Harvard University Press Blog

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.”

A Whoopensocker of a Deal

Gather round, friends, and hear the story of the Dictionary of American Regional English, the new fifth volume of which finally completes the journey from A to Izzard:

 

Now have some fun! Take an interactive quiz offered up by the Wall Street Journal, one by ABC World News, and another by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has hosted the DARE project for decades. Read a list of DARE words with their definitions from the New York Times. Dive into more of the project’s archives by listening to audio recordings of speakers throughout the country, or listen to a composite of a dozen speakers all telling one story.

Had enough? Not hardly, we’re sure. DARE’s been called “one of the glories of contemporary American scholarship,” a “work to consult, and a work to savor,” one that’s “endlessly rewarding to dip into,” so much so that you’ll have a hard time pulling yourself out. But, more than just a good time, DARE is a window on a country, what the Times calls “an invaluable guide to the way Americans not only speak but also live.”

It’s even been said that DARE is a national treasure, and though we blush we’ll agree. And, in order to share DARE’s riches, we’re happy to make all five volumes available at a special discounted price for the entire month of March. To help spread gems like flannel cake, buck buck, packsaddle worm, pungle, scramble dinner, and goozle? It’s the least we could do.

UPDATE: Chief Editor Joan Houston Hall discussed DARE on the Diane Rehm Show on March 7th. Listen online here. 

Aesthetic Education, for the Ethical Impulse

As we were preparing to publish Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, a memo from the book’s editor served for many of us as an introduction to this important new work. Revisiting that memo now, it’s a wonder that its movie-trailer quality had previously escaped our notice:

In a world where there are so many forces conspiring to shatter any person’s sense of having a self, the deconstruction that Spivak once championed is problem, not solution. The solution lies right where great theorists who dominated the field twenty years ago denied it lay, in teaching literature as a means of causing people to realize that they have souls.

It’s not often that we’re able to imagine our memos in voiceover, but that bit conjures a dark and dramatic film, the epic story of the last great hope for a global dystopia.

We shouldn’t make light, of course, for the world described in that memo is our own, and its depredations have inspired a radical reorientation in Gayatri Spivak’s thinking. This book, presenting essays from throughout her career in newly revised form, conveys Spivak’s renewed sense of the importance of teaching literature as “training for the ethical impulse.” As the excerpted memo above indicates, globalization now ensures that our lives are characterized by the uncertainty that Jacques Derrida, Spivak, her teacher Paul de Man, and other post-structuralists once upended the study of literature to help us see. In the twenty-first century, encountering the limits of theory, Spivak now asks: “How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living?”

This book is an attempt at such reconciliation. As the conditions of the world have changed, Spivak has over the last two decades increasingly recognized the critical importance of training in the humanities. With our increasing technological interconnections leading paradoxically to our increasing physical and emotional isolation, Spivak argues, literature and the humanities can help citizens of the world retain a sense of one another as humans. While recognizing the ways in which technology conspires against us, though, she is emphatically not a technophobe. Rather, she holds that in order to reap the benefits of new technologies we must simultaneously reimmerse ourselves in the practice of aesthetic education as developed in 18th and 19th century Europe.

We recently spoke with Spivak about An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

 

"Can you have work and love in a damaged world?"

The duo behind the Thinking Aloud video archive recently interviewed George Kateb about the possibilities of living a good life in our damaged world. Kateb, one of the most respected and influential political theorists of the past several decades, is the author, most recently, of Human Dignity, a secular defense of a concept that has received little true scrutiny.

We encourage you to watch the full video of his interview, available at The Stone. Here, though, is a bit of what Kateb had to say about how to live:

The point is to live one’s life, whether or not you think the world is damaged. To live a life. But, never, never to think that you can lead a good life. Never, never to think that you can lead the good life.

I think of two things that help to define a tolerable life that people need and are right to need and want. And they are the two that Freud comes up with: work and love.

Can you have work and love in a damaged world? Yes, you can, but not with an easy conscience. Why not an easy conscience? Because it’s never justified. There’s always too much damage in the world for you to think that the world exists for your work and your love.

We are oblivious, and can’t help but be to some extent oblivious. We would die from the impact of true knowledge of the amount of suffering existing just around us at any given moment in time. This is a lesson taught powerfully by George Eliot in Middlemarch. We’d die if we could hear the heartbeat of a squirrel. We would die from the roar at the other end of silence.

So how does one live against a backdrop of nothingness? What does one do about the pathologies that seem to make life less worth living, rather than more worth living?

