Author: daelnorwood

Uncategorized

Bloggitty blog blog blog

daelnorwood

Or, My Navel is Quite Interesting, Thank You

navel_orange

As far as solipsistic synopses of premature punditry go, this, by Scott Rosenberg (author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters) is pretty damn sharp. (h/t)

It starts off with some throat-clearing repetition of conventional wisdom about technological history (of fairly recent vintage, incidentally), which initially made me a bit doubtful (which isn’t to say I disagree, precisely; it’s just history and its interpretation are a bit…elastic), but then quickly starts flinging the analytic insights fast and furious.

For example:

A blog lets you define yourself, whereas on a social network you are more likely to be defined by others. Sure, blog readers can write comments — but the blogger can delete the comments, or disemvowel them, or turn them off entirely. Sure, a blog is dependent on the links you point outward and those that others point in; but it has its own independent existence in a way that no amount of messaging and chat and interaction on a social networking site can match.

and

A blog lets you raise your voice without asking anyone’s permission, and no one is in a position to tell you to shut up. It is, as the journalism scholar Jay Rosen puts it, “a little First Amendment machine,” an engine of free speech operating powerfully at a fulcrum-point between individual autonomy and the pressures of the group.

and

Blogging uniquely straddles the acts of writing and reading; it can be private and public, solitary and gregarious, in ratios that each practitioner sets for himself. … Nothing else so richly combines the invitation to speak your mind with the opportunity to mix it up with other minds.

Now, if I were a history blogger truly worthy of being listed on the Cliopatria blogroll, I’d follow this with some kind of comparison to how people thought about the invention of the rotary printing press or the clipper ship or political parties some such thing…but I have quasi-valid philosophical objections (see above, re: history of technological progress) and besides, it’s late and I am tired, so no go. Have an orange instead, they’re cheap.

Image cite:Robert S. Donovan, “navel oranges 99¢ LB,” Flickr, CC License

Knowledge Droppings, Our Glorious National Heritage

How did knowledge drop in Early America?

daelnorwood

Or, if a congressional report falls in the forest, can anyone find it?

Holiday

I ran across this letter today while poking through the correspondence of Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts Congressman and semi-influential figure in Whig politics. On the surface, it’s a perfectly normal letter, but the more I started thinking about it, the weirder it seemed.

But first, here’s the text:

Dear Sir,

I had the honor to receive the documents relative to the northeastern boundaries, & I feel truly obliged to you for your very kind & polite attention in putting yourself to the trouble of procuring & forwarding it. Our public libraries which are entitled to a copy of the Congress documents, do not generally receive them till very late, & they are often permitted to lie for a long time boxed up at the State house, because the officers of the library do not call for them – With renewed thanks for your repeated courtesies,
I have the honor to be,
very respectfully, &c
J. G. Bradford

~J. G. Bradford to Caleb Cushing, Boston, 20 July 1839, Container 20, Caleb Cushing Papers, Mss Division, Library of Congress

Cushing has a ton of letters just like this — either requests for public documents or thanks for the same. The correspondence files of most other politicians, in fact, from the backbenchers to important national figures, is just the same; at times, such request for reports almost outnumber requests for patronage gigs.

So what struck me was not that Cushing was doing such distribution, but that Bradford expected that public libraries would obviate the need for a personal request. On the face of it, that sounds perfectly commonsensical; of course Congress would distribute documents that way! But then you think…to what public libraries? They didn’t exist yet (or at least I didn’t thinks so). And then as the sheer number of requests — even from areas wading in seas of cheap print, like urban New England – attests, the reality seems to be that these documents were fairly difficult to lay hands on. Or maybe I’m only getting exposure to the lazy / motivated people.

Before seeing this letter, I had assumed that either government officials (Congressmen, et al.) distributed their alloted copies themselves, especially to their favored newspapers (which commonly summarized important reports and speeches); or people read summaries of reports in other print media. But this bit about public libraries really makes me wonder…

So my question is: what was the legislation on this? How were these documents supposed to be distributed? How were the actually distributed? And what does the daylight between these two poles mean?

I’m going to do a bit of digging on this, but suggestions (or even better, facts) welcome.

Image cite: nacaseven, “Holiday!” Flickr, CC License

The Past is a Foreign...Something

The Romance of the Tapirs

daelnorwood

Also, A Blog Jubilee

Tapir

To celebrate the fiftieth post on this here blog* I thought I might share a sweet little story I found today. Who’s day isn’t improved when theorists of organic American nationalism, tapirs, and romance are in the mix?

Here’s the context: Francis Lieber, famed German-American jurist and political economist is writing to his BFF** Samuel B. Ruggles to tell him that he’s safely returned home from his visit to NYC. After spending most of his letter begging Ruggles to help find him a job at Columbia College because (ironically) he hates life in Columbia, South Carolina, he lightens the tone by recounting a “ludicrous scene” he saw on the train ride home.

To wit:

… My journey was plain, hum-drum, as most [railroad] journeys are. One ludicrous scene I witnessed. You may remember that the platforms in the depot at Baltimore run a long way on both sides of the rail, and are on a level with the cars, when they come in. I was in the first and stepped out; an elderly gentleman was standing near me, waiting for some one. When the next car came in, I saw a woman looking anxiously out of one of the windows; the gentleman reached toward her, and, she protruding her lips, he tried by an equally elongated mouth to catch the proffered kiss, but the cars moved on, so did the woman and consequently her lips, which she stretched longer and longer; the elderly man ran astride on the platform and as the horses moved faster than he, his mouth in turn stretched farther and farther, as one might imagine an India rubber tube would do, if it could be attracted by some magnet.

