The USA as Humpty Dumpty: Musings of a History Teacher

In the first leg of my post-college life, I've been teaching 8th grade US history. At this time of year, 8th graders learn about sectionalism, Andrew Jackson, and the problems of the 1820s and 1830s that festered and eventually exploded into a civil war (yet that war was not necessarily inevitable, as my students seem to think. 20-20 hindsight and teleology, however, are subjects for another day). This is a period of time that I have not studied since the 11th grade, but I'm starting to develop a new appreciation for our nations past as I probe these issues in order to teach them to my students.

The issue I'm pondering today: Why did we have a civil war?

I've been in conversations where people will shout simple answers until they are blue in the face. The debate goes as follows:
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SLAVERY!!!!!! Or STATES' RIGHTS!!!!!

.(if you live in the north) (Maryland and points south)

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When I was in 11th grade, my teacher led my class in a discussion on this very topic. We listed probably thirty reasons for the Civil War and then went back and labeled the reasons that involved slavery in some way. And that was nearly all of them. So I left high school with this vignette in my back pocket ready to explain when people said to me, "You study history? Tell me, what caused the Civil War?" (never mind the fact that I studied European history.) My boss (at my part-time, non-school related job) adamantly claims that interstate commerce caused the War Between the States. Interesting theory. One to which I will return later. So let's add that to our list:

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SLAVERY!!!!! STATES' RIGHTS!!!!! INTERSTATE COMMERCE!!!!!

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In light of my recent lessons on the Missouri Compromise and the Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833, I think the issue is much more complicated than any of these positions would lead us to believe. And I think understanding these complexities will give us a new and perhaps more holistic understanding of how our country was put together, torn apart, and then put back together again.

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The United States wasn't always the one nation, indivisible, that it seems to be today. From colonial times into the early 1800s, people saw themselves as citizens of a state, not a country, and politicians were more often interested in the best interests of their region than they were in the best interests of the Union (perhaps this is still true today...but that would be another essay). Sectional (read: North/South) divisions complicated the writing of the Constitution and resulted in the notable compromises on slavery and representation and the composition of the legislative branch that became part of the new system of government.

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These differences played out during the administrations of the first few presidents and only deepened as the West expanded and the North and South developed different economies and different societies. These tensions manifested themselves and could have brought the nation to war as early as 1820. In this year, the Missouri Compromise provided a temporary resolution of sectional tensions by maintaining the balance between slave and free states and defining how slavery would expand as the country expanded into the Louisiana Territory. It was less about the question of slavery than it was about two contrasting ways of life (political, economic, social, philosophical) and how those ways of life could be housed in one country under one federal government.

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Fast forward to 1828 and 1832. Congress passed tariffs designed to protect American manufacturers and promote the purchasing of American goods. Reasonable, yes? Well, the South depended on European manufactured goods bought with the proceeds from cash crops (namely cotton), and they balked at the thought of paying more for European goods. Enter John C Calhoun and the philosophy of nullification. Calhoun's South Carolina refused to pay these tariffs and threatened in 1832 to secede from the Union. The subsequent conflict, which saw the passage of another compromise and of an act authorizing the president to use force to enforce federal laws within states, was not really about tariffs or slavery (slaves after all produced the cotton sold in return for manufactured goods and drove the Southern economy). The conflict was really about the authority of the federal government and how that power and the authority of the states fit together. It was about defining federalism. Calhoun made it about the source of federal power--he argued that it came from the states, while folks like Daniel Webster of New England argued that federal power came from the people. Thanks to another compromise from the hand of Henry Clay (architect of the Missouri Compromise), another argument was resolved. But sectional tension persisted for the next thirty years and exploded at various points during that time before the pot boiled over in 1860 and 1861 in what we know as the start of the Civil War.

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So why was the Civil War fought? To preserve the Union? Maybe. South Carolina and ten other states left, and Lincoln sent troops to bring them back. To secure states' rights? States' rights to own slaves, nullify federal laws, develop their own political and economic systems without the interference of Washington? Maybe. To free the slaves? Depends who you ask. Abolitionist sentiment had been simmering in the North for decades, Uncle Tom's Cabin caused a ruckus, and slavery was intimately involved in the problems in Missouri and Kansas in the years before the war broke out. But Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation until 1862 after a major Union victory at Antietam, and then the declaration only applied to the states that had seceded, leaving slaves in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri still enslaved. According to an op-ed piece in the New York Times last weekend, Ulysses Grant, the great Union General, did not seek the abolition of slavery. Even though he thought the South's "peculiar institution" would be a casualty of the war, he was motivated more by the threat secession posed to "democratic republican government, of which Lincoln said...there was no "better or equal hope in the world.""

