Results for Chris Beneke's Posts

Unto the Sea Shall Thou Return: Boston, 2050

October 21, 2013
Chris Beneke

On my office wall, I have a replica 1775 Boston map. It looks like this:

Zoom view
Boston, 1775
As I stared idly at it last week, I was suddenly struck by how much the drawing resembled other maps that I'd seen recently, such as this one:

These Scary Maps Explain What Sea Level Rise Will Mean in Boston
Projected map of Boston after a 5 ft. seal level rise (coupled with another 2.5 ft. storm surge.)
If you concentrate only on the grey areas above, you should discern (as I finally did) an eerie resemblance to the 1775 map at the top.

I wasn't the first to notice the similarity. The Atlantic ran a piece last February that I missed, and perhaps you did as well. There, Emily Badger noted the resemblance between Boston in the 1640s and the exceedingly damp, post-global warming projections of what it will look like in 2050, 2100, etc.

By dint of massive and repeated landfills over the last two centuries, Bostonians have doggedly claimed areas that once belonged to the sea. Before this century is over, the sea may be taking many of them back.
Unto the Sea Shall Thou Return: Boston, 2050 Unto the Sea Shall Thou Return: Boston, 2050 Reviewed by Joseph Landis on October 21, 2013 Rating: 5

On the passing of Pauline Maier

August 16, 2013
Chris Beneke


Pauline Maier passed away Monday. Her academic title was William Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s a distinguished position, but hardly does justice to the person who filled it.

I didn’t know Professor Maier was ill. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine her in a non-effervescent condition. Every other observation I’ve encountered since Monday affirms the testimony of my own experience: Maier was irrepressibly charming, ceaselessly brilliant, and blessed with a thunderous, seminar-shaking laugh.

Professor Maier published important books at a stately pace. There were four major monographs, one per decade. The first two changed our understanding of pre-Revolutionary politics;  the third upended standard interpretations of the Declaration of Independence;  the fourth provided the first full account of how the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Each was definitive, the sort of book that every early American historian needs to read at some point. Each was also a marvel of original documentary research and nonfiction storytelling.

Pauline Maier, the world-renowned scholar and teacher, also happened to be kind. She didn’t dispense saccharine praise to the minor figures who clamored for her attention. Instead, she offered genuine respect for their ideas and lots of tough, useful criticism. As a graduate student with no prior acquaintance, I invited her to comment on a conference panel. She agreed and, when the time came, cheerily directed me to think about many rudimentary things about which I should have already been thinking. A few years later, when I asked her to read part of my book manuscript—a punishingly dry and tedious tome—she agreed again, and then administered the thorough, friendly thrashing it needed.

These were the kind of things she did for people and partly explains why she published four landmark books instead of eight. Maier treated her fellow historians with the same honest consideration that she tendered her historical subjects, remaining ever open to the possibility that the lowly might possess more insight than their better appointed counterparts (as well as the possibility that they might be out of their senses). Ratification’s acknowledgements leave no doubt how much she appreciated the assistance that others offered in turn. She thanked them not merely in lists of names, or even sentences, but whole paragraphs. Word count be damned.

Maier was more irreverent in her work than big-name professors typically are. She had little use for unsubstantiated assumptions or pious orthodoxies. She had a keen eye for the workings of power and a still keener appreciation for the anxieties of those who confronted it. But Maier never succumbed to the vain illusion that doing history is the same thing as doing politics.

Professor Maier loved good argument but always approached the past with the kind of wonder and excitement that those burdened by mountains of historiography often find difficult to muster. Of course she knew the relevant scholarship inside and out. Maier just didn’t have much use for the things that we habitually say about those who lived before us. She wanted to know what they said themselves.

Scholars as celebrated as Pauline Maier are vulnerable to severe cases of self-absorption. That was not a malady from which she suffered. In addition to the innumerable kindnesses she extended to other historians, she was perpetually delighted by her children, grandchildren, and Rhode Island garden. And she loved her husband Charlie.

