By: Aviva LeShaw,
on 8/11/2016
In a poignant post to his Facebook page on 8 July, police officer Montrell Jackson offered a “hug” and “prayer” to those he met as he patrolled the streets of his native Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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By: ChloeF,
on 11/19/2014
Autumn is here again – in England, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, in the US also the season of Thanksgiving. On the fourth Thursday in November, schoolchildren across the country will stage pageants, some playing black-suited Puritans, others Native Americans bedecked with feathers. By tradition, Barack Obama will ‘pardon’ a turkey, but 46 million others will be eaten in a feast complete with corncobs and pumpkin pie. The holiday has a long history: Lincoln fixed the date (amended by Roosevelt in 1941), and Washington made it a national event. Its origins, of course, lay in the Pilgrim Fathers’ first harvest of 1621.
Who now remembers who these intrepid migrants were – not the early ‘founding fathers’ they became, but who they were when they left? The pageant pilgrims are undifferentiated. Who knows the name of Christopher Martin, a merchant from Billericay near Chelmsford in Essex? He took his whole family on the Mayflower, most of whom, including Martin himself, perished in New Plymouth’s first winter. They died Essex folk in a strange land: there was nothing ‘American’ about them. And as for Thanksgiving, well that habit came from the harvest festivals and religious observances of Protestant England. Even pumpkin pie was an English dish, exported then forgotten on the eastern side of the Atlantic.
Towns like Billericay, Chelmsford and Colchester were crucial to American colonization: ordinary places that produced extraordinary people. The trickle of migrants in the 1620s, in the next decade became a flood, leading to some remarkable transformations. In 1630 Francis Wainwright was drawing ale and clearing pots in a Chelmsford inn when his master, Alexander Knight, decided to emigrate to Massachusetts. It was an age of austerity, of bad harvests and depression in the cloth industry. Plus those who wanted the Protestant Reformation to go further – Puritans – feared that under Charles I it was slipping backwards. Many thought they would try their luck elsewhere until England’s fortunes were restored, perhaps even that by building a ‘new’ England they could help with this restoration. Wainwright, aged about fourteen, went with Knight, and so entered a world of hardship and danger and wonder.
One May dawn, seven years later, Wainwright was standing by the Mystic River in Connecticut, one of seventy troops waiting to shoot at approaching Pequot warriors. According to an observer, the Englishmen ‘being bereaved of pity, fell upon the work without compassion’, and by dusk 400 Indians lay dead in their ruined encampment. The innkeeper’s apprentice had fired until his ammunition was exhausted, then used his musket as a club. One participant celebrated the victory, remarking that English guns had been so fearsome, it was ‘as though the finger of God had touched both match and flint’. Another rejoiced that providence had made a ‘fiery oven’ of the Pequots’ fort. Wainwright took two native heads home as souvenirs. Unlike many migrants, he stayed in America, proud to be a New Englander, English by birth but made different by experience. He lived a long life in commerce, through many fears and alarms, and died at Salem in 1692 during the white heat of the witch-trials.
The story poses hard historical questions. What is identity, and how does it change? Thanksgiving pageants turn Englishmen into Americans as if by magic; but the reality was more gradual and nuanced. Recently much scholarly energy has been poured into understanding past emotions. We may think our emotions are private, but they leak out all the time; we may even use them to get what we want. Converted into word and deed, emotions leave traces in the historical record. When the Pilgrim William Bradford called the Pequot massacre ‘a sweet sacrifice’, he was not exactly happy but certainly pleased that God’s will had been done.
Puritans are not usually associated with emotion, but they were deeply sensitive to human and divine behaviour, especially in the colonies. Settlers were proud to be God’s chosen people – like Israelites in the wilderness – yet pride brought shame, followed by doubt that God liked them at all. Introspection led to wretchedness, which was cured by the Holy Spirit, and they were back to their old censorious selves. In England, even fellow Puritans thought they’d lost the plot, as did most (non-Puritan) New Englanders. But godly colonists established what historians call an ‘emotional regime’ or ‘emotional community’ in which their tears and thunder were not only acceptable but carried great political authority.
John Winthrop, the leader of the fleet that carried Francis Wainwright to New England, was an intensely emotional man who loved his wife and children almost as much as he loved God. Gaunt, ascetic and tirelessly judgmental, he became Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor, driven by dreams of building a ‘city upon a hill’. It didn’t quite work out: Boston grew too quickly, and became diverse and worldly. And not everyone cared for Winthrop’s definition of liberty: freedom to obey him and his personal interpretation of God’s designs. But presidents from Reagan to Obama have been drawn to ‘the city upon the hill’ as an emotionally potent metaphor for the US in its mission to inspire, assist, and police the world.
Winthrop’s feelings, however, came from and were directed at England. His friend Thomas Hooker, ‘the father of Connecticut’, cut his teeth as a clergyman in Chelmsford when Francis Wainwright lived there. Partly thanks to Wainwright, one assumes, he found the town full of drunks, with ‘more profaneness than devotion’. But Hooker ‘quickly cleared streets of this disorder’. The ‘city upon the hill’, then, was not a blueprint for America, but an exemplar to help England reform itself. Indeed, long before the idea was associated with Massachusetts, it related to English towns – notably Colchester – that aspired to be righteous commonwealths in a country many felt was going to the dogs. Revellers did not disappear from Chelmsford and Colchester – try visiting on a Saturday night – but, as preachers and merchants and warriors, its people did sow the seeds from which grew the most powerful nation in the world.
So if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this year, or you know someone who is, it’s worth remembering that the first colonists to give thanks were not just generic Old World exiles, uniformly dull until America made them special, but living, breathing emotional individuals with hearts and minds rooted in English towns and shires. To them, the New World was not an upgrade on England: it was a space in which to return their beloved country to its former glories.
Featured image credit: Signing of the Constitution, by Thomas P. Rossiter. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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By: AlanaP,
on 2/8/2013
Today represents a red letter day — and a black mark – for US cultural history. Exactly 98 years ago, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles. American cinema has been decisively shaped, and shadowed, by the massive legacy of this film.
D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) was one of the more contradictory artists the United States has produced. Deeply Victorian in his social outlook, he was nevertheless on the leading edge of modernity in his aesthetics. A committed moralist in his cinematic ideology, he was also a shameless huckster in promoting his movies. And a self-avowed pacifist, he produced a piece of work that incited violence and celebrated the most damaging insurrection in American history.
The source material for Birth of a Nation came from two novels, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), both written by Griffith’s Johns Hopkins classmate, Thomas Dixon. Dixon drew on the common-sense version of history he imbibed from his unreconstructed Confederate forebears. According to this master narrative, the Civil War was as a gallant but failed bid for independence, followed by vindictive Yankee occupation and eventual redemption secured with the help of organizations like the Klan.
But Dixon’s fiction, and the subsequent screenplay (by Griffith and Frank E. Woods), was a literal and figurative romance of reconciliation. The movie dramatizes the relationships between two (related) families, the Camerons of South Carolina and the Stonemans of Pennsylvania. The evil patriarch of the latter is Austin Stoneman, a Congressman with a limp very obviously patterned on the real-life Thaddeus Stevens. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Stevens comes, Carpetbagger-style, and uses a brutish black minion, Silas Lynch(!), whose horrifying sexual machinations focused, ironically and naturally, on Stoneman’s own daughter are only arrested by at the last minute, thanks to the arrival of the Klan in a dramatic finale that has lost none of its excitement even in an age of computer-generated imagery.
