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Does the Present Shed Light on the Past?

I thought it was an original discovery of mine—the notion that present-day concerns often direct historians to study particular aspects of history.

In the 1960s, for example, economists and politicians were trying to help newly independent, but underdeveloped, countries grow. Sidney Pollard, a historian, thought that a better understanding of the first great period of development, the Industrial Revolution, would “help forecast, and pave the way for, the next steps to be taken by living economies”; thus its study had “a severely practical basis.”[1]

While composing my post, however, I learned that historian David Cannadine had already written an essay detailing how present concerns shape investigations of the past. Writing in 1984, he identified four waves of historical analysis of the Industrial Revolution up to that time. He ingeniously tied each one of them to economic conditions at the time of writing.

While historians like Pollard had treated the Industrial Revolution as a model for future development, by the mid-1970s disillusionment about economic growth had set in. “[T]he British Industrial Revolution is now depicted in a more negative light,” Cannadine wrote, “as a limited, restricted, piecemeal phenomenon, in which various things did not happen or where, if they did, they had far less effect than was previously supposed.”[2]

Should such periodic re-investigation make us wonder about the validity of historical findings? That is, are those findings anachronistic (a word that historians dread)? An anachronism is something inappropriately included when depicting a particular period of time. For example, Shakespeare has a clock chime in Julius Caesar. Clocks did not chime in ancient Rome. [3] Academically, anachronism occurs when historians “pose the past in a form that would have been alien to the period we are describing.”[4]

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Good News about the 1600s, Part I

The seventeenth century in Europe was bloody and violent. Some examples: a continental war that went on for thirty years (1618-1648), three British civil wars (1639-1651),  naval wars between England and the Netherlands (1652-1674), and military efforts to rein in France’s Louis XIV and the Spanish Hapsburgs.

At the same time, however, economic changes were quietly occurring, laying a foundation for the Industrial Revolution. That’s the little-known subject of this post.

“What happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a wholesale shift of industry, including rather sophisticated sectors, from city to countryside,” writes Jan de Vries in his informative book Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750.[1]

This shift from cities to rural areas is not the typical “Industrial Revolution” story, which says that peasants were forced off the farm and into the cities, making them available for burgeoning industrial factories. To some extent that did happen later, but manufacturing in England and other parts of western Europe started in rural areas, not cities.  Here’s how, according to de Vries.

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The Form that Failed

[Photo: credit: Campus facility (UA023.005), Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina.]

Like the child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, someone (Lawrence Biemiller) is admitting that the great wave of Modernist buildings on academic campuses—constructed from the 1960s until very recently—has not been a success.  We may think of universities as places of ivy-covered brick walls and quaint quads, but the fact is that for decades, universities chose to construct  stark “form follows function” buildings admired by architects, but rarely by students.

Here at  North Carolina State University,  Harrelson Hall, built in 1962, was torn down in 2016. Even the NC State website describes Harrelson as “a circular freak of a building that flummoxed students with its spiral ramps, windowless classrooms and ductwork that whooshed like a subway tunnel.”

Harrelson was over 50 years old when it was taken down, but I frequently walk by a newer construction, the Ricks Hall Addition, built in 2009. It is Modernist—a rectangular box connected on the second floor to the 1922 Ricks Hall, which boasts Ionic columns. The only similarity I can see to the original building is the color of the brick. I see nothing pleasing about it.

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Should We Admire the Greeks and Romans? Bastiat Didn’t

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.

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How Did We Get Land-Grant Colleges?

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.

Yet Simon’s statement reflects a still-prevailing image of the idealistic movement for land-grant colleges. Continue reading “How Did We Get Land-Grant Colleges?”