My fancy could not help imagining some enamored tapirs, stretching their trunks farther and farther toward one another, to catch the token of love, yet without success. On this whole scene moved, car, woman, man, trunks and all until they passed me and I thought I felt the old man’s funnel, formed of his mouth, brush my occiput, while the woman’s swept my nose in front. The scene was abundantly ludicrous and yet deeply touching to me, who was hastening to his wife and children. And altogether, is not that which is touching of itself, the more so for being manifested in some thing ludicrous? Is not this the secret of many of the most moving, nay harrowing scenes of Dickens’s, e.g. all those dreadful scences at Squeer’s school?? The contrast heightens the effect, as also the part that the people not caring for the ludicrous exposure show only the depth and earnestness of their feelings. …

~Francis Lieber to Samuel B. Ruggles, October 10, 1842, Francis Lieber Papers, 1830-1872, Library of Congress

Lieber, in addition for his gift for political philosophy, had, at times, a certain way with imagery. (Remind me to show you his ode to the idea of a Panamanian Canal sometime).

And before you ask: yes, the first rail cars were indeed powered by horseflesh, not steam engines. The cars even looked like stagecoaches (sorry I don’t have a pic, but use your imagination).

I’m not sure if in this case horses were just used to maneuver individual train cars around the station, or if they were actually pulling train the whole way. I suspect the latter, as Baltimore was early in railroad development. In any case, a good reminder that one of the key innovations of railroads was the lower coefficient of friction (μ) on land –- not just the application of steam power.

* 153 days old, more or less, today. Who knew? Don’t worry, I won’t mark every anniversary like a hyperactive moonstruck tween couple.

** No but really; their correspondence is quite touching.

Image cite: guppiecat, “Malayan Tapir (Tapirus indicus),” Flickr, CC License

Uncategorized

A Plethoric Cyclopedia of Links

daelnorwood

Or, Why Not Blog and Be Sick at the Same Time

Everyone_loves_kites

Your devoted correspondent has of late been sidetracked by a nasty bout of bilious fever (never eat a salad at Chipotle!), preventing trips to both the Archives and the Intertubes. However, because I do not wish you, my kind and gentle readers, to be deprived of my avatarial presence for too long, please enjoy the following random links in lieu of more developed musings:

  • Sterling Fluharty, at Cliopatria, asked a really good question the other day: “Who Reads History Books?” His proposed method of finding out, using Amazon and a method poached from social scientists, strikes me as a good start. Anyone with the expertise that could help a fellow historian? Also, his post reminds me of how terrible the commenting mechanism over at Cliopatria is (so terrible). MoveableType anyone? WordPress? please? Goodness.
  • If you love Kate Beaton (and I know you do), allow me to recommend the lovely work of Sydney Padua who’s in the midst of doing a great alt-history series on Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage.The comics are longer-form, and the drawing a bit more detailed, and so actually a bit more in the style of someone like Dylan Meconis more than Beaton; but in any case, who can resist a story that name checks Martin Van Buren, the panic of 1837, and the Duke of Wellington and his horse? Not I; and neither you. You may want to start with the origin story. (h/t)
  • Sean Safford has a fascinating post, over at OrgTheory, about the possible consequences of Penske’s purchase of Saturn. Safford argues that the shift that Penske could be initiating is from a “producer-driven” commodity chain to a “buyer-driven” one — basically shifting the auto industry into the same sort of model that governs most other industries now (think: computers, sneakers, etc). This is the clearest statement about this deal that I’ve heard, and should be of interest to all students of American capitalism (of which this blog hopes/purports to be, in part). It might mean that the M-form corporation is finally, and completely, dead. That could have consequences…
  • This is a bit of old(ish) news, but Caleb Crain, Lingua Franca alum, generally great reviewer and correspondent of many a tony publication, and proprietor of the excellent blog Steamboats are Ruining Everything, has recently (self) published a dead-tree version of his best posts, titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay. He also had an interesting talk about the process of turning a blog into a book over at the New Yorker. The book is on my to-read list, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
  • Finally, on a note that at least touches on the steampunk vibe that partly animates this establishment: there is robot unemployment in Japan.

Image cite: Balakov, “Everyone loves kites,” Flickr, CC License

Adams Family

JQA, the Universe, And Everything

daelnorwood

Or, For He’s A Quite Dour Fellow, Which Nobody Can Deny

the bouncing birthday boy
the bouncing birthday boy

This blog would be terribly remiss if it failed to note that today, the eleventh day of July, is John Quincy Adams’s birthday. So let’s pour one out for Old Man Eloquent.

Though as Jeremy Dibble over at the MHS blog, The Beehive, demonstrated today, JQA has a certain … knack … for deflating even the happiest of occasions.

Via Jeremy, here’s JQA’s diary entry on the most important birthday of them all, the forty-second, (in 1809; good lord that man lived for ever). Adams, as you’d expect, was his usual lighthearted self :

The year of my life now expiring has been marked by a continuance of that persecution which the combined personal enemies of my father and myself, had unrelentingly pursued the year before. It has appeared in various forms, some of them singular enough; but its effect has been to impel me into more general notice and estimation throughout the country. … I pray for clearness of intellectual vision to see the right path – for the necessary courage to pursue it; and for the Fortitude and the Temperance to bear with equanimity the vicissitudes of its Fortunes, whether adverse or propitious. Grant, O God, that I may do good to my Country and to Mankind! And deal with me, and mine, if it be they gracious will, in Mercy.

Yeah, you can totally see why he rocks that party hat so hard. And that it’s probably no coincidence he shares a birthday week with one Jean Cauvin …

In any case, between celebratory toasts of madeira and guilt, you should check out the wonderful things that Jeremy, and the rest of the folks at MHS, are doing with their blog and twitter feed.