Historians agree that Griffith, a former actor who directed hundreds of short films in the years preceding Birth of a Nation, was not a cinematic pioneer along the lines of Edwin S. Porter, whose 1903 proto-Western The Great Train Robbery virtually invented modern visual grammar. Instead, Griffith’s genius was three-fold. First, he absorbed and codified a series of techniques, among them close-ups, fadeouts, and long shots, into a distinctive visual signature. Second, he boldly made Birth of a Nation on an unprecedented scale in terms of length, the size of the production, and his ambition to re-create past events (“history with lightning,” in the words of another classmate, Woodrow Wilson, who screened the film at the White House). Finally, in the way the movie was financed, released and promoted, Griffith transformed what had been a disreputable working-class medium and staked its power as a source of genuine artistic achievement. Even now, it’s hard not to be awed by the intensity of Griffith’s recreation of Civil War battles or his re-enactments of events like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
But Birth of a Nation was a source of instant controversy. Griffith may have thought he was simply projecting common sense, but a broad national audience, some of which had lived through the Civil War, did not necessarily agree. The film’s release also coincided with the beginnings of African American political mobilization. As Melvyn Stokes shows in his elegant 2009 book D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the film’s promoters and its critics alike found the controversy surrounding it curiously symbiotic, as moviegoers flocked to see what the fuss was about and the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People used the film’s notoriety to build its membership ranks.
Birth of a Nation never escaped from the original shadows that clouded its reception. Later films like Gone with the Wind (1939), which shared much of its political outlook, nevertheless went to great lengths to sidestep controversy. (The Klan is only alluded to as “a political meeting” rather than depicted the way it was in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel.) Today Birth is largely an academic curio, typically viewed in settings where its racism looms over any aesthetic or other assessment.
In a number of respects, Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln is a repudiation of Griffith. In Birth, Lincoln is a martyr whose gentle approach to his adversaries is tragically severed with his death. But in Lincoln he’s the determined champion of emancipation, willing to prosecute the war fully until freedom is secure. The Stevens character of Lincoln, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is not quite the hero. But his radical abolitionism is at least respected, and the very thing that tarred him in Birth — having a secret black mistress — here becomes a badge of honor. Rarely do the rhythms of history oscillate so sharply. Griffith would no doubt be bemused. But he could take such satisfaction in the way his work has reverberated across time.
For Jim Cullen’s selection of films all history and film buffs should see, watch his video syllabus.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. He is the author of Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (December 2012), The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, and other books. Cullen is also a book review editor at the History News Network. Read his previous OUPblog posts.
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Image credit: Birth of a Nation film poster, 1915, public domain in Wikimedia Commons.
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By: Alice,
on 2/7/2013
This year’s academy award nominations of Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty, attest to our fascination of watching “true stories” depicted on the screen. We adopt a special set of expectations when we believe a movie is based on actual events, a sentiment the Coen Brothers parodied when they stated at the beginning of Fargo that “this is a true story,” even though it wasn’t. In the science fiction spoof, Galaxy Quest, aliens have intercepted a Star Trek-like TV show and believe the program to be a documentary of actual human warfare. As a result, they come to Earth to enlist Cmdr. Peter Quincy Taggart (Tim Allen), star of the TV show, to help fight the evil warlord Sarris (named after the film critic, Andrew Sarris), as they believe Taggart to be a true war hero rather than merely playing one on TV.
Ben Affleck in Argo. (c) 2012 Warner Bros.
One psychological point is clear: our emotional involvement with a movie depends on the degree to which we expect or “appraise” the events to be real. Studies by Richard Lazarus and others have shown that physiological markers of emotion, such as skin conductance (i.e. sweaty palms), increase when subjects believe a film to depict an actual event. In one study, subjects watched a film clip depicting an industrial accident involving a power saw. Those who were told that they were watching footage of an actual accident (rather than actors re-enacting the event) exhibited heightened emotional responses. Thus, people watching the same movie may engage themselves differently depending on the degree to which they construe the events as realistic portrayals.
Even when we know we are watching a re-enactment, as with Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty, I suspect we become more emotionally attached when we believe we are witnessing actual events. We more readily empathize with characters and buy into the story. Of course, the authenticity of a movie depends not only on us having prior knowledge that a movie is based on actual events but also on how realistic the characters appear in their actions and predicaments. As wonderfully realistic and engaging as Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty were, in my opinion the most “realistic” movie among this year’s Academy Award nominees is the entirely fictitious Amour, in which the elderly Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) must care for his wife (Emmanuelle Riva), whose mental abilities are deteriorating from strokes. The superb acting and unusual editing (e.g. exceedingly long takes) amplify emotions and engage us as if we are watching a true and heart-wrenching story.
Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He studies the psychological and biological underpinnings of memory and movies. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to study links between art, mind, and brain. He is co-editor of Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (Shimamura & Palmer, ed., OUP, 2012), editor of the forthcoming Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies(ed., OUP, March 2013), and author of the forthcoming book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (May 2013). Further musings can be found on his blog, Psychocinematics: Cognition at the Movies.
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By: Alice,
on 9/4/2012
No Easy Day, the new book by a member of the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden on 30 April 2011, has attracted widespread comment, most of it focused on whether bin Laden posed a threat at the time he was gunned down. Another theme in the account by Mark Owen (a pseudonym) is how the team members openly weighed the political ramifications of their actions. As the Huffington Post reports:
Though he praises the president for green-lighting the risky assault, Owen says the SEALS joked that Obama would take credit for their success…. one SEAL joked, “And we’ll get Obama reelected for sure. I can see him now, talking about how he killed bin Laden.”
Owen goes on to comment that he and his peers understood that they were “tools in the toolbox, and when things go well [political leaders] promote it.” It is an observation that invites only one response: Duh.
Of course, a president will bask in the glow of a national security success. The more interesting question, though, is whether it translates into gains for him and/or his party in the next election. The direct political impact of a military victory, a peace agreement, or (as in this case) the elimination of a high-profile adversary tends to be short-lived. That said, events may not be isolated; they also figure in the narratives politicians and parties tell. For Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2012, this secondary effect is the more important one.
Wartime presidents have always been sensitive to the ticking of the political clock. In the summer of 1864, Abraham Lincoln famously fretted that he would lose his reelection bid. Grant’s army stalled at Petersburg after staggering casualties in his Overland campaign; Sherman’s army seemed just as frustrated in the siege of Atlanta; and a small Confederate army led by Jubal Early advanced through the Shenandoah Valley to the very outskirts of Washington. So bleak were the president’s political fortunes that Republicans spoke openly of holding a second convention to choose a different nominee. Only the string of Union victories — at Atlanta, in the Shenandoah Valley, and at Mobile Bay — before the election turned the political tide.
Election timing may tempt a president to shape national security decisions for political advantage. In the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt was eager to see US troops invade North Africa before November 1942. Partly he was motivated by a desire to see American forces engage the German army to forestall popular demands to redirect resources to the war against Japan, the more hated enemy. But Roosevelt also wanted a major American offensive before the mid-term elections to deflect attention from wartime shortages and labor disputes that fed Republican attacks on his party’s management of the war effort. To his credit, he didn’t insist on a specific pre-election date for Operation Torch, and the invasion finally came a week after the voters had gone to the polls (and inflicted significant losses on his party).
The Vietnam War illustrates the intimate tie between what happens on the battlefield and elections back home. In the wake of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Lyndon Johnson came within a whisker of losing the New Hampshire Democratic primary, an outcome widely interpreted as a defeat. He soon announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. Four years later, on the eve of the 1972 election, Richard Nixon delivered the ultimate “October surprise”: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced that “peace is at hand,” following conclusion of a preliminary agreement with Hanoi’s lead negotiator Le Duc Tho. In fact, however, Kissinger left out a key detail. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu balked at the terms and refused to sign. Only after weeks of pressure, threats, and secret promises from Nixon, plus renewed heavy bombing of Hanoi, did Thieu grudgingly accept a new agreement that didn’t differ in its significant provisions from the October version.
But national security success yields ephemeral political gains. After the smashing coalition triumph in the 1991 Gulf War, George H. W. Bush enjoyed strikingly high public approval ratings. Indeed, he was so popular that a number of leading Democrats concluded he was unbeatable and decided not to seek their party’s presidential nomination the following year. But by fall 1992 the victory glow had worn off, and the public focused instead on domestic matters, especially a sluggish economy. Bill Clinton’s notable ability to project empathy played much better than Bush’s detachment.
