Harvard University Press Blog

The Origins of Memorial Day

The following short passage is excerpted from David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Blight’s newest book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, will be published this fall.

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At the end of the Civil War the American people faced an enormous challenge of memorialization. Their war of limited aims in 1861 had become an all-out struggle of conquest and survival between the largest armies the western hemisphere had ever seen. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war, 60 percent on the Union side and 40 percent Confederate. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. Death and mourning were everywhere in America in 1865; hardly a family had escaped its pall. In the North, 6 percent of white males aged 13-43 had died in the war; in the South, 18 percent were dead. Of the 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union army and navy, 20 percent perished. Diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia claimed more than twice as many soldiers as did battle. The most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughter and how to remember it.

Death on such a scale demanded meaning. During the war, soldiers in countless remote arbors, or on awful battlefield landscapes, had gathered to mourn and bury their comrades, even while thousands remained unburied, their skeletons lying about on the killing fields of Virginia, Tennessee, or Georgia. Women had begun rituals of burial and remembrance in informal ways well before the war ended, both in towns on the homefront and sometimes at the battlefront. Americans carried flowers to graves or to makeshift monuments representing their dead, and so was born the ritual of “Decoration Day,” known eventually as Memorial Day.

In most places, the ritual was initially a spiritual practice. But very soon, remembering the dead and what they died for developed partisan fault lines. The evolution of Memorial Day during its first twenty years or so became a contest between three divergent, and sometimes overlapping, groups: blacks and their white former abolitionist allies, white Northerners, and white Southerners. With time, in the North, the war’s two great results—black freedom and the preservation of the Union—were rarely accorded equal space. In the South, a uniquely Confederate version of the war’s meaning, rooted in resistance to Reconstruction, coalesced around Memorial Day practice. Decoration Day, and the ways in which it was observed, shaped Civil War memory as much as any other cultural ritual. The story of the origins of this important American day of remembrance is central to understanding how reconciliationist practices overtook the emancipationist legacies of the Civil War.

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In Race and Reunion Blight goes on to explain the origins of Memorial Day, and also how its evolving celebration in the decades after the war reflected the changing ways that the nation was making sense of the conflict and its legacy. You can read the remarkable story of the first Memorial Day in David Blight’s New York Times piece “Forgetting Why We Remember.”

Martha Nussbaum on the Capabilities Approach to Human Development

Traditionally, a country’s Gross Domestic Product has been used as a rough measure of its quality of life. If Country X’s GDP is higher per capita than Country Y’s, the thinking held that we should be able to assume that people in Country X have a higher standard of living than people in Country Y.

But that’s not actually the case. It turns out that an increase in GDP is not very strongly correlated with improvements in many of the areas that affect the lives of a nation’s people. So how should we comparatively assess quality of life, if not via GDP? And how can we shift the conversation from a purely economic basis to one focused on people? As an alternative to the focus on GDP, the Capabilities Approach (also referred to as the Capability Approach and the Human Development Approach) was developed to help the world think about what it means to live a full life, and how governments can provide the opportunities to help their people do so.

The philosopher and University of Chicago Professor of Law and Ethics Martha Nussbaum has been one of the leaders in developing this approach, along with the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. This way of thinking about development led to the creation of the Human Development Index, a UN-backed measure that has thankfully been replacing GDP as a metric of quality of life in policy discussions.

The conversation about this approach has been conducted in academic circles, mostly among development economists. However, we recently published Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, the first book intended to outline the approach for non-specialists. In the book, she outlines what it means to use an approach that takes each individual person as an end. She explains what’s meant by “capabilities” (“not just abilities residing inside a person but also the freedoms or opportunities created by a combination of personal abilities and the political, social, and economic environment”), and presents her list of the ten most central capabilities, the threshold requirements for a life of human dignity.

In the video below, Professor Nussbaum explains why the Capabilities Approach is superior to a focus on GDP, and why good governments should be supporting the kinds of vulnerability that enrich life while helping to shield people from the kinds that don’t.

