Results for Lessons from the Past

Robin Hood and Remote Rule

February 28, 2014
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

British North America developed from a landscape of religions into a nation of races over the course of the eighteenth century.This process culminated in a hot, locked Philadelphia hall in 1787, but the lessons upon which the drafters drew reached back to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and earlier to Rome.

Americans had, after all, just rejected their inclusion in the British variant. If they failed to grasp the significance of their success, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome, David Hume’s History of England, and the tales of Robin Hood1 served to remind them of the dangers of remote rule.


Early Modern Europe possessed two empires with established Protestant populations inhabiting borders under perpetual threat.The Holy Roman Empire’s borderland Protestants included the Southwestern Germans of Wuerttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate, for whom “cuius regio, eius religio” offered precious little protection from neighboring Catholic armies. The British Empire sent forth Scots to settle among and pacify the Catholics a few leagues away in Northeastern Ireland. These two groups moved away from their fraught locations on Europe’s bloodiest frontiers topopulate the so-called backcountry of eighteenth-century British North America from the Kennebec to the Altamaha.2


The Germans, Scots, and Irish, in a multitude of hyphenated forms, created a cultural and military frontier in the new world as they had in the old. The German Swabs and Ulster Scots had a great deal in common. Both had theological roots in the ‘second’ or ‘radical’ Reformation of the 1570s.  Southwest German’s Lutheranism was heavily influenced by Zwingli3 and Covenanters in Scotland and Ireland derived their beliefs from the Swiss reformer, Calvin, as well as Zwingli, as John Knox interpreted their theology.4 Both came from regions of Europe where radical Protestants lived cheek by jowl with counter-Reformation Catholics. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. By 1688 French troops bathed the Palatinate in blood.Britain’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ in the same year may have peacefully secured a Protestant succession in England, but its new Protestant King, William, and Catholic claimant, James II, ensured that the Ireland suffered enough for all three British kingdoms combined.5 For both border populations, these traumas were but the latest horrors in litanies of loss wrought during centuries of constant crisis. Seeking escape, both landed on Atlantic shores with dreams of stability guaranteed by land-holding independence.6
 
In Europe, these ill-definied communities buffered their rulers’ borders from attack, but they also attacked their rulers.Luther’s condemnation of the South German’s Peasant’s Revolt of 1525, secured its infamy in historical memory.7 The covenanter’s revolt in Scotland and the Catholic revolt in Ulster cost Charles I his head in 1642.8 The sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries created real and imagined bandits throughout Europe. A few real bandits possessed the noble motives of the fictionalized Robin Hood, whom Wilkesites adopted as their mascot on both sides of the Atlantic.9 

All bandits, Eric Hobsbawm argues, thrived in the unruly borderlands: in the Roman, Holy Roman, and British Empires.10 Martin Luther drew the parallel with bandits in his tirade against the peasants wrecking havoc under the influence of Thomas Muenzer. “Like public highwaymen and murderers,” he raved, “It is right and lawful to slay at the first opportunity a rebellious person….”11 

The linkage between these peoples in Europeans’ corporate imagination dated back at least to the Roman conquest of both “Upper Germany” and Britain. The Romans built their most famous walls to keep out the populations (Der Limes for the Swabs and Hadrian’s Wall for the Scots) that British seaboard colonies invited into their midst.  Those south-west Germans misnamed ‘Palatines’ and those from north-east Ireland ‘With No Name’12 had once shared the label ‘barbarian’ to the civilized rulers of Rome.“All ancient writers agree,” writes Hume in his widely read History of England “in representing the first inhabitants of Britain as a tribe of the Gauls or Celtae, who populated that island from the neighboring continent.” These Celts shared language, manners, government, and superstition in Hume’s estimation.13 Even when a Roman colony, Gibbon thought the empire unable to “guard the maritime province against the pirates of Germany” leaving “independent and divided” Britons to fall prey to “rapine and destruction” when “the Saxons might sometimes join the Scots and the Picts in a tacit or express confederacy.”14 In Hume’s historical framework, after Rome fell, Germany became the prize in the medieval tug-o-war between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, while Scotland and Ireland played a similarly critical role in the Tudor-Stuart era rivalry between the French and English crowns.15
Robin Hood and Remote Rule Robin Hood and Remote Rule Reviewed by Joseph Landis on February 28, 2014 Rating: 5

