Exploring History through Space

Heather Cox Richardson

On Wednesday, March 9, the space shuttle Discovery touched down for the last time. The Endeavor will fly in April, and the Atlantis will launch in June. And then America’s shuttle program will shut down. This marks the end of the era that began with President Kennedy’s September 1962 speech at Rice University, when he announced the national commitment to the space race. In that speech, President Kennedy described the nation’s history, beginning with Pilgrim William Bradford in 1630, as one of people who deliberately moved forward. Men could not be deterred in their quest for knowledge and progress, President Kennedy said, and America must be in the forefront of the exploration of space.

The exploration of space would require new science education, new computers, and new universities. It would create new companies and tens of thousands of new jobs. “Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this state, and this region, will share greatly in this growth,” Kennedy promised. In the next five years, NASA expected to double its engineers and scientists, to expend $60 million a year, to invest $200 million in plants and laboratories, and to contract for more than $1 billion of goods and services.

This would be expensive, he acknowledged. The current space budget was “$5,400 million a year,” an astronomical sum although, as he noted, “somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.” That cost would rise until the space race took more than 50 cents a week from every man, woman, and child in the United States, he said. And it would be worth it, for only such bold determination would guarantee that America would be the first to control space.

The U.S. threw itself behind President Kennedy’s vision. NASA’s budget soared into the billions, and Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon less than a decade after Kennedy’s speech at Rice.

Yet the meaning of the Space Race seems to me still in doubt. The 2010 collection of The Best American Science and Nature Writing (edited by Freeman Dyson this year, with Tim Folger’s usual steady hand) features an entire section on space, and offers some ideas about what exploring space means, and has meant, for Americans.

In an article in the collection reprinted from the New York Times, novelist Tom Wolfe portrayed America’s adventures in space as a cultural combat between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., abandoned as soon as the U.S. could declare victory by winning the race to the moon. Wolfe saw the mission of space exploration as a way to build that proverbial bridge to the stars, enabling humans to colonize the universe against the day that Earth becomes uninhabitable. NASA needs philosophers to proselytize, he says, convincing Americans to continue to send astronauts to space to explore.

Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has a very different vision of the importance of space exploration. In an article reprinted in the collection from the New York Review of Books, he said he finds the vast sums of money poured into manned space programs galling. The real function of a space program is its ability to illuminate the laws of nature. Astronomy and cosmology are helping to reveal the secrets of particle physics, but politicians refuse to supply the relatively small sums necessary to continue this research because, they claim, voters want their money to go to the manned space flights that are far more exciting than, for example, the Super Collider. He thinks that’s bunk; astronomy and cosmology are even more exciting than astronauts.

What exactly did Americans throw their enthusiasm and funds behind in the 1960s? Was it the excitement of what Wolfe describes as a sort of David and Goliath combat against a dangerous foe? Or was it the realization that we were at the threshold of a new understanding of the universe, suddenly attainable thanks to the extraordinary expertise unleashed by WWII?

Or was it, perhaps, a serendipitous moment, when those eager to learn the larger lessons of astronomy and physics found a president able to harness a cultural impulse that would enable them to fulfill their vision?

Dr. Weinstein is indisputably correct about the extraordinary discoveries in astronomy and particle physics in the past several decades. (Indeed, he’s made some of them himself.) We now have excellent data about the history of the universe stretching back almost 13.7 billion years, to just after the Big Bang. (Watch this video of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Flythrough.) This data is orders of magnitude better than any data that archaeologists or paleontologists or geologists, to say nothing of historians, will ever have about the history of our own planet.

Yet Wolfe’s point is well taken, too. For historians, the Space Race has to be understood culturally as well as scientifically. If astronauts are seen as soldiers in the struggle

between the U.S and the U.S.S.R. rather than scientists, their actions help us develop a spectrum of military behavior. They can also be studied as popular heroes.

Still, I lean toward the idea that the central story of the Space Race is political. It was a moment when policy makers managed to direct huge popular enthusiasm toward an end with no immediate payoff. While some historians have studied the relationship between the space program and public policy, there is plenty more work to be done. In an era that demands long-term investments in science, education, infrastructure, and so on, we need to know as much as we can about how policy makers have successfully directed public enthusiasm (and funds) for long-term goals.

Earthquakes through Time

Randall Stephens

When I was on a fellowship in San Diego last summer, I became very familiar with the USGS’s “Recent Earthquakes” page. The aftershocks from the Easter Mexicali earthquake continued to rumble through southern California. Having never been in an earthquake before, even minor ones like we were having, the whole experience was bizarre and a little frightening. The US Geological Survey has another helpful page that lists “Earthquakes with 50,000 or More Deaths:
Most Destructive Known Earthquakes on Record in the World.” I include a selection from that below. Note the words “on Record.” It has been 1,200 years since Japan suffered an earthquake as destructive as the one that shook the island nation on Friday afternoon.