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So where does that leave us? Maybe it's a tragic oversimplification to say that the Civil War was fought over slavery or states' rights or interstate commerce. Perhaps these are manifestations of some larger questions. What if the War Between the States was fought in order to find out:

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1. How is our country put together? Where is the power? Where does it come from, and how do we share it?

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2. What if a state that joined the Union voluntarily by democratically ratifying the Constitution disagrees with the direction of public policy and/or no longer wants to be part of the Union?

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3. Who does our government protect? If power comes from the people, who are "the people"?

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4. How do we resolve our problems? Is there room in the Union for a very diverse set of interests and cultures?

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Perhaps by asking these questions of the past, we might understand better the tensions that

brought us to a civil war and the answers the war and Reconstruction provided. Maybe also these are questions we need to ask ourselves and our own political leaders as we face new tensions and new divisions in our modern, indivisible, one nation.

Judge in Memphis Grants Asylum to German Home Schoolers

This is an interesting case--for the article, click here:

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I read about the Romeike family in this week’s issue of Time Magazine, and today’s New York Times carried an article about how an immigration judge in Tennessee granted political asylum to this German family because they fear persecution in their home country. Why? They wish to home-school their children, which is illegal in Germany. Now, I’m surprised at this law simply because I know nothing about such policies in other countries, and I find this an interesting case because the family hails from the same German state where my penpal lives. As an American, I have known many people who were home-schooled for one reason or another, so the fact that this practice is not common or allowed in other countries definitely gives me a changed perspective on things. In conclusion, I have learned something about other societies that I did not know, making me a more informed citizen.

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Yet, the critical point here is that I am an American. The judge in the case is an American. In America, we have the right to educate our children however we want.

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But there’s another critical corollary to this discussion:

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NOT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS AMERICAN OR SHARES AMERICAN VALUES.

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The writer for the Times explains the judge’s ruling as follows: "In a harshly worded decision, the judge, Lawrence O. Burman, denounced the German policy, calling it “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans,” and expressed shock at the heavy fines and other penalties the government has levied on home-schooling parents, including taking custody of their children."

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That would be fine. German laws (or the laws of any other country) can resonate poorly with us here in the US of A. It happens. But, the people in Berlin who made these laws are NOT Americans; they are Germans, and their legislators DO NOT answer to the American status quo when they make their laws. If they want to outlaw homeschooling, it’s their right. It’s our right to disagree. That’s why we make our own laws here. If the Romeike family wants to leave Germany and home-school their children someplace else (like the USA), that’s also their right. The judge’s ruling, however, is blatant cultural imperialism, and no judge in this country has the right to attempt to impose our values on other societies. We have enough trouble in this country dealing with debates over whether judges should or ever do inflict their perspectives on our own society (read: judicial activism) that we have no business criticizing the legitimate social policies of other nations. Hasn’t this gotten us in enough trouble already?

I ain't afraid of no ghosts?

I definitely have to post a longer reflection on my own post-graduate life in Chestertown, but for now, here's an anecdote from the life of Ten Page:

Sunday morning, I came back into my apartment from the laundry room, and I happened to notice that my VCR said 7:45. Not a big deal you might say. Except for the fact that I got up at 8 on Sunday morning, and it was almost 9am at this point. Somehow my VCR clock managed to set itself back an hour. We didn't have a power outage or surge, all of the other clocks in the house read the correct time, and I haven't even had the VCR on in a week, much less changed the time my self.

Spooky...

One Lovely Night of History

Last night, at a small, stunningly beautiful, outdoor theater in Spring Green, WI, I was powerfully reminded why I love both history and theatre (and Shakespeare as a vessel of both these things) during a performance of King Henry V. I know that so much of the history we learn is made up of kings and countries, but I saw one of those history-making kings weep over the body of a young boy, slain by fleeing French in contempt of the rules of war. Even kings are mere men, and it is of the deeds of all men that history is made.