When Virtù Courts Virtue

February 19, 2014
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

I found my way to this topic via a peculiar trajectory that began along the Cam under the tutelage of Quentin Skinner, where the distinction between classical republican virtù and protestant Christian virtue first entered my consciousness.  The hybridized virtù(e) that filled the political treatises of the American Revolution/War for Independence fascinated me but were not the centerpiece of my doctoral research.  When I returned to Jane Austen as my entertainment while my second son nursed, I realized that the hybridization process took place on the pages of Miss Austen’s novels.

The historiography of the American Revolution nearly drowns in examinations of Republican motherhood and patricidal rage. Austen’s heroines need not kill their fathers. They are already dead (Sense & Sensibility) or emasculated by poverty (Pride & Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park), frailty (Emma), and vanity (Persuasion).  It takes little imagination to envision Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Moreland, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot as the republican mothers of a future generation.  In attributes they share much with the ultimate Republican mother as proven in her dual role as the United States’ first wife and mother to (failed) Presidents, Abigail Adams.  They can hold their own in discussions of the lofty but are unafraid to engage in the lowly. Think of Abigail Adams mopping her floors with vinegar while her many children lay sick, and Anne Elliot caring for her injured nephew while his squeamish mother tends to her own nerves not his physical needs.  When the virtùous Captain and Mrs. Wentworth set sail, I suspect their destination is the new republic on the other side of the Atlantic.

Thomas Jefferson obsessed over virtù(e) and corruption in both the public and private spheres.  Jefferson is remembered for his assiduous adherence to the necessity of landholding independence as a prerequisite for political virtù. He never deigned to fight in the colonies-cum-new republic’s wars though famously wrote on the worth of blood spilled for a virtùous cause.   He is also remembered for his utter lapse in private virtue, bedding but never wedding a woman he considered his racial inferior.   Jefferson was a last gasp of  this double standard in the Americas.  The widow’s of New Jersey had already become the first in Atlantic world to cast their votes in a simultaneous demonstration of both their virtù(e)s. 

Finally, I beg leave to indulge in some Whiggish analysis and imagine that William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency would have been very different indeed  had Americans not come to accept Jane Austen’s definition of hybridized virtù(e) and applied it to men and women alike.

____________

Sources: Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters; and Jay Fleigelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims.
When Virtù Courts Virtue When Virtù Courts Virtue Reviewed by Joseph Landis on February 19, 2014 Rating: 5

What on Earth is Guy Fawkes Night?

November 05, 2013
Randall Stephens

I've only been in the UK once during Guy Fawkes Day, or Bonfire Night.  I saw plenty of fireworks and bonfires lighting up night skies and scratched my head in wonder about the whole thing. What an interesting, historically odd celebration.

The BBC has this short summary and a video interview (see below) about the fiery fest:

Guy Fawkes night is the annual commemoration of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot - when 14 individuals planned to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605.

The BBC's Carol Kirkwood asked bonfire night organiser Graham Callister why we celebrate Guy Fawkes night when it was in fact a plot to maim and kill.

See also this entertaining slide show at ABC News.

Is the celebration in danger of being extinguished?  The worry this year is that the fest has lost its, um, spark.  Halloween may be eclipsing Guy Fawkes Day.  Some down under are saying its time to let go on an "old English grudge." 

What about that grudge and the religious dimension?  Here's a very short report from the Beeb. 

