Moby Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

    Classics can be hit or miss, but this was a huge hit for me. Moby Dick is one of the best books I have ever read, and I know I will be coming back to it for years to come. Melville writes language that is so close to being over the top, but writes with such confidence and skill that it works. The language is super Romantic and makes clear that Melville is in love with whales and whaling. His passion is just poured on the page and you can tell that he knew he was doing something here.

    The one thing that takes away from the book is the intense racism of its narrator. Melville was probably racist himself. The book seemed to start out with a lot more racist language and then eased up, but I might have just gotten used to it and managed to ignore it. I think the argument could be made that that racist perspective is just what should be expected from an 1850s whaler, but it also made it hard to read. For example, in chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Melville analyzes the titular topic, and talks all about how whiteness usually enhances beauty, going on about how the whiteness of his skin gives "the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe," yet the whiteness of the whale makes it scarier. We could pretend this is just the narrator, but this it Melville expressing his own idea matter-of-factly, just like he would talk about the anatomy of the sperm whale, he would say that the white man is the master of the world.

    But the writing is amazing. I just took note of a few great lines and passages because they deserve to be reprinted here. They're over the top, but something about seeing someone go on for pages about the anatomy of whales and the makeup of whaling ships with references to Greek mythology and classic literature just makes it all work. Melville also writes some chapters with stage directions like a play, and has the sailors break into song.

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map, true places never are.

I just like that line. The next multi-paragraph passage is just a really funny bit on how kings and queens are anointed with whale oil. 

    It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life, we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

     But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, not macassar oil, nor castor oil, not bear's oil, nor train oil, nor codliver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

    Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

Melville is so funny for dedicating these little chapters to asides like that. That was almost the entire chapter above, and it was just to make a point about how valuable and important whale oil is/was! Here's another:

    As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. It this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!

     In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough the shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

Here's another one:

 Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

And another:

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field.

You see what he did there with cannonballs into ploughshares like swords into ploughshares? This guy can write! And I love the image of Ahab's death, in the final chapter of the book:

    The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in it's depths.

    I'll finish by saying that this book is so modern. I read it less like a work of fiction than like a modern work of literary-esque nonfiction. I think of The Perfect Storm, a nonfiction book that maintains a really engaging story while still stuffing the reader full of facts about fishing, the Atlantic Ocean, and what drowning is like. Melville is doing that a century earlier, teaching the reader about whaling while using this story. I think this is especially good in chapters 74 and 75, titled, "The Sperm Whale's Head" and "The Right Whale's Head." He introduces these two anatomy lessons from the point of view of the narrator, Ishmael, on the Pequod, giving a tour to the reader as if you were on the ship with him. The tour happens at that moment only because we have reached a point in the events of the book when the ship has two whales' heads tied to either side. So Ishmael says, "Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own," and "as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?" How can you not love that?! And then he goes on to tell you about how whale bones are used in umbrellas, and how the whales are even philosophers, with the Right Whale being a stoic and the Sperm Whale a Platonian. Truly one of the best books ever written. I get it.

 

 

 

 

 

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

    A Midwife's Tale is a really cool work of scholarship that absolutely masters what would seem like a small task: publicizing and contextualizing the diary of a midwife from 1785-1812. The author's work is so important because it reveals Maine history that was otherwise totally lost and also teaches by example that getting women's perspectives on history can completely change the modern perception of events. In countless instances, Martha Ballard's diary provides completely unique or very different interpretations of events, and sometimes records names and events unrecorded elsewhere. 

    Martha Ballard seems like an incredible woman. She delivered over 600 babies, and saved countless lives of children and mothers. She crossed frozen rivers and streams, and on one occasion, fell through the ice, and arrived soaking wet and freezing to deliver a baby in December. At the time, women practiced "social childbirth," meaning that as labor got closer to delivery, female relatives and neighbors attended births and assisted the midwives. They would often become midwives themselves after this informal apprenticeship, since it was not infrequent that a midwife would be delayed or called too late to attend the birth. Martha Ballard probably developed her career as a midwife in this way, and the author writes that it is no mistake that Ballard's midwifery picked up more when her daughters were old enough to weave, freeing up her time. Ballard was also a member of one of the last generations of women to engage in this system of social childbirth and midwifery in the United States, as doctors started to take a greater and greater role in childbirth in the 19th century, and midwife's slipped into a role as doctors' assistants.

