Author: daelnorwood

History and Historians

Structures, Agency, and a Bleg

daelnorwood

Narcis

Or, An Apprentice Scholar’s (narcissistic) Lament

Ran across this the other day, and thought it worth “commonplacing”:

Ultimately, I hoped to show that we should not think of “agency” and “structure” as rivals, or even as being mutually exclusive. As I state in the last paragraph of the book, “The constraints and structures of any particular period are, however, often the creation of a previous generation’s political agents. In the short term, politics is, in fact, a world of constraints, but to agents willing to wait for effects that may not emerge for decades, the world is full of opportunity.” Agents have to operate in a world of structures. But if they have a long time horizon, they can create new structures, which will then act to constrain the next generation of agents. And so on.

~Steven Teles, “Response,” Crooked Timber, 1 May 2009, describing one of the themes of his book The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (PUP, 2008).

Continue reading “Structures, Agency, and a Bleg” →

The Past is a Foreign...Something

Bubbles, Apparently

daelnorwood

Bubbles

This both charmed and baffled me when I ran across it:

Bubbles!

Hurrah for bubbles! I go for bubbles, my dear – stopping for a moment on his way through the large drawing-rooms, and looking at his wife and the baby, very much as a painter might do, while in labor with a new picture. ‘Bubbles are the only things worth living for!’

‘Bubbles, Peter! – be quiet baby! – hush, my love, hush! Papa can’t take you now!’ Baby jumps at the table.

‘Confound the imp! There goes the inkstand.’

‘Yes, my dear – and the spectacles – and the lamp –and all your papers. And what else could you expect, pray? Here he’s been trying to make you stop and speak to him, every time you have gone by the table, for the last half hour, and holding out his little arms to you, while you have been walking to and fro as if you were walking for a wager, with your eyes rolled up in your head, muttering to yourself — mutter, mutter, mutter — and taking no more notice of him, poor little fellow! than if he was a rag baby, or belonged to someone else’

‘Oh don’t bother! – little arms, indeed! – about the size of my leg – I do wish he’d be quiet – I’m thinking out a problem.’

‘A problem! fiddl-de-dee! [sic] – hush baby! – a magazine article, more like – will you hush!’

Papa turns away in despair, muttering with a voice that grows louder and louder as he warms up – ‘wisdom and wit are bubbles! – “atoms and systems into ruin hurled and men a bubbleburst! – and now a world!” – I have it – hurrah! – can’t you keep that child still !’

Thoughts?

Cite:
“Bubbles!” n.p., n.d., Box 5: Documents & Manuscripts, Cataloged, Park Benjamin Papers, Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, Butler Library, Columbia University

An archivist’s note on the document itself attributes the piece to John Neal (1793-1876). Emphasis and quotation marks are as in original.

Image cite: Aeioux, “Bubbles,” Flickr, CC License

The Past is a Foreign...Something

John Murray Forbes and the Coolie Colony on St. John’s River, Part II

daelnorwood

Boiler

The Unbearable Ubiquity of Steamship Accidents

Last we left John Murray Forbes, China trader and nascent railroad baron extraordinaire, it was 1860 and he was all het up about a possible Federal ban on the coolie trade. In a letter to a Massachusetts Congressman, he argued that banning this trade — as opposed to regulating it — would play into the Slave Power’s hands. Banning the importation of cheap Chinese labor would eliminate a source of free labor in the South, and thus remove a threat to the antebellum plantation complex.

He supported this point with a host of ad hominem attacks on a former American consul, and, more interestingly, an anecdote about a Chinese colonization scheme he’d once supported, but had subsequently dropped on the advice of a planter friend. Forbes’s unnamed interlocutor had made it clear that planters’ “jealousy,” of “any scheme of labor outside of their ‘peculiar institution’ ” would make such any importation of free labor untenable in the South.(1)

Thus was Forbes’s plan to simultaneously “improve the condition of the Chinese, and show in our tropics the benefits of free labor,” strangled in its cradle.

But let’s step back a moment. Who was this planter friend? And what was their actual exchange? How well does Forbes’s story in 1860 match up to what the document’s tell us?

Let’s start at the beginning. Forbes’s planter-adviser was one James Hamilton Couper, or as it’s misspelled in JMF’s published letters, Cowper.(2)
Continue reading “John Murray Forbes and the Coolie Colony on St. John’s River, Part II” →

Ivory Towers

A Question

daelnorwood

Old Coins

 

Why is it that papers about money always read like Hegel wrote them? I.e. simultaneously Really Important and Uncannily Soporific.

Seriously folks, time to deploy some verbs, start using normal capitalization, and use words that make sense.

And then maybe I won’t fall asleep like four times while trying to read your work.

Maybe.

 

 

Image cite: Lesleyraez, “Old Coins,” Flickr, CC License