 

As Creating Capabilities makes clear, the embrace of the Capabilities Approach has entailed a shift from a conversation about economics to a conversation about justice.  

Oh, The Pleasure Dairy

We publish a lot of books. It can be tough to keep them all in your head. Sometimes a book flies under the radar but then arrives with a wallop. Yours truly was just walloped by Dairy Queens. What a luscious book this became!

The book, by Meredith Martin, is everything you wanted to know about pleasure dairies but were afraid to ask. Or, rather, didn't know to ask.  Because, really, who’s heard of pleasure dairies? Not enough of us.

From Martin’s Introduction:

This book tells the story of an early modern building type that today has been largely forgotten: the pleasure dairy, or what is known in French as the laiterie d’agrément, or laiterie de propeté. Most of us are familiar with the legend of Marie-Antoinette dressing up as a milkmaid and, together with her aristocratic female friends, churning butter at her faux-rustic hamlet, or hameau, at Versailles. Some are also aware of the luxurious white marble dairy that her architect Richard Mique built for her as part of this pastoral enterprise in the mid-1780s. From the time of its creation, Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy has been an essential site in the development of her bad reputation, both as a thoughtless and extravagant queen and as a historical figure who violated the boundaries of her class and gender.

The Hameau de Versailles, in fact, has two dairies: the pleasure dairy and the functional preparation dairy, or laiterie de preparation. Marie-Antoinette’s servants used the preparation dairy to fabricate milk products that were then brought to the pleasure dairy to be admired and consumed by the queen and her guests. Though the two dairies resembled each other in exterior appearance and interior layout, the pleasure dairy’s furnishings were made of sumptuous white marble (rather than a plainer stone), and its interior stone walls were painted to resemble marble, complementing the trompe l’oeil coffered ceiling and rich crown moldings. The room was also outfitted with a lavish set of gilded porcelain dairy ware that was produced at Marie-Antoinette’s own porcelain manufactory in Paris and that imitated the basic stone and tin utensils used in the preparation dairy, including settling pans and milk jugs. The Hameau’s pleasure dairy constituted an elegant re-creation of a typical working dairy, one whose “work” centered less on production and more on consumption, royal symbolism, and aristocratic play. It provided Marie-Antoinette with a venue in which to enjoy the pleasures, and embrace the values, of rural life in a manner fit for a queen.

How can we begin to make sense of this curious building type and its historical and cultural significance? First, it is important to understand that the Hameau’s pleasure dairy was neither an isolated example nor the product of Marie-Antoinette’s frivolous imagination, as has been assumed. To the contrary, it was part of an established tradition of dairy construction in French royal and elite gardens that began in the mid-sixteenth century with Catherine de’Medici at the court of Fontainebleau.

Your Loebs!

A few months back, as part of our celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, we asked you to show us your Loebs. And you did! We’ve been receiving submissions from around the world.  Take a look!

Before we get to the photos we have this fantastic video, from our friends at Blackwell Classics in Oxford:

 

Loeb at First sight, indeed!

Another great surprise: last week the online literary magazine The Rumpus featured a really terrific illustrated documentary on the San Francisco Public Library by the artist Wendy MacNaughton. You should definitely read the whole thing, but first check out the Loebs!

As the caption indicates, the Loebs in the piece illustrate the fact that the overwhelming majority of resources housed in libraries still aren’t available digitally. Digital Loebs? We’re working on it, actually.

Who Was Walter Benjamin in 1910?

How best to describe Walter Benjamin? Philosopher? German-Jewish Intellectual? Marxist? Moralist? Critic (as argued by Daniel Bell when we began to publish Benjamin’s work)?

Benjamin was all of those things and more, of course. Much of his reputation is based on his writings of the ’20s and ’30s, when he produced works like his best-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” But where did that Benjamin come from? How did he develop? Who was he as a young man? Our latest Benjamin volume, Early Writings, 1910-1917, shows that, even at 18, Benjamin was already Benjamin.

