Harvard University Press Blog

Biking for Cabinets in Rhode Island

If you found yourself at a backyard birthday party in North Providence this past Saturday evening, you may have overheard a conversation about bicycling. A handful of Rhode Islanders were describing recent long rides, commiserating over the mistake of overindulgence at the halfway mark. One told of marking the turn with too many boozey beverages, making for a risky ride back. Another recalled pausing in a long pedal for a heavy lunch, after which her partner wanted to get a cabinet, too.

You’d have been forgiven for assuming that the conversation had just taken a strange turn towards office furniture. But, actually, you’d just been gifted with a regionalism. As one of the partiers explained, “cabinet” is Rhode Island speak for “milkshake.” None present had a notion as to why, nor did they really need one, standing in that yard, fenced by knee-high chain link, driveway full of old station wagons, and having just gotten a tour of a home frozen in time, with a completely stocked basement bar seemingly untouched since the ’70s, and a lushly green-carpeted hallway, decked with old garden sprinklers wall-mounted like hunting trophies. Rhode Island’s just weird, no explanation needed.

Just kidding, OF COURSE we want an explanation. That’s what the Dictionary of American Regional English is for:

cabinet n: A milkshake. Chiefly used in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts.

The etymology is actually uncertain, but a woman from Fall River interviewed in 1968 claimed it originated in a drugstore there, named by the pharmacist who concocted it. “The ice cream was kept in those days in a cabinet that was part of the soda-fountain set-up,” reads the DARE entry.

The entry also cites a letter to the Today Show from 1971 that explains that a milk shake in Rhode Island is without ice cream, while a cabinet has ice cream. And a Smithsonian letter from a Rhode Islander in 1982:

In Rhode Island this term more likely refers to a milkshake (using milk, syrup, and ice cream) than a piece of furniture. I grew up five miles from the Massachusetts border. As a child I could order a cabinet in R.I., but had to remember to order a frappe just five minutes to the west.

Because “frappe” is totally normal. Carry on, America.

What Does it Mean to Represent a Race?

Kenneth W. Mack’s Representing the Race is a collective biography of a group of African American civil rights lawyers during the era of segregation. Mack moves away from the standard telling of 20th century American race relations (“stories of protest and accommodation, heroes and villains, assimilation and black separatism, movement building and backlash, progress and retrenchment”) to focus instead on what he calls an “enduring paradox” of race relations:

From their beginnings, Americans imagined that they inhabited a country composed of distinct racial, ethnic, and religious groups that somehow constituted a unified nation—an idea that, for some, is encapsulated in their historic national motto, e pluribus unum. Just as assuredly, since the time of the nation’s founding Americans have imagined that certain minority groups fit uneasily, or perhaps not at all, into the national whole. Among the most prominent of these groups have been African Americans, and what has connected this particular minority group to the larger nation has been its representatives—those who claimed to speak for, stand in for, and advocate for the interests of the larger group.

The usual story of black civil rights lawyers in American history is that these lawyers represented the interests of a unified minority group that wanted to be integrated into the core fabric of the nation—or, as more-recent accounts have described them, perhaps these lawyers failed at their task of representation. But the story was not so simple as either of these accounts would have it. Rather, from their beginnings, black civil rights lawyers were people caught between the needs and desires of the larger, white-dominated culture, and those of their own racial group, and there was no simple way out of that dilemma.

We recently spoke with Mack about the book, and in the video below he describes how the career of Thurgood Marshall, the most famous figure he discusses in Representing the Race, demonstrates the challenging melding of authenticity and exceptionalism still demanded of those said to “represent a race.”

 

Kenneth Mack will discuss Representing the Race at the Harvard Book Store’s Friday Forum this afternoon at 3pm.

When Wal-Mart Went to Mexico

The front page of the April 21st New York Times carried a long investigative report detailing allegations of widespread bribery at Wal-Mart’s Mexican subsidiary. According to documents obtained by the Times, Wal-Mart de Mexico orchestrated a multi-year campaign of bribery to win market dominance, paying off officials in “virtually every corner of the country” in its rush to build stores. After being alerted of the pattern of wrongdoing in 2005, reports the Times, Wal-Mart’s leaders ordered that the internal investigation be shut down. The Times characterizes the entire affair as a prolonged struggle at Wal-Mart’s highest levels, pitting “the company’s much publicized commitment to the highest moral and ethical standards against its relentless pursuit of growth.”