Year: Place, death toll, magnitude

856: Iran, Damghan, 200,000, unknown

1667: Caucasia, Shemakha, 80,000, unknown

1693: Italy, Sicily, 60,000, 7.5

1727: Iran, Tabriz, 77,000, unknown

1755: Portugal, Lisbon 70,000, 8.7

1923: Kanto (Kwanto), Japan, 142,800, 7.9

1970, Chimbote, Peru, 70,000, 7.9

1976: Tangshan, China, 255,000, 7.5

2005: Pakistan, 86,000, 7.6

2010: Haiti region, 222,570, 7.0

Men and woman have always tried to understand why earthquakes happen when and where they do. After the 1755 Lisbon quake, felt in Africa and across Europe, Europeans were eager for on-the-ground intelligence and desperately sought to make sense of the whole thing.

Social critic Walter Benjamin, oddly, delivered a 1931 radio address to children on the effects of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. He ably demonstrated its scope and terror . . . for kids, nonetheless! He also spoke about how it changed the ways Europeans thought about their world:

There is a further, special reason that helps to explain why this event affected people's minds so powerfully--why countless pamphlets passed from hand to hand, and indeed why new descriptions continued to make their appearance almost a century later. The reason is that the earthquake was the most powerful on record. Its impact was felt throughout Europe and as far away as Africa. It has been calculated that, together with its most distant tremors, it affected two and a quarter million square kilometers--a huge area. Its most powerful shocks extended from the Moroccan coast to the shores of Andalusia and France. (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: vol 2, part 2, 1931-1934, eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings [Harvard University Press, 2005], 537.)

Benjamin goes on to site some original accounts of the quake, including one by the Englishman Rev. Charles Davy:

It was on the morning of this fatal day, between the hours of nine and ten, that I was set down in my apartment, just finishing a letter, when the papers and table I was writing on began to tremble with a gentle motion, which rather surprised me, as I could not perceive a breath of wind stirring. Whilst I was reflecting with myself what this could be owing to, but without having the least apprehension of the real cause, the whole house began to shake from the very foundation, which at first I imputed to the rattling of several coaches in the main street, which usually passed that way, at this time, from Belem to the palace; but on hearkening more attentively, I was soon undeceived, as I found it was owing to a strange frightful kind of noise under ground, resembling the hollow distant rumbling of thunder. All this passed in less than a minute, and I must confess I now began to be alarmed, as it naturally occurred to me that this noise might possibly be the forerunner of an earthquake, as one I remembered, which had happened about six or seven years ago, in the island of Madeira, commenced in the same manner, though it did little or no damage. . . .

Perhaps you may think the present doleful subject here concluded; but alas! the horrors of the 1st of November are sufficient to fill a volume. As soon as it grew dark, another scene presented itself little less shocking than those already described: the whole city appeared in a blaze, which was so bright that I could easily see to read by it. It may be said without exaggeration, it was on fire at least in a hundred different places at once, and thus continued burning for six days together, without intermission, or the least attempt being made to stop its progress.

It went on consuming everything the earthquake had spared, and the people were so dejected and terrified that few or none had courage enough to venture down to save any part of their substance; every one had his eyes turned towards the flames, and stood looking on with silent grief, which was only interrupted by the cries and shrieks of women and children calling on the saints and angels for succor, whenever the earth began to tremble, which was so often this night, and indeed I may say ever since, that the tremors, more or less, did not cease for a quarter of an hour together. I could never learn that this terrible fire was owing to any subterranean eruption, as some reported, but to three causes, which all concurring at the same time, will naturally account for the prodigious havoc it made. (Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham Univ.)

As of now, there is no telling what the long-term implications of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami will be. What sort of additional reports will be relayed from those who survived it? How will we understand it differently in days and years to come, after considerable reflection and after the damage is assessed? How will victims make sense of it? What will be it's global impact?

Presenting History to the Broader Public

Morgan Hubbard

One of Heather's posts from December got me thinking about the challenges of presenting history visually. As a public historian I'm interested in narrowing the gulf that exists between professional historians and the broad reading public. Part of this job involves thinking about how we've always presented our arguments about the past—and how we might make those presentations more engaging, more memorable, and better suited to the twenty-first century.

A historian who wants both job security and to teach people about important things might find herself pulled in different directions. Tenure committees want to see specialized monographs best suited to university libraries, books that expand the boundaries of what we know. The emphasis in these works is on mastery of the subject and relevant historiography, exhaustive research, and a style that puts the book's conclusion first. But the general-interest reader is interested in the story, not what other historians have said about it, and tends to want a narrative that is plotted and paced more than a conclusion that is delivered up front. (I understand these are gross stereotypes and that real life is more complicated, but my goal is just to sketch the outlines of the problem.)