A quick digression: this fall we’re publishing Becoming Dickens, a new bio of Dickens that looks just at the first half of his life, with a particular focus on the pivotal years of 1833-1838. That book lays bare all of the contingency of becoming, with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst showing that the man who became Dickens actually nearly didn’t. As origin stories go, Benjamin’s is strikingly different. The early writings in this new volume make especially clear the philosophical foundations on which Benjamin never stopped building—the concern with the role of the present in historical remembrance, the concern with truth in the work of art, and the anxiety over language’s mediation of life.

Benjamin was heavily involved with the German Youth Movement in the years before WWI, and much of the writing in this volume reflects that association. Howard Eiland, the editor and translator of this volume and others, including The Arcades Project, notes that these zealous youth- and education-focused writings clearly reflect what we know of the adult Benjamin:

In these polemical writings, exhorting the sons and daughters of the German middle class to “awaken,” we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The pieces are concerned with matters ranging from the spiritually fruitful appropriation of history to the intellectual relevance of Romanticism in particular, from the theory of education to the idea of experience and the idea of love. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the Twenties and Thirties are already in evidence here.

Of the forty-five pieces in this volume, over thirty are presented here in English for the first time. Many are articles that were published by Benjamin in various outlets; others were never published in any language in his lifetime. The works fall into four principal subject areas: personal writing (poetry, fiction, diary); education and its reform; youth (with essays on love and eroticism); and literary subjects. These early writings lack some of the polish of his later work, and also absent are the sociological perspectives and montage techniques that Benjamin wouldn’t develop until his freelance writing days after his student years. But, as Adam Kirsch notes, through these seven years one can see Benjamin develop “from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker.”

We’ll just end here with a snippet of the 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”:

What does language communicate? It communicates the spiritual essence corresponding to it. It is fundamental to recognize that this spiritual essence communicates itself in language and not through it. Hence, there is no speaker of languages, if that means someone who communicates through these languages. Spiritual being communicates itself in, not through, a language: this is to say, it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being. Spiritual being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is communicable. What is communicable in a spiritual entity is its linguistic being. Language, therefore, in each case communicates the linguistic being of things, but their spiritual being only insofar as this is directly included in their linguistic being, insofar as it is communicable.  

As this short excerpt makes clear, one other notable Benjaminism was already well-developed in his youth: his –abilities.

An Engineer's Eye on Animal Navigation

Saturday was International Migratory Bird Day, and shame on us for not having properly recognized it.  According to the Environment for the Americas group, the day exists to educate and empower people to help combat the many threats to healthy bird populations.  You all out there can of course be forgiven if the day passed without your notice. Not so for us, given that we’ve just published Engineering Animals: How Life Works, a book that explains the actual physical principles of animal structure and behavior. Animals as machines, basically.

One the book’s richest sections is on animal navigation, which really is the most fascinating aspect of bird migration. How do they know where to go? And how to do they know when they get there? As the book’s authors Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean explain, we’re just beginning to understand the complexity of these practices:

The past half century has seen a revolution in our understanding of animal navigation brought about by many, many thousands of studies: radar or global positioning system (GPS) tracking observations; experiments that altered the apparent direction of the sun, or the brightness or color of light; experiments in which migrating birds were displaced several hundred or thousand kilometers; experiments in which animals were blindfolded in one or both eyes, or had their sense of smell removed, or were placed in planetariums with altered star patterns, or had magnets attached, or were banded or radio-tagged. . . . It used to be thought that, for example, a migratory bird made use of a single skill, such as navigating via the sun, but our understanding has broadened considerably and with greater understanding comes greater respect for the capabilities of migrant animals: most birds use many different cues, which they prioritize in different ways when these cues conflict.

One of the things that these experiments have shown is that many migrating animals are born with routes hardwired into their brains. “Head southwest for 9 days, then turn due south until you reach a desert, then head east for four days and then south until you run out of gas.” That sort of thing. In one experiment that helped document this hardwiring, a group of migrating European starlings was displaced several hundred kilometers south while en route to their usual wintering groups in northern France. The older birds that had previously made the journey used cues such as the sun’s location in the sky to sense their displacement, adjusted course, and made it to their intended destination. The younger birds, on their first trip, just followed the hardwiring in their brains (“A direction for X days, then B direction for Y days, etc.”) without correcting for the displacement, and ended up in northern Spain. Denny and McFadzean: “Clearly, the novices were just reading the instructions that their genes handed out to them, whereas the more experienced birds were overriding these with learned cues, enabling a more flexible response to changed circumstances.” Most amazing part? Conditioned by this first voyage, the young starlings actually returned to northern Spain in subsequent years, not to the France that their genes intended.