Now, the history nerd in me was astir at the early discussion of the intricacies of Salic law, which I understood all too well, and the common discussion of Henry's royal lineage, with as twisted branches as most royal family trees, intermingled by intermarriage. Before the battle of Agincourt began and the English despaired of returning alive across the channel, I knew how the powerful English long bow would confound French expectations of an easy victory. While Henry wooed Katherine with the words of a soldier and a king, I knew the tragedy that would leave his son fatherless at a tender age, and how the bitter Dauphin would regain his throne with the help of a French peasant girl named Jean d'Arc. But these are the mere cold facts of history, the basic substance of the past, but wrought from them on that empty stage was a story epic in scope and human in nature.

So many people, and I know this because I used to be one, see history as a boring miasma of dates, names, and places. But it is a vibrant tapestry of emotions and people just as human as we are, just as fallible as we wish we weren't and just as capable of the same greatness to which we aspire. When Henry exhorted his weary men once more unto the breach and to cry God for Harry, England, and St. George, I wanted to leap out of my seat and follow him into battle. And that is the power of truly excellent theatre. History may just be words on a page to us now, but it was real to the people who lived it. The blood that was so often talked of, whether in threats against France, or in laments against that already spilled, was drawn from real men and women, who felt as much pain at it as we might.

I have always had a fondness for the Hundred Years War (of which the action of the play is a small part), and I have a deep love for the theater that mounted the production, so I was naturally predisposed to like it. I did not expect to find myself pulled so deeply into the history I have seldom looked at since my graduation this past May. When Henry passed sentence on three traitors early in the play, my history major mind was pleased at the distinction of these men as guilty of high treason, having learned the distinction between high and petit treason from my thesis research. This same research again leaped to mind when a common soldier was condemned to a hanging for stealing a minor sum from a French church. I knew about these laws, and I tried to understand the human cost of them. But nothing brings it home like the pain in Henry's face when a man he has known his whole life sells his king to the French and he must condemn him to death, or the anguish when he hears that the common thief being hanged was a companion of his recently abandoned youth.

I have often wished that I could have some permanent record of plays of have seen, and this wish was most fervent after the play was over. But in this, theatre is like history: once it has happened, it lives on only in the memories of those who experienced it. Just as any record of an event is in some way biased and incomplete, my memories of the play can never truly recreate within me the experience of being there, nor can my description of it to anyone else ever accurately convey exactly what happened. But I will never forget the powerful emotions I was allowed to share a taste of with those actors, and it is such passion that we should never remove from history. We should pursue it with as much passion as was given by those who lived it.

This beautiful production of Shakespeare's play brought the human back into the history, the most important and yet, I think, the most often overlooked aspect of our past. We may analyze events and actions, searching for meaning in the vagaries of human record, but now, more than ever, I am determined to remember that the study of history, first and foremost, connects us to other people who lived as we lived, and that to see that we are the same as them is the greatest achievement we can hope to attain.

Brenna

Openings

Happy Election Night! I hope everyone got out and voted today, and if Facebook statuses are any indication, it seems that people my age aren’t as apathetic as we are stereotyped to be. But that’s not what I’m here to ponder this lovely night.

I’m taking the History of Western Art with Dr. McColl this semester, and about a month ago, the Art, German Studies, and Gender Studies departments sponsored a lecture given by Dr. Jeffrey Hamburger, a medieval art historian at Harvard University, on text and image in medieval religious books. Dr. Hamburger was one of Dr. McColl’s professors in graduate school, so Dr. McColl required our class to go (not that I wouldn’t have gone anyway, the medievalist that I am). In this talk, Dr. Hamburger stressed the symbolic and practical importance of the codex form and the new possibilities that the act of opening a codex created. For medieval Christians, the open book represented salvation, illustrated in the Lamb’s ability to break the seven seals in chapter five of the book of Revelation. I found the manuscript images of this scene interesting in that they depicted the book as a codex, as the modern Biblical translations with which I am familiar describe this object as either a book in general or a scroll. This is an important distinction, as scrolls were used in medieval art to represent the Old Testament Law and prophets, while codices represented Christ, and the new covenant. The codex appeared in the fourth century AD, but it was this symbolic value to Christians that accelerated its adoption. Dr. Hamburger also pointed out the practical considerations that popularized the production of codices: they were more convenient and more comprehensive than scrolls and allowed scribes and patrons to add images to texts and to exploit facing pages to show two images that complimented or juxtaposed one another. While scrolls were still used for public documents and oral readings, codices came to be associated with silent reading and with a transition from an aural culture to a visual culture in which seeing was more important than hearing. Dr. Hamburger chose a variety of images from many different times and places during the Middle Ages to illustrate the various purposes of images in books and the different techniques artists used to achieve their desired effect., which demonstrated the breadth of his analysis.