With the company now in full damage control mode and watching its stock price fall, it’s worth reflecting on the origins of Wal-Mart’s expansion into Mexico, currently home to one in five Wal-Mart stores. In the text below, excerpted from her 2009 book To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, Bethany Moreton details the crucial role that the company’s expansion into Mexico played in the U.S. debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). “For a brief but decisive moment in U.S. politics,” she writes, “the key to imagining free trade was Wal-Mart in Mexico.” What follows is an early ’90s story of globalization, market deregulation, and what’s now alleged to be systematic law-breaking, with cameos from the likes of the Clintons, Ross Perot, Al Gore, and Newt Gingrich.

-----

In 1965, Mexico had begun experimenting with export-oriented maquiladoras [manufacturing operations] along its northern border, where some areas enjoyed duty-free status to entice manufacturers. Such efforts, however, did not attract much attention initially, nor were they meant to: Mexican policy from the 1940s to the 1980s remained committed to developing native industry for domestic consumption behind protective tariff walls, just as the United States and Britain had done in the nineteenth century.

Between 1940 and 1980, this strategy produced annual growth rates of over 6 percent and a steady rise in real wages. But the “Mexican Miracle” came at a price, one increasingly met through high-interest loans from American banks. In 1982, the Mexican finance minister was forced to go to Washington, hat in hand: the country could not honor its foreign payment schedule. In return for emergency loans, Mexico submitted to free-market restructuring, cutting social services, privatizing hundreds of state-owned enterprises, and joining the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The buying power of the Mexican minimum wage dropped by almost 70 percent between 1982 and 1991. Industrial wages fell by almost half; per capita basic food consumption dropped 30 percent.

In early 1991, following announcements of negotiations for NAFTA, American investment in Mexico jumped to two and a half times its previous rate. In this context, then, Wal-Mart’s decision to enter Mexico’s retail market represented part of a larger shift underway to realign the post–Cold War global geography from NATO and the Warsaw Pact into competing free-trade areas. President George H. W. Bush negotiated the agreement with the help of the business-heavy Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. A business coalition of more than 500 corporations—“a virtual lobbying Who’s Who”—helped the administration secure Congressional approval for fast-tracking the treaty, or requiring an up-or-down vote without the possibility of amendments. The constitutional division of labor that had often stymied free traders—commercial regulation to Congress, but foreign policy to the executive branch—could thus be short-circuited: It was to be the trade agreement hammered out by President Bush, or no trade agreement at all.

But the old Cold Warrior was not the visionary who could see it through to ratification. That job fell to Arkansan Bill Clinton, whose wife resigned from Wal-Mart’s board to help her husband’s presidential campaign in 1992. Despite his party’s resolution against NAFTA in 1991 and his own ambivalence toward it during the campaign, the new president threw his support to the treaty in 1993. The key for business under the new administration was now to see the trade agreement through a scheduled vote in the House in mid-November. If they lost, and a new round of negotiations opened up, it might be years before they could muster the political will to pass another version, what with the recession and climbing unemployment.

The Business Roundtable swung into action. It organized 2,300 corporations into USA-NAFTA and assigned state captaincies to Roundtable members. The captains—all but four of whom had participated in the treaty negotiations through seats on the Bush-era advisory boards— mobilized unprecedented business unity in campaigning for public opinion through every conceivable media outlet, from op-eds to talking heads. “You may also want to consider involving employees in a company-wide letter-writing campaign,” suggested the Illinois NAFTA Coalition in a July 1993 memo to its members. Procter & Gamble, a major Wal-Mart vendor, promoted the treaty’s potential to double the company’s export market in a quarterly report to its 170,000 stockholders. Wal-Mart made early appearances as a symbol for this export potential. “Here’s a country with 86 million people, trying to grow and needing access to the kind of products we have here,” said a USA-NAFTA council member. “I’ve been told by the leadership of Wal-Mart that they can’t get enough American-made product into their stores they are now building in Mexico.”

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"

The death last week of legendary American musician Levon Helm has his music back on the minds of many. Helm was best known as the drummer and sometime-singer for the seminal rock group The Band, which consisted of four Canadians and Helm, an Arkansas-native and the band’s American anchor. Perhaps thanks to the perspective afforded by being eighty percent expat, The Band forged a quintessentially American sound, most apparent on their first two records, 1968’s Music from Big Pink and 1969’s The Band. The latter featured “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” one of the highlights of The Band’s catalog and its best showcase for Helm’s powerful southern voice. Though a dispute over its authorship eventually led Helm to stop playing the song, it’s arguably the signature performance of his career.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a story of the last days of the American Civil War, told from the perspective of a poor white farmer from Tennessee named Virgil Kane. Though he’s seen the land around him destroyed by Union soldiers, and lost his brother to the conflict, he carries on, living through the “beautiful sadness” of the South that The Band’s Robbie Robertson says inspired the song. 