If, as planned, I had been able to attend her spring seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I would have seen Professor Maier one last time. But I had kids to watch at home. As much as I regret that absence, I suspect she would have told me that the time was better spent with my boys. That’s one of the reasons I’ll miss her.
On the passing of Pauline Maier On the passing of Pauline Maier Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 16, 2013 Rating: 5

Mitch Daniels’ Email Criticizing Howard Zinn Roundup

August 08, 2013
Chris Beneke
 
Tom LoBianco, “Daniels Looked to Censor Opponents,” The Associated Press, July 16, 2013
“Emails obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request show Daniels requested that historian and anti-war activist Howard Zinn's writings be
banned from classrooms and asked for a "cleanup" of college courses. In another exchange, the Republican talks about cutting funding for a program run by a local university professor who was one of his sharpest critics. … The emails are raising eyebrows about Daniels' appointment as president of a major research university just months after critics questioned his lack of academic credentials and his hiring by a board of trustees he appointed.”

The Mitch Daniels email, February 9, 2010
“This terrible anti-American academic finally passed away. The obits and commentaries mentioned that his book ‘A People’s History of the United States’ is ‘the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.’ It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. … Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”

92 Purdue faculty members, “An open letter to Mitch Daniels,” July 22, 2013
“We trust our colleagues to introduce young people to the facts of history, but also to the much more difficult, much more essential practices of critical thinking. We trust our K-12 colleagues to know how and when to present challenges to received knowledge and how to encourage their students to judge such challenges for themselves. And we trust them to decide how and when to use controversial scholarship such as Zinn’s in their classrooms. This kind of academic freedom is essential to all levels of education, whether within a tenure system or not.”

American Historical Association, “AHA Releases Statement,” AHA Today, July 19, 2013
“The American Historical Association would consider any governor’s action that interfered with an individual teacher’s reading assignments to be inappropriate and a violation of academic freedom.   Some of the relevant facts of this case remain murky, and it is not entirely clear what in the end happened, or did not happen, in Indiana. Nonetheless, the AHA deplores the spirit and intent of former Governor Daniels’s e-mails of 2010 …. Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of Howard Zinn’s text, and whatever the criticisms that have been made of it, we believe that the open discussion of controversial books benefits students, historians, and the general public alike. Attempts to single out particular texts for suppression from a school or university curriculum have no place in a democratic society.”

Robert Cohen and Sonia Murrow, “Who’s Afraid of Radical History,” The Nation, August 5, 2013
“Innovative history teachers across the United States have for decades used A People’s History at the high school level in similarly comparative and rigorous ways. High school teachers desperate to breathe some life into their classes have distributed Xerox copies of Zinn’s most provocative chapters to offer a contrast to state-mandated textbooks, seeking to engage students in historical debate so they learn that history involves sorting out competing interpretations of the past rather than mere memorization of names and dates. These teachers have been drawn to Zinn because he offered their students a uniquely accessible introduction to the new social history, which revolutionized historical scholarship beginning in the 1960s.”

Rich Lowry, “Daniels vs. Zinn,” The National Review Online, July 30, 2013
“The caterwauling in the Daniels controversy about the importance of academic inquiry is particularly rich, given that Zinn didn’t believe in it. He had no use for objectivity and made history a venture in rummaging through the historical record to find whatever was most politically useful, without caring much about strict factual accuracy. ‘Knowing history is less about understanding the past than changing the future,’ he said. He joined his propagandistic purpose to a moral obtuseness that refused to distinguish between the United States and its enemies, including Nazi Germany.”

Sam Wineburg, “In Indiana, history meets politics,” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2013.
“The Purdue faculty dismissed criticisms of Zinn's scholarship by Handlin and presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. as coming from the ‘consensus school of U.S. history.’ But their dismissal ignored the searing criticisms of historians with impeccable leftist credentials, such as [Michael] Kazin and Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who wrote that for Zinn, ‘everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great.’ … His [Daniels’] view of history, presented in his 2011 book "Keeping the Republic," is as one-sided from the right as Zinn's was from the left. … What bothers me most about the whole flap — about Daniels' emails and about the Purdue faculty's reaction to them — is the way nuance was sacrificed to politics. We've come to expect politicians under fire to engage in spin. But when academics respond in kind, they reduce education to a game of politics. The loser in this game is truth and the students we are supposed to teach about the value of pursuing it.”
Mitch Daniels’ Email Criticizing Howard Zinn Roundup Mitch Daniels’ Email Criticizing Howard Zinn Roundup Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 08, 2013 Rating: 5

When is Profanity Justified?

June 11, 2013
Maura Jane Farrelly and Chris Beneke

April was an especially cruel month in Boston. It was also a profane one. In the wake of the marathon bombings, the Dominican-born Red Sox slugger David Ortiz dropped an f-bomb before the team’s April 20 game. “This is our f**king city” he declared to an approving roar from the “Boston Strong” crowd.