There's no simple way to resolve this tension, but it seems to me we can start to address the problem by conceiving of our projects from the outset as both scholarship and storytelling. Easier said than done, I know. One way to start is by capitalizing on the power of the internet to relay information visually. This doesn't mean “dumbing down” the historical analysis we produce and present. But it does mean realizing that some historical processes are best expressed visually and dynamically. Traditional books can't give us that. But the web can.

One of my projects this semester is a statistical analysis of the ways that themes in American science fiction changed between 1945 and 1965. I'm sampling about a thousand science fiction stories from three of the major English-language science fiction magazines (Amazing Stories, Astounding Science-Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.) After I read each story, I classify it according to a taxonomy of themes, “tagging” the story with as many themes as it takes to approximate its content and tone. When the data set is complete, I'll display it visually, in a short animation that will condense 20 years of historical change into about a minute.

I could use the results of my statistical analysis to write a report that shows how science fiction changed in the first two decades of the Cold War. But if I do a good job, the animation will accomplish the same task more intuitively, in less time, and with more panache. Die-hard fans might read a written report, sure, but most of the people I know wouldn't want to sit down with twenty-five pages of explication and graphs. But picture this: the story of science fiction's evolution, demonstrated instead of merely described, in colors that draw the eye and with an aesthetic that echoes the vintage science fiction in question.

This project isn't guaranteed to work. But if it does, I think it will be good public history.

Science as History and Big History

Dan Allosso

The past finds its way into all types of disciplines. Historical speculation is done by everyone, including scientists and popular science writers. I recently read a really interesting little book by British science writer Colin Tudge. Called Neanderthals, Bandits & Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began, this 50-page essay speculates wildly about the fate of the Neanderthals, ascribes the origin of global Great Flood myths to dim memories of rising sea levels after the last ice age, and suggests that agriculture spread with the original human migrations, rather than being simultaneously discovered in many places afterward. It’s short on “facts” and long on speculation, but it’s really fascinating speculation. (I wish I had this guy’s agent!)

The sciences all deal with change over time. Evolution is history. So it’s no surprise to people who read science that they are reading history. But recently science has leaped onto the history shelves in the form of Big History. I wonder if history-readers excited about Big History are aware that in many cases they’re just reading science. We may be impressed by the novelty of a view that goes back to the big bang, but this is nothing new to the science-readers. Even Bill Bryson had a bestseller out (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003, which is a really good read) when David Christian’s Maps of Time was making waves among historians. Other good examples of science-histories include Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, both of which are stories of both the history of the universe and of our expanding knowledge of it: or, histories and historiographies.

Actually, the heritage of that science-reader type of big history goes back to some very interesting documents like Robert Chambers’ 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which presents a case for evolution and has been credited with causing Darwin to keep his ideas secret for decades. But unlike these science texts, what big history does, is try to contextualize “small history.” This is something the scientists aren’t concerned with. Big History doesn’t do what Fernand Braudel did, and add scope—it actually undercuts regular history (at least momentarily) by its sheer geological and cosmic scale. Maybe it sometimes goes too far, and passes a point where the comparison becomes meaningless. But at least it reminds us that the world didn’t begin when people started keeping records.

The context that history like Braudel's brings is environmental, which is also not what the scientists are doing. Except perhaps in the sense of the Anthropic Principle, which argues (circularly) that things “had” to be this way because these are the basic cosmic conditions that enable life. The scientific perspective is usually materialist, but not determinist in the human sense. While some scientists argue that given complete information about the initial conditions of the universe, a sufficiently powerful computer could predict the future, others point to quantum uncertainty as the way out of this trap. Still others, following the hints of scientifically-inclined humorist Douglas Adams, might suggest that there’s only one computer big enough to solve this equation, and it already exists: the universe itself.

There are evolutionary biologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Are there actually any evolutionary historians, who have deliberately applied the ideas of modern evolutionary theory to history?

Regular People Read Erasmus Darwin?

Dan Allosso

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was a full-time British physician who traveled an average of 10,000 miles a year to visit patients. He was a founder of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and a prolific inventor. Zoonomia was Darwin’s major scientific publication and the leading medical/biological book of its day. Published in London in 1796, Zoonomia was reprinted the same year in New York, by “T. & J. Swords, printers to the Faculty of physic of Columbia College,” and again the following year by Thomas Dobson of Philadelphia. A “second edition” was published in 1803 by “Thomas and Andrews” of Boston. By 1818, a “Fourth American Edition” had been printed in Philadelphia, by Edward Earle. The continued popularity of Zoonomia over more than two decades suggests a wide readership outside of medical schools. The 1815 “Catalog of the Library of the United States” lists Zoonomia, The Botanic Garden, and Darwin’s posthumous poem, The Temple of Nature.

Like his grandson, Erasmus Darwin wrote about evolution through natural selection. Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from . . . the parent . . . to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.