What on Earth is Guy Fawkes Night? What on Earth is Guy Fawkes Night? Reviewed by Joseph Landis on November 05, 2013 Rating: 5

History and the Voting Rights Act Roundup

July 25, 2013

NPR Staff, "The Voting Rights Act: Hard-Won Gains, An Uncertain Future," NPR, July 21, 2013

. . . . Congress also noted, however, that the Voting Rights Act was still needed, and it had
Fort Scott, Kansas, Tribune, August 6, 1965, p. 1
From the Google News Archive.
been used hundreds of times since 1982 to protect against discrimination.

But in his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested it is a new era. "Our country has changed," he wrote for the majority.

But Rep. Lewis says race is still very much at the forefront.

"I think there has been a deliberate and systematic effort on the part of certain forces in our country to take the whole idea of race out of public policy," he says. "Race is involved in everything that makes up America, and we cannot escape it. We have to deal with it face on.">>>

John Paul Stevens, "The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent," New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013

In Bending Toward Justice, Professor Gary May describes a number of the conflicts between white supremacists in Alabama and nonviolent civil rights workers that led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—often just called the VRA. The book also describes political developments that influenced President Lyndon Johnson to support the act in 1965, and later events that supported the congressional reenactments of the VRA signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, by President Gerald Ford in 1975, by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, and by President George W. Bush in 2006.>>>

"The Future of the Voting Rights Act," On Point, WBUR, June 27, 2013

The Voting Rights Act was the monumental achievement of the civil rights movement, a powerful federal response to racist policies like poll taxes and literacy tests that kept blacks home on Election Day. But that was 1965.

Today southern blacks vote at even higher rates than whites. So this week the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the law, freeing mostly southern states to change their election laws without federal approval. Guests: Vernon Burton, Kareem Crayton, and Ronald Keith Gaddie.>>>

John Fund, "A Civil-Rights Victory," National Review, June 25, 2013

The Supreme Court’s decision today to overturn a small part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is actually a victory for civil rights.  As the court noted, what made sense both in moral and practical terms almost a half century ago has to be approached anew. . . . Clint Bolick, director of litigation for the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona, says the demise of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will also reduce the balkanization of racial gerrymandering that has become so popular lately. “Voting districts drawn on racial or ethnic lines divide Americans,” he says. “This decision helps move us toward the day in which racial gerrymandering becomes a relic of the past.”>>>

"New obstacles for voters," Baltimore Sun, July 22, 2013

If there were any doubt the Supreme Court erred badly in the term just ended by striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to protect minorities' access to the polls in states with a history of voter discrimination, it's been dispelled by the swift reaction in states formerly covered by the law's pre-clearance requirement. Officials there have lost no time in using the ruling as a license to start discriminating again.

Barely two hours after the court declared unconstitutional Section 4 of the act, which determined which states were required to get Justice Department approval before changing election laws in ways that disproportionately affected minority voters, Texas' attorney general announced that a 2011 voter-ID law a lower court had blocked as discriminatory would go into effect "immediately." Over the next week, four more former pre-clearance states moved to tighten restrictions on voting.>>>
History and the Voting Rights Act Roundup History and the Voting Rights Act Roundup Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 25, 2013 Rating: 5

Memo to America, Re: Welfare in the Olden Days

July 24, 2013
Gabriel Loiacono 
 
One evening, chatting with friends from church, one asked me what kind of history I focused on. I told him: the history of welfare in early America.  He said: what welfare in early America?

"The drunkard's progress, or the direct
road to poverty, wretchedness & ruin," 1826.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
I find myself having a conversation like that one more and more these days.  Whether on the left or the right politically, high school grads or Ph.D.s, most Americans I talk to assume that welfare is a creation of the twentieth century: midwifed by Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson.  Those hearty, independent minutemen of the Revolutionary period, they assume, either made the poor find work or relied only on churches for charity. 