Like my father before me
I will work the land
And like my brother above me
Who took a rebel stand
He was just 18, proud and brave
But a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can't raise a Kane back up
When he's in defeat

In Mystery Train, his classic work of rock criticism and American cultural analysis, Greil Marcus described the song as being less about the Civil War than about “the way each American carries a version of that event within himself.” That description conjures Robert Penn Warren’s claim that the Civil War is America’s only “felt” history, “history lived in our national imagination.” And it rightly situates “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as an important reflection of popular memory of the Civil War.

More from Marcus’s Mystery Train:

It is hard for me to comprehend how any Northerner, raised on a very different war than Virgil Kane’s, could listen to this song without finding himself changed. You can’t get out from under the singer’s truth—not the whole truth, but his truth—and the little autobiography closes the gap between us. The performance leaves behind a feeling that for all our oppositions, every American still shares this old event; because to this day none of us has escaped its impact, what we share is an ability to respond to a story like this one.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize this as David Blight territory, and that Robert Penn Warren quote above actually opens the Prologue of Blight’s Race and Reunion. His more recent book, American Oracle, picks up the story of civil war memory at the time of the war’s centennial commemoration in the early 1960s, just a handful of years before The Band recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” In American Oracle, written in the run-up to the war’s sesquicentennial, Blight explores how the stories the nation tells itself about the war play a defining role in the country’s self-conception:

 

A Literary History of The Autobiography of Malcolm X

This week the late Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X was quite rightly awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention gives us as clear a portrait of the man as we’re ever likely to have, and in the process sifts through many of the stories and myths that Malcolm X told about himself. Many of those stories are best known through Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malclom X, an absolute classic of American letters that now sees itself superseded as historical document by Marable’s work. In the piece below, excerpted from A New Literary History of America, David Bradley considers the life of The Autobiography as spark of a movement, mainstay of colleges and prisons both, social science, prophecy, and postmodern literature. A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, is available in paperback this spring.

-----

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. The Saturday Evening Post, though it had published an excerpt from the forthcoming Autobiography, eulogized him as “a violent and baffling young demagogue” and wondered “did he really have a major role to play?” Time magazine pronounced him “an unashamed demagogue” whose “gospel was hatred” and “creed was violence.” Doubleday terminated the contract for his autobiography.

Enter Grove Press. And when The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published, enter Eliot Fremont-Smith, in the New York Times, calling it “an eloquent testament.” And enter I. F. Stone, in the New York Review of Books, predicting for it “a permanent place in the literature.” Enter also Truman Nelson, in the Nation, lauding “its dead-level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose.”

Nelson also praised Haley who, he said, provided “the great revelation” in an epilogue, written with Malcolm X’s permission but independent of his control. In fact, the epilogue offered a series of revelations: that the interviews, which took place late at night, when Malcolm was usually exhausted, often seemed more like interrogations or therapy sessions; that when Haley served coffee he purposely provided only paper napkins, so he could later analyze Malcolm X’s doodlings; that he kept two sets of notebooks, one for Malcolm X’s thoughts, one for his own.

The epilogue, more than the narrative, revealed a faceted Malcolm X, who, certain the room was bugged, initiated interviews with, “Testing—one, two, three,” who “went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying,” who cried out in frustration, “We had the best organization the black man’s ever had—niggers ruined it!” It revealed also a subplot, in which Malcolm X, who once called Haley “one of the white man’s tools,” came to trust him “twenty-five per cent,” and finally said simply, “I’ll trust you”—while the middle-class, ex-military Haley, whose Playboy interview suggested a distaste for Malcolm X, confessed, “I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met.”

And the epilogue told the story Malcolm X could not tell: how he “walked out onto the stage, into the applause” . . . and the gunfire; how he was carried to a hospital on a makeshift stretcher, where “surgeons cut through his chest to attempt to massage the heart”; how “the effort was abandoned at 3:30 p.m.”

