Andrew Sullivan Cites Jefferson

One of famous blogger Andrew Sullivan's email correspondents emailed him quoting what he referred to as "Jefferson's 1781 Essay 'Religion in Virginia'." Sullivan posts about it. I can't pass up a prominent Jefferson reference, of course. What the emailer calls "Religion in Virginia" is actually an excerpt from Query XVII of Notes on the State of Virginia, which is available online here.

Forgotten Roanoke

A new page on the excellent Forgotten Roanoke site focuses on the Old Southwest section of Roanoke; and more specifically on a lynching that took place there on September 21 1883. The page is absolutely top notch, with original photographs. I envy the work this guy is doing; I really do.

Colonial Williamsburg suffering?

This article from the Virginian-Pilot discusses the approximately 40% drop in visitors to Colonial Williamsburg since the 1980s. Annual visitors have dropped from 1.2 million to 700,000. Hotel occupancy rates are the lowest in Virginia. The most depressing point in the article:

"[Decreases in attendance at living history museums has] alarmed museum administrators, who have worried about whether their facilities offer enough hands-on activities and whether their interpretations register with today’s multicultural audience.

“As far as living history sites go, is it because people are having a harder time connecting with what living history sites do?” asked Lynne Belluscio, president of the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums. “I think that’s what we’re seeing -– people asking themselves, 'Is that my history, And can I make that connection?’ It’s harder to make those connections.” "

Wow-- so people are failing to visit one of the birthplaces of America because they think it is not "their history?" That sounds like real trouble to me.

Woodrow Wilson

Earlier this month Congressman Bob Goodlatte introduced legislation to create a Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library. Here is a link to the legislation. Obviously I think that Virginia's last president needs a fully fledged Presidential Library. There is currently an entity called the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library; I suppose that this is associated with the birthplace in Staunton, and is not a full-blown Presidential library in the Johnson-Nixon-Reagan sense of the term.

Wilson is an interesting and critical character in twentieth century Americal History; he led the country into the Great War over the objections of a lot of Americans and ushered in the "American Century." He is prominently mentioned in two of the books I mentioned in my last post. In "The Great Influenza," Barry says that ""America had never been and would never be so informed by the will of its chief executive, not during the Civil War with its suspension of habeas corpus, not during Korea and the McCarthy period, not even during World Wat II. He would turn the nation into a weapon, an explosive device."

In Gore Vidal's "Smithsonian Institution," the time-travelling protagonist wants to stop World War II in 1939. With the assistance of Grover Cleaveland, he travels back to a Sunday morning in 1911 and talks Wilson out of entering the New Jersey Governors' race. World War I, and the European components of WWII, are instantly wiped from history.

Maybe the fate of the century was in the hands of a Virginian.

Recent Books I Have Read

Roscoe by William Kennedy. The most recent Albany book (the same series as Ironweed); set between the Great War and WWII. Excellent. Kennedy is Gore Vidal's only rival in American historical fiction.

The Great Influenza (The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History) by John M. Barry. Worth reading for its history of American Public Health (and in particular for its account of the founding of Johns Hopkins medical school); but a failure in its attempt to fit the frantic search for the cause of a health disaster into the conventional form of a thriller.

Chronicles by Bob Dylan. Surprisingly good, particularly if Dylan did not use a ghostwriter. The book is a sort of autobiography by sample; it leaps around from Dylan as a college dropout in Dinkytown, MN, to the New Orleans recording of "Oh, Mercy," and around his early months in New York, meeting the characters on the folk scene. I hope he keeps writing these to fill in the gaps.

The World is Flat by Tom Friedman. Worth reading, but preachy and about 200 pages too long. Friedman distills a lesson from a bunch of facts, then spends a few pages beating you over the head with the lesson, then ties that lesson in with the previous lessons he taught you in the previous chapters. He also takes the trouble to tie in his lessons with the experiences of his friends, tying those lessons to all of the previous lessons, etc. Again, the lessons are worth knowing-- the world and its commercial relationships are changing at breakneck speed-- but the overt preachiness of the book is off-putting.

