News about History in July

Bastille Day

It’s Bastille Day. Read about the French Revolution, in context, by a British professor of history writing for the BBC’s History Extra. 

Hamilton the movie doesn’t represent Hamilton the man, says Phil Magness  in Independent Review. 

Why did the French army fold in 1940? Or did it? Robert J. Young calls the story of French military weakness “misremembering” and writes about it in two essays (here and here) on the History News Network.

An amazing historical find: The dispute over the Freedmen’s statue leads to discovery of a letter about the statue by Frederick Douglass (he disliked it). In the Wall Street Journal.

“We shall overcome.” Black Americans overcame, and  Walter Williams explains why “as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.”

Continue reading “News about History in July”

Remember the Ladies, Mr. Cannadine*

In studying British history, I’ve come across female British historians of the early twentieth century who helped develop economic history as a discipline. They were intellectuals; we’d call them “blue-stockings” in the United States (a few were also elegant), and they tended to delve deeply into regional archives.

Julia Mann, for example, was the expert on Britain’s pre-industrial textile industry; Ivy Pinchbeck wrote a pioneering volume about how women’s lives were changed by the Industrial Revolution; and Pat Hudson practically owned the history of woolen textiles, Britain’s largest industry before the Industrial Revolution.

I recently read a 1992 essay by Maxine Berg indicating that these historians, while well-regarded, were not taken as seriously as they should have been. [1] Berg suggests that such inattention may distort our understanding of the historiography of Britain.

I realize that historiography—the study of what historians write—may not appeal much to my readers, but that is what my master’s thesis is about. Specifically, I’m looking at what historians have said about labor conditions in the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) and how their views changed over the years. Thus I need to know which historians helped paint the picture accurately.

And I see that some may have been left out. Continue reading “Remember the Ladies, Mr. Cannadine*”

So Much News about History This Month

Historian David Blight defends the Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, DC.

‘A Master Historian’: George Nash reviews the latest book by the prominent American historian Bernard Bailyn (now 97 years old).

George Washington shouldn’t be “canceled.” John Berlau explains.

Can we learn from the pandemic of 1596? From the History Workshop. Continue reading “So Much News about History This Month”

Middle-class at Heart (Part II)

In 2012 President Obama outraged many people when he tried to argue for the value of government by saying, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” His statement was wrong because, of course, you did build that.

But that doesn’t mean that you had no help. For many of us, that help goes back perhaps hundreds of years.

In my last post I wrote about some of the family histories my readers have sent me. I was struck by how “middle-class” their families were, even 100 or 150 years ago.  I concluded that if you are a successful professional today, chances are good that you have a family history with a lot of solid middle-class people behind you, people who worked hard, sometimes back-breaking hard, who gave up leisure, and who sought education for themselves or their children.

That doesn’t mean your family history didn’t have some cads and misfits (mine did) but the general direction was toward discipline.

In other words, we have a cloud of witnesses who have predated us. Perhaps we received material goods from those ancestors, but far more important were the habits of mind—the mental strength that allows us to give up short-term rewards in the hope of longer-term gains. Continue reading “Middle-class at Heart (Part II)”

News about History in June

President Grant’s statue torn down in San Francisco—because he briefly owned (and freed) a slave? On The Hill. 

Cancel the Democratic Party for a history of racism? Manhattan Contrarian offers a list.

Portland protesters topple a statue of George Washington; University of Portland removes statue of York, the slave who accompanied  Lewis & Clark, citing fears of vandalism.

Quillette tells the libertarian history of science fiction.

A timeline of pandemics, courtesy of the Carolina Journal (see pp. 12-13).

Is the attack on statues a ‘cultural revolution’? Yes, says Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.

‘Racism and the Early History of the American Economic Association’: Phillip Magness discusses Richard Ely and his students on aier.org.

David Kaiser discusses the decline of history departments. On the Martin Center site.

Horatio Nelson was both war hero and supporter of the slave trade, says History Extra. (Hat-tip to Mark Brady.)

Matt Ridley:  The Russian pandemic of 1899 offers clues about COVID-19.

Statue honoring Robert Shaw and his African-American soldiers during the Civil War is defaced.

Continue reading “News about History in June”