And so it has been with Osama and Obama. Following the former’s death, the president received the expected bump in the polls. Predictably, though, the gain didn’t persist amid disappointing economic results and showdowns with Congress over the debt ceiling. From the poll results, we might conclude that Owen and his Seal buddies were mistaken about the political impact of their operation.
But there is more to it. Republicans have long enjoyed a political edge on national security, but not this year. The death of Osama bin Laden, coupled with a limited military intervention in Libya that brought down an unpopular dictator and ongoing drone attacks against suspected terrorist groups, has inoculated Barack Obama from charges of being soft on America’s enemies. Add the end of the Iraq War and the gradual withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan and the narrative takes shape: here is a president who understands how to use force efficiently and with minimal risk to American lives. Thus far Mitt Romney’s efforts to sound “tougher” on foreign policy have fallen flat with the voters. That he so rarely brings up national security issues demonstrates how little traction his message has.
None of this guarantees that the president will win a second term. The election, like the one in 1992, will be much more about the economy. But the Seal team operation reminds us that war and politics are never separated.
Andrew Polsky is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Polity, his most recent book is Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War. Read Andrew Polsky’s previous blog posts.
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By: Mary Lee,
on 2/16/2012
By: Elvin Lim,
on 11/29/2011
It should now be clear to all that the highly polarized environment that is Washington is dysfunctional, and the disillusionment it is causing portends yet more headlocks and cynicism to come.
Here is the all-too-familiar cycle of American electoral politics in the last few decades. Campaign gurus draw sharp distinctions to get out the vote. The impassioned vote wins the day. Impatient voters watch their newly elected president or representative fail to pass in undiluted form the the reforms promised during the campaign. Disillusion ensues. The gurus step in with a new round of fiesty charges, and the cycle begins anew.
At some point, citizens are going to get tired of being stoked, poked, and roped, and all for nought. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are reactions against a system gone awry. The low approval ratings for the Congress and the president are another indicator. The Republicans’ perpetual search for an anti-establishment alternative is another.
And now we are facing a spectacular new failure. The “super committee” charged with reaching a budget reduction deal has proved itself anything but super. If twelve people can no longer agree to make hard decisions, it is reflective of the larger malaise of which we dare not speak. It is that democracy has run amok in a republic founded on the idea that our elected representatives should be able to make decisions on our behalf, and sometimes in spite of ourselves, because representation is a higher calling than mimicry. Maybe that is why Abraham Lincoln did not deliver a single campaign speech in 1860.
Each of the twelve men and women in the committee are thinking about their constituencies, their parties, and their base and so bluster and bravado must take precedence over compromise and conciliation. When the voice of the people, artificially stoked for shrillness, begins to infect the deliberative process even in between electoral cycles, there is no chance for serious inter-branch deliberation. We have reduced our representatives to sycophants whose mantra is do nothing but heap the blame on the other party.
The solution is not to exploit the disillusioned by way of new campaign slogans and negative ads to artificially jolt their temporary and baser passions, but for the noise and the trouble-makers fixated only on winning at the next ballot to be weeded out of the system. To do that, citizens must realize that the lion’s share of what counts as democracy today is making it nearly impossible for the representatives of our republic to make decisions on behalf of We the People. Remember: ours is a republic, if we can keep it.
Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.
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0 Comments on The disconnect between democracy and Republicanism as of 1/1/1900
By: Claire Louise Milne,
on 11/30/2009
The locks all combed and ready to spin, just as soft as they look in the photo. A winter nest anyone?
I even got to keep the 1st place ribbon this fleece won!
The locks in this fleece range in colour from pale silvery grey to very dark brown/black (pictured in the 2nd lock photo)
The locks vary in length, I've started working on the long (medium gray) ones
By: Rebecca,
on 10/28/2009
Welcome to Historical Thesaurus Week on the OUPblog! Every day this week we will be looking at the first historical thesaurus to be written for any of the world’s languages, the Historical
Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Conceived and complied by the English Language Department of the University of Glasgow, and based on the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the result of over 40 years of scholarly labor. Today we have an article by Ammon Shea, a good friend of this blog, which looks at how the HTOED could be used to rewrite the Gettysburg Address. Be sure to check back all week to learn more about the HTOED.
Mark Twain once famously remarked that the difference between the almost-right word and the right word was the same as “the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning”. Choosing words based on incomplete information can easily lead to writing that may range from the simply unclear to the laughably wrong. Below is an illustrative example of how the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary might be of use when faced with the need to find the right word, as opposed to the almost-right one.
Imagine you are a student who has been asked to re-write the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. As an example of how you might do this, we’ve posted the opening line with four words bolded. What options would you have to replace these words with synonyms if you were using the HTOED, as opposed to if you were using an online thesaurus?
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Fathers – Looking in the HTOED, there are 26 different words listed as synonyms of father (ancestor). Every one of these words is provided with dates for the first recorded instance of its use in English. In a number of cases there is also a date provided for a word’s last recorded use as well. Given that the Gettysburg Address was written in 1863, the user of this thesaurus would be informed of the fact that fore-runner, antecestre, and eldfather were no longer in use at that time, but that grandsire, ancestor, and progenitor were.
In the event that one wished to be more specific, there are another 47 words and phrases that are related to the concept of ancestors, all of which are listed under a specific subcategory. For instance, the HTOED differentiates between ancestors in general and female ancestors. It provides separate categories for ancestors in direct line and ancestors collectively.
Furthermore, many of the words found here are assigned usage labels that can inform the user of when it might be appropriate or inappropriate to use them. Progenitrix is listed as figurative, collateral ancestor is specified as being a law term, and kin is listed as being dialectical.
Looking at Thesaurus.com, the first entry that comes up when one searches for ‘father’ exhibits the following range of words, all listed as synonyms: ancestor, begetter, dad, daddy, forebearer, origin, pa, padre, papa, parent, pop, predecessor, procreator, progenitor, sire, source.
The entries from Thesaurus.com are listed in alphabetical order, and do not have any indication of when they might have been current. There is no immediate indication that begetter or sire might be of older vintage than dad. Of the sixteen words, one (pop) is listed as being informal – none of the other entries are labeled in any way.
Nation – When looking at the entry for nation in the HTOED, the historical value of this work is immediately apparent. It shows how recently most of our words that deal with nationality came into existence. There is only one word listed under the category of ‘the state or fact of being a nation’, and that is nationhood, first recorded in 1850. The concept of ‘having a national quality or characteristic’ is first attested to by a single word in 1691 with nationality. And the term nation-building, so common in political speech of late, does not make its appearance in English until 1913.
In addition to providing a wealth of historical data that is not found anywhere else outside of the Oxford English Dictionary itself, the HTOED also gives a list of synonyms that were definitely in use in 1863, and which would be acceptable substitutes, including country, state, and nationality.
Turning again to the first entries in Thesaurus.com we find the following: commonwealth, community, democracy, domain, dominion, empire, land, monarchy, people, populace, population, principality, public, race, realm, republic, society, sovereignty, state, tribe, union. Again, there is no indication of whether any of these words are archaic, or when they entered the language. There are no usage labels for any of them. For some of these words, such as race, it is difficult to truly say that they are in fact synonyms.
Liberty – As was the case with nation, the word liberty has had strikingly few synonyms over the years. In fact, of the nine nouns listed for the concept of liberty (freols, freot, freedom, freeship, freelage, franchise, liberty, and largess) only freedom and liberty were in current usage when Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address. Your choices are suddenly much clearer.
As user of the HTOED would also have a far easier time in finding similar and related words to liberty, not only in the semantic subcategories, but also in the other parts of speech that have to do with liberty and freedom. Nouns that relate to ‘liberty and freedom’ are listed first. The next entry in the thesaurus deals with adjectives that pertain to ‘freedom’. This is followed by adverbs meaning ‘freely’, which is in turn followed by phrases meaning ‘free’ or ‘at liberty’. Once the subjects of freedom and liberty have been exhaustively treated, they are followed by concepts such as independence, liberation, and permission. This logical organizational structure of the HTOED makes it considerably easier to find the right word.
