How the Post Office Created America

How the Post Office Created America:  A History
© 2016 Winifred Gallagher
336 pages

Once the conduit of revolution, then a mainstay of communities both rural and urban, the post office has fallen on rough times as of late.   Amid speculation that its services may be ended altogether, Winifried Gallagher offers a praiseful history of the US postal service, arguing that it helped the colonies establish independence and a national identity, preserved it as its citizens expanded west, and advanced the American dream by opening itself to women and ethnic minorities earlier than any other branch of the federal leviathan.  How the Post Office Created America  delivers a social history of the United States, centered on the post office but not limited to it, Gallagher also explores how the postal service influenced American culture, from  encouraging a republic of letter-writers to the inclusion of Mr. McFeely of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. (Kidding about that last one. In a grievious oversight, the author neglects to so much as mention the much-loved postman.)

The story begins with Ben Franklin and Benjamin Rush, who believed that a good postal service was essential to the republican experiment.   A republic needed informed citizens; informed citizens needed ready information. In those days that meant newspapers, and their circulation was promoted by heavily subsidized rates. How subsidized? In a day when a letter cost $0.50 to make it from New York to New Orleans, a newspaper could make the same trip for $0.015.   In days before telegraphs, let alone telephones and the internet,  the mail service was a vital part of everyday life. Alexis de Tocqueville marveled that even in the frontier, rural villages received mail at least once a week.

Gallagher largely focused on the 19th century, that fascinating period in which the early republic transformed  and filled an entire continent. In its beginnings, the postal service consisted of men on horseback, delivering saddlebags to general stores where the proprietor was also the local postmaster.   A century later,  the postal service had massive infrastructure and had literally redrawn the political map, as homes were given distinct addresses and later ZIP codes to allow for efficient and accurate delivery. Gallagher marks key points in the postal service's evolution,  from the adoption of rural and city free delivery to the implementation of stamps. The postal service's  pricing scheme inadvertently promoted both cheap paperbacks (they could be shipped as periodicals) and the first reams of junk mail.  The early embrace of the railroad system created a golden age for the post office, and the trains themselves offered the unique ability to sort mail in the process of transportation.  The postal service effectively subsidized the creation of American commercial aviation,  as all of the early airlines relied on mail contracts to establish themselves to the point that they could build passenger service.  As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the post office became more professional in its organization;  early administrations used it to reward their friends, giving away pork positions to their cronies, but the "spoils" system was largely dismantled in favor of a more meritocratic one, with post office employees required to sit for a civil service examination.

As American society became more technologically complex, with sophisticated transportation and communication networks, the postal service's   prominence faded. Early on, Americans debating the nature of the post office decided that while it wasn't a business that had to support itself solely on its income, it did need to support itself as much as possible while at the same time being supported enough by the public to keep pace with rural expansion. In the 20th century,  with the country fully developed and competing networks now in existence, the debate over its future and nature resurfaced.  The hybrid public-private elements of the office created conflicts of interest:   if the institution was expected to support itself like a business, it was only fair that it be allowed the same freedom of action as other businesses, like expanding its services. At the same time, it was hardly proper for a publicly-funded entity to go into competition against private citizens by offering commercial photocopying and banking.  Gallagher notes that the post office has been increasingly weakened by recession and constrained by Congress , to the point that it seems to be headed for insolvency. She urges readers to take stock of the post office's long, pivotal role in American history and urge their local congresscritter  to take action.

While I strongly doubt the post office will disappear,  business as usual certainly can't last for long.  The volume of mail sent by Americans continues to fall by the year,  especially  lucrative first class mail.  Parcel delivery is up, as the private  shippers sometimes use the USPS as their last-leg for home deliveries, but that's only a small contribution to the bottom line.  At any rate, How the Post Office Created America is a fun social history, albeit one written by someone who is not a historian but  who seems to write pop-nonfiction.  That's not a criticism -- I'm a generalist myself, and have to appreciate someone whose books cover attention, the post office, the power of place,  houses, God, heredity,  novelty,  and purses. 

Related "Making of America"-esque books:
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph, Tom Standage
Empires of Light:  Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World,  Jill Jonnes
The Great Railroad Revolution, Christian Wolmar

Related:
Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West,  Phillip Fradkin. Wells Fargo established itself as a rival against the postal service, which struggled in a way to achieve fast service between California and the eastern US.

Poetry Night at the Ballpark

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America

© 2015 Bill Kauffman

442 pages

 “Lift up your hearts, friends – America ain’t dead yet.”  For thirty years, Bill Kauffman has been blowing raspberries at or haranguing the politics of empire – mocking and condemning all things swollen and centralized, and cheering on the local and small.  This interestingly-titled volume collects a diverse amount of Kauffman’s writings, from  biographical sketches of eccentric American figures to literary reviews, with all manner of opinion pieces in between. It is an anthology that celebrates the little America outside of New York and Los Angeles, the America that breathes when the television is turned off.  If you have read any Kauffman before, or even read a review of Kauffman – or for that matter, the first two sentences of this review –  the general temper won’t  be a surprise. But Poetry Night at the Ballpark, while consistent with Kauffman’s usual spirit,  collects so many different kinds of writing that even his fans will find surprises here, and delivered with his usual fondness for amusing or provocative titles. Some of the sectional collections are definitely unexpected, like a series written about holidays (in which he champions Arbor Day over Earth Day, for instance)  and…some space-themed writing.   The sections called “Pols”, “Home Sweet Home”, and “The America That Lost” are more of his usual fare.  I’ve been reading Kauffman’s columns at the Front Porch Republic and other sources to have seen  and remembered a few of these – a favorite is 2012’s “Who Needs a President?” in which he revisits the antifederalist arguments against an executive office.

In Poetry Night at the Ballpark, Kuaffman introduces a multitude of forgotten individuals, all with their quirks, and recounts stories from American history which have been largely forgotten.  Take those arrogant Roosevelts – T.R.  tried to inflict a new kind of spelling on the entire nation, in one of the first examples of the Oval Office obviously unhinging whoever sat in it.  (Actually, considering the west wing was constructed during Teddyboy’s reign, maybe he was already unhinged and imbued it with his spirit.)    Franklin Roosevelt also moved Thanksgiving hither and yon hoping to create more shopping days for Christmas,  beginning the occasion’s slow  but total conquest by Christmas.  As varied as the essays are, they’re reliably grounded in Kauffman’s love for the small, local, and particular, be it movies or baseball. He begins  in and titles his  book   at the local ballpark , cheering on his hometown’s boys,  but has no use whatsoever for the major leagues, whose local connections are abstract, and who are oriented  towards money than  love of the game;   sports and home intersect in  his section on movies, where he calls for films that tell local stories with a local flavor, and comments at length on Hoosiers as a small-town classic.

I make no secret of liking Kauffman, and for me this book was like encountering him  at a bar and sticking around to  hear some salty stories of odd characters and fun stories, as well as some good old-fashioned belly-aching about the soulless suits in power.  It’s not as focused as his other work, so it’s best read by people who have already encountered Kauffman before – unless a first-timer opens the book in the store, finds themselves drawn in by his playful pen, and has to sit down to experience a bit more.