At that point in the semester, we hadn’t moved past Hellenistic and Greek art in class, but Dr. Hamburger’s presentation touched on several concepts that we had already discussed. In some of the works we examined, such as Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, we considered the role of the viewer in the meaning of the image; in this case, the pose of Aphrodite implies that the viewer interrupted her bath. The relationship between the viewer and the image was also an important element in understanding medieval images such as those in a certain Carolingian gospel book that bring the reader into the world of the four evangelists as they composed their gospels. We also looked at the interaction between text and image in works such as the Palette of Narmer and the Stele of Hammurabi, and this interaction was much more developed in medieval books, as images communicated ideas contained in texts or created new meanings for images by associating them with certain texts, as was the case with the images of Jesus and Mary surrounded by verses from the Song of Solomon. In ancient art, we looked at various representations of the relationship between humans and deities, and this tradition continues in the medieval images we saw during Dr. Hamburger’s presentation. Some prayer books showed different images of the ruler humbling himself before Christ, while others, such as one image of an emperor and the Virgin Mary, give humans the same status as important religious figures in a way that is very similar to images such as the Stele of Hammurabi. The media, iconography, and function of these medieval images are very different from the ancient and classical works that we discussed in class, but the presence of these themes illustrates that there are elements of continuity that transcend time and space and to connect people and the images they create.

Not only was this a really fascinating talk, but Dr. Hamburger has a great sense of humor, which he showed throughout his talk. He passed around a wax tablet and stylus to show everyone what one medieval writing tool was like, and he used now obsolete printer paper and a stapler to illustrate differences between scrolls and codices. We also learned the complete history of the bookmark: it was an important readers’ tool in breviaries and other books that frequently made use of cross-referencing. They were also important to copyists who needed to mark their places as they worked through manuscripts. After the talk, the audience asked some excellent questions, and Dr. McColl said in class that Dr. Hamburger was very impressed with the audience and the students who asked questions—apparently that doesn’t happen often in the Ivy League.

It’s been a really good semester for lectures, as there have been a lot of really interesting speakers. Brenna went to a history lecture last week about swearing, and there’s a talk next week about Jewish roots in Germany and the week after on the Whiskey Rebellion. I’m glad that there have been a variety of speakers and that I’ve been able to go; when I first came to college, I went to a lot of lectures my first semester and I thought they were each great opportunities for students. In the past couple of years, there haven’t seemed to be as many and my schedule has made it more difficult for me to go, but I’m hoping that I’ll still be able to catch lectures like these wherever I end up after graduation.

The Educational Side Effects of YouTube

This is me babysitting the computer lab in Goldstein after having realized that I cannot do homework, because I am ahead on my homework. This means that the only books I have were for class today, and for Friday's class, we've moved on. Oh well. The problems of being an overachiever. So, I am taking the opportunity to finish a blog post I started last semester about the educational benefits of YouTube.

Yes. You read that correctly. YouTube as education. YouTube as a valuable teaching aid. YouTube making class a heck of a lot more fun. You may be scratching your head in disbelief or you may be laughing at me, but I am dead serious, and I will tell you why.

It began, for me, early last school year. In my class on ancient Roman history (which those of you who read this blog last year might recognize), we discussed the various Roman emperors, including Augustus Caesar. Well, there happens to be a wonderful mini-series about said emperors called I, Claudius. Dr. Sorrentino (my wonderful professor) was able to go on to YouTube and find a wonderful clip from the series which she showed us in class. We got to watch as Augustus walked down a line up of approximately 20 men, asking each of them whether they'd slept with his daughter, eventually asking if anyone in Rome had not had sex with her. It really added to our appreciation of just how screwed up some of these Roman emperors were.

Then, last semester, we were discussing whether TV shows from the 60's truly represented life. Dr. Sorrentino found clips from some of the shows discussed, including I Love Lucy and The Honemooners, which gave those students who were not familiar with these shows a chance to see what they depicted. We then watched clips of movies when we were discussing movies about the Vietnam War.