I thought this passage was particularly good:

To celebrate such a life is to acknowledge the power--and the poverty---of written records. Outside her own diary, Martha has no history. Although she considered herself "the head of the family," a full partner in the management of a household, no independent record of her work survives. It is her husband's name, not hers, that appears in censuses, tax lists, and merchant accounts for her town. She is not listed in Hallowell's poor relief records, though we know she relieved the poor, not in the earliest records of the Augusta First Church, though she was a member. Nor does any extant court records acknowledge the testimony she took from unwed mothers in delivery. Her name appears on a list of witnesses at the North rape trial, but no one, except she, preserved a record of what was said. Henry Sewall mentioned her five times in his diary, four in relation to births and once when she died, but he never explicitly identified her as a midwife or acknowledged paying a fee.

It is incredible to think how a long life can be summed up. She delivered 600 babies, testified in a rape trial of a judge, witnessed the aftermath of a family annihilation-style mass murder, and did so much more in 77 years of life, and all that is left of her is her diary, miraculously-preserved.  

Common Sense

    Around the same time I finished A Midwife's Tale, I read "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine, which was an extremely good essay, although way more religious than I ever realized. It is totally within the tradition of the other essays I read in the Revolution, although it is really strange to read something written in January 1776, after the war began, but before the Declaration of Independence was written. Of course, this essay gives the best reasons for the necessity of declaring independence. 

    One thing that I thought was interesting was that Paine is clear on the lack of necessity of government and obviously has a more positive view of men's ability to live in a smaller-government world. He writes in one good line, "the plain truth is that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as it is in Turkey." He is also really strong against the English monarchy. He refers to William the Conqueror: "A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives is, in plain terms, a very paltry rascally original." The part that I knew from the essay, that it is ridiculous for a small island to govern a continent so far away, only shows up wedged in the middle of the long essay, and doesn't take up that much space. But the government Paine proposes is very similar to the government eventually adopted, although I like his idea of having the presidency rotate among the states.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• It isn't surprising that Martha Ballard spelled and punctuated words and sentences more or less randomly. What is interesting, though, is that she used different spellings for the names even of her own family members. That's a very different way of thinking about names before everyone was literate and writing.
• It was not uncommon for Ballard to receive payment for a delivery as much as four years after the fact.
• In the eighteenth century, it was believed that a woman could not lie about the father of her child while in labor, and it was sometimes considered a legal necessity for an unwed woman to declare the father of her child while in childbirth in order to establish which man was legally responsible.

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred F. Young

    After getting big historical and ideological context for the American Revolution, I am honing in on three books addressing three disadvantaged groups of the period: the poor, women, and slaves. This is the first, on the poor, and covers the life and popular discovery of George Twelves Hewes. Hewes was a young man who participated in the Boston Tea Party, and was rediscovered as an old man in 1834, when two books were published about him amidst a reinitiation of interest in the Boston Tea Party.

    One complaint about the book is that Hewes is not as important as the book makes him seem, and the premise that the Boston Tea Party had been forgotten and rediscovered, which was teased in the introduction, is revealed by the end to not be true. No one had forgotten the Boston Tea Party. And although the 1830s biographies of Hewes were the first works in print to name the event the "Boston Tea Party," Young's investigation reveals that the term had been used colloquially probably since the event itself, but was only formally referred to as the spilling of the tea in Boston Harbor or something to that effect.

