Philadelphia Skating Club performing a rescue as others skate happily on the Schuylkill in Fairmount Park in the late 19th century; image courtesy Library Company of Philadelphia

This has been a winter to empower the global warming naysayers--with a few snowstorms and freezing temperatures, it's hard to believe that the plant is getting warmer, on average. But a look back in time shows that we've just gotten wimpy.

This past weekend's bitter cold doesn't approach the cold of winters past in Philadelphia. A low in the teens, like we had this weekend, is abnormally cold these days. But most of the record lows for the city are much, much colder--with many below zero. Imagine being in Philly on February 9th, 1934: it was -11 degrees Fahrenheit.

Images even show that people could ice skate on the Schuylkill River in the late nineteenth century, and one image from the winter of 1856 shows skaters on the Delaware. Overall, as this graph shows, the past 20 years have been trending warmer. That historical perspective isn't making me feel any warmer, though!

Liveblogging the State of the Union

Some blogs had "liveblogging" updates during the State of the Union. I find these speeches painfully boring, in part because they are constantly broken up by partisan applause. So I wondered what unique take I could offer on the SOTU...and what else besides tracking the (often cheesy) history references. So, here goes.

9:05: PBS Commentator Mark Shields suggests that having the new governor of Virginia give the response to the SOTU from the VA State House is like a "State of the Confederacy." Jim Lehrer is not sure how to handle this.
9:11: Obama opens with history of SOTU; "it's tempting to look back on these moments and assume our progress was inevitable." I am very disappointed to hear that America's greatness was not preordained.
9:12: references Bull Run, Civil Rights Marches, the landing at Normandy
9:13: "we must answer history's call" (Somehow it seems like nobody can agree how to pick up the phone to answer that call).
9:18: has a president ever laughed during the SOTU?
9:21: wow another joke? this may be historic.
9:27: "From the first railroads, to the interstate highway system, our nation has always been built to compete." The Smithsonian has that story covered.
9:34: "We made the largest research investment in history." John Quincy Adams would be proud; people thought he was nuts when he proposed that the govt support research in the 1820s.
9:49: points out that in 2000, we had a massive budget surplus. That does seem like ancient history.
9:51: announces no new spending for the next 3 years. Oh well, so much for Keynesian economics or learning from the Depression.
9:58: "the Supreme Court reversed a century of law" with the campaign finance decision. The camera pans to the justices and they stare foreword blankly.
10:00: the debates between parties are 200 years old and are "the essence of our democracy." Hoftstadter would love that.
10:03: "through-out our history, no issue has united our country so much as national security." Hmm, not sure about that. See Alien and Sedition Act backlash and then almost every national security move since.
10:09: on nuclear power--"I've embraced the strategy of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan." I'm confused. I think he just wanted to make sure to get their names in somewhere.
10:14: "It's our ideals, our values, that built America, values that allowed us to forge a nation made up of immigrants from every quarter of the globe. Values that drive us still." These values: the American dream of immigrants...and the nativism of Americans.
10:18: "The only reason we are here is that generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard."
10:20: "The spirit that has sustained this nation for 200 years lives on in you." Nice line.
10:28: Mark Shields says Obama was Reaganesque; "He invoked the country's past to give a sense of confidence about where we are now. And nobody did that better than Ronald Reagan."

Image: George Washington's State of the Union address--the first ever--on January 21, 1790

Saint Domingue's Legacy

Many historians had Haiti--or, as it was called in the colonial period, Saint Domingue--on their minds long before the massive earthquake there this past Tuesday. It has become the accepted wisdom in the field that the Haitian Revolution in the late 1790s was one of the most important events in the history of the Atlantic World. There's been a lot of research recently about slavery and rebellion in Saint Domingue (including by some of my friends), but historians rarely refer to that island nation as "Haiti." It's as if there's a total disconnect between the heroic, revolutionary Saint Domingue and present-day Haiti.

This week, an unlikely source brought past together with present. Televangelist Pat Robertson made the link rather grotesquely in his much-criticized remark on Wednesday:

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about. They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'Ok it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another."

Well, maybe not such a true story. I'd defy him to find that conversation in the archives. Oh, and he's got the wrong Napoleon.

Haiti's ambassador to America, Raymond Joseph had the perfect response:

"The independence of Haiti...[enabled] the US to gain the Louisiana Territory...that's 13 states west of the Mississippi that the Haitian slaves' revolt...provided America....So, [the] pact the Haitians made with the devil has helped the United States become what it is."

Ambassador Joseph is right--the loss of French money and lives during the Haitian Revolution compelled Napoleon to give up his presence in the New World and sell the Louisiana Territory to the US at an outrageously low price. But I don't think this is a fight about the past.

Robertson is using history to make claims of religious and racial superiority at the most tasteless time possible. What troubles me is that those who actually do know about Haiti's past seem to have so little interest in its present. Let's hope this catastrophe changes that.

image: Toussaint L'Ouverture receiving a Proclamation. (1821), NYPL Digital Gallery.

South Carolina's Scandalous History

While I'm in South Carolina on vacation, I've been thinking about the long history of major political scandals in this state--with 2 of the biggest coming in the past year. It's hard to imagine, as I look out the window at pines and oaks draped in Spanish moss and hear the slow, friendly drawl of the people here that this is the place that produced Joe Wilson. Wilson, who in fact represents the area where my family vacations, was the congressman who yelled "You lie!" during Obama's speech on health reform this past fall. It wasn't the accusation so much as where it was said and how. There is a decorum to criticizing the president, and a decorum to behavior in the chambers of congress.