According to Time magazine he had been, “in life and in death . . . a disaster to the civil rights movement.” Certainly many who’d grown impatient with nonviolence heard in his voice a cadence more compelling that King’s “soul force.” In June of 1966, Stokely Carmichael, a six-year veteran of the nonviolent trenches, survivor of two dozen arrests, punctured the orotund rhetoric of yet another peaceful march with the Malcolm-esque cry, “Black Power!” The civil rights movement, and its rhetoric, would never be the same.

But Malcolm X’s voice was heard beyond the political arena. The day after his death, playwright LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, formed the Black Arts Repertory Theater, the crucible of a Black Arts movement that would influence two generations of black writers. Three years later, at a celebration of Malcolm X’s birth, a group of musicians later known as the Last Poets fused percussive rhythm with politics-and profanity-laced lyrics into a sound that came to be called rap.

Recorded and amplified by The Autobiography, Malcolm X’s voice spoke to black men languishing in prisons in language they could comprehend, inspiring some to their own tough, uncompromising eloquence: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother.

A Nation Among Nations

In his compelling new book, historian Eliga H. Gould argues that the United States at its founding faced a paradox that’s now rarely acknowledged. As Gould explains in Among the Powers of the Earth, the young Union’s desired state of independence could only actually be achieved by claiming—and being granted—full membership in the community of nations. “We think of the American Revolution as the moment when Americans began to make their own history,” Gould notes in the video below. “It actually would be much more accurate to say it’s the moment when we began to make the history that others were prepared to let us make.”

 

 

 

Gould makes the case that the Declaration of Independence and many of the other founding documents from the American Revolutionary period demonstrate that what Americans actually sought was independence under the law of nations, rather than some sort of complete freedom from external obligations. So, even in that moment when a budding nation was determined to free itself from the constraints of colonial rule, the American founders were conscious of the need to conform to what other nations deemed legal.

To Gould, even the United States Constitution should be understood as an attempt to secure international recognition, rather than just a document outlining American liberties and rights. And one of the fascinating implications of Gould’s argument is what this American conformity meant for the spread of what was previously a particularly European law of nations. In the course of staking its independence in the New World, then, the United States also served as a new outpost for and exporter of a distinctly European sense of sovereignty, which had tremendous global and local implications.

It says a lot about the United States as a nation that this early need for approval and membership is largely absent from the stories we tell ourselves about the country’s founding. It’s not surprising, of course, given the still-thriving streak of American exceptionalism that’s always characterized America’s conception of itself.

To Gould, though, Among the Powers of the Earth doesn’t simply force us to reconceive American origin stories. The book should also help to assuage some of the concerns of those made uneasy by the prospect of a world in which the United States is but a member nation, no longer a singular leader, master of its own destiny. “I think it’s comforting to know that the founders faced a very similar set of problems and that even though there were moments when they made missteps, that they also came through it. And certainly the hope is that we too, today, will find our way through it as they did then.”

“Warning: Black People at Leisure”

Andrew W. Kahrl is Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University and author of The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South. By exploring how beaches and waterfronts became sites of racial contest, The Land Was Ours gives us a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of racism and resistance. In the piece below, Kahrl looks to the history of segregated leisure in an effort to contextualize the nationwide discussion of race occasioned by the killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin.

-----

Earlier this month, in the face of outrage over the killing of Trayvon Martin, the conservative columnist John Derbyshire penned a wide-ranging racist screed offered in the guise of “a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids.” In the piece, which eventually led to his dismissal from the National Review, Derbyshire posited that nonblacks planning a trip to a beach or amusement park know to “find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks.” Those objecting to the implication of widely-held and casually blatant racism in Derbyshire’s remarks should look to the history of the urban island park Belle Isle, where we find evidence of white America’s strategic retreat from integrated public leisure spaces. Look also to Twin Lakes, the gated community where Martin was gunned down by a neighborhood watchman, and where we see the kind of space to which many whites retreated. Indeed, the historical forces that led to the tragic death of Martin and those that have steadily re-segregated and privatized America’s leisure spaces are deeply entwined.