    What is interesting is that the spilling of the tea was not commemorated as a holiday for about half a century after the revolution. Boston was dominated by the Federalists, who were more aristocratic and resented the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre as the "wrong" kind of events in the American Revolution, being led by the mob. It was not until Democrats began to dominate the city in the 1820s and 1830s that celebrations of the mass actions became more popular in Jacksonian America. July 4th had taken over all the other Boston commemorations once the war had ended, whereas during the war, Bostonians had celebrated opposition to the Stamp Act on August 14th, the resistance to the Redcoats in 1770 on March 5th, the old Pope's Day celebration of the Gunpowder Plot being foiled on November 5th, and the Tea Party on December 16th. These were all swallowed up into the 4th of July after the war. New public memory was rekindled by the War of 1812, and by Congressional acts that sought to grant pensions to surviving veterans of the Revolutionary War. One such act required veterans to write about their experiences, which created a surge of popular memory about the war. Additionally, Lafayette's visit to America in 1824 spawned more interest, as well as fiftieth anniversary celebrations in that decade. Finally, increased interest came from men like George Twelves Hewes, who were well-understood to be the last exemplars of that generation.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the summer of 1768, there were four thousand British soldiers posted in Boston, a town of fewer than sixteen thousand inhabitants. That gives a lot of context to the Revolutionary-era fear of standing armies.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

    I can tell why this book is a classic. I always wanted to read the authors name-dropped in Good Will Hunting and now I can start regurgitating Gordon Wood. Wood's primary thesis is that the American Revolution's place in history should be revised from being seen as a more conservative revolution (especially when compared with the French Revolution) to being extremely ideologically radical in its own right. The French Revolution's radicalism was obviously greater in its violence, but the American Revolution was just as much if not more ideologically radical. Above all, Wood argues that the American Revolution transformed society, not just government. While we may look back today and see an unfinished revolution for slaves and women, the equalization of all landowning men was an incredibly radical step at the time, and the Revolution really continued into the 19th century, when all white men, not just landowners, were made full citizens. Books like this are at their best when they distill the development of ideas into a path that clearly shows the contradictions and coherencies of thought at the time. You end up feeling that, because it was all explained so well, that the development of these ideas was inevitable. 

Slavery

    Indentured servitude in the New World was not a brand new concept. In England, servants usually had yearlong contracts. Indentured servitude in the colonies became especially long (five to seven years) to pay the large expenses of transporting someone across the ocean, obviously not a factor when they stayed in England. Due to the high value of these servants, the governments instituted a system of passes that was not needed in England to control their comings and goings. White servants were treated nearly as bad as black ones if not worse in the minds of some contemporary observers. Apparently they were sold like chattel as well. The big difference though, is that the white servants were on a contract that would end, while black slaves were in bondage for perpetuity. Wood uses this example to illustrate why colonial thinkers took so long to identify the abolition of slavery as a political goal. For the colonial thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery was a difference in degree from indentured servitude, not in kind. Of course, there was still a different, but when society was so harshly graded into strict hierarchies as the society of 18th century America was, abolition of slavery didn't seem so high a priority. 

    What is really interesting is that the idea for the liberation of the slaves comes out of the same intellectual tradition as the liberation of Englishmen living in America. Once people started to think that they could not be taxed without representation and that colonists had been made slaves of the King and Parliament, they started to think about the freeing of actual slaves. But for all of human history until that point, very few if any had thought that slavery, in any of its many forms, should be abolished. Until the late 18th and early 19th century, slavery was just another low status in a world of low status people. That meant that once white men were transformed from subjects into citizens, the difference between black slaves and white free men (who started calling themselves gentlemen) transformed from a difference in degree into a difference in kind in the early 19th century. Only then did slavery become an aberration that required explanation. It isn't hard to see how the same thing could happen for women. In that way, liberation begets liberation.

The Transition from a Medieval World into a Capitalist World

    You could give a rough sketch of the medieval world as a world based on status and hierarchy that emphasized identity, while contrasting it with a Capitalist world that emphasized production and services. To illustrate, a medieval man worked in a trade because he was apprenticed into an appropriate trade due to his status in the community. A capitalist man worked in a trade because it could make him money. There were no businessmen in the medieval world, but in early America, Toqueville describes everyone as a businessman. A medieval nobleman owned land that was in his family for generations. Capitalist men bought and sold land to make money and speculated on its value. A medieval shopkeeper would sell to an aristocrat on credit because of his family name. A capitalist shopkeeper said "show me the money." America was a test case of early diminution of community, dominated by personal connections, in favor of society, dominated by impersonal dealings based on self-interest. Coincidentally, Adam Smith was writing in 1776 that self-interest would be the best basis for running the world. By the 19th century, that's how America was operating.