When I was doing research in Ashfield, Massachusetts, I was surprised to find that six Ashfield children were named “Darwin” or “Erasmus Darwin” between 1803 and 1847. Erasmus Darwin never visited America, although he was a political radical, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and a supporter of American independence. Looking a little farther, I found there are at least sixty-three towns in Massachusetts where children were apparently named after Darwin before 1849! I also found 96 towns where there’s no record of a child named “Erasmus” or “Darwin” in the Vital Records (these two groups represent all the towns whose records I was able to find online).

It’s possible that a few of the children named “Erasmus” may have been named for the fifteenth-century humanist, or for remote family members (close ones would have showed up in the records I was searching). But I think most of them were named for the scientist, especially because in many cases the children are actually named “Erasmus Darwin.” So far, I’ve found no record of “Darwin” being a family name anywhere in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts, and Charles Darwin’s only significant publication before 1849 was his The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, published in 5 parts, 1838-1843. So there’s a high probability that a lot of people in Massachusetts thought highly enough of Erasmus Darwin to name a son after him.

In all, I found 112 children named “Erasmus,” “Erasmus Darwin,” “Darwin,” or, in a couple of cases, “Erastus Darwin.” But my initial search of Vital Record books available online missed 187 towns, whose records are not yet available electronically. After my PhD work is done, I’ll try to complete the map. In the meantime, I think it’s remarkable how widely read and apparently influential the works of Erasmus Darwin were in rural Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century!

(Green = places with a "Darwin"; Brown = places without; White = haven’t got to it yet)[See also Dan's sketches of these "Darwins" here.]

Contingency: In the Event of a Moon Disaster . . .

Morgan Hubbard

When I lead discussion sections as a Teaching Assistant at UMass, I try as often as I can to bring up the notion of historical contingency. I think it’s important that we keep in mind, all of us, that the world looks and works as it does in large part because of the collected decisions of many people over many years. But history has a weight to it, and when we learn it as children and young adults it can acquire an inertia that feels like determinism: things are the way they are because they couldn’t have been any other way, right?

Every once in a while, a historical document is

especially good at shaking up this determinism.

Below is a July, 1969, memo titled 'IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER' written by then-speechwriter William Safire to Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. The memo was penned two days before the first manned moon landing. It was meant to be read by Nixon as a public statement in the event that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were somehow stranded on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission and consigned to perish, as the statement reads, in “the deepest of the deep.”

Images courtesy of the National Archives and hat tip to the fantastic blog Letters of Note. Click images to enlarge.

Creating an Online Exhibit: History for the General Public

Morgan Hubbard

This guest post comes to us from Morgan Hubbard, a talented masters student in Public History at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Hubbard reflects on his creation of an on-line exhibit, which he launched “to explain the explosion of science fiction on the American literary scene in the first two decades of the cold war era.” He describes some of the challenges of doing history on the web and explains what worked best.

Presenting history can be as hard as all the research that comes before it. This seems to be especially true for web exhibits. How do we give readers enough structure so they won't get lost, but not so much that we overpower the web's ability to render history vividly and dynamically?

I recently did some research on American science fiction readers from 1945-1965, for a class Heather Cox Richardson taught last semester at UMass-Amherst called “Writing History for Popular Audiences.” The research was a breeze. The hard part, it turns out, was trying to present my findings in a web exhibit aimed at a non-specialist audience. The result is Uncertain Futures: Americans and Science Fiction in the Early Cold War Era; you can judge its worth for yourself. But I thought it would be worthwhile to write briefly about some of the ways I think we, as historians, can put the web to good use.

First, a web exhibit allows for layered content—think footnotes, but better. Text can link to other sites, or it can serve as a kind of inline footnote for extra content. I tried both with this exhibit. Good use of images, too, can give an exhibit a layered feel—I think the images in Uncertain Futures are crucial to the story, so I used a script to activate an optional slideshow of each page's images when a reader clicks on one of them. And, finally, sound makes history dramatic. I conducted an interview, a sort of oral history, with the founder of the UMass Science Fiction Society; that interview is embedded in the “Fans and Fandom” page, with a simple player.

Second, and more importantly, it seems intuitive that readers will interact differently—maybe in a nonlinear fashion—with web exhibits than with the traditional media of historical scholarship. Books have introductions, arguments that build sequentially, and tie-it-all-together conclusions . . . but the chances seem vanishingly small that readers of my exhibit will start at the beginning and then work methodically to the end. How to deal with this? I tried to provide as many “signposts” as I could, in the form of chapter subtitles. At the time I was going for cleverness, but in retrospect I should have made these subtitles much clearer. Ideally, subtitles—and the navigation panes at the top of every page—can provide readers with a map of the exhibit's narrative arc, from intro to conclusion, visible from anywhere in the exhibit.

