Things Noted Here & There

by Cliopatria

"Visuals and Representations," Giant's Shoulders #28, the history of science carnival, is up at Jai Virdi's From the Hands of Quacks.

For the Washington Post, 14 October, Michael Dirda reviews The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis.

In Benjamin L. Carp,"Noble Patriots or Glorified Vandals?" WSJ, 16 October, the author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America considers comparisons.

Simon Schama,"The beastliness of modern art," Financial Times, 15 October, is an edited version of Schama's lecture at the Frieze Art Fair.

Beverly Gage,"Under God . . . or Not," NYT, 15 October, reviews Jeffrey Owen Jones's and Peter Meyer's The Pledge: A History of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Ken Kalfus,"Path to Dissent," NYT, 15 October, reviews Vasily Grossman's The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays. Trans. by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova.

Alexandra Mullen,"The Hard Work of an Effortless Pose," WSJ, 15 October, reviews Barry Day, ed., The Noël Coward Reader.

Eric A. Posner,"The Four Tops," The Book, 14 October, reviews Noah Feldman's Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices. David J. Garrow,"Justice William Brennan, a liberal lion who wouldn't hire women," Washington Post, 17 October, reviews Seth Stern's and Stephen Wermiel's Justice Brennan, Liberal Lion.

Steven Heller,"Silent Pictures," NYT, 8 October, and Sarah Boxer,"America's First Wordless Novelist," Slate, 17 October, review Art Spiegelman, ed., Six Novels in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward.

Janet Maslin,"A French Thinker Who Crossed Continents and Cultures," NYT, 17 October, reviews Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in His Laboratory.

Charles Horner,"A Born Controversialist," WSJ, 9 October, and Hendrik Hertzberg,"Politics and Prose," New Yorker, 26 October, review Steven Weisman, ed., Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary.

David Remnick and Caroline Elkins cast doubt on rumors that Barack Obama, Sr., was murdered. Andrew Ferguson,"The Roots of Lunacy," WS, 16 October, reviews Dinesh D'Souza's The Roots of Obama's Rage.

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Chris Bray - 10/20/2010

Many thanks for your reply -- I know how unpleasant it is to wedge these discussions into 600 words, and I appreciate your dilemma. I hope to see your AHA panel, and very much look forward to reading your new book.

Benjamin L. Carp - 10/20/2010

Dear Chris Bray,

Thank you so much for your engagement with the piece--I most definitely take your point. Yes, I've read Lee and Fischer and Maier. I'm not sure I completely agree with the idea that the crowd always obeyed its self-imposed cultural controls, but in any case this is an issue that I'll be confronting much more fully and directly at an AHA panel in Boston in January.

In the meantime, all I can offer are a couple of admittedly lame defenses.

First, I only had 600 words, and it just wasn't the time to be airing out the full historiography.

Second, I think the general public generally errs too much on the side of "the patriots were always restrained," and so my goal was to complicate that image by nudging readers in the other direction.

Finally, I agree there are always problems with drawing analogies between a 21st-century context and an 18th-century context--in fact that was one of the main points of my piece. If you think I've countered a bad analogy with a worse one, then that's a fair criticism. In any case, the book itself presents a more fully contextualized picture.

--BLC

Chris Bray - 10/20/2010

And there's no way that Benjamin Carp doesn't know all of that, which makes the "bullying jerks" op-ed piece even stranger.

Chris Bray - 10/20/2010

That op-ed piece in the WSJ is *extremely* strange, with its argument that the original Tea Party would be "considered political vandalism in the 21st century" and that the Sons of Liberty were "on occasion, a bunch of bullying jerks."

But he makes no effort at all to place their violence in its very particular historical context. Who cares what it would be considered in the 21st century? That's not when it happened.

Political violence in the late-colonial United States was both common and constrained, organized within clear boundaries even as it confronted government. After all, these were people who didn't have police, and responded to crime through the hue and cry -- they were familiar with personal violence in a way that we're not, because we pay the state to manage it for us.

There's all kinds of great scholarship on this question, and none of it is in evidence in Benjamin Carp's essay. Wayne Lee's great book on violence and "signaling," David Hackett Fischer on the organization of violence leading up to the confrontation at Lexington and Concord, Pauline Maier on the ideological boundaries of violent confrontation with the state.

They weren't "bullying jerks." They had a point at which they stopped, and knew they had to stop, and it matters.