Just last week, Dr. Black showed us clips of a few Russian movies to illustrate points about Ivan the Terrible. One clip was from some Russian slapstick comedy about an inventor who creates a time machine that sent two guys back in time and brought Ivan the Terrible forward in time. The other one was a little more valid, showing Ivan's coronation from a movie about his reign.

What, might you ask, is the point of professors using YouTube? Personally, I think that it is a wonderful way to help the students to connect with and remember the material. I came back to the dorm and promptly showed the clip of Augustus and the line up of guys to my friends. It also provides a nice change in how class is run. Class is usually based on lecture with discussion mixed in to keep things interesting. YouTube allows professors to break up the routine, to prove to their students that they actually are a part of the 21st century. YouTube is basically a staple of life for many college students, and I think that it helps to make their classes seem a little more relevant.

So, the next time you sigh because of all the random YouTube videos that people you know watch, just remember that somewhere out there, lucky college students are benefiting from all of its wonderful educational attributes. I know I have.

That's all, folks!
Brenna

Strange Fruit

Greetings, folks! Brenna and I sort of resolved to return to the land of blog once school started, so I thought I’d take a moment and report on this year’s George Washington Book Prize celebration. You might remember that last year’s prize went to Charles Rappleye’s Sons of Providence, which I read over winter break last year. It was pretty interesting, and it started a chain of thought that brought me a summer research project this year, but more on that another day. This year, the prize went to Dr. Marcus Rediker of the University of Pittsburgh for his book The Slave Ship: A Human History. Brenna started reading it, and she’s really enjoying it so far, except that the topic is rather depressing. The title of Rediker’s social history explains it all—the book is about the international slave trade and the experiences of the 12.5 million Africans carried to North America and the various other people involved in the slave trade over four centuries. As Dr. Rediker said at the beginning of his presentation, this isn’t a part of our history that we are comfortable discussing, but “we’ve got to face our past.”

During his talk, Dr. Rediker called the slave trade “a human drama” featuring people of many different cultures and ethnicities who were brought from the interior of Africa, made to endure “humiliating medical inspections,” and directed aboard slave ships, which he called “chambers of horrors.” Because the Africans would cry out as the ship pulled away from the coast, these ships often left port during the night while its cargo was sleeping, leaving the Africans to awake and discover they were in the middle of the ocean. On the other side of the Atlantic, “you could smell a slave ship before you could see it” as a result of the heat, seasickness, and death that took their toll on the ship’s passengers. Dr. Rediker also explained the captains’ use of terror to control the Africans and prevent them from rebelling; he repeated one story that he included early in his book about a woman who was lowered overboard to the sharks that followed the slave ships. When she was removed from the water, her lower half was gone.

One of the most interesting parts of Dr. Rediker’s presentation was his explanation of how Africans resisted aboard slave ships, demonstrating the agency Africans had. Africans engaged in hunger strikes, completed suicide (sometimes en masse), and attempted insurrection (although insurrections were not often successful). Africans also, in Dr. Rediker’s view, showed creativity as they built new cultures, new communities, and new languages during the voyage across the Atlantic, and these mark the slave ships as the start of African-American culture. Bethel AME Church, which is located a block south of our campus, provided a beautiful venue for the lecture, and as a part of the presentation, a woman named Karen Somerville performed songs that described different elements of the slave ship experience. One of these songs mourned the Africans’ departure from Africa and the fact that they were a long way from home, another was a later song about lynching called “Strange Fruit” that they used to highlight the experience of the woman dangling above the sharks, and the final song celebrated the end of slavery and the humiliations of the auction block but lamented and honored the thousands that perished over the course of the slave trade.

After the talk, Brenna and I went to the dedication of the Patrick Henry Fellow’s residence and then to the reception at the Hynson-Ringgold House. The dedication was exciting, especially when Adam Goodheart (director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience) brought out a large 18th century sword and used it to open a bottle of champagne (a moment I watched from next to/in a nearby bush to escape the splash zone, as Brenna and I had been right in the front talking with Dr. Miller and his friend, who teaches at the College of William and Mary), and between the dedication and the reception, we were able to catch up with several of our professors. Like last year, there was a public conversation with Adam Goodheart and Dr. Rediker, but Brenna and I both had class, so we weren’t able to attend (which is a shame now that I’m looking back at my notes and the questions I had written down). Nevertheless, a good time was had by all, and I’m going to have to read The Slave Ship over winter break.

Until next time (to quote The Phantom of the Opera), I remain your obedient servant, Ten Page.