    One change in this category was about who should be serving in government. For a long time, there would hardly be an idea of "corruption" as a public vice. Public servants were not paid a full salary and were not expected to dedicate all their time to public servants. Before the American Revolution, public servants were expected to donate some of their talents to run the country for a time before returning back to their gentlemanly interests. Therefore, corruption wouldn't be looked at the same. It was common for individuals in government to face huge conflicts of interest and resolve them in their own favor. But while we would view this today as exploiting public offices for private interests, in the old world, they would have thought that the government was exploiting those private individuals for public interests, and their gains were an acceptable price to pay. Gentlemen, because of who they were, were expected to supply the officer corps and lead the government. After the American Revolution, all men were gentlemen. Indeed, even before the Revolution, rich Americans didn't have the funds necessary to fund themselves in government. So the idea transformed. Instead of being part time government leaders, America would pay it's officials, and eventually transform their posts into full-time jobs.

    Wood points out that in the Revolution, the great divide was not rich vs. poor, workers vs. employers, or democrats vs. aristocrats. Instead, it was patriots vs. courtiers. The self-made men of the colonies rebelled against the men who held positions based on their connections. It was a matter of rank/position coming from below versus above. It was only after the Revolution was complete, starting in the 1780s and becoming most obvious in the debates over ratifying the Constitution, that the key debate became democrats vs. aristocrats, with democrats represented by the Democratic-Republicans and the aristocrats represented by the Federalists.

Democrats Against Aristocrats

    With the actual war against Britain complete, the major conflict in American society centered around populism for decades thereafter. Once the courtiers were ejected by the patriots, the patriots were divided into two groups: those who thought politicians should only be wealthy, disinterested gentlemen, and those who supported the presence of "interest" in politics. The "interested" populists won, and their victory brought about a change in government. A big part of the reason that officeholders needed to be disinterested before the American Revolution was because the legislatures of the states (and Parliament) for that matter, had nearly absolute powers. Like was discussed in Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the King's absolute authority was replaced by the legislature's absolute authority. Legislatures adjudicated disputes that are now for the courts. They had unitary power over lawmaking and enforcement. The reason that it was possible to run a government with interested officeholders was thanks to checks and balances dividing government into different branches that would check each other. The genius of the system is that it would democratize government by pitting societally forces against each other through their direct representatives, rather than requiring their virtual representation by wealthy landowners who would claim to speak in society's interest.

    To illustrate the conflict, Wood hones in on the debate in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1786 regarding the rechartering of the Bank of North America. The two protagonists of the debate were Robert Morris, the wealthiest merchant in the state, who supported rechartering the bank, and William Findley, a Scotch-Irish ex-weaver from western Pennsylvania, who supported debt-relief and paper money. This debate continues to modern day: monetary hawks versus doves. It is interesting how the same exact debate continues today, in similar form. Findley was accused of being "narrow, illiberal, and interested in the promotion of paper money and debtor-relief legislation," just like Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. It is interesting to see how liberalism can adopt these aristocratic tendencies time and time again that results in working class debtors aligning themselves with populists. But what is interesting is how the debate between Findley and Morris foreshadowed the victory of the populists. Findley argued that, first of all, Morris was not disinterested, and was advocating for his own interest as a wealthy banker. And Findley, rather than arguing Morris' interestedness was the problem, argued that there was no issue, but that simply Findley was interested in the other direction, and thought it was hypocritical to pass off their interestedness as disinterested virtue. Wood writes that Findley suggested that interest "was quite legitimate, as long as it was open and aboveboard and not disguised by specious claims of genteel disinterestedness. The promotion of private interests was in fact what American politics ought to be about."

Cosmopolitanism

    Wood writes that "the revolutionary generation" was the most cosmopolitan of any in American history." They did not make a "national" revolution in any sense, since they considered themselves defending their rights either as Englishmen or as natural rights given by God. Many of them were deists, and thought Freemasonry could serve as a social binding that would replace religion. They were also men of science. Wood writes,

When Franklin was minister to Frace during the Revolutionary War, he issued a document to English explorer Captain Cook protecting him from American depredations at sea during his voyage of 1779. Franklin told all American shop commanders that they must regard all English scientists not as enemies but 'as common friends of Mankind.' When an American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying that the United States did not make war on science.

