbs."

These are the juicy parts of the book--Schwieterman and Caspall are low-key if not bland in their approach, but the lesson shines through. Cities are not designed by experts, whatever they may think; the experts' designs are shaped by the city.

Fun: Feministing finds the most baffling abstinence poster yet.

Not so much fun:  The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals tries to put the opposition to gay marriage on a scholarly, non-bigoted, non-religious basis. Co-editors Robert George of Princeton and Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago present eleven papers delivered at a Princeton conference in December 2004.

Admiring reviewer Glenn Stanton writes in Christianity Today:

"We are moving from this natural, universal model to a greater embrace of what I call 'disembodied procreation' in same-sex unions, where sperm and egg meet only in a Petri dish and foreplay is a legal contract.  [In one article] Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, considers family changes during the past 40 years. The pill and legalized abortion, says Wilcox, have dramatically separated sex, procreation, and the larger family unit. Each now stands on its own. Undermining the need for marriage and family, these medical 'advances' have disproportionately hurt the poor."

The people making these arguments--whether they use sectarian language or not--are, technically, not bigots.  They're not just out to stigmatize gay people. They want to see a world without contraception, so that the version of marriage they grew up with can be forever frozen in amber. 

History's harder to write when it's personal.

A novice family researcher recently checked the 1930 census and learned that her grandfather was serving time in the New Jersey state prison that year. (Bootlegging during Prohibition.) Knowing that this fact would upset some cousins, she asked experienced researcher Chuck Mason what to do. Writing in the National Genealogical Society newsletter, Mason recalls counseling her to "state in her genealogy that her grandfather was living on Cass Street (where the state prison is located) in Trenton, in 1930"--thus "not putting this embarrassing information in either her genealogy or her source citations, but [still being] truthful about her grandfather."

Well, "truthy," anyway. This looks like the real-life analogue of the old chestnut about the horse thief who was hanged--and, years later, eulogized by a relative as having "passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed."

Oberlin College history professor Gary Kornblith writes that he recently asked his students to imagine a scenario:

“‘It is April 12, 1865. Richmond has fallen, and Robert E. Lee has surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. All major military operations have been completed.’ Then I wrote on the board in big letters: ‘Mission Accomplished.’ I proceeded to ask if the Civil War was really over by April 12, 1865, or whether it was just entering a new phase—one that would turn out differently than the phase of conventional warfare.”

Haw! He said “Mission Accomplished”!  . . . Of course you see where this was going, but I didn’t.

Kornblith was and is convinced that the Iraq war was a bad idea, and that the Bush administration’s blundering attempts to impose Western-style democracy on the cheap will fail.

But he also thinks that the federal government should have stayed the course during Reconstruction and done whatever it took to foster real democracy in the former Confederacy, instead of pulling out in 1877 and leaving blacks to the un-tender mercies of their former owners. (The book to read is Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.)

Of course 19th-century Mississippi is not 21st-century Iraq--history doesn’t provide any “lessons” that crudely obvious--and Kornblith hasn’t changed his mind about either one. But comparing the two episodes has made him “less confident than before about passing judgment on how others have tried to shape the world.”

Close your eyes and imagine a world in which advertising provides only hard-core factual product information like inches and pounds, nuts and bolts, cubic feet--the stuff you’d want to know if you were a (non-corrupt) business or government procurement officer.

Got it? Me neither. But Inger Stole does, because she’s dug through the papers left behind by the antiadvertising movement of the 1920s and 1930s and written a new book, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s, summarized here. (Stole teaches at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)

When today’s octogenarians were kids, there really was such a movement. The book Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollars, was a best-seller. The authors, engineer Frederick Schlink and economist Stuart Chase, wanted people to buy goods “according to impartial scientific tests rather than according to the fanfare and triumphs of higher salesmanship.” (That was a long time ago in both style and substance. Read the whole thing here if you dare.)

Today, even those who would give the advertising industry an upraised middle finger have adopted its techniques. Stole has a hard row to hoe. Even her title was used thirteen years ago, for a how-to book subtitled “Managing Your Agency for Effective Results.”

Wikipedia says that blogs combine "text, images, and links."  By that standard, the Reader has had one since August 16, 1985, when the ink for "The City File" first hit the back pages of the paper. (Check out an image of that column below.)

Of course, back then we had neither the word "blog" nor hyperlink technology. "Google" was just a way to misspell a very large number, and any reader who questioned the information in an item had to make phone calls and/or visit a public library.  But a bloggy substance was already there in that first column--short snips that referred to original sources and occasionally provoked conversation.  
 
In that first blog entry I noted that local entrepreneurs had to find venture capital in Minneapolis; today Marshall Field's is set to become Macy's, dancing to a tune played at regional headquarters in--Minneapolis. Other items back then chronicled drug-war insanity and racism in schools and public housing, and one quoted now-famous new urbanist Peter Calthorpe's case that city dwellers are doing the environment a favor just by . . . being city dwellers.  

The medium has changed, but the stroboscopic alternation of insight and idiocy goes on.