Palin on government.

What’s that you say? You mean there’s someone out there named Palin besides Michael?

PS I’m sure Dennis the Peasant would have been all over this joke if he weren’t off celebrating his anniversary. Ironically, he’s in Alaska.

Am I the only one who tears up at the sight of old roadside signs?

The above is from a flickr collection of old Polaroids of roadside signs from the 1960s (via Boing Boing, my new favorite website of all time precisely since it posts stuff like ).

A&P was my grocery store growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, but since signs like this were zoned out I feel like its showing me something I missed.

More Milton Friedman.

UD is right about the Milton Friedman Institute controversy at the University of Chicago. If you’re opposed to it, playing up Friedman’s association with authoritarian regimes is by far the strongest argument. But she mentions another stupid argument against it which I didn’t get to in my last post on this subject that is also worth considering:

[Opponents] complain that they don’t like its reigning ideas, forgetting that universities are about free inquiry (The Institute, protests another professor, will represent a “pure, free-market conservative or neoliberal position, where the market is the solution to everything.”).

Complaining that the University of Chicago is going to be associated with free-market conservatism is like someone from Chicago complaining that their city risks being associated with wind. That ship has sailed. They don’t call it the Chicago School of Economics for nothing.

Not that anybody asked me, but I think I’m now officially agnostic on this one. I can’t stand free-market conservativism or neoliberalism, but this cause strikes me as tilting at windmills. Can’t the liberals at the University of Chicago find a fight to engage in which they might actually win?

Paging George Bailey! Paging George Bailey!

If Enough Banks Fail, The FDIC Could Run Out Of Money

If we could just repeat this scene at every failing bank across the country everything would be alright:

Of course, these days the money is probably invested in abandoned McMansions in Central California or derivatives somewhere in Asia rather than the house down the street.

Oh well, so much for that idea.

Chicago 1968 (again)

While still not ideal, this clip (thanks Huffington Post) is much better than the last clip of the 1968 Democratic convention violence I found:

I’d probably start about a minute and a half after it starts. At the end it switches to Dan Rather getting beaten up inside the hall, which is certainly more interesting than anything you’re likely to see during most of the coverage this week in Denver.

Speaking of later conventions, NPR played a very interesting story about the McGovern Commission’s reforms instituted after Chicago which you can find here.

“We’re all Marxists now.”

I love this piece in the Wall Street Journal by Tony Woodlief about teaching his kids to enjoy work. Most notably, Woodlief went to his bookshelf to find a good philosophy of work and reports his results:

Adam Smith’s philosophy of work was that it requires one to lay down “a portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness.” My sons agree wholeheartedly. Further, Smith measured wealth in terms of one’s ability to hire others to do the work. I’ve not caught anyone paying to have his chores done, but I suspect it’s a matter of time. Needless to say, “Wealth of Nations” is coming off our shelf for the time being.

It turned out that Karl Marx was much more helpful to him:

Karl Marx…offers a helpful work philosophy where traditional fonts of conservative wisdom fail. Marx saw humans as naturally creative: “free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man.” Furthermore, humans want to craft loveliness: “Man . . . produces in accordance with the laws of beauty.”

What Marx opposed were working conditions that stultify the mind while divorcing the laborer from a final, satisfying product. Marx railed against work that goes against man’s “essential being,” such that he “does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind.” Anyone who thinks that description applies only to 19th-century factories hasn’t labored in a fluorescent-lit cubicle.

Woodlief ultimately concludes:

“We’re all Marxists now.“

What Woodlief is really asking is which kind of workplace would you rather work in: Smith’s or Marx’s? Of course, Marx and Smith were both right about the nature of work depending upon the job. In fact, Woodlief’s piece is really better for learning how to manage labor rather than how to inculcate children.

Come to think of it, that might explain why someone in the Wall Street Street Journal is advocating Marxism, even if it’s just a little bit of it.

What is Mickey Mouse doing on YouTube?

I have asked this question before, but the Los Angeles Times has a possible answer:

Brand experts reckon his value to today’s Walt Disney Co. empire at more than $3 billion. Acts of Congress have extended Mickey’s copyright so long that they provoked a Supreme Court challenge, making Mickey the ultimate symbol of intellectual property.

All signs pointed to a Hollywood ending with Disney and Mickey Mouse living happily ever after — at least until a grumpy former employee looked closely at fine print long forgotten in company archives.