Occasionally, this assumption is voiced explicitly in national, political discourse.  For example, in a famous September 12, 2011 Republican Presidential Primary debate, Representative Ron Paul described assistance to the poor in the past thus: “Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.”  Less off-the-cuff, respectable-looking websites will tell you that charity was almost entirely private before FDR, aside from a few dark and dingy poorhouses, which were more effective at driving inmates out than keeping them comfortable.  And it is not only critics of welfare who think this; one can find defenders of welfare describing the U.S.A. as essentially without welfare before FDR.[1]

More often, this assumption is implicit.  You can see this in recent discussions of food stamp policy and the Farm Bill.  When both critics and defenders of welfare policy bring history into the argument, they usually head back to the 1960s.  Occasionally, they reach back to the 1930s.  They almost never go further back in time.  On both sides, the assumption is that prior to the New Deal, there was no welfare to discuss.  Thus, these are the good old days or the bad old days depending on what you think about welfare today. 

It is for this reason that I fantasize about writing the following memo:

MEMORANDUM

TO: The American People
FROM: A Historian
CC: Candidates, Think Tanks, Warriors of the Internet Comment Boards 
SUBJECT: Um, actually there was welfare when the United States was founded

I would go on, of course, to flesh this statement out with some background, evidence, and precision.  I would point out that poor laws came to North America almost with the first British settlers, and that a large welfare state developed in almost every English municipality.  I would cite figures showing that poor relief comprised more than half of most municipalities’ budgets before the 1820s, when school and road costs grew large enough to match poor relief.  I would feel compelled to mention that poor relief could mean a poorhouse, but more often some combination of cash, food, clothes, firewood, doctor’s attention, medicine, or even full-time nursing care.  I would highlight how significant local taxes were to most early Americans, compared with much lower state taxes and almost non-existent federal taxes. 
"Publicly-owned poor houses like the Dexter Asylum
in Providence, Rhode Island did not come cheaply."
Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

This would lead to the obvious comparisons.  Americans spent more than half of their taxes on poor relief when George Washington was president, compared to 12% on the federal “safety net” today, or 55% if you include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.  Unlike today’s contributors to Social Security and Medicare, however, most taxpayers (read: property owners) in 1789 would not have expected to benefit from poor relief in their lifetimes.  They could depend on it, though, if they ever met with a financial catastrophe.  I would almost certainly quote historian Elna Green’s witticism, that so many grocers, doctors, wood-hewers, etcetera made money from the town by helping the poor that the poor law system should be called the “welfare/industrial complex.” [2]

Finally, I would point out one big difference between early America and the present: Today’s welfare is largely federal while early America’s was largely municipal.  In fact, I think the local nature of early American welfare is the reason why so many policy analysts overlook welfare’s past.  They just don’t look at the state and local levels of government. 

My fantasy memo is not a prelude to some specific policy prescription for the present day.  I just wish that when we do bring history to the argument, we use a reasonably correct version.  As an historian writing about pre-Civil War poor relief, I find myself cringing almost every time the history of welfare surges into public discourse.  Usually, there is a 300-year hole in the story.  For colonial American and U.S. history, that is a pretty big hole!

Surely, though, I am not alone among historians.  What about the rest of you? What makes you cringe?  You historians who see your subjects of expertise routinely misrepresented, what do you do?  What is your responsibility?  How do you lend your expertise in a helpful way?

_____________________

[1] On respectable-looking websites, see “The Poor in America Before the Welfare State,” at Intellectual Takeout: Feed Your Mind www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/sociology-and-culture/poor-america-welfare-state.  For a defender of welfare on the non-existent past of welfare, see Charles Michael Andres Clark, “The Truth Deficit: Four Myths About Deficit Spending,” in Commonweal July 12, 2011. 

[2] Elna C. Green, This Business of Relief: Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, 1740-1940, p. 1.
Memo to America, Re: Welfare in the Olden Days Memo to America, Re: Welfare in the Olden Days Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 24, 2013 Rating: 5

Summer Scholarship for the #altac

July 14, 2013
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

As I struggle to find the energy, focus, and drive to complete my summer writing deadlines, the opening lines of Thomas Paine’s The Crisis take on new meaning:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

For those of us “Alternative Academics,” marked by #altac hashtags on Twitter, the summer IS the season that tries our souls.  Our tenure-line colleagues disappear into the archives and post to Facebook from glamorous destinations around the globe. At the same time we work full time and wonder whether or not to attempt CPR on the scholarly commitments we left flailing for breath during the academic year. 