Another South Carolina congressmen crossed similar lines in a scandal in 1856. Preston Brooks had a gripe with another member of congress, Charles Sumner. Protocol then dictated Brooks should challenge Sumner to a duel, but that would require acknowledging that Sumner was a gentleman--only gentlemen duelled each other. So, Brooks took what was to him the logical alternative--whacking Sumner with his cane in the Senate chamber. Sumner suffered such severe injuries he was unable to return to work for 3 years.

Both congressmen met with support from their constituents, cheers from the supposedly genteel voters for the indecorous acts of their representatives. Brooks received gifts of new canes, one reading "Hit him again." The phones at Wilson's office rang off the hook with calls of support. In both cases, opposition in the North erupted in response. I'm not the first to note the parallels--this NY Times column describes the Brooks/Sumner story in more detail.

I can't think of much in the way of historical parallels for the second big South Carolina scandal, Governor Sanford's "hiking the Appalachian trail" incident. But consider these other SC sex scandals:
-Strom Thurmond's secret, illegitimate black daughter revealing her identity in 2003
-the wife of an indicted SC congressman posed in Playboy and bragged about having sex with him on the US Capitol steps in 1981.

And some other SC political hits:
-the lieutenant governor shot and killed a newspaper editor in Columbia, SC in the early 1900s
-a coalition of state congressmen calling themselves "The Fat and Ugly Caucus" attempted a power grab and many were later indicted in a vote-selling probe
-a speech on the Senate floor--reminiscent of Joe Wilson--by a SC Senator which the New York Times called "coarse abuse of the president" under the headline "Senate Disgraced" in 1896

Oh, and let's not forget that South Carolina was the first to secede from the Union. One historian argues that "South Carolinians don't really want to be part of the United States, and they don't have any use for the political rules and processes the rest of us pretty much agree to." It's true that South Carolina was historically, and continues to be, one of the least democratic states in the country. It has been shaped by social hierarchy and deference since its beginnings, and it appears that South Carolinians are content to let their elected officials do as they please--and sometimes even cheer them on.

The Grand Tour of Random Cities

There is irony in the fact that a city founded by the most hard-core of the Puritans is now one of the least law-abiding places in the country. As the train enters the city, a decrepit brick building towering over the ruins of another building has a message in graffiti written across it: "Detox the Ghetto." And on the city's tourism website, the changing advertisements on the right of the page are for financial rewards for turning in guns or illegal dumpers, a crime hotline, and a neighborhood renewal group.

Newark, New Jersey, may have dropped from the most dangerous to the 20th most dangerous city in America, but it is far from feeling like an alive and healthy place. It was my latest stop in what could be called my "Grand Tour of Random Cities." In my travels in the past few years, I've gone to places that are largely off the tourist map--East Lansing, Michigan; St. Louis; Springfield, Illinois; Providence; Richmond; Columbus, Ohio; Baltimore; and now, Newark. Each of these cities has its merits, but they are all places that have struck me as still recovering from the near-death experience of white flight and urban decay in recent decades.

I only saw a small pocket of Newark during my visit to the New Jersey Historical Society, but what I found most creepy there--as in Richmond, St. Louis, and to some extent in Baltimore--was the lack of people out in the streets. Broad, congested city streets run through block after block of silent, cold buildings and the people are largely sealed inside their cars. The historical society is in one of the few remaining 19th century buildings in this part of Newark, and as I sat in the 5th floor library, the whole building occasionally shook as a trolley rattled past.

In a city like Newark, the past feels fragile. To walk through the empty streets of a half-dead city in order to read the papers of its earlier inhabitants, inhabitants who lived there when the city was growing and thriving, is in some ways a depressing endeavor. I feel like a voyeur who is peering into the city's past without contributing to its future. Unless, that is, cities like these can figure out--as Washington, Boston, or Charleston have--that their history is what could build their future.

"The Most Unconquerable Place on Earth"

I was talking with a friend today about Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Somehow I just cannot work up the energy to be angry, because it seems more laughable than anything. Really, if Genghis Khan couldn't conquer this place, what makes us think that we can? Maybe tanks, drones and machine guns aren't such game-changers after all. And perhaps Obama should have had an historian or two--or John Oliver--join his team to decide a course of action in Afghanistan.

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Party Politics

I have been frustrated the past few weeks by the same phenomenon in two different eras: the twisted convulsions of politicians trying to fit into our two-party system. My argument about the stalled health care debate in the Senate hinges on this fact: the Democrats are such a diverse party that the idea of a Democratic super majority is really meaningless. There are two subparties: the DINO's (Democrats In Name Only) from conservative states, and the Progressives. The third entity, mostly left out of the argument, is the Republican party, which is now almost wholly Southern and right-wing because of having bled moderates in the past few elections. At any rate, all of this means there are three factions with totally different interests, each accusing the other of heading the country into ruin.

How little things have changed...in the US history survey course I'm TA'ing, we've been covering the Second Party System in the past few weeks. From the fall of Federalists to the rise of Democrats and Whigs, to the fall of Whigs and rise of Republicans, plus those other pesky third parties thrown in, it's almost impossible to follow. The messiness of it does explain, though, why nobody could ever make any real progress on dealing with slavery. And, like today, politicians on both sides were accusing each other of destroying America. But the messiness is also frustratingly complicated to grasp.

It occurred to me that since we do know, in the case of the 19th century, the full trajectory of the party system, a diagram would be helpful to explain it. Surely somebody had created such a thing...and, thanks to Google, I found this amazing diagram courtesy of the UNC education school:

(follow the link to see a copy big enough to read)

Not that this whole jumble of political changes could ever be crystal-clear, but I think the diagram helps quite a bit. Historians are often loath to use images for explanations, preferring the written or spoken word. I wonder if part of our graduate school training should be in the use of images to tell historical stories and illustrate concepts; sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words (or a 50-minute lecture).