There are some great resources available for researchers thinking about how to present history online. George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media has a suite of tools and publishing platforms, available for free. And the University of Maryland’s Public History Resource Center has some good criteria for evaluating history websites, and a lot of helpful website reviews. These are only two—there are plenty more. Whether the web will change traditional historical scholarship remains to be seen, but it seems clear that public history has already been altered—and for the better!—by the online world.

Reviews for Historians in Conversation Volumes

Randall Stephens

The October 2010 issue of History and Theory includes short reviews of Recent Themes in the History of Science and Religion, ed. Donald A. Yerxa; and Recent Themes in American Religious History, ed. Randall J. Stephens. Both are part of the University of South Carolina Press's Historians in Conversation series, which draws on essays that have appeared in Historically Speaking over the last few years. Each of the eight volumes includes an introduction that contextualizes the subfield and offers some insight into new directions.

"[T]he contributors to" the Science and Religion volume, writes the reviewer, "seek to broach the big questions at stake in ongoing efforts to fathom the historical interface of science and religion—two of the most important ways of knowing our world—to better our understanding of how both have shaped the course of history and the direction of modern thinking. Designed as a supplemental reader for students of scientific and religious history, this volume will appeal as well to general readers with avid interests in history."

Recent Themes in American Religious, says a reviewer, contains a "collection of essays and interviews from Historically Speaking address several subjects central to religious history in the Unites States. . . . Recent Themes in American Religious History will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers of American history, American studies, and religious studies."

With a minimum of a $50 donation to the Historical Society you can choose two volumes of the eight to receive for free.

Larry Friedman on Erich Fromm and Public Intellectuals

Randall Stephens

See the new issue of Historically Speaking, now available on the Project Muse site. (Most will only be able to access the full issue from a university computer or with a university account.)

I excerpt here part of my review with Larry Friedman, professor of history in Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative at Harvard University. Friedman has published a variety of books and articles on the history of psychology, the history of race and racism, and the history of social reform movements. His books include: The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Prentice-Hall, 1970), Inventors of the Promised Land (Knopf, 1975), Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1982), Menninger: The Family and the Clinic (Knopf, 1990) and a definitive study of developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson: Identity’s Architect (Harvard University Press, 1999). He’s currently working on a biography of one of the most influential psychologists and public intellectuals of the 20th century, Erich Fromm.

"Erich Fromm and the Public Intellectual in Recent American History: An Interview with Larry Friedman," conducted by Randall Stephens, Historically Speaking, September 2010.

Randall Stephens: The popular psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm was once one of the most influential public intellectuals in the West. Yet many are unfamiliar with his life and work today. Could you say something about his context and significance?

Larry Friedman: Yes, that’s true. But his influence is still felt in many quarters around the globe and, as you say, he was once a major public figure. . . .

Fromm is significant for a number of reasons. But, perhaps most importantly, he had a wide influence as a best-selling author. His first book, Escape from Freedom (1941), linked Nazi and authoritarian regimes with the individual’s fear of freedom and autonomy. To escape from freedom was to find a greater sense of order in sadomasochism and its cycle of degrading others. Fromm’s The Sane Society (1955) railed against consumerism and made the case for local face-to-face democracy. His most enduring and popular work, The Art of Loving (1956), called for the love of self as a central component in the capacity to befriend and love others. It sold a staggering 30 million copies globally and was available in airports, drug stores, you name it. In 1973 he published The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, which suggested that a conflict exists in all people between necrophilia and biophilia, a rage for death and annihilation on one hand and an affirmation and love of life on the other. To complete this book, Fromm took up the study of neuroscience, physical anthropology, linguistics, and other fields far outside of his training in psychoanalysis to explain why some favored death and destruction while others preferred life and love. We might speculate that if mainline psychoanalysis had branched into other fields as Fromm had done, psychoanalysis might have escaped the doldrums of recent decades. . . .

Stephens: How relevant are [Erich] Fromm's interests and causes to the average educated reader today?

Friedman: For one, his writings on war and devastation are still remarkably discerning. Of course, in Escape from Freedom he was concerned with the perils of Nazism and Stalinism. But he also pointed to future developments, like McCarthyism and the Red Scare. And he is exceedingly relevant even to today's world. Take, for instance, his position on the Mideast, specifically Israel. He was very critical of Israeli belligerence. His views bear some resemblance to those of Noam Chomsky.

Stephens: Your historical work has had a heavy psychological component. What's your opinion of the psychohistory of the 1960s and 1970s?

Friedman: I thought much psychohistory had become reductionist by the late 1960s. I felt that it was giving psychological exploration a bad name. It overemphasized the psychoanalytical element and did not employ cognitive psychology or neuroscience. It tended to be ahistorical. Now what is sometimes called the new cultural history is heavily psychological, but less reductionist than the old psychohistory of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Stephens: Your next book is about Richard Hofstadter and the mid-century New York scene. I wonder if you'd say something about that.