The difference appears less acute from September to June.  I may advise while others teach, but the strain on scholarship seems less stark then.  In the summer, when the professoriate retires from lectures, seminars, and office hours, I still Skype with fellowship applicants as registrars revise databases.  In some ways the summer pressure is less.  Undergraduates don’t line the halls.  Thus, the summer #altac scholar thinks a flurry of productivity just might be possible.

Other hindrances crop up as well.  For instance, if we stand by our scholarship as good patriots of the academic cause, no one thinks we deserve accolades and thanks. Simply put, no one cares.  My annual review holds no space for academic conference presentations and publications.  I can practice semantic gymnastics and squeeze mention of my scholarship into some discussion of professional development. I know full well, though, that no increase in title or pay will result.  That is not what the university hired me to do.  And still, I don’t think I would be capable of advising students on scholarly development if I were not an active scholar myself. I am, however, in a distinct minority. 
 
Some of us in administration are trained in history.  Many more have degrees in higher ed.  The research of the latter covers the practicalities of university administration.  As it happens, my scholarship sometimes involves educational institutions too. True enough, from 1550 to 1750 few people fretted about MOOCs and multicultural curricula.  Still, those institutions from long ago struggled with parallel problems and offer instructive lessons for today’s educators. My research subjects speak to me from the grave.  My colleagues with contemporary topics can circulate surveys among the living.

As summer progresses, I eventually find my way back into on-line archives, thankful for the treasures the digital humanities offers #altacs and independent scholars. I can log on and dive into documents from my desk while I eat lunch or from my sofa while my children play in the sun.  For that, this #altac summer scholar is always thankful and sometimes productive.
Summer Scholarship for the #altac Summer Scholarship for the #altac Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 14, 2013 Rating: 5

Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK

May 14, 2013
Randall Stephens

Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal, Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th
Read the above at the BBC
e future." ("History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian, May 12, 2013).

Here's a brief excerpt:

For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.>>>
Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 14, 2013 Rating: 5

John Adams and the Rule of Law in Boston

April 23, 2013
Heather Cox Richardson

Message boards and blogs are full of angry people calling for Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be tortured or killed. Or both. Immediately. After all, it’s pretty clear he’s guilty,
A Gilbert Stuart portrait
of John Adams, ca. 1821.
right? Why waste tax dollars on this guy with a long, expensive trial?

And anyway, who ever said a terrorist who murders Americans should get a fair trial?

Well, Founding Father John Adams, for one. Right here in Boston.

Adams was a rising lawyer in Massachusetts during the infancy of the American Revolution. On March 5, 1770, eight British soldiers opened fire when someone in a taunting mob threw a rock at them. When the shooting was over, five Americans were dead and others were wounded. Within weeks, a grand jury indicted the soldiers, along with their commander, Captain Thomas Preston. 

It seemed all Boston was inflamed against the murdering foreign soldiers. The “Boston Massacre” became a rallying cry for those eager to revolt against England. Son of Liberty Paul Revere produced his famous engraving rewriting the event to show the soldiers firing systematically into a peaceful crowd. Few wanted to bother to try the prisoners, and in the end, officials delayed the trial for seven months in the hope that emotions would subside. They didn’t.

After a number of lawyers refused to defend Preston and the soldiers, 35-year-old John Adams took the case. Adams supported the Revolutionaries, but also fervently believed in the rule of law. (Ironically, the prosecutor was a Loyalist.) When prosecutors botched their argument—perhaps intentionally—Adams and his team refused to throw the game. Bearing down, they managed to get all but two of the soldiers acquitted. Those two were convicted not of murder, but of the lesser charge of manslaughter. Thus, Adams won his case . . . and won freedom for the men who had killed his countrymen.
A detail of from the Paul Revere of the Boston massacre.
 