If you'd like a taste of Kauffman, one of my favorite speeches by him is called "Love is the Answer to Empire" That title links to a written version.

" [Walt Whitman] understood that any healthy political or social movement has to begin, has to have its heart and soul, at the grass roots. In Kansas, not on K Street.

"And it has to be based in love. Love not of some remote abstraction, some phantasm that exists only on the television screen—Ford Truck commercials and Lee Greenwood songs—but love of near things, things you can really know and experience. The love of a place and its people: their food, their games, their literature, their music, their smiles.

"I am a localist, a regionalist. To me, the glory of America comes not from its weaponry or wars or a mass culture that is equal parts stupidity, vulgarity, and cynical cupidity—one part 'The View,' one part Miley Cyrus, and a dollop of Rush Limbaugh—rather, it is in the flowering of our regions, our local  cultures. Our vitality is in the little places—city neighborhoods, town squares—the places that mean nothing to those who run this country but that give us our pith, our meaning."

The Republic of Imagination

The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Other edition subtitle: A Case for Fiction
© 2014 Azar Nafisi
352 pages

When Azar Nafisi taught literature in Iran, she dreamed of America. Not the United States, the government of which had been making itself decidedly unpopular in Iran, but "America" -- an idea, a dream, where people were free to pursue their own lives, to grow and flourish without a shah or a thought-police militia's interference.  She discovered and explored this America via its literature,  an experience which is partially shared in her Reading Lolita in Tehran.  When she came to the United States to teach literature, another Iranian immigrant disgustedly told her that these people were not what she was looking for. Americans weren't passionate about literature the way Iranians were -- not even their own.   Although Nafisi rejected his resignation,  the fate of the humanities - literature, particularly --  weighs on her in writing this, and the experiences that she and others have had wrestling with American literature are offered here as proof of what serious engagement with literature can provide.

Nafisi's subtitle, America in Three Books, takes reader through Huckleberry Finn,   Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, and Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  Nafisi describes all of these as subversive, and links them as Individualist experiences --  the individual against conformity, consumerism, and their own lonely anguish.  My own experience with American literature has been so paltry that I haven't read two of the three books mentioned,  but Nafisi's strikes me as a fair take on Huckleberry Finn -- both because he resists being 'sivilized' and shut up in doors, and because his instinctive human sympathy for a friend of his outweighs the dictum of the day that his friend is a slave who should be punished for escaping.   Nafisi's intent is to connect themes in literature with our lives, so amid the literary discussion are events from Nafisi's life, and conversations (or arguments) she has had with Americans and Iranians. Those who have read Lolita in Tehran will remember the style from that book. Nafisi's deep love of literature puts her slightly at odds with the political currents she is otherwise sympathetic to: she abhors the knee-jerk reaction the academy has to classics, of automatically dismissing them because they are old and by the wrong people.  Literary criticism has missed the point altogether; instead of embracing works like a friend or lover to relate with, the books are beaten to death and the corpses picked at..  (To borrow from Douglas Adams:  “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.")  Similarly, she is not a friend of the 'common core', and its sterile treatment of education as nothing more than mounds of Gradgrind facts to memorize.

When I first heard this title, it resonated with me, making me think of both the Greek cosmopolis -- an ideal republic admitting all with reason as citizens -- and another republic, one that absorbing a tradition makes us a member of, allowing us to learn and fight with a lecture from Cicero, or an argument from Aquinas or de Montaigne. Nafisi's conviction that literature unites people across political boundaries led me on, however, as her republic of the imagination is a little more ethereal. It's a place where people escape to -- a place where people can find connection even if they live in a dehumanizing state. But it's not merely a place of escape; in her epilogue, Nafisi admonishes those who demand trigger warnings on books and cry out for safe places. The world is not a safe space.  Even if you live in a perfectly bland place, a Pleasantview right out of 1950s television, you may fall in love or lose a parent or find yourself facing some other emotional storm. Literature, Nafisi argues, prepares us for these storms: it fixes our feet, steels our spine, clears our mind.   We must embrace its challenges, not shrivel away from them.

While I suspect anyone reading a book subtitled America in Three Books would already regard fiction as important,  for me this was a welcome exposure to a couple of books I've only heard a little about,  an encouraging reminder about the universality of good literature.

Related:
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, Fatehmeh Keshavarz

The Irish Soldiers of Mexico

The Irish Soldiers of Mexico
© 1997 Michael Hogan
298 pages

And it was there in the pueblos and the hillsides
That I saw the mistake I had made
Part of a conquering army, with the morals of a bayonet brigade
And amidst all these poor dying Catholics --
Screaming children, the burning stench of it all --
Myself and two hundred Irishmen decided to rise to the call
From Dublin City to San Diego,  we witnessed freedom denied
So we formed the St. Patrick Battalion and we fought on the Mexican side.
("The St. Patrick's Battalion", David Rovics)

One discovers the oddest stories through music.  Take this, for instance -- the story of a few hundred Irish immigrants to the United States, who shortly after participating in the invasion of Mexico, decided to defend it instead. They fought valiantly in five battles, flying the green flag of St. Patrick,  and their survivors continued to serve Mexico even after the war as a check against brigandry.  To the United States, they are an embarrassment best forgotten, a blotch on the United States' first military adventure outside of strict self-defense. To Mexico, they are red-headed heroes: they are the San Patricos.  The Irish Soldiers of Mexico  makes the best of scarce resources and supplies generous background information to give the fighting Irish their deserved laurels.

Hogan grounds the decision of the Irish to bolt in both race and religion. Prior to the waves of European immigration in the late 19th century, the early Republic shared England's pride in its Anglo-Saxon heritage, complete with varying degrees of disdain or contempt for non-Saxons. Prejudice against the Irish was as pronounced as it might be against blacks or Native Americans, at least until so many Irish came over that they begin blending in.   The early Republic was also expressedly  Protestant in its religion,  viewing the Catholic church as Old World and un-American as it was possible to be. Even Maryland, established as a Catholic sanctuary and home to the largest landowner of the founders, Charles Carroll, was quickly taken over by Protestantism.   The abuse incurred by the Irish for both their Celtic blood and their Catholic region kept a barrier up between them and the affection they might have had for their adopted country, and made them sympathetic to the plight of Mexico -- what was Ireland, but a poor nation of Catholics, dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestants who regarded its inhabitants as fit only for serfs?   The abhorrent behavior exhibited by the invading US Army -- the same abhorrent behavior exhibited by virtually every invading army anywhere,  in which men are replaced by uniformed chimpanzees bent on looting, raping, and burning --  coupled with the seemingly deliberate attack on Mexican churches forced the Irish to make a decision. Who would they keep faith with? Their paymasters, or the people of Mexico, whose plight was so much like the Irish?

Although this book concerns a military battalion, it is not principally military history; what we know  based on  terse US records and  Mexican records (reduced by fire, unfortunately) is that the San Patricios were particularly noted for their work on the cannons. In one battle, after Mexican troops had exhausted their ammunition, the Irish fought to the last, recovering their compadres' retreat.  Those San Patricios who were captured were put to death in a gruesome manner -- not shot as soldiers, but incompetently hung after standing at attention for four hours, or beaten with the lash in excess of the Articles of War.  Half the book's volume is given over to notes, and much of its content proper explores the racial and religion aspects of the Irish stand. While this information is slight, this is an often-overlooked chapter in the Mexican war, one that Irish Americans in particular should note with interest.