Friedman: Hofstadter was one of the greatest historians of the modern era. You can say he's wrong on a number of points, but he's brilliantly wrong and always worth going back to. Current debates about the role of conservative religion in America or the influence of anti-intellectualism revolve around some of Hofstadter's basic ideas. His take on the American political tradition continues to influence high school curricula. He remains amazingly relevant. What interests me especially is mid-century New York City. His friends and associates who lived there, intellectual giants like Peter Gay, helped shape our basic understandings of history and culture. Hofstadter also interacted with Manhattan's theater community and art world. Hofstadter's New York in the 1950s and 1960s was a fascinating intellectual and cultural hub. >>>

A Crosspost on Presidential Speeches on Energy from the Miller Center of Public Affairs

Lauren Dunsmore
University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs

President Obama addressed the nation yesterday about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He also talked about reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels, a theme in many presidential remarks.

In a 1977 speech on energy, Carter says we will have to drill more offshore wells if we don't conserve.

Ford had similar remarks on May 27, 1975. Check out this clip in which he says Congress has done little or nothing to decrease America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Click here to see how past presidents—from JFK to Reagan—addressed domestic crises during their administrations.

Some Historical Perspectives on National Healthcare

Randall Stephens

Teddy Roosevelt campaigned on health care in his 1912 Progressive Party bid for the presidency. Makes sense. He needed a little medical assistance after surviving a gunshot wound/assassination attempt in Milwaukee: "Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. . . . The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best."

The Progressive Party platform of 1912 declared: "We favor the union of all the existing agencies of the Federal Government dealing with the public health into a single National health service without discrimination against or for any one set of therapeutic methods, school of medicine, or school of healing with such additional powers as may be necessary to enable it to perform efficiently such duties in the protection of the public from preventable diseases as may be properly undertaken by the Federal authorities . . ."

Two decades later FDR seemed to have thought a national health bill was one bill too many for his already ambitious alphabet soup initiatives.

It then fell to FDR's accidental successor to give it a go. "In my message to the Congress of September 6, 1945, there were enumerated in a proposed Economic Bill of Rights certain rights which ought to be assured to every American citizen." So began President Harry Truman's address to Congress on November 19, 1945.

One of them was: "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health." Another was the "right to adequate protection from the economic fears of . .. sickness ...."

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection. . . .

Our programs for public health and related services should be enlarged and strengthened. The present Federal-State cooperative health programs deal with general public health work, tuberculosis and venereal disease control, maternal and child health services, and services for crippled children. >>>

Didn't work out. Some Republicans equated it with communism and the American Medical Association came out against it.

Indeed, longstanding opposition to federal involvement in health care squelched most efforts. The American Medical Association again stood firm against Lyndon Johnson's landmark 1965 health insurance program. The AMA's chief players backed Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, making their criticism loud and clear. The AMA fiercely opposed Medicare. And in the early 1960s, Ronald Reagan warned that after the passage of such a national program, "We will awake to find that we have socialism."

Calvin Woodward offers some useful historical context on the current battle in the Sunday LA Times.

To history, it is likely to be judged alongside the boldest acts of presidents and Congress in the pantheon of domestic affairs. Think of the guaranteed federal pensions of Social Security, socialized medicine for the old and poor, the civil rights remedies to inequality.

Change is coming, it now appears, but in steps, not overnight. . . .

In contrast, on June 30, 1966, after a titanic struggle capped by the bill signing a year earlier, President Lyndon Johnson launched government health insurance for the elderly with three simple words, as if flicking a switch: "Medicare begins tomorrow." >>>

See also: the Boston Globe's (Associated Press) rather interesting timeline of health care legislation; A PBS timeline from Healthcare Crisis; and Jonathan Chait, "Health Care Reform And History," TNR, March 19, 2010.

The Moon Landing at 40

Randall Stephens

With the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission just around the corner--the landing was on July 20--it's a good time to reflect on what that meant and still means. In 1969/70, some rhapsodized about the power of human innovation and the horizon of exploration. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, playwright Arthur Miller wrote in the July 21 edition of the New York Times:

There are two schools of thought about the moon landing. One heralds it as the start of a new Age of Discovery like the period that began in 1492. The other regards it as a distraction from social problems. Few, though, feel anything but pride in the men who step over the astral frontier; even the crabbers are secretly envious of them.

I think it's a great thing for all of us. After the moon we undoubtedly will put men on other planets further and further away from Earth. The climax, which I doubt anyone alive will witness, will come when a scientific expedition finally lands on 125th Street or the North Side of Waterbury, Connecticut.