When one looks up liberty in Thesaurus.com one finds an impressive array of synonyms (autarchy, authorization, autonomy, birthright, carte blanche, choice, convenience, decision, deliverance, delivery, dispensation, emancipation, enfranchisement, enlightenment, exemption, franchise, free speech, immunity, independence, leave, leisure, liberation, license, opportunity, permission, power of choice, prerogative, privilege, relaxation, release, rest, right, sanction, self-determination, self-government, sovereignty, suffrage, unconstraint), but as before, it is difficult to say whether many of them share the actual whole meaning of liberty, or if they merely share some of the meaning. Free speech and power of choice may well have something to do with liberty, but it is perhaps not a workable substitute. Perhaps you would choose autarchy, since it is an impressive looking word. It may look good, but unfortunately autarchy carries a fairly specific meaning that refers to economic independence, and so would not be appropriate to use in this case.
Equal – The HTOED is based on the Oxford English Dictionary, and so can boast of having been mined from a resource that is unparalleled and unavailable to any other thesaurus. It is the reason why, when looking at the entry for equal, you will find 129 different words and phrases, divided amongst the main entry and 28 subcategories. It is why you will see categories as finely differentiated as ‘equal in effect’ and ‘equally powerful’ each of which has specific entries that are slightly different. It is why you have access to the full range of words from efen (which means ‘equal’ and dates back to Old English) to the expression toe-to-toe (which means ‘equal or well matched’ and was first recorded in 1942).
The user who is looking for a synonym for equal not only will find such choices as tantamount, even, and equipollent; they will also have all the necessary information to ensure that the choice that they make is guided by decades of scholarship, provided by a team of researchers that is unequalled in the history of the study of the English language.
By: Rebecca,
on 4/29/2009
It is not everyday you get two Lincoln Prize winners together to ask each other questions, but lucky us, we had that very honor. Below is a conversation between James M. McPherson, most recently the author of Abraham Lincoln, and Craig L. Symonds, most recently the author of Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War.
James M. McPherson: We know from John Hay that Lincoln put himself through a cram course of readings in military history and strategy during the fall and winter of 1861-62, mainly so he could deal more intelligently and forcefully with such generals as McClellan, Halleck, and Buell. Did Lincoln do anything comparable to overcome his admission that he knew “little about ships”?
Craig L. Symonds: Not really. A lifelong autodidact, Lincoln focused on learning as much as he could about war in the first months of the conflict, but he saw from the beginning that the land war was far more important than the naval war. While he read all that he could about the theories of war, he did not undertake a similar regimen concerning naval strategy, in part because there were fewer such books. He was fascinated by new weaponry, played a role in getting the Navy to adopt Ericsson’s Monitor, and he consulted both Seward and Bates on the legality of the blockade, but for the most part, he relied on Gideon Welles, and especially the Assistant Navy Secretary, Gustavus Fox, to provide him with whatever professional knowledge or technical information he needed.
McPherson: Historians hold a wide range of opinions about the effectiveness of the blockade and how important a role it played in ultimate Union victory. Where do you stand on this question?
Symonds: I guess it depends on whether the glass is half full or half empty. The blockade was never impervious, and at times seemed quite porous. As many have argued, the South was able to import through the blockade the weapons and supplies it needed to sustain its armies in the field for four years, though it did encounter serious shortages in specific areas such as steam engines, engine parts, and railroad rails. Exports were a different story. Cotton exports plunged from 2.8 million bales in the last year of peace to only 55,000 bales in the first year of war. That undercut the Confederacy’s ability to establish credit overseas, contributed to inflation and civilian unrest at home, and generally undermined the Confederate economy. The loss of southern revenue from cotton exports was greater than the amount the North spent to establish and maintain the blockade. Given that, I think the blockade was worth the investment. If it succeeded in shortening the war by, say, six month, it probably saved many thousands of lives.
McPherson: Along with Gideon Welles and Gustavus Fox, Lincoln was critical of Samuel Francis Du Pont for lack of aggressiveness and pertinacity in the failed attack on the defenses of Charleston on April 7, 1863, and compared Du Pont to McClellan. Was this fair?
Symonds: There are many things in war that are not fair. Du Pont was very likely correct in asserting that Charleston could not be taken by a purely naval attack, as Gideon Welles repeatedly encouraged him to do, and he was effectively fired for demonstrating that his view was correct. Kevin Weddle calls Du Pont “Lincoln’s Tragic Admiral,” a victim of Welles’ determination to protect the reputation of his beloved monitors. But Du Pont’s fall from grace was due not merely to his failure to capture Charleston. It was also due to two other factors: One was that Lincoln had become scarred by his lengthy and frustrating relationship with McClellan during the 1862 campaign, and by 1863 he had began to view Du Pont through a prism defined by that experience. When Du Pont called for reinforcements, or bemoaned the obstacles in front of him, it was McClellans’ voice that Lincoln heard.
The other reason for Du Pont’s fall is that he never fully explained to the President precisely why he objected to a navy-only attack. Instead he only hinted at it by detailing how strong the enemy defenses were and how limited his own forces were. He never clearly laid out an alternative with the kind of strong advocacy that showed his willingness to carry it out. Even then, I think Lincoln would have stood by Du Pont but for Du Pont’s own foolish behavior when he insisted that the Government must publish his official reports (including compromising information about the vulnerabilities of the monitors) in order to counter hostile newspaper articles about him. In the end, Du Pont’s reticence and touchiness were responsible for his tragedy.
McPherson: Did Lincoln show unjustified favoritism toward John A. Dahlgren when he promoted him to rear admiral and gave him command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron even though Dahlgren had limited experience in seagoing command?
Symonds: Dahlgren was unquestionably Lincoln’s favorite admiral. He much appreciated Farragut’s success, but he liked Dahlgren, often went to the Washington Navy Yard to visit with him, and eventually he asked Welles to promote him to admiral, even though Dahlgren had virtually no important sea service. Most of the navy looked upon Lincoln’s decision to promote his friend from commander to Rear Admiral in one step as personal favoritism. It was favoritism, but whether it was unjustified depends on how well Dahlgren performed in command. Though Charleston never fell, Dahlgren was an active and effective commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, and despite suffering poor health that might have ended the career of a less determined man, Dahlgren worked hard and earned the confidence of his officers throughout the long and wasting siege.
McPherson: From 1862 on, Acting Rear Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee wanted to attack the defenses of Wilmington to shut down the port to blockade runners. When the time came in 1864 to carry out the attack, however, Welles, Fox, and Grant convinced Lincoln that Lee was not the man to command it, and replaced him with Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. Was this treatment of Lee justified?
Symonds: Like Du Pont, Phillips Lee was a competent officer who was at his best managing the multivariate activities of a far-flung squadron. Unlike Du Pont, he never had the chance to prove himself in a major battle and thereby win promotion to the permanent rank of Rear Admiral. Because the authorizing legislation stipulated that promotions to admiral must be won in battle, Lee repeatedly asked Welles for permission to attack Wilmington, North Carolina. Not until 1864 did Welles accede, and when he did he sent Lee off to the backwater of the Mississippi Squadron and brought in the brash David Dixon Porter to carry it out. Lee felt himself a victim of Welles’ favoritism for others. But in this case, it was U. S. Grant as much as Gideon Welles who was responsible. In Grant’s view, Lee had not been sufficiently aggressive during the move up the James River, and he wanted someone else to command of the attack on Wilmington. When Farragut declined the command, Welles gave it to Porter. Lee’s anger at this treatment is understandable, but Welles and Grant had concluded that while Lee was an effective manager, he was not the man for a full-scale attack. In the end, Lee never did get a chance to prove himself in the kind of engagement that might have won him the promotion he sought.