Related:
Green, Blue, and Grey: The Irish in the American Civil War, Cal McCarthy

The Lost Continent

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
© 1989 Bill Bryson

When I read The Road to Little Dribbling, full of Bryson complaining and thinking murderously about people who so much as annoyed him, I returned it disappointed. "Bryson's turned into a real crank," I thought. The Lost Continent makes me think he's always been that way, he just hides it better in some books than others.

This book chronicles Bryson's attempt to apparently re-live his childhood road trips, often following the very routes his father chose to get lost on in those bygone summers. That can only be a beginning, however, because by the end of the book he has visited (or at least zoomed through) all but eight of the 48 states, Hawaii and Alaska being frauds. Although billed as a tour of small-town America, he zooms through several larger cities as well. (One, Los Angeles, is pointedly avoided.) The book consists of Bryson chattering along as he drives, recounting stories of his family's travel misadventures, complaining about the view (or rarely, admiring it), or venturing into completely irrelevant terrain. When he is not being an utter pill -- heaping scorn on any development that is not a 18th century mansion, or raging against locals for being ignorant, too friendly, too suspicious, etc, Bryson can be funny. To an extent he's funny when attacking people, but it grows obnoxious after a while.

Related:
I'm a Stranger Here, Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years, Bill Bryson

Florida Under Five Flags

Florida Under Five Flags
© 1945 Rembert Patrick
160 pages

Note: I read from the 1st edition. This cover is from the 5th edition,  which has been updated and presumably revised.

The State of Florida entered the Union in 1845; in 1945, presumably as a centennial celebration, Florida Under Five Flags was published to provide an outline history of the state, from its beginnings as a Spanish frontier post through to the 'present day'. It is a history which can be enjoyed in a single evening, and is amply illustrated with historical art depicting cities like St. Augustine and Jacksonville; photographs of street scenes and prominent personalities are also included.

Florida titular historical accomplishment is having been an object of contention between virtually every European power with an eye toward American colonization. (Fernandina Beach cheekily claims to be the city of eight flags.)  The Spanish arrived first, though Ponce de Leon perished amid his explorations. The French were the first to plant a settlement, though the Spanish bloodily drove them out and began establishing a fuller colony, one with several towns and a network of missions. While Florida was expensive for the Spanish to maintain, its forts were crucial in protecting access to Mexico and the rest of "New Spain". The English quickly took an interest in Florida, but despite capturing the city of St. Augustine, were unable to triumph over its fortress, the Castille de San Marcos. What eluded them in combat was won in treaties, however, and Spanish Florida became British-controlled West and East Florida -- governed from Pensacola and St. Augustine, respectively. Florida flourished under British rule, but would be ceded back to Spain following the American Revolution. Amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic years, Louisiana and Florida were both juggled by France and Spain, and the aggressive interest of the nearby United States made selling the land more feasible than defending it into the poorhouse.

Florida, having been depopulated virtually every time it switched hands, began attracting settlement from the Southern coast; the multitude of planters from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas who took a part in creating a new American state meant that despite Florida's radically different climate, in culture it was part of the South, and would follow where the southern states led. That meant secession only twenty years after becoming formal members of the Union. Florida's ports were immediately targeted by the Union navy, falling before the war was even a year old, but Florida itself was spared most of the devestation of the conflict. Only a few minor skirmishes occured within the state, mostly over the control of salt-works. Florida was still subjected to Reconstruction, but plagued by corruption that set back genuine progress for decades. Florida soon recovered, and as railroads unified the state and linked it more firmly to the rest of the county, its cities began growing all the more. A once economically-sleepy peninsula home only to rude huts and subsistence agriculture had been transformed into a prosperous State, one which played an important role in the Spanish American war and which was poised to participate even more fully in American life.

I read this principally interested in colonial Florida. While it is only an outline history, the narrative is perfectly enjoyable as a story. I suspect parts of it would be rendered differently were it published in the modern era, particularly the author's mere mild condemnation of slavery. I didn't realize how long Florida took to become fully "settled"; the author writes that Florida's frontier wasn't closed until 1920. A book published so long ago is arguably irrelevant for understanding modern Florida, considering how radically it has changed in demographics, culture, and in its standing with the rest of the Union -- but as a survey of Florida's early history, it is perfectly enjoyable and helpful.

Original cover:

A scene from colonial St. Augustine.

The Chinese in America

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History
© 2003 Iris Chang
558 pages

Like most Americans, my earliest notion of the Chinese in America is an association with the Transcontinental railroad. As it happened, their story begins before that, with the California gold rush. Poor Chinese men, having caught wind of the bonanza in California, made their way to "Gold Moutain" in hopes  of making a fortune and returning to China with it. While many hit the jackpot and returned, still others made another home in America, becoming actors in its story. In The Chinese in America,  Iris Chang superbly runs together three threads:  a history of China, as the decline of the last empire and the resulting civil strife (including war)  created a need for opportunities and safety to be found abroad;   the history of the United States,  lassoing in the West and needing all the railroad men, miners, and farmers it could get;  and the story of the generations who traveled from one nation to the other, attempting to adjust to a new country without losing their heritage.   It is an admirable story of perseverance amid bewilderment and hardship.

 The earliest Chinese visitors to the United States came not to flee wicked oppression in China, but to make money on Gold Mountain and go home rich men.    A few did strike it lucky and retire wealthy, but many more stayed. Although most of the Chinese who settled in the United States remained on the west coast, not all congregated in urban Chinatowns. They searched for opportunity wherever it might be found; working farms and ranches, mines and railroads, and - occasionally -- even finding their way to New England and the South.   There, despite racially-orientated legislation, they found tacit acceptance, safe in their ambiguous status.  That changed in the 1870s,  when a depression set teeth on edge and prompted unemployed laborers to blame the cheap labor flooding in from the East.   The Chinese Exclusion Act followed, barring most immigration from Asia. Strict quotas were imposed, and only certain professions were entirely welcome.    The Exclusion act would hold until the 1940s, when the United States and the Chinese people became allies, both targets of Japanese imperialism.  (Shortly after World War 2, racial limitations on immigration were ended altogether. even as the war and those which followed generated anti-Asian prejudice)  As one generation pushed the frontier by breaching the Rocky Mountains, linking the coasts and allowing agriculture to prosper in the west, another stretched it still further in aviation and software engineering. Chang doesn't limit herself to politics and economics; a strong reliance on oral history imparts a good dose of social history, as well, like the evolution of  "Chinese" food.

The Chinese-American story is not one I have any experience with -- the South's Asian population is predominately Korean and Vietnamese, at least in my neck of the woods. What little I knew came from histories of San Francisco (particularly Good Life in Hard Times, with a section on Chinese gangs).  This  was, then, a welcome introduction to another aspect of America's mosaic.