Hamilton's Blessing (The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt) by John Steele Gordon. I had read about this before and was glad I got around to reading it. Published in 1997, it is one of the early examples of the "long subtitle-- short book-- founding father" genre that has become very popular these days. The book starts with a biographical sketch of Alexander Hamilton and with a history of Great Britain's use of defecit financing to finance its empire. It follows up with a survey of Federal Budgets of the last 200 years; points out that the incentives faced by politicians do not encourage responsible budgeting, and adds that the government does not use double entry bookkeeping, which is a scandal and a travesty. It has a nicely done description of the federal tax code as a byzantine mass of Keynesian incentives, and questions the use of tax policy for anything more than raising revenue.

The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials Book I) by Phillip Pullman. I picked this up after reading this article in the New Yorker. Other than Harry Potter and a re-reading of the Lord of the Rings I had not read any fantasy or science-fiction since I was 15. I thought the book was well-imagined, well-written, and original (if puzzling at times). However, now that I have read the sequel (which is excellent on every level), I like it even better.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. The book that started the trend of statistical social analysis mixed with neat-o societal obsevations. (Without this book there would have been no Freakonomics, for example). Very enjoyable while you read it, although not a whole lot of it sticks with you. My favorite part was the chapter dealing with Sesame Street and the studies of how children learn. There is also a great Bernard Goetz chapter. Gladwell just started blogging this year. Here is his take on the abortion crime "link" found in Freakonomics.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. It was a bad idea to read this right after reading the Tipping Point; I think I overdosed on "neat-o." Surowiecki is the business writer for the New Yorker; he used to have the same position for Slate, and he is one of the best at what he does. His book is "The Tipping Point" with more statistics and economics. The point to take home from his book is that futures markets (like this one) are the best way to take advantage of collective wisdom. There is a particulaly good look at the failure of the Space Shuttle Columbia's "Debris Assessment Team." In spite of the fact that a couple of the committee members saw the disaster coming, they were bullied out of saying anything by the small group dynamics. Any MBA type should read this right away.

The Smithsonian Instutituion by Gore Vidal. A lesser book, certainly, by the best essayist and historical novelist alive, but worth reading if you like his themes. In 1939 a boy genius is called to the Smithsonian, which is filled with living manequins capable of time travel. The mechanics, of course, are less important than the issues raised by the great men; there is a particularly interesting moment when Jefferson asks Lincoln why he resorted to butchery to stop citizens from exercising their right to rebellion.

The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials Book II) by Phillip Pullman. A real gem-- masterfully written. I actually stopped and read the first chapter (an account of a small boy watching his mother descend into mental illness) twice. The first Dark Materials book was noteworthy; this one is a masterpiece.

Willisville, Virginia

This is an article from Sunday's Washington Post about Willisville, a hamlet in Loudon County, that has no water or sewer lines. If I had been a member of the Loudon County Board of Supervisors at any point after 1950, I think I would have to consider myself a failure.

Better for All the World

This is a review of a new book called "Better for All the World," about the eugenics movement. Virginia was a leader in the movement, and the opening chapter of the book takes place in Lynchburg at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, which is now known as the Central Virginia Training Center. The forced sterilization of a retarded woman at the Virginia Colony led to the United States Supreme Court's approval of the practice in the famous case of Buck v. Bell. The book's title is a quote from the opinion, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can precent those who are manifestly unfit for continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Thomas Downing

This review of "The Big Oyster," a book about oysters and New York City, briefly mentions Thomas Downing, a free black Virginian who opened a famous oyster house on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street in 1825. The review states that "The oyster, that great class leveler, made Downing an admired, influential and wealthy man. His curious history, and his elevated status in 19th-century New York, make him easily the most intriguing figure in the city's oyster history." Here's a link with more information about Downing's Oyster House. Downing's son used the cellar as a stop on the underground railroad.