Film credits from the 1920s revealed imprecision in copyright claims that some experts say could invalidate Disney’s long-held copyright, though a Disney lawyer dismissed that idea as “frivolous.”

Although studio executives are not yet hurling themselves from the parapets of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the unexpected discovery raises an intriguing question: Is it possible that Mickey Mouse now belongs to the world — and that his likeness is usable by anybody for anything?

The article is a long and fascinating story about the guy who found the loophole that might make the early Mickey Mouse cartoons beyond copyright protection. Perhaps then, Disney doesn’t want to risk losing a suit.

So to celebrate, here’s “Traffic Trouble” from 1931:

More fun than any historian should be allowed to have.

“Wanderlust” from Good magazine (via Boing Boing).

How many monographs do you know that have come out in children’s versions?

I’ve been teaching historiography for about eight years now. [I do it two semesters in a row, every other year.] One of the first decisions I made when I started was that I wanted to rip a monograph apart and put it back together with my students graduate-school style, but very, very slowly so that I could be sure they’ll follow it. In picking a monograph for this, I wanted one by an author who was very transparent about the sources they used and their strengths and weaknesses. And that discussion had to be in the text, not just the footnotes. Back then, I picked The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cline Cohen. If you know that book you know why, and it has worked out well for me and my students.

While I still love that book, I was getting bored teaching it over and over again. In fact, some people around here were starting to call me Professor Jewett, which is a name that might apply to Patricia Cline Cohen, but certainly shouldn’t apply to me. So I made a change.

A few weeks ago, Oxford University Press sent me a paperback copy of Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Steel Drivin’ Man, his book about his quest to find the real John Henry of folklore fame. I actually had the hardback sitting around and had never gotten to reading it. Using the new copy as an excuse, I quickly read it, loved it, and risked the wrath of my bookstore to switch Nelson for Cohen maybe a month before classes started. Here’s my new question for the paper the students will write on for the book:

Does the evidence that Nelson has gathered adequately support his arguments about John Henry, especially the argument about who John Henry really was?

I’ll probably rephrase that after the first semester of teaching the book, but I already know my personal answer: Who cares? It’s a great story even if Nelson’s wrong.

Anyhow, I was feeling all psyched to get to that book in a few weeks when I started reading Cliopatria this morning. Ralph sent me to a new blog and I always go to blogs that Ralph recommends (unless it’s some crazy medieval thing I wouldn’t care about) because he’s usually right about what history blogs are worth reading. This one is called “The Broad Gauge Gossip.” [Apparently, it's the "'Wonkette' of the history blogosphere." With a billing like that, how can you resist?] The hilariously named blogger “Ambrose Hofstader Bierce III” has a post up that’s got a picture of Nelson with Bruce Springsteen. But the book The Boss is holding isn’t Steel Drivin’ Man; it’s called Ain’t Nothing But a Man. Briefly, I’m left wondering if Nelson wrote the same book twice.

Then I followed Bierce’s link, and I see that what Springsteen has appears to be the National Geographic kids version of the book I’ve assigned. Think about it. How many monographs do you know that have come out in children’s versions? But here’s my problem: Do I embrace the kiddie version, maybe even use it as a teaching tool, or do I sit on that info for fear my students will use it like Cliffs Notes? It’s not like the original Nelson book is all that long (that’s one of the reasons I picked it over Cohen). Advice from all quarters would be much appreciated.

If George W. Bush weren’t President, we wouldn’t have ice cubes.

I really wanted to hate this article in Salon, “Does Air Conditioning Make People Vote Republican?” It’s based on a stupid snarky counterfactual argument: If there were no air conditioning people wouldn’t have moved their factories South and therefore there’d be fewer Southerners who could vote Republican. And what if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?

The thing is, there’s some actual good history inside this intentionally stupid argument. I was particularly grateful to see a link to the .pdf version of Raymond Arsenault’s “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture” from 1984. When I started working on a book on the American ice and refrigeration industries a friend of mine who’s a Southern historian handed me a copy of that article and said, “You’ll need this.” Sure enough, I did.

There is one thing I can’t get past about this argument though: Air conditioning and refrigerating are basically the same technology. Refrigeration is chilling food. Ice-making is chilling water. Air-conditioning is chilling air. Therefore, if George W. Bush weren’t President, we wouldn’t have ice cubes. Is his presidency worth the cold drinks?

Well, I guess there are still five months left for him to push that question one way or another.