America First

America First: Its History, Culture, and Politics
© 1995 Bill Kauffman
296 pages

For slightly over a year prior to the attack at Pearl Harbor, there existed a civic organization of nearly a million people called the America First Committee. It dedicated itself to stymieing the attempts of D.C. and Hollywood to embroil the United States in yet another European war  Despite its name, this book isn’t about them, though Kauffman does honor their heritage in the expanse of people it celebrates here. America First hails writers and politicians commenting on not just foreign policy, but the American spirit.   Here collected are the broadsides and literary stabs of men and women from across the political spectrum, from across the country,  from across income brackets -- who have resisted the idea that America needs to be great to be wonderful.  Politically, their concerns are straightforward: they are against foreign wars and against involvement in organizations that jeopardize American sovereignty. This isn’t merely a rehash of Ain’t my America, with added rebukes for NATO;  instead, Kauffman  shares the ardent love of these writers for America in itself via literary reflection. These authors don’t love it for what it could be – a global player, even a global savior – but for what it is, a vast land of beauty and promise, with a healthy individualistic tradition that protects people not only from the state, but the danger of social smothering.

Kauffman begins in the early 20th century, examining the populist and progressive backgrounds of many who later joined America First. They included Amos Pinchot, written out of the Progressive movement for his strident anti-imperialism. (The rough riding-Caesar, Teddy, referred to him as the party's lunatic fringe.)  Teddy's pistol-packing  daughter Alice Roosevelt also appears,  vexed at both Wilson's League of Nations and her cousin's entire administration. After the war, Kauffman pivots again to literary types -- Jack Kerouac and that magnificent son of the desert, Ed Abbey. Another dear fellow, Wendell Berry, is quoted a few times. (One reason I'm so fond of Kauffman, besides his punchy writing filled with words like katzenjammer: we're both fond of men like those two, plus Dorothy Day.)  Kauffman finishes the book with a section on the contemporary of this 'peculiar nationalism', one that wants to celebrate America as America, not as another frustrated and penniless empire. Writing in the early 1990s, he saw in the campaign of Ross Perot great promise. Here at last was a sign that Americans were escaping the bonds of the establishment -- and there were other kooky fellows like Pat Buchanan waiting to do their part, too.  (Buchanan is hailed as convert to the cause; while previously supporting military adventures in Grenada, he's since written numerous books  urging Americans to focus on the home front --  protecting American industry, discouraging immigration, etc.)  Twenty years later, here we are again, faced with the most depressing candidates in American history.

The high point of America First are the long-forgotten authors whom Kauffman exhumes. Hamlin Garland, Amos Pinchot, Harold Frederic -- who knows these names, other than Kauffman and his readers?  On the low end, a fair few of the people chronicled here carry  the faint aroma of xenophobia.  To their wholly-legitimate fear of railroad monopolies (who controlled their only means of getting produce to market) and of banks (to whom they were often in hock), they added the specter of immigrants with strange cultures swelling the ranks of New York  voting machines, or surging into the heartland and taking what few opportunities were there.  "Americanism" had its dark side, manifested most obviously in the Klan -- who, in their 1920s iteration, seduced many by targeting outsiders. Kauffman doesn't mention this, and while he always acknowledges racial tinges to populist criticism, he doesn't dwell on it. He is more interested in the quiet pride and content people can take in simply being home, in taking solace in the simple pleasures like good company and a family recipe for blackberry cobbler.   Kauffman's own embrace of homebodies from across political camps -- he is a localist with an affection for Gene Debs, who always won his conservative hometown's presidential devotes on the merits of his being a good neighbor --  is well reflected in one chapter's closing remarks:

Who should 'run' America? No one. Or 250 million single individuals.[...] As Americans from Emerson to Mencken have known, following leaders is a fool's game. Only when we restore to Americans their birthright -- local self-government in prideful communities that respect the liberties of every dentist and Baptist and socialist and lesbian and hermit and auto parts dealer -- will we remember what it means to be an American, first."

In commenting on the Harold Frederic novel for which he did a screenplay, Copperhead, Kauffman wrote that the essential tragedy of the story was that its characters had lost sight of the human. They contended against one another not as neighbors, but as ideological nemeses.  That is how the Civil War nearly destroyed their town -- not by artillery fire, but by the fire of their self-righteous rage.   While American money and attention is constantly devoted to defending Europe, defending  southeast Asia, managing the middle east,  and policing the seven seas, there's little time or opportunity for tending to each other.

Related:

• Copperhead, Harold Frederics
• Selected Quotations from America First!

Turbulent Skies

Turbulent Skies: The History of Commercial Aviation
© 1995 T. H. Heppenheimer
408 pages

What a century was the 20th, which turned everyday life into the stuff of yesteryear's science fiction. Who would believe at its dawning that one day people would travel the world primarily through the air, soaring through it in great machines made of iron?  Turbulent Skies is a history of commercial aviation in the United States, Great Britain, and (occasionally) Europe. Part of the Sloan Technology Series, it mixes business and social history with extensive commentary on aviation engineering.  Between the generous expanses devoted to airframe and compressor problems to the play-by-play of mergers and expansion plans, Turbulent Skies is a through bit of reference reading.   The author includes as many diagrams of jet engines as he does of the planes themselves, which I found curious.

Turbulent Skies largely focuses on the United States, with occasional chapters on Britain and a few mentions of French and German development.  The chapter on World War 2 features Germany heavily, but this is not a book of aerial strategy; instead, Heppenheimer records the respective powers'  pursuit of jet technology.  (Germany was able to produce the Me-262, a potential fighter that was thankfully squandered as a light bomber.  Considerable resources were diverted from planes to the V2 bombing programs,  again mercifully.)   What leaps out in Turbulent Skies is how utterly the creature of government air travel is. Unlike trains, which had their origin in commercial mining, the first air-commerce companies in the United States  balanced their budgets on mail contracts.  The world wars were likewise a boon to aviation, producing technologies like radar that were put to use in the consumer market. The amount of airplanes produced for military service and then dumped onto the consumer market likewise produced a multitude of small companies buying planes for pennies and trying to build regional empires.  The government  also bankrolled municipal airports and then forbade city governments from making a fuss about the noise. (Mind your business, peasants...)

With such support behind it, little wonder the airplanes had a quick triumph over their transport rivals, the train companies. (The quickness of aerial ascent is made obvious in the life of Juan Trippe: he created Pan-Am in the early days of aviation, and was still its lord and master when the 747 was created.) Of course, air travel had honest advantages -- speed and novelty.  Passenger ships also lost out to the planes, but the industry as a whole survived by shifting its focus to cruises. The seagoing experience, rather than being a comfortable means of transportation, became instead a vacation in itself: the ship was the party.  (Heppenheimer doesn't mention this, but trains tried doubling-down on luxury, too; unfortunately, toodling along at 30 mph speed limits inside cities isn't quite as relaxing as cruising the Caribbean.)     The happy days didn't last forever, though; in the 1970s, oil crises and recession saw some of the mainstays begin to flounder and perish.  The most notable death, prolonged until 1991, was Pan-Am. It  achieved early success by focusing on connecting the United States to the outside world, snagging a government-granted monopoly of the  Central-South American routes.   The recession and energy spike caught Pan-Am at just the wrong time, when it was borrowing billions to launch a vast period of expansion with 747s.  Perhaps it will be revived when we begin passenger service to the Moon.