Conclusion
    This was another excellent book that taught me about things I didn't even know I didn't know. I came away especially interested in how the Democratic-Republicans, despite essentially being made up of the losers from the fight for ratification of the Constitution, just trounced the Federalists for years and years after Adams was kicked out of the presidency. The country just became much more populist and rekindled the revolutionary spirit after Washington was gone. It was a total social transformation in which gentlemen and aristocrats were ejected from the ruling class. By the middle of the 19th century, the idle leisure that Washington and Jefferson embodied was held in contempt by a massive middle-class that valued hard work. Then, the same principles were applied to slaveholders, another aristocratic class that would lose to the value of hard work. 

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Land ownership was completely different in England and the colonies in 1776. At that time, 3/4 of English farmland was owned by noble and gentry landlords, and four hundred families owned a fifth of all land in England. Meanwhile, 2/3 of white American men owned land, while just a fifth of Englishmen owned land.
• Wood writes that young Americans at the end of the 18th century may have used pregnancy to force marriages of their choice rather than their parents'. At that time, between a quarter and a third of all brides were pregnant before their marriage.
• Members of Parliament did not receive salaries until 1911.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett

    Unfortunately, I did not get this novel like I did War and Peace, so it was a big disappointment. Usually I don't finish books that I don't like, but I finished this one because I thought I was getting it up towards the 2/3 point of the book, and then stopped getting whatever it was. I never really connected to any characters or understood the book. I apologize to myself for wasting my own time. 

    The book is interesting in the sense that it is a cool historical artifact of the 1870s in Russia, but beyond that, I just didn't connect with it. Apparently it's one of the best books ever written, but I just don't understand why.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

    As I continue my learning about 1776 and the American Revolution in the year of its 250th anniversary, I reached this classic of the subject. In addition to The Ideological Origins I was interested in reading Pamphlets of the American Revolution, Bailyn's earlier work that led to writing this one. However, I learned that there is only really one edition and no digital copies readily available, so I settled for this book. I am glad I did, because it was fantastic. But in addition to reading Ideological Origins, I read some of those pamphlets:

• A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers - Jonathan Mayhew - 1750
• The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved - James Otis - 1763
• The Rights of the Colonies Examined - Stephen Hopkins - 1764
• Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament - Daniel Dulany - 1765
• Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania - Jonathan Dickinson - 1767-68

These pamphlets were an amazing primer into Revolutionary thought. I will admit that they were hard reads and I missed a lot from them. In particular, I thought the James Otis pamphlet was interesting, but I didn't really get Otis' sheer importance until I read Ideological Origins. Now I see how important it is that Otis and others conceived of a source of power not in the King or in Parliament, but in the People, who possess inalienable natural rights, that no man can be justified in taking away. This originates in the unwritten English constitution, but for the Americans, goes much further. I was more focused in reading the pamphlets on the grievances that the Americans had for the English based out of the French and Indian War, but if I read these again, I would focus more on the ideological issues that Bailyn talks about.

    Otis stands out as the best writer of the pamphleteers, probably followed by Dickinson. Otis is clear in his stance that Parliament cannot rule absolutely: "The parliament cannot make 2 and 2, 5." Otis represents an early American exceptionalism and superiority complex: "The province of the Massachusetts, I believe, has expanded more men and money in war since the year 1620, when a few families first landed at Plymouth, in proportion to their ability, than the three Kingdoms together." Hopkins is also particularly clear in expressing the danger that colonists foresaw. During the French and Indian War, colonists became aware of the massive power England and Parliament exerted over them, and how a standing army could arrive and take control of the colonies so easily. In fact, the result of the war was that the colonists realized France could pose no threat, being decisively defeated, and now the greatest threat to their liberty came from their own government, which was stationing a standing army in the colonies.