On the run in Algiers, Eldridge Cleaver, Information Minister of the Black Panther party, unleashed a torrent of criticism. On July 20 he told New York Times reporters that the moon landing program was a "misuse of public funds." Cleaver didn't see "what benefit mankind will have from two astronauts landing on the moon while people are being murdered in Vietnam," and starving in the U.S. Politicians like Nixon, "number one pig," were to blame

Others, like Norman Mailer--razor-tongue gonzo journalist, premature curmudgeon, and egomaniac--used the moon landing to rant against America's banal technophilia. He wrote in Of a Fire on the Moon: "Armstrong and Aldrin were to do an EVA that night. EVA stood for Extra Vehicle Activity, and that was presumably a way to describe the most curious steps ever taken. It is one thing to murder the language of Shakespeare - another to be unaware how rich was the

victim. Future murders stood in the shadow of the acronyms. It was as if on the largest stage ever created, before an audience of half the earth, a man of modest appearance would walk to the centre, smile tentatively at the footlights, and read a page from a data card. The audience would groan and Beckett and Warhol give their sweet smiles."*

Now to the present... In the Guardian Christopher Riley has written "The Moon Walkers: Twelve Men Who Have Visited Another World." Maybe his piece indicates that the landing is no longer a sounding board for politics?

The 12 members of the most exclusive club in human history had many things in common.

All came from a highly technical background and all but one studied aeronautical or astronautical engineering. Growing up, many had been Boy Scouts and even more were active members of their University fraternities. They all went on to study for further degrees – many at military test pilot schools – and almost all of them saw active service in cold war skies, often flying nuclear weapons behind enemy lines.

Popular Mechanics features a collection of essays on all things 40th-anniversary-moon-landing related. Highlights include: "Is America's Space Administration Over the Hill? Next-Gen NASA"; "Giant Leaps: Apollo 11 Alums Reflect 40 Years Later at MIT Conference"; and "Exploring the Moon: Apollo 11, The Untold Story."

For an excellent documentary on the moon landing and space race, see Race to the Moon (PBS, 2005).

Adam’s Ancestors

An Excerpt of Donald Yerxa's Interview with David Livingstone from Historically Speaking (June 2009)

David N. Livingstone is a professor of geography and intellectual history at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Arts. One of the most talented and perceptive scholars currently working on the history of science and religion, Livingstone is especially interested in exploring the spatial as well as the temporal contexts within which ideas are produced and consumed. Among his many books are Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and most recently Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Historically Speaking senior editor Donald A. Yerxa caught up with Livingstone on March 3, 2009, to discuss his latest book as well as his approach to intellectual history.

Donald A. Yerxa: Your most recent book, Adam’s Ancestors, is a history of pre-Adamite thinking. What is pre-Adamism?

David N. Livingstone: Pre-Adamism is actually a notoriously simple idea, though its consequences are multifaceted. It’s the idea that the Adam of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament is not the first human being. In some incarnations Adam is simply the father of the Jewish people, whereas in other versions Adam is viewed as the father of Caucasian people. But the material point of pre-Adamism, at least in its early days, is that there were, and perhaps indeed continue to exist, peoples who are descended from a pre-Adamic or at least non-Adamic source. This would mean that there were at least two (and arguably more than two) creations of the human species. In pre-Adamism lie the origins of what anthropologists used to call polygenesis. And, indeed, that has been and continues to be something of an issue right up to contemporary paleoanthropology. Should we look at all humans as derived from a single source, let’s say, a “mitochondrial Eve”? Or did the human species emerge in many different places? So the debate in that sense, without the biblical significance of Adam, continues to be important in thinking about human origins more generally.

Yerxa: How significant was pre-Adamism in Western intellectual history prior to Darwin?

Livingstone: There are a couple of things to be said about this. Another historian who worked on this subject some years ago, Richard Popkin, made the arresting suggestion that pre-Adamic theory was much more destabilizing to European intellectuals in the 17th century than the Copernican revolution or indeed the mechanical universe of the Newtonians. Popkin reasoned that pre-Adamism challenged human beings’ sense of their own identity, of who they really were. For a very long time, going back to the church fathers, to Augustine, and indeed to much earlier times, descent from Adam came to be a definition of what it was to be human. So I’m inclined to agree with Popkin because while you can scarcely find an advocate for the idea after 1655 when it first began to achieve wider publicity, you find many, many refutations. Although pre-Adamism seems initially to have had few converts, a lot of people felt the need to refute it.

Yerxa: Throughout your book it is clear that this notion is quite versatile and can be adapted to a number of arguments. Could you speak to that?

Livingstone: Pre-Adamism can be used for many contradictory purposes and is hugely adaptable in different environments. Let me just pick out three or four of these. Initially, when it was first put forward in the 1650s by Isaac La Peyrère, it was rapidly castigated as a heresy. Emissaries from the Vatican picked up La Peyrère when he was traveling in what is now Belgium and took him off to Rome, where he was forced to recant before the pope. Clever devil that La Peyrère was, however, the recantation never really admitted he was wrong. Pre-Adamism was considered heretical because it plainly challenged a literal reading of the Genesis narrative. One has to rethink a sequence of other related theological precepts if one accepts the notion that there were pre-Adamites. For example, did they also fall from grace? How representative is Adam of the human race? How does original sin come into the world? How is it transmitted?