Darker than Blue, from Curtis Mayfield to Paul Gilroy

New this month is a paperback edition of Paul Gilroy’s W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures. Entitled Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, the lectures and book present Gilroy’s call for a revitalization of Black Atlantic studies. He uses a discussion of the fading political voice of African American music, once represented by such outspoken talents as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Curtis Mayfield, as an entrée to a wider examination of the state of black intellectualism in America. Gilroy suggests that black thinkers should open a new dialogue to address the problems arising from an unsustainable consumer culture in which African American cultural output now circulates as generic Americana.

Gilroy, a DJ and music journalist on top of being an academic, uses music to trace a shift in Black Atlantic culture from group consciousness to individualism. From that analysis, he provides a roadmap to the shifting terrain of identity politics in the “Age of Obama,” critiquing the urban chic championed by Jay-Z and 50 Cent, and the commodification of black politicians and statespersons such as Condi Rice as “diplomatic assets.”

The musicians Gilroy highlights from the 1960s and ’70s appealed to him as a young man in the UK by offering “the traveling truths of a people who were now even darker than an Ellisonian shade of blue.” For Gilroy, the music of that era endures:

Extraordinary things can still be heard in the enduring music of that uniquely soulful era. The live recordings made by Aretha, Curtis Mayfield, and Donny Hathaway have proved particularly durable. As they established new aesthetic criteria for African American popular music, they seemed to invite even their most distant listeners into a collective that felt intimate in spite of its attenuated, outernational character. Eager crowds had been dynamic collaborators in those epoch-making performances. Perhaps that surprising possibility should be recalled, now that the art of live recording has shrunk to fit the hyper-real, pseudo-classical niche in which we are told authentic jazz performances still dwell.

Curtis Mayfield’s concert recordings captured the kernel of this magic. After his shamanic January 1972 shows at the Rainbow Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park, an imaginary line linking him to James Brown (then becoming known as the Godfather) constituted one axis of my own nascent, “uk blak” mindset. The contemporary contrast between Kanye West’s ironic appetite for branded finery and 50 Cent’s scarred, muscular, Republican frame prompts us to ask: Where can Mayfield’s dignity and bespectacled seriousness have gone? Not, surely, into the global business enterprise that has been built up so skillfully by brand Jay-Z?

The Anointed Leaders of the Religious Right

This fall we’ll publish The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, an analysis of intellectual authority within evangelicalism by Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson. The authors argue that there is an anti-intellectual populism undergirding evangelical “truth,” and that the movement takes its cues from a handful of enormously influential but only dubiously credentialed authority figures. After a New York Times article and Daily Show appearance recently raised the profile of one of the central figures of The Anointed, we invited Karl Giberson to provide some context. His piece is below.

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The May 4th New York Times introduced readers to David Barton, an amateur historian whose ideas about America being a “Christian Nation” founded by evangelicals are quite foreign to the readers of that publication. Described as a “quirky history buff” and “self-taught historian,” Barton has long been a powerful and influential figure with America’s vast evangelical subculture. For many years he was co-chair of the Texas Republican party and his multimillion dollar media empire—Wallbuilders—churns out a steady supply of materials supporting his key message that America was founded as a Christian nation and needs to return to its roots to recover the favor it once received from God. Barton, who Glenn Beck describes as “an expert in historical and constitutional issues,” is also a “professor” on Beck’s new on-line university. Barton’s formal education consists of a degree in communications from Oral Roberts University.