Though informative, casual readers should be aware this is more about technology and business contracts than the social/human side of air transport.

Related:
Getting There: The Epic Battle Between Road and Rail, Stephen Goddard
The Great Railroad Revolution, Christian Wolmar

How the Scots Invented the Modern World

How the Scots Invented the Modern World:The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It 
© 2001  Arthur Herman
400 pages

An elderly patron at the library has adopted me as his go-to source for history books. These days he merely arrives at my desk and announces, "You know what I like. Let's find something!". As a reward for my literary services, he decided to lend me one of his books, How the Scots Invented the Modern World.   As it happens, I know very little about Scottish history, except in connection with English and American history -- so I dived in, and found it a most interesting book.  At its best, it's a history and reflection on the Scottish enlightenment, sweeping enough to bring to mind Will Durant's approach for history.  The author addresses -- for starters -- religion, philosophy, architecture, politics, economics, and literature. At a middling level, it's social history of a sort, recounting the Scottish experience in America in a manner very much like previous books I've read on the Scots-Irish.  At its most trivial, it is merely a narrative recollection of this Scotsman inventing this and that Scotsman inventing that, and oh, by the way, that fellow invented steamboats in America, and he was born in Scotland.   Fortunately, How the Scots Invented the Modern World is only trivial toward the end.

 The bulk of the book is taken up with Scotland's intellectual and economic development as a developed and 'enlightened' nation, though the author favors those who celebrated Scotland's romanticized wildness, like Sir Walter Scott.   Some very familiar names, like David Hume and Adam Smith appear here, along with names wholly new to me, like Francis Hutcheson.  These figures do not appear sans context; instead, their arguments are rooted in Scotland's political history, from the various revolts against Anglicanism and Catholic kings, to Scotland's matrimonial bond to England.  In the authors view, Scotland was not a victim of empire, but helped author it, and indeed we see Scots exploring Africa,  arguing for a remolding of India in the British form, and penetrating deep into the American interior as Scots-Irish settlers.

I would recommend this book solely on the treatment of Enlightenment-era political philosophy along, as the author is strongest here. That section won me over despite some early black marks, as when he identified a founder of the Jesuits as a figure of the Reformation, and declared that the Protestant revolution made the Bible no longer a closed book.  Now anyone could hear it read, or read it themselves. What were they up to at church in the centuries prior, playing tiddlywinks?  The entire structure of Judeo-Catholic-Orthodox liturgical tradition is based on the reading of scripture! Still, the author managed to redeem himself wonderfully after that.


Related:
The Scotch-Irish:  A Social History,  James Leyburn
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, Jim Webb
How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill

Miracle at Midway

Miracle at Midway
© 1983 Gordon Prange, Donald Goldstein and,Katherine Dillon,
512 pages

Miracle at Midway is a thorough history of the June 4-7 effort of the Japanese to simultaneously seize the most likely U.S. approaches to the Empire and lure the US Pacific Fleet into a general engagement wherein it might be destroyed in total. Though colossally outnumbered in ships, the US Navy and Army Air Forces on Midway island had a slight advantage in planes which was used to enormous effect; in this David and Goliath battle, the Japanese carriers were the object of a surgical strike, though one of dive-bombers instead of stones. While there was definitely an element of luck on the American side -- one Japanese carrier's planes were caught pants down, trying to refuel and re-arm -- Midway was a victory of intelligence and courage more than fate. Although suffering from a paucity of maps, the authors bring extensive analysis and heavy research into the Japanese side to the table as well. Midway is one of the more important battles of the second World War, at least for Americans: just six months after the humiliating surprise of Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Fleet had utterly reversed its fortunes, destroying in a day the pride of the Japanese imperial fleet. Dai Nippon lost not only four carriers, but hundreds of planes and thousands of veteran men whose talents and experience could not be replaced. It's also an extraordinary moment in the history of naval warfare, the first battle in which the competing surface fleets never saw one another but through their air wings.

Men from Earth

Men from Earth
© 1989 Buzz Aldrin and Malcom McConnell
314 pages

Forty-seven years ago, men from Earth first stepped foot on the moon. There, they left medals commemorating the men of Apollo and Soyuz who perished in this quest for fire in the sky, and a plaque that declared their intentions: "We came in peace for all mankind."    Buzz Aldrin was one of the first men to step foot upon the grey dust of the lunar surface, and in this account -- published in 1989,  twenty years after the triumph of Apollo -- he provides a history of the early space race, a memoir of his own time in the Gemini and Apollo programs, and a final thought about the future.

While there is no shortage of astronaut memoirs, Aldrin's intrigued me at the start because I knew from other books that he  helped create the orbital rendezvous procedures that were practiced in Gemini and essential to pulling Apollo off.  The astronauts weren't just fighter jocks: advanced degrees were required of any astronaut candidate. While the account of the first-ever lunar landing is interesting in its own right, Aldrin attempts to record the whole of the space race. Not only does he devote early chapters to the beginning of German, American, and Russian rocketry, but throughout the book he follows developments on the Soviet side as well.  He draws from other books here,  then-recent scholarship. While sometimes the supporting authors are forced to speculate, given Soviet secrecy, the look across the iron curtain is most welcome. Both programs were beset with similar problems -- not only technical, but political, as program coordinators were being pushed for results by their respective governments for moral and propaganda purposes.

Aldrin's writing is detailed, but shouldn't scare off readers who are wary of too much technical detail. The descriptive writing is sound -- not poetic, but it's hard to compete with A Man on the Moon on that note.  One  sight is especially well conveyed, the eerie and abrupt transition of light when Armstrong and Aldrin left the shadow cast by their lander. According to Aldrin, the effect was total: if he stepped out of the shadow and cast his arm behind him back into it, it almost seem to disappear into another realm.  There was no transition between dark and light; when they left the shadow, the blinding drama was though they'd transported from the depths of Carlsbad Caverns into the middle of the Sahara. Also of note here is a final chapter, covering '1969-2009'.    Writing in the eighties, when the shuttle fleet was active and routine, with the International Space Station still in the future, Aldrin seemed  disappointed but optimistic. He is wary of the Soviets, who continue to support manned spaceflight. While they would collapse within a year or so of this book being published, these days NASA astronauts still hitch rides with Soyuz up to the ISS, so Aldrin's concern is not that far off.   Aldrin remains a space booster, recently writing a book encouraging a manned mission to Mars.

Men from Earth is a shorter history of the space race than A Man on the Moon,  but if you're looking for a history of Apollo as whole it might not satisfy,. He ends with Apollo 11, and some of the most interesting lunar missions -- scientific endeavors with go-karts! -- were thus not mentioned. Still, for a recap of Mercury and Gemini it's quite good, and especially so when the coverage of the Russians is taken into account.

Related:

• Two Sides of the Moon, Alexei Leonov and David Scott. Joint memoir between an astronaut and a cosmonaut. 
• A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikan. The definitive Apollo history. 