Symonds: George McClellan is clearly a central character in this story. In your view, was Lincoln too patient with Little Mac, not patient enough, or just about right? Would the Lincoln of 1864 have tolerated McClellan as long as the Lincoln of 1862 did?
McPherson: In one sense, he was too patient. McClellan deserved to be fired after his failure to reinforce Pope at Second Bull Run, as a majority of the Cabinet wanted Lincoln to do. But in another sense, Lincoln was absolutely right that only McClellan could reorganize the army and restore its morale, and if the president had fired him then, the army might have broken down. In the end, Lincoln’s timing on removing Mac from command–just after the fall elections in 1862–was just right.
Symonds: What about the so-called political generals: Did Lincoln appoint and tolerate them out of perceived political necessity, or because he believed that some of them, at least, had genuine merit? And, for that matter, did any of them have genuine merit?
McPherson: Lincoln appointed the political generals in order to mobilize their constituencies for the war effort. Northern mobilization for the war in 1861-62 was a from-the-bottom-up process, with important local and state political leaders playing a key part in persuading men to enlist in this all-volunteer army, and political generals were a key part in this process, which increased an army of 16,000 men in April 1861 to an army of 637,000 men in April 1862. And while we are all familiar with the military incompetents among the political generals, some of them were actually pretty good–John Logan and Frank Blair, for example.
Symonds: Why did Lincoln put up with Henry Halleck?
McPherson: Lincoln used Halleck to translate presidential orders and wishes into language that military commanders could understand, and to translate their reports and requests and explanations into language that Lincoln understood. That was what Lincoln meant when he called Halleck a “first-rate clerk.” Of course he had wanted him to be more than a clerk, and that is why Lincoln finally appointed Grant as general in chief and booted Halleck upstairs into the new office of “chief of staff,” where his clerkly qualities were needed.
Symonds: Lincoln was clearly relieved to turn over military operations to Grant in 1864, but did he also fear Grant as a potential political rival?
McPherson: He had been concerned about Grant as a potential political rival, until Grant let it be known throughout intermediaries that he unequivocally and absolutely had no political ambitions in 1864 and strongly supported Lincoln’s reelection. After that, Lincoln had no more concerns.
Symonds: Now that you will be the owner of two busts of Lincoln by Augustus St. Gaudens, along with your many other prizes, isn’t your house getting pretty full?
McPherson: There is still room in the house, but since my grandchildren are interested in Mr. Lincoln in bronze, I may deposit this bust in their house, where I can visit it whenever I want (they live ten miles away).
Oh, Gilda Joyce. How I love you and your wonky ways.
It's summertime and Gilda has moved to Washington, D.C. for a summer job at the National Spy Museum. How perfect is that? She is sharing an apartment with Caitlin Merrill ( a recent college graduate) who is more than a bit surprised when she takes in Gilda's appearance. She is decked out in her 60s spy chic outfit complete with flipped hair and Jackie O pink suit.
Once Gilda gets to the spy museum, she is in heaven. After getting settled in Gilda gets to go on a field trip with the museum's historian to acquire some new spy paraphernalia from an Russian former spy. On meeting Boris, Gilda immediately notices some of his left over spy habits...like gazing over her shoulder to see who is coming down the street and she notices that her psychic abilities kick in when she is around him.
Soon after the museum acquires Boris' lipstick gun and red glass brooch, Gilda starts having dreams. Dreams that she is certain are a message. And these dreams are peppered with D.C. locations, and well as a blond woman and Abraham Lincoln! Gilda wonders what is going on. Funny things also start happening in the museum...things that cannot be explained or blamed on faulty technology. Is Boris really and ex-spy? Is the Spy Museum haunted? Will Gilda be able to solve any of these mysteries in her new role as spy camp counselor?
Jennifer Allison keeps this series going strong with the familiar (yet growing) character of Gilda in a new location. She is on her own, but Wendy is present in Gilda's letters to her, and Gilda's mom comes in with phone calls. The Washington contingent is fun, and the appearance of a certain author is well placed. D.C. itself becomes a character, as readers see it through Gilda's eyes. Descriptions are rich and detailed, yet don't go on too long. A personal favourite is the description of the crazy hotel where spies and celebrities go when they don't want to be bothered! Though Gilda is 14, she is a young 14. I feel like she gets a bad rep in some circles as unbelievable, but trust me...working in a MS shows that there is certainly a range when it comes to maturity levels and young teens.
For fans of the series, of mysteries and of quirky characters! On shelves May 09.
By: Rebecca,
on 4/8/2009
Stephen Spector, chairman of the English Department at Stony Brook
University, is the author of Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism which delves into the Christian Zionist movement, mining information from original interviews, websites, publications, news reports, survey research, worship services, and interfaith conferences, to provide a surprising look at the sources of evangelical support for Israel. In the original post below Specter looks at the contrast between Bush and Obama’s views on Israel and Islamic extremists.
President Obama’s staff recently removed a stern-looking bust of Winston Churchill that George W. Bush had kept in the Oval Office, replacing it with a bust of Lincoln. There could hardly have been a more compelling symbolic gesture to mark the change in presidential worldviews.
As Obama notes in The Audacity of Hope, Lincoln believed that there are times when we must pursue our own absolute truths, even if there is a terrible price to pay. But Obama also knows that Lincoln had a complicated view of world affairs: Lincoln knew that we must reach for common understandings and resist the temptation to demonize, since we’re all imperfect and can’t know with certainty that God is on our side.
Bush’s impulse, by contrast, is to value moral clarity. As a result, he took Churchill as his model in advocating an unambiguous and aggressive response to Iranian and Arab extremists. He did take pains to note that the battle is not with the “great religion” of Islam, which he called a religion of peace, but with terrorists. Yet in describing the goals of radical Islamists, Bush repeatedly evoked the fascist aggression in World War II. In 2005, for example, he warned that militants practicing a clear and focused ideology of Islamofascism seek to establish “a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” Today’s terrorists, he said in 2006, are “successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists and other totalitarians of the twentieth century.” They have a common ideology and vision for the world, Bush said, and against such an enemy the West can never accept anything less than complete victory. That echoed Churchill’s words rallying the British people against Hitler: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
Religious and political conservatives who made up much of Bush’s electoral base often view the world as he does. They particularly admire Churchill’s dogged determination in warning of the approaching Nazi danger in the 1930s. Like him, they name what they see as the coming fascist threat and they disdain attempts at appeasement. Many of them warn, as Bush did, that World War III has already begun.
Discussing a foiled terrorist plot in 2006, Gary Bauer, a leading conservative Christian, quoted one of Churchill’s classic lines: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” (A few days later, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used the same quip, which was surely more than a coincidence.) And Bauer is far from the only evangelical who reveres Churchill. The devotion of James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is so great that the largest painting in his Colorado Springs office is not of Christ, but of Sir Winston. (According to Dan Gilgoff in The Jesus Machine, Dobson’s wife didn’t want him to buy it because she was afraid that he would put it in their bedroom!)
John Hagee, the founder of the pro-Zionist evangelical lobbying group Christians United for Israel, is one of those who considers the Islamist threat today to be equivalent to the danger posed by the Nazis in the 1930s, and equally impossible to appease through compromise. In 2007 he received standing ovations at AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington when he said, “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.” Hagee warned that the “misguided souls of Europe…the political brothel that is now the United Nations, and sadly even our own State Department will try once again to turn Israel into crocodile food.”
Some Israeli and American officials and commentators also evoke the Nazi threat in describing the present conflict with Islamic radicals. Benjamin Netanyahu, the new Israeli prime minister, says that, in Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel is confronted by an enemy of the sort that the Jewish people have not faced since Hitler. The conflict is not about territory, but about Islam’s goal of eradicating the Jewish state, Netanyahu says, a statement that agrees perfectly with the warnings of Michael Evans and other Christian Zionists.