It was perhaps fitting that, on the day after Derbyshire’s piece was published, the state of Michigan announced plans to charge entry fees to Belle Isle in order to fund improvements and eventually make the park an attractive place for “corporate outings” and other private events. Once considered one of the nation's finest urban parks, Belle Isle suffered serious budget cuts and deterioration after being mostly abandoned by whites. For, in the summer of 1943, Belle Isle provided the spark that lit one of the nation’s worst race riots. On a hot summer afternoon, an estimated crowd of one-hundred thousand whites and blacks jostled for space to picnic and swim on the island. Fights erupted and soon spilled over onto the mainland. When the dust settled two days later, twenty-five African American and nine white Detroiters were dead. It was neither the first nor the last time that an attempt to draw (or erase) a color line in the sand would descend into deadly violence.

While we tend to think of segregated beaches and public parks as among the most irrational excesses of the Jim Crow era (how absurd, after all, is the notion that one can demarcate a color line across a body of water), racialized leisure space served an important function in the maintenance of white supremacy. In Jim Crow America, working- and middle-class whites came to see public beaches and parks as their own private domain—a publicly funded “country club” for the common (white) folk—and understood desegregation as the theft of “their” beaches and parks at the hands of privileged white public officials. That these public officials were themselves often members of private swim clubs and owners of summer vacation homes, thus experiencing fewer direct effects of desegregation, served only to fuel white backlash against civil rights, and cynicism toward government in general.

But while some whites defended what they saw as their “rights” to segregated leisure by greeting African Americans at the park and on the shore with chains and baseball bats, those who could afford it instead retreated to new, commercial theme parks, safely located in remote outposts of suburbia, accessible only by automobile. Or, they implemented a host of racially laden but ostensibly color-blind measures of exclusion designed to make public beaches “public” in name only. During the years when African Americans stepped up demands for the right to enjoy public beaches, many wealthy shoreline municipalities, especially along the northeastern seaboard, adopted entry fees (with different rates for residents and non-residents), removed public locker rooms, or—in some cases—placed outright bans on non-resident access.

Meanwhile, towns with comparatively large numbers of poor and minorities steadily abandoned public beaches altogether and sold portions of their beachfront holdings to private developers. Other towns targeted by civil rights protests proposed designating certain days on the summer calendar when poor blacks from the inner city, under the auspices of the Fresh Air fund and other charitable organizations, could visit the beach—and, presumably, allowing locals to do as Derbyshire would later advise: make other plans. We see this form of strategic avoidance on display at public beaches and parks across the country today, where on certain holidays and pre-scheduled annual events, large crowds of African Americans and other minorities gather to enjoy a moment in the sun while whites retreat to their backyards and private clubs. Indeed, the irony of the outrage among white liberals over Derbyshire’s “talk” is that so many of them already teach those same lessons simply by virtue of their choices of where (and when) to take their children for pleasure and amusement each summer.

Forward Into Things That No One's Ever Heard Before

For years Robin D. G. Kelley has been one of the most well respected scholars of American History, especially within the interdisciplinary circles of American Studies. The publication in 2009 of his wonderful biography of Thelonious Monk helped to propel Kelley’s work to a broad audience outside of the academy, and we’re thrilled to have worked with him on a new book that builds on that study. In the excerpt below, and in the accompanying video, Kelley explains the meditation on modernity that he presents in Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, and how his work helps us to reconsider the origins of jazz itself.

-----

By exploring the work, conversations, collaborations, and tensions between both African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization, I examine how modern Africa figured in reshaping jazz during the 1950s and early 1960s, how modern jazz figured in the formation of a modern African identity, and how various musical convergences and crossings shaped the political and cultural landscape on both continents. This book is not about the African roots of jazz, nor does it ask how American jazz musicians supported African liberation or “imagined” Africa. Rather, it is about transnational encounters between musicians, or what the ethnomusicologist Jason Stanyek calls “intercultural collaboration,” and encounters between musicians and particular locations (such as Lagos, Chicago, New York, or Cape Town). In other words, it hopes to explain how encounters with specific places, people, movements, cultures, provided fertile ground for new music and musical practices.

As a nod to the great critic and poet A. B. Spellman, whose Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966) serves as a model for this book, I focus on four artists and the various groups they led during the age of African decolonization (roughly 1954–1963). Two of these artists, pianist Randy Weston and bassist and oudist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, hail from the United States (or, more precisely, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn); drummer Guy Warren is Ghanaian; and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin is South African. Each of these artists was propelled by the upheavals of the 1950s to seek new musical forms, new collaborations, new fusions across time and space. They shared neither a common agenda nor a common culture, though they recognized and often embraced cultural commonalities, “jazz” being one. Nor did they always succeed. On the contrary, they occasionally clashed with fellow artists, or bumped up against prevailing assumptions, the intransigence of the market, an oppressive state that viewed their music as a threat to order, or consumers whose own stereotypes made them incapable of hearing and appreciating the work.