    The Americans were not complaining that their rights were taken, but that their rights were treated as privileges granted by the Parliament, which could be taken at the prerogative of parliament. It meant that the 17th century had placed an absolute legislature in the role of an absolute monarch. This was most apparent in the intersection of taxation on mercantile monopolies. England would force the colonists to buy certain products only from England, rather than France or Spain. This created uproar when England raised the tax on those products, essentially unilaterally raising the price when no competition was allowed to exist. Even if not a deathblow to the economy, colonists saw this for the tyrannical overreach that it was.

    The pamphlets themselves were important as a medium for the messages that inspired the Revolution, and their physical properties influenced the ideas that were contained in them. The pamphlet emerged in the 16th century and was a one-man show, possible for a man to write in a day or two and to print just as quickly. It is short and unbound, not requiring the lengthier publication process of a book, and usually pamphlets were considered "lowbrow." Pamphlets were also somewhat flexible in size, being possible to fold into ten or fifty pages, containing between 5,000 and 25,000 words. The revolutionary pamphleteer favored a length in the middle of that range, long enough for a polemic but short enought to be read quickly and passed on to the next reader.

    Ideological Origins is mainly a work of intellectual unification of the ideas of the pamphleteers of the 1760s and 1770s, in which Bailyn identifies and analyzes how these pamphlets influenced one another to form a somewhat coherent, although not a dogmatic, ideology that catalyzed the Revolution. For one, the pamphleteers drew on the same sources. Obvious points of influence include the Bible and the Roman Republic, but there were less obvious, more contemporary events arising out of states that we would not consider democracies today--but they were liberal. Denmark, apparently, had transitioned from a liberal power-sharing arrangement between the king and the nobility to a system in which the king was absolute. Poland was a more democratic state that had fallen into dysfunction. Conspiracy theories penetrated all levels of society between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Colonists were concerned about what the British had done, but were more concerned about what the British would be doing. As Baylin writes, laws like the Stamp Act were not considered evil in themselves, but as harbingers of greater evils to come. 

    The high point of the book comes in Part V: Transformation, which features three chapters on Representation and Consent, Constitution and Rights, and Sovereignty. Part VI: The Contagion of Liberty also forms the meat of the book. Starting with Representation and Consent, I learned something I had never heard before, which is that in medieval England, the earliest form of representation in Parliament was a trustee-based system in which the Parliament that existed until the fifteenth century was made up of local men whose business ended with their constituency, which had given each one specific instructions on how to vote and lobby. These men were basically attorneys for their electors, who would seek redress from the king and were authorized to grant specific amounts of financial aid to the king. These men were tightly bound to their constituency: they were not national delegates expected to vote in the best interests of the country as a whole, but to narrowly exact the best deal for the propertied men that essentially hired them to go to London. They were instructed minutely on their powers. But as Parliament transformed into a system of delegates of all the commons, for one assembly, one interest, and one nation, colonists reproduced the older English institution "in miniature." Moreover, like their medieval forebears, Americans lived similarly to autonomous medieval towns in the wilderness, far from central government. They felt that they were the benefactors of the central government, not the beneficiaries of it, and did not identify their interest with the central government's interest. It was required, in Massachusetts first, and then elsewhere, that representatives be residents of and property owners in, the places for which they acted as representatives. The upshot is that colonists valued their representation in their state assemblies than they did their "virtual representation" in Parliament by delegates whom they did not elect.

    Another huge question that men like Otis were dealing with was what it meant to have a "constitution," and whether that constitution, or anything for that matter, could be a limit on lawmaking bodies. It's really the basis of Marbury v. Madison and the Bill of Rights that was being formed in the 1760s and colonists argued the Parliament could not exercise unlimited power. The reason that this idea came about in America was due to the prior existence of written constitutions in the colonies. And I had never thought about this before. But in each colony, there were documents existing long prior to the 1760s that established some of the rights of the colonists. The Massachusetts Bay Colony charter originated in commercial charters, and evolved to frame government in that state. Crown charters in Connecticut and Rhode Island were designed as instruments of government, and proprietary grants, such as in New York, Maryland, and North and South Carolina provided for governmental institutions. William Penn, described by Bailyn as "courtier and sectarian; saint, schemer, and scholar," created frameworks of government in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Bailyn writes that, "By the Revolutionary period, the surviving charters, which in origins had been the instruments of the aggressive creation, or legitimation, of power, had become defensive bulwarks against the misuse of power." They were viewed as confirming a much older common law of Englishmen, with rights for the colonists that could not be abridged so easily by their colonial assemblies.

