Reviews and News:
How Americans got over their fear of camping: “With so many Americans headed for the woods over the summer, it is useful to remember how long it took us to feel comfortable with camping. In the imagining of the first European settlers, the continent’s wild places teemed with imps and devils. On the Mayflower in 1620, the future Plymouth Colony Gov. William Bradford gazed out at what he called the ‘hideous and desolate wilderness’ of Massachusetts. In Puritan poems, the forest gibbered and howled. The notion that danger lurked in the woods lingered long after the Puritan era. In 1818, people thought that the New Hampshire lawyer and adventurer Estwick Evans was crazy when he set out by himself on a long-distance camping trip in the dead of winter. Passersby in the western territories assumed he was an idiot or a spy. What sane person would pitch a tent when there was lodging nearby?”
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W.E.B. Du Bois was the first scholar to claim that American slaves were freed by “a general strike which transferred…labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.” He was wrong, Allen C. Guelzo argues, in a review of two new books on black emancipation.
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Chidike Okeem reviews Peter Eisenstadt’s Black Conservatism: “Black Conservatism, a collection edited by Peter Eisenstadt, is an introduction to the lives of lesser-known figures who can be categorized as some strain of black conservative. When assessed as singular pieces, the essays are elegant and informative, which is unsurprising given that they are written by experts in their fields; however, the collection is hampered by its grievous inattention to some of the most important figures in the history of black conservatism. How one compiles essays in the ‘intellectual and political history of black conservatism’ without the inclusion of pieces on Frederick Douglass, Carter G. Woodson, Thomas Sowell, and Zora Neale Hurston is beyond comprehension. All of these acknowledged heavyweights of the black right are relegated to inconsequential footnotes in this book… The book’s framing of ‘black conservatism’ also raises concerns.”
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China’s young: “China’s current young generation is plainly much better educated than its predecessors. It is composed of individualistic, innovatory men and women who, like many of their counterparts elsewhere, spend much of their lives roaming the digital universe — for pleasure as well as profit. There is genuine “space” to be found here, despite tight control over the internet.” But they also feel the “thrall of the past”: “China’s long history is a source of strength and an object of pride. Yet for young people in particular it imposes a straitjacket that tends to confine moral and social behaviour to patterns acceptable to the older generation, traditionally the object of veneration since the very foundation of Chinese society.”
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What was wrong with Van Gogh? “Van Gogh exhibited a range of symptoms, from hallucinations to memory lapses, behaving erratically with friends, family and strangers. ‘Nobody could live with van Gogh,’ says Steven Naifeh, the co-author (with Gregory White Smith) of Van Gogh: The Life, published in 2011. During his lifetime, the artist was diagnosed with epilepsy.”
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The story of American utopianism.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Wall Street Journal, Alison Gopnik writes against “parenting”:
“A strange thing happened to mothers and fathers and children at the end of the 20th century. It was called ‘parenting.’ As long as there have been human beings, mothers and fathers and many others have taken special care of children. But the word ‘parenting’ didn’t appear in the U.S. until 1958, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and became common only in the 1970s.
“People sometimes use ‘parenting’ just to describe what parents actually do, but more often, especially now, ‘parenting’ means something that parents should do. ‘To parent’ is a goal-directed verb; it describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to somehow turn your child into a better or happier or more successful adult—better than they would be otherwise, or (though we whisper this) better than the children next door. The right kind of ‘parenting’ will produce the right kind of child, who in turn will become the right kind of adult.
“The idea that parents can learn special techniques that will make their children turn out better is ubiquitous in middle-class America—so ubiquitous that it might seem obvious. But this prescriptive picture is fundamentally misguided. It’s the wrong way to understand how parents and children actually think and act, and it’s equally wrong as a vision of how they should think and act.”
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Image of the Day: Milky Way over Very Long Baseline Array
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Poem: Chloe Honum, “The Motel”
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