Pre-Adamism has been quite versatile, however. In the 19th century—and indeed on into the 20th century—the idea was promulgated by those who were much more conservative in their theological outlook. It was adopted in a new guise by conservative believers who wanted to hold onto the historic significance of Adam while at the same time take some notion of human evolution seriously. So pre-Adamism, once deemed a massive heresy, was later taken up by conservative, orthodox believers.

Let me provide another instance of its adaptability. In the 1650s La Peyrère thought that Adam was the father of the Jewish race, but he was convinced that we all, whether Jews or not, participate to some degree in the benefits of the Jewish religious tradition and divine action in the world through the children of Israel. So in that sense, pre-Adamism is inclusive, humanitarian, and sweeps all of humanity—whether Jewish, Adamic or non-Jewish, non-Adamic—into a human family that benefits in Israel’s redemption. But later, pre-Adamism was used for the grossest forms of racism by depicting certain racial groups as non-Adamic and thus inferior and perhaps even subhuman. So pre-Adamism has been used for both humanitarian and racist purposes. . . .

Yerxa: You were trained as a geographer, and yet much of your recent writing has been in the area of intellectual history and the history of science. Is this an unusual intellectual trajectory? Or is this question premised on a false assumption about what it is that geographers do?

Livingstone: Being trained in geography in my generation encompassed aspects of physical science as well as the humanities and social sciences. Geography integrates nature and culture, or environment and society. Since its institutionalization in the 19th century, geography has always had considerable interest in the history of exploration. If you go back to early examination papers at the University of Oxford, you will find papers dealing with the history of what was then called, in those colonially unconscious days, the Age of Discovery or the Age of Exploration. So there was always interest in the history of growing geographical knowledge about the globe. . . .

C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" at 50

Randall Stephens

Robert P. Crease reflects on the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's “The Two Cultures” lecture at physicsworld.com. Snow's subsequent "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," Encounter, XII (June, 1959), famously turned readers' attention to the yawning chasm between the sciences and the humanities. Crease's comments are particularly relevant to a recent biology vs. history conversation on our blog. (See David Meskill's post, "What Can Historians Learn from Biologists." Snow's observations have also come up in Historically Speaking essays and forums on science and history.)

Crease acknowledges Snow's many faults, but writes that Snow helps "us to recognize the two-culture gap half a century later in a different world. . . ." Crease sees the "two-culture gap in the attitude of historians, novelists and philosophers who deride the idea that they need to incorporate science when thinking through humanity’s 'important questions'; a condition that I named — with less flair than Snow — 'anosognosia'."

He concludes: "The pertinence of the phrase 'two cultures' continues; the science kids and the humanities kids, as it were, still sit at different tables in the lunchroom."

For more on the relevance/irrelevance of Snow's thesis, see also, Robert Whelan, "Fifty years on, CP Snow's 'Two Cultures' are united in desperation," Telegraph, May 4, 2009; Peter Dizikes, "Our Two Cultures," New York Times, 19 March 2009; and "May 7, 1959: Can't We All Just Get Along?" Wired, 7 May 2009.

Religious Responses to Epidemic Disease

Randall Stephens

According to the New York Times: "Health officials continue to report mild cases of swine flu throughout the United States and worldwide. The number of deaths in Mexico that officials suspect to have been caused by the flu is 159." The NYT also features a map that tracks cases by region. Schools and private companies have laid out plans of action. Churches and mosques are urging the faithful to reconsider "several traditional observances," according to the Raleigh News & Observer. "At St. Mel Parish in Fair Oaks, Calif., congregants will be asked not to shake hands during the exchange of peace or hold hands when the community recites the Lord's Prayer. The church will not offer the Communion cup during Mass."

For some historical perspective on this coverage--and perhaps to counter the shrieking, doomsday coverage of swine flu--I post here a link to a forum we ran in Historically Speaking several months ago. In the intro to “Religious Responses to Epidemic Disease: A Roundtable,” Donald Yerxa writes:

Thanks to the seminal work of William McNeill and Alfred Crosby, historians pay much more attention to the impact disease has had in history. Historians, however, have been slower to consider the nature and variety of religious responses to epidemic disease. To help readers think about this relatively neglected topic, we invited Andrew Cunningham to comment in general terms about religion and widespread disease in the West. We also asked David Arnold and Howard Phillips to explore two specific cases outside of Europe—one from India, the other from South Africa. Then we commissioned Duane Osheim to use these essays to comment on the overall topic of religion and epidemic disease in history.