Yet they all shared a vision of jazz as a path to the future, a vehicle for both Africans and African Americans to articulate and realize their own distinctive modernity while critiquing its Western variant. And, from their vantage point, standing at what appeared to be the precipice of freedom for Africa and black America, the continent represented a beacon of modernity blazing a new path for the rest of the world, but one tempered by deeply spiritual, antimaterialist values. Indeed, I suggest that African American musicians were seeking new spiritual and ideological alternatives to what they saw as a declining West that led them to a deeper exploration of African music and culture. Likewise, African musicians who were drawn to jazz as a particular idiomatic expression of black modernity also saw the need to infuse it with the music of their homeland. Echoing the late poet Aimé Césaire, in the atomic age, when colonialism and the Holocaust left the West spiritually wanting, Africa represented both an ancient, pristine past possessing a higher spiritual order and a modernizing force able to maintain its humanity precisely because it presumably would not relinquish the best elements of its traditional values. This sort of Janus-faced modernism is key to understanding the nexus of jazz and Africa in the age of decolonization. As Veit Erlmann warns, we have to resist the easy binary of modernity and tradition, especially when the subject is music. “Modernity and tradition,” he writes, “are not only the two most significant historical fictions here but also the tropes whose role in the Western discourse about itself and the others is reflected and configured in the very grammar of musical performance itself.”

 

The Short American Century

Andrew J. Bacevich, who’s been described as “the single most respected radical critic of U.S. foreign policy,” is the editor of a new collection of essays examining the period of American global preeminence that followed World War II. The collection, which features contributions from a number of leading historians, calls into question the still-common notion that the United States functioned as a benevolent leader, exporting rights and policing conflict. The nature of its leadership aside, in his own contributions to the book Bacevich passionately argues that the era of American hegemony is over. In the brief excerpt and video posted below, he explains the motivation behind The Short American Century: A Postmortem.

-----

The argument here is not to invert the American Century, fingering the United States with responsibility for every recurrence of war, famine, pestilence, and persecution that crops up on our deeply troubled planet. Nor is the argument that the United States, no longer the “almighty superpower” of yore, has entered a period of irreversible “decline,” pointing ineluctably to retreat, withdrawal, passivity, and irrelevance. Rather, the argument, amply sustained by the essays collected in this volume, is this: To further indulge old illusions of the United States presiding over and directing the course of history will not only impede the ability of Americans to understand the world and themselves but may well pose a positive danger to both. Faced with a reality that includes, within the last decade alone,

• an inability to anticipate, whether the events of 9/11, the consequences of invading Iraq, or revolutionary upheaval in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world;  
• an inability to control, with wars begun in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, along with various and sundry financial scandals, economic crises, and natural disasters, exposing the limits of American influence, power, and perspicacity; 
• an inability to afford, as manifested by a badly overstretched military, trillion dollar annual deficits, increasingly unaffordable entitlement programs, and rapidly escalating foreign debt; 
• an inability to respond, demonstrated by the dysfunction pervading the American political system, especially at the national level, whether in Congress, at senior levels of the executive branch, or in the bureaucracy; and 
• an inability to comprehend what God intends or the human heart desires, with little to indicate that the wonders of the information age, however dazzling, the impact of globalization, however far-reaching, or the forces of corporate capitalism, however relentless, will provide answers to such elusive questions,

Americans today would do well to temper any claims or expectations of completing the world’s redemption. In light of such sobering facts, which Americans ignore at their peril, it no longer makes sense to pretend that the United States is promoting a special message in pursuit of a special mission. Like every other country that confronts circumstances of vast complexity and pervasive uncertainty, the United States is merely attempting to cope. Prudence and common sense should oblige Americans to admit as much.

[...]

The insistence that the American Century perdures—that it does convey truths of ongoing relevance—goes beyond nostalgia to signify something akin to a collective flight from reality. To insist that the perpetuation of the American Century (along with its corollary American Exceptionalism) offers a template for national policy is to indulge in escapism, inviting Americans to enter an alternative universe of their own invention.

Escapism makes for good box office but bad politics. Only by jettisoning the American Century and the illusions to which it gives rise will the self-knowledge and self-understanding that Americans urgently require become a possibility. Whether Americans will grasp the opportunity that beckons is another matter.

 

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.