A Country Called Amreeka

A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold through Arab-American Lives
Alternate subtitle: Arab Roots, American Stories
© 2009 Alia Malek
320 pages

I discovered  A Country Called Amreeka while looking for the film Amreeka, the story of a Palestinian woman who emigrates to the United States with her son Fadi.  (Trailer) Ms. Malek's book is a history of thousands of men and women who have made the same journey, escaping civil war and poverty by journeying to America.  Ms. Malek does not endeavor to give a survey of Arab immigration to the United States spanning a century, as the title hints she may; instead, she uses the personal stories of various families to visit  20th century American history through their eyes.  The book begins with American factories soliciting immigration from Europe, and unexpectedly receiving it from Greece, Syria, and other areas around the Med's eastern rim.  Although these first Arabs would draw the wrath of nativists like the Klan for both their appearances and their faith (the Syrians were predominately Catholics),  these first immigrants largely sought assimilation within the American melting pot.  Later and larger waves coincided with the civil rights movement within the United States, and total assimilation was resisted.  America's foreign policy in the same period gave Arab-Americans from diverse countries a cause to unite around, chiefly opposing the United States government's unqualified support of Israel.

The collection of stories here has quite a few  strengths; the heavy use of Christian Arabs, which runs against American media stereotypes;   a few interesting tales like an Arab-American soldier in the Iraq war, or the two women who fought fiercely for opposite sides in the Bush-Gore presidential battle. (Set as it was before 2003, how strange now to think of Bush being courted by Arab-American civil associations..)  The book suffers from an over-emphasis on politics,   with more ink devoted to Palestine than the Arab-American immigrant experience.  Considering that the author is a civil rights attorney who once worked in the West Bank, the focus isn't surprising. Still, more interesting information filters through this repetition: in Michigan, for instance, Arab auto workers went on strike against their union after it began buying Israeli bonds with dues money.  While a book like this is presumably useful to hypothetical Americans who think everyone in the middle east gets around on a camel,  what it mostly amounts to is accounts of Arabs experiencing racism during events like the hostage crisis and the post 9/11 period, and then fighting for Palestine through political activism.  While these are aspects that deserve thought, there is far more to life -- and to the immigrant experience -- than mere politics.

Our America

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States
© 2014  Felipe Fernández-Armesto
416 pages

Spain disappears from American history books following the Spanish-American war, in which the tired old empire was given a sound thrashing and retreated from the hemisphere, but Spanish America isn't a thing of the past.  Its heritage is older than English America, not only because the Spanish arrived first but because Spanish colonialism fused itself with the peoples and culture which it found.  Our America is a history of Spanish America, principally Mexico,  delivered from the rare perspective of a Spaniard raised partially in England.  While not nearly as sweeping as Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in the United States,  it offers abounding detail on the Anglo-Spanish struggle for power, first around the Gulf Coast and then later in the southwest as English colonies developed their own identity and ambition.  It is problematic, in that a Spanish Brit spends the book lecturing a American audience on what being 'American' is, but the perspective is unusual and at times refreshing.

Fernández-Armesto examines American history not from the east to the west -- which is how, in fact, the history of the United States as a government unfolded -- but from south to north.  He sees the United States as more colonial than European, and interprets affairs like the Revolution and the Civil War as part of general new-world struggles against colonial power. He sees the South's bid for independence as very kin to Mexico's own battles between centrists and decentralists, for instance . As mentioned, Our America's focus is Mexico and the Southwest, with Cubans and Puerto Ricans receiving scant attention at the very end. Our America is thus more a history of "New Spain" -- a label which, prior to the collapse of the Spanish empire during the Napoleonic wars, encompassed both areas.  If Fernández-Armesto actually hailed from Mexico, this could be called a localist history of the United States, rather like a history of the US delivered from the perspective of the South.  The chief weakness of this book is that the author confuses the United States and 'America' when he argues that the United States began with Spanish America. While the Euro-American experience as a whole began with Spanish exploration, the 'United States' is a government formed by thirteen States along the eastern seaboard of North America, ground never trod by the Spanish.  He also attributes European success in the Americas largely to the 'stranger effect' -- an effect which included hospitality given to visiting strangers, respectful awe of travelers from afar, and  the inclusion of them in native government to swing local battles for power one way or another.  While it's a factor to take into account, he completely writes off the 'guns, germs, and steel' triad in favor of this social element.

As a general history of Latin America, I think Harvest of Empire superior; but the amount of detail given to Spain and England's colonial wrangling, and later the American conquest of the southwest, makes it a book of note. It's certainly gotten my interest in the Spanish colonial period fired up!

Related:
American Colonies, Allen Taylor. Colonial history of Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and even Russian America.
The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, James Wilson
Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, Juan Gonzales

Harvest of Empire

Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
©  2000 Juan Gonzalez
416 pages

Harvest of Empire is a tale of two civilizations, Anglo and Spanish. In general terms, it recounts the history or rather the plight of Latin America, of people and cultures dominated first by European powers, and then by the colonial rebels turned colonial master, the United States.  The author ends by arguing that the United States owes as much its Hispanic tradition as its Anglo, and that it should embrace Hispanic culture  and make amends to foreign policy which has wreaked havoc throughout the eastern hemisphere.  Divided into three parts, Harvest first dwells on the roots of Anglo-American conflict by recounting the age of discovery and rise of American imperialism, moves to the "branches", in which populations disrupted by war and famine (often linked to American foreign policy) migrate to the United States to seek their fortunes, and then ends with a "harvest" that looks towards a stronger role played by Latino culture in the United States.

 Considering that two of the leading recent  Republican candidates for El Presidente were Cruz and Rubio, 'los hermanos cubanos',  there's no denying the book's relevance, despite its sixteen years of age. Even though neither are in the running now,  immigration  -- the causes and consequences of which are explored here -- remains a big-ticket item.  While some of the author's recommendations (that the United Staces embrace its Hispanic heritage and start promoting and protecting Spanish) are likely to fall flat,  at the very least this review of the United States' catastrophic record of international meddling in central America might give American leadership pause about supporting future debacles.  More convincing is the authors' case for settling the matter of Puerto Rico, which for a century has been a bastard, neither  sovereign, nor a territory or a state.  Harvest has a lot to recommend it, first as a general history of Latin America, secondly by focusing on the widely varying experiences of different Latino groups as they moved to the US.  What name recognition does Puerto Rico have with most Americans, other than the film West Side Story? ("Puerto Rico is en America now!")   The author is right when he points out that the United States is scarcely over two hundred years old, a mere blip in the historical perspective, and the past century of exploitation and dominance by D.C. over Latin America are not likely to last. Latinos will play a larger role in the United States as they continue to migrate here, and will shape D.C's policy as they achieve political influence -- and as the descendants of those who have experienced the consequences of foreign-policy imperialism, they are unlikely to support more of it.

Celebrating America: Independence Day Reading

Every year since this blog's inception I have committed part of June and July to Independence-Day reading. The number and variety of the books has grown every year, and usually includes material on the colonial period, the revolution, and the early Republic. This is an election year, however, a season full of rancor and ambition. Politics is so pervasive that I want to get away from it, so this year I am tacking a course away from that bitter port. Instead of war and debate,  the last week of June and early July will instead be a period of American literature -- of revisiting or learning anew American stories.   I had also planned to seek refuge in books on small-town America, reading Bill Bryson's tour of backroads and visiting Wendell Berry's Port William again, but that will wait until the TBR hits five or less.  Expect Willa Cather, Mark Twain, and Jack London.

