Category: Personal Experience

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Wood Wars on the Susquehanna

This is a guest column by Jay Schalin, senior fellow at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Born in Pennsylvania, he responded to my request for “state stories.”

The uplands of northern Pennsylvania were a wild and wooly place in the early years of our nation. Rough men carved out large fortunes—or eked out bare livings—by extracting its natural resources, with violence occasionally erupting from their endeavors. Sometimes, the triggers for violence were the treatment of workers, as occurred in the eastern coal fields, pitting the pro-union Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society, against coal baron Franklin Gowen and his Pinkerton Detective Agency allies (the theme of a 1970 movie starring Sean Connery).

Another case of industrial violence resulted from a clash between competing technologies. It featured small independent entrepreneurs attacking the purveyors of more efficient, larger-scale methods. This is somewhat reminiscent of the violence wrought by English textile workers known as “Luddites” against more efficient factories in the early 19th century. Continue reading “Wood Wars on the Susquehanna”

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Silencing the Past: From the Haitian Revolution to American Correspondence Schools

Drawing or etching of the Haitian Revolution

We’ve all heard that history is written by the winners.  In his 1995 book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History,  Michel-Rolph Trouillot both agrees and disagrees. He shows that  historical narratives, such as the story of the Haitian Revolution,  reflect differences in  power—”the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals,” from the initial event to the written word.[1]

In other words, the people who shape history are not necessarily the winners. But they usually have some kind of power.

About a third of the way through his book I realized that I had discovered  such silences in my research on, yes, American correspondence schools. Continue reading “Silencing the Past: From the Haitian Revolution to American Correspondence Schools”

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The Problem with Political History

US. Capitol

As many readers know, my husband, Richard Stroup, died in November. For those who didn’t know him, here is a short obituary.  I very much appreciate the messages so many have shared with me about Rick.

Rick was somewhat skeptical of history as a discipline because he didn’t see any theory behind it (it seemed more like “one damned thing after another“). He preferred economic theory and its application to political behavior, which is called public choice economics. He and his coauthor James D. Gwartney were among the pioneers in this field.

Can history and economics be reconciled? Continue reading “The Problem with Political History”

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How to Be a Graduate Student in 2020

NC State University

James Hankins, a Harvard historian, has written an astute essay for the Martin Center about the difficulties facing a graduate student who wants to study traditional history. Such a student is one “who dislikes mixing contemporary politics into every historical dish and is out of sympathy with the perfervid evangelism of the modern progressive academy.”

These potential  students, whom he calls conservative (but may not be conservative in the usual sense, just eager to study traditional history), are increasingly avoiding the academy. They find themselves out of sync with “social justice” agendas, and sympathetic would-be mentors are increasingly entering retirement.

I highly recommend Hankins’ article. In addition, it gives me a timely opportunity (in journalism, a “news peg”) to share my own experience as a history graduate student at North Carolina State University, from which I will soon receive a master’s degree. Continue reading “How to Be a Graduate Student in 2020”

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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)”