Jihadist Muslims intend to perpetrate a second Holocaust, says Netanyahu. He adds that Ahmadinejad presents an even more serious threat than Hitler did: Hitler lost the war because he could not develop nuclear weapons, but Ahmadinejad is on the verge of accomplishing that. General Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, adds that when Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off of the map, he means to destroy the West, a charge that echoes those made by American Christian Zionists.
The Obama administration is hoping to achieve through diplomacy what confrontation against a supposed unified enemy did not. They’ve even dropped Bush’s signature phrase, the “War on Terror.” Meanwhile, Christian Zionist leaders are sending newsletters and prayer updates to hundreds of thousands of readers pointing out that Netanyahu called Iran’s leaders a messianic apocalyptic cult who must never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. For them and many other religious and political conservatives, negotiation with Islamic fundamentalists is nothing other than the folly of appeasement, the same catastrophic mistake that Neville Chamberlain made in 1938.
By: Rebecca,
on 3/3/2009
Craig L. Symonds is Professor Emeritus of History at the U.S. Naval Academy
and the winner (with James M. McPherson) of the 2009 Lincoln Prize for his book Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War. In the post below Symonds discusses his experiences at the Lincoln Bicentennial celebrations.
A few Thursdays ago I spent the day with Abraham Lincoln. Of course I had spent most of the last four years with Lincoln while writing my book about him. As Doris Kearns Goodwin said about the many years she spent working on her book Team of Rivals, every day I got up excited about the notion of spending the day with Abe.
February 12th was Abe’s 200th birthday, and everybody, it seemed, wanted to spend the day with him. In the nation’s capital, a number of Lincoln scholars and other dignitaries spoke at a breakfast and a wreath laying at the Lincoln Memorial in the morning; a more formal celebration in the Capitol Rotunda followed at noon with music by the U.S. Army chorus and, of course, more speeches—including one by President Obama; the Library of Congress opened its new Lincoln exhibit at 1:00, an event marked by a luncheon, ribbon cutting, and more speeches; and dinner that night featured, what else, more speeches.
The historic Willard Hotel where Lincoln himself had stayed in as a Congressman in 1847 and again as president-elect in 1861 hosted the dinner. It is not the same building that existed then, but it stands on the same site, and has the same social and political pedigree.
Willard’s was at the very center of the dramatic and pivotal events of the 1860s. Most politicians stayed there when they were in town, and advocates for various causes would hang out in the lobby to buttonhole Congressmen in order to promote their agendas, a practice that created the term “lobbyist.” Many Union generals and admirals stayed at the Willard, too. By 1864, the desk clerk at the Willard had grown blasé about the appearance of yet another brigadier or major general, of whom there were then hundreds. That February, a scruffy looking major general showed up and asked for a room for himself and his son. The clerk assigned him a back room and asked him to sign the desk register. Then, spinning the register around, he read the name: “U.S. Grant and son, Galena, Ill.,” and discovered that he had a much nicer room available after all.
The dinner at the Willard last Thursday began with the usual lengthy acknowledgment of all those who had helped put the evening together. Almost every one of the 160 guests was introduced, some more than once. A string quartet played 19th century music, and of course there were speeches.
I gave one of them. I talked about Lincoln’s early political career that was marked by his opposition to the Mexican War, then at full flood. President James K. Polk had insisted that war with Mexico was justified because American blood had been shed on American soil by Mexican soldiers. Lincoln disputed that assertion. His resolution called for Polk “to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was shed, was, or was not, our own soil.” The gangly western Congressmen made something of a nuisance of himself in these resolutions, called “The Spot Resolutions” at the time, and earning Lincoln the nickname “Spotty Lincoln.”
It is ironic that this man who began his political career as a kind of war protester, subsequently presided over the bloodiest war in our national history. We are fortunate that he did, for he possessed exactly the temperament needed for our country to survive: a willingness to accept expert advice, remarkable patience, and a sensitivity to what public opinion would accept as he moved forward toward union and emancipation.
After I finished, the second speaker came to the podium. It was George McGovern, looking remarkably fit and dignified at age 86. McGovern, too, had spent the last several years with Abe, writing a book of his own on Lincoln. Assessing history comes second nature to McGovern who earned a Ph.D. in History at Northwestern University back in 1953 and subsequently taught at his alma mater, Dakota Wesleyan University. After his political career, he returned to teaching, succeeding Stephen Ambrose at the University of New Orleans.
Listening to George McGovern talk about Abraham Lincoln in the Age of Obama was fascinating, even a bit disorienting, but also reassuring, clear evidence that Lincoln’s legacy reaches across the generations. That very day I had heard President Obama acknowledge his own debt to Lincoln: “I owe a special gratitude to this figure that made my position possible.” Now I listened as McGovern acknowledged his admiration of, and obligation to, Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln would no doubt have been surprised by the attention he still attracts. He knew he was not history’s prime mover. Late in his presidency he famously said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” He was not being modest. He was acknowledging that History is a force we can only influence, not control. All of us who study history eventually become humbled by the appreciation of how complex it is, and that it has many fathers. Lincoln was great because he was confident enough to be humble, wise enough to be patient, and responsible enough to honor the opinion of the public he served.
By: Rebecca,
on 2/12/2009
All week on the OUPblog we will be celebrating the Lincoln Bicentennial. Be sure to read Jennifer Weber’s post on how Lincoln almost failed, 
the excerpt from James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln, and Craig L. Symonds post on how Lincoln and his leadership are reflected in our current President. In the original piece below Allen Guelzo, author of Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, answers some FAQs about Lincoln. You can read part one here and part two here.
OUPblog: More than one observer has noted that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free any enslaved people in the very territory controlled by Lincoln’s government. What then is its lasting importance?
Allen Guelzo: This is probably the most-frequently-repeated howler in American history, and no one who thinks twice about will ever believe they said it.
The question refers to an apparent oddity in the Emancipation Proclamation – Lincoln freed the slaves in the Confederate States, but did not free the slaves of the four border states which remained loyal to the Union or the slaves in the Southern areas which had been re-occupied by federal forces. So, Lincoln frees slaves where he can’t control them, and neglects to free them where he can. Right? Wrong.
We live under a Constitution which does not give Presidents plenary powers to do anything they like. Only in time of war or rebellion does the Constitution even surrender control of the armed forces to the President, and the “war powers” which the Constitution confers on the President are almost the only discretionary powers he has.
It was under the rubric of those “war powers” that Lincoln issued, and could only have issued, an Emancipation Proclamation. And since those four border states, and the occupied districts of the South, were not at war with the United States, or in rebellion against it any more, Lincoln had no “war power” authority to free any slaves there. If he had tried, slaveowners would have made a bee-line for the federal courts. And at the top of the federal judiciary, itching for a chance to strike down emancipation for good, sat Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision. Lincoln might have had the military power to free slaves in those places, but not the legal authority.
By the same token, Lincoln declares the slaves of the Confederacy free because, even though he lacks the military power at that moment to enforce his proclamation, he retained the legal authority to do so. Lincoln had never recognized the Confederacy as a valid government. In his eyes, it was an insurrection against the existing forms of constitutional government, and as such, it came directly under the weight of his “war powers.” He might not have been able to enforce the Proclamation at once, but that’s very different from saying he had no authority to free the slaves there. Having the authority, it was only a matter of time and events before the enforcement, in the form of the Union Army, caught up with the authority and liberated the ex-slaves from their masters. Many of those slaves saw the distinction clearly enough that they began running away in droves to the Union lines, where they knew that the Army would at once recognize their freedom. Together, Lincoln and the slaves made the Proclamation in reality what it already was in law. But the reality would never have happened without the law.