All the Shah's Men

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
© 2003 Stephen Kinzler
272 pages

On one  dismal  night in 1953,  a conspiracy destroyed both Iranian democracy and American honor.  At the dawn of the 1950s, Iran was struggling to free itself from British domination, a  precursor to the bloody colonial revolutions that would mark the mid-20th century.   Despite being a product of colonial rebellion itself, the United States would betray its own history and one of amiable relations with Iran to  assert itself on the world stage.  All the Shah's Men is an admirably executed mix of espionage, history, and politics,  brimming with passion.

Iran arrived at the 20th century in a sorry state;  ruled by monarchs who were either corrupt or incompetent, it fell under the influence of both Russia and Britain, whose great game of tug-of-war used Iran as the rope, plundering its resources. While Russia would collapse into civil war in 1917, Britain proved a far more formidable opponent, securing a long-term monopoly over the harvesting of Iranian oil and natural gas, and virtually taking over the country in the 1940s during World War 2.  For fifty years, Iran's mineral wealth was literally siphoned out and shipped away:   Iranians were denied the opportunity to learn and master the industry,  granted only menial labor and a token share of the profits.

The forced abdication of the shah in 1943 meant that the Iranian parliament and its democratic offices were free to grow in legitimacy and authority. Increasingly, the parties running for office called for an end to British imperialism in Iran, and one Mohammad Mossadegh was particularly famous for his attack on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  He called for better working conditions for laborers, the inclusion of Iranians in the engineering and administrative aspects of the oil business, and a more equitable division of profits between the British company and Iran.  Britain would have none of it.

Mossadegh achieved office several times championing the cause of an independent Iran as the Truman administration gave way to Eisenhower's.  The change of American leadership was important, for while the British government wanted to take action in Iran, it wanted American support, in part because of D.C's previous help in securing Iran against German interests.  Truman had no interest whatsoever in going to bat for British petroleum, but Eisenhower had witnessed the fall of China to Communism and the unraveling of Korea, and -- with help from Winston Churchill, no stranger to mideast debacles --  he was sweettalked into seeing red in Iran.   There would be no Persian Mao, not on Ike's watch.    While Britain considered and dismissed the idea of simply invading Iran, this was decided to be more trouble than it was worth. Far better to take the country from within, by using the lingering authority of the shah's successor-prince to dismiss Mossadegh, and back him with the Iranian and Allied militaries as need be.

Although the coup initially seemed to be failing disastrously -- arrests of conspirators were made, followed by the fleeing of the shah  to Iraq -- the American man on the ground was able to turn things around. Kermit Roosevelt was the son of Teddy Roosevelt,  one of the first American executives to dream of the United States having a 'place in the sun', stretching its wings across the globe.  Using the economic depression that followed Britain's economic war against Iran, Roosevelt  stirred up dissent and paid people to form an anti-Mossadegh mob that would march on the man's house.  He was arrested, his  government fell, the shah returned, and-- well, things just went downhill from there. Emboldened by outside support, the shah grew ever more tyrannical against his own people, until he was ousted by a religiously authoritative regime that was hostile to Mossadegh for its own reasons.

  
All the Shah's Men succeeds brilliantly in part because of the connections Kinzler draws to broader Iranian history. The Iranians had thrown off another resource monopoly sixty years before,  and in the process they established a constitutional government. While weak against the traditional authority of the shah, and his control of the military,  it steadily acquired its own moral authority -- increasingly seen as more legitimate than the shah, who was a creature of the outside world, forcing its designs on Iran, from control of Iranian resources to the forced adoption of Western suits and hats.   Mossadegh's championing of Iranian independence was not merely freedom from outside manipulation, but freedom from the unjust and arbitrary rule of the shah.  The coup didn't simply topple Mossadegh's government: it and Anglo-American support  of the shah thereafter sabotaged and reversed the trend toward Iranian self-government.

The coup not only derailed Iran' development as a democratic and humane society, but has caused no end of trouble for both Britain and the United States, mostly the Americans who did the dirty work.  When the shah was ousted in 1979 and sought refuge in the United States, Iranians who remembered 1953 thought they were about to re-witness history. Hadn't the shah fled  before, only to be returned under the aegis of the Americans?   Such was the spark of the hostage crisis, leading to decades of hostility and cold fury between the powers in which Iran and the west continue to wage war against one another's interests;  in Iran's case, this has taken the form of funding terrorist organizations.

All the Shah's Men is one of the more outstanding books I've ever read; though  principally about the conspiracy,  Kinzler does a terrific job in explaining the historical context.  But the book doesn't read like a lecture; at times it has the feel of investigative journalism or a spy thriller. Kinzler isn't just summarizing news articles, but relies on interviews with those who remember Mossadegh, for whom the man is a memory of a time when Iran's destiny seemed its own to make, when the law was being strengthened as a redoubt against arbitrary authority instead of being used to execute it.


Related:

• Nehru: the Invention of India, Shashi Tharoor.
• Tehran and the United States, Seyed Mousavian

American History: the Index

Across the Bering:  Native America

• Twilight of the Mammoths,  Paul Martin
• The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, James Wilson
• Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: Peopling the Americas, Brian Fagan
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann

The Age of Discovery and Colonization

• American Colonies,  Alan Taylor
• The Americans: the Colonial Experience, Daniel Boorstin
• Tobacco:  A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant TSeduced Civilization, Iain Gately
• Everyday Life in Early America, David Freeman Hawke

The American Revolution

• The Birth of the United States, Isaac Asimov
• The Cost of Liberty: the Life of John Dickinson, William Murchinson
• Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation, Joseph Ellis
• Chainbreaker's War: A Seneca Chief Remembers the American Revolution, Jeanne Adler
• 1776, David McCullough
• A People's History of the American Revolution,  Ray Ralphael
• American Cicero: the Life of Charles Carroll, Brad Birzer
• His Excellency: George Washington, Joseph Ellis
• John Adams, David McCullough
• American Sphinx: the Character of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Ellis

Early American Republic

• The First Congress: How a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government, Marcus Bordewich
• American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies, Joseph Ellis
• Founding Rivals: Madison vs Monroe, Chris DeRose
• Alexander Hamilton, Rob Chernow
• The Artificial River: the Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, Carol Sheriff

Sectional Division and Civil War

• Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, John Hope Franklin
• Look Away!  A History of the Confederate States of America, William C. Davis
• Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War, David Williams
• A People's History of the Civil War, David Williams
• The Yellowhammer War: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama,  Kenneth Noe
• The Most Glorious Fourth, Duane Schultz
• The South Since the War,  Sidney Andrews

Reconstruction and the Gilded Age

• The Golden Door, Isaac Asimov
• Stagecoach: Wells-Fargo and the American West, Phillip Fradkin
• Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America, Ann Norton
• The Great Railroad Revolution, Christian Wolmar
• The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C.Van Woodward
• The Spanish-American War, Albert Marrin
• The Gangs of New York, Herbert Ashbury

Early Modern

• Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition in America, Daniel Okrent
• Disaster 1906: The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, Edward. F. Dolan