A week later, a filmed confrontation between Cambridge resident Roger Nicholson and Dan Bidondi, a correspondent for the conspiracy theory website, InfoWars, went viral. At a press conference earlier in the week, Bidondi had implied that law enforcement officials knew about the marathon attacks hours before they happened. Nicholson told Binondi that he was not welcome in Cambridge, where the citizens have “half a f**king brain.” “I don’t care if people think I’m an ***hole,” Nicholson said, “ I’m not saying the FBI blew up innocent people.”

Under ordinary circumstances, both Ortiz and Nicholson might have been censured or fined for their emphatic use of expletives in public space. But less than an hour after “Big Papi” addressed Fenway Park, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski tweeted that all was forgiven. Ortiz, the chairman noted, “spoke from the heart.” Nicholson’s tongue-lashing earned its own kind of public sanction when Nicholson was invited to appear on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir show. Bashir extended a warm welcome to Nicholson and agreed that the idea of government involvement in the Boston bombings is a “risible theory.”

Both events raise a question with which a liberal democracy must occasionally grapple: When is profanity justified?

Forty years ago, near the fractious end of the Vietnam War, these same questions came to a head when the Supreme Court heard the case of Cohen v. California (1971). In a narrow 5-4 decision the Court ruled that Paul Robert Cohen’s t-shirt, imprinted with the phrase “F*** the Draft,” was a form of protected speech. “People bring passion to politics,” Judge Harlan wrote in the majority opinion, “and vulgarity is simply a side effect of a free exchange of ideas—no matter how radical they may be.”

In the 1960s and early 1970s, profanity became a kind of oppositional discourse, a means of expressing firm, unequivocal dissent or of radically reframing mainstream assumptions. What is indecent and obscene, new leftists argued during the 1960s, was not bad language or sex, but violence, bigotry, and poverty. The idea was arresting. And so it remains today.

Of course, profanity is sometimes merely indecent, and sometimes merely titillating. In 1972, a year after the Cohen decision, George Carlin famously enumerated his seven words you can’t say on TV, which walked a fine line between political expression and mere titillation. That line is not always obvious nor defensible.

The politically expressive power of profanity (just like its comic effect) resides in its restricted and selective use. Employed too often and without thought, profanity devolves into coarseness. Liberal democracies require the civil (and yes, decent) language that shields our social interactions, collective endeavors, and commercial enterprises from the unrelenting siren call of the id.

But Ortiz’s f-bomb and Nicholson’s remind us that profanity can sometimes perform an invaluable public service. When pointed and well-conceived, it can bring egregious false-dealers to light or express deeply felt grievances in a poignant way. In other words, it has the capacity to stir us from our collective slumbers.

We just shouldn’t grow too dependent on it.
When is Profanity Justified? When is Profanity Justified? Reviewed by Joseph Landis on June 11, 2013 Rating: 5

The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42

April 22, 2013
Chris Beneke

In a famous photograph of baseball star Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, the African American legend prepares to sign his 1948 contract. As he does so, the viewer of this staged scene can make out a small photo hung above Rickey’s head at top right. From that modest rectangular frame, a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln gazes upon the scene.*

Three years earlier, Robinson met Rickey under that same gaze and the two men discussed, among many other things, their shared Christian devotion. During this tense  and seemingly interminable meeting that would lead to the end of baseball’s longstanding prohibition on black players, Rickey had Robinson read a line from Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ: “But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Robinson agreed to turn the other cheek and in April 1947, he joined the Dodgers as the first African American major leaguer in more than half a century. 

There’s no getting around the fact that the latest retelling of Robinson’s epic first season, Brian Helgeland’s film 42, succumbs to Hollywood sentimentality. It’s certainly not a great film, arguably not a good film, and definitely not a subtle one. It aims at a high-level of verisimilitude and mostly achieves it, but too often at the expense of dramatic effect and historical significance. The awkward conflation of events (Dodger scout Clyde Sukeforth appears to apparate, Harry Potter-style, into a Missouri gas station where Robinson has just negotiated his way into a segregated bathroom) and a syrupy musical backdrop (including an Olympian trumpet fanfare to accompany one of Robinson’s exultant trots to home plate) will surely disappoint viewers who were lured by the gritty, thumping Jay-Z-scored trailer.
Yet critics like the perpetually outraged Dave Zirin who see here nothing more here than a pious melodrama that idolizes a cigar-chomping, penurious white man (played with gruff, endearing self-righteousness by Harrison Ford) and an overly deferential, assimilating black man (played arrestingly by a stoic Chadwick Boseman), will miss something themselves.