Once you’re determined to do something, the obligation is to do your best. Should you assume an obligation to do something? I think one should. It’s not the same thing for everybody, though. But, to sort of struggle against pathology on the one hand, and the temptation of destructive nihilism, on the other hand, it’s enough to keep you going… fill up a life.

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.  

An Interview with Schomburg Center Director Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Late last year Khalil Gibran Muhammad was selected as the new Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Muhammad is also the author of The Condemnation of Blackness, a widely praised study of how the idea (rather than the reality) of black criminality has shaped modern urban America. His tenure at the Schomburg begins this summer, and Muhammad discussed his goals in a recent conversation with Tavis Smiley that you can watch below.

As Muhammad makes clear in the interview, there are definite challenges involved in taking over this storied center for documenting the experiences of peoples of African descent at this moment when it’s often suggested that we’ve reached some post-racial plateau. From the interview transcript:

I have serious concerns about a level of anti-intellectualism in this country and a kind of post-racial zeitgeist that both work against the interests of an institution dedicated to Black history in culture.

So on one hand, a lot of people read less and care less about the minutia of the past or really to appreciate learning the details of one’s culture or one’s society. On another hand, the notion of post-racialism finds us repeatedly asking every February is Black History Month necessary any longer.

So the idea that somehow we could arrive at a point in America’s history where we don’t actually interrogate the experiences of races in this country through the lens of both the African American experience and the diasporic experience of people of African ancestry is as ridiculous as no longer finding the Revolutionary period important to understanding what this country is about.

So my commitment is to making sure that the young people, the 5 to 15-year-olds, have a place at the Schomburg because I see them as the people that I need to invest in and to encourage stakeholders for the future of the institution.

In their conversation Smiley and Muhammad also discussed how the beating of Rodney King and the trial of O.J. Simpson drew Muhammad to the subject of history as a college student; the legacy he carries as the great-grandson of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad; and what he brings to the Schomburg as its first Director to come straight from academia. It’s a lively conversation with a young historian whose eye to the future promises to turn the Schomburg Center into an even more exciting and valuable resource.

The interview begins after a brief ad:

Watch the full episode. See more Tavis Smiley.

 

 

Keynes and Hayek, Economists and Battle Rappers

What’s the threshold for “internet sensation” these days? Surely 400,000 views in less than a week makes the grade. So, meet your latest internet sensation: “Fight of the Century,” an epic rap battle staged between actors portraying the economists John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Take a look:

 

Pretty impressive production, and also not a bad primer on some of the differences between two prominent economic schools of thought. It’s clear from the video that its producers’ sympathies lie with Hayek. In the boxing match between the two men, Keynes is nearly knocked out, barely struggles to his feet, and yet, in a surprise for both combatants, is ruled the winner by the judge. The boxing match serves ostensibly to illustrate the verbal combat in the video’s other thread, which also ends with Keynes being embraced by officials (while Hayek is championed by the people).

Be careful with taking too many lessons from this video. There’s more than a little manipulation going on here. Keynes cast as an unfairly-crowned champion? In a context meant to resemble the United States in 2011? That’s gotta make you chuckle. You know who else is chuckling? Milton Friedman.

Sure, the economic collapse led to the development of some renewed appreciation for Keynes. But a glimpse at the tone of the ongoing budget discussions should give the lie to any notion of the triumph of Keynesianism. In 2010 we published a book called The Return to Keynes, which documented the dramatic rebirth of Keynes’ thought as a guiding force for the recovery. And then, not a year later, someone at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting saw the book in our booth and cracked that, with hindsight, it should’ve been called The BRIEF Return to Keynes.

Teaching the Civil War to Young People

This past fall we published Peter H. Wood’s Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War. The book is a masterpiece of historical detective work, a meditative parsing of the Homer painting with which it shares its title. Near Andersonville is a rarely studied portrait that, at first glance, may not strike viewers as being among Homer’s strongest works. It’s also largely unfamiliar; it was painted in 1866, but as Wood explained in a post here last fall, it was forgotten and mostly unknown until its discovery in a New Jersey attic in the early 1960s.

What Wood does in the book is create a life for the woman at the portrait’s center. He also uses the clues in the painting—the woman’s clothes, the items around her, the Union soldiers being marched to the Andersonville prison camp over her shoulder—to persuade us that Homer himself had a deep empathy for Africans Americans at that transitional moment in history. Wood’s book is a rich and surprising study with much to offer to anyone thinking about the Civil War.

But how best to share that information with young people? Wood’s book is accessible and certainly jargon-free, but it’s also a brisk and scholarly piece of art history, the brevity of which requires assuming familiarity with much of the context.  Wood’s analysis shows Homer’s portrait to be a rich resource for teaching the Civil War to young students, but how do you cut right to the core?