At Gettysburg, Lincoln called on the nation to remember the war dead by a re-dedication to “unfinished work.” What is unfinished today? The unfinished work he was talking about at Gettysburg was the war itself, which he realized had to be won if the principle of government of the people was to be vindicated. If there was a sense in which he looked beyond that, it was to the larger goal of bringing opportunity for self-advancement and self-improvement to as many as possible. For Lincoln, the promise of the Declaration (that “proposition” that all men are created equal) was realized best when an open and democratic society gave to everyone the freedom to climb as far as talent and ambition could take them – as he himself had. Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, once wrote that Lincoln “was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” Douglass attributed Lincoln’s lack of racial bias to Lincoln’s sympathy with Douglass’s struggle and the “similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting at the lowest round of the ladder.” I confess, having also started on that “lowest round,” that this is what fascinates me most about Lincoln, too.
By: Rebecca,
on 2/12/2009
Editor’s Note: We are giving away one signed copy of Lincoln and His Admirals. The first person to email blog.us(at)oup.com will win.
It is my pleasure to announce that Craig L. Symonds is one of two winners of the
The media took much notice of the fact that Barack Obama was intent on duplicating much of Abraham Lincoln’s behavior as President-Elect. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s superb book Team of Rivals is said to be one of the books Obama has read with great interest, and he has chosen a “Team of Rivals” for his Cabinet. Similarly, President Obama took a train from Philadelphia to Washington, duplicating part of Lincoln’s journey from Springfield to the capital in 1861. For this, Obama might have consulted Harold Holzer’s new book on Lincoln, President Elect. Others have noted that Obama has inherited what is arguably the worst national and international circumstance for a new president since Lincoln, with the possible exception of Franklin Roosevelt. How will he apply Lincoln’s style or outlook to the problems he has inherited?
My own recent study of Lincoln has confirmed in my mind several aspects of Lincoln’s leadership style that already seem to be part of Obama’s world view, which should stand him in good stead as he considers how to manage (or end) two wars, and stabilize and then revitalize a collapsing economy.
The most obvious of these is a serenity fueled by patience and a habit of thoughtfulness. Though we tend to assume that strong presidents are proactive, controlling a situation rather than responding to it after it has happened, the fact is that Lincoln was almost never proactive. Instead he took the time to consult with his advisers often making them present their positions in short memos. He also took up the pen himself, writing down options in order to clarify them, then writing down possible solutions. Many of these “Memos to Self” were never made public and were found among his papers only after his death. He also waited to see what public opinion would tolerate, reading many newspapers, especially opposition newspapers, before making a decision. He was so patient that it sometimes looked as if the momentum of history was about to take the decision out of his hands before he acted.
Indeed, his very first crisis—what to do about Fort Sumter—found him waiting until it was almost too late. It is even possible to argue that he waited until is WAS too late. On his very first day in office he received a report from the beleaguered commander of Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, that the garrison was running out of food and that it must evacuate soon if not re-supplied. Moreover, Anderson reported that it would take twenty thousand men to re-supply him. Well, here was a conundrum. Lincoln had just promised in his inaugural address to “hold, occupy and possess” all Federal property in the South—a clear and specific reference to Fort Sumter, but there were not twenty thousand soldiers in all of the U.S. military in 1861. Like no-drama Obama, Lincoln did not panic. He met with his Cabinet and his military advisers, listened to all their input, sent scouts to Charleston to assess the situation there, and waited. By the time he sent an expedition there, Anderson’s supplies were all but exhausted. Lincoln’s patience was not a product of passivity, however. His decision to notify South Carolina State authorities that the expedition was en route deftly threw the ball into the South’s court and, when Fort Sumter was attacked, allowed the North to emerge as the aggrieved party.
Similarly, during the Trent affair, Lincoln was a master of forbearance. After Captain Charles Wilkes captured two Confederate ambassadors on the high seas, Britain responded with an ultimatum that gave the U.S. just seven days to release them and offer a public apology or face war. Again Lincoln waited, and his patience let the emotions of the moment ease allowing a solution that was both diplomatically acceptable, and politically benign. Had he responded to the ultimatum with the kind of fist-shaking defiance that would have been popular at home, it might indeed have led to war and the U.S. might be two countries today.
Even in dealing with emancipation, the most difficult problem of his administration—indeed, of American history—Lincoln showed remarkable composure which in the end led to a permanent solution. Some thought he was too patient. The abolitionists, including free blacks like Frederick Douglass, could not understand why he moved so slowly. But Lincoln knew what he was about. He moved as fast, and as efficiently, as public opinion, and the war news, would allow him to do.
Barack Obama, who has already demonstrated his patience and his pragmatism in his “no-drama” campaign, seems now to be echoing not only Lincoln’s cabinet choices and his travel route, but also his characteristic style. This bodes well for the future.
By: Rebecca,
on 2/11/2009
All week on the OUPblog we will be celebrating the Lincoln Bicentennial. Be sure to read Jennifer Weber’s post on how Lincoln almost failed,
OUPblog: Lincoln had the highest regard for the U.S. Constitution, yet he assumed extraordinary powers during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. When we look at this story for lessons about the conduct of a government today, what should we find?
Allen Guelzo: When we say that Lincoln exercised “extraordinary powers,” it sounds as though we were accusing him of making himself a dictator. But the Constitution itself gives the President some extraordinary powers when it designates the President as Commander-in-Chief in time of war or rebellion – and Lincoln was certainly willing to use those “war powers” during the Civil War. But looked at in retrospect, Lincoln used them very cautiously. Even the Emancipation Proclamation was issued as a “war powers” proclamation, with all kinds of restraints and caveats to keep it strictly within the legal bounds of military necessity. The Constitution was, for Lincoln, the frame mounted around the “apples of gold” in the Declaration of Independence, and you could not damage one without damaging the other.
OUPblog: During the Civil War, Lincoln declared martial law and suspended habeas corpus. He ordered the arrest of draft resisters and opponents of the draft, newspaper editors, judges, and other prominent opponents. He argued that it was an issue of self-preservation of the nation, as described in Article II, section one of the Constitution. What about opponents of the President’s policies?
Guelzo: Lincoln was a far better lawyer than I am, and he could answer that question with much more attention to constitutional law. But it is significant that the same issues are once again before us – not only that, but the same accusations of violations of rights, and the same response that the nature of the threat justifies extraordinary actions in national self-defense. One thing to bear in mind is that Lincoln has, on the whole, been judged fairly mildly, first, because the threat to the survival if the United States in 1861-65 has been seen as very real, and second, because, at the end of the day, the steps Lincoln took were not out of balance with the nature of the threat. (Those steps, by the way, included suppressing draft riots, executing a slave trader, and even exiling a political dissident). If anything, Lincoln once said, his administration would probably be remembered for treading too lightly on wartime civil liberties cases.
By: Rebecca,
on 2/10/2009
All week on the OUPblog we will be celebrating the Lincoln Bicentennial. Be sure to check in daily for posts from Jennifer Weber,
OUPblog: What is the most important aspect of Lincoln’s legacy today?
Allen Guelzo: That he saved the idea of popular government, both politically and morally. In the first place, he showed that democracies are willing to fight to save themselves, that they are not forever doomed to divided and sub-divide over one issue after another until they have whittled themselves down into helpless political miniatures. The essence of popular government is that people come together to govern themselves; when they disagree, the form majorities and minorities over the disagreements; but the majority has the privilege of ruling, and the minority has the responsibility to yield to that rule, and not stage armed resistance or attempt to walk away. At the same time, though, the majority does not have the right to retaliate against, or persecute the minority; and both understand that at the next election, the balance of majority and minority can freely change.
In the second place, he showed that popular government is not the same thing as “everybody gets to do whatever they want.” There are certain fundamental truths which cannot be changed by any popular government, or by any majority or minority – chief among being the right everyone has to eat the bread they earn by their own hands, instead of being forced, as slaves, to feed another. Popular government is the pole-star in Lincoln’s firmament, but it does not abolish natural law.
OUP: Lincoln hoped for a “new birth of freedom” in America. What would that mean today?