    Another major question was where sovereignty rested in government. In the 17th century, England had battled over the question between sovereignty between Parliament and the King and the Parliament won, executing a king, and bringing over William of Orange as a king some decades later. In the Thirteen Colonies, the colonists argued that there was no absolute power within government at all--that power resided in the people, and needs to be divided within government and within federalism, a new idea. The idea morphed into the idea that Parliament could only legally issue external taxes on the colonies before colonists soon started arguing that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies at all. 

    This was a fantastic book that I would recommend to any reader of American history. It is encouraging to read as an American about the genius of our Founding Fathers. Bailyn sums up the ideological revolution of the American Revolution well. He points out that it was Americans who conceived of legislative assemblies as mirrors of society and the people. Americans were those who believed that human rights existed above the law and stand as the measure of the law's validity. Americans were those who saw that absolute sovereignty in government didn't need to be the monopoly of one agency but could be shared between agencies and branches of government to regulate itself. These ideas were revolutions in thought that have since swept the world over in a global ideological revolution.

Miscellaneous:

• I thought this was interesting. Jonathan Mayhew envisioned future streams of refugees leaving Europe for liberty in America, and asked "who knows?" that "our liberties being thus established, ... on some future occasion ... we or our posterity may even have the great felicity and honor to ... keep Britain herself from ruin," which of course is exactly what happened in WWII. 

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

    I really liked this book, which has been recommended to me for years, and I'm happy I read it when I did after reading a couple yizkor books, in order to really appreciate it as a yizkor book in its first half, in which Frankl describes his experience in the Holocaust. I was amazed to learn that he wrote the portion about his Holocaust in just nine days in 1945. It is so interesting to have such a great thinker also be a Holocaust survivor, and makes me think how many other great thinkers were murdered in the Holocaust, and left manuscripts unpublished. Like so many others, Frankl feels that his life was decided by forces greater than him. He describes an opportunity to escape, to leave Austria before the Holocaust began, but that he was stuck in a dilemma, unsure whether he should leave, or stay to take care of his elderly parents. He was looking for a sign. He writes:

It was then that I noticed a piece of marble laying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, "Which one is it?" He answered, "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days be long upon the land." At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.

    Frankl's book is most interesting because he can address the behaviors of Holocaust victims and survivors from a trained psychological perspective. One interesting aspect was humor: he describes entering showers with several other men, and them joking that at least it was water coming out of the sprays instead of gas. Another was curiosity: at some points, he didn't fear death as much as he was just curious whether he would live or die. Another time, as prisoners were shipped in an overpacked cattle car from Auschwitz through Bavaria, they marveled at the beauty of the mountains they could see through holes and slats in the wooden walls. In camp, they observed beautiful sunrises in th midst of their slavery and torture.

    One thing that I think was horrible for survivors was the trauma of dreaming about the Holocaust for the rest of their lives, and how painful it would be to relive that memory. But something less obvious is how painful dreaming would be for those same people as they lived through the Holocaust, since waking up was worse than any nightmare! Frankl describes that, as one time he observed a man writhing around, obviously having a nightmare. But he decided not to wake him, since whatever the nightmare was in the man's sleep would be better than their waking nightmare. 

    Frankl comes away with several short life lessons that I'll list here:

• The salvation of man is through love and in love.
• From Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
• A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthlessness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. 
• Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also the being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. 
• Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
• Also Nietzsche: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There is also an additional chapter in which Frankl discusses the tragic triad of (1) pain, (2) guilt, and (3) death. How can one embrace life in spite of those three things? He calls it "tragic optimism," which is: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.

    Frankl is just a strong believer that, for most people, mental health is shaped by circumstances and how we react to circumstances. No one can take away a man's source of meaning. But no one can give him one either. Every person has to figure it out for themselves, and he observed, in the camps, people who gave up on life and died shortly after. His book is a classic because suffering is classic, and Frankl shows his readers how to find meaning in suffering.