But by insisting on a fair trial for his country’s enemies, Adams served his cause far better than if he had bowed tothe popular desire to mete out mob justice. Adams and his team established that Massachusetts—and by extension, the new nation Massachusetts men wanted to create—would put no man, even a killer, beneath the law, and no man above it. Theirs would be a nation based not on popular sentiment, but on law. “Facts are stubborn things,” Adams said in defense of the soldiers, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates or our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” He went on: “The law no passion can disturb. ‘Tis void of desire and fear, lust and anger. ‘Tis . . . written reason, retaining some measure of the divine perfection. It does not enjoin that which pleases a weak, frail man, but, without any regard to persons, commands that which is good and punishes evil in all, whether rich or poor, high or low.”

That principle turned the Revolutionaries into our founding generation, and that same generation made John Adams the nation’s second president.
John Adams and the Rule of Law in Boston John Adams and the Rule of Law in Boston Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 23, 2013 Rating: 5

The Titanic, Time, and the Fragility of Human Life

April 16, 2013
Heather Cox Richardson

I have been pretty vocal about my inability to understand why people are so gripped by the Titanic disaster. Just a shipwreck, I’ve said. I don’t get it. Why not the Lusitania, which was by a torpedo in the same era, or any of the thousands of disasters that happen every day?
Titanic survivors. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Maybe I get it now.

The RMS Titanic set out from Southampton on April 10, 1912, a luxury ship carrying more than 2,200 passengers. She made port in France and Ireland before heading out to sea on April 11.

I’ve just started experimenting with ways for historians to use Twitter, and for the last several days have been tweeting snippets about the voyage, day by day: the vessel leaving port; the crew member who jumped ship in Ireland; the ten-course dinner of April 14; the radio operator’s determination to send out passenger messages as soon as he could raise the Newfoundland station late in the night of April 14; his brusque dismissal of a nearby ship’s warning of an ice field. As I trawled through little events, what I began to see was just how calm and safe and, well, unremarkable, the experience of the Titanic’s passengers was.

Until it wasn’t.

I left off in the small hours of this morning with the lookout’s sighting of an iceberg near midnight; the 37-second eternity before the collision that would sink the “unsinkable” Titanic; and the captain’s order to lower lifeboats for women and children. I fully expected to start up again today—the 101st anniversary of the day the Titanic actually sank—with the story of more than 1,500 passengers dying of hypothermia within minutes as they struggled in the frigid water, survivors recounting the tale of how the band played “Nearer My God To Thee” before the ship’s list got too steep and it broke in two, the pieces sliding beneath the ocean’s surface.

And then the bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Before 2:50, all those people, watching my city’s big party, celebrating the hard work of the runners (many of whom were raising money for charity), were spending an unremarkable day. They were watching, cheering, snapping photos, talking to the kids they had brought with them to pass an April school vacation day, safe in the knowledge that they were … safe.


But they weren’t. Any more than the passengers on the world’s safest ship were safe.

Today, just as it did 101 years ago, a second sliced the world into before and after. In 1912, in the space of a breath, young, vibrant passengers had to count their lifespans in minutes. Today, in the space of a second, runners in top physical condition became amputees. And cheering people became silent.

Forever.

Maybe what I have never been able to see is that the Titanic disaster illustrates the terrible human curse that time is not even fully one-dimensional. It runs forward, but we cannot make it go backward. In 1912, no one could turn the clocks back a single hour to make the radio operator pay attention to warnings about the approaching ice field. Or even turn it back 37 seconds to stop the Titanic’s lookout from sighting the iceberg.

And today, no one could turn the clock back a single second to stop a bomb.

Maybe the Titanic reminds us that any moment, any day, could be the moment that cuts the world in two.

And maybe remembering it makes us thankful for every moment that isn’t.

My heart goes out to today’s victims, cut down on a sadly historic day.
The Titanic, Time, and the Fragility of Human Life The Titanic, Time, and the Fragility of Human Life Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 16, 2013 Rating: 5
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