American Zenith

• A Man on the Moon, Neil Chakin

          =============== Special Topics =============

Constitutional History

• Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College, Gary Gregg II
• The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, Joseph Ellis
• The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy
• Nullification: Resisting Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, Tom Woods

Ethnographies

• The Scotch-Irish: A Social History, James Leyburn
• Dixie's Forgotten People: the South's Poor Whites, Wayne Flynt
• The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad
• Poor but Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites, Wayne Flynt

Intellectual and Social Movements

• Ain't My America: the Long and Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism, Bill Kauffman
• Selma 1965: The March that Changed America, Chuck Fager

Social History

• More Work for Mother: The Ironies of American Housework, Ruth Cowan
• A Consumer's Republic, Lizbeth Cohen
• Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth Jackson
• Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, Susan Strasser
• Never Done: A Social History of American Housework, Susan Strasser
• Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, Laura Shapiro
• The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler

Surveys

• A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddaeus Russell
• A People' History of American Empire, Howard Zinn

The Scotch-Irish

The Scotch-Irish: A Social History
© 1989 James Leyburn
397 pages

        Though they have long ceased to be a distinct ethnic group outside of Appalachia, for years the greatest non-English minority in the United States were the Scotch-Irish.   Theirs is a history riven with politics, for they were created by it and became the shapers of it once they moved to America.  The Scotch-Irish appraises not only their political history, however, but the evolution of their character, distinct culture, and social institutions. It is a triptych, the story of a people told across three lands.   The story begins in Scotland, a place slow to join the Renaissance, but quick to grasp the Reformation. Scotland indeed became a  hotbed of diehard Presbyterianism, and as the  Crown began supporting the established Anglican church more firmly, it drove Puritans into the Netherlands and Presbys into Scotland.   Of course, the Crown wanted more Protestants in Ireland; a good strong community of them could withstand Gaelic wiles and serve to consolidate the Crown's position. The Ulster plantation soon developed a culture distinct from Scotland's, despite constant emigration from it, and Leyburn devotes particular attention to the social power of the Presbyterian church as it branched out.  Ultimately, rent hikes would drive many of the "Ulster Scots" to America, where their loathing for the crown and aggressive westward rambling would spur on the Revolution.  Leyburn  offers state-by-state tracking of the Scotch-Irish as they grew in number began filling the interior, making this social history of immense value to students of colonial history, complete with deep background in Irish and Scottish history.



Related:

• Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, Jim Webb
• The English People on the Eve of Colonization, Wallace Notestein
• The Americans: the Colonial Experience, Daniel Boorstin

Unstoppable

Unstoppable: the Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State
© 2014 Ralph Nader
224 pages

George Carlin groused that when he heard the word bipartisanship, he knew a larger than usual deception was in the works. Ralph Nader's Unstoppable offers a different kind of bipartisanship -- cooperation, not conspiracy. Written primarily to a progressive audience, Nader draws on his reading of Russell Kirk and F.A. Hayek to share the good news:  there are people who share the similar values in both political wings, and plenty of room to work together against a common enemy. What common enemy? The crony-capitalist state, the nemesis of both progressives who fear the power of modern-day robber barons, and of libertarians and conservatives who value free markets, the rule of law, and civic order.

Nader opens Unstoppable with a victory several decades old: the termination of a particular nuclear project based on a alliance between progressive environmentalists and fiscal conservatives.  Although joining forces with conservatives was initially a pragmatic move, in the decades that followed, Nader familiarized himself with both conservative and libertarian literature.  Nader deserves kudos, for while it's not unusual for those passionate about politics to learn their opponents' arguments merely to demonstrate to them while they are wrong, Nader seems to have gained a genuine sense of empathy for those on the other side. Humanistic concern runs through each political camp considered here, a commonality that can be the basis of cooperative action.  What most progressives think of as conservatism, Nader writes, is a new thing, the product of decades of slow corporate corruption of the political state.  Its subsidies to multinationals, the benefaction rendered by regulations that smother competition, conserve nothing -- and nor do they promote liberty. Nader may still disagree those on the right, but underneath the ideology, he writes, we are still human beings who, when confronted with abuses, want to help one another.

The alliances that can be created vary. Progressivism's opponents may agree on opposing the State's growing activity in everyday life, but they don't agree with one another.  Take the environment: some of the United States' most sweeping conservationist legislation was enacted by presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and environmentalism lends itself well to the language of conservatism; think 'stewardship'.  Progressive horror at the inroads consumerism is making in the lives of children can find kindred spirits in the ranks of social conservatives, especially the religious who fear their children becoming selfish and materialistic.  Libertarians who swear more by the market than moral order may object to progressive-conservatives limiting choice by barring certain kinds of advertising, for instance, but when it comes to forswearing money given to corporations they're stalwart allies. Another area of progressive-libertarian camaraderie is ending the drug war, which even Old Right types could be convinced to join if shown how the war has completely destroyed civil law enforcement in favor of pseudo-military police enforcement.  Free trade is a particularly thorny issue: libertarians may be for it, and paleo-conservatives against it, but there's a fuzzy thin line between protectionism (which progressives might  back) and cronyism.

In the latter half of his book, Nader puts forth a list of twenty-five issues that progressives can work with either libertarians or paleo- and populist conservatives on, or both. Some of them involve the federal government doing more, which I don't think will sell well in allying with groups who view federal overreach as the entire point of opposition. It's a let's-get-the-Wehrmacht-out-of-Paris-before-we-strengthen-it-against-Stalin situation.  Others involve a heart dose of localism. like promoting 'community self reliance', and distributive electrical grids. At one point Nader quoted Who Owns America?, the classic agrarian-distributist critique of the then- nascent plutocracy, and I may have swooned.  Considering that two of the major contenders for the presidency have nebulous connections to their respective parties -- the independent socialist Sanders and the populist Trump --  Americans' frustration with the reigning RepubliCrat scheme seems ripe for this kind of cooperation. I only wish Nader had put more emphasis on local cooperation, which is further removed from ideology, and more motivated by  having to work with the facts at hand. Non-progressives will find Nader's repeated assertion that progressives have less interest in ideology than facts to be  dubious, and  for the record I think that comes a little too close to holding that the ends are more important than the means.  It's not enough to take steps to take care of what ails us:  we should have some idea of where we are going. If we allow power to accrete in the name of "doing something", then we'll simply pave the way for future abuses.

Quarrels withstanding I found Unstoppable to be an immensely heartening book, a reassuring dose of civility and cooperation. I think if more Americans read it -- progressives, liberals, conservatives, and even those power-enabling rascals in the middle, the liberals and neocons, we might see each other more as people with genuine convictions, and not merely wrongheaded enemies who need to be defeated and driven from the field.   When the talking heads on TV, both the announcers and the candidates, drive one to despair, consider Nader's humane rebuttal. Genuine hope for America may not be forlorn.

(And where else are you going to find a book with a Green party progressive hailing decentralism and lamenting over the problems of regulatory capture and bureaucratic quagmire?)

Related:
Crunchy Cons, Rob Dreher
Citizen Power, Mike Gravel
What's Wrong with the World?, G.K. Chesterton
We Who Dared Say no to War, ed. Murray Polner and Tom Woods. (Men of the left and right, respectively.)