Barton is a powerful symbol of an invigorated anti-intellectualism that has long flourished within American evangelicalism and is now taking over the Republican party. But, as historian Randall Stephens and I argue in our forthcoming book The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, Barton is far from alone. American evangelicals, Fox News, and increasingly the Republican Party, take their intellectual cues from a roster of remarkably similar populists who head media empires. These leaders, who we dub “The Anointed,” wield an astonishing influence on America’s main streets. But because this influence is felt primarily at the grass roots level—and rarely discussed in the pages of the leading opinion journals—it can seem invisible.

Barton has created a rose-colored “past” that appeals to conservative evangelicals fretting about the trajectory of a nation they believe once belonged to them. If only this Edenic past can be recovered, Barton assures them, we can reverse the nation’s blind stagger toward Gomorrah. Barton’s message is welcomed in churches across America’s heartland, where he frequently appears. The warm and welcome nature of Barton’s message, together with his born-again credentials, are more than a match for the persistent challenges he faces from both the secular academy and from fellow evangelical historians like Mark Noll and George Marsden. By any imaginable academic yardstick Noll, the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at Notre Dame, former professor at the conservative evangelical Wheaton College, and author of the acclaimed America’s God, towers over Barton. If Republican leaders were really serious about understanding the nation’s religious history they would be talking to Noll, not Barton. Noll is as thoroughly evangelical as Barton, but understands history well enough to know that reading his own faith back into the founding fathers is irresponsible. That the religious right prefers Barton over Noll is an alarming testimony to the power of wishful thinking and anti-intellectualism.

Unfortunately Barton shares the Right’s academic stage with discouragingly similar leaders in other fields. In The Anointed, Stephens and I note the degree to which American evangelicalism has created its own set of homegrown academic “experts” who preach comforting messages at odds with generally accepted understandings of the modern world.

So You Want To Study Secularism?

According to a report in yesterday’s New York Times that is making its way around the internet this morning, this fall Pitzer College will become the first institution to create a department of secular studies and offer a major in secularism. Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion, proposed the department as a way of concentrating study on modern society’s shift away from religion as its primary organizational structure. The Times quotes Zuckerman as saying that “There are hundreds of millions of people who are nonreligious. I want to know who they are, what they believe, why they are nonreligious. You have some countries where huge percentages of people—Czechs, Scandinavians—now call themselves atheists. Canada is experiencing a huge wave of secularization. This is happening very rapidly.”  

At HUP over the last handful of years we’ve developed an essential little list of books on this very topic. Consider this our pitch for course adoption.

Our list on secular studies is anchored by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, published in 2007. The book begins with a simply phrased question that captures the spirit of inquiry behind Pitzer’s new endeavor: “What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” More simply asked than answered, of course.

Taylor notes three senses in which modern Western society could be said to have become secular. One applies to public spaces or social spheres, where behavior and interactions were once guided by religious principles but have now been ostensibly emptied of God. As Taylor notes, this sense of secularization is not incompatible with a continued individual belief in God and embrace of religion. So, a second sense he then identifies is that of a falling off of religious practice and belief.

A Secular Age mostly concerns itself with a third sense, which for Taylor consists of “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” To Taylor this entails a fundamental shift in what it means to believe, which occurs when belief itself becomes merely an option. From the Introduction:

So what I want to do is examine our society as secular in this third sense, which I could perhaps encapsulate in this way: the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give it up, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a recognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. There will be many others to whom faith never even seems an eligible possibility. There are certainly millions today of whom this is true.

In Praise of Design, Regional Edition

As publishers, we keep company in various overlapping circles of the book business. One community with which we’ve had a long relationship is the Bookbuilders of Boston organization, which brings together people involved in book publishing and manufacturing throughout New England. Last night the group held its 54th annual New England Book Show, at which we were thrilled to see a number of our books recognized for their excellence in design and production.

In the category of illustrated general trade books, our annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice, and the relaunched Image of the Black in Western Art series were both highlighted for their overall design and production, from jacket to layout:

In the reference category, The Classical Tradition got a nod for its overall design:

 

The following were all recognized as outstanding jackets in the general trade category, including a “best in category” award to our old sheepish pal: