For years I’ve heard about the academic pressure to publish. Now, as a graduate student, I’ve come across some results of that pressure. These are books that make an interesting subject dull.[1] I’ll consider one of them, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, in this post.
To be sure, my professors have taken pains to assign only books they consider important and relevant, the “cream of the crop.” (One professor advised his class that if we didn’t like these, we would hate the ones he had rejected.) Nevertheless, a few clunkers come through. Well, I consider them clunkers. As an editor (current and past), I am frustrated when I see tremendous talent combined with disappointing execution.
The book I’m commenting on was praised on its cover as “superior and fascinating.” It reflects enormous research (12 years’ worth), including meticulous gathering of visual artifacts across two continents and several centuries. And it exhibits heroic efforts to come up with new interpretations. But, in my view, its impact is restricted by having to meet the academic goals that lead to tenure and full professorship.
Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World[2]is the story of how tobacco and chocolate, substances that were part of pre-Columbian social and religious rituals in Mexico and Central America, became popular products in Europe during the 1600s.
Frédéric Bastiat was a classical liberal who lived in France from 1801 to 1850. (For more information about Bastiat, see a previous post). His writing—which was rediscovered by American libertarians in the 1940s after years of disdain and neglect—is witty and insightful. It provides fables that help teach economics, such as his “Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, Etc..” which carries protectionism to absurd lengths: Candlemakers petition the government to command people to cover their windows and stop letting in sunlight (thus “protecting” them from sunlight), because the sun is ruining the candle business.[1]
Bastiat was as harsh on French education as he was on protectionism. He split with classical liberals who accepted publicly provided education; he didn’t think the government should be involved in teaching.
But that is not what is extraordinary about his educational views. Rather, he challenged the French secondary-school curriculum because it revered the classical civilizations of antiquity. To Bastiat, the Greeks (both Athenians and Spartans) and Romans were violent, military, and disdainful of work—not worth the study that was slavishly given them. This is extraordinary because respect for antiquity permeated the views of educated Europeans. Among French educators, there were some intellectual disagreements along the lines of whether Athens or Sparta was “better,” but studying classical civilizations was the bread and butter of proper education.
Land-grant colleges are state schools founded to teach “agricultural and mechanical arts.” Today, many are among the nation’s largest research universities. In this post I’ll share some thoughts about how they came about.
Let’s begin with conventional wisdom. Land-grant colleges “emerged from an idealistic concern for the adaptation of existing educational resources to a changing society . . . .” [1] Oddly, this somewhat grandiose explanation for the land-grants comes from John Simon, a historian who deftly investigated the politics behind the 1862 act that authorized such schools. He also recognized that the typical American didn’t have much truck with higher education in the mid-nineteenth century. One agricultural school was called the “Farmers’ High School” because the title “Farmers’ College” would sound too fancy.
Wouldn’t it be rewarding to sit back and read a comprehensive history of the United States written by a historian who has thought long and carefully about how America became what it is? Someone who could guide you through its triumphs and tragedies and show how they are linked? Surely the time spent would be worth as much as hours devoted to the latest biography by David McCullough or Ron Chernow: it would give you a sense of the full story.
Now you can do just that. Wilfred M. McClay has written Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.[1] It’s meant to be used as a textbook in homes, private schools, and charter schools—places where the dictates of public textbook commissions and education-school ideologies don’t hold sway. But it’s also written for “readers, young and old.”
The Wall Street Journal has described Land of Hope as a “counterpoint” to A People’s History. That popular history by the late Howard Zinn recounts the story of the United States as a country in which power dominates over the oppressed. Zinn wanted to tell the story of the victims—the Arawak Indians in Hispaniola, for example, rather than Columbus, the European intruder who “discovered” them.
I’ve previously observed that few historians are military historians and so some basic questions about wars tend to go unanswered. However, I have found a book that fills in much of the gap.
Years ago, a critic challenged William McNeil’s magnum opus, The Rise of the West, [1] by saying that his book lacked military analysis—it “lost track of the interaction between military technology and political patterns.” So McNeill wrote a book about just that subject, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000. [2]
I’d like to share two items from his book. One is astounding, but perhaps true. The other addresses the frequently asked questions, “Why did Europe go to War in 1914 and why did the war last so long?”