If you’re the Newark Museum, home to Near Andersonville, you turn the painting into “a living portrait.” In collaboration with an actor named Tia James, the museum produced the video below as a component of its “Civil War @ 150” curriculum, a teaching resource recognizing the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.  It’s a pretty creative teaching tool, and along with Wood’s book it helps turn a long-forgotten and still easily overlooked portrait into a really useful aid for understanding the experiences of enslaved African Americans, a necessity in any attempt to understand the American Civil War. Take a look:

 

Peter Wood was recently a guest on the Studio 360 radio program. He discussed the work that illustrators like Winslow Homer did in documenting the Civil War, and why, in those early days of photography, a painter could still do things that a photographer could not. You can listen to that conversation and see some accompanying paintings and photographs here.

Mark McGurl Awarded 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

We’re excited to share the news that UCLA English Professor Mark McGurl has been awarded the 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for his 2009 HUP book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. The $30,000 award—the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism—is administered for the Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Past winners of the award include Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney, and Seth Lerer.

“I am truly honored by this award and delighted by the irony that it is made in the name of a wonderful writer, Truman Capote, who contradicts most of the generalizations about postwar American fiction made in my book,” McGurl said. “I’m proud to think that I have helped move the conversation about creative writing and the university forward a few steps and shed new light on recent literary history, but humbled by this reminder that contemporary literature is a much larger and richer enterprise than any one book or critic could grasp.”

Many critics have strong opinions about the general effects of the now-ubiquitous creative writing programs that McGurl studied. They’re often accused of having ushered in a formulaic approach and standard tone which detractors suggest now dominate and degrade American fiction. McGurl doesn’t hold that view himself, but wrote The Program Era because he recognized the lack of an objective study of the effects of their prominence:

“It is only a small exaggeration to say that the rise of the creative-writing program has been entirely ignored in interpretive studies of postwar literature,” McGurl wrote. “Discussion of the writer’s relation to the university has instead largely been confined to the domain of literary journalism and to the question of whether the rise of the writing program has been good or bad for American writing.”

Rather than a mere history of these programs, then, The Program Era became a major study of American fiction. Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, observed, “McGurl’s book is not a history of creative-writing programs. It’s a history of twentieth-century fiction, in which the work of American writers from Thomas Wolfe to Bharati Mukherjee is read as reflections of, and reflections on, the educational system through which so many writers now pass.”

In the video below, produced by UCLA, McGurl discusses the book and outlines his take on American fiction in the era of the creative writing program.

 

Marie Antoinette and the Machines

Not so long ago, a short video of a truly uncanny dulcimer-playing wind-up automaton made for Marie Antoinette in 1784 appeared online. The queen was no stranger to extravagance, we know, but why this machine, this wonderful human-like machine, which must have taxed the greatest artisans and mechanics of her time? What was its appeal? We asked Minsoo Kang, author of the newly published Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Watch the video below, and then scroll down for Minsoo Kang’s response.

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This video shows a demonstration of a beautiful dulcimer-playing automaton that was made by Peter Kintzing and David Roentgen in 1784, which was presented to Queen Marie Antoinette in the following year and purchased by her for the French Academy of Sciences. The object was not a simple doll with a musical device inside it, but a fully articulate construct that actually played a miniature dulcimer by striking its metal strings with tiny hammers. The wondrous automaton was one of many such intricately and exquisitely designed machines that mimicked living creatures during what I have designated as the period of the European “automaton craze” which began in 1738-39 with the appearance of works of Vaucanson and ended at the closing of the century with the performances of the chess-playing Turk of Wolfgang von Kempelen, which was a false automaton.

My book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination looks at how intellectuals have utilized the self-moving, life-imitating machine as a symbol and a conceptual object from the time of ancient civilizations to the twentieth century. I look at the Enlightenment—when various notions of the human-being-as-machine and the machine-as-representation-of-the-human became ubiquitous in Western discourse—as the crucial period in the history of the automaton idea. For almost a century before the automaton craze, philosophers, scientists, and writers described the universe, the state, and the human body as machines, contributing to what the historian E. J. Dijksterhuis famously called the mechanization of the world picture. When later mechanics began to build and display actual automata with astoundingly complex mechanisms, they were seen as beautiful, wondrous, and rational representations of the entire worldview of the Enlightenment. It is for this reason that the automata were a success not just with everyday people who came to gape in awe at the wondrous machines but with intellectuals as well, as such luminaries as Voltaire, Diderot, La Mettrie, and Mercier commented on the objects as things eminently worthy of study (as reflected in the articles under “automaton” and “android” in the eighteenth-century Encylopédie).