Local Color

Interesting post to the "Lost Oregon" Web site on Portland's radical past, focusing particularly on the immediate post-World War II era: http://lostoregon.org/2011/05/01/portlands-radical-past-2/.

I was struck once again by how many of these cases related to civil rights. Oregon's heritage in this regard is seriously scarred; the succession of stories about accusations of radicalism based upon race relations activism--and about radical groups standing, often nearly alone, on the side of racial justice--is a significant reminder that the practice of typecasting civil rights concerns as the work of Communist infiltrators seeking to arouse domestic unrest was not isolated to the South.

That said, we must bear in mind that this is not the complete story. Oregon Public Broadcasting's excellent 1991 documentary, "Local Color," outlines how a young Republican state legislator named Mark Hatfield, for example, played an important role in finally securing passage of a public accommodations bill in the early 1950s.

These are stories of which Oregonians (indeed, Americans more generally) should be aware, especially at a time when the leaders of cities such as Portland are just beginning to become aware of the darker side of gentrification. Significant numbers of African Americans are being driven from the very neighborhoods to which they were once confined by red-lining and de facto segregationist practices: see recent Oregonian coverage.

Too often, we fail to acknowledge the role the past plays in how we perceive the present. Ignoring Oregon's history doesn't erase the past; rather, it causes future division without equipping citizens to make thoughtful, informed decisions.

On Osama

Intriguing post from historian Gil Troy on the History News Network, reflecting on lessons he believes we can take from the career of Osama bin Laden and the events of 9/11: http://hnn.us/articles/138855.html.

I am profoundly relieved he is gone.

I suspect, however, that this is an occasion more for solemn remembrance and rededication to the tasks still before us than for jubilation. We're still a world fractured by divisions in ideology, and so many, many lives have been lost to reach this point.

Clack-clack-clack-clack-*ping*

The last typewriter manufacturer in the world has ceased production, with 500 models in its inventory and no plans to produce additional machines. The manufacturer, Godrej Prima, is located in India--where, the Business Standard relates, early national leaders like Nehru once promoted typewriter manufacturing as a step toward an industrialized India.

While the concept of a typewriter dates to the early 1700s, the first working typewriter was created in 1808 by an Italian inventor. American inventor Christopher L. Sholes introduced a more "modern" machine with the first QWERTY keyboard in the 1870s. (See this site for images and additional background on the invention of typewriters.)

By the twentieth century, of course, typewriters were a fundamental component of business operations, as "pools" of predominantly female secretaries typed carbon copies of important documents and countless generations of academics and college students agonized over the particularities of aligning footnotes in an age before Word. As recently as my own college application days I was typing words into my admissions forms, and when I first came to UCLA in 2001 there was still a room housing a typewriter for similar purposes in the history department.

From symbol of modernity to obsolescence in 60 years... such is the story of technological progress in our fast-moving age. The legacy of typewriters lives on, from the QWERTY keyboard I type this upon to children's books (Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type, anyone?) and amusing YouTube monuments to a bygone age.

Royall Tyler and the Practice of History

I'm reading Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, 2010), which I'm finding fascinating, if a bit prone toward jumping around and certainly advocating a particular series of positions. Regardless of one's opinion regarding the current political climate, I found myself struck by an anecdote she shared about an early American lawyer, legal scholar and author by the name of Royall Tyler.

Tyler began writing his autobiography in the early 1820s, addressing it to a fictional reader in the year 2025. It was never published, and survives only in fragmentary form, but Tyler's understanding of the potential shortfalls of history is profound. As Lepore shares, Tyler envisioned his mythical reader as a historian, smiling at

The sprawling letters, yellow text,
The formal phrase, the bald stiff style...

And in the margin gravely notes
A thousand meanings never meant.