Among other things, they will miss the fact that the script for the enterprise of baseball integration was originally conceived by Rickey and originally dramatized by Robinson. The plan this pair executed was both conspicuously Lincolnian and unapologetically Christian. It required Rickey’s pragmatic liberal management, which proceeded in measured strides, and the transcendent suffering of Robinson, who sacrificed for the larger good of racial redemption. Rickey tempered expectations while moving ahead resolutely, shaping an environment that allowed Robinson enough space to develop as a player without depriving white fans and players of the time they needed to adapt as human beings. Robinson endured uncomplainingly and then succeeded spectacularly in a heroic combination of personal restraint and athletic brilliance.

These unmistakable Lincolnian and Christian themes may elude progressive critics who desperately want to see broad-based social movements in action against institutionalized racism. Eric Foner’s influential critique of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln—that it ignores the work done “at all levels of society, including the efforts of social movements to change public sentiment and of [African Americans] themselves to acquire freedom”—has already been leveled against 42. It is demonstrably true that baseball integration was the product of larger forces which Rickey capitalized upon. And 42 does elide the political pressures that were mounting in Harlem and Washington D.C., while slighting the work of civil rights activists such as Wendell Smith.**

But 42’s protagonists, Robinson and Rickey, really did matter. The defining historical role they played may be gauged by remembering that Rickey originally considered signing a number of other exceptional African-American ball players, several of whom possessed baseball potential surpassing Robinson’s. But Rickey saw something else in Robinson that exceeded his ability to play baseball, something intimately related to Robinson’s Methodist faith. Helgelend briefly evokes that other thing when he has Ford utter one of the film’s better lines, expressed with Lincolnesque economy and wit: “Robinson’s a Methodist. I’m a Methodist. God’s a Methodist! We can’t go wrong.” A teetotaler who neither smoked nor womanized, with a well-established commitment to racial justice and Christianity, Robinson was precisely the person Rickey wanted for the job. The fact that he had Hall-of-Fame baseball talent also helped. After all, Rickey, the dogged pragmatist, intended to win on the ball diamond as well as in the contemporary moral universe.
Poster from the 1950 Jackie Robinson Story. See full film here.

Robinson repaid Rickey’s faith with humble Christian expressions and herculean acts of self-control. The things Robinson refrained from saying during his witheringly difficult rookie season often made the difference. He would eventually have plenty to say about his experiences and about civil rights, but in these early years he deployed his words carefully, sticking to Rickey’s script and gaining tens of thousands of admirers in the process. After his first, harrowing game in the majors, Robinson told an inquiring reporter that he’d thanked God the night before, adding that he belonged to a Methodist church in Pasadena and had taught Sunday school. “[T]hey gave me the bad little boys,” Robinson recalled, “and I liked it.” Robinson also repaid Rickey’s Lincolnian aspirations by suggesting in his autobiography that while Rickey’s hero, “Mr. Lincoln,” had ended the institution of slavery, that institution had survived into the twentieth century in the form of segregation and discrimination. With Robinson’s entry into major league baseball, the second emancipation commenced.

Like Lincoln in the nineteenth century, Rickey and Robinson drew on untapped reservoirs of decency and inchoate conceptions of fair play among their fellow Americans. They demonstrated, more than a decade before Martin Luther King, Jr., that the perpetrators of injustice in a democracy may be worn down by dignified and well-publicized suffering. 

If 42 neglects the bigger picture, if it privileges a couple of extraordinary individuals at the expense of the collective movements that enabled them to do their work, it also reminds us of the good that morally grounded pragmatists can accomplish.

___________________

* The signing took place on February 12, Lincoln’s birthday. In another staged photo, only Lincoln’s portrait hangs above Rickey, the picture of Rickey’s daughters and manager Leo Durocher having been removed, though you can still see the nail that may have held Durocher’s photo. Rickey, who claimed to have read every biography of Lincoln, was sometimes called the “Second Great Emancipator.” 
 
** Smith, played by Andre Holland has a large supporting role in the film, but we don’t see the behind-the-scenes campaign for desegregation in which he had been engaged for several years. 

