Thomas Isern > Recent Status Updates

Commencing serious reading of this work while lodging in the heart of the Chickasaw Nation, at our favorite hideout in southern Oklahoma. This is serious summer reading.

My early-Sunday-morning devotion this week has been to calculate the size the the field described by Maxi'diwiac. See - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W...

Rereading Clark's short history with my students this semester. Will post a running commentary here, for my own reference as well as theirs.

"You would think that by then I would have developed some confidence in writing a new story, but I hadn't, and never would. To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn't matter that something you've done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you."

"Why does someone whose interest is to write about real people and real places choose certain people, certain places? For nonfiction projects, ideas are everywhere. They just go by in a ceaseless stream."

Why does someone whose interest is to write about real people and real places choose certain people, certain places? For nonfiction projects, ideas are everywhere. They just go by in a ceaseless stream.

Rich ambivalence in Perett's treatment of the rise of Jan Hus. On p. 36 Hus decries his clerical antagonists as "enemies of the Scriptures."

Liking the scholarly set-up in the early chapters, accessible to non-specialists. A clear revisionist intent, discerning and soberly delineated: "Judging by other standards, the fifteenth century was brimming with religious vitality, even if, like all other transformational periods, its narrative history is rather messy around the edges" (13).

I am struck by White's account of the 1920 Republican convention - the story of how he warned his fellow delegates that to nominate Harding would bring disgrace on the party, but eventually, whether from weakness or amiability, he caved, and gave his vote to the Harding. A quarter-century later the pangs of regret still tortured him. He should have stood for what he knew was right.

“Legislation in such a society could not be the transcending of the different interests but the reconciling of them. Despite Madison’s lingering hope, the public good could not be an entity distinct from its parts; it was rather ‘the general combined interest of all the state put together, as it were, upon an average.’”

“It was an imposing conception--a kinetic theory of politics--such a crumbling of political and social interests, such an atomization of authority, such a parceling of power, . . . creating such a multiplicity and a scattering of designs and passions, so many checks, that no combination of parts could hold, no group of evil interests long cohere.”

“In America a constitution had become, as Madison pointed out, a charter of power granted by liberty rather than, as in Europe, a charter of liberty granted by power.”

“The Constitution had become the climax of a great revolution.”

“In a crucial sense the Antifederalists had lost the struggle over the Constitution when the New Jersey plan, embodying the essential character of the Articles of Confederation, was rejected in the Philadelphia Convention in favor of a national republic stemming mostly from and operating on individuals.”

“Relocating sovereignty in the people by making them ‘the fountain of all power’ seemed to make sense of the entire system.”

“From the moment, often at the very beginning of the Revolution, that various Americans realized that their separate states were no to be homogeneous units, they sought to adjust their thoughts and their institutions to the diversity.”

“America was actually approaching the point where ability, education, and wealth were becoming liabilities, not assets, in the attaining of public office.”

"Throughout all the states spokesmen for 'the poor and middling orders' were directly challenging the eighteenth-century assumption that social authority was a necessary prerequisite to the wielding of political power. . . . 'A democratic government like ours,' said John Smilie of Pennsylvania . . . 'admits of no superiority. A virtuous man, be his situation what it may, is respectable.'"

"Most American leaders . . . were not opposed to the idea of social movement, for mobility, however one may have decried its abuses, lay at the heart of republicanism. . . . Republicanism represented equality of opportunity and careers open to talent."

"By the 1780's many had come to believe that the principle of separation of powers was 'the basis of all free governments' . . . one, in Jefferson's words, 'in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.'"

"The most obvious republican instrument for eliminating these prejudices and inculcating virtue in a people was education."

"The American people apparently did not possess and were unwilling to acquire the moral and social character necessary to sustain republican governments."

"The crisis was therefore of the most profound sort, involving no limited political or economic problems but the success of the republican experiment itself. . . . Viewing the state as analogous to the human body, Americans saw their country stricken by a serious illness. The 1780s seemed to mark the point in life of the young nation where a decisive change had to occur, leading either to recovery or death."

"The people, it seemed, were as capable of despotism as any prince; public liberty was no guarantee after all of private liberty."

"An excess of power in the people was leading not simply to licentiousness but to a new kind of tyranny, not by the traditional rulers, but by the people themselves--what John Adams in 1776 had called a theoretical contradiction, a democratic despotism."

"The use of binding instructions and the growing sense that the representative was merely a limited agent or spokesman for the local interests of his constituents in the decade after Independence ate away the independent authority of the representative and distorted, even destroyed, the traditional character of the representation."

"If sovereignty had to reside somewhere in the state--and the best political science of the eighteenth century said it did--then many Americans concluded that it must reside only in the people-at-large."

"American liberty seemed in fact to have made revolution perpetual and civil disorder legitimate. All the developments of the period pointed to this conclusion."