Lepore: "Historians, Tyler knew, will always make too much of too little. After all, what if only his left shoe made it down to that superexcellent age, 'to be gathered as an invaluable treasure into the museum of the Antiquarian'? Some historians, 'after vainly essaying to fit it to the right foot, would gravely declare that the anatomy of their ancestors' pedestals differed from those of his day.' They would think people who lived in the eighteenth century had two left feet." (Lepore, 151)

A perceptive bloke, was Tyler. So often we use our fragments of evidence to cobble together a coherent narrative that fits our vision for how the past should have operated. We need legitimacy for our beliefs, so we go in search of those bits of the past that will enable us to claim it. In truth, however, the past is always more complicated and more contested than that. This, really, is Lepore's larger argument, even if she does go on to suggest some conclusions that might better fit her own stable of beliefs.

Does this mean that history is necessarily illegitimate? Does it mean that we can never use the past to help inform the present? I would argue no. The past has much to teach us, and careful historical study is the best way to improve our grasp upon what came before. The problem comes when we attempt to make history fit our current circumstances. History informs our circumstances from behind. It's a one-way path. Any time we begin from the present and start to impose the present upon the past, we are going to run into trouble. Our best understanding of our past comes when we examine history without such preconceived notions, understanding that the complexity we find will not lend itself to easy conclusions. Life may have become more 'complicated' in a technological sense, but humans 200 years ago were just as complicated as they are today.

Parallel histories

It is easy to forget--indeed, it has been largely elided from our histories of the period--that the hundredth anniversary of the events of the Civil War occupied the same years as the most focused period of the civil rights movement in the American South. These parallel narratives no doubt heightened the tensions and the emotions of white southerners and black protesters alike as they contested contemporary conditions in an atmosphere of blinkered commemoration.

Robert McElvaine, a historian at Millsaps College, has written a fascinating account of the 1960s' first southern commemoration of what these Mississippi participants would no doubt have referred to as the "War of Northern Aggression." He cogently points out that these events were taking place in near-perfect tandem with the first sit-in demonstration in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, a "read-in" at the public library in Jackson.

Here's the link so you can enjoy your own "read-in." Comes complete with a distressing photo of Gov. Ross Barnett in a Confederate uniform. This is the same Gov. Barnett whose recalcitrance in fall 1962 would help lead to riots as James Meredith attempted to become the first African American student to attend Ole Miss.

Busy day...

On this day in 1811, American fur traders arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River to found Fort Astoria. The American settlement itself was short-lived; British traders took possession during the War of 1812. Without the precedent it established, however, Oregon, Washington and Idaho might well be Canadian provinces.

On this day in 1861, Confederate forces launched an attack upon the Union's Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The Civil War was officially underway.

On this day in 1961, the Soviets launched Yuri Gagarin into space -- yet another thorn in the side of a United States still irked by the Soviets' launch of Sputnik in 1957. Fortunately, 24 days later (May 5) Alan Shepard successfully made it into orbit.

On this day in 1981, the first American space shuttle--the Columbia--was launched. The shuttle program comes to an end later this year.

Tensions are rising at Fort Sumter

The year 2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the most perilous period in American history--the Civil War. This has already been a subject of considerable controversy (and we won't even get to the shots fired on Fort Sumter until next Tuesday), including the actions of the Virginia legislature in omitting slavery entirely from a proclamation regarding the war and some possibly ill-advised Confederate balls over the winter in southern states.

To counter more selective episodes in American memory I have discovered a fascinating series on the NY Times Web site called "Disunion." The site's scholarly contributors are using period accounts and historical analysis to follow the Civil War as it unfolded. You can find a link to the Disunion section of the site here: Disunion. This site explores the developing military conflict, bearing in mind that again, we haven't actually gotten to shots fired--I'm sure more military coverage will come as the anniversaries of those events unfold--but it also examines the wider context of the impending war. I especially enjoyed this post regarding Lucretia Mott and Quaker activism against slavery.

Well worth bookmarking and reading! I may call particular attention to especially cogent articles as the remembrance of the war progresses.