Guelzo: It’s interesting that a man of such meager public religious profile should resort to religious language in his most famous speech, but that’s exactly what this “new birth of freedom” is. In fact, the Gettysburg Address is shot full of religious language. What a “new birth” meant since the two great religious Awakenings in America (in the 1740s and again in the 1820s) was a complete spiritual renewal – literally, being “born again.” Lincoln borrows the terminology, and lifts the energy, the transformation, and the dedication to God that this new birth implies, and transfers it to a renewal of our commitment as citizens to popular government.
By: Camille,
on 2/9/2009
Dewey: 973.7092
The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary by Candace Fleming, Schwartz & Wade, 2008
Candace Fleming has a gift for finding those stories in history that would be lost to children if she did not tell them.
A Big Cheese for the White House: The True Tale of a Tremendous Cheddar and Boxes for Katje are two of my favorite Fleming books.
Here, Fleming focuses on the Lincoln's personal life, telling the story in a scrapbook format.
My own family has a scrapbook that was kept by my great-grandmother while living on the Wyoming frontier in the late 19th century. The look of this book bears a strong resemblance to that family heirloom with clippings from magazines and newspapers papers that give a feel for the time. The book design and even the typeface, Old Times American, brings the 1800's to life.
Fleming has included material from letters and archives that paint a picture of Lincoln family life. Her notes and picture credits at the end of the book testify to her research. Period photographs, cartoons, and illustrations carry the reader through their story, from start to finish but also invite browsing for an odd fact or two.
My original plan to skim through the book was, thankfully, defeated by Fleming's clear and engaging writing which sent me scurrying back to the beginning to read the whole thing.
The outlines of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln's lives are generally known. "The rest of the story" that is presented here makes for fascinating reading.
I did NOT know:
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By: Mary Cunningham,
on 1/20/2009
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By: Jama Rattigan,
on 10/24/2008
Abraham Lincoln is my nam[e]
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
~ Abraham Lincoln
I've been having a great time this month reading about our Presidents and First Ladies, and testing out some of their favorite recipes.
There are lots of new children's books about Lincoln out this year, and more coming out in 2009, just in time for the Bicentennial Celebration. As I reacquainted myself with his life and accomplishments, I couldn't help but get that feeling of
deja vu.
Some two hundred years later, we are looking yet again at a man from humble beginnings, with a gift for oration, who established his political career in Illinois. And sadly, some of the old wounds that divided the country back then have resurfaced, making Lincoln's words even more poignant.
Living Historical Farm building, Lincoln National Boyhood Memorial, Lincoln City, Indiana
What I didn't realize until recently was that Lincoln wrote poetry along with his great speeches. He loved the theatre, especially Shakespeare, and counted Robert Burns and Lord Byron among his favorites. According to the Lincoln Bicentennial website, "Mortality," by William Knox, was Lincoln's favorite poem. One of his earliest surviving rhymes, written when he was a teenager, goes:
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast and speed
and left it here for fools to read
His most serious poetry was written in 1846, and includes, "My Childhood-Home I See Again," "The Bear Hunt," and "The Suicide's Soliloquy." They are testament, along with his speeches, of an enlightened intellect and a God-given talent, even more awe-inspiring considering he was self-educated.
I can't help but think that if not for Lincoln, my Presidential candidate of choice might not have been able to even pursue a formal education, let alone run for public office. So today, I salute President Lincoln and give thanks for the power of words, which we often take for granted or misuse. Surely the best way to utilize this gift, and the freedom we have to implement it, is to bring people together, not divide them.
During Lincoln's tenure, America was on the brink of unraveling beyond repair. This election proves that we have made great progress, but our work has really just begun. Let's not forget the foundation upon which our nation was built, as we begin the arduous task of revitalizing America from the ground up.
And, economic crisis aside, I am humbled to be able to witness this milestone in American history.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
by Berton Bellis, 1919
Remains of the foundation of Lincoln's log cabin, Lincoln National Boyhood Memorial
Down thru endless ages,
Came a soul from others apart --
Incased in a body of awkward appearance;
But in a true heavenly made heart.
He was born in a hewed log cabin,
Grew up simple and plain;
This life -- on earth a sacrifice,
To remove from liberty a stain.
No pen can give him the credit --
No words the good of his mind;
But his love is forever burning,
In the hearts of all human kind.
The world now bows to his honor,
And hail this emancipator's name;
Columbia is proud of his memory,
He lives in everlasting fame.
His life of bitter sorrow,
Hard work and saddened tears,
Has made happy millions of humans,
And will for the future years.
O, Father, hear us in heaven!
May his reward increase ten-fold!
To repay for the great good he did us,
While his clay on earth lies cold.
His life is a lesson for the living,
Shows democracy is strength and sand,
That a good mind no matter how humble,
Can spread peace and love o'er the land.
"In God we trust" -- our nation all --
Our reward was grand and kind,
For we'll always live and never fall!
By following his wonderful mind.
For a great list of poems written by and about Lincoln, click here.
Today's Poetry Friday Roundup is at Kelly Herold's Big A little a.
By: Jessamyn West,
on 2/18/2008
A President’s Day link for you. An NPR story about some recently surfaced photos of Lincoln’s inauguration, via MetaFilter.
The Library of Congress had discovered unseen photos of President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration. They’d been housed at the library for years, hidden by an error in labeling.
I bought a moleskin shortly after I spied my friend Amanda's at a market I was working last summer. It's been such a treasure. It's exactly the right size and weight (can be carried with me at all times for creative moments that come out of the blue), is flexible and so so soft!
No matter what situation I'm in and no matter how hectic my schedule, if I find the time to sketch during my day it brings me great peace. While this is not always the case with client work, where there is always pressure to create something better and more lively, sketching for myself has been a very effective way to test different styles and techniques and an even better way to just clear my head of nonesense.
I like to go back into my sketchbook months afterwards and add colour to the cross hatching I first did with my pen in front of the tv. For some reason I don't like just sitting and watching tv... I enjoy doing something creative while I do this. Perhaps it lessens the guilt factor of being a movie nutt.
* Just a reminder: There's only 6 days left until I draw for those two free calendars and secret prize...
By: kate,
on 10/25/2007
I had a dream the other night about a bear opening our kitchen window and sticking his nose inside. It's that time of year when the last of the bears are frantically fattening up for winter--their footprints are everywhere in the surrounding woods, and their incidents of breaking and entering are all over the news. It's certainly enough to give anyone nightmares, and the heebie jeebies when taking out the trash at night. I'm hoping any bear that attempts to visit our cabin is the friendly sort.... or at least friendlier than the scary bear in my dream. Henceforth, my friendly doodle bear.
By: jim bradshaw,
on 9/12/2007
Whatever came to my mind, landed on the page.
jim
By: Ronni A. Hall,
on 7/29/2007
Found a great book in the library: Keys to Drawing with Imagination. This is the kind of book I was looking for. The writer opens you up to being more creative with your drawing. These are the first drawings I did for exercise one, Doodling and Noodling. I'm tackling my moleskin notebook. It's actually quite cute. We may be bonding. Too early to tell.
I'm tired from staying up reading HARRY POTTER. J.K. seems to be killing off people left and right. What kind of mood was she in when she wrote this book??? Poor Harry is in a constant state of grieving.
I missed the deadline for a local art show, but the organizers will allow me one more day! It's a ANIMALS AND ART exhibit. Hello! That's what I do! Couldn't miss that one. Most of my work lately has been on marketing myself in the new town. So far so good. Wish me luck. :) Need to stay POSITIVE and focused on what I want, not what I don't want.
Does anyone know what ROADRUNNER TOTEM means?
Happy Presidents' Day 2012 on Monday
Happy Presidents' Day 2012 on Monday
The Lincoln book looks like a treasure & I have seen if reviewed several times, always making me want it more! This Washington book looks great too, so guess it's another for my list. The idea of it is so clever. I remember when I found out that the cherry tree story was not true. I was not happy about it. Thanks, Mary Lee.
Good picks! I am going to look for these at the library this weekend.