The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42 The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42 Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 22, 2013 Rating: 5

Field Trip: A Report from the Bright Side of Fourth-Grade History Education

March 10, 2013
Chris Beneke

Guided tour at Lowell National Park. 
Photo courtesy of www.nps.gov/lowe
If the experiences of my kids are at all representative, the glum accounts you’ve heard or read about elementary and secondary education in the U.S. have some basis in fact. Public school students move in virtual lock-step with their classmates, get a meager fifteen minutes for recess, and take tests with unsettling regularity. Meanwhile, their hardworking teachers and principals must manage both rigid curriculum standards and large classes.

In light of these oft-repeated concerns, my perspective brightened last week while chaperoning my son’s fourth-grade class trip to the Lowell National Park, the splendid and well-preserved site of the famous textile mills where America’s industrial revolution took off in the 1830s and 1840s. I didn’t come away feeling like a Finnish parent probably feels after accompanying his or her child on a field trip. Still, the experience left me much more optimistic about the trajectory of early history education: the kids arrived well-prepared and the museum’s activities were engaging, hands-on, well-paced, and occasionally revelatory.

After a brief introduction to the tour’s theme—“Yankees and Immigrants”—the fourth-graders had to locate cultural objects, e.g. ethnic musical instruments, notices for historical leisure time activities etc. (I was of little use as “chaperone” here, partly because I came across Jack Kerouac’s typewriter and backpack.)

Then it was on to the recreated boardinghouse where these little historians got an up-close view of the cramped quarters—four young women to a room, and two to a double-sized bed—that female mill workers occupied at Lowell during the 1830s, the busy kitchen where their meals were cooked, and the elegantly simple dining room tables on which they would have taken them.

Boot Mill Weave Room. Photo courtesy of www.nps.gov/lowe
From there, our elementary battalion marched across the canal to the brick building where young mill girls toiled the better part of each day. My son and I agreed that this was the coolest part of the trip. Inside we discovered the clamorous concourse of eighty-eight power looms that hummed, clunked, and churned below a forest of shafts and belts. Unfortunately we didn’t get much time here. The museum features other tours dedicated to the work and the machinery, but this one tied into the fourth grade curricular standards.

At our next stop, a comfortable terraced theater, the students put on period garb, read lines from index cards, and participated in a mock town hall debate on funding a public school for Irish children. The remarkably brief and unnervingly civil town hall meeting concluded with an affirmative vote on behalf of the poor Irish kids. Emerging unscathed from this lackluster enactment of local democracy, we proceeded to a thirty-minute lunch that was fifteen minutes longer than either teachers and students typically received.

After a morning spent as New England mill girls, parish priests, and local businessmen, our intrepid band spent the early afternoon as immigrants who were interrogated and processed, before seeking the company of their fellow countrymen and women. Formed into ethnic neighborhoods, these newly minted immigrants then rummaged through their bags and trunks for the kinds of personal possessions that would have made the journey from Ireland, Greece, Cambodia or Columbia, located their place of origin on a world map, and succinctly described the artifacts they’d encountered. It was a well-conceived historical exercise.

In short, my day including some promising signs for the state of elementary history education: the kids aren’t just memorizing abstract facts, their learning is active, their activities generally engaging, and museums and schools have developed fruitful partnerships that actually deepen the students’ understanding of the past. From what I could gather, these fourth graders had read and talked a good deal about textile manufacturing and the life of the young women and immigrants who worked in Lowell’s mills, while their indefatigable teacher had already given them a hands-on introduction to the beguiling mechanisms of the power loom. I’m talking about a Massachusetts public school here and the trip was booked and co-chaperoned by two smart and able suburban moms who help organize enrichment activities for the kids. So my experience could hardly be considered universal. But I suspect that it’s more common than not.

One final note: Partisans of social history should be especially heartened. If any mention was made of Francis Cabot Lowell, it escaped my notice. Neither the school nor the museum went out of their way to praise the titans of industry. This was history from the ground-up: material history, women’s history, immigrant history, spiced with paeans to cultural diversity and labor activism and salted with swipes at supercilious male abolitionists and bigoted Protestant assimilationists. Anyone who doubts that history education has taken a progressive social turn over the last few decades needs to spend more time with fourth graders.
Field Trip: A Report from the Bright Side of Fourth-Grade History Education Field Trip: A Report from the Bright Side of Fourth-Grade History Education Reviewed by Joseph Landis on March 10, 2013 Rating: 5
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